Honestly I would eat cat-adjacent rice off the floor with my hands in a heartbeat. That part is almost as appealing as kitty belly. Almost.

But I presume this is from somewhere in asia with different cultural norms. Maaaybe AI?

The top drawer is obviously A, so this cat has filed themselves under B, because is baby.

Sweet baby is cat Sweet baaaaaaby is cat Baby baby baby Sweet baby is cat!

Phwoah, get a load of those gams.

I left mine out for too long and now he’s all squeaky and in need of oiling.

Oh i didnt know that! I definitely feel linehan’s influence in the writing for black books though. It feels similar to father ted and IT crowd, you know?

The writer of the IT crowd (and black books 😭) is a massive supporter of jk, a well known transphobe, and generally consider a lunatic. It’s a shame those shows are hilarious.

Also when you’ve spent an hour being pet and purring contentedly then nothing changes.

That sounds very cute! I’m thinking of the players who seem to need secret knowledge over the other players.

I was in a game with a secret were-rat who was constantly passing notes to the gm and then you’d wake up missing items or finding NPCs you liked dead and the player would angrily deny having anything to do with it. We all saw you pass a note.

A friend of mine once intentionally derailed a pug game by playing a priest of torm who was convinced that torm was black, to piss off the gm and the paladin of torm who were super racist. We probably shouldve just left the game, but we were asshole teens.

Anyone who’s had a player who’s “an [X] trying to convince the party they’re a [Y]” is probably having PTSD flashbacks now.

It sounds funny to read about but in my experience players who commit to constantly gaslighting fictional characters are not team players and always willing to spoil the fun of others.

When my brother’s grade 9 teacher told our mum that he just wasn’t very good at research, she was like, “uhh, he just spent 3 weeks doing research on the wild West to run a game of deadlands for a bunch of people in their twenties and thirties, I don’t think research is the problem”

Those who want to and can run RPGs tend be of above average intelligence, but tend not to be as interested in the real world. Kids who showed a bunch of promise, but often have barriers to translating that promise into mainstream definitions of success.

Or that’s been my experience in life and with other lifelong rpg enthusiasts, and my understanding of the comment.

We say “giblet the baby”. After our first cat got really into a cat food “with giblets” we started referring to any of her food as giblets, mostly so we could say the word giblets a lot. Eventually it came to mean all food when used as a noun and to feed as a verb.

Problem is that having social power actually affects the brain, suppressing the parts that do empathy.

It will always be harder, neurologically, for someone with power to engage their empathy or to consider the pain of others in their decisions.

Hence gestures at the world.

what would you even expect to happen on an ability crit?

Extra information, owed a favour, make a friend, get a small reward, get a clue to a larger reward, impress someone important, uncover a secret, get forewarning of a danger, hinder a rival, gain advantage on something, opponent is exhausted/confused/embarrassed and must pass a saving throw to act…

Skill check crits would be just like combat crits except there’s way more scope for fictional as well as mechanical benefits.

Disagree. People misuse stuff constantly.

Woah wait now. Sure people misuse things but designing with that in mind always produces a better thing than ignoring reality. A gun with a safety is a objectively a better design than a gun with no safety, even if the both have a manual that says not to play with the trigger and keep away from kids.

on them for just not reading the rules

The game trains you to expect a dopamine reward when you roll a 20. A game that consistently meets the expectations it creates would be a better game.

Elden ring absolutely does meet player expectations - challenge is the expectation of the souls-like genre.

6 Charisma can roll a 20 and be able to convince whomever of whatever

Certain people should never be able to make certain successes

only as amazingly as they are capable

I don’t disagree with any of this but I’m not talking about how the win should look in the fiction.

It’s just that when you roll a crit but don’t get a crit, most players will get extra disappointed. That’s a fact of the human experience that no rules text will ever change.

Good design accounts for the reality of how people actually use a thing.

what you believe should happen on a nat 20.

Consistency.

My point is that setting up the expectation of a moment of triumph and then diluting it with exceptions is going to create moments of disappointment at the table.

If a nat 20 is going to be a big win it should always be a big win. That’s so intuitively true that most people just play that way despite the rules.

I disagree that 1% chance is a jackpot but 5% isn’t. I’m using jackpot as an analogy for the emotional impact of a rarer, higher tier win mechanic - I don’t think specifying a number is useful here. That feeling can happen with a range of different rarities.

I’m not following your point about nat 1s, free gimmes or supply and demand.

I think we’re using very different ideas of game design. Are you using good design in the sense of like “tactically balanced”? I think of good game design as setting up and meeting player expectations for fun while minimizing frustration.

The game sets up rolling 20 and critting as a win big moment. To occasionally then deny players that fails to meet expectations and creates disappointment. That’s why I think it’s bad design. And why most people don’t play it as written.

I don’t mean that it’s ultra rare, just that it serves the same function as a jackpot - it’s the best possible outcome, the thing you’re always hoping will happen when you scratch the ticket, press the button or roll the dice.

It’s your chance to have that YOU WIN BIG moment. Setting up that mechanic and then creating situations where it doesn’t apply is intentionally designing disappointment.