I just noticed that the new year started on a Sunday.

• At a point where playstyles are divergent enough, you’re no longer really gaming with people. You’re just nervously steering a flimsy boat through a bunch of mines.

Whatever the truth of the situation is, and I don’t claim to know it, here’s how your coming across: entitled, negative, possessive, self-centered. Your group doesn’t owe you three weeks in a row. Most people don’t want to game with someone who spends his off-time considering which players
to fire, or whether others are being disloyal, or whatever. It sounds like you’re used to GMing from a standpoint where others follow your lead, but the group has come to want more input on scheduling and such. Through it all, all I keep hearing is how upset you are, how your feelings were hurt, and so forth, and it appears likely to me you have offended your group members and I’m wondering why you’re not curious why.

• “If the PCs were under a quest given by Queen Latifa, to save Philadelphia from the the Detroit Lions, and needed Steven Hawking’s help to get the Oscar trophy from the dread
  warlord Donald Trump, they’d remember that freaking campaign.”
• “For freedom! For Philadelphia! FOR LATIFAH!”
• “selective realism isn’t realism”
• You’re using science for no good… we took an oath we would try to do that less.
• This is part of why media usually gives a very short timescale for world destruction. If you give us any time at all, you have to deal with what *billions* of people can do if they set their mind to it.

Here’s how you test your players:
Player: “I want to play an old character for the concept.”
GM: “Sure. You can use the normal non-aged stats and just
roleplay being older.”
Note the reaction carefully.

• I wasn’t changing NPCs. I was making a point to the players that I’m ok with whatever cheese they want to bring to the game, but if they bring limburger, they better like eating and
  smelling it

Just an observation, that’s all.

The year is almost over, Does everyone have a resolution for the New Year in mind?

• He doesn’t even use paper. He just writes this shit on his palm and delivers it to you bitch-style.
• A classic maxim of GM advice is to avoid being be the adversary of the players, to present a world and its challenges, but not to personally fight against the players. A very rules light primarily-trust game environment encourages the adversarial relationship by placing too much in the hands of the GM.
• It’s a long-winded defense of using GM fiat as your resolution mechanic wrapped up with a pretty bow on top. It then attempts to slyly claim that detailed descriptions, player-initiated action, and GM rulings all depend on using GM fiat as your resolution mechanic… which is patently and obviously untrue.
• Furthermore, its general thesis that “modern games include mechanics for resolving stuff that old school games didn’t” is severely selective in its sampling of reality. As a simple example, OD&D included explicit resolution mechanics for monster morale; 4E doesn’t.
• So we’ve discovered that “rulings, not rules” is really just a mantra for, “I like GM fiat.”

Man. You make a good point. Where on earth could I have gotten the impression that you were advocating not having mechanics for certain actions?
Oh. Right. It was the part where you said exactly that. Repeatedly. And in many different ways. And then continued to say it even after you had just gotten done implying you had never said it.

• The single thing I hated most about early edition play was sitting around a table for an hour while describing all the different things we did to a magic ring to try and figure out what it did or all the different ways we searched a room or all the thing we did to try and find or disarm a trap. It was a huge time sink with very little reward. “Whew, it only took us 3 hours to play it out, but I finally figured out this dagger has a slightly magically increased chance to hit! What was that Mr. DM, during the 37 turns of game time I used up in my attempts, the dragon ate the princess?”
• Giving a bad GM the option to make up things in an arbitrary fashion will not make him a good GM.

The infamous “arseplomancer” build for Dungeons & Dragons 3.5: the Exemplar class lets you pick one skill which can be used to impress people, and a high enough Escape Artist skill lets you pass through a space narrower than your head. The result is a character who climbs into a guy’s rectum in a manner so awesome that everyone in 60 ft becomes undyingly loyal to him. Then the poor guy explodes.

• I was shocked when I saw that Fox was advertising gay porn….then I realized I was just watching a commercial for Glee.
• Yep, if it were dripping with any more sarcasm, you’d need to wipe your screen.

I hope everyone has a happy new year!

While other blogs have been wishing you Happy Holidays for days now, this post was actually written weeks ago, so in reality it’s like I’ve been wishing you Happy Holidays for weeks! Beat that, Fear the Boot!

Mercy is certainly a notable trait of a good-aligned character… but it’s not a shackle.
Remember that a swift and clean death can be considered a mercy, given the right circumstances.

• “The navy could probably win a war without coffee but would prefer not to try”-Samuel Eliot Morrison
• as long as it doesn’t get into the biological sciences of evolution, because I DINT COME FROM NO MONKAHS!
• sometimes shit just happens because Fate thinks it’d be cool.
• Also exceptable, Taco Bell printing a full page ad of a middle finger.
• “Can they print a hand gesture?”
• I worked retail long enough to know that 90% of the time the customer is wrong and the business is agreeing with them just to shut them the hell up.
• They should have taken a lesson from Southwest; refund her membership and ask her to please not to let the door impact her posterior during her egress.
• And I find it odd that a group of professional murder-hobos would not have a set routine for proceeding in an environment in which death can come from any direction and any moment in untold gruesome forms.
• Players frequently have no idea how to do what their character’s abilities and powers allow. Asking for them to describe what they do off the cuff and then arbitrarily ruling on the described actions is not going to work most of the time, at least from most players’ perspectives.

Have a great day!

By now You’ve been hearing christmas music for about six months straight. I think you’ll agree it’s gettin’ pretty old.

Honestly, the obelisks and pyramids only require very basic engineering, provided you have a stable workforce–which an agricultural society, especially one in a mild climate, can provide.
I’m not saying that the priests and such were the deities, but rather that they “knew two things more”. It doesn’t take very much extra knowledge to appear to do magical things–I regularly pull that sort of crap off during my every day work.
Human nature does not change. People want to do things their own way, and people are much more likely to “invent” their own way of doing a task than find out what others are doing unless they are specifically taught how–take a look at the HBGary debacle, where the guy in charge thought he “invented” social media tracking.
Now, extrapolate that back to a time when research was a lot harder, and people were less likely to share their secrets.
I’m of the opinion that your so-called “advanced” construction techniques have been invented and reinvented every few hundred years across much of history. They’re not that hard to figure out, if you sit down and think about it. All it’d take is one particularly smart and observant “technoshaman”–and suddenly you’ve got the means to build another pyramid.

• make like a loom and bolt
• if you are a DM that has yet to read the PHB cover to cover and at least retain a little bit of info, you might want to consider a different system.

First – if you are a “new” DM and you decide to run an adventure for players with 5th level+ spells its going to be a trainwreck. I’ve seen it happen. You traditionally start at low level and following the normal XP progression, you will have quite a few sessions under your belt before PCs hit 10th level. If you still don’t get how to craft an adevnture for PCs of that level, maybe DMing isn’t your gig. Or, maybe you should wrap the game up at a nice end point right then and there. Then start another campaign and work your way through the levels you are comfortable with until you can start to understand what is necessary at higher levels.
Second – Look, in any game, sport, etc. there is a learning curve. If your players are “suffering” through your attempts at DMing presumably it is in a charitable sense. And if it never gets better, presumably they are good enough friends to step up and say “Hey, look, this just isn’t working out. Why don’t we let the player who is able to dismantle everything you throw at him in a standard action run the game for a bit?” However, the bottom line is people learn from their mistakes, they learn to be good at something they are motivated to do. I’d rather cultivate Great DMs then rearrraneg a system to accomodate so-so DMs.

• Me llamo Capitán Shepard y eso es mi tienda favorita en el Citadel.
• Emotional maturity? Not to put too fine a point on it, but I’m not the one gnashing my teeth about getting punk’d on April Fools Day.
• It’s only my opinion, but I think anyone who was offended, hurt, or meaningfully impacted needs to re-evaluate their life choices.
• The answer is obvious, people… BAN CHILDREN!!! No children, no child porn! No child abuse! No childhood diseases! And eventually, the end of ALL crime!!
• “By the book, by the rules, for weal or woe – mine is to enforce them, not change them.”

Why can’t there be a few new holiday songs that don’t suck?

This starts Phoning It In month here at UnderDiscussion!

• There’s also the case that if the Kender are continually appropriating stuff and misplacing it, but never apparently getting rid of anything, Kendermore should be somewhere between a giant garbage dump and antique store, and occasionally sheer avalanches of pilfered grot should bury kender alive.
• In a separate, but probably related note: Magic items are not mysterious and wonderful to me as a player. A new item in a new book may be, but like anything else that is new it eventually gets old, and telling me I can’t have it won’t make me suddenly go back to thinking it is wonderful.
• Except for Ending Slavery, Fascism, Nazism and Communism, War Has Never Solved Anything.
• we have to let go of our realism hangups the minute an old guy in his pajamas starts shooting fire and ice out of his fingertips at a spider the size of a Hummer.
• Penn and Teller do this trick a couple times a week at the Rio in Vegas…
• But it may require a little more subtlety than that mail-order course on strategy from Palpatine University might suggest. “Wipe them out, all of them” might cut it if they’re the only guys in the neighborhood, but picking a fight with every humanoid tribe in the region because you want to put the cultists on level 4 out of commission probably isn’t a great idea.

Anyone who claims that any of the ancient megastructures required outside intervention has obviously never learned how levers work.
\Force goes in, force comes out

-\Never a miscommunication

M = Fd
Mechanical advantage of at least 10:1 can be obtained relatively easily on each lever; use a number of levers and a number of people pulling on them, and use shims to maintain height once you’ve gotten it.
200k lbs at 10:1 advantage would be 20k pounds of force; divided amongst ten levers, that’s about 2k lbs/lever. Assume ten people hauling contributing to the lever–workforce of 100 people–and you could get it up right quick.
Part of it is the leverage, and part of it is the logistics. It takes a relatively stable society to have 100 people capable of exerting 200lbs downforce plus assorted supervisors and people working on shims and the like to get something like that raised. Look for agricultural advances to fuel these things.

The ancients were very familiar with ropes. Ropes allow you to move your workforce farther away from the piece to be worked, and still maintain force on it.
“Magic” is simply knowing two things more than the next guy. In this case, those two things are trial-and-error engineering, and the organic (i.e. “wooden”) scaffoldings for use in force redistribution.

• It doesn’t take that much scaffolding to raise a heavy object, if you’re at all competent at putting it together. You just have to have either the requisite math, or a knack for visualizing compression loads.

Why would I have three block quotes in a row? See the opening line of the post.