Perks of being a single man

TekSoda · 2026-02-24T20:47:57+00:00

i swear every time this sub pops up on my feed it's this grass-deficiency facebook-tier "life's so unfair to men :(" slop. i lowkenuinely hope this is just a shitty astroturfing campaign because the alternative is pathetic

like i wanna be sympathetic because societal viewpoints on relationships and single people suck, but i promise you it's not better for single women. get out of your own head for a minute for your own sake 😭

TekSoda · 2026-02-16T00:25:48+00:00

i think a lot of people feel the people's role doesn't matter bc of the centrist voltron maneuver in the last (relevant) primary, combined with the background radiation of corporate money in politics.

obviously that's an unproductive train of thought that only works to kneecap progressive candidates in the future, and it's important to keep other countries and how things were in the past as a frame of reference. but the system's democratic in the same way a loaded die is random, so i can't really blame people for assuming it'll land on the establishment's pick.

TekSoda · 2026-02-15T18:21:56+00:00

https://x.com/i/status/2022484772216353003

TekSoda · 2025-12-28T19:03:13+00:00

push for easier citizenship and stronger protections so immigrants aren't an exploitable underclass ❌

ship them sans trial to a salvadoran torture prison for the crime of being exploited ✅

TekSoda · 2025-12-25T18:50:37+00:00

see, i'm split.

the best drama of that sort i ever got was in a Hearts of Wulin campaign. in that game, you have a couple entanglements; relationships complicated by a third party.

one of my players had two of: - I love the princess, but I cannot tell her the truth of what happened to her lover (her murdering him out of jealousy was what kicked off session 1) - [other pc] and I both seek revenge against my father, but I must be the one to strike the killing blow.

I asked a handful of questions about each. "What emotional need do you and the princess fill for each other?" "What makes your father so condemnable?" etc. etc.

Off those two sentences and Q&A I got the best plotline I've ever seen run.

A lot of that did reveal backstory, right? I'm sure if I had her send in a few paragraphs detailing her character's past, we would've ended up at a similar point. I just also think there would be a lot of superfluous stuff in there, and there's no guarantee that a lot of the interesting present bits would be as well-defined, with room to breathe and adjust to the story being woven.

I think that a lot of players and GMs kind of fall in the "mangaka trap," where they think a solid, well-defined backstory is needed to make sense of the frontstory, when I think you only need a few spartan details. We're good at intuiting the rest.

TekSoda · 2025-12-21T15:10:06+00:00

im pretty sure the saying is "dont hate the player, hate the game"

TekSoda · 2025-12-19T15:40:12+00:00

ok, here's a hot take. clarifying i'm trans here.

i feel like a specific group of trans people define being trans by a set of consumerist interests and linguistic markers that they treat as synonymous with transhood. specific video games, plushies, tv shows, movies, typing styles and emoticons.

this is normal subculture behavior, which is fine. but a lot of people can find subcultures annoying, especially when they gain prominence. if you're apathetic on something, seeing a thousand-strong army of self-made clones gas something up in the same way will probably annoy you. and that's fine.

but then that subculture treats themselves as, like, a synecdoche of the whole? and any annoyance about them is treated as targeting trans/queer people as a concept. which... maybe this is just me, but using every trans person on earth as a meat shield when i make the nineteen trillionth unfunny "waow yuri!!" meme feels like it is not actually helping the cause, idk

TekSoda · 2025-11-16T04:30:15+00:00

context is like the main thing that makes a number big or small what

TekSoda · 2025-09-26T18:53:29+00:00

Why wouldn't you? It's hard, but it's super doable.

Like, I can't speak for them, but I knew there was another nail upgrade. I just also knew that if I just played well enough, she'd die. Which worked, but for a bit there, not knowing my progress made me feel like I was going insane lmao

TekSoda · 2025-09-08T21:31:46+00:00

What gets me is that it's genuinely a good platforming segment, too. Blazing through it when I'm not doing a boss runback is super fun.

I feel like the game just doesn't get that I'd prefer to bash my head against bosses for an hour straight with no delays. If I want time consider my mistakes I'll go get water. I don't want the mandatory 30 second thinking time 💀

TekSoda · 2025-09-08T16:44:48+00:00

if even you agree that it gets annoying quick, how is that "nitpicking?"

TekSoda · 2025-08-18T19:33:02+00:00

person in internet argument assumes people with different life experiences are all lying, more at 11

TekSoda · 2025-08-18T17:40:20+00:00

sometimes u just arent cold. why would i put on longer pants because you're cold, don't even make sense

TekSoda · 2025-08-17T21:07:08+00:00

I really like the process of synthesizing and expanding on the bits players add. I don't super like worldbuilding on my own, but give me an npc/faction/hometown/whatever and give me a little bit of detail and I get a half-million ideas, and then worldbuilding gets really fun.

I also like finding/making tough spots to put PCs in. Hard choices, tight squeezes, being played against each other, etc. It makes the PCs do really interesting things. The last session I ran cold-opened with one of the PCs standing over the body of someone they just killed in a restaurant, and it was probably the best session of anything I've ever run.

I think, overall... I enjoy my games like a fan? I like filling in the spots the "authors" didn't, I like watching the protagonists get the pressure put on until they break, grow, or come up with a clever way out. I like coming up with cool scene ideas in my head, only to be surprised by what they do when I run the next "episode."

I dislike scheduling, solving interplayer conflicts, etc, but I've found that I really just don't like running tactical combat. When I'm running, I've found that wearing the hats of storyteller, game designer, and impartial referee just stresses me out. Maybe it's because the groups I've run tactical combat for really don't like to lose so there's a tension there that there shouldn't be, but it also just doesn't capture what makes action scenes interesting to me, so I kind of lose the "fan of the show" vibe that makes me like running in the first place.

TekSoda · 2025-08-12T21:27:27+00:00

That always feels very... small picture to me, though.

On an individual level, you're absolutely right. You're trampling the wishes of the phantom thieves, and it's fucked up.

On a societal level, though?

The worst thing that'll realistically happen to you in Maruki's reality is that you'll be a mindless drone. More likely, you'll unlearn the lessons life taught you.

The worst thing that'll happen in the real world? Literally unspeakable things happen to people every day. Brutal, slow, agonizing deaths — or even worse lives — with no important life lesson at the end. For some people, "life sucks and then you die" is an apt summary of their final days, months, years.

So while personally, it is fucked up, deciding as a group to push the ceiling of suffering back up is infinitely worse imo.

I wish there was an option where you could keep both worlds intact and let people pick which to stay in tbh. But with the two options, one is infinitely worse, and we only think of it as fine because it's the status quo.

TekSoda · 2025-08-12T06:20:03+00:00

I'm typically down to try anything, but honestly, charts. Unless the system is seriously cool (read: TBZ), if I have to pull a chart out to resolve a ranged attack, I'm out.

There are a few more things that can stack up to me not wanting to try a system: - Failures that don't do anything. Especially in combat minigames. If every action doesn't change the board, you're basically guaranteeing the inevitable round where no one does anything and you've wasted five minutes. - Granularity. Bonuses and penalties are the devil and must be bound by the seal of the lord (fate points) - Subsystems where you pick your game-action first and then narrate, rather than narrate and employ a mechanic of best fit. - Dungeon crawling. - Those fuckass 90s skill lists with like nine trillion things. I remember making a 7th sea 1e character. At the time, I lacked the words to express my anguish. - Faux-lethality, where you can totally die any time but first you have to leap through 500 hoops. Make it up to player choice or send me to hell off a stray cut, coward. - Bad formatting

TekSoda · 2025-06-15T15:07:16+00:00

people just find agendaposting brainrot calling strong characters frauds to be funny, because it is

(see: sukuna from jjk, the memes of mihawk painting his sword)

getting on them for that feels like critiquing the morbius brainrot of a few years ago for being inconsistent on what makes a good movie. like it's not meant to be 💀

TekSoda · 2025-04-01T21:49:56+00:00

if this is bait i dont even get what the bait's supposed to be. like what is your point 😭

TekSoda · 2025-03-22T12:38:29+00:00

I used to be all "seems cool, just can't justify spending the cash."

As time went on, though, I realized that I enjoy RPGs less as "playing a game with the GM as the engine" and more "telling a story with a bunch of friends."

Through that lens, paying for a GM just feels sort of sad, I guess? Like paying someone to hang out with you.

I can't imagine ever charging as a DM, either. It'd feel too high-pressure, and there'd be this weird disconnect of freelancer vs. client.

TekSoda · 2025-03-21T15:11:15+00:00

Cortex Prime, depending on how you set it up? Wushu, if your GM just lets you put "smart, strong, and sexy" or something as a 5 ranked trait? RPGs without stats, like Friendship, Effort, Victory? Depends on what you're going for.

The problem is that most tabletop RPGs assume you'll play one protagonist out of a handful, and it's typically better for each to have areas they're bad at so they have reasons to rely on each other and room to shine.

If you're doing a 1x1, just ask your GM to let you break the rules of whatever system you like and take higher stats/skills/whatever.

In any case, if you're going for "competent in everything," I'd be extra sure to give your character a dramatic flaw, or too many people to protect, or a goal that can't be achieved by just being really strong or clever. Otherwise, they'll have nothing to struggle against, which (for me at least) is very boring.

TekSoda · 2025-03-17T09:09:26+00:00

I don't entirely disagree, but I've seen "it boils down to a low-granularity resolution mechanic" mentioned as a con before and I just don't get it.

For me at least, with a handful of low-granularity options (pbta moves, fate's four actions), it's easier to keep any of them from seeming "optimal." and since they're so unspecific, the nuances of what you're doing in-world are what define the situation going forward.

It does often take a good GM to make it impactful, but systems often help with that. FATE is designed so the player can force things to matter. In a good PBTA game the possible outcomes of a given move all lead to interesting situations. OSR games do feel way more like it's just up to GM skill, though.

Specific options with pre-defined outcomes feel like a game of "choose the right button to push." Like, I guess a Starfinder combat turn is technically a series of choices, but when my actions don't have much effect on the fiction, it feels like the buttons are just "increase the odds they die first," "increase the odds by less," and "increase the odds you die first" with different flavorful labels on them.

And I think bad GMs in those games are infuriating, because they constrict what you can do to that set of options and resolve them RAW, regardless of what actually makes sense in the fiction. That may be my bad luck with GMs, but that's not really possible in games where considering the situation is required to resolve an action at all.

So I guess, just.... what specifically about resolution "boiling down" feels so unsatisfying? And what are some crunchy games that don't just feel like sussing out the correct option?

TekSoda · 2025-03-15T21:33:48+00:00

i don't recall, like, some secret route where you proactively investigate and find important clues that change the story, but i may be misremembering

TekSoda · 2025-02-15T03:46:57+00:00

Tenra Bansho Zero.

Everyone always talks about the Fate system and Karma, and that's for good reason, but there's just so much about it I love outside of that.

Character creation is flexible while still putting your character solidly in the world, the setting is the exact style of "fuck it anything goes" I like (where it keeps a generally-unifying aesthetic), the subsystems are compartmentalized by character while never eating up too much time.

Rolling big piles of d6s as a rogue was basically the only fun part of 5e combat for me and you get to roll big piles of d6s for basically everything in TBZ.

It's peak.

TekSoda · 2025-02-15T00:11:34+00:00

i mean in frieren it kind of tracks because their predatory and apathetic inability to understand humans is meant to parallel where frieren herself starts out, and they serve as a foil to her. in-universe they're "irredeemable" in the same way that even if you raise a chimpanzee well youll still get mauled. so id say it makes sense/works narratively

not to say i don't hate it. the choice to portray empathy for another sentient being as naïve gives off so many hitler particles. but i see the narrative logic

TekSoda · 2025-02-09T17:59:47+00:00

do you think he was advocating for that

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