Recent content by Thomas Shey

I don't think its just either. You can put your thumb on the scale by watching for certain traits and trying to help people lose bad ones, but you don't have an infinite number of options, and various things can narrow the ones you have, so there's some random elements that you may just not be...

Hard row to hoe.

While primarily designed for people with certain sorts of physical ailments, it can be repurposed pretty well for strong introverts, too (of course part of that may be because one of is is probably mildly autistic and the other likely has some degree of undiagnosed ADD/OCD too.)

Just a note that in some respects all three editions were pretty different in the kind of experience they provided, even if they had similar premises.

Yeah, honestly I think Chill 3e is an excellent game in many ways, but I can't in good conscience recommend it any more without at least letting people know about the problems with the authors.

Sometimes its seemed to be possibly genuine MDs operating outside their field of expertise. There are a couple of notorious public examples of people who were apparently quite good within their specialty but that said things about, say, epidemiology that were pretty insane.

I'm just a reasonably well-educated layman (partly by natural inclination, partly from having worked at a medical library during part of my librarian days) and some of what I see com out of "doctors" on the Internet makes me back slowly away...

There's two problems that come up here, and they interrelate: 1. Problems between two players don't stay there in many cases. Over time they're pretty likely to splash off on the group as a whole. 2. Not only are some people very confrontation-averse (they'll just sit and put up with...

I haven't run enough games set modern or near-future for it to usually be an issue, and the majority of those I have have been superhero games where its somewhat moot.

As I said, I've also seen people who read the stressors that will already be there for having to have that sort of exchange going on at all as more strongly accusative than they are (or perhaps they genuinely are, and the other person is trying--unsuccessfully--to keep it tamped down) and...

We were really late (by our standards) and only got them done last weekend. We usually do get it done in late February once all the forms are available. It doesn't hurt that we both file digitally and don't bother with much in the way of itemization.

Yeah, I sometimes think the "this is easily handled" responses show more that some people have been fortunate, either in not hitting it much in their gaming time, or in being able to be sufficiently fussy about who they game with that they could rarely having to deal with it, and not accepting...

Yeah, but the flip side of this is some people will say anything to avoid confrontation in person, or simply to satisfy their interlocator, while being willing to be a bit more honest and open at a distance. And the people causing problems in-game are the most likely to avoid any personal...

The difference is that here we're largely interacting with strangers. As such we have little or no contectual basis for the exchange in the first place. All being in person when a problem is being discussed is for people to read the body language involved in a negative way. Text is a cooler...

It goes beyond respect. It requires trust in other people's reactions and how that will play out, and bluntly, a lot of people don't have that with many other people, whether they're strangers, friends or coworkers. Heck people don't consistently have that with their significant others.