People are emotional. All of us, more or less. Some people also sometimes have other ways of engaging with the world.
But cars are emotional for people. So was 9/11. Facts don’t really matter.
So when you tell someone something bad about cars, they have an emotional response and that’s game over. Especially if they see you as out-group.
I don’t know how to fix this but I think it’s the root of all of our problems.
Maybe if we can get people to see experts as in-group again?
I accidentally made a rom-com subplot in one of my games… Twice… And the players loved it both times.
The first time there was a divorced smith lady who sort of had a death wish, and the timid tavern owner who had a massive crush on her. Of course the players wanted to set them up.
The second time, the players had to infiltrate a masquerade ball. Sadly I’m starting to forget the details. I think there was tension around meeting them while masked and, like a rom com, trying to figure out what they thought about the PC. And then they tried to get the NPC involved in their heist, because they just happened to have a skill they needed. And of course it wasn’t a clean heist, and the NPC had some trauma.
Mergers and acquisitions should be a lot harder than they are. Maybe even prohibited in nearly all cases.
What constitutes a hobby?
I was encouraged from a young age to read books. I still do. I enjoy it. Are books a hobby?
My parents are both music fans. Had a big music collection, went to a lot of concerts. I’m the same. I enjoy it.
It’s a short leap from books (eg: lotr) and some music (eg: some metal, some prog rock) to DND and similar games. It looked cool so I got into it.
Bikes are pretty ecologically friendly and the exercise is good. I’ve only dipped my toes into biking but it wouldn’t be a big leap to buy my own bike, find s meetup, or whatever.
A friend of mine learned about weaving… somewhere. I don’t know where actually. But they said "that looks cool’ and looked into it. Now they weave and knit and such. Read about it online, watched some videos, signed up for a class.
A guy I know saw some photos online and went “that’s cool. I could do that” and I think took a beginner class in it. Bought an entry level camera and just has fun taking pictures of stuff.
The common thread here is it’s all stuff people enjoy.
Maybe delete more of your social media. That stuff is bad for you. A friend of mine started tracking how much time they spent on it, and realized it was like 4 hours a day doing nothing on Instagram. It’s mostly trash. You don’t need it.
Some guys at work are getting into chess. Not sure where it started but now they’re playing and reading about strategy and stuff.
Don’t beat yourself up over being bad at things.
Those people aren’t a good match for you (or maybe anyone).
Their first pathfinder game was so excruciatingly guide dang it I never finished it, and never even considered this game. I kind of assumed it was the same way, where there’s stuff like “Ah, you didn’t return to this unmarked forest on day 7, so now you never get a wizard”
Oh, now I remember having an argument on here with some asshole who insisted I just have “fomo” over this. Sign posting and foreshadowing are only to appease fomo, I guess.
Sometimes I feel like I want to play a game that I’d run, but then I realize that’s the cliche “Go write a book”
Some people probably know them in real life. Like, you might have a friend who’s like “Yeah this [slur] wouldn’t update her mod so i posted [hateful thing] on her insta”. You could talk to them. People listen to their in-group more than randoms online.
But then again, the worst sort of people probably mostly have the worst sort of friends, and reinforce their bad behavior.
My favorite is “I knew a poly couple and they broke up (but nevermind all the monogamous people who broke up)”
Monogamy vs non-monogamy is another axis of this, where people often find their unexamined assumptions challenged.
Video Games are a broad medium, akin to reading. Asking “should I get into books?” would be similarly difficult to answer.
Also, be mindful of sturgeon’s law. 90% of everything is crap. For every “Taylor Swift” that was widely popular and successful, there’s 9 meh bands no one remembers.
All of that said, it’s a wide and deep medium with a lot of experiences.
If you like card games, there’re related genres. Deck builders are popular. Slay the Spire is popular. Cobalt Core is fun and not as hard. Monster Train is pretty good.
Those are all also “rogue lites”, so you could make the leap from there to something like FTL.
Lots of options.
Probably don’t spend a lot of money up front. Stuff goes on sale on Steam pretty often.
Probably avoid “gacha” games that are free to play or have “loot box” stuff. Those tend to be exploitive and bad.
I get the impression that some people have such decision fatigue, asking them to do something seemingly trivial is akin to asking someone without limbs to pick up a spoon.
People’s brains don’t work good.
Most people don’t know much, and don’t care that they don’t know much. Half of US adults can’t read at a 6th grade level. They don’t care about and probably do not understand complex topics.
That’s it. They just want cat gifs, and that’s the end of the thought.
I knew someone who was smart and successful and politically aware. She didn’t care about any of this. She was tired from work and just wanted the familiar ease or twitter. Trying to figure out which server to sign up for and finding content was too much work.
A lot of people have executive dysfunction. Making a choice is hard.
“would you rather have nothing to eat, or poison?”
If you eat nothing, maybe you can figure out a better solution with your remaining time. If you eat poison, you’re probably going to be too sick (or dead) to improve things.
Trump is poison.
Also Biden did improve some things, so it’s less “nothing” and more “some crackers”. Sure, a full meal would be better.
t’s not stupidity, it was a clear option between something the American people know does not work, and something that might work.
There is no reasonable expectation that Trump would “work” for anyone outside of some very wealthy and grifters. So, yes, voting for Trump is stupid.
Accelerationists can fuck off.
Satire is dead. Unfortunately, this guy somehow survives despite his best efforts to get sick.
Never used Facebook much. Nor Myspace before it. Seemed like it had some obvious pitfalls that everyone else was ignoring.
Used Twitter for a little while, but it was just making me mad. Then horrible guy bought it, so I deleted the already abandoned account.
Instagram also seemed like a source of feeling bad, so I never used it much.
I left reddit recently. It had some good content but the ownership sucks. With general Internet search getting bad, losing reddit sucks. Like, I searched yesterday for how to disable a setting in some app, and landed on some AI slop website that told me to write a letter to my local news station.
So this is all that’s left for me. It’s frustrating that most people don’t give a shit and will just move on to the next private platform. I had a friend who was generally smart and successful, but she just didn’t give a shit about this kind of thing. She wanted her easy entertainment, so she was on all the major platforms. Mastodon “didn’t have good content” so she didn’t use it.
One of the reasons I enjoy games with metagame currencies like Fate points or Willpower. I just don’t find it fun or interesting to lose due to bad dice most of the time. Especially if the bad dice just delay things instead of resolving them, like one time a D&D fight against some ghouls took like 45 minutes because no one rolled well. No tension or stakes. Just dice for an extra ten rounds. Absolutely flubbing a roll can be interesting, but I like when there’s more choice involved.
“I rolled a 0 to grab the thief? No, that’s stupid. I’m a Royal Bodyguard I’m used to acting fast. I spend a fate point and bump that up”
More generally “succeed at a cost” is just missing from D&D as a concept.
It’s federated with my lemmy instance. I neither seek it out nor avoid it.
I’ve tried this a couple times with limited success.
Those were then bumped up or down depending on if it was “budget”, “consumer grade”, or “corporate grade”. Hacking into some nobody chump’s security system from across the street is something the hacker PC get done for free with a little luck. Hacking into the ASI Corporate HQ maglock door subsystem from across town would be a feat of legend, not something someone can likely do just off the cuff.
I do like that Fate encourages players to do some preparation for hard tasks. Have someone use their talky skills to talk up some junior workers, and learn something about the network. That’s an advantage you can invoke. Have someone spend resources to bribe someone, that’s another advantage.
A problem that’s come up each time I’ve tried this kind of game is not having a shared understanding of what “hacking” can do. Fate kind of helps here because the actions are kind of agnostic about what skills are creating them. If you’re trying to remove someone from the scene, that’s likely an Attack whether you’re using “hacking” or “fight” or “intimidate”. The hacker might fake a text from the boss telling the bouncer he’s fired where the bruiser might just deck him, but they go down the same kind of mechanical funnel. The tactical considerations for the players comes from like “what looks like a softer target: his face or his phone? is anyone going to see?”