I’m outside so I’m not sure how to evaluate “the room”. My phone is the most immediate at hand (pun intended) useful thing right now though.

There was a (fiction) book I was called “all the birds in the sky”. I really liked it. Highly recommend.

One of the plot threads is a rich tech bro character that’s like “the world is doomed we need to abandon it for somewhere else. Better pour tons of resources into this sci-fi sounding project”. And I’m just screaming at the book “use that money for housing and transport and clean energy you absolute donkey”.

There are a lot of well understood things we could be doing to make the world better, but they’re difficult for idiotic political reasons. Racism, nimbyism, emotional immaturity, etc.

There are other RPGs that may scratch slightly different itches, if the fantasy + combat + resource management parts of DND don’t really appeal.

I really like Fate. it’s a lot more focused on story and is overall a lighter system. it does ask more from the players though.

I also really liked pillars 2, and am sad they’re not making a third one.

This pains me.

One time in a tabletop DND game, the party wiped over bad rolls. It was partly my fault for over tuning the fight, but also bad luck. The party had a potion that was like “you can make an extra full attack this turn, all your hits do an extra 1d10, and you’re hasted. Afterwards, you are paralyzed for 1d4+1 turns”.

Fighter drinks it and proceeded to miss like 6 attacks in a row. I think he needed to roll above like 13 and just couldn’t do it.

This is also why I prefer games that give players more tools to tell the dice to fuck off, like fate points in Fate or willpower in CofD.

I think of my cat as a lovable, kind of stupid, little brother. He usually wants to be involved in whatever I’m doing , follows me around the apartment, and so on. But also sometimes he just decides to do something ridiculous like climb into the dresser and get stuck.

I’m not sure how he thinks of me exactly. Seems affectionate!

I have a somewhat bad memory of playing DND as like a 13 year old. We were a mess. There was a cliff, a waterfall, and rope. Someone tied rope around himself and wanted to go down. There was a lot of cross talk and the guy with the rope around said he was going down.

The DM was like “no one is holding the other end of the rope”

“What?”

One by one they went through what everyone else had said they were doing. Searching the cave rocks for secrets. Keeping watch at entrance. Fighting over who got the magic stick. Etc.

Player went over the cliff.

It was decided that the character would wash up downstream with 0 HP and would live, so long as we could get to him in a reasonable time. Lessons were learned, sort of.

Oh gosh I looked at the hand and think I lost 2d4 sanity points.

Targeted ads should be illegal.

Contextual ads are a compromise I would accept. That is, you can buy ads based on the page content, but not the viewer details. So if I’m looking at a website about bikes, you can have bike ads on there. You don’t need to know I’m a xx year old living in zip code 10001. That’s how ads worked for like decades (centuries?). It’s fine.

I went to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_revolution and clicked on the most recent successful entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nepalese_Civil_War

The civil war was characterized by numerous war crimes and crimes against humanity, including summary executions, massacres, purges, kidnappings, and mass rapes. It resulted in the deaths of over 17,000 people, including civilians, insurgents, and army and police personnel; and the internal displacement of hundreds of thousands of people, mostly throughout rural Nepal.

That’s not great.

That sounds like a way to get a lot of people killed and end up worse than how you started.

Then I say we enforce the social contract of “don’t be a fucking asshole”, with force if needed.

A stupid argument I was having about how DND isn’t the best tool for many stories that aren’t about combat + resource management. I know people can have fun with anything but it bugs me when people are like “I do a political intrigue game about secret modern vampires in DND 5e” the same way it might bother some of you if someone was like “I put in my screws with a hammer” or “I add up the numbers in my spreadsheet by hand and type them into the totals row one at a time” or “I don’t use copy-paste I just retype everything”

Like, it doesn’t matter but it bugs me a little.

But I was getting down voted into oblivion so I gave up after someone begrudgingly admitted that yes different games have different focuses.

Climate change deniers should have to stay. Everyone else should probably get assistance moving somewhere else.

Guild wars 2 is a very good game, but very different than guild wars 1.

They both avoid the endless gear and level grind, but gw2 is generally easier and less tactical. You can solo most of it. Builds are a little more limited, but it’s also harder to make a useless character.

They addressed the most common problems with early mmos: other players are never a bad thing. there’s no kill stealing. If you’re doing some event to fight off demons that have invaded the town, and other people show up, the game silently scales up a to accommodate more players, and everyone gets credit. it’s great.

I really like it. I don’t play it every day, but I go back to it all the time.

My parents and grandparents would get weirdly but wholesomely excited whenever they saw the animation on the cards (like the sun on the beach smiling). They all played a lot of solitaire.

My cat would always try to drink out of people cups, so I conceded. There are tea cups on the ground in the hallway for him.

Government is inefficient if you elect people who believe it is and set out to prove it.

People who say “run things like a business” don’t know shit. Every job I’ve worked at has had tremendous waste, but no one was looking closely because it’s private.

Like, right wing nut jobs would lose their shit if they learned a government office was buying fresh fruits for workers but most of it was going bad and being thrown out. But that happened every day for a while.

There’s also been a lot of “why is this machine still running? How much are we paying AWS for this??”

There’s also been a lot of "we don’t need to do accessibility on our website because most of our customers don’t care, and no one’s making us ".

I have very fond memories of a pandemic DND game where the players were making their way through a large puzzle sort of encounter. The confusion, the despair, the panic - so good. And the rising mood when they started to figure it out! And the triumph when they escaped! It was fantastic. One of the players said afterwards “I’ve never been so stressed before” and I was like “that is the greatest compliment you could give me”

I miss that group. Alas, when the pandemic wound down they all returned to real life interests. We’ll never know what the gnome depot was up to in their corporate office, now.

Have you played Nioh2? It has diablo-like items, but actual combat. It’s very good.