#immovablecod

[st-just]

Last year I started reading Worm because of your blog, loved it. Read some/most of Pact and really enjoyed it, love the world and how the practice works. I've started reading Pale now and am enjoying it so far. Just wanted to say thank you for talking about them and recommending them 😊

Oh, you've entirely welcome! I'm really glad you're enjoying them!

And I am always absurdly pleased when anyone reads anything they like because of me. So thanks for the ask!

[st-just]

Any suggestions for music to listen to while reading Pale?

honestly I'm terrible at, like, mood-appropriate music. I just listen to whatever weird corners youtube autoplay takes me off the last song I thought to load, and when it ends up on a 6-hour megamix and I get sick of the genre just start over.

Um, opening to the floor, any suggestions?

[st-just]

immovablecod replied to your post “Anyway, I’m now 90 pages into Too Like The Lightning, and I have to...”

Have you read Ann Leckie's Imperial Radch trilogy? Ancillary Justice and those? She does a similar/same thing there

Ah, but just using ‘she’ for everyone is simplicity itself, and pretty easy to follow once you pick it up. (I did rather like in Provenance where we get the POV’s from some non-Radch characters who find that particular cultural tick honestly pretty insulting). 

Whereas I just finished the page-long aside where the narrator is arguing with the reader that, while his description of fashion and outfit might lead one to assume a feminine presentation, the character in question is in fact just full-time cosplaying a Enlightenment era French dandy, and as such will be refereed to with masculine pronouns. (That they are a woman being entirely besides the point in either direction).

Anyway, I have been repeatedly assured that Dominic is going to be my favorite character, so quite looking forward to his.  

[lawfulgoodness]

Mostly Athletics, though if I can ask more, Diplomacy and Endurance too. Thank you!

“Game Master Ask Prompt.”  

Athletics - Do you have any tips for running combat?

Never, ever, ever reroll initiative for every round.  I don’t care what the rules say. just don’t.  It makes everything last longer.  Also, when fibbing rolls: only lie in the players’ favor, never lie to make your NPCs or villains look more badass than the die dictate.  Let the players feel awesome.

Diplomacy - What player style do you have most trouble GMing for?

I’m sure nobody will be surprised to learn that I suck at combat strategy, so those players that spend their off-weekends playing Axis & Allies or Risk can usually take me on no problem unless I’ve got a handful of mooks to charge in if combat gets too easy.

Endurance - What’s your worst tabletop experience?

So I’ve got 2 stories that really stand out.  One of them I already mentioned  as one of my craziest most bizarre experiences.  The other one occurred at my very first tabletop session.  I had been invited by some friends to observe their game to help convince me that roleplaying wasn’t actually the spawn of Satan (I grew up around the moral panic of d&d, so that was my initial baggage).  At the game, they mention the fact that one of the players is rather... intense... and they’re looking to split off the game into a different group.  When the session started, this guy had captured a storm trooper (it was a Star Wars game), and proceeds to torture him for information.

Now, this wasn’t just “I want to torture him for information.”  It was graphic, detailed instructions of how he was torturing them, and what Willpower rolls he would have to make to resist.  Even after the GM made it abundantly clear that the Storm Trooper knew nothing useful, the player said, “Well my player wouldn’t know that, so I keep pulling out his finger nails.”  It was super creepy and almost enough to convince me everything I’d been told about D&D was true.