For clarity, when you say “anti-gun”, what is that position? Like, “average people should not have them, period”?

Not trying to knock on you - it’s that there’s so many positions which get lumped under “pro-” or “anti-”, it helps to actually understand where someone is coming from.

Yes and no. I think I was overly optimistic that people would make use of the possibilities of social media. I have thoughts on why I was mistaken, but ultimately I failed to recognize that a lot of people like their views affirmed and will seek out circles which do so.

At the same time, you’re 100% right: Companies saw an opportunity to drive engagement and reap huge profits with the teeeeensy little side effects of further siloizing viewpoints, distorting reality, and elevating the most extreme positions. It turbocharged everything awful and repeatedly turned sites into cancerous shitholes.

At one point I really, truly believed that the internet and social media would be a turning point in human interconnectivity and cultural understanding. The ability to just… talk to someone on the other side of the planet, at will? When we know that exposure to other beliefs and cultures is superb at punching holes in hatred and misunderstanding? Surely this would lead to great things!

Yeah, that was a miss.

Exposure to other is still a fantastic way to grow understanding. But the internet and social media were not a highway to it, and as the “wild west” era of the internet faded and we instead got corporate-governed, algorithm-driven siloization of views, my views on the value of social media changed sharply.

For me it’s the ‘Can you hear me now?’ animations. Every once in a while, when I see someone having issues with their phone/earbuds/whatever, those pop into my head unbidden.

Killfrog.com

Shit, that just awoke some memories in me. Back from ye olden days when people would just fire up their own website to host their stuff.

Oh, I’m not arguing about placeholder names. This whole issue is placeholder names escaping into the wild.

To me personally though, “2024” felt like the last gasp of Hasbro trying to sell an infinitely-rolling, “DnD-as-a-service” dynamic. Fans broadly understand editions and expect them to come with a serious scope of updates, but “annuals” could be deliberately confusing and ephemeral. The hope was they’d seem “new and shiny” enough to still prompt fans to buy them.

Or maybe that’s just over-conspiratorial thinking. I dunno.

“C’mooooon… play more OneDND 5e2024 5.5e. It’s totally a proper edition this time. Pleeeeeeease?”

In fairness this isn’t the first time. 5e was “DnD Next” (terrible name as well) during its development.

It is unacceptable that Babylon 5 is not on this list. It was rare, at the time, for shows to have a multi-season story arc with character development planned from the start. JMS got his seasons, though, and used them beautifully. Every single episode, even those that don’t contribute to the main storyline advancing, either show a character developing or build the foundations for that development.

FMA:B is up there on “shows I wish I could forget just so I can watch it for the first time again”, and so much of it has is how many characters’ final moments (re)define them. Tossup for me between:

Yeah, I 100% get where you’re coming from. (And I agree with you; the Ori seasons weren’t the strongest of SG-1. Babylon 5 had a similar problem where they wrapped up the entire show’s myth arc, only to be told there’d be a sudden fifth season. It showed.)

I think for me a lot of it depends on whether they decide to “un-conclude” the existing story or branch it off in an entirely new direction. Like, looking to Stargate again, the Ori seasons struggled, but Atlantis was a great way to propagate the concept with a new cast, characters, and story.

I’m kind of ambiguous about the first point. I think you can expand on a tightly-written, concluded story… but not repeatedly. Furthermore, it requires you to - to some degree - shift the focus of the following stories. Continuing the meta-story is all and just fine, but the immediate story can’t be about the same theme/issue/encounter indefinitely.

It’s an episode almost or entirely composed of clips from previous episodes. Usually it has some sort of a framing device - for instance, in an adventure show, it might be the characters taking a ‘breather’ after a tough encounter and musing on how they got here. Or one character might confront another about a situation that’s been brewing, and the clip show is showing bits of that situation leading up to the confrontation.

On an aside, reception to clip shows is an interesting shift. For a long time, one or two were an accepted part of a long-running series - either because it let you make an episode on the cheap using recycled footage, or because in the pre-internet-streaming-on-demand world, it let audiences catch up on what had been happening in episodes they might have missed or seen months ago.

Nowadays, however, they’re almost universally viewed negatively, as their reason for existing is absent and they’re mostly taken as a sign of poor planning by the creators.

This. It says, “I acknowledge you are upset, and accept blame.”

Tactical gameplay is already something I very much encourage. One nice thing about playing with the same group for a long time is that I know they’ll respond when I put things on the map - opportunities to flank, drop or collapse things, and so on.

Thanks for that link! I’ll toss that at my group and see what they think.

Out of all the ideas here, this is one that interest me the most. I’ve seen a lot of things, but not something that does better when you’re low…

Oh, my rolls as DM are private (and of course I’m fudging them as needed). But their rolls are public still!

Well, I’d like to fix the frustration (for both me and my players). Whether that means fixing the rolls or fixing the encounters to account for bad rolls, something needs to be altered.

After I noticed this, to confirm it wasn’t just imagination I just started logging the roll results (d20s, at least) into an Excel sheet as we played. And yeah, they’re actually rolling that badly.

Oh, trust me. I’m already working in that kind of thing.

Actually it was a sign of how incredibly frustrated my group is with this situation that they - who normally will pull out every stop to ensure not a single foe escapes - looked at the fleeing NPCs and said “Nah, forget that. We’re not dealing with more of that.”