worships Fortune

becomes extremely wealthy

Time to impugn her reputation! Wait, hold on…

The joke is on you, I don’t know my own true name!

(Mortals generally don’t in most settings, I think.)

Ten years ago /tg/ on 4chan used to be surprisingly good (if you could appreciate the elf bdsm content) but I haven’t been there since so who knows…

One of my proudest accomplishments was starting a thread there that people saw fit to archive. It was about pretending that there was a real White Wolf game called Bear: the Mauling in which the Foraging skill was so overpowered that no one actually mauled anything.

find traps finding intentional clauses in legal documents

Rogues always read the Terms and Conditions before accepting them.

Eh, most levelling systems are totally unrealistic and it’s best not to think about them too much. If I had to explain them, I would say that at the start of the campaign, the PCs were blessed by the gods with tremendous innate talent. It doesn’t matter if one PC had a hundred more years of experience than another because until the campaign started, none of the PCs were talented enough to be extraordinarily good at anything.

Ok but then who exactly is the World Bank propagandizing to on Twitter?

Why was the World Bank advertising on Twitter (or anywhere) in the first place?

WD, Seagate

Has Seagate improved? After having multiple Seagate drives fail, I did some research on failure rates and Seagate was way worse than every other brand. Since then I have only been buying enterprise-grade WD drives. However, I did my research almost ten years ago and a lot could have changed since then.

One time I asked “Do you think I could go fast enough on my bike to escape from a werewolf?” The answer was “I don’t know, does the werewolf also have a bike?”

Chance is an illusion. You cannot escape your fate.

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I think Gaston would have been a good main character for a hypothetical Beauty and the Beast sequel (or a good D&D PC). He’s the inverse of the standard hero - rather than starting out weak but pure of heart, he starts out strong, clever, brave, and charismatic, but also a rotten person. However, he just crossed several lines in a row (literally stabbing someone in the back is pretty bad even by his own standards), nearly died (Disney characters routinely survive falling off of cliffs), and can’t go home to a town where everyone knows he’s a villain. Can he turn his life around after hitting rock bottom (both literally and figuratively)?

I’d play him as a paladin, for that strength/charisma combination. Maybe he was saved through divine intervention? That could be enough to make him change his ways. A combat-oriented bard might work too; he does sing…

How could you say something like that!? You don’t care about me at all!

Well this one is easy, just ask them “is my butt big?”

They’re not actually sexy women with wings and little horns; that’s just the form they usually use when someone summons them deliberately because it’s the form most summoners want to see. They’re malevolent, shape-shifting extra-dimensional entities, they’re adept at emotional manipulation, they want to drain away a mortal’s soul through physical contact, and they prefer having that contact given willingly. (Maybe the soul is more useful to them like that, or maybe it just tastes better.)

They don’t need to seduce you. Maybe being a mercenary has severed your bonds to your family and your community? Maybe you’ve seen things that you wish you hadn’t? Mommy understands. Mommy will make you all better. Give Mommy a hug…

Were NPCs delicious too?

Well, technically all goblins have backstories. Most of them just don’t have backstories that involve getting proficiency in dex saves.

One thing I’m curious about is whether player-initiated exposition is a good idea.

Normally, the DM has to take the initiative to explore your character’s backstory. For example, he might say “You recognize the leader of the bandits - he was with the man who killed your father.”

What if instead, when the DM has a generic group of bandits attack, you remain in character and just confront the leader of the bandits. “You! You were with him! Where is the man that killed my father?”

On the one hand, this forces the DM to suddenly improvise when he already has a lot to do since he’s running the entire adventure. The DM might not like that. On the other hand, it also takes some of the work off of the DM, since it’s no longer his job to make sure that your characters’s backstory is being revealed the way you want it to be and he gets a memorable NPC for free.

If the DM doesn’t want to roleplay a dramatic dialog right there and then, he can say something like

The man was just a hired thug. All he knows is that the murderer and his elite guards left in the direction of [city the players were going to visit later anyway].

The man was killed during the fighting, but you find half of a strange icon, the holy symbol of a god you don’t recognize, hanging from a golden chain around his neck.

This way the DM can decide what the clue means when he gets around to it. Even if the bandit is just dead and the DM gives you no clues, you can roleplay your frustration. In any case, now everyone in the party knows something you (as the player) want them to know, even if it’s not something you’d tell them in character.

One thing I love about art deco is that it is not self-conscious. That’s how you can get stuff like this:

(A beard to impress any dwarf! Also, when I first saw it I thought he was zapping the viewer with two lightning bolts but he’s actually holding a compass.)

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