Seriously, though:

The sourcebook GURPS Goblins provides a fascinating variety of misfortunes that might befall player characters as a result of invoking random lookup tables. Some of these misfortunes have specific conditions, such as occurring only in particular seasons, or only to characters with particular traits; if such a misfortune is drawn while its conditions are not met, nothing happens, to the target's good fortune.

I've just noticed that one such conditional misfortune is that only male characters are at risk of being randomly struck by lightning. The "males only" tag is reiterated in several places, so it's probably not a typo, but at no point does the text see fit to explain why this is the case, or even to remark upon it in any way.

So, according to the CDC, males are 4 times more likely to be struck by lightning. Leaving aside reasons for how and why that statistic came to be, your table entry is probably a joking reference to that weird bit of trivia.

You know, being an obscure joke about incongruous CDC statistics probably also explains why being struck by lightning is mixed in with a table of random diseases.

200 Word RPGs 2024

Each November, some people try to write a novel. Others would prefer to do as little writing as possible. For those who wish to challenge their ability to not write, we offer this alternative: producing a complete, playable roleplaying game in two hundred words or fewer.

This is the submission thread for the 2024 event, running from November 1st, 2024 through November 30th, 2024. Submission guidelines can be found in this blog's pinned post, here.

Collected entries for 2024-11-26:

Previous summaries: 2024-11-01, 2024-11-02, 2024-11-03, 2024-11-04, 2024-11-05, 2024-11-06, 2024-11-07, 2024-11-08, 2024-11-09/10, 2024-11-11/12, 2024-11-13, 2024-11-14, 2024-11-15, 2024-11-16/17, 2024-11-18, 2024-11-19, 2024-11-20/21, 2024-11-22/23, 2024-11-24, 2024-11-25

The last-minute scramble is underway in earnest now – these 19 entries easily make today our busiest yet. Interestingly, in spite of this year's relatively slow start, we've now officially pulled ahead of last year's total by this point in November; in 2023, we had 199 total entries by end of day on the 26th, while 2024 is currently sitting at 202.

200 Word RPGs 2024

Each November, some people try to write a novel. Others would prefer to do as little writing as possible. For those who wish to challenge their ability to not write, we offer this alternative: producing a complete, playable roleplaying game in two hundred words or fewer.

This is the submission thread for the 2024 event, running from November 1st, 2024 through November 30th, 2024. Submission guidelines can be found in this blog's pinned post, here.

I'M NOT LEARNING TO PLAY MAGICAL GATHERING

A subtractive game for three or more players.

First, decide who's the JUDGE.

Each non-JUDGE player should click the following links to assemble Magic: The Gathering cards representing, respectively their GUY, their guy's STUFF, and their guy's SPECIAL TECHNIQUE:

Each round, you may reroll one result. Once every player has decided whether to reroll, take turns to ATTACK (explain in 90 SECONDS why your GUY would beat the others in free-for-all combat with their STUFF and TECHNIQUE).

After each ATTACK, the other players may each DEFEND (spend 30 seconds explaining why the ATTACKING player is wrong).

You are only allowed to refer to the name, art, and flavour text of relevant cards to make your arguments; you may not refer to any rules text on those cards or to any Magic: The Gathering rules concepts or lore.

Once all ATTACKS and DEFENSES are finished, the JUDGE decides a winner under the same criteria. That winner is the JUDGE for next round.

ADVANCED EDITION

To add more variables, go to https://scryfall.com/random?q=t:land to generate an ARENA and https://scryfall.com/random?q=t:enchantment+-t:creature for a BATTLE SCENARIO each round. These apply to all GUYS & can be invoked in any ATTACK or DEFENSE.

The weirdest part about the Twitter exodus for me is that a bunch of folks I used to follow on Twitter but had never interacted with are now following me here. I guess that makes us... step-mutuals? Mutuals-in-law? I'm not sure what the approved nomenclature is for this scenario.

I mean, I'd love to close the loop, but the context of the Twitter followership in question sometimes doesn't offer many good conversational openers, y'know? "Hi, glad to finally meet you, long-time fan of your very detailed drawings of buff dragon ladies blasting rope."

They're already into Savage Worlds, and Savage RIFTS is right there. There's lots of space dedicated to Techno-Wizardry.

I prefer to recommend games that are actually playable.

Is Savage Worlds a rough system? I've heard varying things but haven't gotten the chance to try it myself.

Core Savage Worlds is fine. Its adaptation of RIFTS is... interesting, let's put it that way!

Surely the most efficient solution would be a Blades in the Dark hack

okay time to say something genuinely cursed but also i think true...

wouldn't this just be d20 Modern but for D&D 4th edition?

I'm not convinced that D&D4E's mechanical spine is amenable to being adapted for purely or primarily ranged combat – I've seen it tried and failed too often! – but if a non-terrible conversion of this sort existed it absolutely would have been my first recommendation here.

Wait, I think I actually might have the perfect system for this in mind. Shadowrun, 4th Edition, strip out vehicle, matrix, and maybe possibly astral rules.

Downside, uhm, how crunchy -do- you want your system to be?

They're already into Savage Worlds, and Savage RIFTS is right there. There's lots of space dedicated to Techno-Wizardry.

I prefer to recommend games that are actually playable.

Is Savage Worlds a rough system? I've heard varying things but haven't gotten the chance to try it myself.

Core Savage Worlds is fine. Its adaptation of RIFTS is... interesting, let's put it that way!

Surely the most efficient solution would be a Blades in the Dark hack

okay time to say something genuinely cursed but also i think true...

wouldn't this just be d20 Modern but for D&D 4th edition?

I'm not convinced that D&D4E's mechanical spine is amenable to being adapted for purely or primarily ranged combat – I've seen it tried and failed too often! – but if a non-terrible conversion of this sort existed it absolutely would have been my first recommendation here.

The phrase "to put [someone] through the wringer" is, of course, referring to a laundry wringer, a formerly popular but now little-used home appliance that looks like this:

It's easy to understand why being put through one would be an ordeal!

So here's the question I have: for the folks who just found out from this post what a laundry wringer is, and have been spelling it "through the ringer" all this time, what were you picturing when you said "ringer"?

I knew what a laundry wringer was but wasn't sure if the ringer in "through the ringer" was one or if it was a boxing term.

At the very least, "put through the wringer" appears to be the older form; you'll occasionally bump into alternate expressions like "put through the mangle" (another word for laundry wringer)* or "put through the mill" (a device which performs a similar function), or the extended form "put through the wringer and hung out to dry". Likewise, cognate expressions to "put through the wringer" appear in other languages where "(laundry) wringer" and "(bell) ringer" don't admit homophone confusion, as in the Finnish "vetää mankelin läpi".

* Amusingly, the English mangle-as-in-laundry-wringer and the English mangle-as-in-mutilate appear to have unrelated etymologies, in spite of the fact that the former will quite handily do the latter. Just one of those fun linguistic coincidences!

(As an aside to the preceding footnote, though mangle-as-in-mutilate and mangle-as-in-laundry-wringer appear to be legitimately unconnected in origin, do you know what English word does have solid evidence for a shared origin with mangle-as-in-laundry-wringer? "Mangonel" – as in catapult. That word's been on quite the journey!)

Today's aesthetic: when a cartoon does a flashback where the hero and villain are friends, except the villain already has their sinister skulls-and-spikes aesthetic before the Tragedy That Drove Them to Evil™, implying that those two things are unrelated and they just never outgrew their high school goth phase.

@temporarilypermanenturl replied:

In my experience, even the most dedicated lifestyle goths almost always eventually outgrow the "long spikes on dailywear" thing – not necessarily because it's childish, but because it's inconvenient, and as an adult you've got shit to do!

The weirdest part about the Twitter exodus for me is that a bunch of folks I used to follow on Twitter but had never interacted with are now following me here. I guess that makes us... step-mutuals? Mutuals-in-law? I'm not sure what the approved nomenclature is for this scenario.

I mean, I'd love to close the loop, but the context of the Twitter followership in question sometimes doesn't offer many good conversational openers, y'know? "Hi, glad to finally meet you, long-time fan of your very detailed drawings of buff dragon ladies blasting rope."

Back when I was fooling around with GURPS, I found that the tone of the community around the game was overly obsessed with fine-grained differences in equipment, specifically which hand loaded bullets granted a +1 to skill and which granted a +2, which lent the community the air of being gunhuggers.

And when I finally came to play GURPS, I discovered that it was almost impossible to accomplish anything unless you can get your skill up to 14+, which for Guns skill meant working uphill against speed, range and size modifiers. And then when you did hit, any damage that made it through DR might get halved, depending on the size of the bullet you fired.

And because that's a lot of character points to spend and results weren't guaranteed, the players tend to turn to powergaming their equipment, which meant arguing over grains of powder and the shape of bullets.

To be fair, if you're aiming at emulating a modern military themed tactical puzzler in the vein of Tactical Breach Wizards, that's kind of the vibe. That might not be the vibe the requesting party wants, of course, but if so, they can clarify.

I'd politely disagree? TBW isn't a game that cares about the miniutia of guns or spells, it gives you abilities with simple effects and simple upgrades/modifiers and let's you combine them into interesting emergent gameplay

I will note that the requesting party didn't ask about emulating the mechanics of Tactical Breach Wizards; however, setting that aside for the moment, there's a legitimate balancing act that needs to be navigated here, and it's one of the reasons that party-based tactical CRPG mechanics often can't be adapted directly to the tabletop.

When the player in a video game is managing four or five characters at the same time, even very simple character-building options can lead to a combinatorial explosion of player-facing choices; having (for example) just four viable builds per character yields 256 possible party compositions when you multiply it by a four-character party, which is a lot of territory for one person to cover.

However, when you shift that same breadth of options to a tabletop RPG context where each player only needs to look after their own character, having a tiny handful of viable builds to work with is liable to feel inflexible and tedious.

The upshot is that is that if you want to preserve the same feel in a tabletop RPG, your character-building options generally need to be more fiddly – often considerably more fiddly – in the tabletop version than they are in the video game version just to offer the same effective level of engagement.

GURPS is admittedly on the very high end of the fiddliness scale, so there's a fair bit of territory to explore here; however, aiming for the exact same level of player-facing crunch as the game you're adapting is also typically a mistake in this particular context, so – like I said – there's a balance to be struck.