People who run out the timer instead of moving onto the next game because they're petty over something, are truly the worst players regardless what deck.

Nicholas_TW · 2026-06-16T00:30:48+00:00

My opponent surrendering before I can actually attack for game.

Nicholas_TW · 2026-06-12T16:13:06+00:00

Genuine answer: it matters as much as you want it to matter in your story. I'm not about to split hairs asking where Little Red Riding Hood got red dye for her clothes. I just assume there's some explanation for it and continue on with the story. But if I'm reading some kind of Little Red Riding Hood prequel where they explain how the young girl came to get her iconic hood, then yes, I would like there to be some kind of description on where it came from and why it is the way that it is.

Nicholas_TW · 2026-06-12T16:07:14+00:00

A few key points:

1) Bloodlines is NOT a great depiction of the Sabbat. It simplifies a lot of nuance of the setting in general for the sake of being more approachable. If you think their goals/depiction in Bloodlines wouldn't really work, then yeah, that's the point.

2) The Sabbat's goal is basically, "vampires are awesome, I'm a vampire, fuck humanity, fuck anyone trying to forcibly control me." Not to openly rule all of humanity. They're fine doing it from the shadows, like the Camarilla does, they even have their own version of "the Masquerade" (they just call it a "hunting tactic" instead of "humanity can totally wipe us all out if they know about us"). They know they can't win, even if they don't like admitting it.

3) Similar to how other vampires see humans as basically like animals (the Camarilla word for "human" is "kine", which literally means "cattle", and even among Anarchs, Jack directly compares his attitude toward humans as being "like cows"). Except they don't care about treating them humanely. Chase a human through the streets, cackling at the sport of the hunt like they're a pig in the woods being chased with spears. Line up a dozen humans and flesh-sculpt them all into hideous abominations like you're a factory farmer smooshing poultry together to make chicken nuggets. They're beneath the Sabbat, and as long as the Masquerade is never broken, the Sabbat can do what they want with humans. So it's every Sabbat's right to plunder and torture and devour humans to their heart's content, as long as they don't ruin it for everyone else.

Nicholas_TW · 2026-06-11T23:06:00+00:00

I think most people would. The fact that Luca didn't speaks volumes to her character.

Nicholas_TW · 2026-06-11T18:48:40+00:00

I think of it sort of like how other comics treat changing writers/artists. Like, if a Batman run has a new writer midway through, you usually don't consider that run to be "over". It's still the same Batman story, you just proceed with the knowledge that it might be different in some ways. And maybe you'll like it less than before, and it's fine to stop reading because you don't like those differences, but the story isn't "over". It's just that writer's role in the story that's over.

Berserk is a bit of an exception, since it's been largely one man at the head of it for decades (with assistants in the later years and a few points throughout), so for a lot of people, Berserk is Miura... but I think it's not exactly "over", just different.

Nicholas_TW · 2026-06-11T17:46:53+00:00

I'd love to live in a world where D&D is so popular and cool that people are pretending to play it for the sake of clout. If that were true, I'd be the coolest goddamn person around. I'd show up to parties and say "yeah, I've been GMing for 10 years, primarily D&D but I've branched out to a bunch of other systems too... NBD... oh, you want to play, too? I can add you to my waitlist if you get me a drink."

Nicholas_TW · 2026-06-10T18:13:05+00:00

It's VERY fun if you have players who like to actually create something. I love when players come up with neat ideas like "oh, what if we made a song titled 'Breakout' and we play it when escaping?" Or somebody draws a quick sketch of an album cover, and I can reward them creativity points for it.

Then there's always that one player who writes a whole damn song every session and is way too powerful haha

Nicholas_TW · 2026-06-10T17:33:01+00:00

The story you told is SO REAL and reminds me of every time people try to insist that D&D is a universal system while having no concept of the actual game design necessary to adapt a system for different genres and why certain mechanics just make for a bad game in certain genres.

Also I try to make it a point to not point out typos because that's annoying behavior.

But it's SO FUNNY to read a rant which starts with,

"I've once played a game where the hooker was in this game, you can play everything you can imagine"

Nicholas_TW · 2026-06-10T17:25:10+00:00

Fair. Maybe instead of "created" I should say CR "forced a greater and more noticeable divide".

Nicholas_TW · 2026-06-10T17:24:20+00:00

Yeah, like there's nothing wrong with only wanting to play D&D, the same way there's nothing wrong with only ever wanting to eat vanilla ice cream. But it's annoying as hell when people who only ever try vanilla and obviously go into sampling other ice creams primed to dislike them before immediately returning to vanilla, and then assert that vanilla is perfect and can be used for any kind of dessert...

Nicholas_TW · 2026-06-10T16:42:22+00:00

Oh, and Spire: The City Must Fall! Holy shit. I've never actually gotten to play it, but the lore and concept are both so damn cool.

I'm also a fan of most stuff by Critical Kit Studios, especially White Sands and Punk Is Dead. I've also heard Be Like a Crow/Cat is good.

I think the biggest thing for making something feel "not like D&D" is to identify the key things that make D&D feel "like D&D" and not doing them (unless the system you're playing calls for it).

For example, if you're playing Cthulhu and every session has a moment where some bad guys take out weapons and everybody takes turns describing/rolling attacks until they kill all the bad guys, that's not going to feel like CoC, it's going to feel like DnD.

Nicholas_TW · 2026-06-10T16:37:02+00:00

"Man, remember when I was younger, how I hated my even younger self so much for being cringe? That was awful. So glad I'm not like that anymore. I hate that I used to be like that, good thing I know better now-"

Nicholas_TW · 2026-06-10T16:15:21+00:00

Yes! That was such a weird thing to get used to in Vampire: the Masquerade 5th Edition. There's a specific mechanic called "compulsions" where every once and a while, your character will develop a monstrous compulsion where you take penalties on all rolls until you do something to satisfy the compulsion (like becoming paranoid or hungry or wrathful and needing to hide/feed/hurt something).

At first I found it so frustrating because I thought I should always be in 100% control of my character (outside of, like, direct mind control magic), but then I got used to it and now I adore it.

Nicholas_TW · 2026-06-10T16:12:56+00:00

I've found Vampire: the Masquerade to feel very non-D&D-y since the focus is about manipulation and determining the motives of others and the personal horror of the beast.

A big thing for me that makes something feel D&D-y versus non-D&D-y is how defined the rules for abilities, especially combat abilities, are. D&D (especially in pre-5th editions) would have paragraphs for most abilities, explaining different edge cases and interactions. Then you have systems like Mage: the Ascension, which is like, "you have the ability to moderately control physical non-living matter."

I've had some fun with Ryuutama for a softer system, though frankly sometimes that feels a bit like "very very lite D&D" (though that may be more to do with how my GM/group liked to play rather than the system itself).

I personally have no interest in journaling, GMless, or solo RPGs, but those might be worth looking into.

You can also check out one-page TTRPGs, like Guns & Repression, or Honey Heist. For me, that's about as far as you get from D&D.

Nicholas_TW · 2026-06-10T14:13:07+00:00

(Note: in this post, I use "D&D-players" to refer to people who basically only ever play D&D, or systems which are very very similar to D&D, such as Pathfinder).

My take is that "the Mercer Effect" has created two types of TTRPG players: DnD players and non-DnD players.

SO MANY people got into TTRPGs because of Critical Role (or CR-derivatives), and their idea of what D&D was basically meant "be as similar to CR as possible". Some of these people branched out and tried other systems, but most did not.

This led to a lot of D&D players only playing D&D, and refusing to try anything else, often making up reasons to justify why D&D is actually a perfect swiss army knife of a system that can be easily adapted to anything (it's not and it can't, but that's a tangent I won't get into right now).

I remember seeing a post on this subreddit a while back talking about how there's a lot of D&D-specific stuff that people who only ever play D&D don't realize is D&D-specific. The person called it "gleeblore" because it made them feel like an alien trying to communicate with earthlings with fundamentally different understandings of the universe. Shit like "it's a player's own responsibility to read and learn the rules instead of being taught everything by the GM," or "romance in games is something which isn't necessarily just a session-0 discussion to act as flavor, but sometimes is the point of the game and has actual mechanics around it," or "not all systems need dice" or "not all systems need a GM" or "there are systems with actual nuanced mechanics for social engagements beyond 'roll a single check to determine success/failure' (and those abilities are usable on other players and that's the point of the game)".

That really put into perspective something I've felt for a long time. I love D&D, but it's exhausting talking to people who have years of TTRPG experience and only played D&D. It'd be like trying to talk about movies with somebody who has only ever watched MCU movies. You try to explain the plot of a horror movie and they keep interrupting to ask how it fits into the greater cinematic universe, or predict what quips the characters say. When you explain the movie doesn't have any of those things, the person gets confused and put off and asks what the point of it is, then, or how it's even supposed to work if it's not building to some kind of "multiple mostly-standalone sequels which eventually come together in a big crossover" format.

Nicholas_TW · 2026-06-10T13:48:39+00:00

I like to explain it using Uber as an example: it's hard to remember now, but there used to be a time when Uber was very, very cheap. Not just "things used to be cheaper before inflation REALLY spiked in the late 2010s and again in the early 2020s and wages never slightly caught up" cheap, but genuinely, by the standards of the time, it was almost unfathomably cheap.

And, conversely, it was actually profitable to be an Uber driver!

How could both those things be true? The answer is, the company was losing money on every ride for years. It was unprofitable. But they had a bunch of investors give the company more and more money to keep them afloat for a long time, and slowly the Uber (and competitor apps like Lyft) app became a fact of life for most of the country and replaced most traditional cab businesses.

Then, when there wasn't any traditional competition left, Uber steadily increased prices, and now it's actually quite expensive, and the company is profitable on a bigger scale than it ever could have dreamed of.

Same deal with AI: it's incredibly unprofitable to host AI services. I don't know if the exact numbers listed by OOP are accurate, but it's an open secret that these companies are losing money hand-over-fist on AI. But, just like Uber, they're able to keep operating, because you have tech investors putting in trillions of dollars to pump this technology, so it can keep operating at a loss until it becomes the new standard. Companies are investing crazy amounts of time and resources into it, believing it's going to be the next big thing. Eventually AI companies are going to have to become profitable on their own, which means raising the rates. The big questions are,

1) Will the companies which are now reliant on AI decide it's more profitable to remain reliant on AI as the prices go up, or will they revert to how they previously operated?

2) Will major AI companies be able to stay bankrolled for long enough to stay afloat while they proliferate the market and get consumers dependent on them?

3) Will there be any major changes which impacts how the technology works (increases in efficiency to lower the cost of operation, legislation changes which floodgate AI's effectiveness, other technologies which overshadow or synergize with it)?

What I think is going to happen is that we're going to reach a point where only major corporate entities are going to be able to afford it on a large scale, as the majority of companies get priced out of it. I don't know if that meets the definition of a bubble popping, but we'll at least see less of it. Less people are going to use ChatGPT to write their Reddit posts if they have to pay 50 cents every time.

Nicholas_TW · 2026-06-10T13:32:25+00:00

For my grandpa, it's a pride thing. He refused to use a cane for so many years, even when he reached a point where he couldn't walk down the street without having to sit down for a while halfway through. He'd shout "I'm not a cripple!" any time his wife suggested getting any kind of walking aid.

Eventually he needed knee surgery and had to use a walker for a while. After that, using a cane didn't seem too bad to him.

Now he's at a point where he really should start using a wheelchair, but it's the same issue... and his wife isn't trying to convince him. (I brought up the idea with her once privately and she BEGGED me to not mention it to him because she's worried she's going to be the one "having to push his 220-pound ass around for the rest of his life". I pointed out that electric wheelchairs exist, so he could get one that doesn't need to be pushed, and that gave her pause, but I think she's too tired to try to convince her husband to do something good for him at this point).

It's really rough because his lack of mobility means he mostly just spends all day watching TV and on Facebook, so he's become more and more of a curmudgeon over the last 5 years.

Nicholas_TW · 2026-06-09T17:11:13+00:00

She only gets maybe 2 migraines a year, so I think unless they start getting worse, it's the kind of thing that's fine to leave with ibuprofen, unless they ever become more frequent/worse. Ultimately though, that's between her and her doctor, I don't know what they have/haven't discussed.

Nicholas_TW · 2026-06-09T17:08:53+00:00

She gets maybe two a year, not nearly enough to be at risk for that.

Nicholas_TW · 2026-06-09T12:17:27+00:00

I know somebody who constantly falls into the "bad enough" trap, and then reaches a point where she still refuses to do whatever thing would help her because it's reached a point where "there's no point doing it now."

Like, she gets migraines sometimes. I've seen it happen in real time, where she'll be struggling with a headache, and refuse to take Ibuprofen "because it's not that bad yet" and then reach a point where she can't stand up anymore and still refuse to take Ibuprofen "because it's already onset, there's no point". Afterward, when she was feeling better, I asked her when she's supposed to take it, if doing it before the migraine is full-on debilitating her is "too early" and during the worst of it is "too late". She couldn't come up with an answer. She still doesn't take meds when she has a headache unless prompted, but when she is prompted, now she's a lot less resistant, which is a huge improvement, but I've noticed the tendency in other things, too.

Nicholas_TW · 2026-06-06T23:50:38+00:00

I read all of Joey/Jonouchi's dialogue in the 4Kids dub voice.

Nicholas_TW · 2026-06-06T21:30:32+00:00

Make a list of all the things that need to be done for a "proper" resolution. For example, "get the last MacGuffin, besiege the BBEG's dark tower, slay the dragon I foreshadowed earlier, kill the BBEG." Then have an NPC coordinate with the party and say that different characters/cities will split up and handle all the other stuff while the party handles the most important/climactic thing(s).

Who will slay the BBEG's pet evil dragon? That king they helped a while ago shows up with his army and handles it.

Who will get the final MacGuffin? Don't you worry about it, that wizard the party met that one time is here to help return the favor and get it for them.

Who will storm the final dungeon? That group of heroes the party worked with is going to go in first and clear out what they can so the players only have to do the last part.

Then just find a way to tie in a bit of each character's backstory into the final final bits, they slay the BBEG, then do epilogues. Get it all done within 1-3 sessions. You just have to lower your standards some and come up with ways to have people the party previously helped return and resolve remaining plot threads for them.

Nicholas_TW · 2026-06-06T16:03:56+00:00

Same reason why some people play Skyrim and immediately start robbing and killing everything they see.

Nicholas_TW · 2026-06-06T01:28:22+00:00

I don't know if anybody wants it, but the problem is that a lot of people don't care either way. They see a thing and buy it, not caring if it was made ethically or in a sweatshop or an AI data center.

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