“You are using Bonetti’s Defense against me, ah?”

Boring possibility: the DM thinks halflings and gnomes are largely redundant, and picked one to ban.

Or the one shot involves outsiders getting involved with a halfling community in trouble!

Kender, who were similar to halflings and I think are now a variant, were notorious for this. Their schtick is that they “borrow” things from their party members, not understanding that it’s theft. It gave assholes license to be assholes under the guise of roleplay, until the table inevitably needs a talk.

We are officially thinking about this more than the episode did

If the players are demanding wild results, especially if they’re the kind to roll unprompted, then sure.

But in my experience, it’s usually just a little flourish or a small bonus, which I think is fine.

And if the issue is that a nat 20 doesn’t guarantee success, technically, sure, but I’d be more annoyed being asked to make a pointless roll. I know there are reasons, like a hidden target number, or other characters being able to do it, but in general, I’d rather just hear “no” than go through a pointless check.

Let’s also throw in being a creep.

He provided a song for the 2001 animated film Osmosis Jones. This is an animated, family-friendly buddy-cop movie about a white blood cell and a cold pill teaming up to take down a virus. In the song, “Cool, Daddy Cool,” he explicitly states his attraction to underage girls and his fondness for statutory rape.

Young ladies, young ladies, I like 'em underage see

Some say that’s statutory (But I say it’s mandatory)

Like others have said, the rules are… bad. Especially the latest edition. A couple of the older editions are “favorites,” but still mixed bags, and lots of people just take the setting and use it in another system entirely.

There’s a Shadowrun actual play podcast called NeoScum that I loved (now concluded), and it began with “It’s like D&D mixed with Bladerunner!” and ended with “Fuck this, fuck Shadowrun, the universe rearranges itself so we can play a different game.” They even had a goofy recurring bit they would do whenever they had to stop play to look up rules or calculate something, which happened constantly. It’s also not a player issue, since they’ve switched to Call of Cthulhu for another story (Gutter) and just don’t have that problem.

Nobody hates Shadowrun more than the people who love Shadowrun. :P

Utilitarianism for people who think the humanities are pointless

I also bounced off of the Reloaded version (and SW in general). Unfortunately, I can’t really speak to the alternatives from personal experience.

However, I’ve been gearing up to try Call of Cthulhu, and found out it has a Western setting! Down Darker Trails. I had never heard about it, but what I could find was really positive. If and when I run a weird west game, that would probably be my first choice, and certainly a top contender.

He never actually apologized. He released a video saying he expressed himself poorly or whatever, then took it down anyway. He never said all the racist points he made were wrong.

I went hiking recently. State park, at least a mile from the campground, peaceful and quiet.

Then I noticed something scrawled on one of the trail markers. Some dipshit wrote “Fuck Joe Biden” on it.

Holy shit, how miserable do you have to be to do that? To carry a marker and tag a tree just to express how you can’t stop thinking about the guy, and make it other people’s problem, even in the middle of nowhere when you’re not even around.