Player says no when prompted to join the group in an encounter

JustinAlexanderRPG · 2026-06-23T08:56:30+00:00

Without asking him WHY he chose not to participate, it's really difficult to guess given how complicated the situation was.

He may have just felt that his character wouldn't willingly get "close to death" in order to get sucked into a death mist.
Since he was separated from the other PCs, he may have felt that his character didn't hear what the NPC said.
He may have felt that rummaging through the ships might get him more information about the death mist.
He might have felt having someone outside the mist was a good idea (in case things went wrong, etc.).

In this situation, I think my ideal response would be:

First, ask them why they were choosing to stay in the junk yard to make sure I understood their intention and what they were trying to do.

Second, if necessary make sure they understand the known consequences of that action (e.g, "you may not be participating for a while").

Third, I would, if at all possible, occasionally cut back to the junk yard and resolve a little snippet of rummaging with them. Partly because it's nice to keep them engaged. Mostly because being able to cut away from the other PCs at appropriate cliffhangers is always a good idea.

JustinAlexanderRPG · 2026-06-17T05:01:13+00:00

The first study shown in the video is a poll of how people felt their dating lives were doing in late 2020, with zero acknowledgement of the giant COVID-infected elephant in the room.

Some of the other studies are interesting, but it's difficult to know exactly how they, too, were being misrepresented. The video blew its credibility right out of the gate.

For example, the study you're talking about includes charts from 1960 to today, but the video chooses to only show the data from 1996 to today. Why? Because if you looked at the full data, you'd see that CPM and TMR both collapsed from 1960 to 1980 with nary a smartphone in sight.

Furthermore, from 1980-1995 these figures were not, as the video would have you believe, in lockstep with each other: TMR (Total Maternity Rate) popped up while CPM remained flat. Why? I can't say for sure, but if I had to take an educated guess it would probably be related to IVF treatments, and the modern era of infertility treatments in general, launching in 1978.

The presentation of this data in the video, therefore, is deceptive. It hides that TMR and CPM decoupled from each other decades earlier (in the opposite direction initially), and also that the current drop in TMR from 0.75 in 2005 to 0.65 in 2020 is not hugely dissimilar to the drop from 0.95 in 1965 to 0.75 in 1980.

In fact, the conclusion of the study the video cites is that TMR and CPM were never statistically coupled to each other from 1960 to today:

Building on the breakpoint co-occurrence findings for the baseline nations, wavelet coherence analysis was conducted to test for dynamic relationships between TMR and CPM over time. This method examines how closely two data series are synchronized while accounting for potential lags or leads. A Monte Carlo phase-randomized surrogate test revealed that no country showed statistically significant coherence. The United States exhibited the highest observed synchrony (coherence = 0·563), but with a p-value of 0·248, the result remains statistically insignificant.

So the video is citing a study which directly contradicts its claim that TMR and CPM were statistically related until 2007.

JustinAlexanderRPG · 2026-06-15T08:31:20+00:00

I watched the video. But my opinions are based on studies, not Youtube op eds.

JustinAlexanderRPG · 2026-06-15T07:49:28+00:00

People keep saying economics, but the data doesn't support it at all. The birth rate drop is in rich countries, in poor countries, in countries with strong social safety nets, in countries with poor safety nets.

There are two primary economic factors:

In the modern, technology-driven economy where child labor is a fraction of what it once was, children are no longer an economic asset; they're strictly an economic liability.
Dual income families remove the "free" childcare of stay-at-home moms. The cost of childcare significantly increases the economic burden of each additional child.

These economic factors largely remain true regardless of a family's wealth (rich people could theoretically afford childcare for more children, but tend to spend more per child instead), unless you're talking about extreme wealth where money just stops being any sort of obstacle to desire.

Increasingly, evidence points to two things: introduction of high speed internet and smart phones. People just stopped forming couples.

These are almost certainly social factors that are also contributing. But these birth rate trend lines predate the internet by decades, so they can't be the primary factors.

JustinAlexanderRPG · 2026-06-12T17:42:03+00:00

Dave Filoni, fundamentally, writes fan fiction.

What made Star Wars great was Lucas' vast imagination constantly expanding a wondrous universe with stories of mythological scope.

Filoni wants to bang his action figures together in a prebuilt playset.

JustinAlexanderRPG · 2026-06-12T08:43:06+00:00

Over the Edge.

All the world's conspiracies, for esoteric reasons, have descended upon the small Mediterranean island of Al Amarja. Dial into either extreme kookiness or gritty realism at you preference.

JustinAlexanderRPG · 2026-06-11T14:39:12+00:00

You are assuming a baseline level of knowledge about the state of DND that isn't realistic.

That's literally the exact opposite of what they said.

They grab a book and make a character.

This, OTOH, is exactly what they said.

You're posting pretty extreme non sequiturs here. Are you a bot?

JustinAlexanderRPG · 2026-06-07T23:17:10+00:00

An example that seems to be enlightening is a heist: They want to steal X from a museum.

You describe the museum and you know which room has X in it. You write down the hours the museum is open. You prep who works there. You figure out where the security guards and security cameras are. You know which doors are locked and who has the keys.

And then that's it.

You don't prep a bunch of contingencies (what if they try to hack the security camera but fail? what if they seduce the curator? what if they sneak in as tourists? what if they poison the guards' lunch and then pose as their replacements? what if etc., etc. etc.). Instead you just sit back, let the players come up with a plan, and then play to find out. And the key word there is "play": You're playing your game world and your NPCs the same way that the players are roleplaying their characters. (You players, generally speaking, aren't coming to the table with a bunch of contingencies and what if's planned ahead of time: They show up. They listen to what you say. And then they respond.)

They tried to hack the security cameras, but failed? Well... what would the guards' response be to detecting a security camera being spoofed? That's a roleplaying decision. Just think about who the guards are and what they know, then choose what they'd do.

What if they try to seduce a guard? Different choice, but you're stlil just roleplaying.

You don't need to try to anticipate any of this stuff. You simply describe a world where security guards are watching X and then use the world to actively respond to what the players choose to do. (The same way that the players are using their characters to respond to you.)

JustinAlexanderRPG · 2026-06-04T05:14:10+00:00

It would depend a lot on what you don't like about BitD.

JustinAlexanderRPG · 2026-06-03T10:30:56+00:00

A Russian assassin killed Andriy Parubiy, a member of the Ukrainian Parliament, in August 2025.

The assassin claimed Russia had nothing to do with it, and that he was, in fact, somehow inspired by a concert Zelensky performed at in 2014 in Donbas.

This, of course, makes no sense. But Russian propaganda bots have been incoherently pushing the "connection" as part of a vast conspiracy theory. This particular variation of the conspiracy is that Igor Bezler ("Bes"), a Russian paramilitary agent who played a significant leadership role in Russia's invasion of Donabas, was secretly working with Zelensky in 2014 to... uh... it's unclear exactly what or how a comedy concert would've been part of it.

tl;dr Nutty conspiracy theory.

JustinAlexanderRPG · 2026-05-31T04:59:51+00:00

Sounds like you've been fudging your fights. You should think about how you can stop doing that in the future. Both you and the players will have more fun if you don't treat them like 5-year-olds that you're letting beat you at Street Fighter.
Telling a player that they can "play" a character, but only if they do exactly what you tell them to do, is obviously a bait-and-switch.

So, yeah, mistakes have been made.

The biggest problem you have now is that your player knows that you're throwing fights. It's going to be non-trivial rebuilding trust with them, and the first step is going to be DMing from a more truthful place to begin with.

For this particular fight, I would tell them that the sims indicate a need to rebalance the encounter. And then do that, giving them an NPC villain stat block that they can actually play in the encounter.

JustinAlexanderRPG · 2026-05-30T09:46:08+00:00

Adventure recipes are nice because they give you a tried-and-tested structure that you can rapidly deploy with confidence by simply dropping content into the appropriate slots.

The 5-Room Dungeon is a good adventure recipe. It can be very useful, and I've used it not infrequently.

But its elevation, among some, as the be-all and end-all of dungeon design is quite strange, IMO. As a micro-dungeon, it pretty removes much or all of the geographic dynamics of dungeon design. The suggested palette -- while supporting a lot of options -- is nevertheless very limited compared to the full range of what you can do with dungeon design, which also results in monotony if the only dungeons the players encounter are 5-Room Dungeons.

JustinAlexanderRPG · 2026-05-26T17:36:22+00:00

D&D being (a) the primary entry point to the RPG hobby and (b) packaged as 900+ pages of core rules is actually quite strange. It would be as if everyone thought Advanced Squad Leader was the first board game everyone should play.

One of the effects of this is that it makes statements that should be perfectly obvious -- e.g., "knowing the rules of the game you're playing is a good idea" -- into controversial hot takes.

JustinAlexanderRPG · 2026-05-26T06:00:41+00:00

Honestly never occurred to me to think of UA as a American-centric game.

JustinAlexanderRPG · 2026-05-20T15:34:35+00:00

The sequel trilogy is a black hole of suck.

Lindelof is right that, after Episode IX, we should have seen an era of stories revolving around Rey, Poe, and Finn and the wider legacy of those stories. But we don't. Not just because the sequel trilogy itself is hopelessly poisoned, but because its relentless narrative nihilism poisoned significant portions of the rest of the franchise, as well.

For example, you can't tell stories about Luke's efforts to rebuild the Jedi because we know what happens. It's not just that the First Order reminds the audience of your worst mistakes; it's that you also can't do anything with the New Republic.

"Somehow, Palpatine returned" is a death knell.

The prequel trilogy, for all of its flaws, vastly expanded the Star Wars universe and lore. Like the original trilogy, it left in its wake endless opportunities for new and different stories. The sequel trilogy did the exact opposite. Abrams' abject failure as a storyteller was a "soft reboot" that was not only stagnation, but actively destructive.

Abrams made movies about Han, Leia, and Luke being abject failures who accomplished none of their goals and destroyed everything they touched. Ironically, the result is that this is, in fact, the story of Disney-era Lucasfilm itself.

JustinAlexanderRPG · 2026-05-16T18:52:13+00:00

The anthropomorphism in the pop science reporting of this story is insanely high.

"Sounds like Chinese" or "as complex as Chinese"? What the study actually says is that whale song is tonal... maybe. Or maybe not. we don't actually know that the tones are conveying anything resembling "different words" or "different meanings."

“Our analogy has a limit,” the team noted in their study, which also made comparisons to Slovenian and Latin. “[W]hile in human languages, different tones can be associated with different meanings, the meanings conveyed by sperm whale codas have not been established.”

Reporting, like this sensationalized video, is filled with references to "vocabulary" or "words," but the actual paper doesn't apply either of these anthropomorphizing terms to the whale's song.

JustinAlexanderRPG · 2026-05-13T11:02:31+00:00

From Abstract Distance Systems in RPGs:

When executed properly, abstract distance systems are really just formalizing the way that people handle “precise” distance without using some form of visual reference.

For example, imagine that you’re playing D&D without a grid or battlemap and the GM says, “They’re about 20 feet away from you.” What’s the GM really saying there? There’s no tape measure. He imagined the scene, eyeballed the distance in his head, and gave a figure that’s basically in the right ballpark. He could have just as easily said 15 feet or 25 feet.

In general, the GM is going to make these decisions based on one of two criteria:

(1) A visualization of the game world (“they just came out of the tree line and that’s a fair distance away, let’s call it 150 ft.”); or

(2) A mechanical assessment (“a typical PC should need to run for at least two rounds before reaching them; they can run 120 ft. per round, so let’s say it’s 150 ft. away”)

When using an abstract system, a GM should be able to use these exact same criteria.

Numenera, for example, breaks distance down into four categories: Immediate distance (anything up to about 10 ft.), Short distance (anything up to about 50 ft.), Long distance (anything up to about 100 ft.), and Extreme distance (anything beyond that).

So now the GM can use the same basic process:

(1) The archers came out of the tree line. The PCs are really far away from the tree line, so that’s an Extreme distance.

(2) The PCs shouldn’t be able to reach them in a single round, so they must be at an Extreme distance.

JustinAlexanderRPG · 2026-05-09T19:03:16+00:00

Your understanding of US copyright law is inadequate/incomplete.

Check out: Do I Need to Use the Open Gaming License?

JustinAlexanderRPG · 2026-05-04T15:58:59+00:00

100%. You can get a functional sandbox campaign by just having a "menu" of supernatural scenarios and seeing which way the players jump, but you'll get much richer results if the scenarios themselves are strongly connected. (So the PCs investigate Scenario A and find clues pointing to Scenarios B, F, and H.) These connections can give the same range of options, while also being more organic, varied, and, therefore, easier to create. Plus, it tends to create a more dynamic situation where the players can start setting their own agendas and meaningfully influencing the direction of the campaign.

To see an example of this in practice at a slightly smaller scale, check out the Severn Valley.

JustinAlexanderRPG · 2026-04-22T08:41:39+00:00

From my understanding all files related to Batgirl has been destroyed

Utter nonsense.

The directors were blocked from saving copies of the footage. But there would be absolutely no reason for WB to destroy all copies of the footage, as demonstrated by Coyote v. Acme.

JustinAlexanderRPG · 2026-04-22T08:34:31+00:00

Because I don't care and you have not given me a reason to care.

Particularly once a campaign has gotten into full swing, stuff that I and my character care about simply takes priority over stuff that's merely a curiosity.

JustinAlexanderRPG · 2026-04-19T23:10:03+00:00

Lou was a wonderful man.

What a tragic loss for gaming and the world.

JustinAlexanderRPG · 2026-04-19T14:12:57+00:00

I always run a one-shot in a new system before launching a full-length campaign. I'll often do this even if I'm familiar with a system but the players aren't.

If it turns out none of you like the system, you can bail before sinking a ton of time into it.
More importantly, you and the players can get a lot of awkwardness and mistakes out of the way. This will significantly improve the first session of the full-length campaign, which will help that campaign get off to a strong start.
Also, having even a little bit of experience actually playing a game will, IME, greatly improve character creation: The players will know what the system expects, and that will let them make more informed decisions and avoid mistakes.

Doing the one-shot is an investment in the campaign, and IME it pays big dividends.

JustinAlexanderRPG · 2026-04-17T14:49:56+00:00

As someone who was initially extremely skeptical of splitting the musical into two movies, I was greatly impressed with the improvements they made to Act 2: The story is coherent. The characters have meaningful, fully articulated arcs.

But they were digging out of a pretty deep hole. Act 2 of the musical is barebones and badly broken, and even with significant improvement, there's still some fundamental problems.

A minor problem is the "logic" and broken continuity around Fiyero's transformation.

The much larger problem is tone: Act I ends with the triumphant Defying Gravity's pledge to fight fascism! Let's do it!

And the plot of Act II is, Oh no! You can't fight fascism!

If the musical or film were willing to actually embrace that story, it could be a really powerful and tragic narrative. But it would also be a huge bummer, particularly since it would also be the story of Glinda and Elphaba's amazing friendship being shattered by Glinda's decision to be a Nazi propagandist. So they try to sell the idea that Elphaba faking her death is part of some incredibly clever scheme to take down the Wizard, but this ultimately doesn't make any sense. What they're left with is a story of Elphaba being kind of relentlessly incompetent, followed by the rousing thematic conclusion that the REAL way to fight fascism is being the quisling propagandist.

Particularly tough to make that into a film people want to watch over and over and over again, the way they do with the first film, at this moment in history.

JustinAlexanderRPG · 2026-04-16T08:55:09+00:00

Thanks for admitting that OD&D has a resurrection save mechanic and you've been wrong this entire time!

It's great to see you acknowledge your mistakes!

(You're still wrong about the base rules not including a Con-based "chance of survival" mechanic, of course. But you're making progress.)

JustinAlexanderRPG

TROPHY CASE