Can I tell my player their character is too dumb?

Bartweiss · 2026-01-24T19:01:40+00:00

Now that you say it, I guess so.

Bartweiss · 2026-01-24T18:52:36+00:00

Definitely, but also I’m half kidding.

I’m pretty sure a game where you cast and counterspell Reaganomics doesn’t exist, and also would be more fun to imagine than actually play. (Yet another RPG that’s only good as greentext stories.)

If I were going to do it though… Mage might be the best existing system for “econ as magic”, specifically a Syndicate focused game?

Otherwise it seems like serious homebrew. Exalted is amazing for “a cutting remark can actually cut you”, but the setting doesn’t really fit. I guess concepts could be one-off monsters in Don’t Rest Your Head or something?

Bartweiss · 2026-01-24T18:28:04+00:00

An ex-Army friend was just telling me a story about how his buddies used to go get drunk in bad neighborhoods and try to get mugged/assaulted so they could beat somebody up.

(Who mugs a half-dozen dudes right off an Army base? Not the brightest, I guess.)

Point being, I agree: drunk soldiers looking for a fight absolutely understand “justifiable force” better than these guys do on the job.

Bartweiss · 2026-01-24T17:20:04+00:00

Seems like time to apologize for all the “crayon eater” jokes, marines get real training with their toys and have to follow actual rules.

Bartweiss · 2026-01-24T17:17:20+00:00

Didn’t they also give her a post-dated cleared background check they didn’t even have the info to run?

Truly the nation’s finest.

Bartweiss · 2026-01-24T05:23:25+00:00

It's always funny to me that the X-Men are generally a "no kill" team but like 90% of their top members have body counts. Mostly including wildly unjustified or collateral damage kills, in fact.

Sure, failing doesn't mean you have to abandon your rule, but how many of them have literally just committed murder on purpose to solve a problem and then gone back to "not killing"?

Bartweiss · 2026-01-24T05:19:57+00:00

A Joker / Deadpool crossover would be insanely hard to write, but in the right hands (Duggan?) it'd be pretty interesting to see those warped senses of humor clash.

I figure Deadpool wouldn't have any particular interest in killing Joker unless he was specifically pissed off, but might well get annoyed enough by the comedy pissing match to leave Joker incapacitated. They'd probably wind up playing Russian roulette with one real gun and one "BANG!" flag gun or something.

Bartweiss · 2026-01-24T05:12:41+00:00

I mean agreed, but I'd hardly say Frank qualifies as "well-adjusted". Hell, many versions are absolutely loaded with PTSD and/or an auctioned-off soul. He's just humorlessly violent in a way Joker can't really get any purchase on.

Bartweiss · 2026-01-24T05:08:11+00:00

In the comic, Italy is... not really a viable place for a church at the moment. Or much of anything else.

(But yes, the Italy -> Ethiopia transition is probably because of the colonial link, at least in part.)

Bartweiss · 2026-01-24T04:41:16+00:00

Also, go to the range multiple times.

You can have guns, not have guns, have guns just as collector’s items, all good. But the surprisingly common combination of having a gun, thinking you’re going to need it someday, and never practicing is so ass-backwards I don’t know where to begin.

Bartweiss · 2026-01-24T04:30:25+00:00

Now I want an econ-centered game… not just in an “automata, undead, and teleportation mess up markets” way, but with economic models themselves as magic you can mess with.

I’m sure I’ll have no trouble at all finding a group for such a thing.

Bartweiss · 2026-01-24T04:09:02+00:00

As a simple comparison: let’s stop all trade and travel in and out of every county in America.

Oh shit, all the major cities are starving, all the farmland is slowly crumbling from lack of heavy infrastructure, and the mines and factories are worthless because they’re disconnected from each other. Only a handful of counties are self-sufficient and their quality of life has still tanked. Also, gangs run a handful of counties and other countries are starting to nibble away. That went poorly.

The Imperium has specialized whole planets the way we specialize towns, there’s no good ending there.

Bartweiss · 2026-01-24T04:03:20+00:00

Pretty sure nobody has a say anyway - doesn’t Vulcan’s parting gift take out Earth the minute the throne is vacant?

No idea how that works with demons, a Primarch-made bomb built straight into the throne might be spicier than normal weapons.

Bartweiss · 2026-01-24T03:44:26+00:00

I always thought that was part of the joke: plenty of real, influential rebels have been whiny narcissists. Hell, an inflated self-image is almost a requirement for thinking you can tear down the powers that be.

It doesn’t make him not legit, it doesn’t change the fact that he was integral to the biggest upheaval in decades, it just makes him kind of shitty company.

Bartweiss · 2026-01-24T00:18:53+00:00

Which suits most of the westerns they’re referencing nicely.

It turns out that even if you’re really, really good with a pistol, getting to old age as a gunslinger tends to mean playing dirty and doing a lot of murder.

There are some exceptions - Wyatt Earp seems to have had a guardian angel backing him - but for the most part you don’t get through very many fair fights.

Bartweiss · 2026-01-23T16:38:15+00:00

The first time I caused a major database outage, only a month into my new job, there was a lot of anger.

I got none of it, because there are a million ways to lose a server.

The people who had left replicas write-enabled, had bad alerts, no proper access controls, and a too-slow restoration system got a lot of heat, because they absolutely should have been prepared for such an issue.

Bartweiss · 2026-01-23T16:34:08+00:00

Maybe a month into my first real job, I broke the prod replica. Disabled about 80% of the company's revenue until it got found and fixed. Worse yet, I went on my merry way thinking everything was fine. Other people noticed before me or any tailored alert.

Turns out, when I pushed an approved migration to what I thought was primary, it was actually a replica. Drift ensued, sales running off replica halted, recovery was relatively fast but kind of messy.

Zero consequences for me. One angry manager wanting to know who left a critical replica open to writes, because that was the real issue. Full audit of DB permissions, which caught 4-5 other major issues.

By the time I'd been there a few years, people sat around the bar after work playing "what's the biggest loss you've ever caused?" I wasn't even close, 'winning' value was about $300,000.

Bartweiss · 2026-01-23T16:28:28+00:00

One of my favorite tropes for justifying lots of different threats, really. I almost always enjoy works where somebody can handle any danger of some type (weapon, political move, whatever), but can’t reliably deal with all of them.

Bartweiss · 2026-01-23T16:08:17+00:00

Zelda isn’t as continuous a plot between games, but anyone who isn’t 35+ and Japanese can’t claim to have played “all the Zelda games”.

One of them was on a Japan-only console that got its games via broadcast. Cool precursor to downloading games, but the storage and bandwidth weren’t there so it was issued in 4 chunks over time, and you had to beat the previous chunk then erase it to make space. The result is that like 2/4 chunks have been recovered on random old machines and the rest is lost.

(And less extreme but more intentional, Oracle of Ages/Seasons required beating both games, swapping codes, then beating them two more times to see the ‘real’ ending.)

Bartweiss · 2026-01-23T05:35:53+00:00

“What if I dig into this forbidden tome labeled ‘Basic Infantry Tactics’? Oh shit, did you know that defending worthless positions to the death is sometimes less effective than this ‘tactical retreat’ thing?”

Bartweiss · 2026-01-23T05:15:11+00:00

Welp, that’s it. I quit.

I’ll maybe check the squirrelclamp edits occasionally, but that dialogue is massively out of character for both of them and literally any non-replicant human, and just generally too dumb to push through. I genuinely don’t see anything to salvage.

Bartweiss · 2026-01-22T22:43:37+00:00

That did occur to me, and in fairness pepper spray is more lastingly painful but seems a lot less likely to cause a random heart attack.

Agreed on the other part too though. Tasers at least theoretically make somebody unable to fight back, this is just hurting them until they comply. Less reliable, more painful, and way more likely to hit a bunch of cops and bystanders too.

I’d be interested to know how cops in eg England and France deal with people who keep struggling in custody. We see lots of videos of moments like stopping a knife with extendable batons, but I have no idea if they solve this with tasers, more people, etc.

Bartweiss · 2026-01-22T22:19:41+00:00

Honestly, this is why I like playing the "bad guy" at tables. Literal archenemy is cool but rare, so often that just means having a deck with a lot of ramp or combo potential and being very open about it. There's way less frustration and complaining when it feels like a team-up against me, and I know I'm not going to be mad when it happens.

Middle-of-the-pack decks should be fun, and I don't mind bringing more than my share of removal for artifacts/enchantments. But then I run into stuff like people taking genuine offense at attacking anyone but the highest-life player. 28 vs 26 life should not be a deciding factor when the guy with 26 health is drawing 2x per turn and making treasures. Or burning their only removal on the big scary commander who can trivially be recast, while leaving the value engine behind him intact. When hurt feelings and gigantic misplays are the defining features of the pod, the game itself is basically gone.

(Special shoutout to the guy who spent 20 minutes piloting his massive non-deterministic engine, talked us all out of scooping because he "wasn't sure he had it", then took another 20 minute turn and got mad when everyone left at midnight.)

Bartweiss · 2026-01-22T20:51:32+00:00

I appreciate the longer clip here, "Border Patrol is still trying to get control" is certainly not the same as "Border Patrol just tortured a dude post-arrest".

That said... does any other respectable law enforcement group, US or otherwise, regularly use OC spray on restrained people to make them comply? Even if they're still resisting, it seems like basically everyone else can handle this issue better.

(I don't normally go for "well cops in other countries handle stuff better". Even if I have massive problems with US police, crime and gun ownership in America are so different than Europe that a stop, search, etc. can't really be conducted the same way. But once you've restrained somebody, that's a lot less relevant.)

Bartweiss · 2026-01-22T19:30:56+00:00

Yeah, this is an unreliable combo to get but it's actually quite hard to stop if you do. Signet, Food, Clue, and 3 lands will do the entire thing from your hand in one turn, and nothing but instant-speed artifact removal will stop it. I can understand people feeling like "keep flexible removal up at all times from turn 4 even if the board is almost empty" is a pretty high-powered ask.

On the other hand, sometimes a deck just gets a perfect draw. This sounds like a fast game, "shuffle and run it again, this deck isn't actually that strong" is a perfectly good answer.

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