the position of the early Church was that you should not *seek* martyrdom, but you should be prepared to endure it, and the ordinary Minnesotans and others turning out on the streets are living up to that with astonishing bravery.

I had a friend who was angry about the Sec. Clinton emails, as an ordinary fed/contractor would probably have gotten burned. Obv. elite impunity is far worse post-2016 & also directly driven by John Roberts. But finding ways to make the rules widely legible seems key to anti-corruption. (2/2).

This list dates back to the mid-1990s (ah listservs and Usenet) If this admonition makes sense to you as a way to prevent the hero from succeeding, you are probably old:

"Any data file of crucial importance will be padded to 1.45Mb in size."

This is fair. And ultimately I think there's enough evidence of this phenomenon that it's a damning critique of even more benign forms of social media like bsky.

But big picture, I think that pass fail social skill checks w/ situational difficulty are an unsatisfying mechanism in a way that doesn't implicate the satisfaction of other possible mechanisms. However, there is also considerable room for subjective taste.

And should empathize that live RP is a perfectly valid way to handle social (and in a silly parallel, Society for Creative Anachronism is a perfectly valid way to combat). Only dabbled in those games, bounced pretty hard off Mage mechanics when I tried to run it. (1/2)

Have you played much w/ systems that take on that problem? EG L5R operates in a more formal social structure. Burning Wheel has an elaborate RPS overarching structure that could emulate debates, many PBTA retain more agency w/ partial hits & targets picking from a list rather than being compelled.

Right, but that's also incredibly hard. Like 4th edition tried with the skill challenge mechanic and failed. I think successful social interaction systems often come from systems with tighter genre and/or setting expectations.

Legit and makes case for dishonesty. The player that's most excited about it was one of our regular GMs, and I'm definitely privileged to be at a place in my life where good GMs are the scarcest resource.

By contrast, by the end of 3.5 I had less money, but was so excited to ditch the edition.

Yeah, like one of our harder core players was super enthusiastic about it. I'm enjoying the Bastion rules as a new toy and I like the origin feats, but in many ways my experience is like the 4.5 revised core which was a smaller change with a clearer purpose.