The idea that players all make their characters in isolation and just show up on session 0 with them sounds like such a recipe for disaster. I know it can work sometimes, much like “just grab four things from the fridge and throw them into the soup” can work sometimes. But sometimes you get like gummy bear pizza bites with shrimp and mayo topping.
I think a lot of games that came after D&D figured out solutions to common problems, but D&D insists on staying kind of archaic.
The didn’t listen when the GM talked about Theme and mood and end up with a character who doesn’t fit with the party/canpaign
Hah, for a second I thought this was my own post because I wrote something very similar here. But yes, this is one that bugs me.
Reminds me of my first big success at work. There was a weekly report that people wanted generated - it showed how much like each operator had done, how much each warehouse had shipped, how many orders we lost from stock issues, etc. it was a low tech company, so they had someone going through the limited UI, looking up each thing one at a time, copying it into excel, and making the report that way. It took hours, and was error prone from stuff like mis-pasting or accidentally skipping a user.
Took a look at it and was like you could definitely automate this. Used some very primitive scripting to pull all the info out of the system’s UI and dump it into a TSV. Took like a couple minutes to run it, import into excel, and add the colors. But it was super janky because it was manipulating the UI like a user instead of, like, directly querying whatever underlying data store it was running on.
Still, management was impressed. I later learned no one actually looked at the report most weeks, so that took some of the wind out of my sails.
This is an ancient joke but they replaced the original pigeon with a blue thing instead. :confused:
Having a minor crisis realizing that 9th grade was far more than seven years ago for me. This is fine.
You know, I replayed it recently (with OpenMW) and for 2002 yes, but by more modern standards not really, not for me. The leveling system is really bad. The combat system is an awful mix of dice rolls and action, where neither is satisfying. Movement is glacial and it takes a long time to either level speed or get mark/recall. NPC interaction is minimal.
It certainly has a lot of cool stuff in it. Spellcrafting is cool (if janky). Enchanting was like spellcrafting, but better. Alchemy can get bonkers. The world is huge, and because it was less level-scaling and procedural-generation you sometimes could find really interesting things. Like breaking into a room in the fighter’s guild and finding a full set of glass armor. Super cool. Of course, the illusion of a believable world immediately shatters when you walk right out wearing the stolen armor and no one reacts.
So, yes and no. Amazing, for 2002. But also kind of limited, and sometimes kind of bad, and they haven’t really reached new heights in the past 23+ years. All of their games handle stealth badly. They all handle damage badly. There’s just not two decades of improvement by them.
The more I play Bethesda games the more I realize they’re not actually good. Fun sometimes, but also kind of bad.
A tangent, but I do wonder about all the people that played Final Fantasy 7 and just didn’t get any of the pro-environment message. The protagonists are literally eco terrorists who blow shit up to stop the antagonist corporation from bleeding the planet dry.
It’s like people who listen to rage against the machine and don’t take any politics away.
Opportunity costs still exist
I think there’s also a pair:
I’m old and tired and generally am super tired of “wacky” ideas like the second one there. I feel like I’ve come full circle. As a youth, I thought like “let’s play vampires and struggle with humanity!” was cool . Then there was a bit where i wanted to flip it- “let’s play vampires but like go to theme parks and don’t do anything sad or deep!”. Now I’m back around to wanting to just play the theme as intended.
This is especially true if it comes up after session 0. Like, if you want to do a D&D game about running a BBQ shop, fine. Let’s do it. Let’s kill, cook, and sell some weird monster parts. But please don’t derail the whole game on session 3 when you insist on going back to town to cook the monster meat when it was clearly a random encounter and everyone else wants to continue the dungeon dive pitched in session 0.
One of the reasons I despair D&D is the most popular RPG. It’s almost all combat, and not even great combat at that.
Where is “here” out of curiosity?
I’ve read that most of the lead from leaded gasoline is still in the environment, where it does cause harm. It it’s in the soil, and that can get into people through a variety of means.
Ars doesn’t let me say what I think should happen to all these DOGE traitors anymore, but man they are the fucking worst in every sense.
“not the onion” is exactly right - this would be too on the nose if it was satire
Another reason I feel good about buying albums.
Rights just exist, they are a transcendent object that can’t be defined or limited by laws.
I don’t think rights exist in any meaningful way unless enforced / people agree to follow them. They’re just norms in a nicer suit. There’s no external referee that’s going to stop the game because “your rights are being violated”.
This is more content-first where facebook/twitter/etc are user-first. I think user-first brings out worse patterns.
Like violence and threats in the past are okay, but never in the present?
https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Ald'ruhn#Notes
It’s the Ald’ruhn fighter’s guild. Apparently it’s not a full set, but it’s a lot of it.