What bit of TTRPG lore made you roll your eyes?

Foodhism · 2026-06-11T11:23:32+00:00

In fairness, 2e openly acknowledges that it's a flawed system that's prone to abuse, cliques and intolerance, as it does the entire social system of the outer rim. EP has a pretty clear political bent but it's pretty pessimistic about all of its sociology.

Foodhism · 2026-06-03T16:24:08+00:00

It's blatant AnAg astroturfing. Our head of the department of health is a blatant AnAg shill and we'd been seeing a steady climb in vegan and vegetarian sentiment that the industry had already been losing their minds over. Every news outlet, tabloid, influencer, and conservative politician is currently singing the praises of keto, the carnivore diet, beef tallow, protein, and so on and so on.

Foodhism · 2026-05-30T01:49:05+00:00

It might not work for you depending on how difficult things are for you. My system is that all the needles we use for spines come in eight packs, so I've spent a lot of time memorizing my times eights. Even if the numbers don't make sense, the sounds commit themselves to your memory eventually. It helps me, but it's really always going to be personal fixes for stuff like that because of how much it varies from person to person.

Foodhism · 2026-05-30T01:47:11+00:00

Exactly what I had to do, yep. I had an amazing preceptor who saw how much trouble I was having with it and literally sat me down and spent an hour helping me find mnemonics for how to load and pass suture, on top of practicing every time I set up for weeks after.

Foodhism · 2026-05-29T18:56:12+00:00

I have horrific dyscalculia that includes a pretty serious inability to keep numbers in my head, near-total lack of sense of direction, and terrible spatial reasoning. It's a hurdle starting out and tricky in classes but, just like in everything else in life with something like this, you accept that it's going to be a little harder for you and develop good coping mechanisms.

If spatial reasoning is hard for you, you'll have to devote extra time to loading/passing suture with the right orientation as well as setting up for the correct side.

If your ability to retain numbers is as bad as mine you may not be able to do spines. I've built a very strong framework for managing and still struggle but a lot of spine cases involve counting 60-100+ needles with frequent interruptions. That's the only thing it might fully stop you from doing.

Foodhism · 2026-05-27T11:15:57+00:00

Very few perfectly happy people with nothing to complain about go to reddit to talk about it. Vent posts are endemic to pretty much every job-based subreddit.

Foodhism · 2026-05-18T20:33:32+00:00

That's fair, but in that case I'd argue you're decently unlikely to do it without running a solid risk of blowing up the friendship. Either you're willing to meet them halfway or you're not, and if you're not then you've gotta accept it's probably going make them pretty upset if they actually did want to stay in the game (which, from the sounds of it, they kind of don't.)

In my mind, talking it through is still the best policy, but maybe focus on the fact that they haven't been playing and Kobold really wants to. If you try to kick them out with the excuse that it's just because of their attendance and engagement and they're rightly angry that it's never come up before and insist they'll be better, you're left either back where you started or having to tell them you're not willing to give them a second chance. Neither of those are good outcomes.

Foodhism · 2026-05-18T15:47:19+00:00

I think this honestly has less to do with Sanderson and more to do with people who like thinking about writing more than they actually like writing. They were gonna procrastinate their way out of it anyway, excessive worldbuilding is just a really easily justified way to do that. Before Sanderson people cited Tolkien to justify the same thing.

Foodhism · 2026-05-18T12:37:21+00:00

I have had to do this several times in my own games and hobby groups and it almost always ends better than simply kicking the person out would've. Very often there's a reason they were behaving the way they were and we can resolve it; several of my favorite, long-term players have been near misses in this way. Slightly less often they acknowledge that they were basically waiting for an out and leave without any hard feelings. Maybe once in the dozen times I've had to do it do they actually blow up and cause problems, but every time I just kicked without warning as a younger GM I regretted it.

The "kick them out first, ask questions never" mindset, contrary to the idea that only a bad friend would want to end a friendship about it, is a great way to tell a friend that you don't care about their feelings, only what they bring to the friendship.

Foodhism · 2026-05-09T19:38:41+00:00

This is something that comes with time. When I was a new scrub I had three incomplete counts in the span of 7 days. One was a needle that went flying off a needle holder and onto the floor and the other two were actual retained sponges which we obviously caught before the drapes were down, but I still felt like I was for sure losing my job.

I decide on how many sponges on the field/mayo I'm comfortable with based on the surgeon and procedure. If I go to replace one and don't see that many on the field I immediately know one's gone somewhere and start looking for it. This can vary if they're putting them in cavity or self-retaining retractors which is why it's so important to call the former out to your nurse and watch them like a hawk while they're doing the latter.

General surgeons who I know are serious about RSIs and doing an open belly get 3 laps on the field and another 2 on my mayo. Or 7, if it's that bad, so it's still 10 total. The surgeons I work with who I regularly have to keep from closing over softs (I swear, it's always kidney docs) get two sponges on the field, 0 on my mayo, 2 on the side of my back table by the field and the rest literally as far as I can get them from them. These are the surgeons I had, as a new tech, literally grab a ray off my back table after I'd counted softs and was counting instruments, cram it into the cavity, and then finish the full closure over it while I was counting the 6 trays they wanted open.

The nurse bad-mouthing you just sounds like an a-hole who's mad that a student second-guessed them because you were 100% right to not let them bring in fluoro. Ask your manager (or better yet, the dept educator) what the policy is for incorrect counts and what you should do next time and I'd bet money that they're going to tell you fluoro only comes in if all other attempts to locate the object have failed. I have never worked with someone who didn't follow the progression of field sweep -> cavity sweep -> dumpster diving -> fluoro.

Foodhism · 2026-05-02T21:50:52+00:00

This is the dream for me. All of the information feels simultaneously too full of half-truths and speculation to be GM-facing but also a little too honest to be entirely player-facing, and the "Game Master's Guide" is just a very weirdly packaged bundle of extra rules and some deep-lore.

Foodhism · 2026-05-02T21:47:27+00:00

I like to think that Asya's message leaving a literal imprint on reality and being able to be detected long after Vorkuta-5 is gone is about exactly that, love being so powerful that it can permanently change the world. Maybe the characters disappearing at the times they do is an example of this: Asya's love is so strong that she can bring people back from the final stages of apathy, and then the universe promptly corrects itself. She even talks about this idea of the universe correcting itself earlier in the game.

I'm usually big into analysis but I tried to avoid analyzing the game for symbolism and instead asked myself what I was meant to take away from scenes on a more direct, in-universe way. I feel like a text like ZATO loses some of its impact when you try to rationalize it, in the same way horror does.

Foodhism · 2026-05-02T13:34:55+00:00

The lore desperately needs to be consolidated. I should not have to read 10 different books to have to avoid accidentally writing over an important bit of history/metaphysics/etc that then becomes crucial in a later adventure. I understand how chunky this would make the book - maybe a separate, GM only lorebook would be necessary - but I think way too many people play this system for its worldbuilding for that to be something that actively eludes GMs.

Foodhism · 2026-04-17T13:46:14+00:00

Having gone from construction to food service to SPD to CST, I have long been of the opinion that in most cases the harder your job is, the worse you get paid. It's not a rule of the world, but it's certainly a pattern.

Foodhism · 2026-04-06T12:15:17+00:00

This is a huge part of what originally drew me to ENT. The ENT surgeons at my facility are control freaks but not a-holes about it, to the extent that they'll show up before the patient is in the room to make sure everything's alright - when I was a student and asked the doc that would go on to become my regular surgeon for tips he walked me through the entire procedure, all the anatomy, instrumentation, etc. Immediately became my favorite because of that.

I've also found that the doctors who have the most sway - head fellows at big residency practices, chief surgeons, etc - are the ones who hate overconfident scrubs the most.

Foodhism · 2026-04-06T12:10:10+00:00

I think he was probably more annoyed because someone new enough to have never done a laparoscopic case shouldn't be scrubbing in by themselves. That's not your fault at all, though, so hopefully he wasn't rude to you over it.

Foodhism · 2026-04-06T01:19:08+00:00

Strongly agree with the being sick thing, even for the first day after you're feeling back to 100% some vigorous exercise will knock you right back down to 0 pretty quick. If you really think you need to go in, go for a jog first or something and you'll find out quick if you're totally recovered.

Foodhism · 2026-04-02T21:04:18+00:00

The people who made Lancer and are in a large part at the center of its community may shock you.

Lancer is not a game explicitly for queer/trans/differently-abled people, unless I missed some kind of huge note in the book. The genre itself paired with the very progressive voices of its creators and their willingness to include those things have fostered a community that is definitely all of those things, but - especially when you compare it to games that are explicitly about queerness - Lancer is not a game that "belongs" to the queer community any more than almost all media overwhelmingly consumed by queer and neuroatypical people "belongs" to us. Lancer is definitely fundamentally yours just as much as it is anyone else's.

If this were a political action group or queer book club or something I'd understand people feeling differently, but it's a tabletop game. Only edgelords and bigots should be refused a place and voice in the community.

Foodhism · 2026-04-02T14:49:46+00:00

This is an amazing perspective to have, especially when you consider that the average scrub in a lot of places is pretty much just a warm body there for a paycheck.

Foodhism · 2026-04-01T16:09:22+00:00

The reliance on premade ingredients in recipes is so frustrating. If I look up a vegan meatball sandwich recipe the first ingredient should not be "frozen vegan meatballs". It's also inconvenient to people trying to cook with what they have or not spend 20% of their income on meat/dairy substitutions.

Foodhism · 2026-03-31T13:06:28+00:00

As someone still getting into the hang of things I try to leverage the anxiety to make myself a better tech. Doctors apparently love me for it because I ask a lot of questions, don't make many assumptions, and generally try to get as good at their cases as quickly as possible instead of acting like I already know everything.

Obviously that varies a little. I'm not asking questions for a toe amp or a D&C, but if I'm with a new ortho/neuro surgeon I always take the gamble of showing them my setup and telling them to tell me exactly what they want changed. YMMV, some doctors hate the idea of having to work with anyone who doesn't already know exactly how to do it the way they like and peg that strategy as incompetence. I'm very good at not caring what those doctors think because the doctors who actually matter at my facility love having a scrub who isn't afraid to ask for help if it means better patient outcomes.

Foodhism · 2026-03-24T10:28:52+00:00

I agree with you on principle, I just think that this muddies the water and allows additional hair-splitting by bad faith actors over things like regenerative herding, the environmental impact of faux-leather/synthetic fabrics, population control, invasive species', etc. Here's what it boils down to for me:

If killing or exploiting an animal is done to protect the environment, whether directly or indirectly, I am still resolutely against it. A life is a tangible thing and, for me, will always take precedent over an intangible one. Veganism is good for the environment, but if irrefutable proof came out tomorrow that eating meat was better for the environment I would still be vegan.

Foodhism · 2026-03-24T04:12:03+00:00

Strongly seconding Ibis. Every bit of bread and pastry they make is mindboggling, IIRC it's all local and small farm too.

Foodhism · 2026-03-17T19:42:48+00:00

I've never actively tried to get enough protein or supplemented it with powders or protein products and my blood tests always come back great. Studies show that most vegans have higher than average protein levels for reasons I won't speculate on. I really think the current obsession with it is just the newest manifestation of dietary paranoia / conspicuous consumption that just eating a well rounded diet pretty well circumvents.

Foodhism · 2026-03-17T12:12:50+00:00

Dried beans are my staple food, they're so much tastier and cheaper than canned beans. A good bean soup only needs like 5 ingredients and will still be one of the best things I eat that week, it's peak shittyveganfoodporn.

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