ProfessorOwl_PhD [any]

Revenge was my favourite. Not for the racing, but because when you crashed you could explode your car to fuck up the competition.

https://thedailytism.com/autistic-man-stranded-on-desert-island-asks-rescue-team-for-a-couple-more-weeks/

It’s pretty simple - they don’t give a fuck. They have no incentive to do anything but the bare minimum. And the other day, the bare minimum meant you got a box and a half of free ice-cream.

Two that I found very easy to understand just from the battle maps were the Emerald Spire and the Abomination Vaults, as both have a central recurring feature to orient yourself by - the titular spire and the Gauntlight’s beam. It makes them a lot less sprawling than many classic megadungeons, but also lets me and the players easily work out how everything connects just by comparing its position to the central feature.

the PCs intended to meet in a tavern

Ah, I guess it’s a tenses in english thing then - for stuff like “intend”, we use past participle ("intended) to indicate that something was, but is no longer planned to take place, and the present participle for things that still are planned to take place.

Ok, it’s your game and all that, but your op says you want to change plans, so I responded to that.

Do you mean that as in identifying how each individual fits into the team, or establishing them as a single unit who works together? It’s important to remember that you don’t need to cover every moment of each character’s life - the session is there to introduce the players to each other’s characters, so the individual interactions of the characters meeting can happen off screen as long as the opening session established who they each are properly.

Either way, that’s what the cart ride and 3 events are for: you start with the traveller, giving some roleplay as the group establishes who they are, if they trust them enough to travel with them, and get more information from them about the city. People get to present their character’s general demeanour, how chatty or questioning they are, what it is they pay attention to about people.
Next up a fight, where they have to work together to defend the cart/fellow traveller. The group naturally comes together against the threat, with a common goal in mind of defending their stuff. Players get to show off their character’s fighting style and work out how they fit together - who’s in the front and back, what advantages they have in their role etc.
Finally, a skill event letting the players flex their imagination and show off their characters noncombat abilities to each other, whether that’s knowledge checks to recall how to fix a wheel or raw athletics to move a tree aside, while again working together to overcome an obstacle.

By the time you’ve finished you’ve given them ample opportunities to show their character rather than just tell each other about them, establishing the individuals and how they work as a team in the time it takes to reach the city gates.

Honestly I feel “you meet in a tavern” is cliche and uninteresting, but if you must do it give them something to mechanically interact with the NPCs through - a drinking game, some kind of gambling, someone who gets aggressive and has to be face-skilled down from a fight, that sort of thing. First session roleplay is always awkward and needs something to focus around, which taverns aren’t really for.

If they’re immediately leaving for another city there’s not much point in giving them memorable NPCs to interact with though, because they won’t be interacting with them again. Why not start them off already travelling to Ptolus as a group? You can have them travelling with/pick up along the way a memorable NPC from Ptolus, so they arrive with someone already familiar with the city and can point them in the right direction, while setting up a familiar face for the party later when they interact with them again. Throw in fending off a bandit attack and a skill challenge - maybe a wheel breaks on the cart they’re in, or they have to overcome a blockage in the road - and they should arrive at the city just in time for the end of the session, leaving them hanging on a description of the city waiting for next week.

Sugar is more traditional than styrofoam, but it is fun to see the petrol make the styrofoam just disappear.

It’s just a stereotype.

I need you to be honest - do you not know what stereotypes are, or do you not know what racism is? Stereotyping is one of the conceptual parts of racism, so saying it’s not racist because it’s a stereotype is like saying pizza isn’t Italian because it’s from Naples.

stopped being used offensively several decades ago, and was then repurposed into being a praise of sorts.

Could you give me sources for when this happened for “ricing” and “ricer”? Because there are a lot of people in this thread telling you that it’s still offensive, and I’m pretty sure they know a little bit more than you about racism.

It’s an app like tiktok. Symbolically you can interpret it as representing anything you want, that’s how symbolism works, but what it actually is is an app like tiktok.

not exactly how I phrased it

Yeah, no shit buddy, and your “gist” can be pretty forcibly rejected by reading these, which use some form of the term without defending it: https://hexbear.net/comment/5821220 https://hexbear.net/comment/5819913 https://hexbear.net/comment/5821145 https://hexbear.net/comment/5819994

Citation needed, as they say. I only saw car bodies being modded.
body modifications. […] I only saw car bodies being modded.
body modifications. […] bodies being modded.

Bold of you to assume I have smth against groups of ppl based on their race

So it’s not that you have anything against asian people, you just think it’s ok to use a term that origtinated in saying japanese people eat so much rice they even run their cars on it. Uh huh. Would you defend the N-word on the basis that it’s a commonly used word and you don’t understand why it’s so bad?

just an assumption you’re from the US

Extremely unsafe assumption, but newsflash - your ancestors don’t need to be the specific ones who invented a racism for it to be racist to act like them. If you copy someone else’s racism you are still the one being racist. You’ve been told multiple times by multiple people that the term is racist, but you’re arguing it’s not racist because you don’t know how it’s racist. Have you maybe considered you’re just not very smart and need to study racism a bit more? Maybe learn what this whole “microaggression” thing people keep talking about it?

the “wrong” ones that used the “r-word” happened to be blocked

I’m sure you can find enough examples of the word rice, ricing, and ricer to put two and two together and realise the “r-word” isn’t what got them blocked.

there is a comment from another mod that explicitly tells they’ll remove stuff using that.

No it doesn’t, because that hasn’t happened.

nor is it derogatory in its current form

Are you really not able to put together how transferring a term used to deride body modifications (using ethnic associations) to UI modifications is derogatory? Do you think it magically lost context somewhere along the way, the history of the term just disappearing into the aether?

I’d also like to play along and give you folks another (and, arguably, a more worthy) which hunt target

Stop trying to worm out of this you wretched little shit. Defend using that on the site and you’ll also get your comments removed, but we’re talking about your racism right now.

Are you telling me that you have so little understanding of slurs and their use that you think people are getting banned for saying using the word rice? You cannot be serious. How dare you think you have the intelligence to hold an opinion.

I know what you’re arguing you fucking dunce, I just told you you’re wrong. There are plenty of slurs that aren’t as bad as the n-word, you’re not allowed to use any of them. And b) doesn’t matter. You don’t use the n-word even if a black person “gives you permission”, because that makes you a fucking racist.

It’s not like black people using the N-word, it’s like white people using the n-word because a stranger on the internet said it’s ok.

aside from the use of the “r-word”

You don’t think them casually dropping a slur might invalidate their opinion on whether a different word is a slur? Fucking LLM-ass logic right there.

Neither DB0 nor Unruffled, the admins of DBZero, are banned on lemmy.ml. You’re definitely thinking of when Hexbear did it.

I did, it names a bunch of incidents where parts shat themselves then says it’s way over budget. An actual explanation is definitely missing from the article.