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This is a good point. Seeing other people get onto the street can motivate people who weren't feeling enthusiastic.

But I do worry that protests will fizzle out and be, as you say, an ending point. Maybe they won't be.

"a peaceful movement". Ok. Unilaterally disarming seems like a dubious move to me.

I don't think protests where you just stand around and chant are especially effective. Maybe in 1950 when seeing people get firehosed was shocking, but the world is different today. Media is captured by the wealthy and most people don't care.

I've found that when the players hit an outright failure, a lot of the time they just draw blanks or zero in on this one specific solution. It's a weird tunnel vision.

Like, they want to talk past the doorman and he says no after they roll. Good players on their game will then think about other options. Sneak in the back. Set off an alarm. Impersonate someone who lives there. But i've just had so many players that just get stuck on this, and will try to spend 10 minutes on "What if I ask him nicely?"

I've started including a spiel about this in my session 0. "If an obstacle in the world has exactly one purpose in the story, and you attack it dead on, you may fail. Especially if it's not also your strong suit. For example, there is a doorman of a fancy apartment building. His entire role in life is to look at people, and only let them in if they're authorized. If you walk up to him, not authorized, and go 'Hey bro let me in', that will be a very hard check. That is shooting fire at the fire elemental. Disguising yourself will be easier, but still is in his domain of 'Looking at people and only letting authorized folks in'. But going in a back door so he doesn't see, setting off the fire alarm so he evacuates, calling on the phone and telling him his car has been towed, those ideas hit him where he's weaker."

I'm glad you liked the comic.

I read the tweet as saying "Actually learning about history, the good and the bad, is better than avoiding it to whitewash (pun intended) slavers and spare their feelings"

How did you read it?

This also reminds me of a separate post I saw about how social media, and tweets especially, is a really bad format for communicating. The length constraints and incentivizing being clever don't make for fertile ground for ideas. Most people aren't going to read an essay, sadly.

I also can’t imagine someone getting offended about people mentioning the Tulsa Race Massacre or the fact that the founding fathers held slaves.

Actual racists aren’t going to be offended by those historical facts, they just might argue that they were justifiable in some way. Which is obviously super fucked up, but it’s not like racist people are going to deny the fact that slavery happened or that black people got massacred by white people in history. They literally get off on that shit.

Many racists definitely do get offended by those facts. It's because they're coming at it from an emotional place, and the historical facts make them feel bad. Instead of dealing with that, they lash out. Not all racists are intentional about their racism.

I link this a lot, but it's worth a read https://theoatmeal.com/comics/believe

Which is why the tweet seems so strange to me. Black people getting enslaved and massacred and persecuted? That slaps? I fucking hope not.

That wasn't the intent of the tweet and that is a bizarre misreading of it.

Someone should come for Musk and the rest of the republican party.

I can only hope some of the absolute fools who voted for republicans realize that their policies are dogshit, but I think too many of them are emotionally invested in their "team". They'd cheer for their side even as they starved to death.

Elden Ring was very good. You still get the interconnected bits in some areas, and some parts of the world connect in unexpected ways.

The main thing I didn't like about elden ring is how most of the stuff is kind of pointless. Like there's a catacomb but the only thing you get from it is some useless ashes and low level upgrade material. It made replays feel weird, because I'd skip most of it.

I'm not sure how to fix that. Maybe have the little side dungeons affect world state somehow (eg: drain poison from the swamp, get rid of invaders, whatever). Or switch over to sekiro style leveling where you only power up by doing certain things. But both of those might make the side stuff too much of a chore.

Don't put important details behind failable skill checks and just dead end it there.

Like if they find a book with ciphered text, you might be tempted to be like "make an intelligence + investigator check to decipher it", and if they fail be like "you can't figure it out".

It's better to do some sort of degree of success or succeed at a cost so the game keeps moving forward.

Like, on a bad roll they translate it but whoops awaken an angry spirit that's now attacking them. Or they make some progress, but realize they need the key to fully crack it. The note in the margin says it's at such-and-such flophouse, owned by the PC's most annoying rival group.

I've done too many "you rolled .. 0? Ok. Well you have no idea what this altar means" and then later regretted it because the players didn't have a vital clue.

If billionaires were smart they would go along with this kind of non violent plan. The longer they resist, the more likely people will try more aggressive solutions.

I would give them a chance to divest before guillotining. But someone having that much money is disgusting. You know what you could do with that? You know how much was stolen from how many people to acquire that? That's disgusting.

Look at this "wealth to scale" website https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/?v=3

In case you lost sense of how big these numbers are.

But at least we agree that some billionaires should be hung.

Then you're a fool, but I hope if it came down to it you wouldn't go peacefully to a death camp. Maybe it's too much to hope that you'd step up for your neighbors.

I'm reminded of the abyssal words in Elden Ring's expansion. There are signs that tell you "Don't let them see you!" and "You have to hide and run!". You find an area with some tall grass and some creepy eye-monsters. And sure enough, if they see you they come running at you. They'll knock you over, grab you, and explode your head.

Clearly you're supposed to sneak by them.

But...