It’s not exactly my genre of music but i like it anyway.
It does feel like chaotic times are ahead. At some point, the republicans will do something so vile that people will say “No”, and when that happens there will be violence.
I don’t want a civil war. I don’t want unrest. But I do want every republican and their enablers removed from power, and the billionaires stripped of their wealth. I don’t know how to get from here to there.
I recommend players make their characters together. Fate’s rules for it are pretty good, and can be ported to many systems: https://fate-srd.com/fate-core/phase-trio . The whole “You all meet in a tavern for the first time” mode is a valid way to play, but I’ve had friends do that and then struggle with how contrived it feels to fight to the death for people they just met, or go on a whole dangerous sidequest for someone else’s hobby.
I also recommend reading other systems. Not everyone needs to know dozens of games, but if you always play d20 games spending some time in a different branch of the RPG family tree can really be eye-opening. Or if you’ve only really played really light games, looking at how something crunchier does detail can be insightful.
I’ve found that when the players hit an outright failure, a lot of the time they just draw blanks or zero in on this one specific solution. It’s a weird tunnel vision.
Like, they want to talk past the doorman and he says no after they roll. Good players on their game will then think about other options. Sneak in the back. Set off an alarm. Impersonate someone who lives there. But i’ve just had so many players that just get stuck on this, and will try to spend 10 minutes on “What if I ask him nicely?”
I’ve started including a spiel about this in my session 0. “If an obstacle in the world has exactly one purpose in the story, and you attack it dead on, you may fail. Especially if it’s not also your strong suit. For example, there is a doorman of a fancy apartment building. His entire role in life is to look at people, and only let them in if they’re authorized. If you walk up to him, not authorized, and go ‘Hey bro let me in’, that will be a very hard check. That is shooting fire at the fire elemental. Disguising yourself will be easier, but still is in his domain of ‘Looking at people and only letting authorized folks in’. But going in a back door so he doesn’t see, setting off the fire alarm so he evacuates, calling on the phone and telling him his car has been towed, those ideas hit him where he’s weaker.”
Don’t put important details behind failable skill checks and just dead end it there.
Like if they find a book with ciphered text, you might be tempted to be like “make an intelligence + investigator check to decipher it”, and if they fail be like “you can’t figure it out”.
It’s better to do some sort of degree of success or succeed at a cost so the game keeps moving forward.
Like, on a bad roll they translate it but whoops awaken an angry spirit that’s now attacking them. Or they make some progress, but realize they need the key to fully crack it. The note in the margin says it’s at such-and-such flophouse, owned by the PC’s most annoying rival group.
I’ve done too many “you rolled … 0? Ok. Well you have no idea what this altar means” and then later regretted it because the players didn’t have a vital clue.
I’m reminded of the abyssal words in Elden Ring’s expansion. There are signs that tell you “Don’t let them see you!” and “You have to hide and run!”. You find an area with some tall grass and some creepy eye-monsters. And sure enough, if they see you they come running at you. They’ll knock you over, grab you, and explode your head.
Clearly you’re supposed to sneak by them.
But…
You can also parry their attack, and then just kill them.
Or just fucking book it and run past them, but that’s way harder.
"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, "
“nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law;”
Aside from being incorrect in the details, the rules as written don’t matter as much as the rules as enforced. The US constitution is not producing good results for many people.
Also trump isn’t eligible under the 14th amendment for the whole insurrection thing.
That seems fine to me.
Match should be broken up. But apparently some people learned nothing from history and some people don’t care as long as they make money
Ehh. They haven’t really abused their position. They’re popular.
It would be something else if they were buying up competitors like Facebook and Google do. Part of how they maintain their dominance is buying out anyone that competes. Notice how Google kind of sucks nowadays? They’re not really competing on merit anymore.
But at the same time, steam could turn around tomorrow and be like “mandatory $39.99/mo subscription fee” and it would have an outsized impact on the sector.
I use pycharm at work for most things. Work paid for it. It has some nice stuff i like. I’m sure other editors do all of this, too, but nothing’s been causing me enough pain to switch
It does have multiple cursors but I’ve rarely needed that.
I use sublime for quick note taking. Mostly I like that it has syntax highlighting, and it doesn’t require me to explicitly save a tab for it to stay open
This is a good policy.
I do movie nights sometimes, and I tell people similarly: “Doors at 6, show at 7.” It’s good expectation setting.
Is there a written form for us old timers who prefer reading? I’m such a relic, I know.
The first one had a mode that made it just a turn based game, if I recall. Only way I could actually beat it
Take a lesson from all the police murders: “Musk assaulted me and I feared for my life, so I had to shoot him dead. Autopsy says he was shot in the back while running away and pissing himself? No, he was doing some sort of ninja spin kick. Body camera? Must have malfunctioned.”
Musk can’t testify if he’s dead.
There are ways to stop it, but most people don’t want to do murder and risk their lives.
Did anyone want this? MMOs are kind of passé. There’s a couple big ones still kicking around (WoW, Guild Wars 2, final fantasy) but there’s a huge graveyard and hospice for all the others.
We could do a lot for climate change, world hunger, homelessness, disease prevention and eradication, and so on with that much money.
All of these people are doing mass murder via opportunity cost, and I hope they pay for it.
teenager who acts like a dick all the time would be equally annoying.
Was Morrigan popular when da:o was new? She’s an extremely edgy teenager.
This topic would be great for a dontnod game that could appropriatly handle that topic - not an RPG.
I really don’t think queer stuff needs to be banished from the realm of RPGs.
Most people I talked to have refunded the game on steam. Nobody really had fun with it, except for one person that was completely new to dragon age. However, I don’t think she finished it either.
Meanwhile, the 3 people I know who played it all enjoyed it. Anecdotes!
I don’t think so. The writing of Taash was so bad and uncomfortable for the most part that I genuinely didn’t know if they were trying to mock trans-people with this representation. It felt like they were just looking at a terminally online twitter user and modeled the character after that. I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that taash is the worst character I’ve ever experienced in a triple A production.
Taash’s scenes seemed okay to me. The storyline with their mother is pretty close to what a friend of mine is going through now.
I don’t know how to solve this problem, but I kind of don’t believe what people say. I mean, I think sometimes they dislike a thing for reason A, but the words that come out are reason B. They say a character is badly written (B), but really they find the queer subject matter uncomfortable (A). This may or may not be the case, but fundamentally I do not believe the average internet video game fan has the introspection and honesty to say “A” here. There’s no way to know.
Veilguard, on the other hand, doesn’t get better. It just stays bad and even confusing at times.
My problem with Veilguard is the difficulty fell off a cliff and never climbed back up. Other than that it was fine.
You’re probably right. Dark days ahead.
But I hold out a little hope that people will fight back