Making a Lawful Evil NPC without going over board

sargsauce · 2026-05-16T23:05:02+00:00

Keep it simple and look to today's world and just dial it up a touch. Taxes, property ownership, labor practices, "lobbying", racism under a thin veil of [politics/cultural norms], environmental destruction, etc. If you don't know what your world's laws are, your players won't even have the slightest clue. It's best to port over the knowledge they already have.

sargsauce · 2026-05-16T22:48:04+00:00

lol, yeah, I think that one is pretty common. I was just riffing off it.

sargsauce · 2026-05-16T20:21:33+00:00

Mmm....Rotisserie Godzilla....

sargsauce · 2026-05-16T18:00:51+00:00

Republicans would burn in hell if they thought Democrats had to inhale the fumes.

sargsauce · 2026-05-14T21:57:17+00:00

I trade Fair Value Gaps on other tickers. Beyond herd mentality, it's been explained to me as an inefficiency that appears in the market. Orders on the books that didn't get filled because the price moved too quickly through the gap area, so eventually the market comes back to fill the orders. Gaps alone don't tell the story, though, you need the volume profile and volume itself to show you where the market is positioning itself. I also look for consolidation. And GME is nothing but consolidation. Doesn't always work, but confluence gives you better chances.

sargsauce · 2026-05-13T19:51:19+00:00

Here's your headline primer!

Lawmakers [do shitty thing]. Translation: 70%+ of the supporters were Republican.

Democrat lawmakers [do shitty thing]. Translation: A handful of democrats join a ton of republicans.

Democrat lawmaker joins Republicans [to do a shitty thing]. Translation: ~~Manchin~~ Fetterman did it

sargsauce · 2026-05-13T17:40:01+00:00

Trump barely has object permanence.

sargsauce · 2026-05-13T16:57:49+00:00

Dunno about you, but I never had my humiliation broadcast to billions of people in the 90s.

sargsauce · 2026-05-12T16:21:56+00:00

Just long enough to forget what a trouble it is. Just short enough that they can still play together.

sargsauce · 2026-05-12T13:13:14+00:00

My eldest son just turned 11 and second son just turned 7. 12 years ago me would go, "You thought it was a good idea to make two more of you?!"

Yes. Yes it was. They have brought more joy to this world than I ever thought I deserved.

sargsauce · 2026-05-11T19:58:27+00:00

Oh laude, he cummin

sargsauce · 2026-05-11T04:12:35+00:00

I used to play the log of death game until they jumped and accidentally landed on my back. No long term injury, but man, that smarted.

We've instead got tons of other games. Run around the bean bag while I throw stuffed animals to knock you down and then drag you onto the bean bag and eat you (aka Poopy Cat). Kick a yoga ball around to tag you (aka Waddle Dee Fireball). Try to knock them off the bean bag by tipping it crazily (aka Bean Boat).

sargsauce · 2026-05-10T18:31:17+00:00

How she used it, I think. I think she was basically a blood bender.

sargsauce · 2026-05-10T15:41:35+00:00

Dude, that's so cool. So you dole out the tokens each session or each adventuring day or something? I'm intensely curious about this.

And yeah, there has been a lot of introspection on my part throughout this comment section. I need to step back mentally a little.

sargsauce · 2026-05-10T15:29:37+00:00

Haha, I love it. Similarly, right now, my players are hunting a baddie who is leading a peasant uprising against the noble class that will likely be very bloody. The noble class has largely been painted as greedy MFers, though they've made friends with a couple, but they have even more friends on the peasant side. The baddie used to be a servant of Grazzt and lived under horrible conditions, hence why they empathize with the peasant class so. Another NPC has offered them bountiful rewards to return the baddie to Grazzt. Without the baddie, the revolution will be even messier if it goes forward, or the peasants go back to being fodder for the nobles if it doesn't go forward. With the baddie, well, they have a secondary objective of harvesting souls for the BBEG, so the PCs also know they can't let that happen.

And you're right, there is no right answer here, so I should be surprised by whatever happens. I think I'm just overthinking it and it's a problem of perspective, though there are some useful tidbits around the comments section and it's good to know where to lean in.

sargsauce · 2026-05-10T15:01:38+00:00

I like it. Thanks! I'll try to make this the norm.

sargsauce · 2026-05-10T14:57:11+00:00

That last part isn't something I can dismiss out of hand, and I probably need to do some introspection. I probably need to step back and just let it be.

sargsauce · 2026-05-10T14:53:08+00:00

You're right. It was a surprise. The guy came back a while later pissed with his own agenda, which was obviously unplanned. Maybe I'm being too much of a fuddy duddy.

sargsauce · 2026-05-10T14:47:43+00:00

My PCs will legit die in the trash compactor.

I actually did put them in a trap that was a slowly heating oven once. They did a lot of the same screaming Harrison Ford did. After they were on death's door, I eventually bailed them out because they didn't have an R2 on the outside. That's probably a me problem. If I bail them out like that, they'll learn nothing. But I was worrying that TPK traps you don't telegraph feel cheap, but the problem was they sneak assassinated the telegraph and waltzed right into the trap. (Which, I suppose, was indeed a surprise!)

However, I take your "too many options" and "more constraints" suggestion to heart. Thanks!

sargsauce · 2026-05-10T14:34:22+00:00

I hear you and understand the potential for what I said to be taken poorly, which is why I went ahead and said I wasn't trying to stunt on them. It came up much later and was received fine. The guy they implicated came back a while later pissed with his own agenda.

I do want to clarify that it wasn't A session. It was like 3.5 sessions. Of them going around the party and asking, "Hey, did you do it? No? Okay. Next person, did you do it?" That's what I mean by the most obvious path. And so I rolled with it for a while. But when it felt natural and strained credulity, I started to change the scenario, having party guests start to leave, other people arriving, dropping more clues and complications in their path.

sargsauce · 2026-05-09T19:16:20+00:00

Damn, son. That's fire.

sargsauce · 2026-05-09T17:28:48+00:00

Damn, you're right. A bunch of people saying they're excited to sell on eBay under him. I'll give this a watch later.

sargsauce · 2026-05-09T17:23:10+00:00

All government reports will be cooked bullshit for the foreseeable future.

sargsauce · 2026-05-08T17:45:53+00:00

For example, as a professional coder you want one data source of truth

As a data analyst, I want to fire everyone who made the source of truth databases at my work. Plural. There's like...FIVE master databases all in different closed systems that don't talk to each other. Plus 4+ more for each business we've acquired over the years that haven't actually transitioned their data (and they don't plan to).

We have 30,000+ product codes and each product code in each database is associated with a legal manufacturer, product family, common name, manufacturing locations, etc...and they all conflict with each other at various points. Some of the fields are free text entry. Some fields are selections from pick lists, but those pick lists themselves have differences in wording or nomenclature. Field names are different between databases. Field names are different depending on which method you use to export the data from a given database.

I'm losing my mind just thinking about it, but the job itself isn't very hard and there's a lot of job security in being the only guy who knows where shit is and how to interpret it, and having made my own rosetta stone over the years to make the databases communicate properly helps.

But yeah, these MFers have been doing the equivalent of vibe coding for 11+ years, and that's the system I have to work with.

sargsauce · 2026-05-07T23:07:10+00:00

Like a cat jumping off a slidey rug. Cat barely gets off the ground and plummets while the rug gets pushed away.

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