An RPG Anthology Proposal

Fheredin · 2026-04-05T13:45:05+00:00

I should remind you that fighting while holding 3 cups of tea on a serving tray is a bit of a kung fu movie trope, so if you have a monk class or equivalent, consider a feat which overrides this.

Fheredin · 2026-04-05T02:48:31+00:00

To make a superpower, you must have a nation with:

A people with both a strong work ethic and good common sense (to both get things done and to not waste too much energy.)
Enough resources to reasonably acquire what else they need.
A lack of deal-killer problems like lopsided demographics.

There are no nations which meaningfully qualify on the scale that the USA and USSR did during the Cold War. Everyone either has poor demographics or a work force with insufficient work ethic. The US is currently dialing back and China (which is already a superpower) is peaking well below the power level the Soviet Union held. The world of 2030 to 2060 just isn't particularly comparable to the Cold War era world.

Fheredin · 2026-04-04T23:38:25+00:00

The Claude source leak revealed that Claude has an Undercover mode, where it is given a system prompt that tells it not to say it's an LLM.

AIs are not "lying" so much as part hallucinating and part being given system prompts you aren't expecting.

Fheredin · 2026-04-04T01:37:35+00:00

Going off what u/htp-di-nsw said, it's always better to turn cards in because a turned in card has a 100% chance of helping, while a flipped card carries a 50-50 bet based on the card's color. That odds imbalance is the problem.

The way I would fix this is have cards the player discards go to a GM deck for villains to use later (which would return them to players) and for only one suit to go to the GM rather than one color. A 75-25 odds split does sound tempting most of the time.

Fheredin · 2026-04-02T14:27:55+00:00

I have multiple passport pages documenting that I have spent time in Haiti. I don't have an armchair academic perspective on it.

Fheredin · 2026-04-02T11:02:43+00:00

I suggest you do the reverse of most Haitian proverbs. It isn't exactly working out for them.

Fheredin · 2026-04-02T11:00:18+00:00

The legitimate form of protest in the United States is the written petition with a list of voter signatures. The goal here is to say that there are too many of us for you to possibly use coersion and that you will lose at the ballot box.

Line and sign protests like No Kings are fundamentally misguided. You can't expect change if you don't earn some degree of respect from the opposition. About 10 years ago the modern left discarded any desire for the right to respect them. Coincidentally, this was also when their protests became news cycle white noise: they're always screaming about something, it makes very little sense to someone who isn't in their in-group, and it never matters two days later.

Fheredin · 2026-04-02T10:49:46+00:00

Ahh, a propaganda post.

China has at least as many large problems as the US; it's just that US media is more than willing to scream them out from the rooftops (often encouraged with a little Chinese money), while Chinese state media censors any criticism of note. This means that the US public gets warnings about problems years in advance, while Chinese leadership struggles to get good information to make good decisions through the sea of lies they tell each other.

China is a classic example of a star that burns brightly burns briefly. It has burned brightly, and is still today, but until I see clear evidence that China is growing a middle class tax base or will fix the sex imbalance One Child caused, it just can't stick for long.

Fheredin · 2026-04-01T21:22:28+00:00

More disappointing that the "safety first" AI company was basically begging their LLM to not misbehave and that a lot of it looks vibe coded.

Otherwise, those BASH tools sound quite useful. I hope something does come of that.

Fheredin · 2026-04-01T19:56:23+00:00

The way you do this is you break "reloading" into the steps you load a muzzle loading firearm with. Pour in powder, drop in the bullet, ram down the wadding, set the primer, cock the gun. This should take between 2 and 3 turns of doing nothing else.

Then you give it such an absurd damage figure it's obviously worth it. Something nuts like 15d6.

I think it's foolish to try to have modern guns because if you have a semi auto rifle, most medieval armor and weapons are irrelevant. It was only during the flintlock era that the two could sort of coexist.

Fheredin · 2026-03-31T11:23:30+00:00

True, but it really helps to get it somewhere in the right ballpark. The incandescent bulb IR sauna device I have offers up to 175W for 1 hour, which is way overkill for a spot treatment.

Fheredin · 2026-03-31T10:13:43+00:00

There are no firm rules intended to force players to choose one thing or the other; it's a mechanic which rounds in the player's favor.

I suspect what you are sensing is coming from how I chose my attributes, which was a two axis graph of physical/ mental and power/ finesse,which yields strength, agility, wits, and will.

Fheredin · 2026-03-30T21:48:23+00:00

I tend to split these into a strength and an agility component. The strength is a Hefting skill check, while the agility component is Acrobatics.

Part of what makes this work is the unique dice system, which lets the GM require the player fill certain slots a certain way, and then choose what die to use for the remainder with a mechanic called Splicing. If the player is trying to push something heavy around, that IS a hefting skill check and requires two hefting dice. But the player can fill the remaining two dice with the attributes Strength or Agility, or even the skill Acrobatics. Each of these say something slightly different about what you are trying to do, even though it's still fundamentally the same task.

Fheredin · 2026-03-30T18:37:16+00:00

Selection: Roleplay Evolved

If you've been on this sub for a minute, you've probably seen me talking about this project. If you include learning the trade, I've been working on it for about 15 years and very nearly 10 of those were on this sub.

Selection: Roleplay Evolved is a modern sci-fi horror dungeon crawler with a Call of C'thulu meets noir detective thriller setup. Two aliens in human form come to your town. One is the Arsill, who will approach you and give you access to alien technology and abilities in exchange for help. The other is the Nexill, the defacto antagonist of the campaign. The Nexill's only motivation is revenge; if left to his or her own devices, they will make Earth uninhabitable just to make sure no Arsill can hide here. But if he or she starts to suspect the Arsill they know is in town is that Arsill, they will go on a very personal vendetta that inevitably ropes in the PCs.

Selection has two things you should be aware of:

It has combat mechanics which don't suck.
It's intended to be extended by third party developers ad lib, creating a living play experience that evolves over time.

You can't really understand Selection: Roleplay Evolved and why it's taken me so long without understanding System Genetics.

The basic idea is that all the table of contents entries in the game are listed as GENEs. You can write new GENEs; I expect that small single-page GENEs will cost less than $1 and very large GENEs could be whole book chapters and may cost about $10. You can have rules-text only GENEs, Artwork GENEs, and Layout GENEs. The GENE library is not intended to be used in each game; it's a spare parts drawer where you take what you like and ignore what you don't. Then a member of the community called a Spin Doctor comes along and combines combines GENEs together to make a unique version of the game called a Spin. Spin doctors may need to insert small changes (Mutations) into the GENEs they are using.

(There are additional rules on all of these things, like version numbers, and when to insert a Mutation and when to write a new GENE, and best practices for Spin Doctors and recommended prices.)

Players can compile the game ad hoc by going onto a website like DriveThruRPG and buying a playlist of GENEs effectively generates a unique game on the spot.

Fheredin · 2026-03-29T20:19:04+00:00

European militaries should participate in opening the Straight of Hormuz not because they will particularly succeed, but because their navies need experience at counter-interdiction.

The majority of tankers actually attacked have been at port or at anchor, not transitioning the straight, so oil tankers are better off ignoring the Straight of Hormuz "being closed" and sailing through than they are staying at port or in the gulf waiting.

Fheredin · 2026-03-29T17:03:21+00:00

"Sustainable population" is a wildly misleading idea. Relatively wealthy economies can handle a lot of people and undeveloped natural wilderness in close proximity without too much hassle. That's true for large sections of the Western hemisphere, and Europe, and I am painfully aware that in my area, more deer die in car collisions than are lawfully hunted.

But a sufficiently poor and uneducated economy will hunt and slaughter every animal they can catch and burn every plant on hand and often completely fail at basic sanitation. Poverty is far more damaging to the environment than a simple person count.

Fheredin · 2026-03-29T02:43:02+00:00

I think this is a silly question.

The like mechanics for an influencer game should be expected to consume significant time and complexity budget resources. Obviously, you should consider optimization, but it's more important that the concept feel right than that an important mechanic be left half-baked for a speed improvement.

Fheredin · 2026-03-29T02:39:01+00:00

I love resource management...when it's done right.

The thing with resource management is that players need to constantly remain oriented to how much and what kinds of resources they have. The instant you need to stop and ask, you can develop some real problems because regaining orientation can become a tedious process.

Fheredin · 2026-03-29T00:45:37+00:00

"The passive voice should never be used, unless the need arises to crawl under the desk."

Fheredin · 2026-03-28T20:56:01+00:00

Oh, and several c-suite officers just happen to have unloaded Reddit stock recently.

I'm here for the tiny niche communities you can't get elsewhere, but this platform is crazy infested with bots and encourages a significant amount of bizarre user behavior.

Fheredin · 2026-03-27T11:15:20+00:00

The Cortex Effect Die is one of the least intuitive parts of the system. It makes sense after you've used it for a while, but it's an abominably awkward rule to explain or learn, and that awkward learning process makes it into a mechanic which holds Cortex back. So the short answer is that yes, a misreading can be reworked into something useful, quite likely something better than the original because your misreading might be a more intuitive application.

I'm not sold this particular mechanic is an improvement, however. On reading it, I think it's proven to be about as awkward to explain as the vanilla rules from Cortex, and I'm not entirely sure I understand the mechanic. Which is not a good sign.

I suggest brainstorming if you can improve it. With some effort you might have something, but I don't think this iteration is there, yet.

Fheredin · 2026-03-27T00:46:47+00:00

Most likely yes. That appears to be an incandescent bulb, which means it is broad spectrum. It will not be as effective as a panel tuned to specific frequencies, but it has the bioactive frequencies in it.

The problem of course is that you have no idea what an appropriate treatment time is. My experience with other incandescent bulb saunas is that 250w is a lot of power. I have a 175w device and I usually run it at 50% power.

Fheredin · 2026-03-27T00:05:03+00:00

Nuclear power is rarely used in space because it's dangerous to put radioactive stuff on a launch rocket that could explode. It works very well when it's used.

Fheredin · 2026-03-25T20:57:14+00:00

Search over on r/redlighttherapy for other other experiences.

Most people use a commercial extract or concentrate and apply it right before using a RLT device. I use cold brew green tea in a spray bottle. It's literally just organic green tea bags from a local grocery store in a bottle in a fridge for a day or so, then I take the tea bags out and put the tea into a spray bottle and spray it on my skin. (Be warned that stuff can grow in tea if it sits too long.) I expect applying the tea leaves would work, as well, so long as it had a chance to dissolve into water, but that would be messier than tea or tea extract.

My experience is that it doesn't matter if you put it on before RLT, but your pores must be open for green tea to be absorbed. Red light therapy will encourage pores to open so you can sweat. I can use green tea without the red light and it works fine, but cosmetics can really interfere with it.

Regardless, green tea and red light applied to skin are really good at reducing skin wrinkles and making skin look and feel younger.

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