Started playing recently myself. At the start, recommendations have no idea what victory strategy you are pursing, and don’t get that much better at it. They do seem somewhat OK at recommending things that will solve particular problems that city has (slow growth, lack of amenities, etc), though maybe there are better ways available to you. Or, sometimes they notice that your city geography would support a particular wonder or give bonuses to a particular zone. So, if they recommend something that seems weird, maybe check to see if you are missing some mechanical concept. (VI has a lot of obscure interlocking mechanics that can be hard to see, particularly at first.)

Yao Ming (an NBA basketball player) has, nearly single-handedly, saved the lives of tens of millions of sharks by simply asking citizens of China to stop eating shark fin soup. Since he started doing this, the price of shark fins has tanked, and 90+ percent of people surveyed in China support a ban on selling shark fins.

All of that may be true, but it bears little resemblance to the case the US actually filed against Apple. If you haven’t read the charges, you really should. They are filled with reaches that have long been rejected in similar cases, and a desire for government to broadly micromanage. One type of charge, for example, could easily be brought against any company that makes a videogame for just a single platform.

I sold a bunch of 70’s and 80’s tabletop roleplaying stuff when I went to college. A few years ago, I reacquired many of those titles at collector’s prices. Not my most brilliant financial move.

You might actually want to look for RPG systems that are a particular kind of bad.

Some systems with decent math behind them fail because they are too fiddly. They might have tons of modifiers to track, cumbersome rolling, lots of traits based on averages of other traits, and so on. Those types of systems can often be great for things like MUDs, because the computer can hide most of it from the player. And, maybe a roll takes 10 times as long, but that just means the software can do it in 10ms instead of 1ms, so who will care?

If Earthdawn was open licensed, I’d suggest it as being “the right kind of bad”. It’s weird exploding pool step system is interesting because the dice for each step are set up such that the average roll of the pool is approximately the step number.

HexKit

With a name like Robert Conrad, there should be some reference to knocking a battery off your shoulder.

One thing I notice whenever one of these shootings happen: no one ever seems to ask questions about what prescription drugs the shooter had ever used. Maybe in most cases the answer is none, but we’ll never know, because no one digs into it. However, since some drugs are known to cause mental side effects (either when you take them, or when you stop taking them), seems like it might be a relevant data point to consider. (I note that this study doesn’t look into this, either.)

Fourth World.