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I guess the flip answer is, what if we didn’t assume every TTRPG is like D&D? The less flip answer is, if character creation is sucking up your whole first session, don’t do it at the table.

So those “loud voices on the Internet” are not also free speech somehow? And “loud voices on the Internet” are in principle exactly the same as the state exercising its power to suppress speech? https://www.popehat.com/2013/12/21/ten-points-about-speech-ducks-and-flights-to-africa/

I genuinely don’t know what you’re saying here. The thesis that we have to include miserable, scary history as part of our world building, otherwise our games will be narrative wastelands, simply isn’t true. “But look at all the stories we can’t tell without a history of slavery!” You can tell...

The companies profiting handsomely from sales of My Neighbor Totoro and Sesame Street merchandise would beg to differ with this. So would any parent who's had to calm down a child waking up with screaming night terrors at 2 a.m. the third time running because Uncle Mike was babysitting and...

I Am In Eskew, hopefully.

I get that you like this guy and don't want to think ill of him, but no, this isn't living in the past or being a forever DM. We had players like your friend in AD&D games 35+ years ago, and nobody else liked playing with them then, either. It's good that you had a straight up talk with him...

So this dude ignored your pointing out that he was treating the DM and the other players like NPCs and derailed you into a discussion of whether the game was “really” D&D or not? Your problem is not that he has unbalanced characters or bad tactics. Your problem is that he’s a bad player who...

I don't disagree with you that DG as written is very open about the ugliness of state power, but I thought it was John Tynes who said the original conceit was finding an excuse for a standard RPG-style PC party in Call of Cthulhu - a horror subgenre that is canonically about lone weirdos with...

The real problem for them is that perjury can harm them in the case they're committing the perjury in. The court could sanction them in all kinds of ways, including finding that they don't get to make certain arguments or that certain facts are presumed against them. Worse, possibly, is that the...

California just recently made intentional wage theft (by an employer) a felony. This is not because California had lax civil penalties for wage theft before (they are in fact serious penalties) - it's because civil fines don't matter to an employer that either writes them off as the cost of...

Can we not do the “product of their times” stuff to make excuses for admiring Confederates, please.

Same. This essay is more aimed at SFF and fandom, but applies just as well to the "muh AD&Ds" gatekeeping fools: Who Gets To Be a Geek? Anyone Who Wants to Be

I assume the self-appointed gatekeeper is 36 or therebouts. Self-important wannabes have a tendency to set themselves up as the standard by which all others are measured.

The Potty Training Theory of Personal Change holds true.

"Diatribe"? Well, thanks for confirming whether this was a good faith misunderstanding.

Please consider that people can disagree with you for reasons that aren't "they are just malicious and acting in bad faith". I want to make sure I'm understanding you here: you are saying that there was not bullying, gatekeeping, and exclusion in the TTRPG space, and that we are mistakenly and...

As the saying goes, you can't reason people out of opinions they didn't reason themselves into. "Woke" always strikes me as something like "I"m a good person" - it's not a label you have to apply to yourself, and if you do, it raises the question of why you have to tell everyone instead of it...

Well, wait, you just contradicted yourself. If the hobby was not always welcoming to "some" - and "women, POC, LGBTQA+, etc." is a pretty big group of '"some" - then it really wasn't welcoming to "people that were considered outcasts at the time". It was welcoming to a subset of those people...

It also means that bad actors take "what are the odds the other person would try to enforce this, and would win if they did?" into account when entering into contracts, and in their business practices generally. Because sure, anybody can, in theory, file a small-claims court complaint for the...

Legally binding contracts are a deterrent to being ripped off, and help to enforce an agreement if one party is ripping off the other. The claim that having a legally binding contract makes the chances of being ripped off "low to none" is so unrealistic that I have to wonder if it's trolling.