To add to what others are saying, you should consider the framing of your question. Progress isn’t all-or-nothing. There will still be situations where a truck, van, or car is the best tool for the job, and electrifying them will take time, or require advances in technology. We would still benefit from expanding public transportation and decreasing the need to use a personal vehicle for everyday tasks.

Eventually, though, yes, it would be good to replace diesel trucks with trains where possible, and electrify the ones we can’t, when we can.

“You are using Bonetti’s Defense against me, ah?”

Boring possibility: the DM thinks halflings and gnomes are largely redundant, and picked one to ban.

Or the one shot involves outsiders getting involved with a halfling community in trouble!

Kender, who were similar to halflings and I think are now a variant, were notorious for this. Their schtick is that they “borrow” things from their party members, not understanding that it’s theft. It gave assholes license to be assholes under the guise of roleplay, until the table inevitably needs a talk.

If the players are demanding wild results, especially if they’re the kind to roll unprompted, then sure.

But in my experience, it’s usually just a little flourish or a small bonus, which I think is fine.

And if the issue is that a nat 20 doesn’t guarantee success, technically, sure, but I’d be more annoyed being asked to make a pointless roll. I know there are reasons, like a hidden target number, or other characters being able to do it, but in general, I’d rather just hear “no” than go through a pointless check.

Like others have said, the rules are… bad. Especially the latest edition. A couple of the older editions are “favorites,” but still mixed bags, and lots of people just take the setting and use it in another system entirely.

There’s a Shadowrun actual play podcast called NeoScum that I loved (now concluded), and it began with “It’s like D&D mixed with Bladerunner!” and ended with “Fuck this, fuck Shadowrun, the universe rearranges itself so we can play a different game.” They even had a goofy recurring bit they would do whenever they had to stop play to look up rules or calculate something, which happened constantly. It’s also not a player issue, since they’ve switched to Call of Cthulhu for another story (Gutter) and just don’t have that problem.

Nobody hates Shadowrun more than the people who love Shadowrun. :P

Utilitarianism for people who think the humanities are pointless

I also bounced off of the Reloaded version (and SW in general). Unfortunately, I can’t really speak to the alternatives from personal experience.

However, I’ve been gearing up to try Call of Cthulhu, and found out it has a Western setting! Down Darker Trails. I had never heard about it, but what I could find was really positive. If and when I run a weird west game, that would probably be my first choice, and certainly a top contender.

The only good cops are horses and dog.

EDIT: Guys, I know police dogs attack people. They are trained to do so from birth. I don’t blame the dogs.

I’m depressed at how often right-wingers try to win an argument by creating a fictional reality in which they’re right. (If that, even. Sometimes the dreamscape exists purely to make their opponents look hypocritical, pathetic as that is.)

Like you got at with the title, this kind of spamming can be fun, but is easy to bypass.

Diversifying the spam will help, but it could still get caught by a filter, and quickly discarded after a skim. If you REALLY want to do some damage, you could poison the data set. Make the tips sound plausible. The longer it takes to check up on it, the better. Maybe mix in some real and fake information, like a fictional teacher at a real school, or a class that doesn’t actually exist.

Also, while AI is mostly being used by capitalists to make everything worse in yet another case of short-sighted rent-seeking, it’s just a tool, and can have some good uses. In this case, it’s ability to create a whole lot of complete garbage very quickly might be an asset, since you could generate a fuck ton of unique stories with slight variations.

In theory, of course. Sure would suck if, even after filtering out as much as they could, they ended up with a stack of submissions that all seem equally likely, but are 99% (or more) nonsense.

You will soon for domestic flights.

That or a “Real ID,” which I’m convinced is a step towards voter ID as a means of voter suppression.

As a rule, no, but I’ll make some rare exceptions.

It has to be a small studio, I have to be pretty sure I’ll like their next game, and I have to have enjoyed their past game enough that it’s worth throwing them a few extra bucks.

For instance, I’m going to pre-order Slay the Spire 2.

• Mega Crit is an indie studio.

• I thought StS1 was exquisite, so I’m optimistic about a sequel from the same people.

• I playes StS1 for hundreds of hours, so even if the sequel is a whiff, I’d have got my money’s worth from them.

Similar goes for The Haunted Chocolatier, since I played the heck out of Stardew Valley.

My favorite part is when they complain about the overuse of the word “tankie,” then call literally every other kind of leftist a lib.

I love the level-0 “funnels” from Goodman Games. If I have to pick one, let’s say the classic, Sailors on the Starless Sea.

They’re easy to pitch, and really help establish a tone, especially for players who bring a lot of preconceptions from 5e.

Life imitates art, and that art is the board game Twilight Struggle.

(It’s a Cold War simulator, played on a world map, and Canada counts as Europe for game purposes.)

It’s bad enough being one of those states now, and I’m in one of the good ones.

Hey, remember how right-wingers all laughed at What is a Woman? Reveling in their willful ignorance by laughing at anyone who dared to have a nuanced answer? Now they had a chance to define it for themselves, and immediately sat on their own (legally feminine) balls.

I’m annoyed that I expect Hollywood executive, as always, will take the wrong lesson from it. They’ll see it underperformed and think people don’t want a D&D movie, rather than that they shouldn’t have released it between John Wick and Mario.