I once got to do a tour of a historic fort, and when we visited the magazine the guide told us that garrisoned soldiers were issued wooden button fly trousers. They couldn’t use a zipper because a spark might set off the gunpowder, and also they hadn’t been invented yet.

Could’ve just asked Hobbes, he’d tell you they’re nouns that have lost their amateur status

I’m sure it probably varies geographically, but when the plastic ban came first came into effect for us you’d see a lot of reusable shopping bags that were made from plastic.

I remember reading a study that suggested the typical reusable plastic bag used as much plastic as two-thousand disposable bags. So if you had one of those bags, you’d have to use it once a week for forty years to offset your plastic karma burden.

But anyway, as they say, you should bring your own bag because otherwise they’ll make more disposable bags. It has to be legislated, otherwise corpos are going to corpo and we’ll continue drowning in plastic.

These shopping bag bans don’t go far enough imo. The amount of plastic in packaging, shipping, medicine, fishing, whatever industry you choose - it’s just mind boggling.

Here’s a funny plastic quibble I have: a store near me sells bread which comes in a plastic bag, but the little clip/tag to tie off the bag they recently switched to cardboard. A token gesture, but hey, it’s still nice to see. Now if you want to buy in bulk, you can buy a bag of bread with two bags of bread in it. The outer bag is tied off with a plastic tag.

I’m gonna keep it real with you, chief. I don’t like what you said and I wouldn’t love you anymore. Your girlfriend is probably a better person than me.

She needs compassionate care. Not to be threatened with eternal torture. You can’t fix suffering with the promise of more suffering, that’s just pouring gas on the fire.

I started a new job recently that’s much more physically demanding than I’m used to. Unpacking stock, lots of lifting.

Normally I’d expect it would be my back giving me grief, but it seems it’s my elbow. Seems like Tennis Elbow, it only hurts when I move, but even small things like my phone cause me pain.

It’s mostly gone away, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it rears up again. I’m playing it as safe as I can and doing lots of stretches and stuff.

On the bright side, when I finally get used to it I expect to be in the best shape of my life

Pluto is and will always be Hot Shit.

Actually, it’s very cold on Pluto. Which makes Pluto cooler than Fonzie

What doesn’t kill you might succeed on a second attempt.

Quack

My mouth hurts so that my heart doesn’t

3 hours of debugging can save you 30 minutes of reading the documentation

I suppose people will always do what they think is easiest

Sometimes you eat the bear and sometimes the bear eats you

When you consider that a lot of their customers are pretty entrenched in Amazon’s services, “Boycott Amazon for a week” is more achievable than, “Boycott Amazon forever.”

Now don’t get me wrong, I’d love to see people give up on Amazon forever. But sometimes taking a week off is long enough for people to change their shopping habits.

Although I suppose the insidious thing about Amazon is that they only offer an annual subscription so I doubt people are cancelling their service for a week.

I’d say your instincts are good, and that this is too many rituals to give out. In fact, this looks more like a list of all rituals than a player’s wishlist of rituals.

You’ve got some good advice here on how many to allow, so let me take a different tack here and give some advice for handling a lot of rituals at once.

The foremost important rule of a ritual is that it takes ten minutes longer to cast a spell as a ritual than to simply cast the spell.

Many of these spells have a duration of one hour. Say you have three rituals going: comprehend languages, floating disk, and unseen servant. Every hour you would have to rest for 30 minutes to refresh your spells, then you’d have another 30 minutes of adventuring before they begin to expire.

So if your player wants to have the rituals active and ready, the entire party only travels at half speed. I’d have NPCs take the piss out of them and I’d encourage the players to do the same (in character, and all in good fun)

Time is important to you as a DM because you can use it to put pressure on the party. You can do this narratively by imposing deadlines, or taking NPCs hostage, or what have you. However, you can also impose this mechanically by having random encounters.

As the DM you get to decide how to do random encounters. The most common rule I see is to roll once per hour to see if there’s an encounter.

Now, a lot of this sounds like you might be punishing the player for using too many rituals. That’s not strictly true though. You’re enabling the player to make choices, and choices have consequences. Enforcing these rules are a way that you can be the Yes DM you want to be while also keeping the power level grounded.

Hmm, I’d probably call it PG13.

The prologue has some fantasy violence / gore, and the main side plot is lesbian romance. Some sexual tension, and I think a fade to black, but I don’t remember anything explicit.

I don’t know if this would bother you, but the language was like fantasy blue-collar. The protaganist is an orc and curses a lot, but I feel they were fantasy swear words and I don’t remember seeing any F-bombs

The book’s main appeal is this wholesome, cozy vibe though. Even if some of the elements are for adults, it’s got good morals and a heartwarming message

This book is like a warm hug on a cold day. I can’t recommend it enough

I can’t find anything concrete online, but my assumption is that it has to do with the adventure / module design.

Consider a scenario where the party is going to go kill a lich, but first must delve into the lich’s lair before they may fight.

“Prophet” being that the party is forearmed with the knowledge of what the final encounter will be - and perhaps some intelligence on the dungeon.

“Squeeze” where the party has encounters that drain their resources. Those grenades / fireballs are going to be handy for fighting the lich, but they’re also useful for dealing with the lich’s zombie army.

“Monster” where the party finally encounters the prophesied monster and fights the lich.

I’ve never heard this trope named this way, but it’s how so many dungeons and adventures are designed. The party knows they have a particular fight coming up, and must carefully manage their resources because they won’t be having that fight at full strength.

When I was a teenager I felt this way. I didn’t ask to be here, and so far life has sucked pretty hard.

My stance has softened as I’ve aged. I still wish I’d never been born, mind you, but I don’t blame my parents for having kids. They just did what came naturally for them.

You can’t consent to being born, and that upset me a lot. But it’s not like they could have asked my permission anyway. Might as well make the most of the situation.

Just buy another book then, you’ll have only 12.5% of your problems left.

Hmmm, this is going to take forever…

So you’re saying it’s light on flash

Y’know, I’m someone who gets unreasonably annoyed when encountering an unfamiliar acronym, but even I think banning someone for using one is going too far.

That said, none of these acronyms are without enough context to figure out what they are. Everyone knows what LOL means. USAID is an acronym where the acronym describes what the organization does. CJR is present in a thread about Columbia Journalism Review.

As a general rule, if you define your Three Letter Acronyms (TLA), then they’re no longer a barrier to understanding. And then you can use whatever TLA you like. See how easy that is?

Where they banned LOL and a reaction gif, if I had to guess the rule being violated would be about low-effort discussion. And again, I kind of sympathise with the desire to have meaningful discussion and I see where getting a message that just says “lol” could take the wind out of your sails. Banning is still overkill and alienating to your users though.

There’s a certain amount of irony if you consider a rule against low-effort discussion in a community that was made with such low-effort that they didn’t define and publish their rules