This is the best approach I’ve found.

Player says, “I make a sales pitch playing on Priscilla’s hatred of our common foe, and that’s why she should sell us these explosives for cheap” and doesn’t have to actually do a sales call. Roll the dice and decide if that means she buys in, makes a counter offer, or what.

Personally I find adding a lot of flavor that has no mechanical impact kind of distracting and tiresome in a different way. Like, sure, it sounds cool you slashed their ankles or whatever, but if it doesn’t do anything I need to discard that. I can’t, in most systems, then be like “ok he just got stabbed in the leg he’s off balance. I can take advantage of that!”. It’s just noise.

Some people have been like “You just don’t have any imagination!” but it’s not that. It’s that the flavor stuff is often actively not true, and it’s tiresome to hold two separate world states in mind at the same time. One where the fighter just stabbed the guy in the hand and threw sand in his eyes, and the other where he hit for 5 damage and his hand + eyes are fine.

(Contrast Fate, which explicitly encourages you to be creative about the scene, and lets you mechanically benefit as well.)

I think the “I move and attack” stuff can get boring, especially if it’s slow. Like, if the players are speedy about it then you’re basically playing a board game, and that’s fine. I start to lose patience when you get the “can i move here? oh i can only move 30 feet. what about here? oh that will provoke. maybe if i cast misty step? oh i can’t cast two leveled spells in a round. Can I hide first? Oh that takes my action? Sorry I usually play rogue. Uhhh I guess I just shoot them.” mode.

I also kind of really want to spend more time in systems where the talky parts have rules, too. D&D tends to be just "wing it’ and “DM decides”. If you’re at the noble’s ball and try to make a big speech to convince the duke to flee before your army attacks, there’s not really a lot of structure there. It can be fine to just “talk it out, man”, but that runs into the problem where my character on paper has CHA 20 but me in real life rocks a solid 10 CHA. Or the other case, where the fighter with 8 CHA has a salesguy for a player, and he punches well above his on-paper skills using his real life personality, where I’m sidelined.

Honestly, just removing all the social skills from D&D would normalize the system.

But there’s also games like Fate, that handle social conflict and sword conflict with the same rules. Stab someone? Roll fight vs whatever they defend with. Stab someone with your words? Roll Cruelty vs their Composure. In either case, if your dice come out on top enough then they don’t get to go on.

I think some peopel who want more RP would hate this, since it gamifies it. But I’d rather have it than the aforementioned “real life sales guy hogs the spotlight” problem.

I suppose you this touches on how I’m in the US, where everything is skewed towards insane nonsense. It would be extremely unusual to find a conservative of any sort here that would support anything remotely anti-car, for example. Even if it would save money.

Not a fan. It admittedly can be an amusing toy - type something in and wow look what it did! But the costs are high, and our society isn’t a utopia where people don’t need to labor for survival.

Maybe if we were post scarcity it wouldn’t matter that much. But we’re not, and this AI stuff is going to hurt labor, benefit the ownership class, and probably be mildly bad for end users too.

They’re in favour of things like universal medicare/dental care, because those programs are shown to be a net benefit fiscally and socially.

I’ve never met someone who was “socially liberal fiscally conservative” who believed this.

They’re usually pro good things, but they don’t want to pay for them, so they’re not actually pro those things at all.

“Small government” and “private individuals will handle it” typically means it just won’t happen.

That makes sense to me.

But they don’t want to make businesses do anything, even if it means choking the oceans with trash and filling our bodies with plastic. Frankly, they’re bad people that we shouldn’t put up with.

“This violation, if proven, only warrants a symbolic fine,” Spiro argued

Reminded of the narcissist’s prayer

“”"
That didn’t happen.
And if it did, it wasn’t that bad.
And if it was, that’s not a big deal.
And if it is, that’s not my fault.
And if it was, I didn’t mean it.
And if I did, you deserved it.
“”"

I hope when the revolution comes, all the people like this lawyer that enabled Musk also go up against the wall.

Feel like we should not make disposable plastic anymore.

Assuming they’re American: they’re an idiot. Sorry. They don’t understand how things are intertwined, and you can’t have social justice for free. If you let laissez-faire policies be, you don’t get socially liberal outcomes. You get capitalist dystopia.

Any plan that depends on “and then the common person develops discerning taste” is doomed to fail. Especially considering that even people who are usually picky might enjoy something basic from time to time

Why is that valid but “the US should have no qualms about footing the bill and doing it” not?

Eradicating infectious diseases (that don’t respect borders) is a net positive for everyone.

I was going to say something similar to that too. Specifically, the consolidation of power means there’s less smaller companies taking risks. You’d think a big company with Disney money could afford to be weird and experimental, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

I say this despite enjoying superhero movies

Others have touched on this but this also feels downstream from the capitalist hellscape. Most people don’t have a lot of spending money. Movies are pricey and a bad money:time ratio.

I bet if wages were up, more people would go to the theater. I don’t want to spend $40 to watch a movie and eat popcorn, but I’d consider it for $3.

I used to use RPG.net a lot. They have pretty strict moderation, which keeps the place from turning into some kinds of shit holes. But you also can’t tell someone they’re a fool, or all Republicans are traitors. Takes some getting used to, but is probably worth it.

Sometimes I think about the billions of dollars of wasted productivity caused by Outlook being so bad at rendering email.

Also frustrating: how end users don’t care. You can explain how Uber mistreats employees or Airbnb causes rents to rise double digit percentages, but they’ll just be like “oh but it’s convenient”.

Twitter is a Nazi bar but “it has such good memes!”

If people cared just a little more, things could be so much better.

every American worker pays into the social security system as a tax on income.

One irritating note on this: there’s a limit to how much social security tax you pay per year. So if you’re making a lot of income, you just stop paying this tax partway through the year.

This is pants on head stupid and regressive. It should be the other way around. Your first, let’s say $10,000 should be exempt from the tax, and it should get steeper as income goes up.

Rich guy absolutely does not need the bump in take home pay from hitting the cap. Poor guy definitely could use the extra income early income not being taxed.

I’m just so mad all the time about people licking the boots of the rich. They don’t need breaks! They’re rich! They’re going to be fine!

If you think ‘voluntary’ is acceptable for anything important you want corporations to do, you have no business making decisions about real life. If it’s voluntary, they’ll only do it if it benefits them.