Archelon

Been using voyager too, made the jump to Lemmy easier when Apollo shut down.

If you didn’t work you died of starvation.

The majority of all people who ever lived were in subsistence agriculture, which needed constant labour to produce the food you needed to eat in order to keep yourself and your family alive. What improvements were made were developed to keep starvation at bay. If you gave a medieval peasant modern farming equipment, they’d be jazzed about how little time they’d have to spend plowing and milling and threshing and harvesting and how much more time they could spend getting piss drunk with their family and friends.

A babylonian farmer didn’t “just want to work.” They wanted to live, and that meant they spent their life in back-breaking labour in the fields.

Whenever anyone tries to tell me that we should expand execution as a way to determine crime I point at England’s Bloody Code where they hanged people for pretty damn near everything and it just made crime skyrocket.

Turns out, when the state treats their citizens as violent dangerous animals that need to be controlled, that tends to be what they create.

The discussion around the “Fruitful Void” and Brennan’s initial comment made me think specifically of this story from Chocolate Hammer where a highly-random, highly-lethal small-scale cowboy wargame ended up being an extremely fertile ground for interesting stories despite having no narrative mechanics of any kind.

A system specifically focused entirely on combat gave the GM room to weave a vast web of intrigue and personality based on how everyone knowing the power of violence in the system and trying to avoid getting near it while using it to threaten everyone else.

Whatever it takes to avoid seeing differences from the “norm” as anything other than a moral problem.

I usually use it to hold a pocketknife or change

I prefer my strip clubs to be cruelty-free and grass-fed if possible.

Oh come on, it doesn’t make you crack a smile?

Turns out they did (for DS2 at least) and a user on the other site compiled the data into a series of convenient graphs so you can see what the win-loss rate is for all bosses sorted by console.

Unethical working conditions are never necessary.

I’d imagine it’s the OSR influence, especially with the more old-school notion that the random encounters are the story.

That is, instead of random encounters being an interruption of the narrative, they’re just as much a part of it as the time your PCs sat in a bar for two hours trying to convince the barmaid to go dungeon-crawling with them.

Especially if random encounters include variation in distance and attitude. Encountering a knight could involve stumbling into a questing hedge knight‘s campsite, or it could involve hiding from the Black Knight after spotting them from a nearby hillside.

And there is also a narrative purpose in having combat start from “just existing in the game world.” Parts of the world are dangerous and deadly to be in, and random encounters are a good way to portray that without elaborately plotting out a sequence of “dangerous events” on a travel timetable.

Or “give your pet lobster a sweater with mittens”