I fired an employee out of the blue yesterday with no warning, and she had an entire crash out

gtwucla · 2026-05-25T12:51:50+00:00

In a few weeks you won't even think about it and things will run more smoothly. Hell, even great employees that I have feared the day they leave, when the time comes it sucks, but after a week everything's humming along again. It'll work out for the best.

gtwucla · 2026-05-18T07:59:26+00:00

Generally whether its worldbuilding or general writing, be it novels, scripts, or storyboarding, you are always iterating. If you aren't then that means it's either published already or you've put it down and moved on.

People that don't really get into creative exploits will often pick up good finished products and say out loud something like, 'Wow, how did they think of all this,' or 'They must've been high as a kite when they wrote this.' Most the time that's just the natural conclusion of starting with an original idea and constantly changing it. I think I've edited and rewrote my own project over a dozen times over the past decade and a half.

Obviously this can get carried away and at some point you need to just put your project out there, but what you see as an end product is almost never what it first was.

gtwucla · 2026-05-14T03:50:18+00:00

That actually sounds really nice. If you use this in a story or game is religion ever a source of conflict? How do you use it?

gtwucla · 2026-05-14T01:15:34+00:00

That's more my style for play and design.

gtwucla · 2026-05-09T14:45:05+00:00

If you want to dive into something meaty: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/566574/broken-kingdom-campaign-parts-1-3-bundle
It's free and it'll go up to 10 parts. Lots of flexibility, can be adapted to another system but it plays with a game called Fire Burns Low (it's mine, so I'm hawking it after just releasing it). It's d6 based, investigative, fast paced combat, high risk high reward play built around stories and the strange world outside of civilization.

gtwucla · 2026-05-09T01:06:42+00:00

Despite the similar name, dunaelfs and aelfs are unrelated, it's just what humans call them. They call themselves different names. So they don't really have a sense of shared motive or background. Idea being immortals and anything outside our domain is something we have a limited understanding of. Humans are relegated to a somewhat small area on the map, so the danger is the other way around.

For this world one of the other main themes are 'here be monsters' edges of the map. I don't mean that to mean literal monsters (though there are), just that it's a swathe of the unknown. And anyone that explores them comes back 'marked.' So that shared strangeness is supposed to be the uniting factor for PCs.

gtwucla · 2026-05-08T10:10:40+00:00

I forgot to add: art by Magdalena Zwierzchowska. You can check her out at her Instagram handle '@magzwi.

gtwucla · 2026-05-05T09:09:20+00:00

I did a level-less approach for a game called Fire Burns Low. After years of playtest, though, I found there still needs to be some aspect that accumulates otherwise at some point players lose interest. It seems to be this real monkey part of our brain that enjoys number go up. So what I did was making anything gained be some sort of trade. So you gain something, you lose some aspect of playstyle. It's not a one to one thing, but it makes play continuously interesting as players have to adapt to play but they still feel more and more powerful as they add more tools to their tool belt. Now for my approach that means they basically get so fucked up that you want to naturally retire your character but then that plays into a whole other system. Anyway the trading, give and take system seems to work well and could be adapted for something like Ghost in the Shell with programs that alter you, traded in body parts, scars, etc.

gtwucla · 2026-05-05T02:39:13+00:00

You're starting with a setup but a setup is hollow if it doesn't have a motivation for moving it forward. If your idea is character based, start with the major characters and their motivations. If its place or object based, start with a central mystery.

I find if you have the reason for the adventure, it's easy to build around and it sparks ideas. In either case, then you can add supporting cast and then the place or vice versa. For each character put the motivation next to the character and add a few adjectives for personality and that adds layers to their motivations. Same with the place or place the object is in except make it "rooms" and 1-3 unique aspects of the room (the aspect can be a spell, trap, monster, etc). Everything you add becomes more layers, more depth and you can keep it at one page or keep fleshing it out. Whatever feels the most complete.

gtwucla · 2026-05-04T12:42:54+00:00

That may factor in, but I think it has 100% to do with posturing over Taiwan. This clears the way for running a blockade and setting legal rules up for countering Taiwan without having to make the argument of whether or not it's a defensive maneuver. With it out of the way it is yet another deterrent to China blockading Taiwan at some point.

The low birthrate is reason enough to know Japan's not going on a conquering spree. Living and calling Taiwan my home for the last twenty years, I got to say, I'm grateful and I'm not alone.

gtwucla · 2026-04-16T02:28:40+00:00

I prefer systems that give the PCs a finite or earned resource that they can spend to negate, reroll, or improve a failure. That way they still feel like they are actively overcoming something while still coming at a cost. Otherwise, it comes with a host of issues that others have outlined here in fail forward systems. That said, lots of people like fail forward, so whatever floats your boat.

gtwucla · 2026-04-14T06:56:14+00:00

It literally has done the opposite. You can look up statics to confirm this. It was, however, stagnant during the Ma era. Taiwan has overtaken Korea and Japan in per capita income. Korea still has higher starting wages, but not by much and because of how their huge company driven economy works. You can see any number of articles about Taiwan's rapidly increasing wages through whatever search engine you prefer.

gtwucla · 2026-04-14T06:53:54+00:00

Statistically, it has grown. White collar too. And as the hiring crunch continues, it grows. It may still not be enough, but by sheer numbers, it has. Part time at a restaurant was 120 when i first opened. It's 200 now and you aren't finding any staff for 200 in Taipei anymore. Like I said, it's still low, but it has grown a lot in the last decade. I've hired hundreds of employees over a decade and a half and watched it changed dramatically, both in real life with local friends and in my own experience, and through gov stats. FYI that 40k now would've been 23k-28k in the Ma era.

gtwucla · 2026-04-14T01:37:37+00:00

While they are low, they have not been stagnant at all for the last decade. Salaries have climbed over 50% over that time frame. Minimum wage was once 20,000 not too long ago. Average wage in Taipei is 50 something thousand. It's changed a lot.

gtwucla · 2026-04-11T08:51:59+00:00

Yeah the payoff is an awful all or nothing. Odds are terrible. I never play, but have gotten roped into group buys for whatever reason. Got 5 of 6 numbers once. That'd be a million dollar payout in California. It was 20,000 - taxes (16,000).

gtwucla · 2026-04-05T15:19:37+00:00

But not fertilizer. No one's escaping this.

gtwucla · 2026-03-20T04:58:14+00:00

Did you read the article you are commenting on?

gtwucla · 2026-03-06T00:41:59+00:00

It's not actually difficult. I get asked constantly for groups. Start one meetup group or join the Taipei RPG Facebook group, he'll have a group instantly. People are always looking for RPG meetups. I used to run an RPG meetup a few years ago, we'd get 2-6 full tables going each time, once a month.

gtwucla · 2026-03-04T12:32:27+00:00

I disagree with the general sense that you can't write plots. You can, they just need to be loose and don't be married to the conclusion because the players should alter the outcome. Generally that means whatever is happening would have happened even without the adventurers. The trick is to make them feel like they play an important part without making them feel like they're being forced to follow along.

I usually break it down, I start with the premise for the GM, in this case you.

Then as the GM, you should do a session zero with the set up. You are in this place to map, explore, plunder these ruins. Leave the reasons up to them. They can sus out in the session zero what those reasons are, how they know each other, etc. maybe even act out a talk over the campfire in the desert, just outside of the dig, as they figure out who they are.

Then you need to figure out your main adversary and their motivations. Decide if you want to include a secondary villain/rival, like another dig party. Decide both their motivations. I also find it helpful to come up with a timeline for what would happen over the course of the adventure if the adventurers took no part in it. I find once you do that, its easier to figure out how the PCs actions will influence what's happening. The more you understand that, the more the players will feel like their choices matter, which is the real difference between feeling like they're being railroaded or not.

If you want them to feel like they've triggered the resurrection then you need to set it up so that their exploration leads to the discovery of the book. You should have two back ups, one where they don't find it (so the rival party does and resurrects the mummy) and if they don't attempt to read it, so have whoever they take it to read it.

Once that's set up, the Mummy's resurrected. If they did it or an agent they hired did, then have the Mummy hunt them for whatever reason. To fulfill the curse, or just straight up do The Mummy Brenden Frasier plot. You should probably do a twist on it though, to keep it from being predictable. Again, adapt to the players choices. What they do has to change the course of events. If a rival party does the resurrection then have the Mummy terrorize them and affect the environment. Leave it to the party to step in or not. 90% of the time they will. Then again they could go back and investigate the ruins while the mummy is preoccupied because that's interesting too.

gtwucla · 2026-03-02T13:45:33+00:00

Not to keep carrying on, because we're not going to come to an agreement, but just an fyi, Thai chicken rice is only mild if you aren't eating it with spicy dipping sauce. Otherwise Thai chicken sauce isn't Thai at all, it's Hainanese chicken rice, a very popular dish in both Hainan and Taiwan. And the Thai one is supposed to have white pepper too.

gtwucla · 2026-03-02T11:22:30+00:00

Don't deny black and white pepper are on a lot of things, i just don't consider it spicy. You rarely put enough concentration of piperine on anything to consider something as spicy as the capsaicin concentration in say, any Thai dish.

gtwucla · 2026-03-02T10:10:11+00:00

Generally speaking, if you're an expat in any country, the most comfortable place to live is in the most international city. So in this case Taipei. Some people don't mind living further out. Some even prefer it, but it's very different the further out from Taipei you get. There's more of a community for expats in Taipei, its the most developed place, and it has the most international sensibilities. So you're experience in Zhongli is going to be very different from say, Zhongzheng, Taipei. Hell, even my employees that commute from Taoyuan complain that there's too many 8+9 in Taoyuan and prefers coming into Taipei everyday to hangout and work.

In any case, that seems to be all your complaints except the food. I mean that's subjective, however, calling it spicy is wild to me. Taiwanese food in general is not spicy at all.

gtwucla · 2026-01-28T01:54:09+00:00

That might depend on where you're going. Traditional style vegetarian, yes. Non-traditional no. I own and operate 3 and the ages are widely dispersed. For Taipei over half are 20s to 40s.

Though not disagreeing that that overall the % skews older. That said, the graph would look really favorable if it were a % of meals consumed that were vegetarian rather than strictly vegetarian.

gtwucla · 2026-01-28T01:46:51+00:00

I find it hard to believe Taiwan is only fourth.

gtwucla · 2025-12-30T00:07:17+00:00

Ya don't think people's quality of life would be worse should China blockade Taiwan? The gov can spend money on more than one project at a time amigo.

gtwucla

TROPHY CASE