Rob Donoghue

It also illustrates to me why it’s actually kind of weird that divine magic doesn’t get that much play in RPGs. I suspect a lot of it has to do with realities of contemporary religion, and I can’t fault that. There’s not a lot of people wanting games to play out their heroically religious fantasies

Middle Realms had a very Lankhmar take on the gods - there are lots of them, of may small things, and they have OPINIONS. When you interacted with one, it went on a list that also noted its opinion of you. This list could be used to call in favors or introduce complications. It was great.

I am genuinely hard pressed to think of a game that has done anything really interesting with gods since, maybe, @timgray101.bsky.social’s Questers of the Middle Realms, whose “roll of the gods” mechanic has a permanent home in my arsenal of good tricks.

I HOPE I’m forgetting something.

I may, to some extent, be taking the wrong lesson as I work through two series of books about wizards, because for all that I’m paying attention to the details of sorcery, I am more and more taken by how compelling the clerical side is, and how oddly untapped that is in RPGs.

Perhaps predictably, my brain is now running off and thinking about a cold war espionage game in a world where the superpowers are divine, with occasional forays into theological cyberpunk, where each megacorp is its own church.

They are fun things to think about.

In the Craft books, Gladstone has a habit of dropping small notes which my brain snags on and proceeds to spin out on. Elayne’s expense account (as a source of magical power) was one of these.

Today’s was the idea of a god having a covert asset.

A belly-to-back suplex is absolutely the right choice for this as it allows you to see the ridiculous pointy hood get absolutely crushed moments before they slam into the ground. I guess a piledriver would also work in that regard, but suplexes are cooler imo 👀

I completely sympathize with your hate of Jira, but could you possibly use some of that hate to delete some of the ten thousand tickets you've created and left in backlog over the past 5 years because you might want to do them someday?

Gonna post a Second Gig update soon going into more depth on the new locations. I got good shit brewing there

In this era of institutional failure, it is fantastical escapism to explore a world of competent administrators who take injustice seriously. That's what a murder mystery is - a fable of social and governmental decency and efficiency. Take it or leave it.

The animating principle of representational democracy is to protect the rest of us from the whims of deranged rich people, be they kings or oligarchs. Everything else is wainscoting.

… and it’s failed.

Thanks for hosting this week's #TurnBasedThursday! If you like mixing turn-based with cards, check out my game CROWNBREAKERS. A deck-building brawler that has you free a magical city from tyrant billionaires!

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Demo incoming soon!

The best thing about this is that @davidbaldeoncomic.bsky.social made Disney Princess Domino (plus movie!) art!

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I once told my line producer “I became a writer to tell stories and now I argue about how it costs $50,000 to move some
trucks.”

& by running most emotional expression *and* self-understanding through an anger filter. I don't know that it's even conscious for most guys. Sad? anger! Confused? Anger! Hurt? Anger! Vulnerable? Anger! It's teal and orange but for feelings

Historically, fools who think that all a movie or novel takes is an idea have been protected from finding out that their ideas are terrible by the fact that this is not true.

AI will change all that.

In the future, they will be protected from finding out by their lack of taste.

And as much as I would be happy to see the story of noblesse oblige banished to the dustbin of history, its replacement is exponentially worse.

So my rage at Friedman is not just at his role as an economist, but also as a storyteller.

He used beautiful tools to make a knife out of poison and shit.

Now, again, I want to reiterate that the story of Noblesse Oblige was largely bullshit, and it still enabled all manner of terrible things, but it was a powerful enough story to at least provide SOME counterbalance on unchecked greed. Enough to reach equilibrium at times.

I genuinely wish I was being hyperbolic here, but even a small amount of reading and listening to venture capitalists make it clear that - with somewhat more flowery language - this is the story they are telling themselves.

And the story is "We cannot really measure goodness, but we CAN measure dollars, and good things have come out of dollars, so then the only way to TRULY pursue goodness is to pursue wealth. And because this is good, any attempt to constrain growth of wealth would be evil!"

This, sadly, worked.

So, that didn't quite work, and some segment of the population had always resented that, and to them, Friedman was a savior.

Friedman wrote a lot of very smart things about economics, and I am certainly not well versed enough to speak to their intricacies. But I can tell their story.

Anyway, this need for a story is the reason that the worst people in the world really gravitated to the ideas of Social Darwinism. It offered an even better story for their wealth and success, at the minor cost of discarding empathy, human connection and common sense.

(If you think that sounds too small and petty for these great titans of history, I regret to reform you that we are all ultimately trapped in our own heads, and once your basic needs are met, that internal landscape is VASTLY more important than what's outside it)

However, even these gossamer shackles are too much for some, and they have actively sought out stories that would let them keep more of their money while still feeling good about themselves.

So you turn to a narrative of wealth coming with responsibility.

And this works pretty well. So long as you give enough money to put your name on some libraries, sponsor the arts, and police your own, you can continue to be rapacious rat bastards to your hearts content.

Humans are social creatures, and when you look at a vast asymmetry and need to explain it to yourself, to say nothing of your kids, you need a story to tell.

And it turns out "God just made us better than them" had some structural flaws.

It's bullshit, of course, but it's compelling bullshit, because stories are tricky things.

Because, see, that guy with the gold? He ALSO needs a story to tell himself.

One of the oldest stories of this type (outside of ones based on the favor of god) is the story of Noblesse Oblige. Yes, the guy has gold, but with that gold come responsibilities which bind him, and in serving those responsibilities, he serves everyone.