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I don't understand this angle. All that matters is the subjective experience of the players here, not the immaterial nature of the fiction. Of course we could jump back and establish events from the distant past, and in theory we could go to any point in the timeline, but what bearing does that...

I don't really care? I'm more interested in exploring the what's and how's of what turns people off and working backwards to a design principle than I am interested in forensic review of their proposed rationales. I'm pretty comfortable with my personally principled stance on this, rooted...

That would be a fertile area of investigation; we could do more of that, and less of trying to find the angle that allows us to declare it's all made up and doesn't matter. Personally, I think there's two things going on. First, reactive checks are generally treated differently than proactive...

Right, I'm probably in the only deconstructions superhero bucket. You can find me 10 years ago claiming that superhero stories aren't appropriate for games; at the very least I know I've complained about Batman/Superman pairings as unplayable. I'm pretty comfortable putting subjects/genre...

I wanted to jump back to this point, because I think it's where a significant element was moved outside the thing under question. The whole point about constraints on what outcomes are possible is that it allows the player to have preferences and exert themselves toward achieving them. One of...

Right, which is why I narrate all player actions as the outcome of a small army of bugs that follows them around, puppeting their PCs, and they nod along. :rolleyes: Do you need to enjoy congratulationing yourself for seeing through the matrix here, or could you do that somewhere else, so we...

I also found this point confusing. The point of the mechanic is to say what happens. How and why are design level questions that guide which whats are appropriate. A point of critique from the simulationist perspective is often whether the results sufficiently encode for those questions, and do...

Sure, it only takes years of experimentation to get close to right, consumes far more resources to produce smaller quantities and isn't scalable. There are technically small batches of arabica being grown in the UK, but they aren't replacing my bag of single origin Kenyan.

The influence of New York's water is often claimed to make the bagels and/or pizza crust distinctive.

Wine and coffee are the classic examples. For coffee, we only drink 2 varietals, robusta and arabica, and the Turner is larger reserved for instant. Where they are grown (especially ambient temperatures and altitude) makes all the difference in how any given batch tastes.

Mostly I'm just a monster at the FLGS counter, sifting through all the bins for anything that matches in sufficient quantities.

I actually do buy all my dice with matching colors by side count. It's fast and convenient when you put aside the dice superstitions. I have a couple sets of D20s, but I do roll identical dice when I have advantage.

New shrubs maturing. Orange with a champagne vinegar, ginger peach with a vinegar blend and plumcot with white wine vinegar.

As always I dread to discuss immersion, but this whole thing feels like a diversion from arguing that player and character decision making should be aligned. It seems to me that the desirable thing is that players and characters share decision making incentives, information (or at least have...

Well that point I'm much more sympathetic to, I'm just not persuaded a substitute activity is acceptable. I want to play the "read these tomes before play starts" game and I want to find people who also like that kind of thing. No one is made better off by throwing someone not interested in the...

This is a terrible take. I'm open to a set of RPG people who really want to be doing something more explicitly improv-y or generative, but that doesn't make the original activity inappropriate. It's one thing to look up and see a bunch of theatre kids in my hobby, it's quite another for them to...

Technically related, I just got a directional freezing rig set up to make clear rocks. Excited to build up a stockpile.

Oh I missed this! Just out of curiosity, looking at Paritor for the Champion, is there a circumstance I'm not thinking of where there's a difference between a "+1 bonus to attacks vs." and "treat AC as 1 lower" matters? That seemed strangely academic when I first read it.