I mean personally, it’s not something I expect to be reminded of in the top of the feed for what is otherwise a pretty light webcomic community.

It’s nice to have a few hooks and characters and things that a DM can use if the player wants them, but player interest is the key part. A character’s background is there to allow for opportunities to tie the character into the world and vice versa, but you can also achieve the same thing by just giving weight to interactions and having them reverberate through the campaign.

Like, in the campaign I’m running now my players came across an ancient shrine to an axolotl-folk storm deity that was built as a sensory stone playing a ritual, with a hallowed ground spell creating a tongues area of effect. Some spiders had made a nest around it and were communing with it, but rather than talking to the spiders, they immediately shot them and lit the forest on fire. So I added a spider-folk cleric of said deity, gave them some ettercap followers, and had the surviving spiders that ran from the fight go fetch them to get their revenge. Now they’ve got someone extremely formidable that they have to deal with who is only there because they burned the forest around the shrine.

They weren’t initially intended to be in the campaign at all, and even the shrine was initially mostly a throw-away set piece to make a bit of forest more interesting. But because there was a significant interaction there that ought to have consequences, it made sense to add more context around that location.

Letting the players determine which bits get fleshed out on the basis of which bits they show interest in or interact with gives weight and substance whether they go in with a backstory or not. Some players are going to want to load up on backstory and give the DM plenty to work with straight from the beginning, some won’t. As long as you’re responsive to what your players do show you they’re interested in, it’ll benefit your campaign when you lean into it.

I lost two people to cancer this year. Sucks.

I’m not sure this comic is the heartwarming post you think it is.

For some people, possessing any empathy at all qualifies as “virtue signaling”.

I didn’t even know sweat bees could sting. When I drove a cab I used to sit in a field with my feet sticking out the window and they’d inevitably come land on me and suck on my toes. I suppose it wouldn’t make much sense to sting your food source if you don’t have to, though.

Do people who make these memes actually play at tables like this, or is this hyperbole for the sake of clicks? Do they play at all?

It’s an environment that’s mechanically centered around dunking on people. It’s all upvotes, downvotes, and arguing. The design of the platform itself encourages it, because that’s what it’s built to do. Lemmy isn’t really any different, it just hasn’t had as long to develop the same level of toxicity. The same mentality is here too, though, and is growing pretty consistently.

A year ago Lemmy felt like a relative breath of fresh air in comparison to what it’s quickly become. These threads are half arguments and the feeds are half people spamming 6 threads in five minutes to build up some sort of visibility.

Honestly I feel like Lemmy sort of tricked me into wandering into Reddit 2 after having mostly left Reddit.

Meaningless hair splitting. I still have my entire collection of SNES cartridges. They’re still playable, and no one can take them short of robbing me. If my ownership of those games was limited to a license that could be revoked, that might not be the case.

That’s not the story Billet told.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3byz3txpso

That’s not how you spell “steals”.

That is absolutely untrue. Games used to be sold as a physical object containing the game files. No serial numbers to redeem, no servers, no downloads or updates. Sometimes you’d get a booklet with the game that had some codes in it that the game would ask for on startup to make making copies a little more difficult, but that was it.

You’d literally have everything you need just on the CD, disk, or cartridge. We 100% owned the game and the system it was played on, and the only way to revoke that would have been to physically break into your house and steal it.

This whole games as services thing is about 20 years old tops, and it wasn’t even remotely approaching the standard for quite a while after that.

Imagine being lucky enough to have hands and squandering it with capitalism.

Looks like it’s mostly being covered by left-wing and neutral sources.

Yeah, that’s the conclusion I came to after reading their wiki. It doesn’t make me think it’s a very nice place to be. Like they explicitly only disallow Nazi symbols in the areas covered by German law.

It’s become really hard to tell what something like this actually means. Does free speech mean being able to speak out against authoritarian power structures? Or does it mean throwing slurs and hatred around? Because one of those things is something worth defending, while the other is a pretty reasonable expectation for a service provider to want to limit.

The fact that they just typify it as having a free speech policy without qualifying what that means makes my skeptical.

The fact that a term that just means “paying enough attention to be aware of the world around you” is used derisively is incredibly indicative of how much of a braindead mess a lot of the population has become.

I won’t give them a dime until it’s for Elder Scrolls 6 or Fallout 5.

Honestly the mix of 2d and 3d makes me want to play it. It’s giving Roger Rabbit vibes.

This headline is wild. It’s basically the biology news equivalent to “so much for the tolerant left”. Bonobo society is peaceful because they stand up for their young rather than just allowing infanticide from males. Their relative peace compared to their male-dominated cousins is a result of actively refusing to tolerate that sort of violence among their own groups.

Why link the paywalled repost instead of the author’s actual website?

https://poorlydrawnlines.com/comic/so-youre-a-ghost/