Disco Elysium was so stress free for me, I didn’t really think the day counter did anything.

It didn’t bother me at all, because I felt like I did about everything I could every day.

They rest in the boxes they came in.

Broken clock

Blasted is nothing, wake me up when they get slammed.

You’re absolutely right. D&D past AD&D1 should never have been the center of our hobby.

Oh I switched to GURPS years ago. I don’t think D&D is a particularly good system for anyone with any real TTRPG experience, but 5e is actually pretty accessible as an introduction to the hobby. Plenty of canon content to work from, or just buy modules from, and it’s fairly simple to play. Plus D&D is the OG, so it’s the default TTRPG in media.

And I’m fine with media. I like media, temporarily. It introduces the hobby to people who might otherwise remain at a perpetual distance, and while a lot of them aren’t really right for TTRPGs, some of them are, and I’m happy they were introduced to it.

The reason I don’t mind paid DMs is because the people that want them are new to the hobby, probably a whole group worth. The alternative is that they elect one of their own; personally I’m down with sharing the GM’s chair, but I don’t think it’s practical for most newbies without an experienced GM present.

Now someone totally new has to figure out how to run a game, and odds are they’re going to suck a bunch, and that’s going to lead to a game that sucks a bunch, and everyone’s going to think D&D actually sucks, and all TTRPGs as well by extension. Players who might, under an experienced GM, see what it can be, will see it instead as a trainwreck.

The market for paid GMs is newbies, and I don’t mind it. This isn’t the 80s, there’s other stuff to do if their first campaign sucks. I don’t mind paid GMs as the starter to get a group moving. Once they get a little wind in their sails one of them will step up and adopt the mantle.

Especially since I assume a decent GM is probably in the neighborhood of $100/session, so about $25/person for a party of four. I think that the instant one of them feels confident to give it a go, they will have that conversation.

Sure, there might be a bit of an expectation adjustment, as you said, but that actually seems easier to accommodate. It would be obviously unreasonable for the party to expect, for free, the same experience they were previously paying $25/person/session for.

And even if they don’t, and they keep the paid GM, it’s not like WOTC has a DM Uber app. Those aren’t corporate stooges, they’re experienced enthusiasts like yourself getting a little kickback for the years of development they’ve dedicated to their craft. I’d reckon a fair segment of the people who would take the job are veteran GMs with no parties to play with. They benefit doubly.

I just think new players in the modern age benefit more from a good first impression of the hobby, and the cost provides a natural incentive for the unpaid alternative to evolve.

I mean, this just seems really gatekeepy. You’re obviously allowed to play however you like, but I don’t see how the way others play affects you.

the demands from players are ridiculous compared to my expectations and what I set out as my intentions

That sounds like a communication issue. I’ve played fully tactical with battle mats and set pieces, and I’ve played fully theater of the mind, and I’ve never had an issue with player expectations as long as I communicate my intentions pre-session zero.

As far as the paid DM part, it’s very simple: This is a creative hobby.

So is art, so is adventure design. I still don’t see how it’s different from commissioning art of your character or buying a module.

Why stop at DM? Every group should invent their own system, carve their own dice, design their own adventures. It’s not very grassroots to use a system designed by an elitist corporation.

I’m into 3d printing. When the hobby started, there were not commercial printers, you had to build one from scratch. Are we supposed to hate manufactured printers to preserve the creative integrity of the hobby?

I just don’t see the rationale of your preferences for how you like to play metastasizing into hatred. You’re allowed to play how you want, so is everyone else.

The lack of respect for simple theatre of the mind is a direct issue with the way I’ve always run and played since I left D&D.

What do you mean by this?

The tolerance and even acceptance of paid DMing also pisses me off in ways that make it very hard for me to remain civil.

Why? Running a game is work, and not every group that wants to play has a good GM. How is it any different than commissioning art of your character or buying an adventure module? Don’t get me wrong, I prefer unpaid friends, but I’m blessed with multiple potential GMs in my group. Not everyone is so lucky, do they just not get to play? Or are they forced to nominate a GM who won’t enjoy it and won’t run an enjoyable game?

Right now it looks more like that’ll be a Musk project.

Me too, but I don’t really play a lot of video games, so I could list every game I’ve ever played pretty quickly.

I dropped this /s

It’s called a dialectic.

He actually came to the US on asylum from M-13, who were threatening him and his family. El Salvador is the one country on Earth he can’t legally be sent to.

It’s easy to say the right thing on this because he knows he’ll never have to pay a dime more than he does right now.

And it’s easy to make sweeping statements based purely on hypotheticals and your own assumptions. In our reality, he’s one of the biggest advocates for raising his own taxes.

Mixture of experts is the future of AI. Breakthroughs won’t come from bigger models, it’ll come from better coordinated conversations between models.

According to who? Because I was here, and that’s exactly what happened. Pretending a bad plan had merit doesn’t make it so. You are allowed to be done with the Democratic party, but that won’t make anything better. Just look around you.

Declaring your refusal to vote certainly is not hard work, and unsurprisingly it wasn’t even remotely effective. It was literally based on not voting, not actively doing anything, and it paved the way for policy to get exponentially worse, so to be honest it was objectively worse than “literally nothing”.

You don’t get credit for trying when everyone pointed out to you repeatedly that what you were trying wasn’t going to work, and was in fact going to make things worse.

As do I, but that has nothing to do with anyone doing hard, necessary work. I’d call the Uncommitted movement about the farthest thing possible from hard work to give good options a foothold. It was people doing literally nothing and pretending that would somehow improve anything.

If the “practical left” is just voting for the less-bad, while shitting on and shunning the people trying to do the hard work because the magical Fairy of Good hasn’t yet shown up to establish that foothold with a wave of the wand

No one is doing that.

Which is why the practical arm of the left promotes the Dems. Not because they are enough, or even good, but because of the two options they are the less overtly fascist. We don’t vote blue because it’s sufficient, we do it because it’s necessary to slow the descent enough for sufficient methods to take hold. Neo liberal democracy is a farce, but it’s a farce with a bad outcome and a catastrophic outcome.

We vote for bad to stave off catastrophe, so good can actually establish a foothold. Didn’t pay off this time unfortunately, now good has to be fantastic to even slide a toe in the door, and it’s a steep uphill battle at that. You’re right, fascism is definitely more prominent in the MAGA right, our job is harder than it had to be, but so it goes.

Silver lining, I guess we can lean into accelerationism now. Not my first choice, for the sake of those less financially stable than myself, but not really much option now. Send it, sure, might as well at this point. I would’ve preferred building a viable labor movement under the “stationary” part of the ratchet cycle, but we’re here now. If we’re playing the hand we’re dealt, sure, accelerationism.

Probably because the US is now the aggressor?