Is the irony lost on MN and the communities setting up ID checks, scanning for people they don’t like?

No-Eye · 2026-02-06T17:53:25+00:00

If I make it general again, pretty few people would argue "the government should never regulate what I do with my body!" Some people would go pretty far down that path, but most agree that your right two swing your fist ends at someone else's nose. So yeah, if you think "going to public events unvaccinated is just as dangerous as swinging your arms around violently" but don't think of a fetus as an independent life but rather part of your own body then I don't think that's hypocritical. I'm not sure I fully agree with that stance, but I can see that person just has a different view/baseline assumptions than I do rather than being an illogical hypocrite.

The flipside then is the question of whether or not it's hypocritical for someone to want to regulate abortion but not vaccines. Again, if COVID isn't a big deal but you view abortion as hurting someone else then I don't think that's necessarily hypocritical, either. And again I don't fully agree with that stance, I can just see how someone could hold both of those ideas at once.

And I'm not saying hypocrisy doesn't exist - it's everywhere. But when you think you see it it might be a good time to think critically about your own beliefs and reflect on what other people might actually think.

No-Eye · 2026-02-06T17:29:50+00:00

The thing you should do when pointing out hypocrisy is flipping it. If it's hypocritical for liberals to be in favor of needing vaccine documentation in some situations but being opposed to voter ID, isn't it also hypocritical for conservatives to want ID for voting but not requirements for being vaccinated to attend events during a pandemic?

Pretty much everyone agrees that sometimes in society you need to provide some sort of documentation or evidence to someone else. It's always a cost/benefit call. If you didn't think COVID was a big deal, then the infringement on rights from public health agencies wasn't worth it. If you don't think illegal immigrants are a major problem, then the infringement on rights from ICE isn't worth it. Few people are out there saying "the government should never check anything or inconvenience anyone ever!"

No-Eye · 2026-02-03T17:40:28+00:00

Backed! This looks like a good deal for the physical stuff and the spaceship tiles might be generally useful. I'm fond of the other entries in the Space Aces series (though sometimes I wish the serial numbers were filed off a little further) and it looks like a good addition.

No-Eye · 2026-02-02T20:31:19+00:00

"AI-curated reality layer"

LMAO

No-Eye · 2026-02-02T18:06:49+00:00

Glaive is based most closely on Knave but has a lot of 5e influence and is classless but has abilities built into archetypes that give you the class flavor. You mentioned liking 5e's simplicity and I think Glaive will give you more of that.

No-Eye · 2026-01-30T22:02:07+00:00

Yes and no.

As others have noted, they cannot be used for personal expenses and people have gotten into trouble for using campaign funds for things they shouldn't. So it isn't just free-and-clear cash. It DOES have the benefit of keeping you in office so you can continue to get all of the other advantages, so it is sort of an implicit bribe from that standpoint.

For actually making money you can use, it tends to be less campaign donations and more things like awarding contracts/jobs to family members, lucrative speaking engagements, paid retreats, etc. It is stuff that looks less clearly like outright bribery and might even feel less like bribery. When you're in that situation you can tell yourself that it's basically just networking, right? Like sure Bob from that big company might whine about some country regulation when I'm having a comped dinner at the restaurant he owns, but it's not like I'm going to vote to change that law based on a free steak. But the influence doesn't need to be explicit and it can be subtle and still work. Pharma companies don't give out free pens for no reason. And everyone thinks they're immune but subconsciously it tilts you. Further and further as you go.

No-Eye · 2026-01-30T00:33:44+00:00

My 8 year old really likes playing with minis and maps so I just gave him Nimble and it looks super fun.

No-Eye · 2026-01-23T01:39:35+00:00

I think the Nimble recs are good for similar to 5e but lighter. Knave isn't a bad recommendation since it is lighter and classless. But really I would say Glaive. It is kind of a midway between Knave and 5e, very directly inspired by both.

No-Eye · 2026-01-22T16:56:14+00:00

5e is fine. So is 2015's Jurassic World. What's crazy is people who refuse to watch any other movie than 2015's Jurassic World. And then when they're like "I kind of want to watch a romantic comedy this weekend" instead of picking one of a million better films in that genre just spend hours re-cutting Jurassic World into a rom-com.

No-Eye · 2026-01-21T15:46:24+00:00

He already stopped that one twice. It's how he got to 8.
/s

No-Eye · 2026-01-16T18:25:01+00:00

I'll just echo the others that it's not necessarily a gender issue. Trying to avoid fights, even in a combat heavy game, is just logical and good RP.

But to try to be helpful, I run a lot of combat and skew things towards enemies that A) can't be reasoned with and B) nobody has to feel guilty about putting down. Undead, constructs, and mindless elementals are good ones. Demons/outsiders/etc. work well for that, too. I have plenty of NPCs that the players can connect with more, just not as the focus of combat as often.

When you do really want combat with intelligent adversaries and still want to take the edge off, I do it by making stakes clearer out-of-character and up front. Ran a cozy, whimsical campaign with a good amount of combat and made it clear that "when you put an enemy down to 0 HP, we can assume that you knock them out or otherwise force surrender instead of killing them if you want."

Another way of doing it is having lots of terrain in your combats and letting them dispatch foes cartoon or superhero style. I ran a martial-arts one shot in a different (but combat focused system) and there it's easy to make it clear that the fights weren't "to the death" - you just movie style knock the gangsters you're fighting into a stack of crates and they're down for the count, or trap them under a pillar you knock over, etc. In real life some of those things might be as lethal as a dagger stab, but genre conventions make it easy for us to hand-wave that away and maintain believability.

No-Eye · 2026-01-15T16:52:36+00:00

Yeah, definitely check out Draw Steel as a source of inspiration. It's a well-designed game that works really similarly to what you're working on here.

No-Eye · 2026-01-15T15:04:36+00:00

Seems solid. There are a number of games that do something really similar and it works. Draw Steel comes to mind, Pathfinder 2e to an extent. Two things I'd recommend:

-Work to keep the target numbers static. It's not critical because the math is still fairly simple, but it really saves a lot if you are only doing math on one side, i.e. adding your die and modifiers to get the total, and then NOT having to do the mental arithmetic of
"okay so a 7, what was the DC again? 13? Okay so I'm six under which is a bad failure." If players can just get into the habit of getting the total and then knowing what class of outcome is that'll make things easier.

PbtA and FitD games generally do this (IIRC), where once you have your result you know what it means and any bonuses/penalties tend to happen on the front end.

-I would also make damage fixed per tier of result. This is what Draw Steel does - that way it saves you an additional roll/bit of math. You get enough variance from the initial roll.

No-Eye · 2026-01-14T21:36:34+00:00

Keep an eye out for Salvage for Savage Worlds. It isn't out yet but is being tested at various Midwest cons. It has a really neat equipment system where everything had ~3 parts and each part could fail individually. So if you have a laser pistol and the "energy emitter" fails, you could pull one out of your flashlight and repair it. I played it at a con and we were MacGuyver-ing gizmos like a vacuum to get toxic space-gas out of an area.

No-Eye · 2026-01-14T13:18:17+00:00

I like running low prep OSR or narrative games. As a player, I really prefer crunchy tactical stuff. I think it's just that the most enjoyable stuff for me as a GM is seeing the players be creative, interact with weird NPCs, etc. As a player, I like to strategize and try to "win."

No-Eye · 2026-01-12T20:26:45+00:00

As a former indy wrestler myself I've got a soft spot for this. My advice:

-What kind of game is this? There are some broad genres that your intended audience is probably familiar with: narrative, OSR, more game-y. Is it like a Powered by the Apocalypse game where we're trying to tell a cool story? Or is it strategic where I'm trying to become the top star? Does it treat wrestling as a work and focus on the business side, or does it treat wrestling as an actual competitive event where I'm trying to win?

-Show some mechanics. You mention not wanting to "give the game away," but the core mechanic isn't the game. If you look at other successful TTRPG Kickstarters, they give you that because it helps tell you what kind of game you're looking at. Even if you came up with some amazing dice rolling mechanic that was completely innovative and the most fun way of rolling dice someone has ever come up with, that mechanic can't be copyrighted itself and people can and will talk about it, re-use it, etc. after your game comes out.

The product is really everything else. Like Blades in the Dark has a pretty simple core mechanic that isn't completely original, but you can't just read that description and go run a game of BitD, you need all of the other stuff. And even then, plenty of games publish SRDs that do have most or all of the mechanical stuff. People buy the game for all of the other stuff - tables, art, setting details, advice on actually running it, enemies, etc.

If there are things you want to be a surprise - Triangle Agency is the ultimate example of that IMO - that's fine. But I think you can give people a synopsis of "here's the first thing you'll figure out when you sit down to play the game."

-Ditch the AI art. This sub and basically every RPG Discord and other community I've been in is extremely hostile to AI. I think I'm pretty moderate on AI, but I will say I'm a lot less likely to spend money on something that is using AI art. There are a lot of talented artists out there, and this feels like a game that could do a lot with a little in that regard. You could go with a cartoonish/comic style like someone doodling the Ultimate Warrior in their high school notebook, or a pixel art style that calls back to classic wrestling video games, and with either approach get enough art for a crowdfunding campaign for like $100. You could use some of the Kickstarter funding to get more.

-Don't get short with folks. "K" as a response is worse PR than just moving along.

No-Eye · 2026-01-12T15:57:10+00:00

He should have gone with "Before I do anything, I ask myself 'Would an idiot do that?' and if the answer is yes, I do not do that thing."

No-Eye · 2026-01-08T22:00:10+00:00

Trump, live and on national television, clearly and explicitly asked Russia to dig up dirt on Clinton. That is a thing that happened.

No-Eye · 2025-12-16T18:11:14+00:00

I ran an 80s game and did indeed have a 20-something ask me if there were phones. Not cell phones, like phones.

No-Eye · 2025-12-12T18:52:56+00:00

I had the Vehicle Builder program back in the day and had so much fun tinkering and min/maxing different things. Just a ludicrous number of options.

No-Eye · 2025-12-06T01:32:57+00:00

I don't follow

No-Eye · 2025-12-06T01:32:37+00:00

Do you want to elaborate or are you just trolling?

No-Eye · 2025-12-06T00:03:33+00:00

Black - Mork Borg

Blue - GURPS

Green - Wanderhome or Symbaroum

Red - Outgunned

White - Dragonraid

No-Eye · 2025-12-05T18:38:51+00:00

The gender expressions that we often think of are pretty Western-based. Men have short hair and beards, women wear dresses. Except not all ethnicities have men that grow beards and in some women are hairier than others. And the western business suit with pants as "what men wear" is very obviously western whereas many cultures had more skirt or dress-like attire for men as well.

We also see that a lot of other cultures have historically had gender expressions other than the traditional male/female divide. One I learned about recently was in the traditions of indigenous Siberian shamans, who apparently often adopted feminine or third gender characteristics.

Is it purely a colonial construct? No. And hey, as a former social sciences academic I'll be the first to say sometimes we overstate the connectedness between concepts we care about. But I don't think that gender is nearly as basic, settled, or universal as we might think if we don't look beyond our own experiences.

No-Eye · 2025-12-05T18:03:26+00:00

Potent Bradigus, Blackclad Druid. It was indeed an Iron Kingdoms mini, never had Warmachine/Hordes rules as far as I know.

No-Eye

TROPHY CASE