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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • An advanced technique: ask your players to make shit up.

    Like, the players decided to go to the wizard university the wizard PC graduated from. So I ask him, “what’s their entrance hall like?” and let him just riff on it for a while. Players feel more engaged with the world, and it’s a little less work for me.

    Warlock is trying to commune with his patron. I ask, “what is your patron usually like?” and the player is delighted to describe “the great sculpin” in detail. This then inspires me further.

    Note that some players are very much “just tell me a story” and don’t want any input, and won’t like this. Some players are also shy and don’t think well on their feet. And some players are just really bad at staying on theme. But if you know your players , this can be a powerful technique.


  • Everyone saying “they can evacuate” clearly doesn’t remember how bad the covid response was.

    There will be anti-space conspiracy theorists. The ownership class would demand people continue working until the last possible minute (and beyond). It would be politicized, because some people are unbelievably stupid, cruel, and selfish, and enough people are so stupid they’ll buy in.

    Now, if we could make the meteor fall on a location occupied solely by the people who don’t believe in science…



  • Musk seems like the kind of D&D player who would

    • Build a horrible character (frankly impressive in 5e, which is pretty simple in terms of choices to make at the start). Like, a bard with 8 charisma, or a rogue with no dex
    • Or, pay someone else to build their character, and then not know how to play it.
    • And/or induce the other players to murder him (in the game)

  • "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, "

    “nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law;”

    Aside from being incorrect in the details, the rules as written don’t matter as much as the rules as enforced. The US constitution is not producing good results for many people.

    Also trump isn’t eligible under the 14th amendment for the whole insurrection thing.


  • I’m not sure what you mean. There aren’t really a lot of “quests” in gw2.

    There’s the main story, which is a green marker on your map. That’s always there (unless you turn it off or finish it)

    There’s orange markers for nearby events. That’s like “zombies are attacking! Save the town!” or “help these kids pick apples” or whatever. They’re just things that happen in the world and, to a limited degree, change the world state. Like an area might be full of toxic vines until an event finishes successfully, or a merchant might only sell items after his mission succeeds.

    There’s red markers, which are basically the same as orange, except they tend to be world events and not local.

    And then there are collections, which are kind of like quests. They’re not super advertised. They’re kind of of “get these achievements for a special reward”. Sometimes NPCs will give you one- like “go find all my favorite fish” or whatever. They’re optional, but sometimes fun and sometimes have good rewards. Like if you finish the one where you get most of the achievements for one chunk of the game, you get a max-stats accessory that all your characters can share.

    Anyway. Long reply. Nothing is really beamed into your head, no.








  • Many things. I mean, you could hack a lot of stuff into Excel but generally

    SQL has foreign keys and integrity checks. You can make it so like if you delete a user it automatically cascades to delete other rows like their addresses.

    You can prevent someone from entering the wrong type of data in particular columns. This one’s an integer and that one’s text.

    It’s designed to work on larger scales. Excel stops at 1 million rows per spreadsheet, unless my search just gave me AI slop.

    You can do queries, for selecting as well as updating and deleting. You can join tables.

    It’s much easier for other applications (such as a website) to talk to a SQL database

    You can do transactions.

    There’s a lot. That’s just off the top of my head.






  • I kinda like this idea that the players will be so responsible and active over their own entertainment that they’ll pick something to actively do to make something happen

    This is the dream.

    Sometimes I get players that have ideas, but then they’re like “oh that sounds too dangerous, nevermind”, and I’m like “it’s not going to be much of a game if we don’t take any risks”

    It’s probably partly my fault for making the dangers clear to the players. I wanted them to have an understanding of the risks and factors!

    Like one time, the players were told another faction would only help them with their problem if they dealt with a vampire that was in the local cemetery, and his little cult. This was a game of Mage, where even starting tier characters have a lot of strong options. One of the players just was like “you’re asking us to punch Cthulhu in the face! I don’t understand what you want us to do!”

    I was like … there are so many options. Your character can literally control flame, a major weakness of vampires. You also have a strong alliance with a paramilitary group. You can go during the day. You have 3 other party members. One of them can open portals. Like, to places where it’s daytime. Trust me, you can win a 4 v 1 fight. Maybe deal with his cult first if you don’t want civilian casualties. Or maybe talk to him and see if you can negotiate.

    But she just wanted to spin her wheels and complain. Worst player I’ve ever had, honestly.