I just really don't enjoy virtual tabletop as much as face to face. I had a virtual game on Friday and a regular one Sunday, and the difference was night and day. The Sunday game is being run by someone who's on his third session of running games ever, started with a fight where the NPCs outnumbered the players by 4-1 (I had 3 turns in a 2.5 hour combat and I went 2nd in initiative) and the "plot" literally railroaded us into murderhobo-ing some mooks who hadn't actually done anything to us. The Friday game has an experienced GM, some decent combat, and I managed to hijack control of a murder investigation as a rogue who is pretty upfront (with the party) about just wanting to loot the place and get bigger knives. I still had more fun overall on Sunday because at the worst points I was bullshitting with friends, where on Friday at the best points I was sitting in my living room alone.
I get that face-to-face isn't always possible and that virtual is an acceptable substitute for most, but if all I could do was play virtual, I'd find a different hobby. /rant
On another note, does anyone have any experience with Blades in the Dark? I love the aesthetic, and the mechanics seem very interesting.
I feel the same. It is still fun to a degree, but it lacks any immersion, I just don't feel like I can actually get into character and I feel less engaged, even with a video conference.
I catch myself browsing or not listening propperly. People sometimes talk over each other, which means you either do not understand a single word or you have to slow down communication, waiting for people to finish, then wait if someone else wants to chime in, then you start talking but whoopsie, someone else did too, so you wait again, or talk and then they talk and my god even just
talking feels
tedious with this sort of gameplay. You can barely have any banter, and you certainly get way less interaction than with a usual irl meetup. Online, only 2 people can ever have an exchange at the same time (even when it's 2 players and the DM talking, it's still happening one after the other), at the table, while the DM talks to a player, everybody else can talk amongst the group as they wish.
Online gaming, for the most part, is waiting your turn to say something, while you can't do anything else. It's better than not being able to play and it lets you play with people scattered across the globe... but it doesn't even come close to irl gameplay around a table.
Why is twitter having a stroke about orcs all of a sudden? Wtf is wrong with these people?
and
How they are fantasy niggas and fantasy races is racism because races.
A bit more detail:
Someone posted a race-description for orcs on Twitter or tumblr or whatever and whined about how they were described as inherently violent, brutal and evil, bitched about how negrophobic that was, since the terms were also used to describe blacks and what not.
Having become a pessimist when it comes to pop culture, I now expect several companies to bend the knee to the impotent shitstorm crowd and retcon races into oblivion in the future. Every race will become the same blandish "and they are really nice people, respectful of other people and their choices and prefered pronouns" with Orcs and some other usually evil races becoming -at best!- misunderstood noble beings with a rich albeit somewhat primitive culture, being vilified by white cishet men out of fear and hatred... or at worst, Orcs will be wakandalized* and become the good guys all along.
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I suggest the term "wakandalize" as a pop culture specific version of "to vandalize", where some established IP gets changed to it appeals to Twitter SJWs.
Example of use:
I am so sick and tired of Disney wakandalizing every franchise I used to enjoy.
