When are you finding the time to get bored?
Random Rants LXIV: Who's Acting Like a Child Now?
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dusters
Emperor
Erm - I have 2.5 months of vacation which I have been ranting about for two weeks now I think 
The D&D rulebooks do state (at least the ones I use, which don't go beyond 2nd Ed. AD&D) that they are guidelines, and the DM is free to tweak the campaign as he/she sees fit as long as it doesn't unbalance the game.
My own favorite gaming system is Fighting Fantasy, which was originally developed as a solo gamebook series, but which has been adapted to allow multi-player games, run by a GM. In its purest form, Fighting Fantasy only uses two 6-sided dice, and three character traits (Skill, Stamina, and Luck). Some adventures will add one or two others (ie. Fear). Some adventures use magic, but you don't have huge amounts of multi-level spells.
When I design D&D campaigns, I use elements from D&D, AD&D, Fighting Fantasy, plus home-brew rules. Most of my D&D playing has been with people who were also in the SCA and had at least some acquaintance with what items can reasonably be carried and what actions can reasonably be taken while also engaged in swordfighting or archery, and while wearing armor. And like you, I don't care what the numbers say. Just try to act it out, and if you fall on your face, it's too ridiculous for the game.
One DM we had decided to make hand props. So when we found a scroll, there was a physical piece of paper to unroll - no fudging which character was doing it or how, as it was played out in real-time, by a real person. Same with potions (we used water and food coloring in small plastic tubes that were originally used for cake decorations). If you're going to drink the potion, you had to literally drink it and take whatever consequences happened, for good or bad.
Whatever that is, no, I have not heard about it.
Not sure if they would be useful to you, but I ran across some game design books on Amazon.ca. You might try there, using "game design" as the search words and see what comes up for you.
And it would also be good if you played more. That's a great way to see what kinds of actions that players could figure out that DMs don't necessarily anticipate. One of my groups pretty much took everything that wasn't nailed down, in a fortress from which they were attempting to escape... which is why at the end of the adventure they could have opened their own second-hand bedding shop. They didn't start with any backpacks, so they stole every pillowcase they found, reasoning that they would be handy for carrying loot.
Well, the fortress was a bit stingy on the loot (ie. coins, jewels, magic stuff), but the group ended up with several dozen pillowcases and other common household items!
Did you self-publish on a commercial site, or post on a free site? If it's in English, would you like to post a link?
Not sure about dusters, but after my family stopped spending the summer holiday in BC and just stayed home, I found summer holidays rather boring. After a couple of weeks I was ready to go back to school, and would have if summer classes had been offered.
So one summer I decided to get a head start on the fall and ended up watching the morning and evening news, and every lecture and documentary I could find on TV (this was back in the late '70s with fewer than a dozen TV channels, so there wasn't much selection). Still, I did learn some stuff from University of the Air (had to be up at the crack of 6 am for that!) and from the ACCESS channel (it's no longer an education channel, but at one point it had ambitions of becoming the Canadian equivalent of PBS and had some pretty decent content). Actually, I learned enough from some of the stuff on ACCESS that summer that I was allowed to skip a few parts of the social studies class I was in that fall... since the teacher was covering the exact same content I'd already watched that summer.
shadowplay
your ad here
Bricked my laptop. 
Thank you, I just don't want to dump all my troubles on you constantly.
Yeah, it really isn't something I should be worrying about. But it's a small nagging feeling that won't go away.
dusters
Emperor
Yea, I'm exactly in the situation you described. I'm a bit of a workaholic. In one of the previous summers I started watching educational youtube videos, I could do that again, thanks.
I published on a rather free site, but I know that the people who have a say in Latvian literature read that site, so it is a step between trying to publish something to general public on the internet and trying to publish something as a book.
No, it's in Latvian. Since I posted a story in Iron Pen few years ago and then retelled its plot to many people, it turns out the plot was ok, idea was ok, but I can't write in English nowhere near the level I can in Latvian. I have been writing for 13 years, with only 2-3 tries to do anything in English and the idioms/oxymorons etc I use in Latvian simply don't translate well and I lack experience overall.
sophie
Break My Heart
Be the change that you want to see in the world.
sophie
Break My Heart
be the meme that you want to see in the world
gay_Aleks
from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!
dont let your dreams be memes
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
I recognise some of those words.
gay_Aleks
from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!
does this mean you've become old and crotchety
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
I'm only surprised it took this long.
Indeed. That is why we are not mentioning those individuals Dachs alluded to. At all.
ok so this is gonna be like trying to get a toddler through Mordor
Kanye West, who is a popular black rapper, did this thing at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards where he interrupted the presentation of an award to Taylor Swift, who is a popular white pop vocalist, by declaring that Beyoncé, who is the Queen, and who is also black, had really deserved to win the award. Kanye is closely associated with both Beyoncé and her husband, Jay-Z, who used to be a black rapper but who is now primarily a successful black businessman, but he also thought that the video in question was actually better than Taylor's, which it was, and he also often does extremely silly things, some of which are a court jester speaking truth to power and some of which are a court jester making crappy knock-knock jokes while everybody in the room stares in horror. Anyway, the incident was kind of well known at the time and spawned a few memes, like "imma let you finish". Kanye was widely criticized for it, because it was kinda dumb and obnoxious, even if it was also funny and true. Even the President reportedly referred to Kanye as a "jacka*s", which is also funny and true, and helps to show that while a lot of the outrage was white people getting mad at a black man for being annoying to a white woman, a lot of it was just people being annoyed at Kanye for being Kanye.
Kanye and Taylor were generally regarded to be feuding at that point, but it was one of those pop music feuds that doesn't even really involve all that much talking. Kanye apologized, and then he didn't, and then he kinda backtracked. In the interim, he married Kim Kardashian, who is a white businesswoman who invented a popular mobile gaming app. Since they are a celebrity couple who live in the pages of tabloid magazines, they are sometimes referred to as Kimye.
Earlier in 2016, Kanye put out a new album, The Life of Pablo, which was generally pretty good. It included a track, "Famous", wherein he implied that the 2009 imbroglio was responsible for Taylor's subsequent musical success and stardom, and wherein he referred to her as a <snip>, and wherein he raised the possibility that she would still be willing to have sex with him. He came in for a significant amount of criticism from, ah, "certain corners of pop culture" for saying that, because of how rude and disrespectful it was. Taylor also complained about it, which makes sense, because few people like to be called a <snip>. Taylor also complained about the implication that she is a slut, which also makes sense, because few people like to be called a slut.
Last month, Kim claimed in an interview with GQ, which is a magazine about expensive-looking-but-cheap clothes and dick jokes, that she actually had proof that Kanye had talked to Taylor about the lyrics in "Famous" to avoid any personal rancor, and that she had given her personal imprimatur to the song since they were both entertainers being entertaining. Last night, she produced the aforementioned evidence by putting a video on Snapchat, which is a mobile app for sending people unsolicited images of penises, in which Taylor was filmed talking to Kanye at a party and doing exactly what Kim said she had been doing. The video was clearly edited (in one instance, to remove a private phone number), so there is still plenty of room for truthers to squeeze in, but it appears to be the genuine article, and it shows exactly what Kim claimed it did: Kanye clearing the air with Taylor, who then proceeded to talk to the media about how mad she was at him anyway.
This relatively hard evidence of Taylor Swift being a dime-a-dozen backstabbing scumbag feeds into another pop-culture "discussion", which is that a lot of people are starting to think that Taylor Swift is a really very phony person - even more so than the usual celebrity - and that most of her "private life" is invented to give tabloids meat and consolidate a core of die-hard fans. Much of her personal and musical persona has to do with recording breakup songs about real-life boyfriends who have emotionally wounded her, which makes sense except for the fact that there's an unending train of these guys and she breaks up with them after a couple of weeks, which is not really all that long for an emotional wound. Also, there are a lot of people who believe that at least some of these relationships are entirely fabricated, not just that the emotional distress is. Here is an article about that very topic that was posted a week ago, i.e. before the Snapchat video.
Since these two are pretty famous people, and since everything about Kanye, and Taylor, and Kanye and Taylor, is usually ridiculous and funny, it blanketed most forms of social media for a large chunk of last night and is still being regurgitated. It is <snip>, in the sense that there is no reason anybody should care, which makes it funnier, which is one of the reasons why people do care.
And "SMDH" means "shaking my damn head".
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