I personally disagree with the assertion that simulation is unnecessary because dice exist. Crunch and randomization work differently, and serve different purposes in a design. Crunch is good for accounting for the factors that are known, predictable, or obviously true in the fiction. Randomization, by contrast, is good for things not easily known or tracked, or that one could never guess would be true in the moment.

Those of us who actually knew how to write before 2020 deeply resent the slander against em dashes.

One particularly wild bit: that's actually the second time I've had someone decide that the role they'd chosen in the party was meant to make them Always Smart and Right to the point of having more narrative power than the GM... in a trad game structure. (The first time, instead of an erzatz detective/leader, it was a scholar.)

I have a whole blog post about one game I ran that entailed a largely (though not entirely) disastrous few months...pteryx.dreamwidth.org/3448.html

@juergen_hubertThe chapparal, or similar semi-arid locations. You see lots of plains and lots of deserts, but rarely the scrublands in between.

It's my experience that many players have no idea that deciphering is even a thing that needs to be done with clues. They assume that clues are MacGuffins that you just collect in order to redeem for the ending once they've got enough, or that their characters are CSIs and the DM is the detective. Even if they intellectually understand the need to figure stuff out, there's a chance they won't think to talk to each other about ideas, or think that anything other than a one-step solve loses.

Referring back to my "sorcerers have a superhero origin" proposal elsewhere in this discussion... one of the Dragon suggestions for an alternative source of inherent magical power is being the subject of magical or alchemical experimentation.In Eberron, since it just came out of a massive war that involved advancements in combat magic and artifice, it's easy to imagine that type of origin specifically manifesting as "Captain America, but a sorcerer".

While the Eberron setting doesn't directly tie dragonmarks to the Sorcerer class, it does explore hereditary magic as a privilege. In general, if you're not of the bloodlines who are "supposed to" get particular constructive magic and want to go into business using that magic, you need to either sign a contract with the appropriate Dragonmarked House or they'll go Pinkerton on your ass. This cuts the other way, too, where anyone in the House with such powers is pressured to participate.

One idea that pops to mind is simply learning about the strange and sometimes dangerous flora and fauna of a new region... or, more fantastically, about its spirits. Rather than having the tension come from the usual "and we need to find X kind of resource to exploit in the process" (since that's more colonialist thinking), there should be a dawning realization that the region itself is in danger from something the PCs need to stop.

@sirblastalotProbably calls for an exception for specifically discussing when a large company (mis)uses "AI", so as not to silence outcry against it.Concerning those advocating that people "just downvote it"... 1) not everyone who participates in this community does so through a system that allows downvotes (Mastodon doesn't), and 2) IME, people who post "AI" content willy-nilly tend to be so bad at people that they don't understand when they're being told off, even directly.

This also relates to my mention elsewhere in this discussion of what used to be called "special snowflakes" (before the birdsite ruined the word "snowflake"). Some people want novelty and creativity above all in their RP, and that doesn't always come with a sense for how to balance that with intended theme or tone. And as you point out, if no one is playing things remotely straight, things can become farcical, or at least like an "Oops! All Foils" situation with no requisite normal.