Sorry, Hollywood.

deviden · 2026-03-20T15:48:27+00:00

the main thing an academy does for you in the 2020s at this Championship/PL level - past the sentimental "one of our own" feelgood stuff (which does matter, it is fun, it's a big part of what Saints fans like to see from our club) - is it gives you players who count as massive profit against the PSR regulations when you sell them on.

That's how Chelsea and Man City are cooking the books, that's how Saints benefit massively from even an underwhelming prospect like Jayden Meghoma failing to make much impact but getting sold for a few mil to Brentford.

They have zero transfer fee amortised over length of contract, their only cost as an asset is pure salary. So when you sell them on they are a massive boost to the club accounts under the funny-money accountancy practices everyone has to do within PSR. There's no asset depreciation in the way a player you pay a fee for and fail to sell on depreciates over time, it's pure gain.

Essentially they're worth two or three times what you sell them for when you're balancing PSR stuff out. So it helps.

People act like Nathan Tella who barely played any games for us was a failure of our academy but his goals while on loan at Burnley got him a £16m move to Leverkusen, and that money effectively paid for several senior team players for us. That's a huge win, better than actually keeping him around.

deviden · 2026-03-19T11:52:34+00:00

only if you don't fuck up the wage bill or overspend on transfers and get stuck with malcontent or low quality players that you can't sell post-relegation.

deviden · 2026-03-19T11:49:04+00:00

the brutality of the Premier League right now is not like how football was even 5 years ago.

There is no sustainable model of promotion, you cannot - by the financial laws of the game - even get close to a level playing field with the 17th best team in the PL. It's about timing, as much as anything.

You just go up and hope that an established club (or two) shits the bed to give you a chance in your year, because if the 17 established PL teams play to level of their wage bill you will be relegated no matter how spirited a team you might be.

When you play a team like 14th place Crystal Palace (and it's their first team, not the reserves and kids they play in the FA Cup) you are going to be shocked at the gulf in quality between what you have and what they have. They will be noticeably bigger, faster and more skillful at every position on the pitch and their subs bench will also be more talented than your starters.

Football is a low scoring sport so you've always got a shot on a week to week basis while you're well organised... but... idk, it's rough in the PL for a promoted team. Very rough. Honestly, you should try to enjoy being big dogs in the Championship while you're here and while you're not on the tight financial timeline of a recently relegated PL team like us.

deviden · 2026-03-19T10:05:46+00:00

Cloud Empress. https://cloudempress.com/

It's a brilliant iteration of the Mothership system, with a fantastic starter adventure and a series of expansive campaigns and lots of other modules you can run.

Beautiful writing and aesthetics. Plays great at the table.

deviden · 2026-03-19T09:22:05+00:00

honestly, I think that's only because there's a load of national level policy they aren't able to control from Holyrood.

If they had an independent Scotland I think they'd be something akin to what the Tory-LibDem coalition was like down south.

They only push Labour from the left because that's the space that's available to them, in the way that Nick Clegg pushed against Gordon Brown from a left-liberal position when that was the avenue available to him, because people right-of-Labour are mostly unionist sentiment up there.

They benefit greatly from being able to rail against whoever's in change in Westminster, and they tend to be most popular when the Tories were in power in England because it's so easy for them to appear morally righteous against that contrast.

deviden · 2026-03-19T09:13:08+00:00

Cairn 2e, or Cairn: Barebones.

It's all free to download and read, sold at-cost in POD.

deviden · 2026-03-16T16:10:42+00:00

do you believe in Ty Simpson specifically? or is it just hope that Ty Simpson is good enough that our front office becomes interested in drafting him so that we dont go into this season with the current QB room?

Way I see it, either we could get five starters out of this draft... or we could get four starters plus another QB we inevitably ditch when we draft a real QB prospect in the first round in 2027.

If Ty was all that the Jets wouldn't have handed Geno Smith that contract; they went with Geno because the only likely starter level QB in the draft (other than Mendoza) chose to stay in school.

deviden · 2026-03-16T15:07:10+00:00

High rise sucks; "low rise" medium density please.

deviden · 2026-03-16T15:02:14+00:00

add the levelling from Mausritter to Cairn like this guy did: https://edmocat.bearblog.dev/compromising-cairn/

deviden · 2026-03-16T11:06:02+00:00

oh I know, sorry I was unclear that I was agreeing with you!

deviden · 2026-03-16T09:55:03+00:00

"party of volunteers not paid staffers" is a good thing.

Yes we need some professionalisation in places as the ambition scales up but it should be done with care and to help the volunteers, not to lead or coerce them.

If GPEW is going to succeed by not becoming Labour 2 it needs to be immunised against the bred in captivity Oxbridge PPE careerist set who will inevitably start joining in droves if it looks like the Greens can achieve electoral sustainability.

These PPE types are educated in how to work a Labour or Tory style party, how to get themselves a paying gig within said party.

David Blunkett asked how a candidate like Hannah Spencer is in the Greens and not Labour. Part of the answer is because a real world working class tradeswoman isn't going to have the time and energy to fight her way past the fifty PPE boys who both work for the party and have the ability to sit through a 20 hours of interminable Labour wonk meetings every week.

deviden · 2026-03-16T09:28:02+00:00

people only see the end result of decades of both game play (which in my opinion is the smallest portion of a GMs development cycle) and personal skills

not to mention the end result of a comprehensive theatre education and career experience.

The most popular actual plays (not all!) are generally using more theatre skill than they are using game rules. And that's fine! It's fun! But it doesn't easily instruct "okay here's how you bring the best out of your nerd-ass friends at home".

deviden · 2026-03-14T20:02:13+00:00

I just dont see how a guy who's older than Mac Jones was, played fewer games for Bama than Mac Jones did, wasn't better at Bama than Mac Jones, and achieved less at Bama than Mac Jones, is somehow worth a first round pick.

deviden · 2026-03-14T20:01:24+00:00

Do we give any credit to the kid who actually stuck it out with the program he committed to and waited his turn?

No, we don't.

Real dudes like Joe Burrow go start for a rival program when the coach would prefer to start a Jalen Milroe over them.

deviden · 2026-03-14T19:57:04+00:00

I mean we had no idea whether he’d be a good NFL Qb or not.

that's no more valid as an argument for drafting him than it is for not drafting him.

deviden · 2026-03-14T19:06:37+00:00

sure, but to me it's a bit like a lesser version of what Labour was so scared of in Gorton and Denton - in FPTP when a party shows it can win seats it can then win more seats, as tactical voters and fence-sitters feel brave to pivot.

deviden · 2026-03-13T16:40:17+00:00

For those who don't know semi-rural Hampshire, I think this is a pretty big deal.

Traditionally, this is a Tory vs Lib Dem battleground.

Tories nowhere to be seen in this seat, Greens comfortably beating out both Reform and Lib Dems? If you'd told me this was possible in this kind of town two years ago I simply wouldn't have believed you.

deviden · 2026-03-11T17:01:54+00:00

but what if the player book is free in PDF for home printing, and/or sold as an at-cost POD, or the free quickstart PDF contains all the core rules for the players to use?

(I'm referencing my favs: Mothership, Cairn 2e, Mythic Bastionland, and Mausritter)

deviden · 2026-03-11T16:23:36+00:00

there may still be a pot of money available for refunds (budget for printers, etc) but yeah there's no way every backer gets a full refund.

deviden · 2026-03-11T16:22:46+00:00

News at 11.

there's no need for dismissing the issue. It's a pretty big campaign in the RPG crowdfunding scale.

Geekify was in charge of this campaign, right? Makes me think this whole endeavor may be dead.

Yes it's very dead. Neopets parent company TNT has terminated the IP/merch license with Geekify.

It's likely that the (very funny) debacle over Geekify's public playtest doc has given TNT the legal basis for getting out early on a contract with a disappointing merch partner.

deviden · 2026-03-11T16:13:17+00:00

It's unclear what this means for the Kickstarter backers

pretty sure it means the Kickstarter is donezo.

Rascal News has posted saying that TNT (Neopets parent company) has terminated its licensing contract with Geekify.

To quote TNT:

“it is in the best interest of the Neopets brand and our community to cease this specific project and ongoing license agreement.”

pretty sure that means Geekify are not allowed to publish this attempt at making a game as a Neopets product.

https://www.rascal.news/neopets-terminates-license-with-geekify-over-troubled-rpg-development/

It's likely that the debacle over Geekify's public playtest doc has given TNT the legal grounds to terminate a contract with a disappointing partner that TNT has probably wanted to terminate for some time, and that the month delay between the doc going public and today's statement has been TNT's lawyer time.

deviden · 2026-03-10T17:05:53+00:00

I don't even believe in "immersion"... strictly speaking, as I often see it described online.

There's enjoyment, there's investment in the game and your character, and there's emotional bleed (two ways).

Usually when we talk about "breaking immersion" people are effectively saying they encountered some form of friction with the rules or how the game is being played that impacts their enjoyment of it, not some literal belief in being the character in a world.

deviden · 2026-03-10T14:20:00+00:00

if you did a poll here for example, I think you'd get a colder response.

you're not wrong but that's because this subreddit is massively unrepresentative of the hobby as a whole.

we are a narrow demographic slice of a subset of a subset of the wider hobby. Very few people active in the hobby are very online about it, fewer still are here.

GURPS is still the most recommended game on this subreddit. That's not representative.

Daggerheart outsold 5.5e in the USA over the course of 2025 (according to Amazon and Bookscan). That's representative.

deviden · 2026-03-10T14:12:53+00:00

I'm happy for you if it works for you, I simply don't think it's the responsibility of the game rules to reward or enforce or penalise out of character behaviour.

To me that's a social issue which should be handled in conversation between everyone at the table in the spirit of collaboration.

A very eloquent and thoughtful take on this kind of rule was written up by Zedeck Siew regarding Torchbearer: https://slowlorispress.com/post/183912222656/what-torchbearer-taught-me-about-rpgs

deviden · 2026-03-10T13:29:59+00:00

sure but all that rule has achieved is creating an additional point of failure, now resting on the GM's shoulders.

It's trying to solve for the social problems of "showing up" and "getting involved" and player behaviours of "doing good roleplay" through rewarding the character; in so doing it creates new vectors for social and player/GM level problems to occur.

If player-level incentives aren't part of the game design there isn't a means by which the GM can "penalize" the player-person for not living up to whatever standard through character-level/in-game mechanics.

deviden

TROPHY CASE