• 10 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • I got my PhD in engineering just fine. Had to push myself to make a few connections and meet regularly with my advisor, etc., but doing research was really well-suited to my hyper-focus tendencies.

    However the opportunities I had tutoring/teaching did not appeal to me at all. I pulled it off, and I enjoyed sharing my knowledge and being the “expert” in a room full of freshman students, but I would be highly stressed all morning in anticipation, and then out of commission for the rest of the day.

    So, I opted to move into industry mainly to remove the expectation of teaching regular courses and the dependency on networking to successfully claim grant funding and collaborate with other academics. (Also money)

    Several autistic-spectrum friends also left academia but stayed in research in some form, and are doing really well. A couple stayed in academia. One is doing great, and the other basically destroyed his marriage due to the stress.

    Probably depends a lot on the specific responsibilities of your chosen academic field as well as your individual point on the spectrum.








  • Thank you. Yeah, this is usually how I would approach it if it were a more open sandboxy gsme like my last campaign.

    In this case however, the whole adventure doesn’t hinge on this one conversation, but rather the adventure book assumes the players have hit certain story beats in a certain order and plans the narrstive accordingly. If they ignore the couple, then they miss out on receiving their quest to find their daughter or whatever, and arriving at the wolf den the body of the mangled girl has no meaning. If they don’t talk to the paintbrush goblin, they don’t learn about the pixies causing trouble for the goblin clan. Sometimes its critical to the main plot. Sometimes its just a side bonus reward or just a roleplaying opportunity to learn lore or information. The way the book lays it out it states explicitly: players must encounter these 3 points in order so the final encounter of this chapter makes sense.

    Unfortunately asking the players what they want to do next session results in “we want to do what the book says to see what happens in the story!” And that tracks with our session 0. They want a linear story.

    But I can only have my players walk past so many burned out villages before it gets awkward and I just say “look, guys you’re supposed to go in and investigate.”

    I just have no idea how to balance this “on-rails” approach with actually inviting player intersction. Am I just describing scenery or am I hinting they should interact? Is this NPC plot-critical or just setting up some world building? When do the players know they got what they needed from the conversation or if this is just a random guy trying to sell them stuff?