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Respecting the Longbow

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  On the 26th of August, 1346, the forces of Edward III, king of England, stood in a series of columns between the villages of Crecy and Wadicourt, peering down the hills towards Fontaine, where a vast French army was massing to drive the English invaders back to the sea.  The French army was enormous; even ignoring the improbable estimates of ancient chroniclers it is plausible the French outnumbered the English by more than two to one. And while many of the French soldiers were hastily-assembled levies of peasants, the core of their army were professionals: the armored men-at-arms that form the iconic centerpiece of modern medieval warfare. These knights were supported by thousands of professional crossbowmen from Genoa: highly trained experts who carried the iconic pavise shields in addition to their deadly mechanical weapons.  It was, on paper, one of the finest medieval armies one could amass. It was led not only by King Philip, but his royal ally King John of Bohemi...
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Limit your players

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  I love Call of Cthulhu. I'll gush about it some other time; for now it's enough to begin with the fact that it is my favorite game system I've ever played and I've played more than anyone I know IRL. (Granted, online I am basically an infant. I don't know how you people are able to play so many games; I don't even know how you're able to find them.) There are many reasons to love Call of Cthulhu, and few of them really make sense to me. The typical setting of the 1920s is fun but hardly a cultural juggernaut; I don't know anyone who's particularly interested in the 20s other than in the context of the occasional Halloween party themed around Gatsby. The combat system isn't particularly good; it's fine but it's mostly just a way to die, especially as combat only rarely advances the investigators towards success.  But perhaps the most confusing element of the game's fun is that it's generally pretty formulaic.  Please don't p...
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Just Asking Questions

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I have a tendency to start fights. I really don't know why; I have some strong opinions, but most people do, too, and I think I'm much more mild than most. I hate arguing; I always concede to people; I'm pretty damn nice. I really try! I don't think I've ever, EVER picked a fight!  And yet, I do somehow seem to start them. Usually I don't really even know why.  I saw a post online. Someone wrote a single sentence:  Lore that is not actionable is excessive. I paused, unsure if I agreed. It had been reposted by someone I liked enormously! It was agreed to by others! But something was gnawing at me. It's probably the same impulse that causes all the other fight: I wanted to know more and I wasn't sure I agreed.  The minutiae aren't important, really. It started a wide-ranging discussion and I think other people started their own threads and soon I saw some of the people who had initially agreed with the post I was questioning make their own defenses. No...
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History Article: The Material History of Tikka Masala

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 Listen, admit it: You want to read someone else's homework. I get it. You're super curious about the history of tikka masala. Well, bruh, today is your SECOND luckiest day.  This is just another of my academic articles. I'm pretty proud of it, to be honest. The footnotes are broken; sorry about that. I had some good jokes in them, too. You are missing out gems like: Aheheh. Ahem. Anyhow:  The Material World of Tikka Masala Empire is one of the oldest forms of human polity. Almost immediately after humans first settled into agricultural societies, the first empires were born; transient little glories built on bronze, stone, and blood. Humanity seemed to have a taste for empire and refined the concept, one generation after another. By the 1800s the great spider of the British Empire managed to cast nearly the whole of the world under the shadow of its web; great strands carried steamships and railcars to the dustiest edges of humanity. Traditional historiography tells of t...
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Don't Argue until you've seen their Character Sheets

RPGs are intensely personal, which is odd when you remember they're done as a group activity. I guess they have that in common with sex. I'd rather not extend that metaphor further, though.  What matters about that is that it's often hard to remember how different people's tastes are, and that difference can power disagreements. You can really only productively disagree with someone who has fairly similar tastes/values/beliefs/etc as you. The daylight between your competing towers is a place of tension where you can really engage. If your beliefs are wholly alien, you can huff and puff and swear and mock and do all the annoying stuff people do online, but you probably won't get anywhere. There was never anything shared between you; no ability to respect the other opinion.  It's hard to know that, though, because online everyone is a black box of memes and dumb little jokes. It's often unclear what people really believe until you're arguing, and by then y...
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Book Review: Medea

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My best friend loves Madea. I'm not really the world's biggest Tyler Perry fan, but I do respect that Madea, with her tough exterior and warm heart, has at least a little in common with Medea, the ancient Greek sorceress. I'm reviewing Medea , the ancient Euripides play. I've actually seen it performed (my high school had a very dedicated theater program) but mostly I'm reviewing it as a book, because I think that's how most people experience it nowadays. Plus, I don't have the ability to judge theater. Medea tells the story of the sorceress Medea, who is left by her husband for another woman. This is pretty much the entire plot structure: what you then get is about an hour and a half of rage, betrayal, and hatred. The story is told entirely through dialogue—as you'd expect for a play—but most of the important information comes from lengthy monologues, mostly by Medea herself. Those are what make the play an interesti...
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Using Class Primers to Help with a Vibe

Night is a setting for my heavily-customized 5e game. I was a coward when I first started running it and allowed all the base classes, though I did require players to read the following text boxes for their class.  I actually think this worked really well, to be honest. I didn't need to spring too much lore on them in game but it was enough they understood that this was a different type of game with a different feel--a different vibe--and it let them get into character quickly. As they grew more comfortable with the story, it stopped really even feeling like 5e, though we used the same base ruleset. This is actually where I began formalizing my Game Vibes theory. Build the vibes to build a fun game, beyond the rules themselves.  Anyhow, if you're at all interested what this looked like in practice, I copied my class primers below:  Classes : Classes suggest social roles, and NPCs need not use these specific rules Barbarian : There is no urban, cosmopolitan impulse, nor di...
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