🇨🇦🇩🇪🇨🇳张殿李🇨🇳🇩🇪🇨🇦

My Dearest Sinophobes:

Your knee-jerk downvoting of anything that features any hint of Chinese content doesn’t hurt my feelings. It just makes me point an laugh, Nelson Muntz style as you demonstrate time and again just how weak American snowflake culture really is.

Hugs & Kisses, 张殿李

  • 19 Posts
  • 88 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: November 14th, 2023

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  • Get an A2-sized paper grid map (FAR cheaper than laminated) and then get an A2-size piece of that plastic sheeting they use in cheap restaurants to protect the tablecloth (about 1.5mm thick transparent, soft plastic).

    That’s what I use (well, mine are bespoke to fit my table) and not only does it give me RPG-related grid map capabilities, it’s also good for holding board game boards and displays in place, protecting them from drinks and food stains, while giving a surface that you can write on and that gives good grip for playing pieces.










  • Perplexity is the only one I would think of using seriously, and then only when I want it to, say, summarize something I already know.

    After which I fact-check it like crazy and hammer at it until it gets things right.

    One annoying habit it has is that somewhere in the chain of software before or after the LLM it looks for certain key topics it doesn’t want to talk about and either comes out and says it (anything involving violence or crime) or has a visibly canned hot take that it repeats without variance no matter what added information you provide or how much cajoling you try.

    At other points it starts into the canned responses, but when you catch it it will try again. Like I frequently want song lyrics translated and each time I supply some that it recognizes as such it throws up a canned response about how it will not be a party to copyright breaking. Then after a few rounds back and forth about how I’m clearly not doing this commercially and am just a fan who wants to understand a song better it will begrudgingly give me the translation.

    Then five minutes later in the SAME CONVERSATION it will run through that cycle all over again when I give it another song.

    Lather. Rinse. Repeat.


  • A modern day police procedural, likely using either CORPS (if I want crunch) or FATE (if I want drama). Think something like Law & Order without the fascist apologia (but WITH Jerry Orbach!) expanded a bit to include peripheral characters including the criminals, the families of both sides, etc.

    And then the world ends.

    Well, not quite ends, but there’s a rather sudden drop in the standard of living as the half of the world facing the sun gets burned to a crisp, in effect, while the ensuing massive wave of fire and plasma scorches most of what is left. Only very small portions of the world survive (and that only barely). Nobody IC will know how or why it happened (I naturally will—it’s one of the scenarios taken from CORPS Apocalypse) but when it does, the characters will have to face living in a world where most of humanity is dead, the trappings of civilization are gone (most important of those being the supply chains that keep cities alive!) and all that’s left are the buildings and a rapidly-dwindling supply of essentials.

    I tried doing this once when some players were saying they wanted a campaign that would surprise them. And surprise them it did, but apparently this was not the kind of surprise they were looking for. I want to try it again with players who will be strongly warned in advance that the campaign will go completely off the rails and change genre after a few sessions of play establishes their characters, their personalities, their relationships, etc.



  • I’m not sure how you could be in the '90s, walk into a game store to get your AD&D books, and not see at the very least the White Wolf books and Call of Cthulhu. And quite possibly a bunch of other smaller-press books. Even comic shops in the early to mid '90s had more variety and selection in RPGs than modern game shops¹ tend to have.

    So there’s “not being obsessed” and then there’s “must be wearing some very heavy blinders”. And the people who published those AD&D fixes in the '90s had to have been wearing blinders with pinholes in them.


    ¹ In my Summer 2024 trip across Canada I made a point of visiting many game shops and they were shockingly almost all board games with a few minor D&D selections; like not even the core rules of D&D. Ottawa and Calgary were the only two places that had respectable RPG selections in some shops; Fandom II in Ottawa and the Sentry Box in Calgary. In the late '80s and early '90s even a cow town like Regina, Sasksatchewan had three game shops with decent RPG selection.




  • There was a whole phase in early “game design” where every game was basically D&D with a bit of a facelift here and there. Genuinely new games were few and far between (and are the celebrated games of the era now). Then the '80s happened and game design went all over the place with wildly creative ways of doing things happening (and like every wildly creative phase in any discipline, a lot of it was a really stupid direction to take things, so withered quickly on the vine).

    Then this weird phase happened in the early '90s where people nobody had ever heard of or from came out of the woodwork to tout their “grand new RPG” that “solved all the problems of previous games” … and it was always just another variant of D&D. These were people who’d been playing (usually) AD&D for over a decade building up house rules and then deciding that they would publish these house rules as a “new” game system. And it was clear they’d never even once been in a game store, not to mention talking with other designers or playing other games, over their entire span. Because they would “solve” things by proudly proclaiming the number of classes they had so you could play the character you want. (One game had 114 classes!) Or how you could play any race and class in combination. Or, you know, things that hadn’t been an issue at all since the introduction of Runequest in 1978.

    It was always so tragic. These games were amateur in the literal sense: the product of great love. A lot of time, effort, and money had gone into their publication. And they were doomed on impact because while they were, arguably, an improvement over AD&D (the king of the gaming castle at the time) they weren’t sufficiently good to be worth switching to. I had about 20, maybe even 30, of these games on my bookshelf just as a mute testament to what happens if you try to hit a market without even elementary market research.