I’ve tried this a couple times with limited success.

• Hacking something remotely was a default Very Hard challenge. Very difficult to do without spending fate points.
• Hacking something on the same network was hard. Could maybe hit it with a lucky roll, but still would probably require a fate point
• Hacking something with physical access was in the realm of “the PC who specializes in this can likely do it without trouble”

Those were then bumped up or down depending on if it was “budget”, “consumer grade”, or “corporate grade”. Hacking into some nobody chump’s security system from across the street is something the hacker PC get done for free with a little luck. Hacking into the ASI Corporate HQ maglock door subsystem from across town would be a feat of legend, not something someone can likely do just off the cuff.

I do like that Fate encourages players to do some preparation for hard tasks. Have someone use their talky skills to talk up some junior workers, and learn something about the network. That’s an advantage you can invoke. Have someone spend resources to bribe someone, that’s another advantage.

A problem that’s come up each time I’ve tried this kind of game is not having a shared understanding of what “hacking” can do. Fate kind of helps here because the actions are kind of agnostic about what skills are creating them. If you’re trying to remove someone from the scene, that’s likely an Attack whether you’re using “hacking” or “fight” or “intimidate”. The hacker might fake a text from the boss telling the bouncer he’s fired where the bruiser might just deck him, but they go down the same kind of mechanical funnel. The tactical considerations for the players comes from like “what looks like a softer target: his face or his phone? is anyone going to see?”

When I encounter a GM who has like pages of lore, I’m always like “Would you rather write a book?”

Stuff like this can be very good, but be aware there are some players who hate this. Some people just want to be told a story, and if you ask them to be too creative they’ll have a bad time. Sometimes it’s because they’re new and nervous, but sometimes that’s just how they are.

Also some players just routinely have difficult ideas that don’t mesh with the group. Like everyone else is vibing on a serious dark modern day vampire political game, and they’re like “I want to be a ninja turtle from Mars with a reanimated dead fish for a head”. Like, what. Maybe some people enjoy “zany” off-theme stuff. Not me.

Or the player that always wants to be themselves. Or an amnesiac.

Gosh I’ve had so many players I didn’t enjoy.

Anyway. Player input is also built nicely into Fate, both in campaign creation and scenes. I’m a fan. Spend a fate point and declare a story detail like “every Razer Space Technology office has a helipad with a chopper ready to go. It’s because the CEO is weirdly hands on and loves helicopters.”

as an almost maximally privileged person (cis straight etc), i want my whining fellows to shut the fuck up. Just stop. Stop taking up all the god damn space. Just be quiet. It’s okay not to be included in every scene all the time.

Your point about not assuming people are straight by default is valid. But I mostly just want some cis-het folks to stop embarrassing me by being fucking insufferable.

A dark souls kind of slow paced combat game, but built for co-op. Except I don’t have any friends who are on the same skill level and schedule.

More broadly, I really want more games that you can play co-op in where the players are vastly different skill levels, but it’s still fun. I don’t know how to solve this.

I can imagine like a game where one person is playing dark souls and the other is playing candy crush, and they interact somehow. Like making matches in one give estus in the other, and killing bosses gives stuff.

Basically I want to play games with my frienda that don’t play the same games, somehow.

I failed calc2 and am gainfully employed as a mid/upper level software engineer.

One guy at work really saved the day because he’s good at math, and made a very slow process much faster because he knows … uh… vector math? He did magic with numpy

They could make the psn account optional, and most people wouldn’t care. Make it easy to click “No thanks” once and be done. Some people would voluntarily do it because they like seeing their own stats in one place.

They could generate a unique ID for a given install and send metrics home when there’s a connection but no psn account, and most people wouldn’t even notice.

I think most of the consumer anger is coming from getting a worse experience for no gains. It makes the corporation seem unreasonable.

I don’t buy a game solely because it’s the zeitgeist or whatever. A friend of mine routinely buys games that are “the new shiny” and then doesn’t finish them, or loses interest quickly. I usually wait for a sale, some patches, and/or the dlc to be bundled into a goty edition.

Some exceptions:

I bought elden ring near launch because I’m a big enjoyer of the genre, and my friend confirmed it was good. No regrets.

I bought bg3 shortly before it’s full access. I’d liked the other games larian did, and a friend told me it was good. No regrets.

Both of those were pretty light on DLC. No season pass or “goty” editions were likely.

I’m going to wait for the dragon age game to go on sale. I don’t really trust Bioware, and I don’t know if they plan to do a bunch of dlc that will get bundled up later.

I’ve been waiting for Lies of P to get cheap. The demo was just ok when I played it, but a friend tells me it’s phenomenal.

Right now I’m playing a MUD (aardwolf). It really distills some online RPG into the essence of “go kill some stuff to level up, get new skills, and kill bigger stuff”. It’s strangely satisfying.

A fantasy game years ago. The players learned there was a famine in the country, and the king was taxing almost all the food from everyone. Every month more food was taken, and the people were starving. There were rumors of people turning to dark arts, and demonic incursions, as well

So the players knocked some heads and eventually forced their way into the castle. They were ready to throw down with the evil king that was starving everyone to feed himself lavish feasts.

They discovered that the kingdom had drawn the attention of a large gluttony demon, and the king was feeding it all the food in order to keep it sated enough it wouldn’t eat the people. No one among his people were powerful enough to banish the thing, and the demon told them if they told anyone the truth the deal was off.

Luckily, one of the player characters was pretty good at dealing with demons. After some tense “wait is he lying? This GM loves having NPCs just lie to us” they decided to trust the king, and had a big ass “everything is on fire and the wall are melting” fight with the demon.

Good times.

Something with an alien species that wants to join the borg. Maybe their home system is in a bad way, or they just believe in the Borg’s ideals.

Do you just let them throw themselves in and destroy their society? What about people who don’t want to join? What if them joining the Borg is strategically bad for the federation?

Maybe this was done and I forgot

There’s a lot of like management being like “we gotta hit this deadline (that we made up)” combined with “if I hit all my targets and put in some overtime, the boss can buy another sports car this year”

I don’t want to work extra to make someone else richer. Maybe if I had a shit load of shares. Maybe. But I don’t. So I do my job with professional standards, but I’m not doing 12 hour days

It’s nearly impossible to do anything good when you have a major conservative party set on doing bad.

You could have a position of “We should provide food to all children so they can learn without being distracted by hunger” and people would be like “that’s communism i’d rather those kids starve”

Still seems like this could just be a setting book for Fate.

Sounds a lot like aspects from Fate.

Fate still has numbers, but you could probably hack them off without too much trouble. I don’t know if “the troll is fantastic brawler and you’re a good swordsman” is especially better, but it’s an option

I send people links to posts on Lemmy, and tell people I can’t see Instagram/Twitter/etc.

Is it working? No, not really, but it feels like it should.

Very cool that you put this together and got it out there. Most people’s pet projects never evolve past half a page of scribbled lines.

I don’t think it’s quite to my taste- I’ve been in a Fate mood lately- but I hope this finds an audience.

Sometimes you feel like the shittier game took players from the game you’d rather be playing.

Sometimes you feel like the shittier game is kind of a knockoff, and it feels bad when that succeeds.

Sometimes a game is made by a horrible company with a history of abuse from its high ranking staff.

On the one hand, not a big fan of moba or purely PVP games.

On the other, I deeply dislike overwatch specifically and would like to see it dead. Maybe this would make a dent.

Yeah I guess my money’s not good to them.

I hope you’re ready for a deluge of ignorant comments. And some malicious ones.

I’m going quickly enumerate some of the more common responses.

“I knew a poly couple and they broke up!” -> we’ve all known many monogamous relationships that ended, too. Though it is true that going from a conventional, deeply entangled, monogamous relationship to something else is challenging. Read about the missing step if you’re interested. Monogamous people would also benefit.

“It’s bad for the kids!” -> the poly people I know who have kids, the kids are doing great. They have more adults in their lives that are invested in them.

“It’s just cheating!” -> cheating is when you break agreed upon rules. If the rules don’t include “only have sex with one person”, then it’s not cheating to do otherwise.

“It’s just about sex!” -> sometimes! Sometimes monogamous relationships are just about sex. Sometimes they’re not.

“I’m too jealous for that!” -> most people experience jealousy. What’s important is how you deal with it. If you’re the kind of person who has a freak out and breaks into your partner’s phone because he smiled at the waitress, that’s not ok and not something to be proud of. You can and should work on emotional regulation.

“You poly people think you’re better than everyone!” -> some people might. But that’s true for any subcategory of people. Vegans. Linux users. City dwellers. Country dwellers. I will say that living unexamined choices I think is the worse choice. If monogamy is something you really thought about and chose, fine, good for you. But if you’re just doing it because that’s expected and never gave it a thought? Less impressed. The same for eating meat or using windows.

Ok, I think that’s all the highlights.

I use jetbrains’ PyCharm. Work paid for it. It does the things I want it to do (works with docker, git integration, local history, syntax highlighting for every language I use, refactor:rename and move, safe delete, find usages,.find declaration, view library code, database integration, other stuff I’m forgetting)