Honestly the biggest thing that in my experience makes DnD or any ttrpg run smoothly is buy-in
Players have to buy-in to the story otherwise it won't work
And by this I don't mean be railroaded by the DM I mean like,
When one of my players switches characters and I introduce them to the party by them just happening to be nearby, I know my players will find a reason to talk to the new PC cause it's important. If there's a noise outside they'll investigate (albeit cautiously) cause that's the point of the noise outside
You have to meet the DM at least halfway and Want to engage with the world
If people are sad about The Wizard Facism game coming from someone you used to look up to and admire, may I suggest an author whose books are filled with nuanced characters and strong, dynamic women?
Tamora Pierce has been writing since the 80’s and has two worlds of magic and fantasy and bonus!!! Isn’t a transphobic POS.
I want this in every library, everywhere. After all, some kids won’t even google this stuff because they don’t want parents/siblings checking their browser history.
This is really awesome. And if you’re not familiar with how the Dewey Decimal system works - the numbers subject-based, which means these numbers are applicable in EVERY library. So if you see something you want to research on this list - look for those same numbers in any of your local libraries.
You’ve just joined an adventuring party. The rogue wordlessly gives you a handkerchief and slinks away. “Ah, it’s his way of handling his kleptomania. Instead of stealing things at random, he’ll be going specifically for that.”
You were confused about it, at first, because you’re particularly sharp-eyed. You’re the party ranger, you’re often the lookout, you have to be. You watch her in towns, eyeing the fancy lordlings that pass you on the street. The hunger in her eyes.
(Is it anger?)
But she was really cool about that one fuckup with the bear that first time out, even though she got a bit… mauled.
(You still feel bad about that.)
And she does stay out of trouble when you’re in town, even when someone is practically dangling their coinpurse in front of you, even when you’re tempted.
And she’s, like, really pretty.
So you try to help.
At first, you leave it in a pocket, but just a little bit out. Like you stuffed it there in a hurry. You do that for days.
(You watch her for days, and she smiles at you when she catches you at it. Like you have a private joke, together.)
She sidles up to you, at one point, and leans around you, tucking the handkerchief into your pocket, right before you’re arriving at a big town. Her warm hand on your hip, her other slipping the hanky deeper into your pocket.
“You have to be careful with your things, in a place like this,” she said, giving you a wink. “Anybody might grab them.”
“Right,” you said. “Of course. How silly.” You’re a bit embarrassed, really.
(Your hip tingles where her hand was. Silly, silly, silly.)
But you’ve worked it out, now. You figured it out, you get it. She picked you out because she wants the challenge. She picked you because you are sharp-eyed. That makes sense- it’s not fun if it’s easy, right?
Left some water bottles in my car overnight last night and I thought they would be frozen when I got them out this morning, but they weren't. Then I got excited because I thought they were supercooled and would turn into ice when jostled, so I slammed one down on the kitchen counter, but nothing happened. Disappointed, I opened it to drink and that's when it froze.
So I took a little video of another one because it always makes me happy to see.
I used to work in a deli, and one time the thermostat for our walk-in cooler broke and kept running overnight. The next morning, every bottle of water and soda were in this state. Every. Single. Bottle.
Didn't notice until the first customer came in to buy some water and it turned into an ice cube in their hands.
There’s a lot to be said for low- or no-prep gaming, but it kind of annoys me that no-prep advocates keep promoting it as a solution to problems it fundamentally cannot solve.
The fact of the matter is that low-prep gaming requires much greater active player buy-in than high-prep gaming does, which means it’s absolutely not going to fix the problem of all your labour-intensive groundwork going to waste because your players are deliberately refusing to engage with any of it.
Like, do you really think the player who looks at all the work you’ve done laying out a pre-written scenario and immediately runs in the exact opposite direction is going to yes-and the scenario you came up with on the fly? Most of the time they’re just going to stonewall your improv because they think that’s what winning is.
Modifying the way you construct scenarios won’t address the basic lack of respect that leads to issues like this in the first place. You can’t fix the problem of players treating the GM like their dancing monkey by changing the tune.
As someone who has personally had to take those calls, they do matter. It just doesn’t matter what you say in the call: the only way your calls actually reach the politician is a tally sheet of each call received on different topics. End of the day/week, the politician gets told “you had X many calls about people wanting you to do this, Y many calls about people wanting you to do this, etc.”
Individual calls matter little, but if they get tons of calls on one topic then they take it seriously. The example above was probably during a time where the office was flooded with so many calls at once that they took the phones off the hook, which actually means that calls are working especially well. When the phones are blowing up, everyone in the office notices.
The best call to your representative does not involve you making an impassioned and well-argued case, because you’re probably talking to an intern. The most effective call you can make takes 15 seconds: “I am from [place in your district] and I am very pissed about [topic].”
Get yourself a fabric store that will light your fabric on fire for you
No but legit I asked what the fiber content of something was and the guy didn’t know so he cut a chunk off and lit it on fire and felt the ashes and was like. Yeah this is mostly cotton with a lil bit of silk. And that was the moment I knew. This is it. This is the fabric store for me. Also that guy is marriage material. Not for me but damn some person is gonna be so happy with him.
Ok but this is actually one of the easiest ways to tell what something is made of! I did a textiles degree and one day as part of a class we all went outside with a pile of scrap fabric and set fire to the little pieces and recorded how they burned. We were given a chart that looked something like this to tell what each fabric was (it gets a little tricky is it’s a mix of fabrics though). Why did we do this? There is very little regulation in the textiles industry so a lot of materials are mislabelled as something they aren’t and sold for more than they should be, also sometimes people buy fabric second hand or discounted which doesn’t have any label at all. If you have a fabric you are having doubts about, cut a tiny piece off and do the burn test and you should know pretty fast what you are dealing with. Anyways your fabric store should be lighting things on fire because this means that they are actually checking what the fabrics are and aren’t trying to pass cheap stuff off as more expensive than it is.
gummygunk
kianamaiart
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