huey_m, huey_m@piefed.social

I really am tired of people pretending like this kind of thing is purely an American problem and that Europe has no issues with authoritarianism. coughHungarycough (might be coming to an end, (maybe not, we’ll see) but living in 16 years of it…. some stuff here would make Republicans blush). Incidents in the UK with pro Palestinian movements are similarly discouraging…

They’re just different. Sometimes you want to play Lord of the Rings, with a reasonably clean beginning, middle, and end. There’ll be side quests and diversions, but a pretty clean narrative, as if running a published campaign. Other times you want something more open ended where they can chase down random rabbit holes and see where they go. I genuinely like both, or mixing the two, but everyone needs to be on the same page what the goal as players is or someone is gonna get upset.

I mean, even cohesive epics will usually have player driven deviation, and that’s cool, not implying it’s a pure one or the other… but there’s nothing wrong with a DM wanting to run a “tighter” campaign as long as players are buying into it and are still forging the path there (they’re going their own way to Mordor, but they’re still going there, in other words).

I really do like both. Sometimes I want Minecraft where I make my own story, other times I want to play out a choose your own adventure… we’re going to get to the same destination, but how we get there and what the ending will be is a big question mark.

I definitely agree that as a DM, whether epic or open ended, the paths you haven’t thought of that your players throw you is easily the most interesting part on that side of the screen.

I have a few hundred hours (481 between my wife and I… my guess is about 300-350 of that is me). That’s a lot of time. Remember, I said I tried to get through it multiple times, and each time I got bored with it near the end of Act 2, so that playtime adds up. I’m just past the point in my life where I’m willing to put up with much slog to get to good parts near the end, I’ll just watch a video with dinner and call it a day. I actually feel like I wasted too much time on it as it is, but I guess if you have lots of time on your hands some might not consider it much… I do, though.

Again, I’ve seen the rest of the game and don’t agree with the characterization that it’s just the halfway point. It might be in terms of actual time played, but again, turns tend to take quite a bit longer in 5e at higher levels.

Eh, I don’t buy that you need to play an entire game before deciding it’s overrated. There’s this game criticism catch-22 among gamers that is used to invalidate all criticism… if you don’t finish it or play X hours you’ll be told you didn’t play enough. If you do, you’ll be told by someone else it can’t be that bad because you finished it or played too many hours for it to be bad.

I watched the rest on YouTube and didn’t feel like I missed much. I really don’t feel like what I missed was half the game… actual hours don’t mean much here because 5e naturally takes a lot longer to play at higher levels.

In a tavern is a classic for a reason; it’s simple, it usually makes sense, and we can just get to playing quickly.

I also like using something like boarding a ship all players are on for their own reasons. Shipwreck is a great way to throw players into a very alien or remote region very quickly with very little setup.

My favorite was a Sigil-based setting that had all players walking through their own versions in their own worlds of a magic door leading to a Sigil office hiring adventurers, pretty shamelessly stolen from Howl’s Moving Castle as inspiration.

Which is the final thing. Steal, steal, steal. Anything you’ve seen that you thought was cool, steal it. I actually did so hoping people would get references at first, but honestly, I’ve stolen from stuff as vanilla as Skyrim quests and rarely if ever do people put it together while playing anyway.

This actually touches on a really important point. Make sure you and your players are on the same page about the kind of game you’re looking you run. Are they buying into an epic, cohesive campaign over a year or more? Or are they looking for a monster of the week build a story purely on the fly? It’s way easier if you establish this early on… then it’s up to them to bite on the plot hooks you throw them which they almost certainly will. They might throw you a curve ball and send you down different roads than you were planning, but you’ll still get to your destination.

In my experience it’s just when there’s a disconnect there that it becomes a problem.

Baldur’s Gate 3. Game falls apart after the first act imo. Voice acting was great, first act is very fun and I can still play it, but I just can’t manage to make myself even finish act 2. I do get why people like it, but maintain that as a game it was very much overrated. It’s made my wife swear they should only do GOTY selection for the previous year after the full game has been released and played through entirely. I get the sense their early testing allowed for lots of tweaking an adjustment in the first act but they ran out of time to give the rest the same treatment.

I did not use insults. I said your behavior is pedantic, misplaced, and obnoxious, which it is, and that you were being dishonest by pretending the communist world did not refer to themselves as communist (even though they were actually socialist), which you were and are continuing to do so while projecting your bad faith onto me. I’ve not made any criticisms beyond that narrow point, and it’s the one you refuse to engage with, I can only assume because you know it’s wrong. Maybe you should care a little more about how actual communist states referred to themselves before claiming using “communist” in lieu of “socialist” was western propaganda?

That being said, one thing I do agree with is it’s time for me to fuck off (you can say it) if you’re becoming this upset over so little. I’ll do you one better and block you and suggest you make better use of the feature yourself if you get this emotional so easily. Have a good one.

Addressing the point or not isn’t what’s obnoxious; pretending not to understand what is meant by a common, widely accepted usage of a word to shift a discussion towards semantics is. It’s similar to people correcting common use of “theory” to “hypothesis”; these also have distinct meanings, but the common use of “theory” doesn’t really get in the way of discussion… providing people don’t feign not knowing what’s meant when the person has made which they’re using clear. It’s the same here: you knew very well he’s not referring to a stateless, classless society, but rather the communist states of the world.

Again, using “communism” in this way is not purely a polemic and it’s dishonest to characterize it as such. Even here behind the old iron curtain, “communism” as shorthand for “aspirational communism under a vanguard socialist state” is and was extremely common use of the word. Members of the communist parties would refer to themselves and their states as communist all the time. It isn’t “adhering to US propaganda”… all sides used this. It’s really only young, contemporary communists causing a stink over this, honestly.

That I do agree with you on. For Trump criticisms and attacks… well, there’s plenty of meat on that bone that we don’t need to go gnawing for scraps, as it were.

Communism is a stateless society, where the economic basis of class differences has been overcome.

True in an academic sense, but his clarification makes it pretty obvious he’s referring to the Marxism-Leninism of the USSR since he referenced that directly. Using “communism” as a shorthand for that has been common in both western and eastern media and news since the Cold War. I live in a former satellite state of the USSR, and adherents here would use the same language, it’s not just an outside polemic.

Not really looking to debate the merits of it, but I think pretending not to understand what someone means when they use a very wide and commonly accepted usage of a word and instead pedantically clinging to only an academic definition rather than addressing the actual point is a little obnoxious.

More to the point though, what you call an obvious conclusion is nothing more than speculation fueled by hatred.

Mostly with you, but this, I think, is overplaying your point and just isn’t true. This makes it sound like something just made up because you don’t like someone, like Obama not being an American citizen or something. There is certainly circumstantial evidence that Trump has indeed had sex with minors. His role and behavior in underage beauty pageants, frequent trips to the island we know these things happened on, etc.

Not enough to convict someone, yes, but enough that even someone with no opinion at all of Trump (impossible, but hypothetically), if told of this circumstantial evidence, probably wouldn’t trust their daughter to be alone with him.

I think the point that there’s enough to tar him with that’s completely proven and on the record there’s no need to venture into such circumstantial accusations is well taken, but let’s also not pretend those accusations are baseless and purely from hatred. There’s a lot of circumstantial evidence that would lead even a pretty impartial observer to at least consider it.

Was fairly certain the above only applies to land/sea borders for this reason.

Airports themselves count, but not a ~100mi radius. I think.

Criminals ✋

Privacy enthusiasts ✅

Lower earners do get pretty good care in states like California with MediCal. The problem is a) it isn’t federal, so some states they don’t invest get worse care and b) you can fall onto a band of making too much for public health care and too little for real insurance.

Nothing I’ve written should be taken as an endorsement. Medicare should be extended to all. With no means testing.

Eh, that’s overstating it. It still is a stupidly rich country and professional working Americans tend to make more money than their European counterparts, even considering healthcare.

But yes, tying healthcare to employment comes with all sorts of problems and lets too many people not “poor enough” for Medicare to slip through the cracks. In my experience with a state Medicare system that gets good funding, the public system actually holds up quite well when looking at many of the European systems, at least here in central Europe where I live now… simply extending that to everyone would basically fix the problem. I’ve had good dental work, a fantastic pre natal and birth experience along with mending broken bones and such under a public system with no cost to me and honestly my experience was great.

I often lose track when people jump into conversation like that…

I was appreciating what you added to the conversation at first, but man… giving a bad faith one line response to a long, well thought out comment, now being unable to admit a mistake without passive aggressively implying it’s the others person’s fault you didn’t read thoroughly…

I guess I do appreciate knowing who to block before I need to personally interact with them.

There are also plants specifically adapted for wildfires. Sequoias (and I think redwoods) need them to open their cones and they can’t propagate in their own leaf litter, they need to be cleared by fire.

Yup, it actually empowers them. Every time we see someone get fired for some completely dickish stuff they’ve done or said, the next day we see a go fund me worth tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars from cretins living vicariously through them.

I’m not going to find them now, but if you’re interested, there are a lot of studies that look at how money moves through the economy and which dollars are more impactful. While dollars saved do get reinvested in a roundabout way, their economic impact is pennies on the dollar compared to direct spending or investment into business. It’s just far better for any market economy to prevent dollars from pooling into savings beyond simple prudence and is far better to put them directly to work via spending.