Wandering Adventure Party

Are you referring to the fact that you’re not supposed to double the damage from the extra die that Fatal adds, and how the Fatal trait discusses adding this die in such an insanely ambiguous way that it seems almost purposefully written to cause confusion? Because, honestly, the fact that PF2e’s books seem like they’re written only to be read by the writers has more to do with the writers, and not the level of crunch in the system.

Have you considered buying 16 bad domains?

Exactly. Anything that doesn’t directly serve the egos or desires of young, white men needs to be sufficiently OTHER to “real gaming” in order for it to be allowed to exist. Anything introducing women as a real avatar – not just a high polygon wiggling ass to stare at – is automatically a threat, because it means someone is trying to make them see the world from someone else’s point of view.

A lot of gamers seem to think that everything that’s released needs to be for them, specifically, and if there’s something about a game that makes them feel like they aren’t the only person in the room, it needs to be destroyed. Even the suggestion that a game might be trying to treat women or people of colour as anything but objects must be met with violence, because otherwise it might mean having to accept a world where they’re not Player 1.

There is a sense among MAGA folks that the 2020 election was “stolen” from them, because their guy should have won no matter what the votes were. Some of them have claimed that the election was rigged, but mostly they seem to feel like the election shouldn’t have mattered, and that Trump should have been president no matter what, because that’s what they wanted. They’re both entitled, and resentful at a world that dared to tell them to sit down.

Trump saying out loud that he intends to steal the midterms is just giving his base what they want: Revenge.

Pteryx the Puzzle Secretary They just think you don’t understand. If you understood, you wouldn’t be against generative ML models! And since you are, you just need to be shown the light!

You know, they’re the Jehovah’s Witnesses of the tech industry.

How much of this community will be an allegory for the soviet revolution?

I suddenly have a lot more respect for Charles.

Accountability sinks is the whole value-prop of AI. It’s what these companies are actually paying for, and it’s why there’s so much investment here.

Moreau Vazh But that means… talking to the other players at the table! Ewwww!

Moreau Vazh It’s a bizarre cognitive divorcing of play preference from play choices. I’ve heard people say things like “OSR is super deadly, so you need to avoid combat”, when how deadly combat is is entirely a function of what the GM chooses to make you fight, and how they choose to play out the combat. Similarly, I’ve seen people tell curious new folks that PF2e isn’t for them if they like roleplaying, because it’s just a combat game with a thin veneer of the fantasy genre (while also complaining about how much page space is dedicated to non-combat material). But, like, 5e seems to become “OSR” really quickly if you smother it in black paint, print an opinionated guideline for combats, and hype it on YouTube, and OSR becomes extremely crunchy if you slap a Goodman Game’s logo on it and pepper in some werewolves or whatever.

Yet no one seems to be willing to admit that their games play out the way that they do because of their choices at the table, not their choices at the book store.

Moreau Vazh What I find really fascinating about this is the endemic belief among TTRPG fans who know that multiple systems exist, that those systems are built for specific styles or genres of play. 5e and Pathfinder for high fantasy “crunchy” play, KitD and Dungeon World for “narrative” play, and OSR for dark,edgy, gritty play. The idea of a generic system seems to be reserved for GURPS enthusiasts.

Modern players conflate system with setting and aesthetic to such a high degree, it’s kind of paralyzing.

Deb Nam-Krane “Dear Muslima” was a response Dawkins made to Rebecca Watson after she asked atheist convention goers to not randomly proposition women they didn’t know in otherwise empty elevators at 2am.

Ingo Heinscher That is not what the developers I’ve worked with are saying. Lines of code can be produced faster than ever, but software engineering isn’t about the number of lines of code produced, but about what those lines do.

There is something deeply broken about my profession.

Thinking back to the time I was being interviewed by a recruiter from Spotify, who asked me if I was in the Eastern time zone. When I said I wasn’t, they explained to me they could only hire from the Eastern time zone because everywhere else was too far away to overlap with their European offices.

Trying to cheerfully explain to them that there were, in fact, time zones east of Eastern time did not go over quite as well as I had anticipated.

Null Prof. DM is hyping up Deathbringer by saying it’s 5e with some streamlining and harshness. He also has spoken about it in the same breath as the OSR. And it’s now officially a Shadowdark hack.

OSR just means it’s printed in monochrome and looks like the art was done by Rorschach.

Well, that technical interview was a disaster. I’m glad it happened on an application for short term role. It’s a good reminder that the type of question companies say they’re going yo test you on might not be anything like the questions they ultimately ask, though.

Technology Connections Oh man, right-wing heat pump and dishwasher spaces must be in a wild tizzy this weekend. This is going to be worse than all of the people suddenly asking why Star Trek had to go and get all “woke”.

I’ve been on #Mastodon for a month now, and I’ve just been posting pics of my #cats

It’s amazing how quickly you intuited the rules around here.