Recent content by The Firebird

Not that familiar with your style but I use the LLMs a lot and I can clock this as generated text pretty rapdily. Hard to describe why--its not the em dashes or the use of italics alone, but those contribute. The diction generally is very reminiscent of the responses I get though. Note--I've...

No. He would only get paid if the Kickstarter royalties exceed the amount of outstanding refunds from his earlier failed Kickstarter, and GG committed to a limited print run such that the royalties won't hit that level. Some folks would say paying his refunds is paying his liability and so...

I'd like to think that the same kind message was achievable without that. I don't like the idea that the standard is "your personal life will be interrogated to make sure of your bona fides", and that that's just a requirement of being a creator. I think the escrow account seemed like enough to...

Nice of him to do it. Hopefully he won't get any blowback to the company. I think a lot of this stuff was clear from reading between the lines of his previous statements, and I hope that he's ok sharing his private life in this way. It can be hard.

Link here, in case no one posted it yet

I think he's doing something wrong. It's much better than either 1) actively publishing hateful content; 2) working with a creative who is hateful; or even 3) making the agreement with the understanding that bigoted individuals will benefit. Based on Goodman's agreement, the money is primarily...

The stakes aren't how will the guard respond. They are how will the players get past the obstacles to reach their goal. In this case, one such obstacle is a guard on duty who doesn't like bribes.

I missed this before but...I think this is not how I see this discussion. It's not about giving or withholding information from the players. It's about whether that information exists, whether it is true, prior to the players interacting with it.

Again, I don't think that means they aren't eliding. Eliding doesn't mean that play isn't about that or that we can't do anything detailed. A very crunchy combat system is eliding certain specific details about combat (whatever it doesn't simulate) at the same time it is about combat. In...

The engagement roll is such a mechanic. Or not, in your view?

Hmm this sounds exactly like 'the rules elide' to me. The point of that phrase isn't that we don't care about things we have mechanics for. It's that the rules allow us to adjudicate things we don't want to do adjudicate via conversation. In this case, we want to do it via dice to add tension.

As did I, below.

Agree, this is all very reasonable. I think boycotting the product is reasonable. I think refusing to do business with someone on the grounds of those statements in reasonable. Maybe it's a mistake to suggest there's anything boycotts won't achieve. It can come across as being opposed to the...

You're reading it way too narrowly. They don't end up with a list of keywords that code specific behaviors for NPCs. They play the NPCs as characters. We discussed this with an example before, but I don't recall seeing how it manifests (with a simple example) in your games. The argument takes...

-Hey GM why'd you make this ruling? -I don't need any spoilers to tell you--I decided the cliff was that way because X. -Hmm, but that seems inconsistent with your previous cliff ruling. How are they going to work in the future? Then the GM says: 1) you're right, I screwed it up. Thanks...