Oh that’s absolutely why. If they dumped everything at once people would play what they wanted to play and drop the subscription. By doing this people come back.
If Nintendo doesn’t keep NSO as-is for their “Switch 2” people will be EXTREMELY pissed, but it’s Nintendo, they’re fine with that.
Sounds to me like you just don’t want to think that hard, which is fine, I usually don’t either. Half of the time I just play Doom .wads
BG3 specifically: It’s D&D 5e, so… yeah It’s gonna be complex.
Complex systems more generally:
The best way to learn about any complex system is to bite tiny chunks out of it and ignore the rest, even if you know stuff is interconnected. You’ll never learn everything at once, so don’t try. Eventually you get bored with the little bubble you’ve carved out for yourself so you move over and learn about some other bit. You don’t even need to care about whether you’ll understand everything eventually.
I know he’s said a lot of idiotic shit lately but… seriously? He actually said this? Jesus Christ. He truly has reverted into a lonely 4Chan teen.
Yeah, this is a pretty good overview of the situation as it stands now.
BUT somehow I think I found a solution for myself in the hour since I posted it, AsciiDoc seems rad as hell. Very Markdown-like but geared more towards document writing and conversion to other “publishable” formats with features like automatic ToCs, citations, character conversion to more “literary” equivalents like emdash and more proper quotation marks, etc., just more complete in general where Markdown is for quick n’ dirty comments and forum posts. I’m super glad that I found it. Apparently some O’Riley books were written in it.
The thing about fencing is that it basically evolved from the general idea of swords as a form of self-defense, not swords as a tool of war, and pure effectiveness wasn’t the only thought there.
In fact the term fencing as we use it today specifically referred to rapiers from the start, and rapiers were fashion as much as they were tools. They were designed to go well with fancy outfits and weren’t even necessarily designed to kill people so much as to win duels, which it was great at due to it’s light weight (plus, taking a big ol’ killin’ sword would probably be looked down upon, even though someone totally might die either way).
If I were making a character with a background in fencing who planned on going on adventures, I’d have them grab an estoc as it’s essentially a specialized longsword. You want something that can make a big enough wound to drop someone quickly, sturdy enough to pierce armor, and an estoc fits those requirements. Another option would be a backsword as George Silver preferred it as a general self-defense weapon, if you’re not expecting to fight armored opponents much or at all.
Considering Lemmy’s apparent deep-rooted technical issues, I’d be perfectly fine with Beehaw searching for something else. Leaving Lemmy doesn’t mean leaving the Fediverse, which a lot of people seem to be misunderstanding. It’s sort of a hard requirement for anything Fediverse-related to be about as advanced in terms of mod tools as Mastodon at least, and otherwise, what’s the point? People are focusing way too hard on perceived ideas about “what the community is like” or whatever, look guys, it’s the internet, it’s always like that. Maybe stay away from places as general and wide-ranging as Technology (honestly I’d say that’s the flaw of a good chunk of Lemmy instances and people need to start looking for / creating more specific stuff. It’s out there, please god just look.)
Ultimately the purpose of Lemmy is to be something like a traditional forum system, but networked in a way that makes those forums highly discoverable. Lemmy achieves that, but if there’s actually technical barriers to content moderation, yeah, that sucks.
Uh… the whole article is discussing how “the western left’s” sympathy for Palestine and criticism of Israel is being criticized?
Good article, I’ve been wondering why people are calling it populism…
Is this not all kinda well-known information?
…Ah yes, the most grift-y place in the world, the Boston Museum of Science.
The guns didn’t make them suicidal, but they provide a very easy way to be impulsive.
I’m vaguely suicidal a good chunk of the time. I don’t want to be anywhere near a gun.
Oh no!! BallisticNG is a wonderful game, shame that Switch players won’t be getting it.
Que people arguing about GNU’s importance / self-inflated importance or whatever
God the religion vs. faith thing, I’m glad to see someone articulate it. It’s bizarre to me how many people are seemingly super hardcore into their religion as a social club, but if you observe them closely they come across like “believing it” is just a game they play for the sake of staying in.
Well, for a practical example, my Ryzen 5 5600x and Radeon 6600xt combo is juuust out of the running for games coming out right now, I’d say. The VRAM limitations at 8GB are becoming apparent and there’s been a few instances where the 5600x struggles in games that hit CPUs hard. But I’d say that’s because there’s been an oddly big jump in system requirements, recently.
Y’know, every time I think I know all the World of Darkness stuff, I see something like this.
Seriously, ArchWiki has taught me most of what I know about Linux.
Hi, I’m sorry that I didn’t see this post earlier. I’m autistic, and I have sensory processing issues, but not synesthesia.
The single biggest problem architecture causes for me is noise. Public spaces are inevitably noisy. But if the acoustics of the room are poor, then no one can hear themselves over anyone else, and everyone starts trying to talk over the room… which gets crazy pretty quickly. Independent restaurants in older buildings are the worst. Hollow plaster walls + 45 degree corners for the ceiling in some spots + a rowdy Italian family nearby with that one lady that laughs at the top of her lungs = sensory hellhole.
Extend that 10x to stadium concerts. The audio engineers crank things up so much that the sound waves bounce around until you get something like feedback from the room itself, it all just turns into a white noise assault on your eardrums and I’ve straight-up left concerts because of it.
Nothing is ever “quiet” for me, really. Actually, I lost it recently when a beginner guided meditation focused super hard on being aware of everything around you- that’s my experience all the time and I wish I could filter things out like most people!
Shopping: Florescent lights suck. They don’t bother me too much specifically, but they’re a major pain point for a lot of autistic people. Personally it’s just the constant traffic and unwritten “waiting for that one person to stop staring at the canned sauces shuffle”.
Museums are amaaaazing. I love museums. The Boston Museum of Science is one of my favorite places. Now that I think about it, my favorite designed spaces are all either very large and spacious or very small (in the way that historical homes tended to have more small, private rooms). Anything in-between gets… like, there’s enough room for stuff, and just barely room for quite a few people, and they end up even more crowded and chaotic than either of those two extremes, somehow.
For me, it’s Mythras, and it’s Mythras because I can steal ideas from literally everything else as needed. It’s easy to say “this game does everything I need” but in the case of Mythras, I see it as the sanest “base system” around, and it’s structured in a way that actually lets me incorporate mechanics I like from elsewhere without any problems.
Mythras was originally RuneQuest 6e, but after the authors lost the right to use the RuneQuest name, they transformed it into a thoroughly generic game. It’s really a toolset for making RPGs, like GURPS, but it provides way more sane defaults, is way less confusing (IMO) and doesn’t do GURPS’s “be universal by making a few hundred different sourcebooks” thing.
So at this point it’s basically a fork of BRP (RuneQuest, Call of Cthulhu, etc.), and personally I think it’s a direct improvement over it.
I like that Mythras is heavily focused on everything making narrative sense. Something happens because it happens in-universe, no characters getting new magical abilities or “feats” that other people somehow can’t do without them actually learning how to do those things in the story you’re telling. But it manages to do that while still feeling like a traditional stat-y, game-y RPG, rather than an improvisational storytelling tool like a lot of other modern games.
I think BRP style skill resolution is good because it’s boring. How good are you at Athletics? You’ve got 30 points in it, that’s a 30% chance of success, straight-up. It’s extremely clear. As a GM, I think it makes deciding the difficulty of checks (you’re really modifying how many points the players have in that skill) very easy compared to other systems. d% for the win.
I think Mythras’ combat system is the best in the industry, if you’re looking for a game that avoids abstraction. I know exactly what a fight in Mythras looks like without having to ask players to “describe how they swing their sword” or whatever because it’s mechanically telling you that already. There’s no need to argue over what HP actually is or what really happens when a character misses. Mythras manages to do that without getting painfully slow, actually it feels faster than D&D combat, because most combat ends quickly. A defender can take advantage of an attacker’s mistakes, getting stabbed is about as bad as you’d expect getting stabbed to be, and you can end up in states where someone should surrender after a single round or two. You’re given tons of options in melee combat other than “I swing my sword” but they’re gated by successful rolls, your equipment and the situation in a way that stops choice paralysis from happening too often. Your setting involves guns? Mythras Firearms has you covered and those are some of the best rules for modern combat I’ve seen, too.
Mythras is crunchy, but it’s not meandering like D&D is. I don’t feel like there’s always another weird rule exception that people could end up arguing over on a YouTube video. You learn how to play the game and that’s sort of just it! Mechanics all work similarly enough that I find them much easier to remember.
Mythras has rules for everything that matters. Wish you had more structure for social encounters rather than everything other than combat being delegated to a single skill check? The Mythras Companion has you covered (if the core book didn’t already). Want your players to be part of a guild, religious organization, something that they’ll advance through, rely upon and be answerable to? Mythras has a huge chapter Cults, Guilds and Organizations that provides more narrative (but still structured) ways to do something like a class system.
Speaking of, Mythras is classless, being BRP-based. As presented in the core rulebook your character is defined mainly by their culture and their profession, which I love. Characters actually come across as real people with significant lives outside of “adventuring” or whatever. It’s a wonderful tool for introducing players to the world you’re dropping them into. Being “good at fighting” isn’t something that needs to come at the exclusion of being good at other things, not even being a magician of some kind, but you don’t need to be good at fighting. “Combat styles” are an awesomely flexible way of handling it.
Magic is a totally optional part of Mythras, you super don’t need any in your game for it to be fun, but damn does Mythras have magic rules. Actually, it has five magic systems and encourages you to heavily tailor them to your world. Those systems vary significantly in how much power they give your players.
Folk Magic is something you can give your players without worrying about balance much at all. It’s all little domestic spells people might use to heat their home, or fix something that snapped apart.
Mysticism is “monk magic”. It’s themed around inner strength and includes lots of stat buffs, alongside abilities like wall climbing and fitting through impossible spaces. You could use mysticism to have whole campaigns of less “grounded” characters flinging giant swords around like Guts, if you wanted.
Animism is all about the spirit world. Want to play Supernatural as an RPG? you could do that with Animism, easily, although a lot of the chapter is about the shamanistic social structures that usually surround it as a practice.
Theism is what it sounds like, you’re getting magic from a god or gods. This is the most conventionally balanced magic system in Mythras because it makes narrative sense for “more powerful” miracles to only be available to extremely faithful people, or people of a high rank in the local cult. The book Classic Fantasy, which is a Mythras rewrite of classic D&D, uses the mechanics of Theism as a basis for traditional D&D magic.
Sorcery is the magic system that leads people to call Mythras a Sword & Sorcery game, because yeah, the defaults Mythas gives you are perfect for that. Sorcery is the closest aesthetically to the classic D&D wizard trope, but it’s terrifyingly powerful. You can “shape” sorcery spells to be more or less powerful at will, and combine them to do multiple things at once. Sorcery’s primary “just hurt things” spell is called Wrack and unless you modify it as a GM, your player will be an armor-ignoring murder firehose for at least a full minute. Smart players who really dedicate themselves to sorcery could become immortal litches, or perform assassinations by calling down lightning bolts on people while they’re sleeping (right from the comfort of their creepy wizard tower). I find it very cool how Sorcery lets things like that happen systemically, but it’s also so overpowering that the developers warn you in the rulebook about it. Which… yeah.
Examples of the flexibility of Mythras include:
M-Space
Odd Soot
Perceforest
The Mythic Earth series
Destined (yes, it’s a superhero RPG)
Classic Fantasy
Worlds United
After the Vampire Wars
Firocetta
And the list goes on.
Isn’t that pretty much it? Everyone wants to make video games. All of the sudden everyone wants to invest in video game development because they realized there’s money in it. But video games are a big commitment for consumers (compared to most consumables), we literally only have so much time to dedicate them and there’s SO MANY GODDAMN GAMES. Like, an Eldritch horror inducing amount of video games if you have FOMO. And that’s still a drop in the ocean compared to all the people who want to make video games. Hundreds if not thousands of cool games go completely unnoticed by basically everyone every month, seemingly.
There’s a bizarre sort of supply / demand triangle going on.