No, this is the kind of rhetoric that keeps ICE away. If they know they will be facing armed people who can shoot them with impunity because the AG who could prosecute murder has said they won't, then they will stay the fuck out of there.

They are cowardly. They will go find softer targets.

Oh wait, did you want a *good* game to do this?

Start with something like 13A, or any D&D of your choice. Divide all defenses in half, replace d20 with d10, and have the 13A escalation die count down from 6.

Round 1 everything hits. Round 7+ it's normal D&D math.

Request fulfilled.

Yeah, that one's a longtime Zak stan, as opposed to a longtime Zak puppet. Same result though: ignore/block/etc.

Some films give us characters as a lens to understand why people may take the stances they do, individualizing behavior.

Aster pulls out a big Acme magnifying glass that says "everyone is stupid and venal and selfish and full of shit" on the handle.

By responding in this way, they turned reports of their misdeeds into "another OSR vs storygames flame war, vol. 1000000."

So anyone trying to make it a thing is immediately sus. Why do they feel the need to create thought-terminating tribalism? What thoughts are they afraid people might have?

More than that, it makes me suspicious of whoever is doing it.

Some of the worst people in the scene used to try to stoke these fires and then when faced with an accusation about something they did, they would say the accuser was on the wrong team. Just to deflect, to make people tune out.

If you think you can just take a bunch of stale mechanics inherited from D&D but delete some and call it a fruitful void, you are mistaken.

That's just a regular void. The kind that is empty and fruitless.

I first saw the phrase with @lumpley.bsky.social talking about Dogs in the Vineyard.

When I think about Dogs and what is the core of the game, I think about Sin and Judgement (unmechanized, void-fruit), sure. But I also think about escalation and fallout (the core of the mechanics, orchard-fruit).

The German stock exchange kept going up and up in WW2. Even as they invaded the USSR and ground to a halt at Stalingrad.

Thinking "this is so dumb and disastrous, it has to crash soon" is wrong. It can always get dumber and more disastrous. For many years.

Nono, he said *five* buckets.

Easy mnemonic:

Pillars three, Wot-See
Pillars five, for Allah we strive
Pillars four, Anime Sickos Podcast

Hell yeah, Red Cliff was great!

I don't remember much other than it was great, so I'd better go rewatch it.

Listen, we need to hear them out. If we respond negatively to "drown all babies" just because we don't want to drown all babies, we might drive those people away when we should be welcoming everyone in our community.

Auto plants work together. They don't produce all the parts and assemble them all in one place.

Some factories produce smaller parts, some assemble into larger components, some put larger components with other parts into finished cars, etc.

A part may cross from Windsor to Detroit and back again.

Aw, thanks! It's always nice to hear that!

I learned many of my roleplaying skills and philosophy from some crusty old forums.

So hopefully we can all agree, in order of importance to learning RPGs, what matters is:

Systems > forums > blogs > smelly Joe at the FLGS > reddit

"System matters vs Players matter" is a valuable discussion because both are obviously true and people can reasonably disagree on the amount of relative importance each holds.

"System matters vs System doesn't matter" is nonsense because one of those is obviously false when taken literally.