As I interpret it, the purpose of a hook is a big signpost to your players that says “hey the prepared adventure content is over thataway”

If they are down for the social contract they will presumably not be dickholes and interact with it. Of course, it is your job to make it engaging and give them a reason or shut all the alternate pathways off or however you want to do it. But likewise it is kind of their job to interact with the clearly marked “adventure is here” signpost as opposed to implicitly saying “naw fuck what you had prepared I think we would prefer you had to wing it, it’s what my character would do.” Ttrpg environments carry a significant implied social contract on all sides.

This is always a part of my prep sheet, is a little list of random names.

Yeah. Not everything has to be a movie. If you want the little dudes to do exactly what you had laid out for them, get some action figures man. If you want your players to play on the playground just give them some toys, a rough objective, and let 'em run around.

If you want your players to interact with something, make it either related to something they already care about and actively want to achieve, or else thrust them into the middle of it without any choice about it. If instead of that you turn them loose in the dungeon and they just run around having fun killing monsters and having hijinx then there is nothing in the world wrong with that and it is the expected result

A family member of mine once ate an entire slice of apple pie off a plate that was on the belly of his cat who just sat there observing and being chill the whole time

I was once involved in a business enterprise with a man who wasn’t a native speaker

I had talked to a child about buying some of our stuff, and he was psyched about it and went off to fetch a parent to complete the transaction

I was talking with my colleague about it in the interim, and said of the kid “he was sold” as a way of summarizing his receptiveness to my pitch about our products

My colleague became very alarmed. What do you mean, sold? Who bought him? What do you mean?

It took a while to explain.

I have heard good things about the decoy keyboard approach

Look how happy

I love how settled the black cat gets right after.

“Alright, that’s sorted. Back to looking at the wall.”

Maybe not directly related, but this talk makes to me a very compelling point about how magic should work in satisfying fiction.

“The Last Unicorn” has magic that works this way, and it’s pretty good.

😢

We used to have a little cat who would lie on his back on the kitchen floor with his legs splayed open, putting his dick on display for everyone.

When he got old enough and we neutered him, he kept doing the exact same thing, except with his back legs together, all the way over to one side.

Ngl it made me feel a little bad

Which is why it is the perfect encounter table 🙂

It would require ActivityPub to be prescriptive about how you’re supposed to do certain elements of your application, if you choose to do those parts. This is Markdown, this is how you write a link to something in your instance, this is how you handle a threaded community, this is what disliking a message looks like. From my outsider’s perspective it seems like it wouldn’t have been that challenging to lay down guidelines for it.

Eh, whatever. I have my gripes but they’re working on it and it seems okay. It just seems that each application is a sort of little walled garden that works (mostly) with other instances of the same app, but for anything other than that same app all bets are off, which seems like a shame.

P.S. how do you make an instance agnostic comment link?

You don’t 🥲

Yeah, probably so. I’m just slightly concerned that maybe someone will read someone else joking about just using all stuff with CON saves instead, and think that it is for real and that is the way.

JUST LET YOUR PLAYERS BE AWESOME SOMETIMES

I know it’s frustrating if your player is a golden god at dealing with some types of situations which defeat your effort to make a challenge for them, but this is one of the cheapest and easiest ways you can enable them to have fun in your game. There will be other situations which present genuine challenge, but it doesn’t all have to be super hard. It is okay to let them flex.

What’s the point of the mechanics including badass abilities if you’re gonna get all frustrated if your players start to become badass sometimes

A lot of times, individuals who’ve been through rough environments have a deep appreciation for comfort and trust

It is as I suspected

I saw your picture and now I envy your life

Cats don’t like having their water next to their food; if you separate the food and water dishes to different rooms, a lot of times they get more enthusiastic about the water in the dish.

Sometimes of course they are just little weirdos