The best take on Black Flag I ever read was something like: “It’s a great game, except for all the Assassin’s Creed parts.”

I was introduced to flyweight RPGs a few years back and I absolutely love what they can do in the hands of a creative group.

Roll for Shoes is about as minimal as it gets. You will need one D6, and something to track player inventory. The game world is best started by the GM in the abstract, letting the players fill in the world’s details through creative use of questions that prompt die rolls. This is fantastic for players that want to stretch their improv skills.

Lasers & Feelings has a tad more structure. Everyone has exactly one stat that sits on a spectrum of “lasers” to “feelings”. The difficulty of challenges in the game sit on the same spectrum. Depending on the nature of the challenge and what the player’s stat is, a single D6 roll decides the outcome. Everything else is role-playing in what is encouraged to be a Trek-like setting.

In my experience, Roll for Shoes usually turns into a cartoon-esque “let’s see what else is in my backpack” affair, that usually ends with everything on fire (because of course it does). Lasers & Feelings typically devolves into Lower Decks. All of these are positives in my book - I’d play again in a heartbeat.

It’s sister setting, Earthdawn, also had a lot going for it on top of the typical D&D formula. Weaving, instead of casting magic, was a much more involved process for the player/character which did a lot to ground such awesome power. At the same time, fighters of all stripes were also more or less magic users, which unified the whole rule system in a nice way. The setting itself was a fantasy post-apocalypse, troubled by evil horrors that dominated the landscape in the centuries before. In fact, much of the lore was intertwined with how people survived those times.

And like Shadowrun, there were lots of dice thanks to the “step table” system. It could be a huge PITA to sum all the rolls on high steps, but then when else do you get to roll entire fists full of dice all at once?

As a totally cheap-ass DM, my recommendation is to find some printable DnD tokens that you like and glue them to things like bottle-caps, or small round bits of wood (like chunks off of a dowel from the hardware store). There are a bunch around. If you want to splurge, take the bits you want somewhere you can pay for a quality color printout.

Personally, I’m a fan of these generic tokens by “Acquitt”. They’re useful for every encounter: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fexternal-preview.redd.it%2FV7egJC87nsVUTybGs5E3DwvRihmz6KduUfniSJk6Fec.jpg%3Fauto%3Dwebp%26s%3D57f11a74865814f31c7236adb1555a43529ca355

I glued these to some sculpey discs of the same color. I also used transparent binder sleeves for HP tracker sheets, so I could use dry-erase marker. Lastly, my battle map was a large (but cheap) poster frame with 1" grid paper inside¹. This let me use those dry-erase markers to draw terrain.

1. For more thrift, some wrapping paper brands print a barely visible 1" grid on the backside. Some quality time with a ruler and pen can turn that into something useful.

A cantrip that’s as effective as “power word kill” on mundane folk? Use 55 times to kill a dragon? How did I miss this?

As a DM, I’d have to implement a house rule that every such insult must be unique, as it is magically bound to the target at that distinct moment in time. And that goes for failures as well as successes: each use burns that phrase forever. At the very least this goes if used repeatedly against the same target. Besides, a good bard should be able to cook up fresh material.

Snake, this is a sneaking mission. You are not here to assassinate anyone’s work.

Did they conduct this test in Japan? I ask since we could be losing something in translation. AFAIK, the Japanese people have a habit of being overly polite and not conveying strong emotion publicly, which might explain Kojima’s reaction. If he wanted to provoke a strong reaction in people, they’d say very different things.

Honestly, this is more OG than most people realize. You’re doing it right.

Coins, and even dice work in a pinch too.

Yes, exactly!

The moment my therapist laid out the path forward to mindfulness, it felt like I was handed a “debug mode” for my own brain. Life has been transformative ever since.

You can do this - many of us do. However when you get to writing a solid backstory, or attempt to act as that character, it’s all going to be “you” flavored on some level. Kind of like interpreting a Rorschach print.

I think the preference for Y being the vertical axis in gaming, comes from a legacy of orienting the work around screen-space (roughly 50 years ago). It was more efficient to have a memory layout that is easier to supply data to generate a TV signal. Since a CRT raster goes from upper-left to lower-right, line-by-line, that became the standard for screen-space: inverted y. So screen memory (or however the screen is represented in RAM) starts at address/offset zero, and increments from there. All the other features like hardware sprites, used the same convention since it was faster and simpler to do (easier math).

When consumer 3D cards were relatively new, this was inherited, most notably when the hardware started to ship with “z-buffer” support. Carrying all this baggage into 3D engines just made sense, since there was never any confusion about the screen-orientation of it all. Why bother flipping axes around from world and camera space to the screen?

Rogue: Waitasec, how many boons do you have?!

Warlock: I dunno, a bunch. I lost count.

Which is rich considering that a lot of southern conservative politicians model their speaking style on pastors and ministers, complete with reverb to sound like they’re in the pulpit. It’s a signature style. Where the speaker. Has a habit. Of talking. Slowly. And, deliberately. To sound like. They have. Moral authority.

It’s always projection with these clowns.

Hey, sometimes other languages have a more exact word for the concept you’re trying to convey. I completely get it.

That said, the precision is sometimes lost on the audience.

I have the opposite problem. All the adjectives/synonyms come to mind at once, stammering while I have to sift through all that noise in real-time. It makes me feel like my mother tongue is a foreign language sometimes.

Protip: if this is you, just pause mid-sentence and look thoughtful while you pull it together. It’ll make you look even smarter.

It started in the late 40’s, which is on the early side.

My wife is suffering severely with mental health but will not see a psychiatrist. I suspect perimenopause. She does see a therapist.

I’m very sorry to hear that; I can appreciate that the struggle for you both has to be very, very real. It’s a raw deal and it’s hard to manage. I wish you both the very best on this.

What I can share is that finding a good Gyno was instrumental in all this. We went through several practices before we found one that was sympathetic to what was going on. to my complete shock and horror, some seemed far more interested in treating reproduction and reproductive health issues than aging and quality-of-life¹. Your town might be different than mine, but I suggest that you both be prepared to move around a bit if you can’t get support right away. You might find that doctors that are LGBTQ+ friendly as more willing and better equipped to handle this kind of thing.

1. I really need someone with an educated background in women’s issues to make exact sense of this beyond “this isn’t right/fair”. I’m way out of my element.

Rebuilding with period-correct tools and techniques. At least, as best as can be pulled together based on archaeology and the scant documentation we have from the time. The videos make it very clear where he’s taking license and where he’s not, which makes his already top-shelf presentation style that much more entertaining.

This project has also taken forever due to our host taking breaks to work with people on actual peer-reviewed publications about all this. It’s really an enormous project that is contributing to the intersection of engineering and archaeology in profound ways.

There’s also a tendency to experience a diaspora after, or in the immediate years after, school. Say, your mid-20’s or so. That’s potentially a big chunk of your support network disappearing from your life.

Building a routine of healthy habits and sticking to it can make a world of difference.

Exactly. Those coming to diagnosis and support while young stand a chance to be trained and armed for independence, and an adult life of holding one’s self to one’s own standards (hopefully). For many of us oldsters, being diagnosed later, or only learning about mindfulness and CBT well past our formative years, it’s a huge struggle to cobble together habits and a better mindset.

Mrs. Warp Core is also going through this very thing. Basically the wild hormone swings hit her hard, right in the executive function. ADHD meds helped, but ultimately weren’t enough. HRT has helped tremendously. That said, we’re now terrified to roll off of that.

Others may have different experiences, but AFAIK schools tend to be funded by the property taxes in their district. Combined with rampant, unchecked, failed desegreation, and you have some schools that are swimming in cash while everyone else begs to close that gap.