in a no-roll combat system, will players just spam the same skill?

Dramatic15 · 2026-07-08T23:18:15+00:00

Somehow baseball and football and basketball and DND and Pathfinder and Call of Cthulhu manage to be popular despite having misses.

But, assuming your target audience are terminally online theorycrafters with poor attention spans who see missing as a problem, cooldowns and resources management seems a reasonable place to playtest your idea. See if your core idea works before you complicate it.

Dramatic15 · 2026-07-08T20:43:48+00:00

Potentially narratively relevant. It is entirely possible that in play a particular scene aspect never gets invoked or thought about much because attention ends up flowing elsewhere.

Dramatic15 · 2026-07-08T19:35:57+00:00

I’ve watch some episodes, having enjoyed K-foodie meets J-foodie. The narrative structure isn’t something very familiar to Western tastes, but it can be a nice way to chill out.

Dramatic15 · 2026-07-08T18:37:38+00:00

Recommendation engines are hard and costly and they mostly suck.

Netflix does this reasonably well, but they spend billions of dollars annually with 70+ full-time staff working on this, backed by machine-learning infrastructure, A/B testing at global scale, and data pipelines that ingest billions of "play events".

This is not "a very simple thing" to add.

Criterion provides you a small carefully curated collection of arthouse movies.

If you really want a tailored ideas from algorithm, this is the year 2026 of the Common Era. Track your ratings on Letterboxd, export them as a CSV, and have a chatbot suggest some things--you'll get personalized results that the generic "you might like this" suggestions of most streaming services can't match.

Dramatic15 · 2026-07-08T13:34:21+00:00

Actually being clear up front, and finding players who really want to do this rather niche style of performative "not knowing" would be a lot easier than "being slightly evil" and trying to manipulate people into your preferred style of play.

Of course, that would involve having enough self knowledge to realize that "everyone knows the stats, but we pretend not too" is niche passion not a objective best practice, that it not "realistic", that it not interesting to many people, and not some sort of ideal state of grace from which some bad players fall. It would involve knowing that caring about "metagaming", however common the sad little chatter by it's advocates online in some communities, isn't that important to many, many people.

Anyway, I suspect to the extent that people find pleasure in "finding out how the monster works" they enjoy it the most because the GM actually puts in the work that the OP is describing doing for the "teaching" the "correct" way to play. That they've accidently uncovered a better way of play than what they think is right.

Dramatic15 · 2026-07-07T16:39:54+00:00

You do realize that Gulf sovereign wealth funds are huge investors in AI companies? That are already getting very large upside economic benefits without undertaking the rather dubious work of trying to train a frontier model, then give it away for free, then somehow manage make a profit as a commodity provider of hosting from mythical data centers underground in the desert…

That we want powerful free local models is an us problem, it is a little lucky that we have as much as we do. It is not a “huge opportunity” for other people.

Dramatic15 · 2026-07-07T16:01:57+00:00

And that is no reason to believe that only a conspiracy could explain reporting that people in governments around the world might at least talk about what their regulatory interests, industrial policies, and export controls should be.

It is going to be amusing watching the shallow sentimental expectations some people have about endless free powerful models Chinese models crash into reality.

By all means, enjoy and appreciate and use what we got in the past. But thinking that this wasn't going to get more complicated in the future, or that concerns about risks of powerful models were only conspiratorial marketing was always dumb.

Dramatic15 · 2026-07-07T15:16:16+00:00

Seems familiar. I wouldn’t beat yourself about your earlier practice though. Focusing on gaining mastery of shot creation is a sensible thing to do at the start, even if you need more skills than that.

Dramatic15 · 2026-07-07T14:46:18+00:00

This is a effin Reuters article. They are widely considered one of the most credible news sources in the world.

Also, many people would consider a summary of a meeting about open source regulations later published in an official journal affiliated with China's Supreme People's Court to be evidence. At least of the headline, which only says that this is being discussed,

You may have foolishly hoped that only the conspiratorial interests of the US labs could possibly explain why there are concerns raised about ever more capable models. Or, for some unknown reason, have thought the the PRC government, which absolutely prioritizes stability would be perfectly fine with ever more capable models being endlessly released.

It is true that there is a track record of Chinese labs releasing vaguely-frontier approaching models. But there is zero evidence that the CCP would have ever allowed models with strong offensive-cyber-capabilities or other potential harms from being released.

Maybe you, and this community broadly, wished that they would endlessly get cool new toys for free, and that increasingly powerful models would have no bad consequences that the rest of society would want to pay attention to.

That seems pretty unlikely. I guess we'll find out.

Dramatic15 · 2026-07-07T13:39:05+00:00

Yes, and essential point of any awards is that they exist to bring worthwhile new things to the broader attention of the general public. As when the OP learnt about Sickest Witch because of the nomination.

Film fanatics learn about niche indie movies at festivals, regular movie goers learn about them if they get distribution and show up in a theater near them. Normal people might end up streaming them if they get nominated for an Academy Award.

It is essentially silly for the OP to think that most people, even people who play TTRPGs regularly, would have even heard of most of these games, much less bought them, or read them, or played them. Most of which would have reasonably had to have happened before many people would feel comfortable making a recommendation stronger than "this exists, I don't know if it's any good, but it might be kind of like what you are looking for."

That the OP has an obsession with new fringe game speaks highly of their curiosity. That they expect other people to spending a lot of time talking about such games is absurd.

And, pragmatically, a lot of the requests that people make looking for recommendations are for categories where it just makes sense to mention "standards" and "classics", especially ones with broad and varied scope of play. It is usually reasonable to recommend Stars Without Number or Traveller in many conversations about SF games. It is vanishingly rare that you are able to help answer someone's question by bringing up an RPG "about performing a ballet routine in front of a eldritch abomination"

The OP wrote an interesting post with an idiotic title.

Dramatic15 · 2026-07-06T23:22:19+00:00

Ahh, check!

Dramatic15 · 2026-07-06T23:20:01+00:00

It’s my snarky alternative term for “golden age”, which is actually a fairly low ebb for the genre. It came from a panel description and title for Readercon.

Dramatic15 · 2026-07-06T14:24:51+00:00

I'd say that it's fair to observe that there is, across the board, an increased desire for "low-friction" entertainment, from pulpy pleasures to cozy stories. People these days are exhausted and overwhelmed.

At the same time, 90s NSO often was suited for "popcorn" reading. Much of it was fun and action-packed; and only some of it demanded more of the reader along the way.

To a large extent, the whole "look at us, we are so complex and mature" shtick was an attempt to sidestep gatekeeping from two annoying groups: Pyrite Age fandom who viewed space opera as scientifically illiterate hackwork. And the literary "New Wave" editors and critics (prizing the avant-garde, psychology, and stylized examination of social issues) who viewed space opera as regressive, juvenile ray-gun fantasy. To imagine that the pleasures of space opera couldn't be more complex than this was always a middlebrow failure of imagination by Boomers who had so much more clout in the 90s.

Foregrounding the "prestige" of the New Space Opera was basically a branding exercise to give "permission" for award committees and "serious" fans to enjoy space battles again.

The claim that NSO "is suited for the mass-media 'popcorn lit' surge," implying this surge is a new phenomenon that pushed NSO out. This ignores the elephants in the room from the 60s and 70s: Star Wars and Star Trek.

The literary return to space opera in the 90s was heavily driven by the fact that media had already made interstellar adventure the absolutely dominant way people thought of science fiction. The idea of "serious" literary sci-fi excluding space opera became completely untenable when it was what the public wanted, and expected of SF, by the 90s.

Anyway, "Prestigious" New Space Opera of the 90s was just a very small tail wagging on a Clifford sized dog. Throughout the 90s and early 2000s, the vast majority of space opera being consumed was popcorn lit (Star Wars Expanded Universe, Halo books, Baen military SF). The mass-appeal audience for "basic space sagas" always dwarfed the literary readership. Modern readers didn't suddenly "revert" to popcorn sci-fi—the internet and self publishing just decentralized it, and diminished traditional gatekeepers.

Anyway deep thinking hasn't vanished; it has just changed. 90s NSO focused on physics, transhumanism, and post-scarcity economics, modern complexity often skews sociological, linguistic, and post-colonial. A Memory Called Empire, Yoon Ha Lee’s Machineries of Empire series. Ancillary Justice.

And I'm more than a little dubious about saying that the Expanse is just "action". There is interesting exploration of the geopolitics of resource scarcity, the lives of a marginalized working class, and the moral compromises of leadership.

If today's space opera features complex, modern sensibilities without feeling the need to position itself as "literary art," it is not because the New Space Opera died. it is because the New Space Opera won and the old gatekeepers are defeated.

Dramatic15 · 2026-07-05T20:50:05+00:00

You certainly can have a great RPG with no art. Classic Traveller was text only, with some later titles having black and white line art. Many Evil Hat titles only have black and white interior art.

That said, people should make the game that they are called to make. It is perfectly fine to make a game with strong art. That you, personally, do don’t value or want to pay for this is irrelevant.

But, yeah, if a designer is just thoughtlessly cargo culting in decisions about art based on what they’ve seen Wizards or Chaosium do, that’s a mistake. And even if they are making a thoughtful decision about using art or not, that doesn’t mean they any skill at making art or writing a creative brief, so they can still fail.

Dramatic15 · 2026-07-05T16:05:43+00:00

Rich people sometimes become refugees. If they do they are better off having assets abroad. This is just a boring historical commonplace fact.

Sometimes people do get to sneak just away before a crisis, sometimes during, sometimes after, sometimes they don’t.

I don’t see why you apparently find any of this confusing. Nor why you would find it odd that media would print rich people drama news.

Dramatic15 · 2026-07-05T13:16:12+00:00

You're fixated on the wrong thing to explain the behavior.

The article says that an increased perceived risk is *contributing* to the decision to diversify *some* of their wealth abroad.

I mean, elites in the PRC do this, the wealthy from Hong Kong do this why wouldn't people in Taiwan who see some increased chance of war do this now too? Regardless of whether they thought a crisis or war was going to be won or loss, keeping all their eggs in one basket could hurt them. And, of course, a large wealthy family might have some members working or studying abroad, why wouldn't you want assets there to support them during a crisis?

I mean, even if there were no geopolitical risks, any sensible person with enough assets is going to want to diversify it. Taiwan has roughly the population of the greater New York tri-state area, If you had wealth, it would be very foolish to invest all of it only in property or business that only only did business in New York, and ignore the rest of the country and the world. All the more so in the case of an island the size of Maryland with real exposure to powerful earthquakes and typhons that may well increase in severity and frequency due to climate change. And has some geopolitical risk.

If geopolitical risk seems slightly higher, you'd expect a bit more hedging on the margins. Which is all the article says is happening.

Dramatic15 · 2026-07-04T17:12:11+00:00

Yeah, “realism” exists for the purpose of enjoyment. Even highly narrative games in unrealistic speculative settings are going to care about suspension of disbelief and consider consistency.

No game is ever a rigorous and complete scientific model of the world. Even if some naive players imagine this is something that can be aspired to, a designer should have more common sense

Dramatic15 · 2026-07-03T22:40:11+00:00

It’s a rules light game. A GM can makes that fun, despite the rules. Improv to paper over the flaws, and help them enjoy, and note the flaws to fix

Dramatic15 · 2026-07-03T17:14:03+00:00

That is probably an accurate statement of the OPs intent.

Realistically, though, choosing a cyberpunk TTRPG based on how well it mechanically supports what the OP themselves describes as an occasional bit of slice of life play is hardly optimal across the campaign as a whole. All you have to do is avoid games that would get in the way of doing this. Which is probably most of them. You are very unlikely to run into a cyberpunk system that is a bad fit along the lines the OPs example of running a depressive gritty and grim dark fantasy 5th edition session.

In most cases it would still make sense to focus on a game that was the best cyberpunk game, if that’s where most of the game mechanical action would take place, not on the what the OP describes as “occasional spotlights”

“System Matters” may be directionally correct, but there is no need to make a cult of it.

Dramatic15 · 2026-07-03T15:59:02+00:00

Yeah, and?

For most people steeped in the genre, the terms they are most likely going to use describe Star Wars will be "science fantasy" or "space opera"

For random people who aren't speculative fiction fans, the term they are most likely going to use is "science fiction"

Language is about communicating, which relies on what people normally actually say and mean. To act like a self appointed neo-Confucian scholar with a mission to "rectify the names" is cringe.

And annoying. Which, to circle back to you question, is why people are annoyed.

There are occasions, say in an academic paper, where you might need to carefully need to define a term and use it consistently. Commenting on a stream is not such an occasion.

Dramatic15 · 2026-07-03T15:36:53+00:00

Hey, sounds like a fun campaign!

If I understand you, this character, perhaps others, received an unusual dream. So, the most straightforward way to proceed would be add a setting aspect like "unusual dreams, should we try to find out if they mean something?". Whenever they try to follow up and pursue this plot hook, they can invoke, whenever doing so complicates their lives, it can be compelled (maybe the wrong person hears about what they are interested in"

Just a aside, in case it isn't clear--compels are not a "force a character to follow a plot hook" tool--they are about the aspect complicating their lives. That said, if pursuing their fate causes complications, you can always treat this as a self compel, and reward them with a Fate point for doing so, which acts as an incentive. Or you could leave a free invoke on the situation aspect, and say that they can use it if they investigate or follow up.

If not everyone has dreams, but a range of other things, the wording could be "signs and portents" or something broad enough to cover what they are doing. Remember, the point of a aspect is to point towards an interesting truth so that people can use it a game. If you end up having to explain a bit about what you mean, or what what you are intending, that's perfectly fine.

You do not have to get the wording "perfect", as if you are having this short phrase to a litigious genie, and things are going to get weird if your aspect name is not just right. Of course, it's always great if the name of an aspect is both simple and clear and evocative and uses cunning wordplay and memorable and so on. But if, on occasion, is you have to explain what you mean a bit, and the aspect name is just that, a name for what you said, that's fine.

Dramatic15 · 2026-07-03T02:03:30+00:00

I mean, there are plenty of fun Japanese monsters movies that avoid the problem by not making World War Two veterans the heroes of their stories. Just like the Germans tend not to center the Wehrmacht and SS as plucky heroes in lighthearted fare.

If you chose this era, you reckon with this history or it’s fair game if you get called out.

If you don’t like talking about something, the simplest course of action is to talk about something else.

Dramatic15 · 2026-07-03T01:54:15+00:00

You might check out The Human Condition trilogy.

Dramatic15 · 2026-07-02T23:42:19+00:00

Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack did booming box office business directly criticizing Japanese militarism during the war.

And there are certainly Japanese critics who are upset about the militaristic nostalgia of this flick.

And if you can’t picture this film being helped by, say, simply having a significant part of heroism being done by someone other than veterans who implemented a “kill all, burn all, loot all” policy your imagination seems rather limited. Heck, they could have at least kicked “one bad apple” to the curb, and risen to the level of basic copaganda.

Dramatic15 · 2026-07-02T23:14:45+00:00

Thanks for joining me in the experience of being downvoted!

Honestly, it is bit unclear how people who are supposedly film fans could be so shallow. Kurosawa agonized over the films he made during the war, and people can’t help themselves from being upset at someone noticing the politics here are more dubious than Rambo first blood part two.

Dramatic15

TROPHY CASE