it seems weird that the state can keep trying until they get the answer they want. Why is that protection only available later?

It wouldn’t be a coin toss - the odds are heavily slanted in favor of the prosecutor. The defense has no role.

Also does this mean that those times cops didn’t get indicted, the state could have tried again?

Right, but that doesn’t answer if they convene a grand jury for a specific alleged crime, and the grand jury says “no”, can they try again with a new jury? For the same alleged crime? That seems like an obvious flaw in that they can just keep trying until they get an indictment and can proceed. There’d be no point in the grand jury step because it eventually returns an indictment.

Edit: Internet is telling me

Even if a grand jury does not indict an individual, the prosecutor can re-bring the same defendant before the grand jury on the same charges multiple times, although prosecutors will usually wait until a new grand jury is convened for especially high-profile cases. This is allowed because issues of double jeopardy do not attach until a person has been formally charged.

Which seems insane.

https://www.arnoldsmithlaw.com/who-decides-whether-or-not-i-will-be-charged-with-a-crime.html

Our legal system seems really bad, folks

You can keep convening grand juries against someone for the same event until they agree to indict? That seems dubious. And is especially damning in the context of police that don’t get indicted and never go to trial.

Mad that the grand jury didn’t refuse to indict.

Hope the jury nullifies.

If he is found guilty, maybe it’ll be time for unrest.

In my pandemic game, goblins were described as sort of perpetual teenagers. Some of them could be really smart, but a lot of them were impulsive, prone to going along with the group, and being kind of cruel.

They found a pack of goblins that had robbed some travelers… to steal their concert tickets. Most of them scattered, but they caught up with one. The monk decided not to punch this small humanoid in the face and instead asked “wtf are you all doing?”

The goblin told them they wanted to go to the show. the show! everyone’s going to the show! (The show turned out to be put on by an evil warlock, and the players had to intervene to stop the bands from summoning a lord of pandemonium into the world. Everyone loves a battle of the bands)

The players essentially adopted this goblin, Windy, for the rest of the campaign. Windy learned to play drums and flute, and I think they eventually got them enrolled in wizard school.

Sorceress focusing on cold magic. Freeze everything. Frost Wall is pretty effective. Plop it on big things and it explodes for damage + freeze. Put it down otherewise, and it tends to block or distract mobs. Currently in act3-cruel

I think there can be some intra-group tension when half the group is going for “how can we win this fight cleanly with minimal resources spent?” and half is going for “what would my character do? What would be dramatic?”

It’s something to clear up in session 0, I think.

My personal fantasy right now is being part of a highly skilled and competent team. I’m tired of always being the three stooges.

Also bad: when part of the group wants to play for clean victory, and part of the group does but it really bad at it.

Most social media is bad for you. I don’t think this kind of ban is the right tool. But the idea that everyone would just delete Facebook and Instagram is a dream that will never happen.

The government could break up the megacorps though.

It varies. It’s pretty rare that it’s working hours and I’m just goofing off for more than a couple minutes at a time. I look at lemmy when waiting for builds/deploys/etc. a hard ass boss might be like “do more work while that’s happening!!” but that would be a net negative on overall productivity.

I think people have radically different ideas about what “minimal background information” is.

Some people think the Silmarillion is a suitable primer for their setting.

Some people have like one paragraph for the big picture, and one paragraph for each major faction.

There are players that would say both is too much.

I think a couple short paragraphs should be enough for a quick start for a custom setting, but I’ve had players that just refuse to read anything at all. As someone else said, it’s makes it really hard to do some sort of stories if all the players are utter neophytes/amnesiacs/from-another-world/etc

I tried to do a game of Vampire once, but the players refused to read anything about the setting. All the political intrigue fell completely flat because they didn’t understand what the different factions were looking for, nor did they understand how vampires worked.

That group might have just been kind of bad players, but I feel like bad players are more common than good. By “bad” I mean “doesn’t think about the game very much, doesn’t retain anything about the story or rules”. They couldn’t really do anything more complex than a simple dungeon crawl.

Yes, you can make players pre-plan. You nudge them.

No amount of nudging will make some players do anything. Some players are obstinate and frankly not very good, but honestly the solution to “this player won’t stop looking at their phone and their turns take forever” may be to remove them from the group.

Why does it matter how much time everyone takes?

I don’t want to wait 5 minutes for someone to dither and dither and finally decide “I attack”

https://archive.is/9kNLR

I just use archive.is for paywall breaking. Magic.

This was a weirdly aggressive comment.

The solution is the pre-planning, which does not need a timer, nor is it a guaranteed result of a timer.

You cannot make players pre-plan. The timer encourages pre-planning, or at least rapid decision making on the fly. Both have the desired result of the game moving at a quicker pace.

It also has the benefit of creating an impartial tool for measuring, instead of relying on subjective “You’re taking a long time.” It is harder to argue with a clock. This is an advantage.

There was a problem, and in trying to fix it, the DM created a second problem.

What is the second problem?

I’m pretty sure it’s a pretty well known phenomenon that conspiracy theories funnel down into antisemitism

https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2022/10/why-conspiracy-theorists-always-land-on-the-jews/671730/

I don’t know what point you were trying to make

Leaving people to go full Lord of the Flies on their sexual urges leads to violence and fear and resentment.

I don’t think this is unique to sex. Sex is often special-cased in ways I don’t think it really needs to be. We probably agree more than we disagree here.

By contrast, if your basic needs are guaranteed, sex as a profession becomes something you can choose as an entrepreneurial passion rather than a lifeline for your survival.

No argument here. Basic income and the essentials guaranteed would solve a lot of problems for a lot of people. Certain members of the wealthy would be upset, though

This is idealistic, but I think for most people conspiracy stuff is filling an emotional need. If the experiment fails, the emotional problems remain. Thus the theory will be updated to uphold the feelings.

So like if they see a photo of the earth from space, they’re more likely to say it’s a fraud. Truth doesn’t matter. Feelings do.

Anyone who cares about facts on this topic would have left flat-earth after a short while on wikipedia.

So the question is: what emotional need is this filling, and how can it be met more safely?

Anti-vaxxers have hurt many people, but maybe you didn’t mean them when you said these people".

Flat-earth belief likely has secondary unwanted effects, like how all conspiracy theories eventually funnel into anti-semitism. It’s also a huge opportunity cost.

This is a good post.

What we’re really getting boxed in by is the very idea of capitalist rent-seeking through the operation of a business. When you’re selling anything else, the rent-seeking is considered a value-generating profit motive of an entrepreneur. But as soon as what you’re selling involves sex worker’s services, we realize what we’re advocating is human trafficking.

This is a good point in particular. However, it slams into my go to hypothesis for why so many things are kind of bad: People are emotional first and sometimes exclusively so. It happens to all of us. But for most people, sex stuff feels bad in a way that rent-seeking doesn’t. You could make as many points as you want with irrefutable logic, flow charts, and diagrams, and it won’t get through the skittering heartbeat of “BUT IT FEELS BAD”

I don’t really know how to fix this. Dismantle conservative power structures that are centered around placating fear and disgust maybe? If sex work was normalized, in a couple generations many people would probably feel fine about it.

I don’t always run a timer, but it is a tool in my box.

Mostly it comes out when I feel like the players are spinning their wheels. Like, they know they need to get into the server room on the 10th floor. There’s a front door with security, a back door with an alarm, etc. The players are just going round and round with ideas but not doing anything.

I’ll say “I’m starting a five minute timer. If it hits zero, something interesting will happen”.

If it hits zero and they’re still stuck, then as foretold something interesting happens. A rival group rolls up and firebombs the entrance before heading inside. A security drone spots them and is calling the cops. Whatever. Something that forces them to act.

In combat rounds I sometimes do the same, but only if it feels like they’re not making progress. Maybe it’s a little rude sometimes, but I value keeping the scene moving forward. I don’t want to keep spending three minutes on “should I move? How far can I move again? Is there a range penalty? What if I use a spell first can I still shoot?” stuff. Especially if it’s rules minutia they should already know.

The amount of times I had to remind an old group’s bard that yes, in DND 5e you can move AND take an action was too high.