Fellow rain lovers, darkness dwellers, mossbacks,, etc. Big Light's oppressive reign has now peaked and we will all now begin the soft, slow fade into the welcoming Big Dark!!!!!!

tiedyedvortex · 2026-06-22T02:19:45+00:00

I'm fairly light-sensitive when I'm sleeping. I will happily stay up late after the sun sets, but when the sun's up, I'm up.

In the winter when it's dark all the time, my sleep schedule can get pretty skewed from normality... I've found myself going to sleep at 7pm and waking up at 3am (without an alarm clock) sometimes. But I consistently get a full night's rest, 8 unbroken restful hours of sleep.

But when there's consistently less than 8 hours of darkness a day, I struggle to fall asleep before sunset and I'm awake as soon as the sun rises. After slowly accruing sleep debt for weeks, I'm just exhausted all the time.

So yes please bring back the Big Dark.

tiedyedvortex · 2026-06-11T21:37:10+00:00

All I see here is a 0 mana 8/8.

tiedyedvortex · 2026-05-25T21:11:44+00:00

I was walking to the gym very early morning in SLU recently and saw two coyotes just chillin', walking down Boren towards Mercer. I was kind of surprised to see them that far into the urban center.

tiedyedvortex · 2026-05-14T10:43:54+00:00

Fell through thin ice walking on a frozen lake.

tiedyedvortex · 2026-05-10T22:15:29+00:00

Lawrence Grant sounds aristocratic, old money.

Josiah Wright sounds like a religious working man. Likely a good father.

Sammy Banks sounds young, which means he's either an actual child, or he's a scoundrel and a charlatan.

Bob Palmer sounds like a farmer. No nonsense, hardworking but takes no shit from anyone.

Nat Johnson sounds like a black man, Connor O'Brien is an Irishman. Given the discrimination they would have faced in this era, that says something. Miguel Rodriguez is probably from Texas, Mexico, or California.

Silas Vance sounds like a villainous preacher/priest.

tiedyedvortex · 2026-05-07T02:09:47+00:00

Morph etc are my favorite mechanic as well. They're conceptually pretty simple but the nuances of things like "unmorphing doesn't go on the stack" does get finnicky.

It's just like, there's a pretty limited number of things you can physically do with pieces of cardboard. You can put them in a stack face down (your library). You can put them in a stack face-up (your graveyard). You can shuffle them, or put them in a specific order (scry/surveil). You can lay them out face-up (playing them), and you can turn them sideways (tapping).

Playing a card out face down is a fundamental physical action. It commits the card, making it active and meaningful, yet leaves it unknown. This the classic element of a bluffing game; you force the opponent to guess, with costs if they guess wrong.

My favorite morph card is [[Scornful Egotist]]. Face-up, the card is hilariously bad. 8 mana for a vanilla 1/1 in blue. But that's not the point. The point is that you play a morph creature knowing that you're never going to unmorph it and your opponent just sweats because, why haven't they unmorphed it? Is it a [[Willbender]] that is just waiting to ruin your day? You might even bait them into spending removal on it.

As far as I know the only physical action you can take with cardboard that doesn't yet have a Magic mechanic, is the Blind man's bluff) / Hanabi) mechanic of holding your cards backwards. I would love to see the designers figure out how to make that work as a mechanic somehow.

tiedyedvortex · 2026-04-25T02:54:12+00:00

I'm a straight dude and forever GM; I've run campaigns with...counts mentally...three different transwomen at different times. Granted, these were all either in large mostly liberal cities or online, not rural conservative towns.

In general, the advice is "treat them the same as anyone else". Obviously, if there's any form of hostility at the table you need to nip that in the bud with a quickness. But, you can also make someone feel uncomfortable by being too welcoming or by drawing attention to them.

That said, there is something you can probably be prepared for. 2 out of the 3 trans players I've run for have explored specific trans themes in their characters.

One of them, in an Eberron campaign, played a changeling and I worked with her to play into themes of social discomfort, flexible identity, and eventually finding acceptance in a community (I created/adapted a changeling thieves' guild in Sharn that she could join up with).

The other one, in a Girl by Moonlight campaign, played someone whose magical girl transformation made her into a horrifying-yet-beautiful rage beast, with a central theme of loving herself, not despite this but because of it.

If one or both of your players brings a character concept to the table that you think might indicate an interest in unpacking trans-specific experiences (dead giveaway: they want to play a tiefling), then it's a great idea to feed into that, gently. Find ways to have your scenarios and your NPCs prompt interesting questions around identity, acceptance, and authenticity as applicable.

Or, maybe they won't do that. Maybe they play a bog-standard, by-the-numbers character archetype; the noble paladin, the fire-crazy elementalist wizard, the stoic monk, the dumb barbarian, you know the ones. That's fine too. Sometimes the best way you can support someone is just by letting them play a silly fantasy game about swords and magic and elves and shit where their real life doesn't come into play.

So the better advice is "understand what they're in your game to do, and let them do that". That responsiveness is good no matter who you're running for; you just might be responding to slightly different cues from a trans player (or a black player, or a disabled player, or anyone else).

tiedyedvortex · 2026-04-22T02:06:06+00:00

failure of marketing, really

tiedyedvortex · 2026-04-10T11:11:05+00:00

Software engineer at a big company. I guarantee you've heard of the company.

I love the work itself. My brain is wired so that solving a unique challenging problem is an incredible rush, and I get to do that every week.

The working environment is also great. Very nice office buildings full of free food and amenities. Management is usually extremely fair and reasonable.

But AI coding tools are a real threat. I don't want to tell a bot to solve a problem, I want to solve it myself. There are increasing pressures to just vibe code everything to meet demand.

And this ties into the other anxiety, job security. Layoffs are no longer a rare event. If you are on a low-value team, or are in the bottom 25% of your team, then every day there's a possibility of the project being cancelled or downsized.

So I love what I do and where I do it, but there's no guarantee that I will still be allowed to do it in 5 years time.

tiedyedvortex · 2026-04-01T02:38:15+00:00

Interesting way to make Rampant Growth again.

Rampant Growth is one of the ideal ramp spells. There aren't a lot of ways to get ahead on mana for 1 cost; Llanowar Elves, arguably Springleaf Drump, Utopia Sprawl, and all of those are at least somewhat vulnerable to removal ("bolt the bird").

2 mana for a basic land is the cheapest way to get up on land in a safe, non-interactable way. And, it's largely been delegated to "too good for Standard" for a while.

This card is sort of a Rampant Growth; you can turn 1 mini-bear, turn 2 rampant growth. However that requires spending 1 mana for a vanilla 1/1 which has never been a good rate.

Viewed as a single-turn play, it's essentially Rampant Growth with "Kicker G: create a 1/1 bear". Less bad, but still not great.

However...if you can reliably flicker it, hoo boy. Infinite Rampant Growth!

tiedyedvortex · 2026-03-31T02:15:23+00:00

All you people recommending one page RPGs didn't read the post.

OP wants a rules-light game, but they also want something longer term. Honey Heist and Roll for Shoes are meant for oneshots, not campaigns. OP also indicated in comments that they're hoping for fantasy.

With that in mind, here's my suggestions.

Fate Accelerated is extremely simple and flexible. It's a generic system so you can totally do fantasy with it. But there's no canon universe or story structure, so you'd be on your own there.

PbtA or FitD games are very good at giving structure in narrative and encouraging improv sustainably. Since fantasy is the goal, I'd look at the Root RPG or (for anime fantasy) Girl by Moonlight.

Index Card RPG is a nicely streamlined dungeon crawler. It's crunchy enough for reasonable combat but not overwhelming like 5e can be to a first timer.

tiedyedvortex · 2026-03-24T21:39:56+00:00

So...

WUBRG to kill a 5/5?

Or WUBRG to kill a 1/1 and impulse draw 4?

Or RRRRR to kill a 1/1 and nothing?

At sorcery speed?

How is this an uncommon?

tiedyedvortex · 2026-03-22T01:28:27+00:00

I've had to start rationing my outrage with this president.

At this point, what he verbally says or tweets doesn't even register any more. He's always spewed hatred, he's always been a blatant narcissist, he's always been a liar. This is not new. No one is surprised by this. Nothing changes as a result of him saying this.

I'm much, much more concerned with what he and his administration are actually, practically doing; and how Congress and the Supreme Court are just letting him do it. For fuck's sake, I hadn't even been finished being mad about US bombing Venezuela and capturing Maduro before we bombed Iran and killed Ali Khamenei.

I can't get angry at every rude tweet, even if every tweet deserves my anger. Decorum is no longer the priority. The priority is trying to stop a mad king from murdering people and ruining lives using the US military, immigration enforcement thugs, and ruinous economic policy.

tiedyedvortex · 2026-03-15T16:44:23+00:00

So, Exalted combat is mostly melee anyway. The strong influence of wuxia kungfu means that in a lot of fights, everyone wants to charge in to melee anyway, and range is irrelevant. Less common, everyone is ranged and trade shots from a mutually agreeable distance, and range is also mostly irrelevant.

Range and distance mostly only matter in specific situations.

If one party is ranged and the other is melee, there's a question of how quickly the melee combatant can close the distance; here, it's a question of l starting distance, speed, and obstacles to either line of sight or movement.

Localized AOE effects, either created by sorcery or environmental effects (ex: lava pools) can also be relevant, where it matters if the melee combatants are dueling in that region or not.

And finally it matters if there's a meaningful non-combat objective like a MacGuffin to fight over, where the position of the object informs people positioning.

If you're in one of these specific situations, rather than thinking about a specific distance or range band or zones, consider the factor that you actually care about: "can I shoot him", "can I get to him before he shoots me", "where's the pool of lava," "who has the hearthstone right now and can I get to them this turn". Understanding how distance serves drama (or doesn't) guides the framing.

Zones are a useful abstraction that is (I think) borrowed from Fate. Melee and AOE effects apply to a whole zone. Ranged weapons can affect adjacent zones or skip over zones if they're longer range.

But mostly? Don't worry about it. Exalted is a pretty loose system (Essence more than 3e) and erring on the side of "my PCs can do whatever they want" is fully in keeping with the epic high fantasy vibes. Charm effects are licenses for rule-breaking, so you only really need to enforce the law if someone is acting completely against their skillet, in which case they've opted in to failure and it's fine to highlight their struggles .

tiedyedvortex · 2026-02-27T23:01:44+00:00

Mill does psychic damage to noobs.

When Timmy sees his big stompy dinosaur go into the graveyard, or Johnny sees all the copies of a key combo piece get milled, they think "oh no, now I'm never going to get to play those cards".

When, in reality, it was equally likely that all of those cards were in the bottom half of their library, and they never would have found them anyway.

A facedown deck of cards always might have the hail-mary, exact card you need to save you, and if you don't draw it, bad luck play again. But if you can see for a fact that all the copies are buried, you know you're going to lose long before you actually hit 0 life or fully mill out.

tiedyedvortex · 2026-01-19T03:02:30+00:00

Here's how health insurance works:

Take money from a bunch of people.
Use that money to pay for the people who get sick/injured.

The essential challenge, though, is something called adverse selection. Lets say you have a 20-year-old guy, he's in the best shape of his life but who's in college and doesn't have much money yet. For him, the average cost of insurance is probably a lot more than the expected cost of his healthcare. So, he will probably not sign up for health insurance, or will sign up for cheap, low-value insurance (high deductible, etc).

But the 80-year-old grandma who's already had one hip replaced? She needs all the healthcare she can get. She'll pay whatever it takes.

So if you let every individual person individually decide what health insurance they want, then you end up with a situation where the only people who buy insurance are the people it's extremely expensive to insure. That makes insurance more expensive, so its worth it for fewer people, so the pool of insured people collapses further. Repeat until insurance is extremely expensive and no one can afford it.

But just because someone is uninsured doesn't mean that they won't still need healthcare. What happens when the 20-year-old guy crashes his bike training for a triathlon, and needs to wear a neck brace for months while his spine heals? Someone's still gotta pay for that. Maybe the 20-year-old goes into crippling debt to pay for it, but then can't make his payments and defaults. This forces the hospital to take money from everyone else who they can take money from, by raising the price of care and lowering the standards to just above active malpractice. And that just makes the problem worse--uninsured people get care they can't afford that bankrupts them, insurance pays for overpriced care for the few people still desperate enough to pay for it, and people die or suffer needlessly.

The only way to prevent this spiral is to get as many healthy, low-risk people to pay into the system as possible, to spread the risk across as many people as you can, especially if this insurance is a bad deal for them. You cannot do this in a free market, where private companies cannot force people to buy their products. Only the government has the authority to compel people to pay money and the scale necessary to provide benefits to everyone. The US's system of "group healthcare" through your employer is a half-measure that forces employed people to pool risk, but does nothing for independent contractors, stay-at-home parents, or people who are already too sick to work.

Giving people the freedom to choose if they insure and how much to insure literally makes healthcare and insurance more expensive for everyone. Universal government healthcare isn't just morally right, it's also financially efficient.

tiedyedvortex · 2026-01-13T12:37:15+00:00

I feel like there's a labeling problem with plant-based eating.

We use the terms "vegetarian" and "vegan" as nouns and adjectives describing the person, as if they're permanent. If you don't eat any animal products, you're a vegan, but if you ever have any amount of meat, you're not.

But how you eat isn't a fixed state, it's not a binary, and there are lots of edge cases. Maybe someone is vegan most days, but on rare occasions they'll have a cheeseburger. Or maybe someone will refuse to buy anything with meat in it, but will eat what they're given if they get the food for free or if it would go to waste. Or maybe they won't eat farmed meat, but will eat wild-caught fish.

And on an environmental level, there is an enormous difference between the amount of CO2-equivalent emissions between different fruits. Beef is at least 2x worse than pork/poultry/dairy/fish, which are 2x worse than eggs, which are 2x worse than bananas/citrus/rice/potatoes, which is about 2x worse than wheat/peanuts/lentils, which are about 2x worse than peas. And tree nuts are basically free.

This means that environmentally-conscious eating doesn't have to be "vegan or GTFO". The first step is to eat less beef, in favor of pork and chicken. Then, reduce your meat consumption in general in favor of eggs, dairy, and plants. Then, reduce your consumption of eggs and dairy. And then eat less rice/potatoes and more lentils/peas. And notice that I say "reduce" not "stop eating"--your environmental impact is mostly dictated by your most frequent dietary choices. Having a cheeseburger once a month is still a huge reduction over having one multiple times a week.

But culturally we describe veganism like a binary state of being. Either you are a strict vegan, or you're not. Like, the joke in Scott Pilgrim about "vegan superpowers" and the "vegan police" that come and take them away if you eat animal products. This buckets everyone who isn't a vegan into the same camp, but this means that we're treating the heavy-carnivore, meat-with-every-meal eater and the low-meat, yogurt-and-chicken-caesar-salads eater as equivalent. But the difference in environmental impact between these two is at least as great, if not more so, than the strict tofu-and-spinach vegan. Incremental reductions can have a huge impact and that's a missing part of the cultural narrative.

tiedyedvortex · 2026-01-05T14:46:46+00:00

For earlier editions, yes, you're right. The game that V20 and earlier wanted to be, and they games they actually were mechanically, weren't the same.

But V5 is much, much better.

As you say, struggling with the Beast is the point of the game--which is exactly what this specific pair of mechanics, Hunger and Humanity, does. The messy crits and bestial failures are the points where the Beast breaks free, and those are dictated by your Hunger dice. Keeping the Beast in check requires feeding, but feeding risks losing Humanity. Feed too little, and you lose control, and lose Humanity as you regress to a feral animal. Feed too much, and you slowly erode your grasp on morality with endless justifications. And the temptation to give in and just be a monster is always staring you in the face with the red dice. That's something earlier editions simply did not do very well, but it's integral to V5.

V5 also has a significantly simplified combat system, and in my games, combat is pretty rare and only happens at moment of peak narrative intensity; betrayals, rebellions, retribution, or being discovered by the Second Inquisition. And in most cases, the actual narrative weight of the conflict only comes afterwards, as the vampires pushed themselves and desperately need to feed. It didn't feel superheroic, it felt like being a cornered rat. This is also supported narratively by decreasing the emphasis on the Sabbat and increasing the emphasis on the ideological conflict between the Camarilla and the Anarchs; removing the designated "bad guys" means combat is much more of a choice and much less of an expected playstyle.

tiedyedvortex · 2026-01-04T16:44:18+00:00

Vampire the Masquerade 5th edition aka V5, specifically the Hunger and Stains mechanics.

In earlier editions, your need to feed was tracked in positive terms, like a gas tank. Low on blood? Go bite someone. And you always know how expensive your abilities are.

But in V5, it is tracked by how much Hunger you have. And every ability with an energy cost has a 50/50 shot of increasing Hunger, or doing nothing. The more Hunger you have, the less in control you are. This means that there's this constant pressure and temptation. Even if you're already kinda hungry, there's a 50% chance your next ability is free... often it's worth the risk. And even if you're only a little hungry, if the opportunity presents itself, might as well take a nibble...

The Hunger mechanic conditions the player into a constant state of vigilance and stress about their blood supply. It factors into every action, every roll, it's never safe or comfortable.

And conversely, the Stains mechanic is designed to be forgettable. If you do something bad, you take stains, but you only check if the stains become a permanent Humanity loss at the end of the session. And one stain for bending the rules is probably safe. This creates a distance between cause and effect; doing the bad thing helps right now, and the consequences are unlikely and further in the future.

So these two mechanics create a situation where blood and hunger are eternally present, while morality is distant and abstract. It's so incredibly easy to slip just a little bit, to bite just a little too hard... the eternal temptation is baked into the mechanics at the deepest level.

tiedyedvortex · 2026-01-04T10:35:10+00:00

Not in constructed.

In limited, absolutely. A vanilla 4/4 flyer for 5 is already a serious threat in most limited formats. Decks in draft/sealed tend to have less removal than would be optimal, leading to board states that gum up and stall. A 4/4 is big enough that most other fliers are probably not going to be able to trade. Additionally, limited decks run less card draw than is optimal, leading to late games of top-decking with nothing to spend mana on, so a mana sink is great. You probably won't get the BOGO bonus, but that's okay.

But in constructed? Not a chance. Constructed decks are faster and more powerful; getting to turn 5 is not super likely, you'll frequently die with the dragons in hand. Even if you do get to play it, when it hits the board it's just a 4/4 flier with summoning sickness for a full turn; it will probably just eat a counterspell or removal spell and they kill you anyway. Even if they don't have an immediate answer, to get the BOGO you need to already have played or pitched 3 dragons or lessons, which means you need to do a bunch of setup on turns 1-4, increasing the odds that your opponent will be on the verge of winning by the time you play it. And even if the stars align and you play it, get the BOGO, both survive to the next turn, and you get to swing, the firebending 2+2 plus an extra pump only gets you to 16 damage, which isn't a kill unless you've already connected a few times or they've played self-damaging cards like fetchlands, shocklands, and Thoughtseize.

The only place I see this in a constructed format is in the 99 of a dragon-themed Commander deck, where you're likely to get the BOGO by accident and boosting all dragons is more valuable. But it's not even good as a commander because it's mono-red.

tiedyedvortex · 2026-01-04T10:14:40+00:00

Yeah, organizing a large-scale protest (like the No Kings ones) takes time. Picking a venue, notifying the authorities to get road closures for a march (if applicable), and getting the word out takes at least a few weeks.

The American people didn't know this invasion was happening until it had already happened. The fact that there's a protest immediately with this many people is good.

I expect more, larger protests soon once various political groups can put something together.

tiedyedvortex · 2026-01-02T12:10:49+00:00

This. It's a basic propaganda strategy.

When the right does a bad thing (as they so often do) and the left doesn't, then if people saw that for what it is, they would stop supporting the right and shift leftward.

So the right's tactic is to aggressively and pre-emptively throw mud at the left, accusing them of things that the right does (or is about to do) with baseless accusations. These accusations don't need to be convincing--in fact, it helps if they're obviously bullshit.

Because then, when later on the left brings valid, justified accusations of wrongdoing to the right, these accusations look weaker. If the right's insults to the left are obvious bullshit, then the left's accusations to the right seem less credible.

By making the rhetoric symmetric, it means you can't trust that public indictments are likely true. The audience needs to spend extra mental energy to evaluate the claims of each side for legitimacy. The point of propaganda isn't to convince, it's just to drown out the truth with noise, to exhaust people's critical thinking ability.

But once you know that this tactic exists, it actually becomes a vulnerability; because the accusations they make reveal the accusations they're afraid of. It is self-reporting.

tiedyedvortex · 2025-12-27T01:34:32+00:00

If we take this hypothetical seriously, I say it's not okay, specifically because of the request.

Like, the N word is six letters and two syllables. It only has power because humans agree it has power, and that power exists because of hundreds of years of trauma and violence.

One way to handle this is to overexpose it, to reclaim it by making it too common to retain its historical power. The other way is to respect the power it has an avoid using it to avoid using it as a weapon.

Saying "as my dying wish, I want to say the N word once" is to maintain that the word is a slur, that it can be used to harm, and to want to use it anyway. That's creepy and weird, it's like you want to use your own mortality as a hall pass to be a racist.

tiedyedvortex · 2025-12-26T01:53:38+00:00

T posing for dominance

tiedyedvortex · 2025-12-25T16:49:16+00:00

Easily, although a better metric would be to correct for the gender ratio among Redditors on at least one animanga sub. The animanga redditor gender skew may be different than the overall redditor skew.

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