oligopsony

Lynx, 27 Frimaire CCXXVII

2018-12-18T01:34:47Z

Someone scoops me on something I've wanted to do for a while. But it's more of an outline for a project, so maybe I'm still good.
Most public housing isn't associated with crime, but rather a few projects are typically associated with a lot of it. How to convert physical engineering into social?
Anonymization reduces gender gaps in funding, although I wonder how much of the effect is specific to e.g. subconscious gender stereotypes vs. an overall decrease in the returns to well-connectedness (where male advantage could be due to generational effects or to something more stable like who can invite whom out for drinks after a conference without anxiety.) Seems like good practice either way, though.
Ken Hite's homegame 13th Age setting being adulterated into a 5e product. (Absent some eyerolling about how he'll turn Persia or something into a metaphor for Vladimir Putin or whatever, I expect it to be super neat.)
On strategy and dexterity.
Interactive prehistoric globes!
Replication crisis activism in the long view.

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podcasts I recommend

2018-12-17T15:48:58Z

Podcasts are great! They're one of the few new media forms that I can say have probably made me happier for consuming them, primarily because they make exercise bearable and chores actively pleasurable. This isn't everything I listen to, just the major ones I recommend at a first pass (and could also say something interesting about why I liked them.)

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D&D small enough to drown in a bathtub

2018-12-12T17:33:11Z

Trad RPG manuals are notoriously long. But it doesn't have to be that way!

If you don't want to change your system, you can go with an epitome. There are a couple of these for D&D 5e, for instance, Stan Shin's or Ozuro's. These are sometimes conceptualized as "GM's screens," but there's basically no reason not to have every player have one as a handout.

But then there are the hacks/retroclones/whatever that are designed with concision in mind. Knave fits on one double-sided sheet of paper. Into the Depths can be one page side or two double-printed pages. The old Microlite d20 site is full of slightly different small retroclones of both 3e and earlier editions.

It should be easy to add exception-based mechanics of your choice to these, especially if you're dealing with the Slimfast version of a system that already has a lot of mechanical doodads. I've contemplated stitching together something like Microlite d20 + Spheres of Power/Might + E6, for instance. Turning that into a self-contained document that ironed out all the kinks would be a fair amount of work, but just stating the premise gets you 90% of the way there, at least in terms of functionality.

(I've focused on D&D here because its popularity + the uniquely lax copyright of 3e has allowed for an almost infinite variety of experimentation and hacking among trad RPGs, and storygames already often focus on light rules implementation (and aren't really my thing.) But there's no reason to limit the principles here to D&D, of course.)

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some classic conlanging tools

2018-12-11T15:55:14Z

It's not unlikely that you've heard of Mark Rosenfelder's language construction kit. (I have the print version, currently lent out to an acquaintance, but not yet the sequels.)

The site also has some cool tools on it! These are, I suspect, especially useful if you're lazy enough that you don't want to create an actual conlang, but are unlazy enough that you want something that scans right, in terms of having a grammatical structure and set of consistent sounds and that changes over time in consistent ways, and are willing to work with somewhat clunky tools to do so. These include a vocabulary generator (help page), sound change applier (help), and then a number of generators based around creating grammatical sentences.

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