Bioware fans are the worst. According to them, across seven games that they allegedly love so much they have built their entire identities around them (ME1-3 and Andromeda, Dragon Age 1-3), exactly 1.5 of them are any good and the rest are the worst thing they’ve ever played somehow. It’s like Star Wars.

Andromeda was…

Which is so frustrating because they could just buy this from them for peanuts (to them--the devs deserve fair compensation), polish/finish it up, and release it to make bank.

Hades does it pretty perfectly: it’s also a game about being hard and dying a lot and getting better but there’s a mode that gives you a little extra damage resist every time you die until you don’t need it anymore—meaning, you and the game find out together where your sweet spot is. And then if it feels too breezy…

This is what we get for not only welcoming but celebrating that Nickelodeon Smash clone. Are you happy now, my 90's Kids?

This is where I’m at with it. I paid a bunch of money for a bunch of content almost all of which is no longer accessible—the product I paid for was taken from me even though at the time we were all under the understanding that we were getting a relatively fixed product. Minor changes are one thing, but taking most of…

I like all of the things you’re saying. I recently (at your suggestion, remember me?) tried getting back in and while the *game* was great and finally pretty much everything I always wanted from Destiny, there was always the nagging sense of missing the stuff that was gone (or that I had legitimately missed). This…

Why can’t this incredibly popular, broad-appeal, easily-maintained money-printing machine just go away already? It’s not like it appeals to a huge number of people, or is hugely popular, or has a low cost to maintain but a stupidly high profitability, I just don’t get it—I don’t get how one of the most profitable…

Batsman.

Debra Wilson. She was on (of all things) MAD TV for years, and is along with Phil LaMarr one of the best things it ever had going.

Wildlands’s multiplayer was like that—and incidentally, it was developed independently by the studio who has since then been making this Frontline BR (Ubi Bucharest).

The Ghost Recon subreddit exploded with a lot of angry people (and not in the capital G-Gamer way, like this wasn’t entitlement and death threats—it was just really flabbergasted, tired people unable to believe how widely off the mark this was, like the out of season April Fool’s joke guy), and one of the community…

Never heard of Winco either. What I’m learning here, though, is that the regionality of chains across the midwest is fascinating and it’s probably got to do with just how big “the midwest” actually is.

Isn’t Walmart the midwest answer to Walmart? I’m kinda scared to actually see what a Meijer must be like.

Yes! I appreciate PbtA games so much for all that little stuff—abstracting mechanics that made sense originally (when you think of D&D as a roleplaying simulation) but in practice aren’t actually what you’re there for.

In my hacks I use “status cards,” which are index cards with measures on a scale of 1-10 (and are…

(100% agreed re: Kinja and generally positive interactions—I can actually get good, interesting discussions here. Or I get to see trainwrecks, it’s kinda 50/50—but my god is it awful, especially now that you can’t see the full reply in your notifications, and you can’t jump to that comment, and there’s no…

(God, Kinja’s the worst, ain’t it?)

I think I see what you’re saying, and I get that. I know that in D&D you can try things over and over and if you don’t meet the threshold for success you just try again (so, attacking or picking that lock or haggling or whatever). In my mind, though, that’s not really any different…

Right. And if you have a box with a Thing in it and you’re sitting around a campfire trying to puzzle it open, and it’s fictionally a super complex lock, then time passing might be a consequence because it gives your enemies time to move against you. Or for bad weather to develop. Or for your rations to dwindle as you…

I have a few PbtA hacks in different generic genre settings that I use when I want to teach new people about tabletop RPG’s, specifically students and young people, and they’re two sheets of paper front and back (plus a one-sheet character sheet and some index cards). Fold ‘em in half, they make cute little booklets.

I can’t speak to what partial successes look like in D&D, but in PbtA games, partial successes can mean sooooo many things—I mean, like *infinite* things. I really can’t imagine you’d ever be in a PbtA game where you face off against some monsters and just stand there taking turns smacking eachother—which, as an…

I’m a huge PbtA fan and I think that if you’re rolling to pick a lock or do something else literally inconsequential (and I do mean literally—like, it has no consequence, nothing bad can happen as a result of failing it) then you’re either misinterpreting the rules or that particular PbtA system has a poorly-worded…