StrangeThing

I love random generators. Last Saturday I discovered perchance.org, and spent nearly all day making a random Fate Fantasy character creator.

Here’s a Fate rule to make Physique more important in combat, and encourage fighting types to be brawny, iron-clad behemoths. I made it for my D&D inspired fantasy game, but it could easily be adapted for a sci-fi setting featuring steroidal space marines.

 Following up to my last post , how do we escape the cycle? 

Over the years, I've seen a certain pattern play out on site after site. It happened to LiveJournal and MySpace, it happened to countless minor services that never hit the big time, and it's happening to Facebook and Twitter as we speak. 

Gonna try to update the blog a little more often.

If you've spent any amount of time on online forums, you've probably seen it happen. A new poster arrives, and proceeds to make an ass of himself. (It is very rarely "herself".) If your forum is a good one, a moderator soon appears and makes it plain that the new guy needs to chill.  In most cases, it ends there. The new guy either learns to plays nice or slinks off to find another forum with looser standards of civility. But all too often, the asshole digs in his heels.  The arguments are always the same: This is a matter of principle! The right to be a jerk is the most important thing!  People are too thin-skinned! Moderation is a violation of Free Speech! The mods are a bunch of fascists!  The forum locals have a good laugh at his feeble arguments, blind arrogance, and self-centered pleading. Eventually the mods get tired of his impotent raging against the machine and ban him. The last few years have seen this same experience playe...

I love the idea of pay-what-you-want. It warms my socialist heart to see a work of art thrive in spite of being available free.  Welcome to Night Vale is a good example. Any web comic or you tube show with a Patreon button qualifies. There are a lot of those, and many of them are successful. Those who have money to spare subsidize those who do not. That's why I'm a big fan of free-to-play games. It's an easy thing to do badly, of course. But done well, it can allow a pay-what-you-want experience to make enough money to support the massive development expense of a AAA game.