Chebucto Regional Softball Club

Game publishers: We aren't predating on children fast enough. How will we ever achieve infinite money if we don't predate on children faster? Discord management: We can help with that.

Imagine this in another product. Say you were looking at buying some clothes, and because they didn't want to pay someone to cut the fabric, they just folded it over, stitched the outline of a shirt, and left all the fabric on the inside. Then when you point out that they must either be unskilled as tailors because they can't even manage simple seam allowance, or greedy, because they choose not to just to add maybe a few pennies to the stockholder's dividends, some loser who gets zero benefit from the extra fabric runs out of nowhere to explain how 'it's your fault. Don't you have room in your closet for the extra material? Why don't you just move to a bigger house? I'm morally superior because I'm complaining about your complaining about something you can't fix rather than about the people who have the power to make the changes choosing not to! Why don't you stick to wearing your hand-stitched designer clothes made with love and care if you can't afford to buy a closet big enough to house all the pointless wastage of these incredible producers of generic, lowest common denominator, middle of the road, unoriginal t-shirts that people mostly buy because of marketing and familiarity bias? Don't you know the only people who matter are the wealthy?'

Ready to climb the Ziggurat.

Ah, those poor mentally handicapped 7INT people with their staggering ~10% lower likelihood of knowing something.

Many, many things in this world make people wonder 'How is this a thing?' I don't know of any where the answer isn't simply, 'Idiots exist.'

And would almost certainly do anything in its power (especially running away from the creature three times its height and aware of them enough to fight back and summoning lightning from their pointy stick) to avoid getting hurt, because there are no wolves afraid of being called chicken because those who keep fighting for stupid reasons die of sepsis?

Why would you need to be able to gift a free game? That's all that people get there, isn't it?

Very corporate thinking. 'We have the IP for the name of a game with a dedicated following. That's more important than who makes the game, right?'

I hadn't seen them before. Man, the DnD 'races' concept always gets weird in its relation to real world racism but... sheesh.

There is the 'mule rule' thing. It solves the issue in some ways, but still just seems odd somehow. Given the alternative is just \*jazz hands\* 'because magic,' though...

That was one of those things that kind of bugs me about so many other hominid species in DnD and the like. You're telling me there are this many species that are basically a human+X, but they're all distinct and separate? How does that happen? Even with racism, you still get the horrors of sexual violence that will cross those taboos. We have half-elves, but not half-genasi? And all the half-elves are half elf, half human, not half something else? Same with the half-orcs? Same with tieflings, etc? If there are no actual physical blockages to human/elf pairings, and half-elves are so much longer lived while still reaching adulthood in the same number of years as a human, how many generations do you really think you can maintain a distinction between them? Give it a few hundred years and you won't have elves and humans and half-elves, you'll have a complex gradient of very elf to very human to very orcish to very dwarven to every every other 'race' on the setting. At a certain point races in DnD make even less sense than the imaginary 'races' of humans in the real world.

Re the first: This is a semantic dance. Immersion is not rigidly defined. I define it as the sense of losing oneself in the diegetic space, usually by identifying with a particular element within it. I took it as self-evident that no one is achieving total immersion, but yes, you are correct there, no one is achieving full immersion. But the GM **cannot** have even high immersion. They are an individual. The NPCs are many. The GM is the embodiment of the laws of physics, nature, cause and effect, etc. That is not a human, or even sapient, identity with which they **could** identify. Re the second: That's a simplified workflow that applies to basically any GM-based system. Nothing that could be reasonably added would change the fact that the chain is shorter with fewer steps. That's how real number subtraction works. ``` n-x0 ``` Re the rest of it: I'm sorry. I assumed you would understand that my saying 'don't discount this possibility' is not the same as 'absolutely everyone must do this my perfect and correct way.' I assumed you would take it as patently obvious all methods one might approach any game with must involve participant consent, but, okay, let's start with the full text of Principia Mathematica so we can establish 1+1=2 and then move on to establish a shared moral framework of consent and all the other things that I would consider obvious but you feel the need to spell out explicitly, and then finally we can have a nice, clearly defined discussion about dice. 

Immediate flaw there; there is no immersion for the DM. You aren't breaking their immersion because it can't exist. You could argue for breaking their flow, but that's only an issue where they aren't used to it. Once everyone is used to the flow of things, you shorten the workflow from 'player:intent>player:declaration>DM:mechanical interpretation> DM:request>player:roll>player:report>DM:mechanical interpretation>DM:report>repeat' to 'player:intent>player:declaration>DM:mechanical interpretation>DM:report>repeat' One of the problems that people have understanding RPG dynamics is the GM/DM is not playing the same game as everyone else. They aren't an entertainer, like a Martin Clunes, they are an entertainer like a Martin Scorsese, or like a one-person, brain-powered Superblue. Their real role is in 'making the magic happen.' The players are 'playing DnD' or 'playing Changeling' or whatever. The GM, in any GM focused system, is playing The GM's Game. It's the same game, no matter which of the GM focused systems they are using to play The GM's Game. Sometimes, the group of players is of a certain type, and the numbers don't distract them. Such a group doesn't need the GM to handle the numbers, but many players do find them distracting, and if the GM can handle it, it can make the game better, which means the GM is winning their game.

What are they rolling unquestioned? Genuine question. I've had players roll unasked because they wanted to see if their character would do X or Y but that's not mechanical. That's them letting dice handle something they can't puzzle through in real time. As for feats, rerolls, and their analogs in other systems, those are things for the character to decide to use. Most of those rolls, in most systems, are 'may' actions, which means the decision lies with the character. You wouldn't decide things for them, even if it seems obviously 'better' in _your_ head for them to do it. You just let them avoid thinking about the numbers. You can even use software so _you_ don't have to do the math. The point is just to move away from the distraction of the numbers.

Same place as everyone else. They're just a peculiar bunch of people who get more enjoyment out of supporting the players than being the heroes of the story. Not having one of those people means you are not equipped to play the game, just as much as if you didn't have dice. You can try to put someone else in that slot, in the same way you can try to play Eberron as a setting using Werewolf: The Apocalypse rules, but your expectations will need to be low.

There is approximately zero weight to being the roller. If the added task of rolling a die you would normally ask them to roll is going to be the straw to break your back, you're probably dealing with something else.

The math has been within you the whole time, my boy. The rocks do nothing.

That's why you would keep the randomness of the dice, but isolate it. It's easy to trust a DM to be reasonable when it comes to some things, but the randomness is useful in making the play more interesting, and people aren't great at creating statistically distributed randomness. And if your DM is just looking at the die and saying, 'yah' or 'nah,' they shouldn't be your DM. If your players can't handle being told their characters' attack didn't land, they aren't ready to play the game. It isn't possible to win or lose DnD, but it's absolutely possible to succeed or fail to play. And you wouldn't be removing the mechanical elements, such as the smite, just putting player focus on the diegetic space. They can still smite, but with their attention spent on thinking about the righteous smash of their weapon against the enemy's armour and less on going 'okay, then we carry the one, and...'

If your group has the trust, there is something to be said for making all rolls GM rolls. The GM is going to tell you how it turns out anyway so why not just make them roll? Let them handle the mechanical elements of the game so the players can focus on the role play.