The Gaming Den

Kaelik has the gist of PDP. He is a textbook cryptofascist. He's never going to come out swinging for fascism because he is trying to have a career, but when a white nationalist murdered a bunch of Muslims in his name and he decided it might be good optics to do a bit of charity to an appropriate ca...

Man, quoting movie fascists while arguing that the Libertarian world view isn't fascist is a bold and absolutely baffling play. Not really. AC0 has at no point argued in good faith, and the gaggle of utter dipshits here keep trying to get into a reasonable discussion over it. If they're all too fuc...

I do not understand why you have chosen to die on the hill that is healthcare. It is very clear how effective private sector healthcare is at treating the poor, the sick, and the elderly - not very much at all. The poor cannot afford private sector health insurance, until the regulation of pre-exist...

Did I miss a crazy thread? I feel like I missed a crazy thread. Everyone already got to say all the good bits and we've already learned the guy's so far up his own asshole he's defending private sector segregation. Libertarianism is a fascinatingly stupid thing. Once upon a time, someone observed th...

So, politicization came up over in a similar thread on MPSIMS, and I'm just going to carry over something I posted there because it's very relevant. In a South Carolina poll, 38% of Donald Trump supporters in that state believe that the Confederacy should have won the civil war. If that is even remo...

I know pretty much fuck all about therpgsite except for the people who reveal they've wandered in from the place, and as far as I've ever been able to tell they all seem to be subtler forms of Sacrificial Lamb. Is it just openly a fascist cesspit or something? EDIT: I decided to check therpgpundit's...

Which PBTA games are supposed to be good? I'm reasonably confident that Apocalypse World and Dungeon World each see more play individually than the rest combined, so if we're tossing out those two we're left stranded deep in the fucking woods of game design. But why not, let's indulge the train of t...

I do not think Tolkein modelled his orcs after racist African caricatures. You would have a better case arguing that Tolkein modelled dwarves after racist Jewish caricatures, and even then, there is a rather infamous Tolkein letter where he tells a publisher in Nazi Germany to fuck right off - "...

Lord of the Rings is a goddamn tome and doesn't really stop introducing new developments/sub-conflicts at any point, but the opening is just straight up "this is the shire, this is Gandalf, Gandalf visits the shire and figures out that shit may be fucked." It does not dick around getting t...

The standard vehicle by which central banks fight unemployment is by lowering interest rates in the expectation that cheaper credit will entice businesses to take out loans and expand their businesses, creating jobs. This is considered to be potentially inflationary because it increases the effectiv...

So, let me say something seemingly unrelated: it is entirely possible to have a supply-side recession, but the people worried about supply-side recessions today are charlatans who want the government to help them extract wealth from the bottom and redistribute it to the top. It's not a realistic con...

There are three kinds of unemployment; cyclical, structural, and frictional. Cyclical unemployment is when everyone is too poor to buy your boss's stuff so he fires you because he doesn't need your labor. Structural unemployment is when the workforce's aggregate skillset doesn't align with employer'...

About one in six women will self-report being raped. Similarly, dumbass rapists will tell you they've "used forced to coerce a woman into having sex" enough times to amount to about... one in six women being raped. These are both probably underreported. It's amazing but unsurprising how ou...

I tried the same thing for a campaign or two, but it's really just an awkward compromise, isn't it? "I'd like to open the game up to more race/class competitions, but let's not go overboard - some combinations should still be explicitly suboptimal because reasons." It's also an awkward com...

Elf: Super long-lived, but not in a "better than you" way. This is kind of tricky because either it implies they mature super-slowly, which I'm not a fan of - too many "50-year-old toddler" memes- or it implies they're neurologically different from humans, and have a hard time s...

With proper training, you too can surpass almond and become pistachio.

It's less problematic for obvious reasons - mankind doesn't claim to be uniquely valuable among life on planet earth because of the size of their biceps. But ultimately racial ability score bonuses just kinda suck in general, and racism is just another reason to hate them. Why does playing a dwarf r...

I am not particularly concerned about the community culture. I've also never particularly liked getting fbmf involved. It always seemed to me that, at least by the time I showed up, he kept the lights on around here less as a personal hobby and more as a kindness to us. Anything we can solve on our ...

If you want to make a new IP race you can just do that. Call them the "Kremere" and then decide interesting reasons they were made to know upper mathematics at birth. With your own IP you can have interesting histories and backstories and hooks and you can just tell your players those thi...

Yeah, as much as you'd think "these are fantasy Muslims and they're evil" would be a problem, it's not actually that common compared to all the other religious tropes. I suspect it's just the timing of it - the people afraid of Muslims today are the same ones who were afraid of black peopl...

Sometimes fantasy races are just racist caricatures dressed up as Star Trek aliens so you don't recognize them. That's bad. You can kind of sort of fix that by not writing racist caricatures, but also you kind of sort of can't, because people are pattern-matching machines, and your audience is going...

I made my position on that clear. I thought it was pretty shitty to try and take control of what was essentially a public discussion. It's a fundamentally different beast than soliciting input on a TTRPG diplomacy idea you had and not wanting PL to make it a "my version of diplomacy is the best...

There really aren't any special properties to the dieting or exercise process. You eat stuff. Then you burn up a bunch of that stuff by existing. Then you burn up more of that stuff when you exercise. Then your body uses some of that stuff to build more muscle. If at the end of all that you haven't ...

FF15 is an adequate action RPG. You push buttons and things happen and it's all very fast and active and there are meters look at them go up good now press another button yay you're playing a videogame. It's not deep or balanced, but it avoids the pitfall of being something like Darksiders 3 where t...

FF7 has a lot of insane reveals that are of incredibly dubious value to the narrative and/or are exceptionally poorly placed in the broader story and it's wonderful . Like, everything to do with Zack is a hot mess. It's literally just there to have a subplot about how Cloud is a fraud that doesn't a...