If He's Willing To Run Across Town With You In The Middle Of The Night To Break Into A Suspicious School

If he's willing to run across town with you in the middle of the night to break into a suspicious school for orphans than maybe he's ready to commit to a little more than friends.

Absolutely losing it at this Reddit post

And the update

She buttered Jorts

she’s a trend setter 

Ohh I like how this is presented.  I think I already gravitate towards this as a GM but now I can try to do it consciously. 

Plus good points in the comments about how dice rolls should be for tasks that are difficult or carry a degree of chance and/or risk.  The new Avatar RPG is like this, there are plenty of times the characters can just do things. On rolls they are often presented with a choice of outcome or can avoid negative outcomes altogether by taking fatigue.  

A piece of advice that I THINK comes from the Blades in the Dark rulebook (but I'm not sure because I've read so many TTRPG rulebooks in the last year or so) but that I think could be applied to a lot of other TTRPGs is that a roll shouldn't make a competent character look incompetent.

Like, I think most players and GMs (especially those of us that come from the D&D paradigm) tend to think of the dice roll as representing how well the character does the thing. This seems intuitive, but it tends to make a character's perceived level of competency at the things they're supposed to be good at weirdly swingy, which might be undesirable unless you're aiming for a slapstick tone.

Like, your stats/skills/modifyiers/whatever the hell the game you're playing has/ already represent how good/bad your character is at doing certain stuff. So the die roll, being a luck-based number unrelated to these skills, probably shouldn't ALSO represent how well your character does the thing, but instead represent outside factors that influence the outcome of your action, such as something distravting your hero, the enemy jumping away to avoid the swing, or the lock you're trying to pick having a bit of rust that's giving you trouble.

In practical terms, what I'm saying is that if your thief with a decent sneak skill is trying to stealthily follow a guard, but you get a disastrous dice roll that causes you to be discovered, that dice roll probably shouldn't represent your thief suddenly stumbling over and making a lot of noise, but the guard suddenly remembering he left something in his quarters and turning around at the worst possible moment. Mechanically both get you the same result, but one of them doesn't have the unintended of effect of making it seem like your thief suddenly forgot how to sneak.

[Image ID: several images from the Fullmetal Alchemist manga. They depict Scar, his spiritual master, his brother, Kimblee, Winry, and an Ishbalan city in ruins. The text surrounding the images reads:

He is a ninth-year talmid, twenty-two years of age, in the last stretch of his novitiate. The civil war has been going on for six years. He tries every day to clear away his rage, and every day it comes back. His master looks into his pinched face and smiles—never with his mouth, but with his eyes. “Trust in Ishbala. Even the dark things have a name.” His brother loves that phrase, too. When he can’t translate a difficult paragraph in one of his damned books, he’ll sigh Oh well, even mysteries have a name. A way to say that everything has a place in the world. But deep down, there is a part of him sneering like the soldiers sneered, the ghost of his old self standing on the eviscerated ruins of Ayha’ari screaming Does that have a name? Does that have a name? Does that have a name? /end ID.]

He must close his mind to these thoughts. Ishbala gave him his life. Ishbala gave him his right arm. Ishbala gave him his anger. It has all come together so clearly. Is She not with him? Has he not survived, despite all his mistakes? Bradley asked why Ishbala hadn’t punished him yet, didn’t he. I am the punishment, he thinks. I’m coming.

Fic rec: even the nameless, by Nonymos

Despite today being an indoor work day, I was asked to head into the gardens and take measurements of graveyard pins.

Some important context:

1) "indoor work day" means that instead of my grounds crew uniform I was wearing a black dress that wouldn't look out of place in a Ghibli film.

2) graveyard pins like to sink under the surface of the ground with time. If you're lucky, you can whack the spot where they should be with a shovel and find it in seconds. If you're smart, you go get a metal detector.

3) after twenty minutes of attacking the ground by hand, I will admit I was too stubborn to get the metal detector.

Which is why some poor woman slowly drove up to me and very tentatively asked, "do you... Uh... work here?"

"Yeah. Do you need help finding something?"

And she gave a nice long up-and-down look to the person of indeterminate gender dressed like a witch frantically digging right by a gravestone.

"...No, actually. I was just checking."