Why should your fantasy game be limited by something like “health”.

One way of escalating drama and tension is by injuring a main character. The scene in Terminator 2, where Sarah Connor has to knock the T-1000 into the blast furnace with consecutive shotgun blasts, isn’t nearly as cool without her doing it with a wound in her arm. Frodo collapsing from exhaustion gives us the incredible moment of Samwise shouldering him and carrying the guy, ring and all, up the slope of Mt. Doom. Tinkerbell fading away after hearing “I don’t believe in fairies” is what gets the audience on their feet applauding her by the end of the third act.

And particularly for folks invested in the coolness of their characters, some conflicts are much more fun when the outcome isn’t anything either storyteller or player could have anticipated. A totally unexpected David v Goliath moment, where a scrawny guy fells a giant with a lucky shot, will be the kind of story people talk about for years - whether David or Goliath or both are PCs.

To write good Fantasy (of SciFi), you have to go through a process called “World Building”

I think this is more implying that you don’t have to work from the same framework for every fantasy world. Not everything has to be set in Arthurian Medieval Times with Crusader-Era social sensibilities. The menagerie of mythical creatures isn’t a prerequisite or delimiter (dragons / unicorns / etc are not a requirement nor are robots / cthulhoid horrors / woolly mammoths disallowed). You need internal consistency (to a degree) but you aren’t forced to adhere / omit any genre trope.

I would say, at an absolute bare minimum, you need some kind of fantastical or supernatural element to make it “Fantasy” as opposed to “Historical Fiction” or “Science Fiction” or some other category of fictional prose. Although, the genre of “Magical Realism” does make even that distinction a bit fuzzy.

many literature teachers / professors don’t even know about the idea of World Building

You don’t necessary need to go through the whole work of World Building if you’re just banging out a short story or novella. Even serial writers don’t necessarily bother going deep on the background material until they feel the need to expand the scope of the setting. I mean, look at the Star Wars setting. George Lucas didn’t have Jabba the Hutt defined as a big slug monster until the third movie. In the original film, there was a cut scene in which Han confronts Jabba, who was just a be-feathered chubby gangster.

If you’re just spitballing or cranking out bits of fiction in brief, World Building can be superfluous. A story that takes place entirely in a single house over the course of a long weekend doesn’t need the kind of scaffolding that a Long Walk to Mordor requires.

If they don’t taste like peppermint, I’m sending them back.

How can immigrantion matters be considered a civil matter if you criminalized someone’s immigration status?

Because you have a judge who rubber stamps your twisted legal reasoning. And you’ve got a liberal opposition that only knows how to shrug at fascism and deflect blame onto college leftists for not voting harder.

Can we revoke trumps citizenship and deporting him?

Ask Merrick Garland.

He’s been handed a blank check by liberals who were terrified of the phrase “Defund ICE”. They embraced reactionary politics and doubled down on police and military as a remedy for the BLM protests and the COVID economic crisis.

Trump gets to be the judge because Trump quite literally got to appoint all the judges.

they’re more scared of Zohran than they are of Trump.

Well, of course. Why would anyone be afraid of Trump? He’s not even Muslim.

That’s a billion dollar scratch that could have made a huge difference in thousands of lives.

Okay, sure. But consider that they didn’t earn those billions of dollars by sucking up to the right assortment of Wall Street financiers, rich family members, and ego-driven Presidential nominees.

Step 1: Go to an Ivy League school

Step 2: Make friends with a failson/daughter of a prevailing plutocrat

Step 3: Put the Matrix-code screensaver on your laptop (apparently, this worked on Elon Musk in the early Twitter takeover days)

Step 4: ???

Step 5: Get a $10M Series A and a $100M Series B thanks to the family of your rich friends buying into your hair-brained Theranos knock-off.

This DNC won’t help any specific candidate in a primary, but they won’t work against a specific candidate either.

The same group of people absolutely shitting themselves over Zohran Mamdani as Mayor of NYC won’t work against any specific candidate in 2028? Did we completely forget about 2020, when Obama got half the field to drop out after Super Tuesday to pave the way for a guy in fifth place? Or 2024, when Dems forewent having a Presidential Primary entirely so they could fumble between a geriatric genocidal bum and his Cheney-loving VP?

We’re on a huge inflection point

In 1972, Richard Nixon made the case for his reelection by invoking the second derivative of inflation. He stated that the rate of increase of inflation was decreasing.

This is the inflection point the American liberal party has reached, in the year 2025. Things are so incredibly bad that a Cuomo can’t walk off with a high office in the finance capital of the world. The increase of fascism is decreasing.

We can not afford to roll the dice on neoliberalism again

This won’t be a diceroll. The preponderance of Democrats are firmly in the tank for some ideological mix of neoliberalism and neoconservatism. One of the great “successes” of the Democratic Party over the last 20 years has been to draw a big chunk of the economic conservatives out of the Republican Party and into their own.

From Kristen Gillibrand to Kristen Sinema, from Hakeem Jefferies to Henry Cuellar, from Michael Bloomberg to Rick Wilson, this is a party overflowing with Bush Era “compassionate conservatives”. AOC has no path to a national platform in 2028. Y’all are going to be stuck holding your noses and voting for Gretchen Whitmer/Pete Buttigieg while shouting “Vote Blue No Matter Who” in another three years.

But maybe we can get Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman their house seats back. Maybe we can get a few more Mamdanis into the big city mayorships. Then talk about what a minority of leftists in the Senate could look like in another ten to forty years.

The fundamental problem with the politics of healthcare is that it plays directly into the hands of Randian Objectivism. You have healthy people (the Makers) and sick people (the Takers). And the Objectivist logic of economics is that you want to remove all the Takers from your economy, because otherwise they’ll overwhelm your system and turn it into Dystopia.

When we already operate a floundering system that people generally despise, its an easy sell to claim “It’s the sick people who are making health care expensive and driving up the cost of care!” What’s more, with the outsourcing of our manufacturing base, its easy to forget the real material cost of the other amenities that make life in the imperial core comfortable. Why does a brand new TV cost me $400 but a night in the hospital cost me $4000? Seems like the hospital system is broken, right?

This is a trap I see liberals fall for as quickly as conservatives, which is why big blue states like California and Illinois and Massachusetts and New York also refuse to implement the far more efficient and equitable public health reforms common to countries in Europe with much smaller GDPs.

Baiting residents - MAGA and Liberal alike - into seeing health care as a cost center rather than a value center (or even a loss leader) has lead the entire country to reject practices that the rest of the world has enthusiastically embraced.

Fewer hospitals just means more people going to Church.

Americans: “Tragedy of the Commons proves that people are incapable of working together for mutual benefit, because personal greed will always lead to the devastation of the collective common good.”

Chinese: “Why do you not simply arrest and punish the bad actors in your society when they overstep and impede on the general welfare?”

Americans: “Because that’s fascism. Also, we’re arresting and deporting you for asking.”

I’m sorry, I didn’t see Undertale anywhere on the box art.

There’s always the five finger discount

I start wondering if it’s safe to imagine that maybe things could get better

It’s always safe to imagine. Imagining is the first step to a better place to live. But the dream can’t live in your head forever. At some point, you need to take action.

I have no faith that working within the electoral system will fix that.

Mobilizing a large group of activists around a set of tangible and popular goals is its own reward, whether or not the electoral system is accommodating to the politician’s success.

RCV undermines the necessity for a partisan vote. That’s why Cuomo - the party establishment pick - lost by 8 points to a local outsider with better politics and a cleaner reputation.

But I agree, at some point, you do need to support someone. And if that someone is part of a large political organization (aka a party) they can bring a lot of financial and labor resources to bare when organizing and implementing political reforms. In the case of New York City, which is functionally a one party municipality (Dems regularly swamp the GOP 2:1), Zohran’s entrance to the statewide political scene is a huge break from the traditional partisan politics that gave us Eric Adams and threatened to give us four more years of a corrupt, real estate entwined sex pest.

The fact that he’s got a large, active, well-financed DSA behind him - in a way that transformed a coronation into a competitive primary - is a huge point in his favor.

BBEG: Rogue Paladin Player’s Little Brother’s Character

Paladin Player:

Reaganism was definitely a new kind of politics, in the sense that he was the bellweather of the next generation of the GOP (and Dems tailing after).

But if we’re just looking for an excuse to yell at people for how they voted, I can’t think of maybe half a dozen Presidents undeserving of that response.

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