You literally can’t parody tabletop RPG mechanics because whatever you come up with, I guarantee you there’s a published game that’s used that mechanic in earnest. Challenge resolution by playing dominoes? That game exists. Hit points as a communal resource? Same game as the previous one, oddly enough. Jenga as a pacing mechanic? Yes, in multiple unrelated genres. Resolving factual disagreements via player dance-offs? Yep. A game where player-versus-player conflict means stabbing your opponent’s character sheet with a knife? Funny you should mention it.

Now I want to know the name of the RPG where every character sheet and monster statblock has a "bodily fluids" section, primarily used to track blood loss and dehydration but sometimes for other things.

The trouble with designing crunchy tabletop RPGs is that the people who want extremely complicated character creation rules and the people who want extremely complicated procedures of play comprise a Venn diagram with only partial overlap, so you keep getting people showing up at your table who put together wonderfully baroque character sheets which they haven't the slightest idea how to effectively play. What we really need to cut that particular Gordian knot is a game whose character creation rules are four hundred pages long and require flowcharts to properly understand, and whose procedures of play fit on an index card.

(And vice versa, of course – the vital distinction being that games with piss-easy character creation and impossibly complex procedures of play are fairly common. It's the other way 'round you don't tend to see!)

Hate to say it but it's GURPS. Picking from the huge ass list of traits and then most of play is "do you have drive?" "yes but only for boats"

GURPS is the kind of game one might plausibly mistake for what I'm talking about, save that GURPS is explicitly – and intentionally! – designed such that the weirder your character is, the more logistically involved they are to play. GURPS is in fact a sinister trap for players who have a tendency to produce wonderfully complicated characters and then realise they have no idea how to play them.

Some of the games that folks in the notes are proposing to meet the criteria described in the initial post really bring home that they're interpreting "the procedures of play" to mean the physical act of rolling and reading the dice and literally nothing else.

GURPS rules don't literally fit on an index card but this is mostly not my experience running GURPS, with the exception of people who want to play casters in campaigns with very open-ended magic rules (e.g. the Powered by GURPS Discworld RPG, or GURPS Monster Hunters though in the latter case it should be noted that characters with holy or psychic powers are not "casters" in the relevant sense). Here's an example of a character bio I wrote for a pregen character intended for a superhero one-shot. The guy who played her had never played GURPS before but played the character just fine:

Dr. R. C. Solomon

Dr. Solomon is a trauma surgeon living in Alameda County. Her track record in that role is remarkable—unbeknownst to her colleagues, this is because she supplements her (admittedly considerable) talents as a doctor with supernatural gifts. Sometimes, at the end of the shift, she’ll slip into the room of a child with cancer to heal them, though she finds curing cancer physically draining—she usually does it sitting in a chair by the patient’s bed, and will “fall asleep in the chair” afterwards.

Oh, and she also has another sideline as a demon-hunter. It’s less exciting than it sounds—mostly rescuing dumb teenagers who got their hands on the wrong magic book. For Solomon, it’s just one more way for her to save lives using her abilities.

Playing Dr. Solomon

Dr. Solomon’s supernatural abilities are most useful for healing and monster-hunting. Her Avenging Angel learned prayer, however, can turn her into a true combat monster—for 3dx3 seconds per adventure. Try to save it for a climactic battle. For lesser fights, Ghost Shirt reduces the probability that a gunshot wound will be fatal, while Flesh Wounds is useful for healing after a fight. 

She has plenty of combat experience, but only killing demons. She won’t kill humans under any circumstances. She’s also committed to never walking away from those in need, which could lead her to getting roped into all kinds of adventures.

link

I should anchor my predictions on the current wave of China protests; I don’t think they are going to “go anywhere”, for a few reasons; one being that so far I have seen minimal desire to really fight hard lines drawn by security forces or anything like that. The protestors aren’t being violently confronted in the main, and they will do things like push through barriers or the like but there is no sense that the state is the ‘enemy’ going on. We wont see Hong Kong style police fights outside of a few flare ups.

Secondly, Zero Covid was/is broadly popular in China. Its hard to grasp that on the outside, but Covid was built up in the imagination as a nightmare disease, citizen buy-in was actually quite large. As individual cities got locked down their charity drained, but most cities in China have not been locked down like that. These protests are about Zero Covid, but there is going to be a substantial portion of the country who opposes these protestors, proud of the Zero Covid achievement. Enough to make things like police defections a non-starter.

Still the CCP has clearly being wavering on Zero Covid, not fully but increasingly unwilling to eat the costs of the policy. Once the protests fade I expect them to be used to internally justify, very quietly, continued easing. I am personally someone who is less negative on the decision-making apparatus of the Chinese state, so this part is the most against-the-grain, but its where the smart money is imo.

yes I agree, also worth noting that many of these are small student protests, and while student protests are obviously very sensitive (!) they are happen all the time, even if every minor campus complaint is invariably hailed as the potential next Tiananmen on CNN.

(and similarly the industrial protests at Foxconn in Zhengzhou are hardly unprecedented).

still, it’s clear that all the state media on covid right now is pushing the line that restrictions are easing (even when they aren’t) and normal life is coming back (even when it isn’t) and not dwelling on the fact that case numbers are higher than they’ve ever been since this whole thing started.

Agreed, student protests are honestly one of those ‘legacy’ flashpoints; they can be effective still but I think their ability to launch revolutions is something of the past, the social role of the university vis a vis the state has changed from its 19th century heyday. And yeah lol ‘easing’ will occur; but what ‘easing’ means is up for debate - but I think it will be increasingly real as China does slowly internalize how badly the last few years have gone for them.

1,000,000 Americans are dead because of COVID, and 15,000 Chinese are. Why shouldn’t they be proud of their achievements? This is a bafflingly slanted way of saying the zero COVID protests are unlikely to do much because zero COVID policies have broad appeal in China, and that they have broad appeal in China because they have proven effective at saving lives.

I am curious if you were aware of the Urumqi fire when you wrote this? (You can also take this question as metonymy for “aware of all the deaths from not-covid caused by China’s lockdowns, but mostly to be taken literally. Not exactly a proud moment for China)

you know those little critical thinking questions that they had at the end of short stories in literature textbooks? we should start putting those in posts. i miss them,,,,,,

questions:

*pins you against a wall* you thought you could just come crawling back to us huh?

[image ID: a monochrome digital drawing of humanized versions of Tumblr and Twitter. Tumblr is an emo girl wearing dark clothing with a side shave hairstyle. She has a kandi bracelet that reads “nov 5”. Twitter is a shorter girl with floppy hair styled after the twitter logo, wearing a large barette of her logo in her hair. Tumblr is leaned over twitter and is holding her chin while pinning her against the wall. End ID.]

(I’m the one crawling back.)

This is a weird post to write right after the result of the Mueller investigation was to say that you were right about Trump and Russia.

We don’t actually have the Mueller report, we have what the Trump administration wants us to believe about the Mueller report.

(As an aside, folks call your Congresscritters to demand the release of the full report.)

But the thing is, actually I was wrong, and the only way you can get the conclusion “Russiagate skeptics were right” is to move the goalposts. Things like Trump Tower Moscow, and the meeting in Trump Tower NYC to get dirt on Clinton, would have shocked me in November 2016. If what would have shocked you two years ago seems like no big deal now, it’s a sign you’ve gotten numb to the stead stream of revelations about Trump.

Maybe I’m not understanding you. Do you think the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities ?

I used to think Trump’s weird friendliness with Putin was purely a matter of Trump’s authoritarianism but now it’s clear he had at least one, probably two ulterior motives.

What do you think those ulterior motives were ?

The now-known-for-certain one is the lucrative real estate deal Trump needed Russian government approval for.

The probable one is that Russia was helping Trump win. Even if Trump didn’t know (and I’m betting he did), members of his campaign team might have pushed him in a more pro-Russia direction because they knew.

This is a weird post to write right after the result of the Mueller investigation was to say that you were right about Trump and Russia.

We don’t actually have the Mueller report, we have what the Trump administration wants us to believe about the Mueller report.

(As an aside, folks call your Congresscritters to demand the release of the full report.)

But the thing is, actually I was wrong, and the only way you can get the conclusion “Russiagate skeptics were right” is to move the goalposts. Things like Trump Tower Moscow, and the meeting in Trump Tower NYC to get dirt on Clinton, would have shocked me in November 2016. If what would have shocked you two years ago seems like no big deal now, it’s a sign you’ve gotten numb to the stead stream of revelations about Trump.

Maybe I’m not understanding you. Do you think the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities ?

I used to think Trump’s weird friendliness with Putin was purely a matter of Trump’s authoritarianism but now it’s clear he had at least one, probably two ulterior motives.

This is a weird post to write right after the result of the Mueller investigation was to say that you were right about Trump and Russia.

We don’t actually have the Mueller report, we have what the Trump administration wants us to believe about the Mueller report.

(As an aside, folks call your Congresscritters to demand the release of the full report.)

But the thing is, actually I was wrong, and the only way you can get the conclusion “Russiagate skeptics were right” is to move the goalposts. Things like Trump Tower Moscow, and the meeting in Trump Tower NYC to get dirt on Clinton, would have shocked me in November 2016. If what would have shocked you two years ago seems like no big deal now, it’s a sign you’ve gotten numb to the stead stream of revelations about Trump.

I’ve seen John Hickenlooper getting mocked for declining to answer the question of whether he considers himself a capitalist, saying he didn’t want to talk about labels.  I think this response was basically correct, though.

The right has spent decades calling anything to the left of Hayek as socialism.  This has both confused a lot of people and caused a bunch of liberals to take a “re-claim the slur approach.”

In US politics right now, it is not informative to hear whether someone calls themselves a socialist or a capitalist.  We don’t have any Jeremy Corbyns anywhere near positions of power.  Bernie Sanders and AOC call themselves Democratic Socialists, while Elizabeth Warren acknowledges that she is a capitalist.  None of them believe in nationalizing all industry, centralized planning, or the abolition of private property.  All of them believe in a strong welfare state, wealth redistribution, and labor protections and workplace and financial regulation.  

I would really like to see a prominent Democrat go on TV and say: “’Am I a capitalist or a socialist’ is a stupid question.  I believe in both a market economy and a strong welfare state with protections for the little guy against massive corporations.  If Republicans are against that, let them say so openly.”

I reblogged this and then realized AOC might believe in centralized planning? She invokes WWII as a model of what the Green New Deal would be like but it is unclear to me whether she actually understands what the wartime economy of WWII entailed.

Just sayin

What’s happened in Flint is a crime against humanity.

The water in Flint has been at safe levels of lead for some time, according to the scientist who first drew attention to the problem.  (And who is now being made a pariah by people who care more about scoring political points than about what the truth is.)

https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/01/marc-edwards-is-a-sad-microcosm-of-our-modern-political-era/

Holy shit I am seriously annoyed that this is the first time I am hearing about this.

Full Metal Jacket is ostensiably an anti-war movie, yet Marines love the boot camp sequence

Apocalypse Now is an anti-war movie, yet the Helicopter assault scene is a hit with the military

Truffaut was right

Getting sincere support from those who like what you’re criticizing is the only way to be sure that what you’re criticizing, as depicted in your criticism, actually exists outside of your own head.

Content creator: depicts people he doesn’t like, doing things he doesn’t approve of

People he doesn’t like: *love it*

Content creator:

Filmmakers - Accurately portray putting normal people in horrible situations such as war leading to horrible behavior.

People who have firsthand knowledge that this portrayal is accurate - “This is excellent.”

Tumblr idiots who are constantly trying to divide the world into the intrinsically good people and intrinsically bad people – “But, but… how can the bad people appreciate being portrayed as bad?”

The issue isn’t generically liking an anti-war movie but thinking “oh totally badass”. For example, the infamous helicopter scene in Apocalypse Now, where the massacre of a Vietnamese village is set to the tune of Ride of the Valkyries.

Though this may be less an issue of “it’s impossible to make an anti-war movie” than “don’t set a massacre to Ride of the fucking Valkyries”. Like I totally see what Francis Ford Coppola was trying to do with that scene but I think some mistakes were made.