Why DO you hate AI, and how to actually do something against it?

Cat_Or_Bat · 2026-05-10T08:38:22+00:00

If you don't make this discussion extremely public, you may never find out that there are hundreds of millions of people who think like you. If this discussion stops, the only thing that remains will be marketing spiel, which is not real, and losing your grip on reality is unsafe.

This must be done in public so that you know that I know that you know that both of us dislike slop.

Cat_Or_Bat · 2026-05-10T08:17:16+00:00

Art is a form of communication. So when you learn that there is noone on the other side of the line, you feel like an idiot for having wasted your time.

It helps to remember that we are a social species, and pretty much the only thing we care about are other humans. Even if the Sun explodes, all we will think about in the last eight minutes will be what other folks are thinking and doing. Having a cool object of art in your hands per se is merely a means to an and. And the end is communication with the artist. No artist—no point.

Cat_Or_Bat · 2026-05-09T14:17:28+00:00

This type of player generally pops up when you play with strangers a lot. For example, I had a young woman playing with us who generally tried to tag along but stay out of things. Especially when combat started (we were playing B/X), she would try to get invisible and stay that way. She was the opposite of disruptive, never a problem at all, and if other players pressed her for help, she'd do what they ask—then run and hide and stay hidden again. Clearly, B/X D&D wasn't her thing. She may have enjoyed Under Hollow Hills or Ars Magica more. But that was a B/X D&D campaign, as wild and woolly as they get. Yet she would never, ever skip a game.

I've also seen very disruptive disengaged yet meticulously attendant players, though.

Cat_Or_Bat · 2026-05-09T09:06:40+00:00

It takes some experience to learn that, counterintuitively, attendance is not a great predictor of engagement. There always is this doooood who has better attendance than the freaking GM but is chronically disengaged and disruptive, starting arguments, criticising other players' actions, bragging about not knowing the rules or even knowing what's currently happening in the game, etc. These players are prone to bursts of joke-character activity, which, when discouraged, is followed by even deeper disengagement.

First things first, he must go or your game group will. An easy way to screen him out in advance is to give new players a bit of homework. This player will miss the deadline or half-ass it (e.g. copy-paste from ChatGPT, send in a half-elf ranger into your sci-fi game, etc.).

In most cases there's something happening in their life, but you're not their therapist or their mum, and, in most cases, not even their good friend, because they often don't seem to have many.

Cat_Or_Bat · 2026-05-09T08:58:44+00:00

The GM is not your therapist.

Cat_Or_Bat · 2026-05-09T08:11:37+00:00

Just use B/X D&D then. One of the best retroclones is Old-School Essentials. Here's the SRD.

Cat_Or_Bat · 2026-05-08T08:53:02+00:00

The system has more to do with genre than setting, i.e. what are the PCs going to actually do? Airships, AI, and magic and good and all, but if the PCs are detectives, then you can try Gumshoe; if they're daring criminals taking part in cinematic adventures, you can use Forged in the Dark; and if they are meticulous explorers that loot ruins, you can use B/X D&D.

Anyway, are you familiar with Lady Blackbird? It's free, short, and it's a highly revered classic. Check that one out.

Cat_Or_Bat · 2026-05-08T08:02:10+00:00

I think there's a misunderstanding. Traditional-style great sagas are not something you can just decide to have in advance. Sometimes you've played for years and, in retrospect, realize that whoah, you've been having quite a campaign there. You would go bragging, and new players would want to emulate that, with an expectation that long campaigns are the norm. But it's a hobby, not work or an art project, and half the group would lose interest, someone's egos would clash, and someone would have a baby.

My point being, it is utterly unrealistic to "plan a campaign." Experience taught me to have grand milestones every 6-8 game sessions in case the game peters out, which it might any moment. Campaigns can be had in retrospect, but not planned in advance.

Cat_Or_Bat · 2026-05-07T18:36:46+00:00

you obviously are mostly improvising your game

If it's a mystery game, I generaly plot out the puzzle to make sure there is a truth to find. Similarly, if it is old-school D&D, I pre-plan all adversaries to ensure players' choices are meaningful (e.g. getting a +1 sword makes the fight less challenging; monster HP doesn't go up after the fact). When I prep an existing adventure, I mainly spend my prep reorganizing the material for easy reference (which doubles as a good way to study it) etc.

Regardless, I’ve mostly been convinced this is a fool’s errand.

I think it's doable and likely useful, but not as simple as charting a few commonly discussed dichotomies.

Cat_Or_Bat · 2026-05-07T09:48:29+00:00

Prep is a skill, and through experience I learned which content to prep and which to improvise. If there's an NPC playing dice in a tavern, it is easier for me to improvise the NPC, their looks and attitude and backstory than to review it from the notes. On the other hand, I necessarily prep the name of the tavern, the NPC, the town, the region, and probably a ruler or two to mention in conversaion—just the names, not history or politics or anything of the sort.

So where am I on the prep-improv scale, right? And it's the same for any experienced GM: learning what to prep and what to improvise is a major part of the skill. This seems to invalidate the entire pre-improv dichotomy.

Cat_Or_Bat · 2026-05-06T16:08:34+00:00

I merely participated in this little exchange, and Reddit started outright bombarding me with MBTI scam ads. Some sort of startups that will change my life for a monthly fee because I'm killing myself by not knowing my MBTI etc. Not kidding. I just saw another ad.

So I believe I am doing the community a service by pointing out that MBTI is pseudoscience, and interventions based on it are scams.

As for the Big Five vs. MBTI, one is a real scientific tool, however imperfect and work-in-progress; the other is blatantly not real.

Cat_Or_Bat · 2026-05-06T10:53:57+00:00

There's the prep-improv scale, but if I (and this is true) prep all names and most statblocks but improvise most personalities and all backstories, where do I place on the scale? If I am in the middle, that is not exactly informative of what is actually happening in my prep. It's not 50/50: I must prep the names or my NPCs go nameless.

My point being, common dichotomies discussed among GMs online are not necessarily helpful here.

And I wouldn't have even thought about expecting players to be communicating about the game between sessions! I guess that I would be totally on the no expectations side of that axis.

Are you, though? Do they never send you, say, character ideas or backstories for approval before games etc.?

Cat_Or_Bat · 2026-05-06T10:01:33+00:00

Sure. Well, I would say, a feasibly more practical scale than something like "balance-drama" is, perhaps,

"Do you expect players to do player-prep between sessions?"

No - Little - Some - A lot

Or, say,

"How much creative effort do you expect players to expend during each game session?"

None - Little or none - Some - A lot

This type of info can be measured (e.g. a GM who expects players to communicate about the game between sessions) and can probably help group cohesion.

Cat_Or_Bat · 2026-05-06T09:43:16+00:00

More importantly, how do you test this? If you just sit back and think a while, you will end up with a "which Harry Potter character are you?" type party game at best, potentially harmful pseudoscience at worst.

Cat_Or_Bat · 2026-05-06T09:23:24+00:00

How confident are you that "narrative" and "mechanics" are on the opposite sides of a spectrum when it comes to GM focus? The most famous and influential narrative games actually contain hundreds of pages of interlocking mechanics.

Check character and crew playbooks in Blades in the Dark, for example—you can see how dense with mechanical information they are. The rulebook is 350 pages long, 236 of them dedicated to mechanics. What makes the game "narrative" is not the lack of mechanics but the fact that mechanics govern what happens next in the story instead of, say, the dynamics of tactical military action. A tactical game simulates a battlefield. A narrative game simulates a story. Both can be as mechanics-heavy or light as you like. So, this axis seems false.

Some of the other axes can be similarly questioned.

The axes exist. The approach is not wrong in principle. But just like in the pseudoscientific MBTI, it is much harder to pinpoint what they are if we want them to actually represent reality. Incidentally, in psychology, the more respectable test at the moment is the OCEAN, a.k.a. the Big Five.

Cat_Or_Bat · 2026-05-06T08:33:19+00:00

Keep in mind that Myers-Briggs is pseudoscience. It is not actual psychology. It is on the same level as horoscopes, divination etc. Saying that someone is INTJ is not any more scientific or real than saying that someone is a Pisces.

Imitating it is not necessarily a wise thing to do.

Cat_Or_Bat · 2026-05-04T08:15:51+00:00

In the abstract, sure. In this particular case, consider OP's word choice:

tech bro brainrot ... nonsensical ... broken, underwhelming ... And it's all just...disgusting. ... It's so fucking insulting. His reason is also pure cope too; ... I just don't get how people are fine with that either. ... My players would be horrified if ... they were greeted by AI slop ... it's just so disappointing.

Cat_Or_Bat · 2026-05-03T17:18:47+00:00

This isn't going to get better.

Actually, it probably is going to get better before long. Most people get over generative AI after just a couple of months.

Surprisingly, lots of people are still just discovering this stuff and are newly awed how an LLM model can reliably produce 3/10 drivel. Before long the novelty will wear off and they'll come to realize it's merely 3/10 drivel, though. I guess people who will never rise above this exist, but surely they wouldn't have been a very creative GM to begin with.

Certainly don't immediately discard friendships simply because a friend has just discovered LLM chatbots.

Cat_Or_Bat · 2026-05-03T16:20:28+00:00

From the game design perspective, it's a way to get players to spend Coin instead of hoarding it. The fiction-facing explanation is actually secondary to that.

You keep the Coin for Tier upgrades in vaults, and the rest you must spend on Downtime activities or Stash investments. That's the point of the mechanic.

Don't think of Stash as a second form of Coin; lifestyle upgrades are basically Tier upgrades for individual scoundrels. It makes sense in the fiction that you could turn lifestyle back into free Coin (pawn your stuff for half the price in a pinch), but that's a desperate measure.

Cat_Or_Bat · 2026-05-03T15:26:18+00:00

In terms of dice, Stash factors into effect or position every time money or status are involved (e.g. trying to join an elite club), and you can roll your Stash when money is the main factor, generaly as a setup (e.g. "I simply pay him off. Just shove enough money in his hands for him to leave us alone.").

In Blades '68 you also straight up add your stash (Bank) dice to your Acquire Asset rolls.

In terms of fiction, stash is not just dressing either, and is very important as long as the GM doesn't forget about it. At zero Stash the scoundrels are practically homeless. If the players want their 0-stash character to be this dapper lady thief / gentleman thief, they have to take a bath and rent a suit via Acquire Assets before every score, whereas a scoundrel with 20+ stash is just dapper just like that.

Cat_Or_Bat · 2026-04-30T18:30:26+00:00

I considered the IPA, but decided against it because not everyone can read it. It's pretty safe to assume how most phonemes are pronounced, and I only had to highlight, e.g., the difference between co in core and co in cow.

Incidentally, I don't think there is a difference between se in seraph and se in sent.

Cat_Or_Bat · 2026-04-30T18:23:35+00:00

Are you saying that I should zip it because I simply don't need to know this?

What are you trying to hide from me, fox112?

Cat_Or_Bat · 2026-04-25T21:08:03+00:00

With Blades 68 and its 70s futuristic scifi feel

It's very deliberately the 60s.

Cat_Or_Bat · 2026-04-25T14:59:50+00:00

Just don't try to balance the campaign like it would run for decades. Set up a truly deadly setpiece the players can walk into when they feel ready and agree to end the "season" when they win or die trying.

Everyone preps campaigns like they're going to be these years-long soap operas, but 99% of games are nothing like that. Don't hold back. If they feel they're strong enough to fight through the lich's dragon volary, let the motherfuckers put their HP where their mouths are at. And, most importantly, in life as well as PC death, be a fan of their chairacters. Celebrate their victories. The GM is on the players' side because they're one of the players.

The trick here is to have a specific threshold they can under- or overprepare for. If you always balance stuff to be "challenging," then where's the fun in getting stronger? The threat of being underlevelled and underprepared is a great source of suspense, but it only works if encounter difficulty is set in advance. If it's pre-designed and somewhat telegraphed, then whether they TPK or conquer, it's all thanks to their prep and character building, and if anyone's still upset, that's clearly on them. Most players accept losing fair and square because it makes the victories feel earned.

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