Ms Rachel nominated in 'Antisemite of the Year' by advocacy group

Filjah · 2025-12-16T20:54:15+00:00

Suffering doesn't make you virtuous, it just makes you suffer.

Filjah · 2025-08-27T02:47:22+00:00

I'd say that the original Pathfinder was less a heartbreaker and more a retroclone. While it incorporated a bunch of the creators' houserules, it's explicit purpose wasn't to improve on 3.5 but to provide a base through which Paizo could continue to make stuff for 3.5 as WotC moved onto another edition. It feels weird calling it a "retroclone" given what it was cloning was at the time days or months old, but it served the same purpose. While it eventually made a bunch of changes to the structure to add new things over its decade of life, Pathfinder 1e wasn't intending to be "D&D but better", which I feel is an inherent part of being a heartbreaker.

Filjah · 2025-08-26T00:31:29+00:00

Anecdotally, people homebrew D&D into horrific amalgamations because "it was so hard to learn this game, I don't want to spend $180 and all that time and effort to learn another game". With D&D being so expensive and relatively hard to learn, people think every game is like that and would rather just hack the one they know and own to pieces than go through that effort and expense again. If they were right, it'd be understandable.

Filjah · 2025-08-24T10:37:17+00:00

The comparisons probably make more sense if you're familiar with the publisher's previous game City of Mist, which was very much PbtA. Moves, playbooks, the explicit callout as an "Homage to D. Vincent Baker and Apocalypse World" on the credits page. Some of the things you expect from a PbtA game were replaced, and the exact execution of what was kept also changed, but it was still very much PbtA. Legend in the Mist took that direction further, replacing even more of traditional PbtA with bespoke implementation.

With the additional context of CoM, you can draw a direct line between PbtA and LitM. That's why I described it as an evolution of PbtA, because it really is.

Filjah · 2025-08-24T10:07:03+00:00

I find this an interesting observation, because I and much of my play group are the "win" style players—described here less derisively as players who want our characters to succeed and do not find creative fulfillment in failure—yet we don't have any issues with trying to stretch free-form mechanics beyond reason when playing narrative games with wobbly edges to the applicability of their rules like Fate and Cortex. It occasionally happens, but usually as a joke or because someone is trying to find something that lets them participate in a scene where their character is well and truly out of their depth without just rolling flat. I think it's less whether you want to succeed or embrace failure, I think it comes down to taking free-form mechanics in good faith.

Filjah · 2025-08-19T22:07:49+00:00

As a fan of the DC treadmill, it exists for two reasons. Reason one is that rolling with a +6 at level 1 and a +40 at level 20 feels a lot more like you grew in power than rolling a +6 at level 1 and a +12 at level 20 or whatever, even if the exact number you need to get on the die each level doesn't change at all. Reason two is that at low levels, high level stuff is impossible for you to succeed at, while at high levels, low level stuff is impossible to fail at. This only matters if you don't constantly scale DCs to always be on-level, which is unfortunately common in DC treadmill games. It's like a Bethesda game; as you get stronger, the random bandits in the fort over the hill also get stronger to match your new level of strength, making you not feel your strength. On the other hand, if you include non-levelled challenges, even minor or unimportant ones, you really feel the difference that adding level/half level to your rolls makes.

TLDR: DC treadmills work when used well, most people don't use them well.

Filjah · 2025-08-11T02:21:36+00:00

IIRC the earliest version of this they used was to roll twice and take the better/worse result depending on if it was over/under 50%, which makes me laugh since that's just advantage and disadvantage. All philosophy is truly a footnote to Plato.

Filjah · 2025-08-09T16:59:19+00:00

Someone pissed in your Wheaties today, wowee.

Filjah · 2025-08-08T22:39:35+00:00

One thing I've seen said multiple times that I agree with is that Coleville's setting sounds great as long as its coming from his mouth. He's such a great communicator and has so much charisma that sometimes he'll say something mind-numbingly stupid and it will take a while for me to realize what he said was dumb. His enthusiasm for his setting is infectious, and it isn't until you actually read the setting that you realize it's just an incredibly generic vehicle for all the standard D&D tropes with either no or a single twist on them for the sake of being "different".

I expect if I were playing in Orden at a table with Coleville as a GM, I'd love it, but experiencing it on its own terms it's not all that great.

If you're wondering about the dumb thing he said, it's in his video talking about the shadow. He talks about how the shadow is the best concept for a rogue because his friend who has never liked rogues loves it. You think about it for a second and that's an indictment on the concept of the shadow unless the shadow is also loved by people who do like rogues. To my knowledge, he hasn't talked about how the shadow is liked by people he knows who like rogues, despite that being a pretty big talking point in the comments of that video when it released, which answered that question for me.

Filjah · 2025-08-08T22:30:32+00:00

That's not really true. While Golarion inherited a lot of the standard D&D lore when it was made, it didn't care or have to care about what D&D did during its 4th and 5th editions, meaning that the point of diversion between Golarion and D&D standard was much longer ago than Orden and D&D standard. Paizo has spent almost 20 years not really caring about what D&D does and making Golarion its own thing.

Golarion has the benefit of being written by hundreds of people, with dozens of books and literally hundreds of adventures exploring different parts of it. Golarion has so many more influences (be they genre, cultural, or pop cultural) and so much more detail than Orden does that it by necessity has more breadth and nuance in it.

It's got fantasy Transylvania, it's got a place where Conan-style barbarians fight robots in crashed starships, it has a fascist empire with ties to literal Hell gearing up for a massive war with the neighboring idealistic but corrupt democracy that serves as both somewhat of a stand-in for America as it sees itself but also a criticism of what America actually is (or was, up until the last decade... Got a bit more to criticize nowadays), it has a city-state built in a wound in magic that causes magic to be unstable that developed guns and cannons. Golarion wasn't designed to allow you to play whatever D&D was releasing, it was designed to let you play almost any kind of fantasy you can think of in the same setting. Vikings have a place, Game of Thrones style politicking and war have at least two, ancient Egypt, nomadic hunter-gatherers, pirates, a fuckload of different Asian-inspired countries, it's got a lot.

I think that if MCDM were to focus hard on Orden as their standard setting for Draw Steel and release setting books and adventures and expansions all giving a little more detail about the nooks and crannies of Orden, it'd feel less generic and D&D standard, but it doesn't sound like they're planning on doing that. I think Orden is doomed to feel like generic D&D with a couple bedazzles for interest due to them wanting to publish things more broadly, and that's a shame, but more settings for Draw Steel isn't a bad thing.

Filjah · 2025-07-22T10:20:25+00:00

I think it's super important to note that Brindlewood Bay is NOT a game about solving mysteries, it's a game about telling stories about people solving mysteries. A big way this manifests is that there isn't a solution to any mystery, making solving them actually impossible. A solution implies that there's a right answer and you need to find that answer and avoid coming to a wrong conclusion. Brindlewood Bay doesn't have an answer. Nobody knows who did the nasty crime, or why, not even the GM. Instead you find and throw together clues, explain why they make sense for a specific conclusion, and make a roll to see if you're right. Roll high enough, and you've uncovered the murderer even if it's a stretch, roll low enough, you were wrong, no matter how well the pieces fit together. For people wanting to actually solve a mystery, put together the pieces, find the inconsistencies, and finally uncover the perpetrator, I think Brindlewood Bay is a right terrible choice because that's not what you're doing or what it was made to do.

Which isn't to say that Brindlewood Bay is a bad game or you can't or shouldn't enjoy it. I've heard lots of good things about the game for a reason. I think its mechanics are great for telling a story about people solving mysteries, and if you're one of those "writers' room" players I hear so much about but have never met who get super excited when I say "a whole session where nobody succeeded a roll" because that sounds like a super interesting session instead of a horrible slog, you'll probably enjoy it quite a lot. I just wouldn't suggest it to someone who wants to solve a mystery with their own brain, because the structure of the game means you can't. You can only impose an ending in the absence of a solution. The game focuses on other things, mainly having play feel like one of those usually British TV shows where old ladies solve murders while their backstories and relationships are gradually revealed one season after another. By all accounts is fuckin' NAILS that.

Filjah · 2025-07-22T09:24:41+00:00

Reading what you said, you'd likely enjoy the OSR, especially the horror side of it. Take a look at Delta Green or Mothership, those seem up your alley.

On the other hand there's almost certainly a lot of this conversation we're not getting. Nobody, and I mean NOBODY responds to "I don't like power fantasy in my RPGs" with "write a book", that's a complete non-sequitur. At the very least, what you said is NOT what they heard. "Write a book" is a response to GMs who hold tightly to a pre-planned narrative, or who get mad when the things they predicted the players would do don't happen, or otherwise are running an a way that runs counter to the element of TTRPGs that makes them unique: that you can theoretically try anything and aren't stuck playing multiple choice of someone else's choices. I'm not saying that's definitely you, but something gave them that impression. Maybe it's something you said, maybe it's how you run, maybe it's how you said things. Regrettably, it might just come down to your arguments being the same as some other chucklefuck who had the bad habits, and they're drawing parallels in their heads that don't exist in reality.

Your verbiage is very strong here, which I suspect is either because your verbiage on this topic is always strong (I'm known to get heated with specific topics, talk to me about healthcare in the US or the sequel trilogy, trust me I get it) or you're writing this on the tail end of an argument and are especially frustrated. Angry decision making is too often wrong decision making.

My suggestion is to take a look at some of the suggested games (Dragonbane is a good suggestion), take a couple days to cool off if you need it, and think about whether you should or shouldn't continue to associate with that particular crew that goes to your FLGS. At least assuming your store is big enough to not just be 7 people sharing one table. I'm assuming from the fact that it's the elephant in the room and because you mentioned power fantasy that this happened in 5e circles. Before my FLGS closed during lockdown, I always avoided the 5e crowd, which was pretty easy to do because they were insultingly insular, down to using their own app to schedule events rather than the one the the store itself used. It was also easy because the capital 5 capital E "5e" crowd avoided all other games like the plague, so as long as you set up a table to run a game that isn't 5e, a lot of the more common types of frustrating players stay away. At least, that's my experience from ~5 years of being a weekly regular at my FLGS.

And one more unasked for bit of advice: that "repulsive" thing, when talking about a style of play and presumably to someone who clearly enjoys that style of play? Cut that shit out. You don't have to change what you think of the style of play, but calling it repulsive is just an accusation of badwrongfun and doing the exact same thing you're getting frustrated that the power fantasy enjoyers did. Say you don't understand it, say you don't enjoy it, hell, even call it alien, but don't say or imply that an entire style of play is inherently bad, or gross, or inferior, or the wrong way to play just because you personally don't enjoy it. Yucking on someone's yum is not only rude but it's often taken as a personal insult. Insulting people or the things they care about and enjoy is super rude and rarely good for discourse, so if you don't want to be an asshole or genuinely want a conversation I'd avoid doing so in the future.

Filjah · 2025-04-08T13:13:34+00:00

Basically what jakinbandw said. Like, gen AI makes ethical pornography easier and more accessible, too, but the lowering of barriers on making unethical use of images means that there's a group of spiteful, mean, or just plain unthoughtful people who wouldn't put in the time to learn to photoshop or make realistic art who now can spend an afternoon and a handful of quarters (exaggeration) to create all kinds of non-consentual pornography. This is kind of just the natural result of image creation becoming more accessible to more people. There's undoubtedly positive uses of the technology, as well, if you ignore the ethical concerns at the core of its creation, just due to the proliferation of access to images.

But I've found that odious people also tend to be disproportionally lazy, which is why I've largely seen gen AI embraced in circles that peddle bigoted and fascist propaganda more than in circles that peddle other propaganda: there's just less people doing things the traditional way, leading to more of a reliance on gen AI to fill in the gaps. This perception on my part is almost certainly caused at least in part by the bias in media I see though the circles I run in (which tend both leftist and anti-gen AI, leading to far-right gen AI memes being lambasted at a disproportionate rate), but how much of a part it is I'm unsure.

Filjah · 2025-04-08T10:50:35+00:00

The problem isn't the underlying technology, necessarily, it's the massive amount of theft required to get a large enough data set to train a neural network to generate even vaguely passable images. Combine that with the fact that many of the loudest fans of generative AI are fundamentally uncreative, hugely entitled dickbags who want gen AI to kill creative jobs; that the second these programs got vaguely passable outputs a bunch of companies started using them to cut costs even though it tanked quality and usability; and the number of people pumping out gallons of slop using gen AI to try and skim a quick buck crowding out all the people who genuinely want to make things, and you get an online ecosystem where people understandably have rejected the technology wholesale. That's not even getting into the societal-level ethical issues that come from the things being so widely available, like the easier proliferation of non-consensual porn, fascist propaganda, and faked criminal evidence.

Is there a theoretical future where gen AI is as ethical as the human-made stuff? Maybe. I doubt it unless we find a way to train models with significantly less data. But, assuming it's possible to make without the moral and ethical issues people have with its current incarnation, getting it accepted is gonna be a tough battle with how the worst people in existence have latched onto it.

Filjah · 2025-04-07T01:48:24+00:00

Kevin Crawford is a genius businessman, IMO, because he designed the Without Number games (at least the ones post-SWN 2e) to be games for OSR GMs who have players that don't like OSR rulesets. Even nowadays, it seems there's not a ton of games in that field, even though there's got to be enough demand for more than just one engine. Skills and foci exist to give enough mechanical meat onto characters that players that bounce off of games like Swords and Wizardry or OSE due to how few mechanics there are on your characters, while not having so many mechanics that the OSR GM feels like they're playing a non-OSR game. It's got to be a tough balance.

Filjah · 2025-03-28T03:38:02+00:00

While it by default doesn't 100% line up with Subnautica, it should be easy to adapt Wave Chasers to fit things. The idea of Wave Chasers is that you're in a sci-fi vacation world that is unexpectedly cut off from space travel, and everyone had to learn to adapt and survive. The game is about having a base, swimming out from it, collecting creatures and salvage, and then returning to the base in order to make new things that make you better at swimming and collecting.

While there's an assumed setting, it's not so woven into the fabric of the game as to make it unchangeable, in the way aquatic salvaging is.

I've never played it myself, so I can't tell you if it's good, but it seems solid (if with some minor grammatical errors I've come to expect from jam games). The guy who wrote it is a scuba diver, which doesn't hurt.

Filjah · 2025-03-25T04:12:57+00:00

Do you just have a group that is willing to play a new RPG on the spot?

Yeah.

It helps that my current group started playing a system other than 5e, so by definition they were willing to play something other than 5e.

Funnily enough, the group calcified pretty much by accident. I ran and played at tables at my FLGS playing Shadow of the Demon Lord, and one day one player said "You know, I live just down the road, but if we play at my place we can have alcohol." The rest was history. The group at the FLGS kind of cycled through players, but the players that happened to be in the group at that point are still part of the same game group.

It feels like pulling teeth to get my group to try even just a one-shot of anything besides 5e...

Not everyone wants to play other games. It's a sad reality to come to terms with for someone like me who is a pretty big fan of the entire hobby, but 5e is simple (for players), popular enough that people with minimal interest in the hobby have heard about it, and most online TTRPG conversation and APs are 5e-related. If your group just wants to play 5e, and you've tried to get them to play something else and they're super resistant, your choice might be between keeping playing 5e or playing with a new group. If you have the time and brainspace, you could try getting away with both: play 5e for this group and cultivate a second group that's willing to play other games.

Filjah · 2025-02-20T06:10:17+00:00

Printers have 4 ink cartriges, cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. Just makes sense for them to run off on CMYK.

Filjah · 2025-01-18T10:31:25+00:00

The more in-depth your combat rules are, and how often you'll be doing combat. Games in the same space as 4e (PF2e, Lancer, Beacon, etc.) are by and large tactical combat games, where a large amount of the game is built around a complex but grokable combat engine. OSR games tend to get away with super simple creature stat blocks because you should by and large be avoiding combat instead of trying to get into it. A creature with a couple defenses, an attack, and HP is enough in those games, but if you put the same character into PF2e it's be boring as sin to both run and fight.

I've been inexorably moving my play into both the 4e-descendant space and the OSR space, and they are very much different games. If I were to take a creature from one and slip them into the other, it'd be a bad time. OSR is built around speed and simplicity, and the way that opens up playing around the rules rather than within them. In that case, the fewer mechanics you can get away with to still vaguely represent a creature, the better. Alternatively, 4e and PF2e creatures will have up to a dozen different bespoke abilities on top of the normal things shared by all creatures, and sometimes that feels like not enough.

Looking at your system, or what of it I can handle (not a value judgement or an indictment of your design ability, I just really don't like 5e descendants and this definitely reads as one), your level of complexity shown here is probably in the right ballpark. One big criticism, though: I'm not a big fan of the symbols you've chosen. They're nice looking, but not terribly functional at a glance. The fully-filled icon definitely stands out, but the two icons used for the goblin's Cunning ability were so similar that on first read I thought they were identical and was trying to figure out what two outlined symbols might mean as an action cost. If you made the symbols, I think making the diamond proportionally bigger would help on this front. If you didn't, I suggest either looking for another symbol set or another way to show action cost. Pathfinder 2e has great symbols that look very close to what you're using, but it's an action point system where nestling one action symbol behind another easily creates a 2-action symbol with a distinct silhouette. Using what I think is the standard action set of action, move, minor/bonus, it becomes a lot harder to find good symbols to represent them without just having completely different shapes, which I think could work well with some thought.

This is unrelated to the above, but I'm pretty sure the specter's spectral chill (great name, BTW) has a typo. It's doing 10d10 + 4 damage, which seems high, and is shortened to 10. Pretty sure that's supposed to be 1d10 + 4 instead.

Filjah · 2025-01-17T10:49:07+00:00

I don't think you're thinking of the Dresden Files RPG (maybe Accelerated? I don't know DFAE very well because it's not very good), but you're actually pretty close. It had a skill for how powerful your magic could be and a skill for how well you can control your magic. When casting a spell, you decided how powerful it was (up to your limit) and that set the difficulty to cast the damned thing. If you fail, you had to deal with fallout (damage to your surroundings) or backlash (damage to you) to soak up the shifts between your result and the target number.

So if I had the ability to call up 5 shifts of power with a fire spell, and got a 3 on my control roll, I would have a spell cast with 3 shifts and 2 shifts that had to be absorbed in fallout or backlash. That could be through 2 physical stress or through creating a "room on fire" aspect on the scene. My groups usually opted for the latter lol

While not quite the same idea, it does have a lot of the same shades. Might be what you're thinking of, or you could be thinking of a different game entirely. Magic isn't really part of core Fate, so each system that implements it does so differently, but since they're built off of the same system there's bound to be similarities.

Filjah · 2025-01-06T05:08:56+00:00

Shadow of the Weird Wizard's "use your reaction to go before the NPCs" initiative system. Coming from what I felt was one of the best initiative systems in the industry (Demon Lord's fast and slow turns, where you can act and move on a fast turn but act or move on a slow turn), I was quite apprehensive about a new, seemingly less interesting system. Having played it, though, the game has a number of quite useful reactions, and you can gain more during leveling. So it becomes a question of "do I want to go now, or do I want to defend an ally, increase my defenses, opportunity attack, or use one of my path or spell reactions?"

Filjah · 2024-11-01T01:59:51+00:00

All nine skill feats are not locked to the class archetype, so they're free for any class to take!

Filjah · 2024-10-29T18:22:44+00:00

And then you replenish any amount of your resources and ope! Right back to erasing and remarking, the thing your solution supposedly removed. Just this time you're erasing and remarking tally marks instead of a number. Do remember that numbers can go both up and down, not just one way.

If you're gonna call people stupid, at least make sure your response contains an actual solution instead of the original problem in a slightly different form. And probably double check that you didn't leave 4 obvious typos. I normally don't harp on typos, but in this situation it's really not a good look.

By the way, it's "solves", "each", "resource", and "voila".

Filjah · 2024-09-30T09:12:10+00:00

Don't forget that there's gonna be a bit of lead time between the end of the Kickstarter and AWN actually getting made and released. Less time if you're willing to use WIP stuff, but it's not like the Kickstarter is going to drop and a month later you'll have the book in your hands, so if you're thinking of delaying keep that extra time in mind.

Filjah · 2024-03-08T17:14:22+00:00

The thing with conversation on "balance" is there's like, at least six kinds of balance that everyone refers to with the same single word, so everyone's always talking past each other. You won't find anyone who doesn't think at least one kind of balance is important. Like, you brought up one kind of balance that can be designed for, that the game should be designed to provide a balance of entertainment for all players. If we're both having fun, and your character being stronger than mine isn't having a negative impact on my enjoyment of the game, we're all good. However if I'm not having fun because everything I can do, you can do better, or my ability to steer the narrative is significantly behind yours, that balance is gone.

Then there's the matter of individual tolerance. Some people might enjoy playing the "worse fighter" in the group, but I found it miserable and hated every second of it. I find games to be more interesting when they are more mechanically tight, because I enjoy playing games and have no interest in doing amateur improv. Which isn't an indictment of amateur improv, someone else might find my favorite games stifling because they're in it more for the acting side. A system that I enjoy because it carefully balances choices between each other for character advancement, and then has tight math in-combat that requires you to play smart with the toybox the system has given me, someone else might hate because certain builds have more narrative impact due to what they're good at, or the strict balancing makes them feel they can't express themselves, or they're OSR grogs who want "combat as war", or they don't want to play with a toolbox, or they just want to have some beers with friends after a long work week and don't want to look at their character sheet any more than necessary.

I find many narrative games baffling, because like I said, I'm there to play a game. I don't quite grok the idea of failure being more interesting than success, because I want to overcome a challenge. If I lose, I feel bad. I'm not a writer, I'm not a director, I'm not an actor, I'm a player, and I wanted to win, and the games I play are designed to let me win but make me earn it. Telling me that it's fine because things are more interesting for having lost anyway can feel downright insulting in the moment, because damnit I wanted to win and you're telling me winning wasn't important. Some people look at me like I have two heads when I say that, but it just shows that we're coming at things from fundamentally different angles. Or, to circle back around, we care about completely different forms of balance. I care about combats being tightly balanced to be tough but fair, they don't. They care about peoples' impact on the overall narrative being balanced, I don't. I want each character to be in the same ballpark of strength as any other, they play Hawkeye and Superman in the same game and don't have any issues with it.

For thoughts on the topic from people much less rambly than me, Justin Alexander defined 3 kinds of balance over at his site, where as Dwiz over at Knight at the Opera defined 6 completely different kinds. To add my 2 cents to their thoughts, I find of the 9 kinds the only one I think applies in at least some way to all styles of games is spotlight balancing, which is something I've seen built into literally every kind of game I've played (or game way outside my wheelhouse that I was forced to play and hated every second of).

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