A lot of kids were taught to read badly. There’s this whole “whole word” and “cuing theory” approach to reading that doesn’t work very well. https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/

Apparently 65% of fourth graders aren’t proficient at reading (as of the linked source from 2022)

A good Christian would let people stay in their house, though. If they were robbed, they would still have treasure in heaven.

More Christians faith is paper thin at best.

I don’t buy eggs, so not directly.

I think there can be some intra-group tension when half the group is going for “how can we win this fight cleanly with minimal resources spent?” and half is going for “what would my character do? What would be dramatic?”

It’s something to clear up in session 0, I think.

My personal fantasy right now is being part of a highly skilled and competent team. I’m tired of always being the three stooges.

Also bad: when part of the group wants to play for clean victory, and part of the group does but it really bad at it.

I think people have radically different ideas about what “minimal background information” is.

Some people think the Silmarillion is a suitable primer for their setting.

Some people have like one paragraph for the big picture, and one paragraph for each major faction.

There are players that would say both is too much.

I think a couple short paragraphs should be enough for a quick start for a custom setting, but I’ve had players that just refuse to read anything at all. As someone else said, it’s makes it really hard to do some sort of stories if all the players are utter neophytes/amnesiacs/from-another-world/etc

I tried to do a game of Vampire once, but the players refused to read anything about the setting. All the political intrigue fell completely flat because they didn’t understand what the different factions were looking for, nor did they understand how vampires worked.

That group might have just been kind of bad players, but I feel like bad players are more common than good. By “bad” I mean “doesn’t think about the game very much, doesn’t retain anything about the story or rules”. They couldn’t really do anything more complex than a simple dungeon crawl.

It’s a little hard to square “steam is over charging for games” with “look at all these games I bought for 80% off ($5) off”, but I guess there’s more to it.

I sincerely think that someone parked in the bike lane (or fire lane or other places you’re not supposed to park for safety) should forfeit the protection of law. While your car is there, anyone inconvenienced by it should be allowed to just do whatever.

People are like “well I was just there for a minute!” and I’m like it takes less than a minute for a cyclist to swerve around the ill-placed car, get hit by some other car, and die, so that doesn’t seem convincing.

I just don’t care that you need your car to be there for personal convenience. Deal with it instead of making it everyone else’s problem.

I haven’t played Pathfinder 2e but my understanding is it had a lot more choices at the turn level and character build level. that’s good if you want that, but I think for a lot of people the shallowness of 5e is a plus. There are other games that would also be a good fit if you’re not looking for deep tactics or builds, though.

Some people never really learned DND either, but kind of get carried along by the group. I feel like you could switch out systems on those people and they wouldn’t do any worse.

But I get it. Some people are more casual. Some people have executive dysfunction. My current strategy is to find people who want to play what I want to play, and it’s working okay. Still makes me a little sad that DND is so mega popular, but okay.

I think it’s an error to treat “I play DND” the same as “I play RPGs”. It’s like “I play baseball” vs “I play sports”.

There are too many reasons to succinctly list why people might be sticking to DND.

In my experience, you’ll have better luck finding players who want to play something else rather than trying to convert DND players.

Well, I wasn’t having much fun with DND.

There are degrees of fun.

But those bots don’t have any intersection with my network, so their trust score is low.

If they do connect via one of my idiot friends, that friend loses credit, too, and the system can trust his connections less.

The trust level is from my perspective, not global.

A lot of my games sort of take place in the same universe, even when they’re different systems or settings.

Like an old DND campaign had the players visit a wizard university, where they met many NPCs. One of them was Reg. He’s kind of a chill party dude. Loves playing wizard pong (it’s like ping pong, but with mage hands)

My current game is a 2050s corporate dystopia using Fate. Heavy inspiration from World of Darkness and Shadowrun.

And Reg is here. He fully believes he used to go to wizard school, but something happened and now he’s here. He’s pretty chill about it, though. Last game, a werewolf was going berserk and Reg was like “Dude. Fucking metal.” The werewolf gave him a knock-on-your-ass high five and Reg lived.

Sometimes people’s priorities, needs, and desires are bad.

The way I imagine it working is if I notice a bot in my web, I flag it, and then everyone involved in approving the bot loses some credibility. So a bad actor will get flushed out. And so will your idiot friend that keeps trusting bots, so their recommendations are then mostly ignored.

This really is the simplest solution.

Also, the government can’t really do a lot about it because of free speech laws, but like Google and Facebook and so on that gleefully spread anti-vax nonsense should be held accountable. Youtube could just refuse to host anti-vax videos. But I guess all they care about is money, and not enough people are angry enough to start hanging directors and c-suites yet.

but I’m pretty convinced that Linux is not close to being ready for normies.

Yeah. I consider myself somewhat tech savvy (I do software development for work) and I had a really bad time installing mint on my desktop. I got it to work after a day but that was far more than a casually interested person would put up with.

NYC here. Don’t think I’d want to live anywhere else, at least not in the US.

I send people links to posts on Lemmy, and tell people I can’t see Instagram/Twitter/etc.

Is it working? No, not really, but it feels like it should.

My characters often end up exasperated by how idiotic and chaotic the other _characters players are. That checks out.

“So the walls started bleeding, a thousand voices cried out in pain, and a sinkhole into the unseen depths opened in the kitchen.”

“Right.”

“And you, a normal human with no magical powers or special equipment, you jumped into the sinkhole.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“It was there!”

“And then your character died, as one would expect from a hundred foot drop onto stone. And now?”

“I don’t understand. What else was I supposed to do??”