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Oh, that old garbage again. It's not even worth reading the whole post, let alone the thread; and it's absolutely not worth my time or energy arguing. Have fun in your old echo chamber!

Or just a major compatibility problem, maybe. Not everyone who makes stuff I don't like is a garbage person, and not everyone who likes stuff I don't like is a garbage person. That doesn't mean liking different stuff isn't a problem, especially in a dating context. (Having auditioned for enough...

Dunno how many (if any) will find this a helpful distraction, but this is the new member of our household. His name is Blotch. Here, he's looking up from the 439th disembowelment of Rainbow Bug II. He showed up at our back door in a rainstorm. We worked with a local cat organization to have him...

IIRC Bowling Alone is a decade or two old at this point, and I'm wondering A) how its observations hold up and B) whether they're potentially relevant to TRPGs as they move away from being a shared in-person thing. I should possibly see about checking it out from the library to see for myself...

While I see what you're saying at the end, I care much less than you seem to about whether the book I read tonight will be as good as the book I read last night. But I grab a lot of books from the library, based mostly on what grabs me at the moment; while I want every book I grab to be really...

What did I ever do to you, and how can I apologize to you? 😉

Oh, look, yet another thing we disagree about.

Yeah, that 1:1 correlation is way beyond where I'd go in that direction, too..

I would say connections to/in the setting and goals and defined personality things (if not the BIFTs in 5e) would qualify--though the first of that is arguably backstory, it doesn't need to have a lot of narrative attached to it. I mean, the idea that a build without a personality isn't really a...

I was much happier hacking the XP rules, so the players got XP because I Did GM Things. The only times I used anything like Intrusion rules were when there were Nat 1s on the table (which I didn't allow the players to reroll). I mean, if you wanna call framing something in so the PCs have to...

Or just have a better sense of what the other players around the table are making. Either would be a real solution, I think, though I don't think they're so mutually exclusive as you seem to.

Yeah. Catching yourself out in behavior you strongly dislike in others is ... usually not a fun time. I mostly share your feelings about people jumping into my niche, though I can get a bit bothered if someone's doing it in addition to some other niche they say is their primary. Having someone...

I can see being more open to some characters not succeeding, but if you (general you, not Autumnal you) make a character with the specific idea they won't succeed, it seems as though there are some success/failure states in play that are not aligned with the characters--other than "having a good...

If it's intentional, yeah, it's a jerk thing. It's not always intentional--at least, I've seen instances that I didn't think were.

Just to be clear: Musical as in garage band, not musicals as in operettas. See, for me playing a TRPG is more like writing a story than reading one, and it's not at all like telling a story I already know; and the experience comes with a number of coauthors and all the interesting social...

I was free-writing fiction before I was ever trying to GM, and what performance I've done has been almost entirely musical. I guess things attach different to different live experiences, huh? And one of my other pet peeves is that video games and TRPGs aren't the same; they're different media...

Only if they think the game is boring. (Seriously, this is a crap line and I'm sick of seeing/hearing it.) There are real fundamental differences between someone who is playing to win and someone who is playing not to lose. In a TRPG it's possible to encourage the former and discourage the latter.

Clearly we are looking at the asymmetries differently. As we are with so much else. Thing for me is, I got to much of the GMing stuff on my own, though by often circuitous paths. And again, we see things approximately opposite. If you're playing a game, the rules have to matter.

If they're unwilling to accept the possibility of losing, I wouldn't call them "gamers." They're certainly not willing to play any sort of actual game. If you want to just narrate things happening, go ahead and write that novel--and find out that "winning all the time with zero obstacles...