Like others have said, the rules are… bad. Especially the latest edition. A couple of the older editions are “favorites,” but still mixed bags, and lots of people just take the setting and use it in another system entirely.

There’s a Shadowrun actual play podcast called NeoScum that I loved (now concluded), and it began with “It’s like D&D mixed with Bladerunner!” and ended with “Fuck this, fuck Shadowrun, the universe rearranges itself so we can play a different game.” They even had a goofy recurring bit they would do whenever they had to stop play to look up rules or calculate something, which happened constantly. It’s also not a player issue, since they’ve switched to Call of Cthulhu for another story (Gutter) and just don’t have that problem.

Nobody hates Shadowrun more than the people who love Shadowrun. :P

Utilitarianism for people who think the humanities are pointless

I also bounced off of the Reloaded version (and SW in general). Unfortunately, I can’t really speak to the alternatives from personal experience.

However, I’ve been gearing up to try Call of Cthulhu, and found out it has a Western setting! Down Darker Trails. I had never heard about it, but what I could find was really positive. If and when I run a weird west game, that would probably be my first choice, and certainly a top contender.

He never actually apologized. He released a video saying he expressed himself poorly or whatever, then took it down anyway. He never said all the racist points he made were wrong.

Fun fact: a full majority of Supreme Court justices were nominated by presidents who were inaugurated despite losing the popular vote!

The only good cops are horses and dog.

EDIT: Guys, I know police dogs attack people. They are trained to do so from birth. I don’t blame the dogs.

Exactly what just happened to me with Tabletop Simulator. Every single fucking Magic card that I or anyone I played with was saved.

Even better, I couldn’t delete the files to get rid of the low storage warning. Changing the directory TTS uses didn’t work. Deleting the folder didn’t work, no matter how much I tried, because clearly MS knows better and I must have done it by mistake. I had to log in and use their web interface just to fucking say “yes, delete it, yes, I fucking mean it.”

Not that I’m upset about it or anything.

It’s extremely funny that she ruined her own career, including a likely spin-off starring her, because she wouldn’t stop comparing the criticism of conservatives and their beliefs to the mass persecution and murder of Jews during the Holocaust.

It’s also extremely funny that she went on to make a movie with The Daily Wire, no one saw it, it got called woke for being an action movie starring a woman.

To top that off, it’s also extremely funny that The Daily Wire is FULL of people who couldn’t cut it in Hollywood, so they kept self-financing their own shitty movies, and are now in financial trouble.

Yeah, that moment hit hard. I expected someone to come in and sing his part, then… oh. Right. Of course. :(

Soon after the “renaming,” I saw some comment that just said “Finally!”

Like you, I’ve never heard anyone complain about the name “Gulf of Mexico,” and I’ve heard Republicans complaining non-fucking-stop for decades, since I first began paying attention to politics as a teenager. How weak and submissive does a person have to be to take such a stupid and petty grievance, and rewrite their own mind as though they were always upset by it?

And on the flip side, a Cardinal who specifically called him out in the past becomes Pope.

If Vance’s faith were honest—which I doubt—he should be having a crisis of conscience right now.

Not only did he not apologize, he doubled down with a string of extremely bad Nazi puns.

IIRC, even the ADL criticized it, which is hilarious, because it was RIGHT after they burned a ton of what credibility they had left to defend him.

Old-School Essentials, particularly with some of the Advanced Fantasy options!

Though lately, I’ve been taking another look at The Fantasy Trip, wondering if it might turn out to be a hidden gem of a game for OSR sensibilities…

I’m depressed at how often right-wingers try to win an argument by creating a fictional reality in which they’re right. (If that, even. Sometimes the dreamscape exists purely to make their opponents look hypocritical, pathetic as that is.)

As a rule, no, but I’ll make some rare exceptions.

It has to be a small studio, I have to be pretty sure I’ll like their next game, and I have to have enjoyed their past game enough that it’s worth throwing them a few extra bucks.

For instance, I’m going to pre-order Slay the Spire 2.

• Mega Crit is an indie studio.

• I thought StS1 was exquisite, so I’m optimistic about a sequel from the same people.

• I playes StS1 for hundreds of hours, so even if the sequel is a whiff, I’d have got my money’s worth from them.

Similar goes for The Haunted Chocolatier, since I played the heck out of Stardew Valley.

My favorite part is when they complain about the overuse of the word “tankie,” then call literally every other kind of leftist a lib.

I’ve been meaning to try Traveller for ages! The Pirates of Drinax got me interested for a while, but the group fizzled out.

Hopefully I can get a game together sooner rather than later!

I love the level-0 “funnels” from Goodman Games. If I have to pick one, let’s say the classic, Sailors on the Starless Sea.

They’re easy to pitch, and really help establish a tone, especially for players who bring a lot of preconceptions from 5e.

Life imitates art, and that art is the board game Twilight Struggle.

(It’s a Cold War simulator, played on a world map, and Canada counts as Europe for game purposes.)