ProfessorOwl_PhD

"How do you spell that?"
"I dunno, how do you wanna spell it?"

The only marketing I don't hate is handwritten signs by the gate to a farm with addendums like "manur: $free$"

If you really want the feeling of thac0 at your table you can just do AC - attack bonus to find the number you need to roll over, and bang your head against the table for the rest of the experience.

Mostly it's just meant that it takes ages - usually time is a big enough price that no other punishment is needed. Their recent actions generated a group of ghosts though, so ghosts wandering through the room while they're searching is now a thing.

My players like to save their worst rolls for perception checks to find secret doors. Even when they specifically know there's a secret door and just need to work out how to open it, out comes a parade of 1s and 2s.

Oh I agree, what I mean is that the similarities were barely even superficial. They were both hero shooters, but so are Apex Legends and Rainbow Six Seige, and you'd never compare them to Overwatch.

because it was superficially similar to Overwatch it absolutely bombed.

Sort of, the real issue was it had no advertising of its own, just Randy Pitchford synergising buzzwordsalad on twitter and trying to create a rivalry with Overwatch. Nobody really knew what it was supposed to be from advertising, because nobody thought to just say "FPS MOBA".

Ah yes, the Gazebo problem.

To my knowledge she got away without any real consequences - last I heard she had the same position at one of the competitors.

One time I got back from annual leave only to find out that my job had been done away with by the board over a year beforehand and my manager had spent the last year submitting fake timesheets claiming I was working a different position, so I could do the parts of her job that the assistant manager wasn't already doing. The company had assumed I knew about it as they couldn't get in contact with me when they discovered it and came down on the manager (my job was only the beginning of her fraud), but I was in the middle of nowhere and had no signal, so the first I heard about it was when I walked into the office and one of my coworkers went "what are you doing here?".

I used to think fudging Vs not fudging was a stylistic decision, but as I've played more I feel it's a system issue. If you feel a need to fudge rolls, either to raise or lower the stakes, to force desired plot points or avoid unnarrative deaths, or to fix broken challenge ratings, you're probably using the wrong system for you and your group.
Think about what issues you're actually trying to avoid by fudging, and then look for systems that are structured to avoid those issues. If the rolls get in the way of your narrative, switch to a more narrative system. If you're fighting against the system to build satisfying combat encounters, switch to something more tactical.

It'll always take a couple of sessions to get used to a new system, but learning one is always a lot faster than continuing to waste time trying to force a system to do things it wasn't made for.

Really accurate tape measure.