Just remember it’s basically garbage in, garbage out. I know a lot of folks half-ass it (bad photos, lazy profile, half-assed messages) and then are surprised that they don’t rise above the sea of other half-assed people and the algorithms.

I was just telling a friend about my how cat was so annoyed today I wasn’t sitting at my usual desk. He was yelling and standing on it until I sat down. Now he’s snoozing in my lap, at the desk, as intended for this time of day.

I dunno man, you’re the one that said the players can’t talk focus on gay rights now. there’s a demon invasion. Which, again, maps pretty cleanly to that kind of attitude. But I think you might be the kind of person who doesn’t understand subtext, or maybe text.

you choose to lead a gay rights movement while the world is being overrun by the demon king’s hordes.

This maps kind of easily onto “We can’t fight for gay rights right now. They just blew up the twin towers!” or similar “wait your turn for justice” arguments.

I get the impression that you don’t see that kind of thing, and furthermore don’t care. You run whatever kind of game you want, but I would be surprised if your settings weren’t full of unexamined biases and defaults.

People do not all have the same working definition of “politics”. Many people seem to use it to mean “overt content about contemporary issues”, but that’s not really a good definition.

If your game has sentient creatures with agency and desires, it has politics.

For example, if your game has a king, there’s politics. Having the people accept monarchy is a political statement. It’s not as hot-button as, say, having slavery, but it’s still political.

You might not be surprised if your players react to a world with chattel slavery by trying to free the slaves and end that institution. The same mechanism may lead them to want to end absolute monarchy. They see something in the setting they perceive as unjust, and want to change it.

A lot of people are kind of… uncritical, about many things. They don’t see absolute monarchy as “political” because it’s a familiar story trope. They are happy to accept this uncritically so they can get to the fun part where you get a quest to slay the dragon. (Note that the target of killing the dragon rather than, say, negotiating or rehoming it is also political)

People then get frustrated because they feel stupid, and they’re being blocked from pursuing the content they want. They just want to, for example, do a tactical mini game about fighting a big monster that spits fire. They don’t want to talk about the merits of absolute monarchy or slaying sentient creatures.

It’s okay to not always want to engage in the political dimension. That doesn’t mean it’s not there. If someone responds to the king giving you a quest with “wait, this is an absolute monarchy where the first born son becomes king? That’s fucked up” they’re not “making it political”. It already was political.

If you present a man and a woman as monogamously married in your game, that’s political. That’s a statement. If you show a big queer polycule, that’s also a statement. The latter will ping the aforementioned uncritical players as “political”, because it’s more atypical, but both are “political”.

Some of this can be handled in session 0. But sometimes you learn that some people in the group have different tastes and probably shouldn’t play together.

Well, thankfully I included examples other than magic.

However, I do think trying too hard on “martials should be like real life” easily leads to harsher limitations for them. It’s not always intentional. But when someone says “I want to leap 15 feet over the chasm” some people get all “you can’t do that! I can barely jump five feet and I’m athletic (they’re not)” and you have a whole digression where someone looks up human records and then argues about if 16 strength is really Olympic class and what about all your equipment and blah blah blah.

It’s much rarer for that kind of argument to come up with wizard types, in my experience.

Clearer rules up front help, though I feel like half of DND players have never read the rules.

“it seems silly that you can just go around the corner and suddenly you’re hidden. They know you’re there”

This was rebutted with “they know I’m somewhere over there, but not exactly where or when I’m going to pop out. I’m a 7th level rogue, I’m sure I have tricks you and I can’t even think of”.

Sometimes people get like selectively simulationist. They’ll ignore most of the game’s gamey bits (inventory management, hit points and recovery, magic) but some things throw them off. Usually things that are closer to lived reality. For example, someone having no problem with a wizard hypnotizing an entire room, but balking at a fighter climbing a tall fence.

There was also: “It seems like a lot of damage…”

“I’m pretty sure rogue is balanced around doing sneak attack almost every round. The fighter gets multiple attacks, but I don’t. Almost every other class gets a resource to burn like spell points or ki points or superiority dice. I have nothing. All I do is sneak attack. Without it, I’m a particularly accurate peasant that can run away real good. And I still miss about a quarter of the time, which means my whole turn accomplishes nothing”

I wonder if the DMG or something published expected damage per round or per encounter somewhere.

I had a dm once say he was thinking about saying no about my rogue’s “I shoot, move, bonus action hide around the corner” loop. But then he said he realized if he said no, my character would suck and it’d be no fun.

I think that was the right call.

I skimmed over the srd ( https://www.daggerheart.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Daggerheart-SRD-9-09-25.pdf ) and it doesn’t look like a terrible system but I don’t think it’s for me. Class and level, tables, different shaped dice. Meh. Still too close to DND for me.

This seems a little more detailed than I usually go with.

I’m happy cribbing from Fate. Every NPC has a high concept (eg: royal assassin, gig worker delivery man) and Trouble (eg: drinking problem, haunted by well meaning but overbearing grandfather)

If they need more flesh, they can pick up more aspects or goals.

I call my cat by his name. Not his full name, just the first name unless he’s being formally introduced or in a lot of trouble.

Sometimes I go to a meetup that does one-shots. They’re a pretty good group.

Most of my friends either aren’t interested, or aren’t interested enough to actually show up. It’s easier to make friends with people who want to play RPGs than get your friends to play. The worst outcome is when your friends are kind of people-pleasers, and they say yes to the game even though they don’t really want to. Then they half-ass it or flake, and the friendship suffers.

Yes! I usually take any opportunity to gush about Fate but I restrained myself here

The main weakness of Fate is you need more engaged players. Stuff like DND can mostly hum along with passive players, but Fate falls really flat if people aren’t engaging with it.

On player training, I like systems where you can bribe players to let bad things happen.

Like in vampire: the requiem, a player can always turn a regular failure into a Dramatic Failure, and get a little XP. This meant the players went from “oh no the cave is probably full of monsters let’s take forever stressing” to “I ROLLED GARBAGE CAN I JUST BARGE IN LIKE A CONFIDENT IDIOT FOR MY DRAMATIC FAILURE?”

Tastes vary, but I found it made a more interesting and snappier game.

Scheduling, mostly. The classic big bad of DND.

I always wanted to get one of my lawyer friends to play a devil in a DND game I ran. Just have him write the worst contracts for the players that are more air tight than I can come up with.

Did a one shot in high school where to cast any spell you had to sing a relevant line from an extant song.

I don’t remember everyone’s picks, but one player pulled out a pretty enthusiastic Beatles’ “got to admit it’s getting better, getting better all the time” for a heal.

120 feet seems pretty far. I guess you could shout, awkwardly.

There might be meetups near you doing games. There’s one here in NYC that’s very friendly I’ve been to.

I think the “they think they’re a hero but they’re just level 1” trope goes in the same bucket as “let’s make characters based on ourselves!”. Everyone comes up with it but it’s rarely as good as imagined.