Having a great and not at all stressful time.

It makes me happy when they listen

So here’s how laws work in the US. The federal government can’t tell the states what to make their drinking age but they can tell the states that if they don’t make the drinking age 21 then they’ll take away all of their money for highways. So the federal drinking age is not 21 but the drinking age is 21 in all 50 states. But not the territories. Because they follow different rules.

The federal government can tell the states to make marijuana illegal however but the states in return can say “lol no” and for the most part the federal government just can’t be assed to enforce this so a bunch of states have made recreational marijuana legal in varying capacities. But the businesses that sell weed can’t use federally backed banks because what they’re doing is still illegal even though it’s legal and that’s why the IRS has regulations for taxing illegal businesses.

Lesbian sex was invented as a way to pass the time on long train rides

Common misconception! It's the other way around: trains were invented as a means to meet other lesbians to have sex with

It's a real chicken or the egg situation, which came first: the lesbian sex or the train they are inside of

i'm fairly certain the lesbians came several times before the train did.

I think a lot of folks in indie RPG spaces misunderstand what's going on when people who've only ever played Dungeons & Dragons claim that indie RPGs are categorically "too complicated". Yes, it's sometimes the case that they're making the unjustified assumption that all games are as complicated as Dungeons & Dragons and shying away from the possibility of having to brave a steep learning cure a second time, but that's not the whole picture.

A big part of it is that there's a substantial chunk of the D&D fandom – not a majority by any means, but certainly a very significant minority – who are into D&D because they like its vibes or they enjoy its default setting or whatever, but they have no interest in actually playing the kind of game that D&D is... so they don't.

Oh, they'll show up at your table, and if you're very lucky they might even provide their own character sheet (though whether it adheres to the character creation guidelines is anyone's guess!), but their actual engagement with the process of play consists of dicking around until the GM tells them to roll some dice, then reporting what number they rolled and letting the GM figure out what that means.

Basically, they're putting the GM in the position of acting as their personal assistant, onto whom they can offload any parts of the process of play that they're not interested in – and for some players, that's essentially everything except the physical act of rolling the dice, made possible by the fact most of D&D's mechanics are either GM-facing or amenable to being treated as such.*

Now, let's take this player and present them with a game whose design is informed by a culture of play where mechanics are strongly player facing, often to the extent that the GM doesn't need to familiarise themselves with the players' character sheets and never rolls any dice, and... well, you can see where the wires get crossed, right?

And the worst part is that it's not these players' fault – not really. Heck, it's not even a problem with D&D as a system. The problem is D&D's marketing-decreed position as a universal entry-level game means that neither the text nor the culture of play are ever allowed to admit that it might be a bad fit for any player, so total disengagement from the processes of play has to be framed as a personal preference and not a sign of basic incompatibility between the kind of game a player wants to be playing and the kind of game they're actually playing.

(Of course, from the GM's perspective, having even one player who expects you to do all the work represents a huge increase to the GM's workload, let alone a whole group full of them – but we can't admit that, either, so we're left with a culture of play whose received wisdom holds that it's just normal for GMs to be constantly riding the ragged edge of creative burnout. Fun!)

* Which, to be clear, is not a flaw in itself; a rules-heavy game ideally needs a mechanism for introducing its processes of play gradually.

The point is, as a game designer, you are never going to win over the all-indie-games-are-too-complicated crowd by explaining how simple your player-facing rules are and how seamlessly they support the narrative, because their experience of playing Dungeons & Dragons is that they can simply opt out of engaging with any player-facing part of the game they don't care for, up to and including opting out of everything and making the GM do all the work, and they're coming from a culture of play which has a vested interest in treating this as a valid preference. It doesn't matter how light your rules are, you're not going to beat an expected level of engagement of zero!

Me on a friday night

“The power’s out because what.”

Makes sense, that area’s made for boning

"Well, we got a television set three weeks ago. Haven't done a tap of housework since." (1953)

The September 2013 issue of National Geographic Magazine published these maps showing the world as it is now, but with all the ice on land melted and drained into the sea, raising it 216 feet and creating new shorelines for our continents and inland seas.

by NatGeoMaps

I used to do this as a kid (on paper) and we had a cat that would watch you draw the body shape like

:-/

But then as soon as you added the WINGS the cat would go

:O

"The Large One has cast the Spell Of Create Bug"