allstar13521

[allstar13521]

With DND 5e being set up to cause DM burnout, can you give examples of tabletop systems that facilitate easy DMing? I love running a tabletop game but don't have the time to deal with 5e or homebrew anymore.

(With reference to this post here.)

This is an area where you're going to get a lot of bad advice, because there's no such thing as a tabletop RPG that's "easy to GM" in the abstract. Some systems make greater or lesser demands of the GM's time and skill, but the reason that Dungeons & Dragons has a massive GM burnout problem is a bit more subtle than that – indeed, D&D's GM burnout problem is considerably worse than that of many games whose procedures of play place much greater demands on the GM!

It boils down to the fact that games are opinionated. Even a very simple set of rules contains a vast number of baked-in assumptions about how the game ought to be played; in the case of tabletop RPGs, those baked-in assumptions include assumptions about what kinds of stories the game ought to be used to tell. The players of any given group, of course, also have assumptions – some explicit, many unexamined – about how the game's story ought to go. It's rare that these two sets of assumptions will perfectly agree.

Fortunately, perfect agreement isn't necessary, because tabletop RPGs aren't computer games, and it's always possible to tweak the outputs of the rules on the fly to better suit the desired narrative experience. In conventional one-GM-many-players games like D&D, this responsibility for monitoring and adjusting the outputs of the rules so that they're compatible with the narrative space the group wishes to explore falls principally on the GM.

Now, here's where the trouble starts: the larger the disconnect between the story the rules want to produce and the narrative space the group wants to explore, the more work the GM in a conventional one-GM-many-players context needs to do in order to close that gap. If the disconnect is large enough, the GM ends up spending practically all of their time babysitting the outputs of the rules, at the expense of literally every other facet of their responsibilities.

(Conversely, if that gap is large and isn't successfully closed, you can end up with a situation where engaging with the rules and engaging with the narrative become mutually exclusive activities. This is where we get daft ideas like "combat" and "roleplaying" being opposites – which is nonsense, of course, but it's persuasive nonsense if you've never experienced a game where the rules agree with you about what kind of story you should be telling.)

And here's where the problem with Dungeons & Dragons in particular arises. The rules of D&D aren't especially more opinionated than those of your average tabletop RPG; however, the game has developed a culture of play that's allergic to actually acknowledging this. There are several legs to this, including:

a text which makes claims about the game's supported modes of play that are far broader than what the rules in fact support;

a body of received wisdom about GMing best practices which consists mostly of advice on how to close the gap between the rules' assumptions and the players' expectations (but refuses to admit that this is what it's doing);

a player culture which has become increasingly hostile to players learning or knowing the rules, and positions any expectation that players should learn the rules as a form of "gatekeeping"; and

a propensity to treat a very high level of GMing skill as an entry-level expectation.

Taken together, all this produces a situation where, when the rules and the group disagree about how the game's story ought to go, the players don't experience it as a problem with the rules: they experience it as a problem with the GM. A lot of GMs even buy into this perception themselves, which is how you end up with GM advice forums overflowing with people telling novice GMs that they're morally bad people for being unprepared to tackle very advanced GMing challenges right from the jump.

(At this point, one may wonder: why on Earth would a game develop this sort of culture of play in the first place? Who benefits? Well, what we're looking at in practice is a culture of play which treats novice and casual GMs as a disposal resource whose purpose is to maximise the number of people playing Dungeons & Dragons. Follow the money!)

So, after all of that, the short answer is that there isn't a specific magic-bullet solution to avoiding D&D's GM burnout problem – or, at least, not one that operates at the level of the rules, because there's no particular thing that D&D as a system is doing "wrong" that produces this outcome; the problem operates almost entirely at the play culture level.

In practice, two things need to happen:

Placing a greater expectation on the players to learn and understand the game's rules; and

Selecting a system where the gap between the story the rules want to produce and the narrative space the group wants to explore is small.

It's that second one that's the real trick. In order to minimise that gap, we need to know what kind of narrative space your group wants to explore, and that might not be something you have a good answer to if you don't have good lines of communication with your players.

(As an aside, there's a good chance that we're going to see dipsticks cropping up in the notes insisting that their favourite system short-circuits this problem by being perfectly universal and having no baked-in narrative assumptions. These people are lying to you, and lending credence to the idea that there's any such thing as a universal RPG is a big part of how we got into this mess in the first place!)

[allstar13521]

In ongoing the-Algorithm-trying-to-figure-out-what-the-fuck-I-do-for-a-living news, my sponsored YouTube search results now consist exclusively of promotional videos for aerospace machining firms, which implies several fascinating things about its present conclusions.

[allstar13521]

We all know Nintendo's internal politics are shit, but I have to admit that Toadette being anti-union is possibly the funniest character they could have used as a mouthpiece for that particular sentiment. Like, it's just her, so it must be a conscious choice. Why Toadette specifically?

[allstar13521]

In the beginning of The Good Place, Michael doesn't know that no one has gotten into the Good Place in over 500 years. Arguably he doesn't know every single person who got into the Bad Place, or he would have figured out EVERYONE is there, but it's so funny to me when Eleanor asks who is in the Bad Place that would surprise her and without hesitation, Michael tells her "every US president except Lincoln," which implies he's either straight lying to her (in a situation where he's trying to convince her this is real, saying Lincoln is in the Bad Place might give it away? Saying he is in the good place makes it more believable? He had to pick one (1) person to exclude to make the rest believable and chose Lincoln?), or he doesn't THINK he's lying to her. The latter is infinitely funnier to me. He's either never seen Lincoln, or Lincoln isn't in the Bad Place.

And I can't tell which is funnier: that he did indeed go to the Bad Place but escaped, or that he went to the Good Place, but there's no record of it. No one knows where he is, just that he's not in their place.

That, or he never died.

[allstar13521]

Last year Facebook ads decided I was both an army veteran and someone looking to join the military for the first time, this year it has decided I’ve lost all my sexual confidence and I can regain it by joining a 6-week program to finally bring myself to initiate morning sex.

[allstar13521]

Honestly, same. There are parts of me I would love to replace with the cold certainty of steel but for the most part I'm not all that bothered by the weakness of my flesh.

disabled people🤝trans people🤝robofuckers🤝therians

"I just want a robot body"

If you want it for more than one of these reasons, pick which one is most important to you. (For example: While I'd love to have hotswappable genitals for trans reasons, I'd much prefer to have a robot body for "I can't stand up without severe nausea" reasons)

[allstar13521]

Sometimes the technology conspires against me to make me sound crazy in my text messages.

[allstar13521]

Here's a key part of the transfemme experience that is very overlooked: when you don't pass, people don't actually see you as a man, or treat you like a man.

[allstar13521]

Deep Space Nine was not afraid to say it.

[allstar13521]

Collection of me turning into random objects

[allstar13521]

I STEPPED OUTSIDE OF THE FRONT DOOR OF MY OWN HOME ONLY TO FIND THE DEER THAT TRIED TO KICK MY ASS LAST YEAR STANDING RIGHT THERE IN MY FRONT YARD. BOLD AS BRASS.

AM I NOT SAFE ANYWHERE ANYMORE

[allstar13521]

Shoutout to the maned wolf, which is technically neither wolf nor fox but has its own genus called Chrysocyon! Why -

why are your legs so long?

I mean, intellectually, I understand that it’s because you live in grasslands and have evolved to be able to see over the grass, but emotionally… why? Are they?? Like that??? Surely there was a way to make your body more cohesive and proportional-looking?

[allstar13521]

A Vulcan named Stork works at the Terran adoption agency. Parents always request that he be the one to deliver their child to them.

[allstar13521]

Shout out to all the Black ppl that can no longer participate directly in the fandom they love because of the stresses of racism 👍🏾 you contain multitudes of value and I'm sorry that the color of your skin and the power of your voice makes people not want to acknowledge that.

[allstar13521]

What’s mc1r and what do mutations there do?

Mc1r is short for melanocortin 1 receptor, a very important gene/protein in pigment synthesis. In color genetics, it's often called extension gene, too.

The molecule itself basically behaves as a switch: it determines if the cell produces eumelanin (black/brown pigment) or pheomelanin (red/yellow pigment) at any given moment.

In all kind of animals, lots of red, orange, yellow and pale color variants are associated with loss-of-function MC1R mutations, and, on the other hand, melanistic colorations are often caused by gain-of-function mutations. The OMIA database contains documented mutations in 48 different animals, lots of them with several different alleles.

Clown ball phyton, menil fallow deer, blond antartic fur seal, chestnut horse, white camel, red zebu - these are all MC1R-mutants.

Domestic cats however... well, they do have no less but three mutations on this gene, but the standard, wildspread orange that gives us red and tortoiseshell cats is none of them. (That would be on the recently identified Arhgap36 gene, famously sex-linked, unlike MC1R, which is autosomal and inherited independently of sex.) The mc1r cat colors are all relatively new and restricted to one respective breed; they are called amber, russet and carnelian.

Amber tabby norwegian forest cat, (likely solid) russet sepia burmese and carnelian tabby kurilian bobtail.

For further information see my extension tag.

[allstar13521]

On January 5th 1700 School teacher Robert Carmichael appeared before the court after causing the death of a pupil after punishing him.

A case of a singular character was brought before the Court of Justiciary. In the preceding July, a boy named John Douglas, son of Douglas of Dornock, attending the school of Moffat, was chastised by his teacher, Mr Robert Carmichael, with such extreme severity that he died on the spot. The master is described in the indictment as beating and dragging the boy, and giving his three lashings without intermission, so that when ‘let down’ for the third time, he ‘could only weakly struggle along to his seat, and never spoke more, but breathed out his last, and was carried dying, if not dead, out of the school.’ Carmichael fled, and kept out of sight for some weeks, ‘but by the providence of God was discovered and seized.’

‘The Lords decerned the said Mr Robert to be taken from the Tolbooth of Edinburgh by the hangman under a sure guard to the middle of the Landmarket, and there lashed by seven severe stripes then to be carried down to the Cross, and there severely lashed by six sharp stripes; and then to be carried to the Fountain Well, to be severely lashed by five stripes; and then to be carried back by the hangman to the Tolbooth. Likeas, the Lords banish the said Mr Robert furth of this kingdom, never to return thereto under all highest pains.’

From Domestic Annals of Scotland 1695-1702.

Robert Carmichael was perhaps only unfortunate in some constitutional weakness of his victim. An energetic use of the lash was the rule, not the exception, in the old school. Those of us of a certain age can remember being punished throughout our schooling. The main punishment in Scottish schools by the twentieth century was the Lochgelly Tawse, but other schools, mainly fee paying ones used a cane.

In 1982 two Scottish mothers went to the European Court of Human Rights, who passed a judgment that parents had the right to refuse corporal punishment of a child. The legislation came into force in 1987, but most Scottish local education authorities had already abolished it by the early 1980s.

[allstar13521]

There is something really, uh, telling, about how Jimmy Carter’s presidency was widely considered to be a “failure,” and he also is INARGUABLY the U.S. president who has done the most to promote human rights around the world.

It’s extremely telling, about the U.S. nation-state as a political project and institution, about the federal government as a structure, about the nature of imperialism.

To reference a friend of mine, he was the only U.S. President alive in our lifetime who could avoid the International Criminal Court.