I feel like if we had spent the money lost to tax cuts on enforcing existing laws, like really throw the book at tax cheats, like put them in orange jumpsuits and make them rot in a cell, we’d have had better outcomes.
The ultra rich should be afraid.
I don’t know PBTA well but I believe so.
Basically, every scene and character can have ‘aspects’, which are things that are true about them. They’re free form. Sometimes they’re just there, like if you’re in a bar it might have “Bubbling with drunk banter” or “Loud Pop Punk Soundtrack”. Aspects can then affect what makes sense in the scene. “Loud Pop Punk” can make it easier to move without being heard, but harder to make a speech because no one can hear you, for example.
You can also explicitly create aspects. Turn off the jukebox and the aspect might change to “Weirdly Quiet Bar” or whatever. In a fight, you can use the “create an advantage” move. That’s for stuff that isn’t about taking them out of the conflict right now, but setting things up. Like pushing them off balance, disarming them, screaming “LOOK! A DISTRACTION!” whatever. If the roll comes out if your favor, you can create an aspect that’s true and can also be invoked for a numeric bonus on a dice roll. So if you pants the guy you’re fighting, he can’t run full speed to chase you because his pants are down. You can also invoke that if you want to kick his ass, for a bonus on the dice roll.
These are all free form and it’s up to the group to decide what it actually means. Most groups probably wouldn’t let you invoke “I’m literally on fire!!” as a bonus if you’re trying to sneak through a crowd.
Typically, as I understand it, you’re either trying to take them out of the fight or trying to create advantages for side of the conflict. On a dramatic success on trying to take someone out, you can also create a small advantage.
Many people don’t really think about their language. They kind of snap their phrases together like a child with those big duplo blocks.
Most of the time that’s fine, if a bit limiting. But occasionally you get glimpses into how communication could be clearer, or more accurate, if they thought about their words more.
I partly blame our public education system. Not enough funding, some funding misused, other problems I don’t even know about. But it feels like a lot of people are barely educated, and don’t have any intellectual curiosity.
If we were all in the room, we could strangle Sam Altman or whatever other capitalist dog was calling the shots.
This is the best approach I’ve found.
Player says, “I make a sales pitch playing on Priscilla’s hatred of our common foe, and that’s why she should sell us these explosives for cheap” and doesn’t have to actually do a sales call. Roll the dice and decide if that means she buys in, makes a counter offer, or what.
Personally I find adding a lot of flavor that has no mechanical impact kind of distracting and tiresome in a different way. Like, sure, it sounds cool you slashed their ankles or whatever, but if it doesn’t do anything I need to discard that. I can’t, in most systems, then be like “ok he just got stabbed in the leg he’s off balance. I can take advantage of that!”. It’s just noise.
Some people have been like “You just don’t have any imagination!” but it’s not that. It’s that the flavor stuff is often actively not true, and it’s tiresome to hold two separate world states in mind at the same time. One where the fighter just stabbed the guy in the hand and threw sand in his eyes, and the other where he hit for 5 damage and his hand + eyes are fine.
(Contrast Fate, which explicitly encourages you to be creative about the scene, and lets you mechanically benefit as well.)
I think your text has what are supposed to be spoilers on some phrases, but they are fully revealed to me (lemmy, firefox browser)
I think the “I move and attack” stuff can get boring, especially if it’s slow. Like, if the players are speedy about it then you’re basically playing a board game, and that’s fine. I start to lose patience when you get the “can i move here? oh i can only move 30 feet. what about here? oh that will provoke. maybe if i cast misty step? oh i can’t cast two leveled spells in a round. Can I hide first? Oh that takes my action? Sorry I usually play rogue. Uhhh I guess I just shoot them.” mode.
I also kind of really want to spend more time in systems where the talky parts have rules, too. D&D tends to be just "wing it’ and “DM decides”. If you’re at the noble’s ball and try to make a big speech to convince the duke to flee before your army attacks, there’s not really a lot of structure there. It can be fine to just “talk it out, man”, but that runs into the problem where my character on paper has CHA 20 but me in real life rocks a solid 10 CHA. Or the other case, where the fighter with 8 CHA has a salesguy for a player, and he punches well above his on-paper skills using his real life personality, where I’m sidelined.
Honestly, just removing all the social skills from D&D would normalize the system.
But there’s also games like Fate, that handle social conflict and sword conflict with the same rules. Stab someone? Roll fight vs whatever they defend with. Stab someone with your words? Roll Cruelty vs their Composure. In either case, if your dice come out on top enough then they don’t get to go on.
I think some peopel who want more RP would hate this, since it gamifies it. But I’d rather have it than the aforementioned “real life sales guy hogs the spotlight” problem.
It might come to that. People should organize and arm now. Even though that’s kind of hard and scary and I don’t know where to begin.
Also I guess gay men don’t exist. But would not be surprised someone with such a bad take also has bad ideas about queerness
Most people like to be productive.
There is enough money and resources. It’s mostly just consolidated in the hands of the rich. You’ve probably seen https://eattherichtextformat.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/ . If you spread that around, you get more economic activity.
Lots of people choose to do stuff instead of just chilling. Go look at all the open source projects that are just made by hobbyists, or community gardens, or any number of other self organized projects. Capitalism with all the profit is theft bits isn’t the only way.
I’m not sure I follow. What do you think is bullshit?
Someone still needs to do work, but not everyone needs to work all the time.
We would probably be fine if people who wanted to work just kept working. Or if we had universal basic income, so people could more freely choose if they wanted to trade their time+labor for something else.
Like, if absolutely no one wants to tend the fields then that’s going to be a problem for food. I think there are enough people who would do it because they want to, especially for jobs that are local. But even if not, you could still offer money. Having basic income (or some other mechanism to assure basic needs are met) in place means it’s much less coercive, because it’s no longer a question of labor or suffer
true, though sometimes i find the more verbose style easier to read, and more maintainable (eg: you want to do something else in the block, you can just add a line instead of changing your ternary / etc). Small things
I’ve heard of this one. Maybe I’ll check it out.
The downside of reading a lot of depressing non fiction is I increasingly feel like I’m living in a cuckoo clock, and get frustrated with how everyone else seems oblivious and uncaring.
I guess? With enough money you can just buy bonds, which sort of depend on consumerism but indirectly. Some municipal bonds return like 5%. 5% of a shit load of money is enough to live on.
Depends on how it’s set up. If the setting is going into the env it’s a string, so I’d expect some sort of
if os.getenv("this_variable", "false").lower() == "true": # or maybe "in true, yes, on, 1" if you want to be weird like yaml
this_variable = True
else:
this_variable = False
Except maybe a little more elegant and not typed on my phone.
But if the instructions are telling the user to edit the settings directly, like where I wrote this_variable=True, they’d need to case it correctly there.
Is the backend Python and the frontend JavaScript? Because then that would happen and just be normal, because Boolean true is True in python.
Related: the idea that everyone needs to work all the time isn’t really true anymore. If we were in like 3000 bce in a small farming village outside Ur, yeah, people gotta pitch in so we don’t get eaten by wildlife, the neighboring tribe, or whatever.
But in 2025ce, where so many jobs have so much filler nonsense? And when the rich can just live on investment income? No, the whole “work or starve” thing isn’t needed anymore.
We should have basic income for all and public housing. Let people pursue what they want. Maybe it’s art. Maybe they just want to take care of the local library. Maybe they just want to be a local barfly that keeps the tavern interesting. Who knows? But wage slavery needs to go.
There is truth here.
I think rich people will have assets, like stock, and they’ll get a loan out with the stock as collateral. They pay like 2% on the loan, but they get like a million dollars cash. If that was treated like income, they’d pay a lot more taxes.
Not sure the best way to address this, but it should be addressed.