Air Your Grievances


Gamer Life General Discussion

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Scarab Sages

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A thread for venting about your roleplaying experiences. Your GM won't let you play that kitsune kineticist you're dying to try out? You killed an ancient black dragon and all you got was a lousy +2 sword? The other players make fun of you when you try to roleplay an accent? Your game has been canceled for three weeks running? Whine about it here. Please keep the tone light and friendly.

I'll start. Our group just started playing through Mummy's Mask, and in our second session one of the characters died. Now that player gets to make a new character, and I'm jealous, even though I've only been playing my character for two weeks! I have way more character concepts than I'll ever get an opportunity to play.


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I am tired to death of always seeing threads about complaining get shut down


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I enjoy playing and breaking the limits of my characters. Always have since 3rd edition D&D. It gives me a sense of accomplishment when I do incredibly well with a class considered to have weak class abilities. This is why the rogue is my favorite class to play.

So when the GM stops me during character creation and says "Why don't you just play a vivisectionist? They're so much better than rogues." I die a little inside.

Liberty's Edge

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Can we just skip right to the Feats of Strength?


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I'm rather frustrated with our secondary campaigns continually getting shut down.

My Kingmaker campaign has been going steadily since May 2012 and is looking like it will be wrapping up just in time for its four-year anniversary - we're most of the way through Chapter 5 now, but I've got heavy overtime in October and January that will prevent me from GMing during those months and thus postpone the end of the plot. This is my standard work schedule, it happens every three months, my players know and expect it and it doesn't disrupt the game very much.

In that time, on other nights, we have started:
> A series of loosely-connected modules run as a mini-campaign. This one was abandoned because all but one of the players lost interest in their characters and most of the story. Barely finished the first module of eight I had prepared.
> Council of Thieves. Abandoned when the GM got a new job and lacked the time to run a campaign. Ended at the end of Chapter 3.
> Rise of the Runelords. Abandoned when the GM (different from the last) got burned out on the game and quit. Ended in the middle of Chapter 2, right after Foxglove Manor.
> Age of Worms. Abandoned when the GM (also different from the first two) got a second job and lost the only night he had available to run the game. Ended in the middle of Chapter 3, right after stopping the lizardfolk attack on Blackwall Keep.

We're starting up Legacy of Fire soon in this doomed timeslot. Here's hoping it meets a better fate than the rest of these.

Allow me to clarify, I don't begrudge any of these GMs for the reasons for the cancellations. It's just a frustrating habit that's annoyingly persistent. Every time a campaign feels like it's getting fully rolling, it comes to a sudden halt when real-life intervenes.


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I've run a homebrew world for 24 years, mostly revolving around one certain city. 3 years ago my players wanted to play in a new area of the world and use a different city as the base. In fact, they're mostly city based games. I feel like I'm dating a girl I really don't like but don't have the guts to break up with. I want to go back to the original city that I love, but I'm stuck in this relationship with a city I created but just don't like. I recently had most of if destroyed in an attack by dragons, hoping to get the other players to move to the city I like, but they're deciding to stick it out and help rebuild. I don't like this city, even though I created it. I just don't have the creative energy for it I should.


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Are you John Boehner?


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DungeonmasterCal wrote:
I've run a homebrew world for 24 years, mostly revolving around one certain city. 3 years ago my players wanted to play in a new area of the world and use a different city as the base. In fact, they're mostly city based games. I feel like I'm dating a girl I really don't like but don't have the guts to break up with. I want to go back to the original city that I love, but I'm stuck in this relationship with a city I created but just don't like. I recently had most of if destroyed in an attack by dragons, hoping to get the other players to move to the city I like, but they're deciding to stick it out and help rebuild. I don't like this city, even though I created it. I just don't have the creative energy for it I should.

If the city has been destroyed by dragons and must rebuild, this is the perfect opportunity for you to change the city into something you enjoy running. Cities that rebuild after a disaster will by necessity be different than what they were prior to the disaster.


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That's entirely true, and it's something I hope I can do.


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I wish my friends played the way I liked.

I wish the people who played the way I like were my friends.

Group A is awesome people whom I enjoy hanging with in and out of game...but they never start on time, they frequently cancel, and they go on wild OOC tangents during games.

Group B is people I respect but don't really hang out with outside of work...but they start the minute they're supposed to, keep game time for games, and almost never cancel a session.

Why can't it be both?

Once...Once in fifteen years I had this for three glorious months, and two players moved away and it all went downhill.

Liberty's Edge

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Some background: The introduction to the sixth book of Legacy of Fire has the author basically saying "Yeah, we actually considered letting the bad guy win this one." You have a randomized amount of days to go kill the end guy before he uses the world's greatest Wish spell to take over the world. There is, legitimately, a great chance the party will be horribly killed.

For whatever reason that just completely baffles the human mind, the friend who ran Legacy of Fire for our group somehow managed to interpret this as "The party has 1d6 rounds to beat the final boss."
Now, our party has no way of knowing this when we get to the final boss. (Nor did we know that every single enemy we would run into for the last book and a half had resistance to cold damage for some reason, despite the entire AP taking place in a f@#+ing desert in not-Arabia, but whatever. We have other ways of putting the hurt on things.) We begin to fight the final boss, we roll for initiative, confident that we're going to kill a jackass genie and save our campaign setting.

Four rounds later, the DM says "You guys lose." No circumstance, no flavor text, no explanation. Just "You lose."

We respond with a precise blend of confusion, anger, implications of DM fiat, and open questioning of what the hell actually happened. The DM tells us that we had 1d6 rounds to kill the end guy, and he rolled a 4.

My best friend replies, "What!?" and takes the book. I've never seen anybody openly rebel against a DM before, but there's a first time for everything, I guess. Combat screeched to a complete halt for thirty-five minutes as my friend and the DM argue about the very existence of "I swear to God, it's in the flavor text, d6 rounds to win."

Now, myself, I have no horse in this race; my elf alchemist got incinerated two rounds into the fight. But eventually, the DM allowed the survivors to finish a (mysteriously difficult) fight against the boss.


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Given I'm just about to start LoF, I will triple-read that section to avoid throwing that kind of nonsense at my players >_>

Scarab Sages

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Last night's session reminded me of a general peeve.

I would dearly love to play in a campaign where no one ever said the name of a spell. I'd like to see the players and GM all describe the spells, even if they just read the flavor text from the spell descriptions. I'm so tired of people (myself included) just announcing, "I cast magic missile" and then rolling for damage. It makes magic so boring.

I'd also like to see some NPCs act like magic isn't as commonplace as cellphones. Maybe it is in some settings, but I'd like to think of it as a little bit extraordinary even in a high-magic setting like Pathfinder. Sometimes it feels like every NPC has ranks in Spellcraft.

Grand Lodge

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Pathfinder Adventure, Adventure Path, Pathfinder Accessories, Rulebook, Starfinder Adventure Path Subscriber

I wish I didn't have so many good games and good players demanding my time and attention.

Liberty's Edge

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Orthos wrote:
Given I'm just about to start LoF, I will triple-read that section to avoid throwing that kind of nonsense at my players >_>

GOOD.


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TriOmegaZero wrote:
I wish I didn't have so many good games and good players demanding my time and attention.

Sounds rough, TOZ, if it will help I'll ignore you for as long as you want*

*But then again I am neither a good player nor a good game, so, meh

Grand Lodge

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Pathfinder Adventure, Adventure Path, Pathfinder Accessories, Rulebook, Starfinder Adventure Path Subscriber
Terquem wrote:
TriOmegaZero wrote:
I wish I didn't have so many good games and good players demanding my time and attention.
Sounds rough, TOZ, if it will help I'll ignore you for as long as you want*

Well, I doubt that will keep me off of the forums and paying attention to all those good things demanding my attention.


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My Blood Angels librarian killed a daemon prince of Khorne in a sword fight without his power armor on and all I got was a bunch of Grey Knights threatening to mind wipe me.

Liberty's Edge

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When I was DM, by the time we ended Reign of Winter and everyone was wrapping up and turning in the magic item cards they collected over the campaign, each player turned in easily between 25-30+ cards, and a few in each case didn’t even know what some did or remembered they had them.

When I played, that by playing smart to avoid or just ignore a bunch of xp-packed encounters meant to level us up and equip us with proper magic weather we wanted to or not (despite our characters and what they would do) we weren’t properly equipped or leveled at the end of Jade Regent to tackle the bad guys. So a heart-felt, passionate, role played speech by Ameiko’s player resulted in an opposed die-roll, followed by a TPK.


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thegreenteagamer wrote:

I wish my friends played the way I liked.

I wish the people who played the way I like were my friends.

Group A is awesome people whom I enjoy hanging with in and out of game...but they never start on time, they frequently cancel, and they go on wild OOC tangents during games.

Group B is people I respect but don't really hang out with outside of work...but they start the minute they're supposed to, keep game time for games, and almost never cancel a session.

GTG are you me when I'm not looking (or am I you)? The only difference is group B is are gaming friends (don't see them outside of gaming), as opposed to work friends.

Liberty's Edge

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The GM for the group I'm playing in is new, and as an experienced player I'm cutting him a lot of slack and trying to help him grow, but gorram it you don't throw an APL +6 encounter at the party for jollies!

He looks at me and goes "well that's what the cheap resurrections are for." That's...that's putting a band-aid on someone after they've gone a round against Mike Tyson!

Gah. So frustrating.


Orthos wrote:
Given I'm just about to start LoF, I will triple-read that section to avoid throwing that kind of nonsense at my players >_>

LoF is awesome, albeit dated, so be sure to have a whole lotta fun updating it to Pathfinder (assuming you're using PF).


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I really want to kick TOZ's tire, just to see what he'll do, but mostly so we can see who runs the fastest.


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TriOmegaZero wrote:
I wish I didn't have so many good games and good players demanding my time and attention.

Did...did you just pull the gaming equivalent of saying "Oh, pity me, for my junk is so big the women just can't handle it, and I have a hard time finding pants that fit"?

Yeah, I think you did just pull pornstarproblems but with tabletop!


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Since you like to remark so often that you play Pathfinder because it's what oyher people play, you could switch to a system you actually prefer to solve that "issue".

Or admit you genuinely loves the Pathfinders. =-P


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thegreenteagamer wrote:
TriOmegaZero wrote:
I wish I didn't have so many good games and good players demanding my time and attention.

Did...did you just pull the gaming equivalent of saying "Oh, pity me, for my junk is so big the women just can't handle it, and I have a hard time finding pants that fit"?

Yeah, I think you did just pull pornstarproblems but with tabletop!

Hey no you have no idea how hard it is to maintain this.

Liberty's Edge

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Phrasing.


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You're not my supervisor!!!!

Grand Lodge

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Pathfinder Adventure, Adventure Path, Pathfinder Accessories, Rulebook, Starfinder Adventure Path Subscriber
thegreenteagamer wrote:
Did...did you just pull the gaming equivalent of saying "Oh, pity me, for my junk is so big the women just can't handle it, and I have a hard time finding pants that fit"?

No, it was more of a 'I keep playing the game and its eating up my time and becoming more of a job than a hobby but I don't want to let any of my groups down'.

So like a porn star lamenting that sex is no longer fun for them.


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Turin the Mad wrote:
Orthos wrote:
Given I'm just about to start LoF, I will triple-read that section to avoid throwing that kind of nonsense at my players >_>
LoF is awesome, albeit dated, so be sure to have a whole lotta fun updating it to Pathfinder (assuming you're using PF).

I'm using these conversions, plus some minor updates of my own. I sadly do not have the time right now to convert everything myself.


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Randarak wrote:
thegreenteagamer wrote:

I wish my friends played the way I liked.

I wish the people who played the way I like were my friends.

Group A is awesome people whom I enjoy hanging with in and out of game...but they never start on time, they frequently cancel, and they go on wild OOC tangents during games.

Group B is people I respect but don't really hang out with outside of work...but they start the minute they're supposed to, keep game time for games, and almost never cancel a session.

GTG are you me when I'm not looking (or am I you)? The only difference is group B is are gaming friends (don't see them outside of gaming), as opposed to work friends.

I'm just a very punctual guy who absolutely can't stand when people flake or don't show up when they say they will (just say 2 if you mean 2, don't SAY 1 and show up at 1:45 and start at 2. If you want to start at 2, say we're starting at 2!)

It's lead to problems, since apparently lackadaisical attitudes towards scheduling are the overwhelming majority in the gaming community by such a massive margin as to completely shock me when I see anyone who shows up for a game on time or makes it to four sessions in a row without cancelling for flippant low priority reasons like "I was up so late at the party/bar/etc that I only got like three hours of sleep last night, so I totally need to crash. Yeah, I remember we had the game this week. Yeah, I could have gone out literally any other night of the week. Why are you looking at me like that? OW! Why did you throw your oversized d20 at my chest? What do you mean because your aim wasnt good enough for my eye?!"


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i'm easily talked over in games thus i never get to really roleplay beyond facepalms and glares


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My PCs tend to split the party for roleplaying purposes on a regular basis and it's becoming exhausting to tend to them all at once.


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It doesn't exist in a vacuum. When I'm raking leaves, the wind always picks THAT moment to start blowing (and never towards the woods, oh no). It makes things blurry and indistinct at distances of three miles or so. You have to breathe it in order to live. I practice a whole bunch of bending moves from Avatar The Last Airbender and it steadfastly refuses to accommodate me. Air is just so damned inconvenient!

Oh, sorry. I read a comma where there wasn't one. I thought the thread's title was "Air, Your Grievances".


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I wish someone would be willing to run the kind of game for me that I run for my players.

Liberty's Edge

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I'm glad that what happened to Snorb never happened to me. Did his DM not have a shred of common sense.

Dms who give players lots of gold yet somehow we can never spend it. No shops. Or the places that do sell stuff never seem to have what we want. I get some DMs dislike the magic mart effect. It also needs to be balanced with giving players the chance to buy something sometimes.

Players who complain about their characters ineffectiveness then refuse to listen to any advice given by the rest of the group. Then when it looks like they do listen. They then take a similar useless option while complaining again. Very frustrating.

Players who don't want their characters to die or get hurt. We have all at one time or another been reduced to zero hp. Or had a character killed. It's part of the game. Nothing ruins immersion for me more than a cowardly character. Once twice three times your supposed to be a hero dammit.


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My dislike is when players show no initiative. If I wanted to lead by the nose, I'd keep livestock, not run games.

I'd had characters standing in the plot seed equivalent to field of sunflowers, yet still complain that there's nothing to do.

"I'm bored"

"Really? This other player is freeing captured creatures from a lab in order to fight a dragon on the city streets. Yet another player is stealing an ancient sword from vampire yakuza. Still another player is using supernatural speed and endurance to out-rave an entire rave. How can you be bored?"


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The game I GM'd last night stank on ice. I just wasn't feelin' it and the chronic pain I have was so distracting. Plus I'm getting bored with the campaign, and I just couldn't get my head into the game. One of the players drove nearly 3 hours to be here, and I've felt pretty crappy about my performance as a GM.


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Here are a couple new ones:

1. Players who always play traitors to the group in every campaign, but get angry and sulk when the rest of the group defends themselves or puts an end to their treasonous butts.

2. GMs who have every single NPC in the game betray the party, but get angry and accuse the players of metagaming when their characters start taking precautions during NPC encounters.


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GMs who get mad when you don't act the way they expected you too. If you wanted to build a world and make some heroes go through it predictably, write a book. We're here to make you wonder how your big bad evil dragon ever lost to having an immovable rod planted firmly in his unmentionables.

Liberty's Edge

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CampinCarl9127 wrote:
GMs who get mad when you don't act the way they expected you too. If you wanted to build a world and make some heroes go through it predictably, write a book. We're here to make you wonder how your big bad evil dragon ever lost to having an immovable rod planted firmly in his unmentionables.

very much seconded. I don't think Dms realize how annoying and frustrating railroading is. I get that such Dms has a story they want to tell. So do we as players


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memorax wrote:
CampinCarl9127 wrote:
GMs who get mad when you don't act the way they expected you too. If you wanted to build a world and make some heroes go through it predictably, write a book. We're here to make you wonder how your big bad evil dragon ever lost to having an immovable rod planted firmly in his unmentionables.
very much seconded. I don't think Dms realize how annoying and frustrating railroading is. I get that such Dms has a story they want to tell. So do we as players

Whenever I GM I make sure there are overarching major plot points planned, but I don't flesh them out until we get there, because frankly I don't know what f*+#ery my players might do by that point. Whenever they go into a situation I try to predict what they will do and plan for 3-5 different outcomes, but I have definitely had to improvise. My mentality is "They are agents of chaos in my structured world, so let's see what kind of awesome story that can create".


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CampinCarl9127 wrote:
GMs who get mad when you don't act the way they expected you too. If you wanted to build a world and make some heroes go through it predictably, write a book. We're here to make you wonder how your big bad evil dragon ever lost to having an immovable rod planted firmly in his unmentionables.

Agreed.

That said: when you sign up to play the game, you need to have a form of character buy-in and you need to expect that there are some things that just aren't appropriate for that game.

I tend toward freedom-based player options... but I've been that GM that has had a running game go great, and the a PC did something and I just... couldn't... do anything. The story ended right then*.

Not because nothing could be done, but because I couldn't do anything with it... for several months.

But that's something that a player and a GM should be aware of from the beginning.

* For a while. I got better, and we were able to complete it later, but because the idea would so throw off the AP when it first came up, I just couldn't figure out how to go forward. It was Council of Thieves, by the way.


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CampinCarl9127 wrote:
GMs who get mad when you don't act the way they expected you too. If you wanted to build a world and make some heroes go through it predictably, write a book. We're here to make you wonder how your big bad evil dragon ever lost to having an immovable rod planted firmly in his unmentionables.

I agree up to a point, but I feel that making a game run smoothly is a two-way street. If a GM wants to run a world traveling, action packed fantasy epic but all his players want to do is open up a bar and roleplay a fantasy version of "Cheers", then it's not entirely the GM's fault when the campaign falls apart. Everyone needs to cooperate to make a campaign work.


HeHateMe wrote:
I agree up to a point, but I feel that making a game run smoothly is a two-way street. If a GM wants to run a world traveling, action packed fantasy epic but all his players want to do is open up a bar and roleplay a fantasy version of "Cheers", then it's not entirely the GM's fault when the campaign falls apart. Everyone needs to cooperate to make a campaign work.

This is about the situation I'm in.

Liberty's Edge

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See, this is where you have the players just run Cheers d20.

Have the bard make a Perform (Percussion) check to play the first few notes of "Where Everybody Knows Your Name," the alchemist, fighter, rogue, cleric, and magus sing the lyrics/harmonize as appropriate.

Sit back, let the players run their tavern. You the DM act as the regulars. Call for checks as needed.

And then, about twenty minutes in, have one of the regulars sink a knife into Norm But If He Were A Dwarf's back. Have Dwarf Norm's friends get pissed at this guy. Have the friends fight the assassin's friends while Urist McNorm bleeds to death all over his barstool. (This is about where the players should jump in, provided they take this broadly worded hint.)

Once they're going through the pockets of all the guys they killed, that's where you put the plot hook.


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CampinCarl9127 wrote:
memorax wrote:
CampinCarl9127 wrote:
GMs who get mad when you don't act the way they expected you too. If you wanted to build a world and make some heroes go through it predictably, write a book. We're here to make you wonder how your big bad evil dragon ever lost to having an immovable rod planted firmly in his unmentionables.
very much seconded. I don't think Dms realize how annoying and frustrating railroading is. I get that such Dms has a story they want to tell. So do we as players
Whenever I GM I make sure there are overarching major plot points planned, but I don't flesh them out until we get there, because frankly I don't know what f!!$ery my players might do by that point. Whenever they go into a situation I try to predict what they will do and plan for 3-5 different outcomes, but I have definitely had to improvise. My mentality is "They are agents of chaos in my structured world, so let's see what kind of awesome story that can create".

I tell my players that there are things happening in the world, some of them you can change, some maybe not. But the no 1 thing that is guaranteed to cause the whole world to go to pot is if you guys sit around twiddling your thumbs.

Shadow Lodge

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It irks me to no end to see convention success measured in number of tables rather than player satisfaction.


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One is mathematically possible to completely measure and notice trends in marked improvement or decrease, the other is via self-report, and self-report is an incredibly inaccurate measure.

Someone might say "meh, it was okay" but if their usual reaction is "it sucked the fatty", that's high praise. But if they never come back, and an entirely new person shows up, their reaction...should you compare it to the previous person?


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Just to be sure, I agree with you in principle, but I just don't think it's something you can really accurately measure unless you have the exact same group of people come back and measure the comparison over time.

Plus, I haven't gotten to use my Advocate alias in a while, and he needed some air.

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