I still have the onyx path WoD 2e books, and I enjoy them. I find it confusing that there several variations of “World of Darkness”

Tech companies don’t really give a damn what customers want anymore.

Ed Zitron wrote an article about how leadership is business idiots. They don’t know the products or users but they make decisions and get paid. Long, like everything he writes, but interesting

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-era-of-the-business-idiot/

Our economy is run by people that don’t participate in it and our tech companies are directed by people that don’t experience the problems they allege to solve for their customers, as the modern executive is no longer a person with demands or responsibilities beyond their allegiance to shareholder value.

In one of my old groups, I’d usually verify the player and I understood each other , and they understood the likely consequences. Like, “You can shoot her, but remember this is her club, with her friends , and she’s a vampire so she probably won’t die. But if you want to roll, it’s at -4 from her Celerity you’ve seen her use.”

One player was always like “you never let me do anything!”

I was like you can do it, but I don’t want you to be surprised and mad if there are consequences.

Another player, by contrast, would listen to me clarify what was likely to happen, and be like “cool bro let’s do it.”. We still talk about the time his character jumped out a 20 story window to save his friend’s girlfriend. Great player. Took a lot of damage, as warned, but lived.

I had a director of eng once who asked me to mind my language when I said “For fuck’s sake it returns 200 OK even when there’s an error”.

So I started naively replacing “fuck” with “fudge”. “That’s pretty fudged up.” “Well, fudge it, we’ll deal with that next.” “Fudge if I know.”

He didn’t really like it, but he can go fudge himself.

I know it’s not for everyone, but for me I feel like buying music I like directly from the artist/label or via bandcamp has been a better experience. Now I have a library of DRM free music, and I know the musicians got a better cut.

Yeah I was going to say. It’s like that “no take only throw” meme with the dog. Capitalists want us to spend money, but they don’t want to pay us enough money. Just spend what we don’t have.

If I had a nice job I’d be out spending a lot more money. But they want to replace everyone with AI, or off shore, or whatever.

Conservatives often have very poor media literacy. They’re often not smart or empathetic, because if they were then they wouldn’t be conservative.

They’re never satiated.

They’re broken people and aren’t addressing the actual problems.

It was a good game. Not perfect, but very good.

Even the things I don’t like are pretty minor.

• upgrading weapons is kind of tedious. Once you know where the stones are or the bearings, it’s kind of a chore to get them.
• related: once you know where some high value items are, it’s really tempting to just beeline for them from the start. But that’s kind of tedious. I guess I could just pretend I don’t know where the +5 stats talisman is.
• a lot of side content isn’t especially rewarding. The first time you play it’s exciting because you don’t know what you’ll find. But later it’s like “nah, this catacomb has a useless ash and boss I’ll fight elsewhere”. Which is a shame because most of the level design is great.

One of the reasons UBI games are trash

I parsed that as “universal basic income games” and was really confused. Ubisoft makes more sense

I found the solo play of both Remnant games really unsatisfying. Slow pacing, uninteresting enemies. Is it much better with friends?

Yeah, I mostly play Fate or nWoD. But a lot of people are really emotionally invested in D&D, so sometimes I think of ways to try to trick them into playing something different while they think they’re still playing D&D.

no different than taking a bunch of books you bought second-hand and throwing them into a blender.

They didn’t buy the books. They took them without permission.

I bet some obsessive nerd has converted DND to point buy (like wod, gurps, etc) instead of class and level based.

You get XP for stuff, and you can spend that as you like on all the stuff you’d get from leveling. Follow the recommended route and get a standard looking fighter. Or go crazy and buy nothing but hit dice. Or make a glass cannon by buying all the sneak attack dice and second attack (in case you miss) and nothing else.

Or, per this meme, buy superiority dice and maneuvers, and then also buy extended crit from champion.

It would be a mess. I think part of why dnd is popular is its comparably small decision space. There’s just not a lot of room to fuck up your character

I found a free port of Civilization (unciv) on the phone and immediately lost like 3 hours. That shit is dangerous. There are better phone games, but there’s certainly a lot of slop.

I just tried “Language Drops” and it was… interesting. It didn’t place me at the right level, so I got a very beginner lesson when I’m closer to intermediate (but definitely not fluent). I’m not sure I liked matching the pictures- the picture for “thank you” could mean different things depending on how you interpret the person’s face and body language- and then I hit the end of the free content for the day. It didn’t get to different tenses or even whole sentences- just basic vocabulary and no verbs. Maybe it ramps up quickly?

This is pretty good advice. I’ve sort of stumbled into it a few times.

Sometimes I’d be like “ok so here’s the room. Blah blah blah details. What’re you doing?”

Andy will be like “I’m gonna check out that detail”

I’ll get like “cool. You all see Andy head over to that detail. Good?” And sort of pause there for a beat to see if anyone wants to interrupt or preempt.

I think the linked article is a generally better method as it’s more complete, but I think mine is a little faster. Especially if you have a couple passive players.

I think I posted this the last time this topic came up, but Ed Zitron’s article about how business idiots run things despite not really understanding the users or product is pretty solid. Long, but solid. https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-era-of-the-business-idiot/

I made a rogue bird-guy (aarakroka?) that built for strength. I really wanted to pick someone up with grapple and fly them off a cliff, but i never pulled it off.

Oh I’ve seen this joke before, slightly better, but now I don’t know which was the original.

It was like

Bard: I cast vicious mockery

Dm: cool. What do you say to him?

Bard: “You’re none of your best friends’ best friend”

Dm: …

Other players: …

Bard: So do I roll damage or…?

Dm: No… No, he’s dead.