Phil (UK edition)

@thedicemechanic.bsky.social

Geek, gamer, whingebag (he/him) 'Dicemechanic' on Discord. Blogs rarely at dicemechanic.wordpress.com I block often. Nothing personal, but this is my walled garden.

Nothing is more boring than who will play Bond unless they do Across the Bond-i-verse and have multiple Bonds: Bond Woman, Bond Noir, Punk Bond, Indian Bond, Bond 2099, etc. And there can be a bit where they all say "The name's Bond" at the same time and everyone laughs

#RPGaDay 5. Burden I could talk about encumbrance. Others have done this and repetition is the bastard child of tedium. I could write about the burden of prep or juggling the demands of GMing. Other people have written whole books about that. None of these are the TRUE burden of the RPG hobby 1/

To be clear: If “TTRPGs” in your scholarship, teaching, & outreach start & end with D&D — or even GMed games — that’s a skill issue you need to reconsider. You’re gonna get left behind.

Ok. Finished Play Unsafe. It's too short. I now have ideas bouncing around my head that need more examples, more exposition, more detail. The page on putting on a show as GM could easily be a whole chapter. This isn't a criticism. It's just full of great ideas and concepts, and I'm just greedy 😁

Reading 'Playing Unsafe' in the gentle morning light. Reading the section on giving other players what they want. "Try it as a player. If the person opposite you is looking for a murderer..." I was mildly disappointed it followed with: "assist them" instead of: "murder someone"

There are at least *three* right-wing text-based social media sites, one owned by The Actual President, another by the richest man in history, and all of which openly foster white supremacy. But those are not the ones every op-ed page in the western world is sneering about

“He was an absolute arsehole to vast swathes of people but you have to remember that I once had a drink with him and he made me laugh - although I probably shouldn’t repeat what he said lol! So overall a decent guy” - the press, this morning.

If women wore smart glasses, they'd be banned. (soigomaa/x) Think about it. If millions of women wore smart glasses, recording men's behaviour, conversations, comments, their driving & bar chats ... can you imagine the panic? Trust me, smart glasses would be regulated before you can say 'Meta'.

I have always genuinely believed that you should try not to speak ill of someone as soon as their death is abounded, but Rod Liddle did it frequently so I'm sure he'd find it fitting for me a point that he was a racist, wife-beating nonce prick.

Doing Origin Story reveals a few core narratives in history. One is: "This thing didn't really matter until right-wing journalists and activists twisted it into a moral panic that destroyed people's lives for no good reason and then moved on"

Man goes to see the Cyclops. Says he's depressed. He wants to get back to his wife and home, but he keeps running into fatal predicaments along the way. Cyclops says, "Prognosis is simple. Nobody can help you." Man starts crying. Says, "But Cyclops, I *am* Nobody"

#RPGaDay 2. Stature As a teen, I had a brilliant RPG idea with about 30 different stats, with calculations for how each influenced other stats. One of these was Stature, indicating height, which added x% to Strength and y% to Build and -z% to Agility, indicating correlations between stats 1/

#RPGaDay 1. Discipline I loved Vampire disciplines when they first landed, but it quickly spiralled into minmaxing nonsense, so I'm not going to talk about that. Discipline = "Controlled behavior resulting from disciplinary training" It's a trait of many protagonists of heroic fiction 1/

Yes, there are video games, and parents are paranoid, and kids have more indoor things to do than ever before. But I find it odd that every time I go to the village park to kick a ball with 15yo on balmy summer evenings, there is never anyone there. Not a soul. Another lockdown unexpected impact?