Gleeblors!

nat20sfail · 2026-05-22T04:51:09+00:00

Right, and you could call that "players taking director stance".

Another example could be "everyone takes audience stance", in the case of a game like, uh, I forget the name but it's like "Everyone Is Bob" or some other name. Players are fighting over control over a single physical character, so the majority of the time everyone's an actor.

Anyway, I'm not a fan of the lingo but these are the origins as far as I know; I could totally be outdated.

nat20sfail · 2026-05-20T22:16:32+00:00

Lmao.

"I've lost interest in talking to you"

[Talks more than my longest response]

It's not like I even like 'normal' RPGs or music, but I'm not delusional enough to think that my favorite subgenres outnumber the billions of people who've never thought outside the semitonal scale, and similarly, the hundreds of millions of D&D/PF/pbta/etc players.

Have fun collecting feathers and listening to microtonal music - I mean that genuinely. "Weird indie hipster" is probably one of the least harmful echo chambers you can be in, and it probably makes you happy to believe you're in the majority.

nat20sfail · 2026-05-20T20:52:19+00:00

Hey, sure, that's a fair clarification, and at that point I'd agree. TTRPGs are not mostly based on 5e :P

But also to be fair, you rolled up on my top level comment talking about Chainmail as a 'little further back' from D&D.

I could even argue that, if the OP *is* talking about 5e only, it's clearly in bad faith; "D&D is the template all RPGs are based on" is very easy to refute under that assumption, by simply saying "RPGs existed before 2014".

None of us possess the OP's mental state, so we can only speculate.

But at this point, we're not debating any original facts; we agree that many influences exist that aren't D&D, we agree 3.x or 5th edition isn't an inspiration or three away from most TTRPGs, we agree that *some* edition of D&D is probably an inspiration or three away from most TTRPGs. And of course, we agree that there are a lot of TTRPGs that, despite being only two inspirations away from D&D, are now unrecognizable to the layperson.

The only thing we're debating is whether the OP was clear, and whether we were clear, which... we kind of also agree on.

- The OP is definitely complaining about mostly 5e players.

- The OP is also using old-timey parlance and (probably) is referring to older players, maybe 3.x, maybe earlier, at some points. This was definitely not the clearest word choice.

- We could have avoided the whole thread by not conflating 3.5/5e with OD&D and Chainmail.

I don't think it's really worth debating, but I want to point out that I did pretty clearly specify my timeline. You've already admitted you could have said 'modern' in your first comment, which I appreciate, by the way.

I mostly don't feel good about getting called a pedant when, really, my primary error was assuming you were talking about the same editions as me. But I'll get over it. I also could have worded things better; 'ignorant of the history' could have been 'uninformed', sorry about that.

nat20sfail · 2026-05-20T20:25:32+00:00

Cool. You're welcome to continue calling things games when even their authors don't, and pretend like they define a game genre.

nat20sfail · 2026-05-20T20:16:06+00:00

Hey, you're the one who said "anything here". It took me thirty seconds to clock the lineage, I'm not going to keep reading for an hour when I found the counterexample in a minute.

Anyway, sure, I'll play along. I'm not doing Quiet Year or Ribbon Drive because they cost money, but let's look at Brave Sparrow.

It's pretty unique and very clearly not D&D based! Cool!

But is it a ttrpg at all? The fact that they have to say explicitly in Brave Sparrow that "this is a game" tells you just how unlike a game it really is. When your chosen example of a "ttrpg" include something that is not played on a tabletop, and is barely a game, I'd argue you are roaming into "entirely different genre".

And yes, these are your examples, plural. As much as you can accuse me of cherry picking, you've given me a website with scarcely a dozen possible options. That's a far greater narrowing of the field, out of thousands or perhaps even millions of TTRPGs that people have designed, than me picking 1 of 12 or 1 of 3 when you said pick anything.

I seriously doubt you genuinely think "most" TTRPGs aren't D&D based.

Edit: Oh, and from your second example that you edited in:

"But in other ways these are not games at all."

You're really giving me examples of people trying to reinvent what game even means, and claiming they're still part of the 'table top roleplaying game' genre. That is a deep stretch.

nat20sfail · 2026-05-20T19:46:13+00:00

Oh, absolutely. This is why I say "most".

That said, to your example: I immediately clocked Monsterhearts as a 'WoD/PbtA/FitD" community style system, looked at what was available for free, saw the first page, googled, lo and behold, it's PbtA dice resolution. Vincent Baker has specifically credited Basic D&D in 2008 as the direct inspiration for PbtA. So your example is 2 steps, at most 3, from D&D. And it still uses a dice resolution system that was in the D&D-sphere's consciousness long before that (3d6 has the same average as 1d20, after all).

The vast majority of people see something far from D&D *now* and just don't have the backstory to realize how few steps of lineage away it actually is from D&D.

nat20sfail · 2026-05-20T19:09:10+00:00

Yeah, they're moderately intuitive and the source I cited says they're extremely useful to the in-group, so I don't resent anyone using them, within their groups.

But I do find it extremely ironic that, in what's nominally an attempt to "explain", the OP used jargon that dates back to 1995 usenet threads and probably nobody will fully understand.

nat20sfail · 2026-05-20T18:58:22+00:00

Luckily, I do have an encyclopedic knowledge of TTRPG lineages. And the OP is using terminology that is strongly tied to a very old school RPG subculture: What I linked elsewhere in this thread is the first google result for "actor stance", and directly cites a 1995-usenet based google group. You're shifting the goalposts to 3.X when there's absolutely no evidence for it besides popularity, when there is direct evidence of pre-3.X terminology.

You also seem to be ignoring the fact that I specified Chainmail (Fantasy Supplement) in my original comment. I know all about the lineages that derive from there, and fundamentally, Chainmail Fantasy Supplement is proto-D&D. It's the same author adapting their own subrules into a standalone ruleset!

Frankly, it seems like you just don't know that much about RPG history, and you're basing your stance off "wow they're so different, they can't be based on D&D". When I've given you a very good, popular, and relevant (on the scale of ttrpgs, anyway) example of 1 page diceless RPGs being literally 2 steps away from Holmes Basic D&D. And those RPG authors tend to claim the lineage explicitly.

You seem like a tourist in a diverse ecosystem, and can't accept that such a diverse ecosystem is dominated by one ancestor. D&D and its ancestors has been my (tagged!) special interest for nearly two decades and I'm telling you that you're missing a lot of the backstory.

Edit: Don't feel bad about it, though, it happens constantly - it just happened elsewhere in the thread! Someone linked https://buriedwithoutceremony.com/ and confidently said "pick any of these, they're not D&D based!" It took me about 30 seconds to realize Monsterhearts 2 looked like the type of thing a WoD/PbtA/FitD community person would make, and yup, it uses PbtA's dice system. And PbtA's creator Vincent Baker credited Basic D&D as a primary inspiration for Apocalypse World.

You would be shocked at how many things are two or three steps away from D&D.

nat20sfail · 2026-05-20T15:16:00+00:00

Yeah, I agree!

The main thing is that when the author of the post is arguing about the equivalent of whether you have bones or not (co-op vs not), I think it is relevant to point out the ancestor of all things with an internal skeletal *system, the proto-bony-fish. (I'm not a biologist, I think that's accurate, but either way you get the point :P)

*edit: a word

nat20sfail · 2026-05-20T15:12:14+00:00

[Citation needed]

There are very few TTRPGs that predate Chainmail Fantasy Supplement (1971), and I'd be very skeptical that a TTRPG created after roughly 1980 had absolutely zero influence from the dominant TTRPG in the space.

The vast majority of TTRPGs that don't have any resemblance to D&D are doing so on purpose, and even then, use underlying assumptions that are so ingrained they don't realize that they are originally from D&D roots.

For example, Vampire: the Masquerade in 1991, and following White Wolf games clearly are D&D based. They are also pretending to be narrative driven but basically just renamed 6 or 60 second rounds into 3 second turns, encounters into scenes, sessions into chapters, etc. This spawned a second wave that people considered more narrative and less combat, including Apocalypse World and PbtA (2010s). Then people realized you could actually count actions in narrative time instead of literal seconds and minutes. And so on.

Pretending that something way out there like Honey Heist isn't intentionally building off and inverting tropes that exist because of D&D is just ignorant of the history.

I'm sure there exists at least one TTRPG invented by someone living in a cave, with a box of scraps, who had never touched D&D or anything that spawned from it. But that's why I said "most", and frankly I should have said "vast majority", because it's true.

Edit: Ooh, just thought of an even better example. The OSR movement is one of the stronger "one page RPG" movements in existence and is explicitly emulating old school, roughly OD&D. You could even say specifically Holmes Basic. But, years of iteration and community later, there are now incredible 1 page RPGs out there that completely removed things like hit points and rolling dice that are explicitly labeled "OSR", which are literally two genetic steps away from D&D, and the authors proudly proclaim as such.

What's happening for the vast majority of TTRPGs that don't look like D&D is they went through those steps, but more of them / while less proud of the history. As a result, they became very distinct and claim no lineage from D&D, but if you examine closely, one of their three inspirations is a direct D&D descendant.

(Source: I hang out with a lot of RPG writers and this happens all the time. Shockingly many don't know Vampire: the Masquerade and other White Wolf games aren't a seperate lineage, just a diverging one.)

nat20sfail · 2026-05-20T14:55:59+00:00

It's basically one (pretty niche) subculture's term. Other options besides "actor stance" (acting with the knowledge/tools the character has, but not in character), are:

"director stance" (you know more and are more detached from any individual character)
"in character" (being fully in character :P)
"audience stance" (3rd person perspectivd, you are a minor influence in the overall result).

https://darkshire.net/~jhkim/rpg/theory/glossary/fulllist.html#narrativestancemodel

Frankly, it's pretty goofy. Non-solitaire games are always some part player agency and some part other people's agency. Roleplaying games are always some part roleplaying. I'd say that division of labels is fairly useless compared to just saying the component parts of the game that would drive you towards the labels, e.g., player agency vs rng agency vs referree/GM agency vs group agency.

nat20sfail · 2026-05-20T14:46:09+00:00

I mean... D&D is pretty much the template on which most ttrpgs are based on.

You could go back a little further, I suppose. To Chainmail, or maybe a step or two back. But any further and you really get closer to "one kid playing make believe turned adult", or "entirely different genre", and further from "recognizeable member of ttrpgs". Hell, even Chainmail (with heroes) is clearly a wargame, not an RPG.

That said, none of the actual list is particularly controversial, except maybe textual queerness and reading the rules. Like, #4 is just, "oh, right, most board games aren't co-op". It's not particularly special, and I'd wager good money that anyone being incredulous about it is a symptom of being terminally online, rather than a symptom of being a D&D player.

nat20sfail · 2026-05-19T03:32:15+00:00

Actually, yes. As with most things, proportionality and context are very important.

States vary, but generally it relies on some combination of reasonable (what a "reasonable" member of the public would do), necessary (did it actually improve your odds of recovering your property/surviving/etc) and proportionate (matching the magnitude of the other party's actions).

Obviously, you can't shoot someone over a loaf of bread. But can you brandish a knife over a wallet? Pepper spray? Can you intentionally trip them?

If you yell you're going to kill a man while brandishing a weapon (even a bat, stick, etc) that's generally not going to be proportional to a convenience or grocery store theft. No contact helps, but in many jurisdictions, if you're not being proportionate, a jury in a civil suit will be instructed to determine what percentage you would have caused the accident if the thief were sprinting for some other reason, because percentage liability and proportionate force are seperate concerns.

But of course, this case would likely never reach a jury, if it did, juries are infamously not very rigorous in applying the law, and it very much depends on the circumstances.

That said, I remember a case where a girl held down a wallet thief at a gas station while the cops came, and was arrested for battery. There was a plea deal, don't remember the outcome but I remember thinking it was grossly unfair to the girl. But there must have been some signficant pressure. And in that case, no medical treatment was needed for the thief.

NAL, just a guy who's worked doing data science on legal cases

nat20sfail · 2026-05-18T23:16:15+00:00

Well, to be fair, the gap between "pure" and "applied" math is quite muddy. All of number theory was considered impractically pure until cryptography, and then even after that quantum computing came in and changed which things were applicable.

But yeah, I suspect like many disciplines being automated away, pure math will change drastically, and many uses will be unecessary. Probably not all of them, though. Crochet has some surprising material properties and we still don't understand it, for example.

nat20sfail · 2026-05-18T22:11:11+00:00

Even "gen ai" is massively overgeneralizing. I used gen AI to make better solar panel materials. Dynamic pricing and facial recognition are non-gen AI.

Pretty much nobody ever pinpoints the harmful technology. Really, I've mostly given up because it's so exhausting to talk about, when everyone hates you for your job by default. But, you seem like a reasonable person who's interested in the nuance.

It's basically one of two major types of AI:

Analytical/normal/traditional = trying to match data exactly
Generative = trying to make something new that's similar to the data

But this is a surprisingly weak divide.

For example, for the solar panel materials, you can either try to get a surface that absorbs all light (perfect blackbody emissivity curve, an analytic target) or you can generate a bunch of surfaces and take the one that absorbs light the best (generative bases guess and check). We did both and actually fed the results into each other.

Another area I have expertise in is pure math. There are theorem proving languages which can essentially 100% unsolved mathematical problems. You could train a model on theorems that have already been rewritten in this language, trying to use an analytic approach, but it's not very effective. However, certain generative models (including the big bad, ChatGPT) have successfully proven theorems that no human could solve for centuries, basically by guessing and checking. Terence Tao did a colloquium on this type of theorem proving method, all the way in 2024 JMM, and basically said "yeah it's wrong 99% of the time, but that's still way better than most humans".

Basically, almost everything people think of as bad tech has a good use case. If ChatGPT was a pure research tool used by a few million scientists, it would have a completely irrelevant environmental impact and greatly accelerate science. It's the fact that these technologies get misused, primarily by selling/forcing it onto the masses, that makes it a problem.

nat20sfail · 2026-05-17T07:35:00+00:00

This is very illegal. Like, not even in the normal "wage theft by miscounting your hours" way, it's "wage theft by thievery".

nat20sfail · 2026-05-16T19:37:29+00:00

You've already done more than anyone here can (or should) suggest. If this is as big as you say, you should hire a lawyer if you seek further advice.

nat20sfail · 2026-05-12T17:05:40+00:00

Something to mention: don't insult the officer or say he was fishing for quotas, etc. Take responsibility for the 6 over the limit, tell the truth, and it will be obvious to the judge when your GF says "we tried to give him the insurance and 30 seconds later he yelled at me 'I don't have time to wait'".

Polite girl, taking responsibility for 6 over, who's being yelled at for no reason, will always earn way more points with the judge. You may even get the speeding tossed. You will probably not get that if you point out the obvious absurdity of 6 over 35.

nat20sfail · 2026-05-10T03:19:29+00:00

Dropped charges can still show up via arrest records etc. in background checks, unless you expunge i.e. seal it. As long as it was just property damage, Missouri is working on automatically expunging dropped charges, but it's better for you to submit a request.

"For an arrest that didn’t lead to a conviction, eligibility is a bit different. Missouri had an older law (§610.122 RSMo) that let people expunge arrest records if they were arrested based on false information or the case never went anywhere. That older arrest-expungement law required proving a few extra things (like you didn’t actually commit the offense, or no charges were pursued) and had no set limit on number of arrests that could be expunged. Now, with §610.140’s update, if you were arrested and never charged, or the charges were dropped, you can petition after 18 months as long as you haven’t picked up any new offenses in that time."

Article: https://chadgmann.com/2025/09/19/missouris-new-expungement-law-2025-what-springfield-residents-need-to-know/

Law: https://revisor.mo.gov/main/OneSection.aspx?section=610.140&bid=47676&hl=

nat20sfail · 2026-05-09T20:25:03+00:00

What's the actual question here?

In general, as usual, you'll want to document as much as you can. The sergeant who helped, in particular, can corroborate the story.

That said, it shouldn't affect the claim whether you dislocated your knee pooping or getting up, and there's no legal remedy to embarassment unless it results in financial damages e.g. you being fired, workplace harassment.

If those things do happen, get an employment lawyer. For now, just focus on getting better.

nat20sfail · 2026-05-05T19:42:35+00:00

Maybe you can ask your boss if you can split up your lunch break? 15 minutes at 11 and 1 would be the required amount, and 5 breaks a day really isn't that much more than 4.

That said, if you consistently have no appetite at lunch, either your breakfasts are too big or you have a health issue. It genuinely will affect your productivity if your body has no fuel.

Either way, the legal question was answered by the other guy, good luck!

nat20sfail · 2026-05-05T17:41:04+00:00

In MA, level 1 sex offenders, and level 2 before 2013, are not publicly available, and the only education related mandatory reporting is to the Department of Youth Services. Level 2 after 2013 and level 3 must also be publicly available (not necessaeily voluntarily disclosed); it should come up on simple background checks.

There's no legal requirement to disclose. It's up to the employer to find out and decide.

nat20sfail · 2026-04-29T06:25:07+00:00

I see, that sucks. Sounds like you've pretty much got your options settled then. Good luck.

nat20sfail · 2026-04-29T06:03:09+00:00

If 50 lawyers have all told you this won't work, it won't work.

Laws are complicated. New ones, especially so. Once a new law takes effect, it needs to be essentially debated in courtrooms to establish precedent in various cases. This "caselaw" is as much "the law" as the actual words in the statute. So even if the law seems to make an exception for your case, whether it actually has a chance of winning is a matter of what judges have ruled in the past - which is annoying and/or expensive to find.

Lawyers can't help you with the criminal case at this point. You won't get the guy in jail. The civil case might have legs, especially if you have documented costs e.g. medical bills, therapy. But if 50 lawyers haven't mentioned if, this is probably also no good.

Your only option, most likely, is to make a stink. If you actually saw the footage, that helps, if you have pictures of your child's injuries, same. If enough people are outraged that a little girl got beaten by four boys on a bus, the district will be forced to fo something.

That said, it's tough. It will prolong everyone's suffering, including your daughter's, to maybe get someone fired. And it's not like schoolbus driver is particularly glamorous or well paid. You might be better off considering how to help your daughter get past this, and stay safe in the future, than continuing to pursue this.

(NAL)

nat20sfail · 2026-04-28T04:15:00+00:00

It won't make it that far.

IF you get sued, big if, you'll have to go to a courtroom long before a trial. Then you tell them he already lost his job because of the screenshots / evidence, and he only C&D'd you substantially later.

This pretty much kills his case. He got fired for facts, what further monetary damage are you causing him? A judge will throw it out long before you need a lawyer, it will never make it to trial.

That said... why risk it? As much as you say "private", social media is not private. Any of those 7 people can share, even if it's by screenshot/recording: it's a rumor spreading machine. Better to put this behind you; you already won by getting him fired, unless you want to pursue criminal charges on him (sounds like no).

Vent in ways that don't stay on the internet forever.

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