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by maxbond 1164 days ago
What I'm telling you is that people are not video game characters, you don't have a charisma stat that determines how attractive you are, and you can't look at someone and score their charisma stat. Toxic positivity is real, giving people unrealistic expectations happens, but the underlying mechanism there is that the world is murky and the future is unknowable and if you tell someone they have control over their destiny you're making a promise you can't keep.

The mechanism is not that everyone has a stat block floating over their head that they can't see and you're lying to them about what that stat block says. It is not a gesture of "being cruel to be kind" to tell someone they aren't smart or beautiful, because you don't actually have that power to see into their destiny.

1 comments

You can see into statistics, e.g. people who keep their posture are perceived as more confident and attractive. Removing uhm like parasitic words from like your speech also uhm helps in like conversations. You’re trying to boil down this argument to “the future is unknown” and that is true indeed. But there’s a lot of common sense we do know that works for or against you chance-wise.

What I'm telling you is that people are not video game characters

I never said they are. Unless you reject the fact that people have traits, characteristics, etc just tell how you’d like to call them. These concepts weren’t invented in RPGs, they are from natural language.