It would yield another religion, originated in a group that could parley their forced participation into fame on social media, which might lead to many more followers and eventually a holy war with the Mormons. Hmm. Might be worth a try.

Granted, but no hyphen.

Henceforth, possession shall be denoted with ` and contraction shall be denoted with '. Possessive plurals shall be denoted with ``.

OP said ‘humorously’ not ‘to make the world a better place.’

That’s practically the definition of ‘like’ to an infant. ‘This makes me feel how boob juice makes me feel.’

You’re running a few centuries behind.

I suspect they’d invent their own. No one introduced religion to humanity. It came from within.

Been in that state a lot. That’s classic depression. Evo-psych has some stupid ideas but their read on depression is solid. That urge to withdraw from society is a human urge. The urge is designed to lead to either, you leaving your band of primates to seek another, or your fellow group members coming and finding you to show how much you matter to them. Modern life doesn’t let that happen though. So many of our relationships are digital or just shallow so no one can tell you’re leaving, and changing your group in a real way is hard. If you want to feel betterment you have to use your rational brain to seek out what your body is instinctively reaching for. Pick something that you have always cared about, and go to a real life event centered on that thing. This can be almost anything, as long as there are real people, really sharing a physical space. Talk to the people about that thing. Don’t do it just to tick it off the list, you have to pay attention to what they are saying because you need to be able to articulate their ideas and then respond to them.

You have to pick one as a favorite. No splitsies.

It’s far stranger to me that it seems kind of half-assed. January, for the month of the god Janus. February, from februare, for purification, the month of purification. March, for the month of the god Mars. April (not quite as clear) possibly derived from Aphrodite. Possibly just from aperilis, meaning ‘next.’ Things seem to be getting a bit wobbly. May, seemingly for the goddess Maia. June, for the goddess Juno. And then everything goes sideways. July for Caesar, a human, but previously Quintilis, for fifth. August was previously Sextilis, for sixth. Then September, sept for seven, October, oct for eight. Nov, 9. Dec, 10. All those things in the first part, and then they just say, ‘Anyone have any more ideas for the rest? No? Oh well, then. We’ll just number the rest and call it done.’

I have to wonder if the actual woman in the image is aware her face is being plastered all over lemmy by some weird guy.

*for telling people they are responsible for what others do in a chatroom they may look at once and then ignore.

I am in discords I never engage with, but literally only have as a place I can search for answers, like a niche alternative to stack overflow. It is absurd for me to be held to the standard of policing everything that happens on those servers just in case some of it might be bad. Discords can also have permissions limited viewing. Are we supposed to know what happens in the channels we can’t see?

More importantly, despite how much work it is to do so, punishments have to be applied on an individual level. Punishing people who are in a class is too vague.

It’s technically true in absolutes. Absolute freedom, without giving up humanity, gives no guarantee of safety provided by anything outside of yourself. Absolute safety exists only in a providential void, where needs are seen to magically, as by a benevolent god. If you seek safety in the absolute freedom, you lose the freedom in one way or another. Walls to keep out enemies keep the builders in. Tools to provide for survival require production and maintenance, taking away your freedom to choose to do things that you enjoy. If you seek freedom in the absolute safety, you have to risk giving external forces access. Those forces always carry risk of harm, whether by malicious action or indifference. However, while it’s necessary to sacrifice one for the other in the absolute, it’s not sufficient. Nothing about the relationship says being less of one necessarily makes you more of the other. The easy example is prison. In most prisons your freedom is severely curtailed, but you certainly aren’t safe. You might even be imprisoned for the purpose of being harmed.

For one, designing NPCs, encounters, etc. is worldbuilding. You wouldn’t say a painter had stopped painting because they switched from a 3" brush to a 000. This part is just a semantic misunderstanding.

It’s not really a matter of good or bad. I’m not saying ‘good DMs worldbuild and bad DMs steal others’ creations.’ I’m saying ‘Why buy an expensive kit just to make a dorodango?’

You can clearly recognise how much work it is to play/run a TTRPG. (scheduling, planning, worldbuilding, session prep level worldbuilding, player counseling and conflict resolution, game mechanism/in-world effect translation in both directions, mechanical balancing, other things I’m not thinking of just now) The whole point of doing all that work is that it grants freedom.

‘Worth’ is absolutely a subjective concept but I say it’s pretty silly to do all the work it takes to play, only to play something locked into preconceived notions, and especially notions that are designed to be lowest-common-denominator to the general population by someone who isn’t even at the table. You can disagree if you like, of course, but it’s not a matter of right/wrong.

Succinctly, I would say any GM who says ‘I don’t want to spend my time thinking about the in-game world’ is just someone who would be happier as a player but is taking one for the team. In the metaphor, he’s the guy at the orgy squeezing a fleshlight between his thighs and wearing a wig so his buddies can pretend. He’s trying to be creative with what’s lying around. However, everyone would be happier if he wasn’t in that position. They’re all just too desperate to go elsewhere. I mean, it’s really nice of the guy to do that for his friends, but it’s not really what they showed up for.

If it’s literal, I have a very, very, very long life of space travel ahead of me.

If it’s in the Carl Sagan metaphorical ‘we are star stuff’ sense, then it could literally be anything.

It comes a-smiling

In a perfect world, anyone who attempted to go around hurting people would be removed from society.

Only if successfully completing experiments is itself good or evil. The question stipulates they are our moral inverse, not opposite in every way.

Slightly surprised I didn’t get more disagreement.

A prebuilt system has one benefit: the players and DM come to the table with a shared set of expectations. This is crucial for things like adventurer’s league, where the players are all strangers, more or less engaging in a tournament without winners, each using the others to get their RPG rocks off, and can be useful to skip the mechanical design level of play-making. It also makes sense for a corporation to try to hit that lowest common denominator to maximise their audience.

However, I maintain, if no one at the table is creative enough to want to world-build beyond that, they might as well all just stick with consumer media. Those who don’t feel the drive to create aren’t suited to DMing, and a table without a DM is a hetero orgy without a woman.

There was a bit too much of it, but that actually was the reason I included the ‘even the ones I like’ part. Old WoD didn’t pull its punches, and generally was not middle-of-the-road.