That sucks. I’m sorry that happened =(

It was like that for me on the Marvel Rivals subreddit on Reddit. I didn’t like all the smurfs (new accounts made by higher ranked players in lower ranked lobbies) but when I complained about it and said lower ranked or more casual players deserve to have fun, too, a bunch of people diminished my experiences, gleefully said they smurf, it’s a skill issue, it’s not a real problem (despite me checking enemy user profiles and sure enough, they’re all experts at this game with barely any time played and all wins in their competitive matches), just to not play, etc. It’s like pro basketball players dunking on little kid community games. They deserve to have fun, too!

Don’t have any advice or anything, and what I said may not have made any sense to people who don’t play the game, just empathizing on how much the internet sucks sometimes and your comment reminded me of that. Now I’m angry just remembering it lol.

It also feels like half the activity on Reddit now comes from bots. It makes it feel emptier than it probably is to me when I go visit there occasionally, especially on the big subs. Which then makes me focus on the small subs, which end up feeling smaller or equal to the fediverse already, just on more niche topics.

It’s an AI bot that finds songs?

Or during Rome lol.

Republics don’t work. They always just end up authoritarian.

There isn’t really a single form of communist government, same as there isn’t a single way to do democracy or capitalism. Every country does it different, experiments a different way. For all we know, the perfect way to do it is just waiting for us to discover.

For example, I’d say the US’s form of liberal, bourgeois democracy is one of the worst ways to implement it, but it was also an early experiment with it and deserves credit for at least trying it and helping us learn what to do and what not to do.

And we haven’t even bombed you to the stone age yet to take all your oil! (or coal? Whatever Australia has) Imagine it would be even more after that lol.

Same, man, same lol. I’m still patriotic during the Olympics, but if we’re going to be funding genocides, assassinating leaders, and starting wars and shit, fuck it, I hope we lose them all lol. Let’s just start over on the whole project.

I invite US balkanization at this point so I can go hang out in the new sovereign state of whatever CA, WA, and OR will be called. Hawaii can come, too.

You should compare countries of similar development. That’s a good thing. People always compare the richest capitalist countries with the poorest communist countries, but by doing that always ignore the mass amount of poor capitalist countries, ones that are poor specifically because of capitalism.

Russia, for example, was extremely poor and behind. Comparing them to other majority agrarian societies during the Tsar makes way more sense than comparing them to countries that had been post-Industrial Revolution for awhile already, like Britain, Germany, or the US. That wouldn’t make any sense. They were trying to catch up but they were still only just getting a proletariat from their burgeoning heavy industry and rail industries when the Revolution happened. They were way behind the West otherwise. Yet in a short period of time they managed to catch up.

China even more so was basically all peasants. Vietnam, Cuba, Korea, etc all the same, extremely poor, small, or both. So they should be compared with countries of relative equal development, which tends to be the countries in the global South, like Africa or Latin America.

Then there’s the fact that they are kept at low development through purposeful exclusion from global markets, via sanctions, propaganda like the “Radio Free” programs, coups, support of separatist or terrorist groups, taking of national resources, being kept in debt by the IMF, and so on.

The USSR had to deal with a civil war, rising up during WWI and being sabotaged by the Germans, more civil war, foreign meddling, and all while being the first successful communist revolution. Yet they still managed to raise literacy, raise health outcomes, raise average life expectancy, gender equality, science and technology, end the cycle of famines (after the first one or two they had when they were still building up), had faster growth during that period than any capitalist country (except maybe the US, which was doing imperialism at the time and the biggest hegemon), all while helping sustain other socialist countries, like Cuba, Venezuela, or North Korea.

Ya, that makes sense. They seemed pretty similar in concept, I probably just misremembered something he said.

Ya I think he’s said something about replacing that advice with node-based adventure design or something, but this article by itself has helped me improve tons of mystery scenarios by itself that I think the advice works as is.

That’s a food idea to include it on a session 0. For a long time I didn’t realize how lucky I was to have such creative players until I started DMing with players new to rpg’s who aren’t used to that “I can do anything?!” mindset.

Yup. We’re in an extra normal time and people are still clutching to decorum and civility as if it matters anymore.

How so? I heard their protocol was better than Activity Pub, but I don’t really know the details or what the difference is.

I’ll try to add to the conversation with 5e rather than suggest another game like everyone else (although I will say I’ve gotten into 4e recently and it’s surprisingly fun with very tactical, engaging combats lol). I agree with a lot of what you said about sprinkling in descriptions and dialogue throughout the combat. I also think better designed enemies can help a lot. I highly recommend the Flee Mortals book by MCDM. I used it a lot in 5e campaigns now. More interesting enemies can make comabt more interesting.

I also think more interesting environments can also help. Put in lots of cover, spots of difficult terrain, maybe a trap, things like that.

Uninteresting combats should be fast, and one thing that helps that out is low health, high damage enemies, which for me means every now and then I lower enemy health if they already got a few good hits in or an enemy blew a spell slot to take care of them, since the point of this combat is to make players lose resources, not really for the story. This is less of a problem for low level combat, but more for higher level combat when health totals increase. Also, for these don’t be afraid to make them some run to warn other allies, or run in fear if they get low health (unless they’re mindless undead or constructs), or some run when their boss dies, things like that.

On the other hand, interesting or story important combats I’m okay with being long as long as they’re also compelling and fun to play. After all, D&D has a lot of fun combat options in classes and players want to use them. That’s where I recommend things like villain actions in that Flee Mortals book or the other stuff I recommend above.

Oh and the last thing I did is I am very liberal with consumable magic items or temporary buffs as awards for quests and stuff. I like the latter because players aren’t encouraged to hoard it and it in fact encourages pushing ahead more to take advantage of the buff while they have it so the opposite mentality of hoarding, but the former has the nice advantage of being an additional option for a player to use in combat, which can make it more interesting, especially for those without spells. But to prevent hoarding, you have to make combat harder and have the kinds of players that look at everything on their sheet, as well as give enough rewards they know they’ll get more in the future.

Nice! I’ve been slowly making my own playlists but it’s messed up my algorithm when I want to listen to normal music with lyrics lol.

This is a great idea for a patreon or a blog. What other one-shots have you done? I’ve heard of Wood Sheep Chase so wondering if you’ve covered others I’ve heard of.

Great idea!

All of these sound intriguing to me but I’m very much in the wrong timezone. Good luck!

Everyone either seems angry or like a bot. Before I couldn’t pull myself anyway, now I get bored a couple posts into the front page and then I just check it a few hobby subs that I hope can move here someday (mostly TTRPG ones lol).