RT @StartSchoolL8r: Though study after study continues to find later high school start times greatly benefit teenagers in both mental and p…
Archives: Tweets
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Argh, the original (80s) theme song from Dallas is stuck in my head and I have NO idea why. Listening didn’t make it go away, either. Also, wow, the footage in that intro sequence makes Dallas pretty unattractive. “Drab skyline… cut to cows. A shiny building surrounded by small brown ones. Oil derricks? Er, lots of brown dirt? A biggish house? Stetsons! Tractors! Er… more dirt?”
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@tweetsbymoi You can cheerfully blame @kennethhite and @RobinDLaws! It was mentioned on their recent podcast (among other things) as grist for the ol’ RPG mill: kenandrobintalkaboutstuff.com/index.php/epis…
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@jeremiahtolbert @SaveVsTPK I think it depends on the player… 😉
The experience of crunch effectively scaffolding advancement sort of builds the sense in some players that advancement depends on certain kinds of crunch, but I think some players like complicated systems to interface with in and of itself.
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@jeremiahtolbert @SaveVsTPK In our EB game a lot of the “progress” was with alliances, knowledge, bargaining chips, and a growing sense of control over their own destiny. (They figured out debt maximization might make them “to big to fail” as citizens of the city. Fun theory, whether or not it was true.)
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@jeremiahtolbert @SaveVsTPK I mean, I think regression systems are progression systems with a different aesthetic, no? The “progression” system in Electric Bastionland mushes both aesthetics together. (Lose a nose, gain some hit points or points on your DEX.) @jeremiahtolbert @SaveVsTPK But honestly, IME you can have (narrative and even power-scale) progression w/o a trad progression system. Alliances, gadgets, better tactics, hard-won knowledge… they can all generate the same sense of progress if you handle them right.
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@SaveVsTPK Yeah, I was recently discussing this idea with some friends, after a session of Into the Odd, and basically I landed at thinking unless your players really love dense rules and crunch, rules simplicity isn’t a barrier to a longer season/campaign. @SaveVsTPK Wait, actually, was your friend saying that because it’s (sort of) more minimalist, or because it’s space horror?
Countless horror games have campaigns published for them, right? And countless OSR games are deadly and yet get used for campaigns.
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Reminder to self: badly governed Canadian provinces are just as disorganized as your typical South Korean university.
(I usually learn of any policy—not just COVID-related ones— <12 hours before they come into effect. Planning is impossible, with predictable effects on quality.) https://t.co/w5pbCyezAM Hell, we were not even told the Human Rights and Gender Equality web seminar requirement moved to yearly completion requirements till 1PM on December 31. Deadline? 5PM on December 31.
(Giving advanced notice apparently is some kind of weird foreign space science voodoo magic.) -
Book 59: The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath & Other Stories by Jason Bradley “Mockman” Thompson. A wild, feverish graphic novel of Lovecraft’s Dreamlands novel along with “The White Ship,” “Celephais,” and “The Strange High House in the Mist.” Dizzying, ornate, and worth a read! https://t.co/iG6Jlj4xvd I got this (after a long wait unfortunately entirely my own fault) with the Dreamlands map, which is also lovely and will adorn a wall near me sometime, soon.
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Book 58: Jack Vance The Palace of Love (Demon Princes #3) … and that holy crap Vance’s villains in Killing Machine and Palace of Love are basically intergalactic Manosphere proto-Incels. Creepy, nasty scenario, but well-written. You can see Vance developing here. I actually think a TV adaptation where Kirth Gersen is hunting incel/red pill-type influencers across the galaxy (and the evil worlds they end up ruling) might actually work pretty well. With a more diverse cast and more varied galactic culture, it could work!
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Book 57: Jack Vance The Killing Machine (Demon Princes #2) I realized the Demon Princes books are basically James Bond in space while reading this. It was fun and mousetrappy and very brisk, though very much a product of its time… (But the ending is telegraphed so hard that it’s difficult not to realize what’s coming quite a while before the big reveal.)
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Book 56: The Day After Ragnarok (Fate Edition) by Kenneth Hite with Leonard Balsera. This is an over-the-top campaign toolkit for a crazy historical post-apocalyptic world ruined by Nazis summoning (and death) of the Midgard Serpent late in World War II. I especially liked how Hite explicitly laid out a range of potential campaign concepts and types for the same setting. I feel like if you’re prepping a campaign toolkit, it’s a good model to study. 🙂
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I’m sure a few with curious ideas about how creativity works were enraged by the idea, but personally, I think it’s cool that Hangeul might be a distant third-cousin of the ancient Phoenician alphabet (and a fifth(?)-cousin of the Roman alphabet). It’s a small world after all. (Which is to say, yeah, it seems some Mongolian letters did get remixed into some Hangeul letters. But that’s only part of the story, of course.)
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Book 54: Paranoia: The Iceman Returneth by Sam Shirley. A module for Paranoia 2nd edition. It’s from late in the West End era, and was fine for what it is, but didn’t stick with me much. The more I look at pre-XP era Paranoia, the less I feel like keeping them in my collection. https://t.co/zgksvIqrRL Book 55: Gari Ledyard’s The Korean Language Reform of 1446. A fairly dry book on the history of the Korean alphabet, aimed at clearing up some purported misconceptions common around the time it was published.
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Book 52: The Worm Witch: The Life and Death of Belinda Blood by Wind Lothamer & Ahimsa Kerp A weird, worm-centric OSR setting with a lot of icky fun and also some cool ideas and locales I can easily see worming their way into less-gonzo settings. https://t.co/HFeBtQuzEO Book 53: The Stone Sky by N.K. Jemisin The last volume of the trilogy offered some major surprises but also a great deal of sorrow and loss, and I found it a tough read given the “current unpleasantness” —all the sorrow and loss in the real world these days.
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Aw, man, one of my favorite writers of history. Sad to know he’s passed. twitter.com/DGTam86/status…
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It blows my mind this needs to be called out at all.
Again I’m grateful to be somewhere the vast majority of people realize (or go along with the idea) that even if you’re vaccinated, masking is a necessary tool to contain the spread, and should continue. https://t.co/wWHFIKrLPg (Folks aren’t doing so hot on the social distancing/avoiding events here, but then many people started the pandemic with almost not sense of personal space and the assumption one should never ever do anything alone, so I am amazed distancing actually lasted as long as it did.)
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@ahimsakerp Since Twitter KEEPS showing this to me at inopportune times, I’ll just note that “inverts all curses into good fortune, makes all good magic items cursed” would break certain OSR games. Or not: if every cursed item offers some benefit and vice versa..? I guess it’s a wash. @ahimsakerp That said, I don’t know if there’s a compelling way to do it? If you randomize buff/debuff-type spells, the player will just avoid both.
Maybe the easiest way would be to have them roll a d4 with each roll, to see how the dice are polarized at anby given time?
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@QuidamAngela 아구기노스 = Agukinos but I think it’s supposed to be a riff on Agunychus, like “Deinonychus”.
(He’s at that fun stage where he’s started creating monster names by jumbling bits of other monster names.) 🙂
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At this point, I think maybe what’s needed is for required (unscheduled/surprise) inspections of all public facilities where a hidden camera would put someone at risk of crime, and serious fines for any owners whose own (required) regular self-inspections fail to turn them up. https://t.co/eXHBwuObCd But of course that would just launch an arms race as the scumbags would just work harder to better conceal the cameras so the inspectors couldn’t find them. But at some point, in theory, the cameras could get more expensive/difficult to conceal than is worth it to the scumbags?
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@pintsizehorror Adding -ly suffixes to nouns and pretending that makes them adjectives, in complete ingnorance of the fact -ly is added to adjectives to make adverbs.
(It started with “untactly,” and now, the dreaded “contactly”.)
Probably common knowledge for most now, but they’re new to me. @pintsizehorror But it’s a common pattern spanning my whole time here: Korean media makes up awkward/weird Konglish neologisms and then everyone somehow thinks they’re real English words and is baffled when native speakers are like, “Huh? That’s not a real word, what is it supposed to mean?”
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We have now reached the point in the pandemic where nonsensical Konglish words are actually making official communication in English semi-incomprehensible. I mean, you can puzzle it out, but honestly the neologisms never, ever make sense. Just using real words in English would be better for serious communication. Sigh.
(It makes me want to make up Korean words and then start using them and expect everyone to understand them.)
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Thread. Hard to imagine. twitter.com/laurenthehough…
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I was actually thinking this morning, “So, are the dudes who ranted about ‘realism’ in their D&D regarding ‘battle wheelchairs’ also having hordes of moronic peasants in their games protest against/refuse Protection from Evil or Lesser Restoration spells and Periapts of Health?” twitter.com/Popelady/statu…
