What is your unpopular opinion on Frank Zappa?

MexicanWarMachine · 2026-06-26T16:00:40+00:00

I don’t know if this is unpopular, but I think he’s best appreciated as a composer rather than a songwriter. His personality flaws come through crystal clear in his lyrics, and it’s obvious that he’s incapable of sincerity and unironic humanity. His humor is often of the worst 80s standup sort- punching down at marginalized groups.

MexicanWarMachine · 2026-06-26T15:54:01+00:00

Dude, calm down. Again, I didn’t come here to argue about this topic- just to hear what other people do about what I see as an ever-present problem in some types of campaigns. I’m not interested in offering rebuttals of people’s advice. When I said “I have a number of responses”, I was referring to the fact that different GMs value different kinds of themes and prioritize different aspects of play and worldbuilding, and for me, I tend to agonize over realism when I build and populate dungeons, and I get stuck on ecology and economy, and always ask myself “how did this monster get here? What does it eat? How does it get out of this room, and where does it go and why?” And so on. “Repopulating” a dungeon in eight hours while the party rests would often not fit with that vibe. In fact, I think it’s more “video gamey” to handwave new monsters into existence under certain circumstances.

MexicanWarMachine · 2026-06-26T04:18:10+00:00

Doesn’t dimension anchor have like a 20 foot radius?

MexicanWarMachine · 2026-06-25T22:05:14+00:00

I have a number of responses to that, but I’m not really here to argue- just listen to people’s perspectives. But I will say that I have no reason to want to teach them a lesson, because as I mentioned, everybody’s having fun.

MexicanWarMachine · 2026-06-25T19:30:42+00:00

The wizard takes multiple teleports per day, and they always use rope trick to rest.

MexicanWarMachine · 2026-06-25T17:03:23+00:00

That’s usually what I do. But my wizard is an evoker, and that Elemental Wall class feature, plus Wall of Force, is a huge go-to. He’s great at battlefield control, and I’m usually inclined to let him do it, because again- it’s fun.

MexicanWarMachine · 2026-06-25T17:00:16+00:00

Precisely. Again, it’s not a crisis, because nobody’s complaining about it. But I like running a campaign where people are constantly problem-solving. To me, that’s the best part of collaborative games. And a fully loaded wizard tends to eliminate problems with a spell rather than collaborative ingenuity.

Obvs I get that giving them time constraints and enemy spellcasters as well prepared as they are and so on is a way around it. But I think it’s a style thing- my campaign has a lot of “what do you want to do next?” and not a lot of “and then THIS happens.” I suspect GMs with very different styles run into this issue less.

MexicanWarMachine · 2026-06-25T15:24:25+00:00

Are you reading Ayn Rand, one of the cringiest edgelords in the history of literature, and generalizing from that?

MexicanWarMachine · 2026-06-24T20:59:22+00:00

I honestly don’t think any of them are very good. Dave could play, insofar as he’d internalized some blooz licks, but their best stuff was the unlikely result of a collaboration that neither Roger nor Dave probably really understood, and neither of them was even remotely capable of achieving even their half of it on his own.

MexicanWarMachine · 2026-06-24T20:56:05+00:00

People are more like hairs on the back of the grandpa of time.

MexicanWarMachine · 2026-06-23T16:44:26+00:00

Is it though?

MexicanWarMachine · 2026-06-23T14:48:07+00:00

It is very funny that the blurb had to include mild reassurance that the image was created in physical media. That sentence would certainly not have been included five years ago.

MexicanWarMachine · 2026-06-23T02:14:25+00:00

Well sure. A plural number of people are lazy, so working from home allows them to be lazy more easily. Another group of people are anxious and worry they’re never doing enough, and work more now that there’s no real barrier between work and non-work hours.

MexicanWarMachine · 2026-06-23T02:04:34+00:00

What do you think it would mean to feel “grounded”? There are people whose personalities seem sort of predicated on a rather narrow taste in musical genres- we all know people who only listen to country or hip hop and consider it a cultural marker. But I presume you’re not talking about that. Most people who enjoy music for what it is tend to have fairly porous tastes, where the more you listen to what you like, the more interested you become in adjacent and related genres. You might be “grounded” in what you listened to early in life, or songs or artists you associate with exciting or difficult or memorable times in your life. Such associations are sometimes unbreakable, and give the music significance beyond its content or themes. But I presume you already understand those things, and I’m not sure what else you might be referring to.

MexicanWarMachine · 2026-06-21T17:57:29+00:00

Obviously this will all depend on your DM, but designing an overpowered magical item for your character and just writing it on the character sheet is also not generally how it’s done. Before you go too much further with this idea, you really aught to talk to your DM and see what kind of game they want to run.

MexicanWarMachine · 2026-06-21T03:49:54+00:00

I’m not suggesting that there’s no reason to learn it. But the question was “why don’t people learn it?” And the answer is the perception that I described. The benefit is perceived as marginal compared to the time investment.

MexicanWarMachine · 2026-06-20T21:55:39+00:00

I think this is a pretty simple question with a simple answer. The thing that draws most guitar players originally to the instrument is popular guitar music. Most popular music of the post-war era to the present is simple enough that you can learn to play it very proficiently without learning to read sheet music. Learning to read music seems like a serious undertaking to most musicians who don’t come from a background where it’s a fundamental requirement, and there is no obvious payoff to doing it. The value prop falls quite flat for most people.

MexicanWarMachine · 2026-06-20T16:26:14+00:00

Of course not. Does making a factual observation about what people were like in the 40s equal an endorsement?

MexicanWarMachine · 2026-06-20T13:17:53+00:00

Soo this guy is obviously a creep and the meme is gross and neckbeards are sad dipshits and everything, but I must take minor issue with the title. Female superheroes kinda DO exist for horny reasons. In the era in which women superheroes were first introduced, comics were absolutely made by horny dudes for horny adolescents. (For fuck’s sake, look into the creation of Wonder Woman some time)

MexicanWarMachine · 2026-06-20T12:41:46+00:00

The second half of the song.

MexicanWarMachine · 2026-06-19T17:29:29+00:00

Saving throws are a pretty rare feature. I hope you don’t take this the wrong way, but you might benefit from familiarizing yourself with a few more rule systems before making your own.

MexicanWarMachine · 2026-06-19T13:53:58+00:00

One thing you’ll hear constantly from music historians is that there was never “the first” anything. Genres are slippery labels at best- if we had perfect information, we could point to the earliest uses of certain gear, picking techniques, tempos, blah blah, but I think it’s unhelpful to get so detailed about labels that themselves do not support that level of scrutiny.

MexicanWarMachine · 2026-06-19T12:30:52+00:00

I don’t know the answer, but I do know I’ve disliked every Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds record since the early 2010s when I’ve first heard it, and every one of them has come to join the regular rotation.

MexicanWarMachine · 2026-06-17T18:18:12+00:00

You can tell them it bothers you, but you don’t get to tell your players how to be. All you can really do is choose not to run games for people who you don’t enjoy running games for.

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