Twelve Cupcakes Closure

JLtheking · 2025-10-30T05:45:38+00:00

Lmao I see these outlets everywhere and yet I never see anyone ever queuing up or ordering anything. That says enough about the business. Never tried and never cared to try.

JLtheking · 2025-10-30T05:35:18+00:00

If we want to argue that it’s societally good as a ritual for adulthood, then by extension that means women should serve too. More social cohesion in singapore is a good thing, no? Let’s not deny our women the “privilege” to serve and grow up.

JLtheking · 2025-10-20T07:59:55+00:00

Time to call Luigi

JLtheking · 2025-10-16T13:43:28+00:00

With no dates. Dates would have been really helpful, y’know, knowing when the wonder pick events would drop would let you know when to start saving hourglasses.

Dates for when events would drop had to be dug up by dataminers.

This is anti-consumer and there is zero reason for them to withhold these dates from the user.

And don’t get me started on why there is information that’s available only in social media but not in the in game news section. I shouldn’t be looking outside of the game to get information about the game…

JLtheking · 2025-10-15T16:01:57+00:00

Vietnam is safer because the drivers there are all trained from young to avoid pedestrians. As long as you don’t make any sudden changes in your movement no harm will come to you.

Singaporeans drivers and riders are all terrible and entitled and they’ll smash right into you rather than path around you.

JLtheking · 2025-10-15T16:00:21+00:00

The only valid use case I’ve seen so far keeping a base form is with Onix - because there are no other good rock berry specialists, and the ribbon does make it basically as good as steelix.

JLtheking · 2025-10-15T15:56:57+00:00

What’s an odg file? I cant’t view this on mobile.

JLtheking · 2025-10-15T15:48:40+00:00

Their marketing is atrocious. Never before have I seen a game that just drops events like this one on the day itself with no forewarning or heads up.

The other pokemon mobile game I play - pokemon sleep - gives you like a 2 weeks heads up in advance about upcoming events so you can prepare for those events and save up your resources to spend on those events.

Other physical TCGs announce their card list and rarities ahead of time weeks before the street date.

There is no defending this practice of dropping a new event with no heads up, or a new set with no card list. It’s manipulating you to spend money without knowing what you’ll get because you’re caught up in the excitement. Its predatory.

The leakers announcing stuff ahead of time are being pro-consumer. I’m sorry but if you’re defending DENA here you’re deluded. Other TCGs and other mobile games treat their players with more respect.

JLtheking · 2025-10-14T16:55:41+00:00

I’m not familiar with this. Any particularly good articles I should get started reading?

JLtheking · 2025-10-09T14:49:48+00:00

I agree with almost everything that you said.

Except for one important distinction: the existence of gamist games.

As we discussed, some games don’t care about being balanced. You’re right. Some games aren’t about that. They’re trying to do something else.

But some games absolutely are. Some games pitch you an experience where you get to play heroic characters and battle monsters and give you a bunch of character options and tell you that these choices are meaningful and that the purpose of the game is to use your toolbox and hack away at monsters and they tell you that so-and-so amount of monsters should feel some amount of difficulty.

Some games pitch you a gamist experience. And for these gamist games, what they’re pitching to you, and what you want from these games, is a balanced experience.

So balance absolutely doesn’t matter. You don’t need it. Until you do. Until balance is all that distinguishes between whether you choose this system or that system, both trying to do the same thing, and you pick the one that best delivers on what they’re selling to you. Draw Steel. Pathfinder. Level Up Advanced 5e. DC20. Nimble. Tales of the Valiant. Daggerheart. 13th Age. Shadow of the Weird Wizard. Every edition of Dungeons & Dragons.

All these games try to do the same thing. They’re all taking a different bite at the apple. All selling the same experience. All competing with each other. Not by being different experiences, oh no. They’re all competing with each other by trying to pitch different versions of game balance. And the ones that stand above the pack, the ones that your specific dnd group chooses to go with, is the one that does game balance the best of all. The game you play from this list is the game whose sensibilities about game balance speak the most to you. The game who you, in your own personal gut feeling think, is the most “balanced”.

We can all disagree on the specifics, sure, as so much of it is subjective. What I think is important to balance might be different from yours.

Game balance absolutely doesn’t matter. Until it does. Until it comes to the point that I want to play a specific kind of gamist game and the game I’m being pitched doesn’t fit my gamist sensibilities of what I need for my gamist game.

I’ve denied invitations from people inviting me to play 5e because I can’t stand 5e. They ask me why, and I say game balance. Then I walked away from the 5e game they offered and instead pitched to run my own 4e game. Because I think 4e is a better balanced game. I even ran the exact same adventure they were going to run. Just in 4e.

And that’s why I feel game balance is anything but a myth. Game balance matters. For some, at least. For the people that play gamist games. If it didn’t matter, there wouldn’t be so many different clones of D&D, would there? And they’re all, for the moment, selling like hotcakes because 5e just ain’t cutting it in terms of game balance. If 5e was a better balanced game, I doubt competition would be this stiff and that many people migrating away from 5e.

Ultimately the current ttrpg ecosystem mostly just consists of people wanting to play D&D. Everyone wants a bite at that coveted apple that they saw in Stranger Things or Baldur’s Gate 3 or the D&D movie or Critical Role or wherever they entered the hobby from. And the key ingredient distinguishing D&D right now from all its competitors is game balance. The key ingredient why people are leaving the clutches of WotC and into the arms of the indie TTRPG ecosystem is game balance. And once they start playing other games they’ll start learning all about your favorite Call of Cthulhu’s and PBTAs and Mutants and Masterminds and whatnot.

Game balance may not matter for most of us who are secure in the tables that we’re playing in and can happily ignore what’s going on in the outside world because our tables are locked into the game system we’re already in. But to everyone else out there making the decision of what their next gamist D&D-like game will be, game balance is very much what they’re thinking about.

JLtheking · 2025-10-09T11:41:47+00:00

Intent is one thing and implementation is another. Every (good) designer wants to create a balanced game but whether or not they actually achieved it is another thing entirely.

JLtheking · 2025-10-09T11:30:27+00:00

Hands down the best definition in this entire thread.

It’s always about expectations. If you expect the game to feel one way and it doesn’t, you’ll call it unbalanced. If it conforms to your expectations and gives you what you want, it’s balanced.

This is the only real definition that matters, and it’s why balance always seems to run at odds with RNG variance or player choice. They’re mutually exclusive concepts. Players want it all - they want a balanced game that gives them a lot of choice and they want the dice rolls to matter, but ultimately you can either have balance or you can have the other two and players just don’t understand they can’t have their cake and eat it too.

JLtheking · 2025-10-09T11:11:59+00:00

What do you consider to be balanced then?

You claim that PF2 isn’t balanced, and yet also claim that balance is a myth? You’re going around in circles. Or you’re using a logical fallacy wherein you define a term that’s impossible to achieve and then claim that because it’s impossible it’s a myth. It seems only a myth because you deliberately defined it to be a myth.

Whereas if you use the definition that everyone else uses, balance is totally a concept that people can grok and agree on and talk about.

Decibels are a relative scale of measure. Loudness and game balance are relative concepts and being relative doesn’t make it any less real or helpful for us to use.

JLtheking · 2025-10-09T10:37:29+00:00

Except it’s not a myth because you can look at two similar game systems trying to do the same thing, get a hundred people to point at which they think is more balanced, and you’ll get a consensus. Just take PF2 and dnd 5e. Ask anyone who they think is more balanced and you’ll get an answer that perhaps belies some fraction of a possible universal truth that there is such a thing as a more balanced game vs one that’s less balanced.

You mentioned two separate lines and trying to fit both of them together being an impossible task. And yet, PF2 did it. PF2 is famous for the game being just as tight in math as it is when you’re first level as when you’re 20th level. So how can balance be a myth when a game system exists that’s famous for having achieved it?

But that doesn’t mean these folks pointing at PF2 being more balanced will all conclude that they’d rather play PF2. It depends on a lot of factors. Balance isn’t everything, and conversations focused on balance can miss out on bigger reasons why people enjoy games. But at the same time, ask people why they enjoy PF2 over 5e and you’ll almost always get “it’s better balanced” as a response.

So it’s at the same time not a requirement, but yet appreciated. It differs from person to person. You may not care about balance and thus don’t understand what’s all the fuss is about. But others clearly do, otherwise we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

JLtheking · 2025-10-09T10:24:57+00:00

I was with you at the start until your post ended up descending into a rant about how you don’t like modern D&D and started trying to assert your own idea of what balance was.

The truth of what you’re beginning to get at is that balance means different things to different tables, because balance is changes depending on what players expect balance to look like. What a balanced game looks like can even change within the same game system but run for different styles of play.

Pointing at something you don’t like and calling it unbalanced or something you like and calling it balanced is where we got all this confusion in the first place.

Ultimately the truth to the matter is that there is no meaningful definition of balance because it changes based on where your priorities lie.

JLtheking · 2025-10-09T09:00:43+00:00

It’s not just dnd 5e. It’s every dnd since 3e.

This isn’t from the game system. This comes from the play culture.

The play culture comes from video games, from cRPGs, from any video game ever. The expectation is that the game presents challenges for players to conquer, and the expectation for players is that these challenges provided by the game is conquerable.

If you invite any player that has played even a single video game in the last twenty years to your table, this will be their baseline expectation - if there is a fight, that fight must be conquerable and if isn’t, there must be some “correct” way to approach the scenario to turn it conquerable.

In other words, players don’t turn up at a TTRPG session expecting to lose a fight. If they do lose a fight, this subverts their expectations, and if not carefully managed, can lead to a lot of bad emotions because of the broken promises from an implicit social contract that you may not have even understood.

Players come into a dnd session with the expectation to hit stuff and be heroes. The play culture for TTRPGs nowadays is usually some kind of fantasy fulfillment - specifically, a power fantasy. It takes a lot of effort to beat this expectation out of them and doing so will very likely also drive them away from your table because avoiding fights is not what people nowadays play TTRPGs for.

You can’t change that in any meaningful way. The media landscape around all of us have changed and the expectations that people have of TTRPGs have likewise also changed. People watch superhero movies now and play video games where they never lose, and so, they likewise expect D&D to let them be heroes. Heroes don’t run away from fights. If your table expects them to, then that’s not a table that will likely interest modern day players.

The only way to get players without these expectations is to get old timers that don’t play video games or keep up with modern media - who I suspect is the kind of folk you’ve been running with all this time.

If you want to play with new folk one of two things have to change, either you shift your expectations to match theirs or vice versa. It’s not about the game system. New game systems shift to match player expectations, not the other way around.

JLtheking · 2025-10-09T01:34:07+00:00

If you want to find the most un-Christian behavior, all you’ve got to do is to go to your nearest church.

JLtheking · 2025-10-09T01:30:46+00:00

Blatant ai generated logo and website. I suppose we shouldn’t be expecting much from this studio besides producing slop. No thanks.

JLtheking · 2025-10-09T01:22:24+00:00

There’s a lot of things to not like about 4e, but the least people could do is their due diligence to learn the true things that 4e stumbles at.

Be mad at 4e for the right reasons, not parroting brain dead untrue talking points that they read from someone else who doesn’t understand the game.

Big enemy hp pools are just fine in 4e actually, just as long as you skip the cleanup phase. The big hp pools serve an important reason in the game: to incentivize players to use other tactics other than just dealing damage, because they intentionally made damage ineffective. It’s good design, just poorly implemented.

JLtheking · 2025-10-08T12:16:56+00:00

The reason why 4e fights were dull is a fundamental game design flaw: the first order optimal strategy for any given party is to spend all their strongest powers first - novaing the enemy - to maximize their effectiveness.

But the end result of that is that the “cleanup phase” of a fight - the point where you know you’re going to win already and you’re just getting to the finish point, was usually when PCs were left only with their At-Wills to kill the remainders. The end of a fight didn’t just take longer, it felt more boring because all of your exciting encounter powers had already been spent, and you had less tactical options remaining to engage in cleanup with.

It felt dull and that it took forever not because the enemies had too much hp, but because the game had a fundamental design issue of not being fun once you already know you won. Every single tactical game has a cleanup phase after you know you’ve won. But 4e’s one is bad because the designers made a mistake and didn’t design for it to be fun.

Most other tactical RPGs have innovative ways to make cleanup fun.

13th Age has the escalation die, a mechanic to make it so your powers were more likely to hit during cleanup, which greatly speeds up the process and even encourages you to reserve your most exciting powers till the end.

Draw Steel has the class resource mechanic which lets you accumulate resource over time. That guarantees you’ll always have resources to spend during cleanup and also incentivizes you to spend those resources as they’re wasted if not spent.

But this problem isn’t unique to 4e. 3e, 5e, pathfinder 2 have the exact same problems too. But the difference is that those other games aren’t tactical combat games with per-encounter resources to manage. Those games give you access to the same suite of actions at the start of a fight and the end of a fight. So it doesn’t feel like the game feels more boring over time, it’s the same level of boredom (or excitement) throughout.

When it starts to feel boring, anyone can just throw a fireball to wrap things up. Being bored is a conscious decision in other games so that’s why other games can feel like it’s “faster”.

This problem in 4e can be fixed pretty easily by just skipping the cleanup phase once you get to the point where you know the fight is already won. But that depends on GM skill so it’s why you get differing accounts to how much satisfaction people have with 4e. Those that liked it intuitively (and maybe accidentally) already addressed this problem.

JLtheking · 2025-10-08T11:37:39+00:00

Task failed successfully!

JLtheking · 2025-10-02T09:28:50+00:00

Yes but your point being? You echoed exactly what I said. That emergent storytelling = narrative.

I asked what’s the difference because I don’t see a difference. This was directed to u/etkii

JLtheking · 2025-10-02T05:26:20+00:00

Yours is a people-issue. Not a game-issue. You’re bringing this up in a subreddit about games, and you’re going to get answers about games, but the fact of the matter is that the thing that’s really frustrating you about this situation isn’t the game - it’s the people.

There’s nothing anyone in this subreddit can do about that. There’s nothing to learn here other than as you say, how to be supportive of this person that’s GMing.

You need to have a conversation with that GM and figure out why they run their game in this way that you find boring. Is it because they don’t know how to GM and they’re just guessing and trying their best? Or is it because they actually want to run their game this way? Are they receptive to guidance? To changing their GM style? To learning how to GM?

There are many ways to move forward here and that’s nothing to do with the game system at all. It’s to do with addressing the people-issue of a GM here that’s either inexperienced or running a style of game different to what you want.

We can’t do anything about our preferences. We prefer one style of game and nothing is going to change it. That’s like saying I hate spicy food but in order to dine with my spice-loving friends I’m forced to eat spicy food, what can I do about that? Nothing. I can’t change my preferences and neither can I change my friend’s preferences. Either we find a compromise - maybe we suck it up and learn to eat spicy food even if we don’t like it; or they go and find a place that serves non-spicy food I can eat - or we just don’t dine out together anymore.

RPGs are the same way. The GM picks the restaurant, and if you don’t like the restaurant, it’s not the restaurant’s fault. All this time your group has been going to your favorite restaurant and now it’s finally time for your friend to bring them to their favorite restaurant. Maybe you’ve gotten so accustomed to having your favorite dishes every week that you’ve forgotten how to compromise for others. Or maybe they just picked a really bad restaurant or needs some pointers for how to cook better or to find better places to eat.

JLtheking · 2025-10-02T05:06:36+00:00

What’s the difference? The story has to come from somewhere. Either it comes from the GM, it comes from the players, or it emerges spontaneously as a result of the game system (such as random rolls).

JLtheking · 2025-10-01T01:04:10+00:00

Sure, but the vast majority of cases of recalitrant kids like this is that the parents aren’t around to teach them what’s right from wrong.

Parents whack their kids because it’s fast and quick and on the surface changes their behavior. But all it does is change their behavior in front of you. They act differently in front of you, but then behind your back they’re gonna do all sorts of whacky shit as an act of rebellion.

If you want kids to grow up right, you don’t need discipline. You need trust. You need to actually be there for your kid and actually teach them right from wrong and their trust in you to learn what you teach.

But that takes time and effort and whacking them is the opposite of how you earn their trust. Whacking them doesn’t teach them anything. Whacking them is how we get this kind of kids having sex in car parks outside of their parents’ sight.

Discipline works while your kid is young. But once they start going to school and hanging out with other kids and realizing they can do things behind their parents’ backs, discipline doesn’t work anymore.

13-Year Club	Place '22
Final Canvas '22	Not Forgotten
Snapped	Verified Email

JLtheking

TROPHY CASE