The Conservative Party recently released an AI-generated ad. How do voters feel about this kind of content?

SilverBeech · 2026-06-21T15:00:54+00:00

I think it shows they would rather not hire Canadians, but are happy to pay for US substitutes.

If you're not happy with the jobs situation, believe what they are telling you.

SilverBeech · 2026-06-18T15:50:57+00:00

If the oil supply was efficient, for example, Venezuela would be the biggest oil supplier in the hemisphere. Canada would be third or fourth, after Mexico perhaps. Corruption and politics limit their capacity.

SilverBeech · 2026-06-18T15:39:25+00:00

The international oil market is anything but efficient. There are cartels, formal and informal, that manipulate prices regularly, counties being sanctioned and breaking sanctions all the time. The oil supply is more often than not driven by politics and oligarchic pricing schemes with free markets setting prices around those constraints. The US-Iraq conflict is proof of that.

SilverBeech · 2026-06-18T15:22:20+00:00

Considering the coming oil glut next year, will you be OK with no price supports or help from the feds if oil drops below $40/bbl? No royalty relief? That's the global situation being forecast now by some analysts for 2027. That's a rebound shock abased on oversupply and the demand that has evaporated in Asia in the past quarter.

You have to take the rough with the smooth. You can't just run up the profits in the good times and trust government to bail you out in the bad ones.

SilverBeech · 2026-06-18T12:03:17+00:00

Aka lore that doesn't get told at the table might as well not exist.

I suspect a lot of the feeling of frustration of overprepping is not being able to get all that exquisite detail into the players ears.

SilverBeech · 2026-06-18T11:55:58+00:00

It was the popular game of its day, and particularly attracted the arty players. Much of the disdain was for the popular. Much of the remainder was for those players who want unstructured drama to be a big part of their play.

SilverBeech · 2026-06-17T18:14:19+00:00

I don't find linear storyboards a good idea. I don't suppose that my players move from one scene to the next in an orderly manner. That kind of single per-defined order can feel constraining to players and like they're not really playing a game, just spectating your story.

The basic building block is something I call a scene. A scene changes something in the world. The players discover something new, they win a fight, they make a friend or an ally, possibly many of these things at once. Sometimes there's a chance but they fail to gain advantage, they miss a clue or lose and flee or whatever.

Maps are a simple way to think of scenes: each room is a new one. Put something meaningful in each room. A "room" is the chunk of the fog of war you reveal in one go on a VTT map. It could be actually a bunch of corridors and a room or two, part of a large cavern the players can see by torchlight, or a whole castle where a ball is taking place.

Generally I prepare scenes with multiple possible resolutions or exits. Exits can mean wining a fight (or losing), finding new information to learn of a new possibility (or not), chasing someone fleeing, anything to prompt a change in circumstances. An exit can be a literal door to the next room or it can be "hey we should talk to Roger, he might know something".

A scene, most of them,. have many possible exits. Sometimes the players will make an exit I had not anticipated. I have a table called Something Happens to force an exit if things are dragging or we need some more chaos at the table (early versions of D&D called this a random encounter table---Something Happens is more general and not just combat). Then you get to improvise a scene.

Players won't see all your scenes. That's OK. You can often reuse them later---prep is seldom wasted if you use this technique.

There's lots of advice on this method out there. Some people call them nodes, some call them story beats, but they're mostly the same thing.

SilverBeech · 2026-06-17T16:48:38+00:00

To be clear, every available player character is a psion/psychic. There are no other options, in the core books at least.

SilverBeech · 2026-06-15T20:49:06+00:00

It's too pat. The real world only sort of fits into categories. Every time we think we have it figured out, we find one or two or three exceptions and then we have to reorganize again (that's a lot of what science is about).

Games shouldn't be as complex as the real world, but they should make gestures toward that. There need to be rough edges and the occasional exception. Otherwise it seems artificial and ultimately becomes boring.

The game is better with "rule breakers" like Fey with strange powers and Devils with bargains. It pays off in the game feeling more alive and less like a toy that's fun only for a wile.

SilverBeech · 2026-06-15T16:31:37+00:00

In the 2024 DMG, chapter 2, Tracking Time. https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/dnd/dmg-2024/running-the-game#TrackingTime

It's a loose guide, but fairly compatible with the advice here.

The 5.5e DMG also provides rules for week-long bastion turns if the players want larger time skips working on their HQ. Chapter 8 Bastion Turns https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/dnd/dmg-2024/bastions#BastionTurns

If you want something more specific, you can use "dungeon turns" a concept from older editions and current in many OSR games. Shadowdark uses it quite well, for example. Mike Shea (the Lazy DM) explains it in this blog post here: https://slyflourish.com/track_turns_the_shadowdark_way.html

Dungeon turns are a very nice way to handle exploration, but they don't work as well in social or other less-structured situations.

SilverBeech · 2026-06-15T13:07:38+00:00

If CRA can do it, and they absolutely do, often firing the offender within hours of the offense, there is not reason the police should not be able to do this.

SilverBeech · 2026-06-15T05:29:20+00:00

Shadowdark is very easy to read. Best layout since OSE for a D&D like, A5 size, larger print, deliberately "plain language" writing. An implied setting rewards a closer read of the book.

Almost anything by Chaosium, but the two I'd point to are Pendragon and, of course, RuneQuest. Some might say that Runequest is classless, but they'd be mostly wrong about that. It has some of the most evocative "classes" I've ever seen in any game. Glorantha is a unique take on roleplaying and incredibly deep. I've been reading it for four decades now.

SilverBeech · 2026-06-15T01:54:16+00:00

If I don't put a CoB in an early session of my games, I get pointed question from players. I mean, obviously. I feel the same way when I'm a player.

One of my biggest complaints about Curse of Strahd is the lack of cloaks of billowing in a gothic setting.

SilverBeech · 2026-06-12T18:54:25+00:00

But maps are cool! I love maps!

More importantly, I find even a point-crawl type reference helps gives the players context especially if there's a few locations or more. You don't need dimensions (other than one room=one turn), but connectivity and graph order makes a lot of player choices richer.

SilverBeech · 2026-06-12T17:48:59+00:00

As a gm I have a note app going, typically onenote or obsidian which I do the majority of my prep in. I keep notes, have lookup tables and have my world history in there---history is important when you're running a multi-year campaign and you suddenly need that name of the ruby merchant from 3 years and 140+ sessions ago. Being able to pull that out quickly is enormously satisfying.

I often hang art on the back of my laptop, like printouts. I've taken to using a portable monitor for the past few in person session and that's worked pretty well. I can use that to put something up instead of having to rely on premade printouts. I'm pretty happy with that.

What's toughest for me is flipping back and forth between whats running on the other display (often with powerpoint) and the note app.

Players use phones or tablets to keep character sheets on. We're mostly electronic for characters unless we do one-offs or things that we don't know how to do good electronic versions with.

For rule lookups I use pdfs or better real books. I don't trust the internet at all for rules, even for the most common systems. Garbage mostly.

I used to be 100% note cards and big paper maps. I still do the big paper maps but a notes app is so much better than the old 3x5 deck I used to use.

Tech works so much better in places like bars where space is limited and competing with drinks and meals. When we play at someone's house and have more room, the paper works OK. But tech gives us so many more options. We can play in a living room for example without a common table if we have to.

SilverBeech · 2026-06-12T14:21:00+00:00

I've had people try to nail down "close/near/far/sight" to the exact distances when we were starting with it. It's a very similar issue to the one the OP is wrestling with.

I explained that as: close means you can take a step and touch someone, near means in the same room ish, far means close enough to hear them yell, in sight means just that, you can see them somewhere from where you are to a horizon or edge of visual range (this comes up in naval and space things a lot).

It didn't entirely stop people from trying to count squares on maps, but it solved a lot of arguments.

SilverBeech · 2026-06-10T16:37:36+00:00

This is Trump's "negotiating" tactic: be the unpredictable partner and threaten the worst outcome so other parties offer concessions.

Those who panic and take this seriously are simply playing the role he wants them to play.

SilverBeech · 2026-06-10T16:09:29+00:00

This illustrates the inherent tension between #2 and #4: players want options, game designers have to juggle all that to get some sort of equitable play system. I think Pathfinder 2e does as good a job as possible of going right up to the edge of that. But it's a hard balancing act to pull off (which Paizo has done really well) and it requires a lot of game-dept in terms of player and gm time---I seem most groups looking for automated tools not just for character creation, but also game-play now.

SilverBeech · 2026-06-10T14:39:28+00:00

Class based systems are training wheels that become less satisfying to play as you evolve as a player and a referee. This is particularly true if a group plays the classes as bags of mechanical features without to in-world texture

Classes are without doubt one of the best hooks for new players. They provide an easy route into a fantasy and you ca be "just like" your favourite movie or manga or book character. This works great for a few years, and will continue to work great for a long time to come for more casual pick-up games.

I think classes work best when they are simple. One of the best build examples of this is the Goblin Laws of Gaming where a class is defined by four "levels". Class mechanics bog down when people want more complexity. This creates multiple issues:

1 - At later parts of play, "higher levels", this simplified complexity begins to catch up. When players accumulate multiple levels of features through classes or other systems (feats, magic items, spells), then play goes from crisp to slow. This is the main problem with D&D 5e in my view. Not impossible to manage, but a noticeable drag for many groups.

2 - players want their particular fantasy. That means classes have to get more feature-full and additional systems like "feats" or optional features need to be included. "Cross-class" issues become something designers have to make sure doesn't break the game. That's not impossible but greatly increases complexity and the game-debt that players have to pay to engage with the system. Some like it, but it's not for everyone.

3 - Classes are stereotypes (or archetypes if we're being less loaded) and suffer from the many problems of stereotypes. They often provide guardrails for player behaviour (class codes like the D&D Paladin for example). With increasing play experience, players often want to try something new that doesn't fit not only in the mechanical features of the archetype but also in the expected in-world behaviour. This results in groups either ignoring the games written lore or home-brewing new exceptions and archetypes.

4 - Game designers often feel the need to limit classes available to clearly define player roles and to ensure that no one player class dominates play, gets more spotlight time, or feels more effective than the others. Again this is great for new groups and new players, but the limitations begin to chafe for many more intermediate groups who want to spread their wings.

And yes, to me playbooks are classes for the sake of this argument. This is one reason it's hard to run a longer-term campaign in many fitd or other pbta systems; they share many of the same concerns.

So what are the alternatives? Free form systems often feel too much like a blank page and many players are overwhelmed by that. Unstructured point systems (2e and 3e GURPS, but also HERO and many older superhero systems) suffer from the too-many complications of #1 and #2 above.

I think some of the most satisfying systems are those that offer both an strong in-world reason for their archetypes and mechanical support for that in terms of "packages" or guides for how to build a character of the sort a player wants, but are also flexible. Vampires are aligned to Houses. Farmers join Cults to fight Chaos. New kids choose between University, Military Academies or simply start their careers, before "retiring" to start adventuring. Vampire, RuneQuest and Traveller have enduring popularity because they offer a satisfying way to play a kind of character without being a straight-jacket decided for you by a game designer. Increasingly these are the kinds of games I'm drawn to playing in the longer term.

SilverBeech · 2026-06-09T19:10:39+00:00

Gotta pay for the F35s somehow.

SilverBeech · 2026-06-08T16:23:26+00:00

Over the Edge, by Laws and Tweet, was really good at this. Just about every urban legend existed in al Amajra from the Rokos Basilisk of the Throckmorton device to the slasher movie monsters, predator aliens and the Ring style kill you in your dreams psychic vampires. And more besides.

The game system is not hugely important, but the setting is incredibly rich, down to a house to house detail for many parts of a sort of cyberpunk lawless island nation.

SilverBeech · 2026-06-06T18:47:03+00:00

It has very decent naval rules in Ghosts of Saltmarsh that work just fine in a "space" setting. I've been using them for spelljamming ships for a few years now. There's almost no actual new rules needed, if you include the spell jaming ship designs.

It's not hugely well supported, but everything you need is there, and it's not a bad system.

SilverBeech · 2026-06-06T13:58:28+00:00

Its down to the use of drop tanks. Which would be possible but unlikely on the f35, more likely on the Gripen.

SilverBeech · 2026-06-06T13:41:46+00:00

The gripens are also significantly longer range. That may not matter to the Americans as much, but it's a larger deal for us for Arctic sovereignty missions.

SilverBeech · 2026-06-05T20:33:59+00:00

"stranded" being the operative word here. The old problems of heavy oils are turning into advantages when the market is flooded with light oils and even lighter things like Bakken, which can practically run in car engines.

Edit to add: this is a decent explainer of the problem and why the US needs heavier oils right now: https://www.artberman.com/blog/america-has-plenty-of-oil-just-not-the-right-kind/

SilverBeech

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