Recent content by Thomas Shey

I get that some people just lose something out of not playing FTF (I can't say there's nothing there even for me), but I was using some aspects of VTTs locally before I even played remotely, and I can't say I miss the drive to places at all, especially back at the end of the night.

As you can see from my post above, I dealt with that for years. Like I said, sometimes that's just a weird thing that happens and makes no sense. We used to have one group that had trouble with Skype and Discord worked fine and another where it was vice versa. Weird as could be.

Its a thing that can happen. I live in a suburb near Los Angeles, and until a couple years ago when fiber came in, the best I could get was pretty weak DSL. And I don't mean I was too cheap to get better; I mean it just was the best available.

DCC has a fairly strong fandom and overlaps with the D&D community a reasonable bit. Daggerheart is kind of a new hotness. I admit a pleasant surprise when something like a GURPS discussion takes off at all, though. Oh, you can absolutely find it elsewhere; its just this place is...

Yeah, when you live in a city named Pico Rivera that's probably 90% Latinx, its not hard to understand if YT localizes why it may think that's appropriate. I don't think I've gotten that, but I seem to recall a couple of Persian or Arabic things. That makes no sense at all.

Well, in the end, if you spend all your time doing interviews and talking about legal subjects, you're only spending so much time actually, you know, practicing law. And if you're bad or just let yourself get out-of-date it bites you on the behind less. This doesn't mean everyone who does that...

Interest in messing with downtime is one of those things that's all over the map--sometimes even in the same people from campaign to campaign.

I suspect its more likely to be a case that they just feel comfortable not doing heavy lifting to make sure they get it, and going with their first assumptions.

Though I'll note metacurrancy that allows you to introduce new plot elements isn't the commonest case, and even in some games that permit it, there's often some limits on that. A lot of metacurrancies simply allow you a limited ability to boost your effectiveness (or reduce your opponent's) in...

I suspect there's a case to be much less likely to think we understand someone we just met than people we've known for years and/or think being off from that understanding doesn't matter as much.

Which is why I avoid systems and such where its likely to be critical. (And its less won't than simply have big difficulties in some cases understanding what the tone and expectations actually mean in practice, or at least executing that understanding in a consistent fashion.) Like I said, I...

I gather the first of this is new to you? Because I've had crud spatial memory and imagination for a very long time (maybe always), some it associated my aphantasia. Without some kind of map/display I couldn't keep track of people's positions and the layout of a situation on my best day.

I'm mostly talking about social contract issues and how people interpret them (though those can interact with the game structure and mechanics in various ways, and also with what the game is avowedly about. Some of this can be bridged by better and more extensive communication, but not all).

I can't imagine Session 0's and vetting don't have some impact. That said, I do Session 0's and they only help so much. Like most cases where some people find things easy and others not so much, its a thing at least worth thinking about.

Honestly, I'd cheerfully play just via the chat and skip audio, but not everyone spent years playing on MUSHes.