I’ve moved away from the kind of game that has a planned plot and requires players to know a lot of rules. Many players put in as little effort as possible, to the point of not reading rules and not giving notice of a failure to show.

If you feel you need to invest in characters I’d advise only doing it for players who consistently show up.

I finished Dawn Shard now and I enjoyed it more than Way of Kings but not enough to want to read more Stormlight Archives. I actually found the story to be a fairly self-contained story on a boat. I think already knowing a bit of spoilers about spren and void bringers was enough.

There were sometimes parts where characters would mention things like briefly being a king in the past, which I’m sure comes from another book but wasn’t important for the plot of this book.

Overall I’m just not a Sanderson fan I think. I don’t like his humour and I found I really didn’t care about the characters in Way of Kings. The big problem is that his books are so long and it seems like not much happens until the end. I saw fans calling this an avalanche but I really couldn’t stand it. No hate on others who like it but it’s really not for me.

Fair enough but I really didn’t enjoy the first book and these books are huge. I’d rather be confused and get through it than buy and read two more massive tomes I likely won’t enjoy.

Should he be detained like that, no.

He’s an absolute scumbag though

If I was a player in this game I would stop going. It punishes committed players to put them at the mercy of the uncommitted.

I’ll send you an update once it’s done. My group rotates GMs and systems but within a few months I’ll have them doing Gradient Descent.

I’m prepping a one-shot with Fangelsehala and a longer campaign with Mothership.

They’d need to be able to boost our morale with the litanies of hate. I did play in the Deathwatch RPG though which has a Chaplain class.

Wow yikes. You sound like fun at parties. Go find someone to care about.

For the record, I think there is a loneliness epidemic for both genders.

The worst part of this is the “This is part of the story”

This is just a toxic gender wars meme. Go outside, touch some grass, meet someone nice and move on with life. Memes like this come from and perpetuate the loneliness epidemic.

Sounds horrible tbh. A big part of the hobby is meeting new friends. This sounds like a good way to become socially isolated and depressed.

In my personal experience that’s much more difficult

If this happens, the RPG is too complex for that player. Play a simpler system.

I ran a game of “Index Card RPG” with the setting “Blood & Snow”. The setting includes an adventure seed where Cavemen have to search for ancient relic pillars every generation to stop an Ice Age. I never told my players, but in my mind we were playing a Warhammer 40k game and this was a world a space marine chapter used to recruit those who were strong enough.

B/X is good. When characters have d6 hp and it’s instant death at 0 the combat becomes way more serious and tense.

Warlock is a rules-light version of warhammer fantasy roleplay. The core dice mechanic is d20+skill. Combat rolls are opposed rolls, sword vs mace skills for example. It uses the career system from wfrp so characters start as something like rat catcher and change careers to advance. If you like the warhammer old world but don’t want a crunchy game, I’d recommend it.

Great to know thanks! Sad to say but this is much less of a news story. China doesn’t care about dual citizenship, this would have been a huge escalation if they hadn’t been and it’s click-bait that the article title doesn’t mention it.

I wish they would tell us if the Canadians also had Chinese citizenship since China doesn’t recognise dual nationals.

Project Gutenberg and librivox are decent resources for free older books. The author needs to have been dead for 70 years, so they are old but I’ve enjoyed “The Lost World” and “The hour of the dragon”