This supports my hypothesis that most players "playing" DND could easily swap to some other rule system and not even know. Many of them would probably be happier in other systems.
I'd rather spend N minutes reading a list of book recommendations than 5*N minutes watching a video. Presumably the target audience for books is literate.
Someone speaking another language makes them afraid (maybe they're talking about me) or feel bad (I only know one language am I stupid?). Getting angry at the other person is easier on the ego than healthier options.
I love mage, but its magic is so involved and powerful I wouldn't want to use it in a game unless everyone was a mage. You don't really want one players options to be "I hit him with my club" and the others to be boundless.
Awakening 2nd edition was really good, imo, but I never actually got to play Ascension
I used nWoD for fantasy games. The core dice pool system works pretty well, and few things are tightly coupled to any setting in particular.
I mostly don't like d20, so when someone tells me they're doing a game about secret vampire societies in it, I'm a lot more disappointed than if they ported a system I like or am neutral on. Also 5th edition in particular makes a lot of assumptions about how things work.
I dunno man. I've had a lot of conversations with players that go like "do you think your character is the first to come up with this hijink? If it works, why doesn't the entire setting revolve about this infinite damage trick you're trying to sell me?"
Like, if it was as easy as casting Charm Person on the king to become the new ruler, other people would already be doing that. Therefore, there must be reasons why it doesn't work.
Still, the costs for defendants, even if ultimately exonerated, have been enormous, with many having their mugshots blasted by the government and some forced to languish in jail or have criminal charges hang over them for weeks and months
Fundamental flaw in the legal system right there.
In several high-profile cases, the prosecutions fell apart because they relied on statements by Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officers that had no supporting evidence or in some instances were proven by video footage to be blatantly false.
It's kind of insane to me that there's an annual cap on social security payments. If your salary is high enough, you stop paying into it partway through the year. That's ass-backwards. You shouldn't pay anything for the first chunk of money, and then pay more as you make more.
It's always been pretty bad for large chunks of the population. This seems like a low point, but there have been many lows in living memory. Civil rights movement in the 60s. Vietnam war. War on drugs. Countless cruelties done to non-whites and queer folks.
Even the idealized stuff of "buy a house on one income" was more for white people than anything else. Redlining, mortgage discrimination, "and then the white people burned down our house" were all realities.
This country has always been deeply racist. The wealthy ownership class has largely been soulless ghouls. Maybe they build libraries and museums for a while, but they still oversaw tremendous suffering and poverty.
This supports my hypothesis that most players "playing" DND could easily swap to some other rule system and not even know. Many of them would probably be happier in other systems.