Notices by clarity flowers (clarity@xoxo.zone), page 3

@SymbolicCity Oh, yeah, for sure! very important to give the players the feeling that they have that sort agency. I'd also avoid describing emotions as immediate reactions to events (since the players will have better instincts for managing those themselves) vs like, vibes or senses: "something about the way she just did that is really annoying"

@darius I know right? Me too haha

It can be easy to fall into the trap of “I don’t want to tell the players what they feel” but a feeling is a sense just like touch or sight! Hell, even thoughts are a kind of sense. Give them something concrete, and then spin it back to them if necessary: “what feature of his face do you fixate on that is particularly infuriating you?” “why DO you trust her so deeply?”

one of my biggest pieces of advice to ttrpg GMs is “tell, don’t show”. I don’t need beautiful prose, and I don’t need to feel like I can see a movie of the events in my mind; I need useful, specific, and actionable information. You’re not just my eyes and ears, you’re also my attention and gut feelings and vibes! “Mary looks -pissed-” “Something about his face screams ‘punch me’” “She starts rambling about something something destiny whatever, but you struggle to pay attention to any of it”

like ultimately I think we need to dismantle, as a culture, the idea that you can “own” an object without also being responsible for it. Like my landlord isn’t the steward of my apartment. That falls to me and the repair guy. Why does some person who never even sets foot on the place have power and authority over it?

thinking about a manifesto that describes and denounces the capitalist concept of “ownership” and replaces it with an anticapitalist structure for rights and responsibilities of stewardship

@bess yeah that would’ve been smart lol

for all yall getting updated passports, a friendly tip: take a photo of everything going into the envelope right before you pack it in and seal it. The passport office lost my old passport when I sent it in and is making me go through a whole song and dance to claim -I- lost it

Everything is going to get worse and worse every year until something fundamentally changes, and these elections have only ever adjusted the speed of our descent. I don’t say this to cause despair, but to urge you to focus on smaller things. Find people who make the good days more beautiful and make the bad days easier to handle. Get better at asking for and receiving and offering and giving help. Make every choice one that nourishes the soil under your feet.

@kissane this is profound. tho I really wanna hear it as a proper 3-voice canon for full effect

must be nice to only experience crushing mind-numbing anxiety and existential dread where you fear your future might be arbitrarily and cruelly stolen from you once every four years. I wonder what that's like. For me, it's just tuesday.

first thought is, if you want more things to be discoverable but not missable, you need to restructure your game’s plot so you can circle back to old locations/npcs.

second thought is…. just build the strategy guide into the game as an optional feature?

I feel like most jrpgs (and many non-j-rpgs as well) if you play them without a strategy guide on hand just give you a less interesting and less coherent story because you lose out on missable content. This seems like a bummer?? How to fix it…

@detondev ooooooh ty for the names to look into

I keep wanting to make a classic roguelike but the I remember that I don’t actually like classic roguelike combat and I haven’t figured out how to fix it yet

@andrewrk @joethephish. I also use this technique constantly. It's similar to how I'll wrap a C library's pointers in my own namespaces. Feels like what I'd actually want is a "namespaced primitive", so the value automatically coerces to u32 without needing an `enumToInt` but can also have a namespace + functions, etc.

@kepstin yeah it definitely feels like it would have to be an anachronism, more of a Caves of Qud or a Brogue (which actually does use some kanji, but only as shapes and not for their meaning) than an old game

@smellsofbikes oh, this is cute, but yeah I meant more like an ASCII rogue where there the player is represented with "私" instead of "@" and dragons are "竜" instead of "d". It just charms me as a thought that it'd even be possible.

@annika it ends up feeling like never unpacking your stuff because you're just gonna move house in a few years anyway.

are there any classic roguelikes that use kanji to represent things instead of ASCII