I think it’s fine if they act like highschoolers in a show for highschoolers. It just means that’s not a show that’s for me.

I think you’re selling DS9’s progressiveness short. The federation is portrayed as less progressive, but the message of the show itself is far more progressive than the norm; if anything, it makes the federation standins for moderate/centrist/liberals and calls them out for not being left enough.

For sure! And that scarcity of resources and failing supply chains is a GREAT setting for questing!

A couple thoughts occur:

• If you wanted to justify big cities in wildernesses, you could use the prevalence of monsters to do so. Say it’s just too dangerous to have small villages, and everyone has to spend the night in a walled town/city for their own safety.
• I’m pondering how magic could effect this, too. You might have a whole Town in this ecosystem replaced by just a single wizard, who’s willing to magic up complex tools or luxuries in exchange for an exorbitant payment from the peasants.
• A lot of fantasy settings are lowkey post-apocalyptic, inspired by the Dark Ages and/or The Black Death. You may encounter isolated Villages that are struggling to scrape by as their Town got wiped off the map, or isolated Cities crammed full of starving refugees that fled their Villages.

I know y’all are talking about like, buying a wish spell, but y’all make it sound like the mom hired a magic gigolo XD

Now you’ve inspired me. I should make a character who’s 1 level in sorcerer, the rest in wizard, and the premise is that they set out to prove everyone wrong that they’re not just going to rely on their inborn talents and they’re ready to do the work!

You slightly moved the goalposts there. The assertion is not “Everything is making a political statement” it’s “Everything is political.” Your ikea glass reflects your social class, the international relations between where you are and where it was made. It may have been made by an oppressed person in some third world shithole (or even sweden!) It may even be a political statement, like a designer somewhere made it curvy because he thinks people are more likely to buy something with a “feminine” silhouette.

Well, the goal of rent seeking is to collect money, without giving any products or services in return. And without a product, you don’t need a Product team.

“Selectively simulationist” is a great way to put it. I think everyone falls victim to that from time to time and I’m definitely stealing your turn of phrase.

Disco lost me when I got to the episode where everyone is going to die unless the main character cAn tAlK tO a bOy aT tHe dAnCe!

Lower Decks was fun though. And I’ve watched like, 1 episode of SNW but it was a good pilot. Haven’t plumbed the depths of the rest of nutrek yet.

I was too lazy to make it but I was thinking earlier today of doing a “I hate nutrek because it’s derivative and centrist, you hate it because you are a nazi, we are not the same” meme. (Not that I’m calling you a nazi, this was just an idea I had, not directed at you)

Yes

Ohhhh they hate nutrek, got it.

Some have figured out how to eliminate Product. It’s called rent-seeking behavior or more recently neo-feudalism. The short version is you organize society such that everyone is required to give you all their money all the time or die. See for example the health insurance industry.

People are asking for RICK BERMAN back!? Is this a mirrorverse thing?

Nah, no one here likes that show.

Specialization is good, because when everybody in the party is good at one narrow field we all get to take turns doing cool things. If you make a character that’s good at everything, nobody else gets to do anything.

Wow, they really don’t let you have fun in 5e do they?

Lets be real here, Mutiny is like a 200-level course at the Academy

My current game might be helpful, but it will require a little context to explain and work to adapt to your purposes.

All my games take place in the same world. The last game was a pirate campaign, and, by the end, the players were legendary pirate kings (queens, nonbinary monarchs) that ruled the seas.

That leads to the setup for my current game: Sea travel is impractical and dangerous. A land route to totally-not-asia would be great, but none is currently known, due to a thought-to-be-impassible mountain range between there and here. The Explorers Guild is offering bounties on both a pass through the mountains and a viable charted land route to totally-not-asia. The players (and their rivals!) take a dangerous sailing journey around the mountains, to explore the jungle on the back side of the range and try to find a pass from that angle.

EDIT: They’re incentivized to work with the locals, because pissing them off would make a potential trade route dangerous and therefore worthless.