I really like where D&D’s at, since it has multiple classes at every point along the “at will” to “once per day” spectrum, so players can pick what they like. D&D 4e tried homogenizing everyone into having mostly “at will” powers and players (myself included) hated it.
Agreed about not liking that D&D sucks all the air out of the room, though.
you sit at a red light. a bicycle passes you on the side of traffic. you grow obscenely, irrationally angry and vow to get all bike lanes removed from your city. the traffic gets worse.
Yeah this particular piece of data isn’t gonna go on top of my list lmao. Major corporate audits like this also frequently find that they’re not culpable for child labor when they are, shit like that.
Yes. Also everyone should be required to learn how to use a slide rule before they ever get given a calculator - I think that seeing how the numbers relate to each other on a physical device can help students conceptualize them better.
I like all three of those games, but calling SMO “half Kirby and half Banjo-Kazooie” is incoherent to me. Bigger maps don’t make your game more fun, go too big and all you’ve managed to do it make it more tedious to get from point A to point B. Also, kirby’s power ups don’t work the same way SMO’s do - almost every SMO powerup changes the way you interact with the game world, whereas a kirby powerup just gives you new ways to dispatch enemies (which was already trivially easy).
SM Wonder is good but not quite at the high bar achieved by Donkey Kong: Tropical Freeze or Rayman: Legends
All of the best games ever made have been janky as hell. Highly polished games are usually that way because they avoided doing anything interesting and just did things that had been figured out by previous games.
Something like Rome: Total War, but at full historic scale and with a total commitment to realism. You would need to come up with some kind of time scaling to make it manageable, but battles should play out over the course of in-game hours or even days.
Lines of communication should be important to maintain, as you can only see what your general sees and everything else on your screen is the result of reports coming in from your scouts/skirmishers. Your orders get delivered via a combination of shouting, flag and horn signals, and messengers on horseback based on the complexity of the order and the distance to the unit you’re sending it to - which of course means they can be intercepted in some cases.
The battles play out with a simulation of crowd dynamics, where casualties from weapons are pretty low but if you can cause a retreat you’ll be trampling the other army to death, or if you hit an enemy unit from multiple sides at once you can potentially cause a crowd crush that makes them unable to effectively fight back.
Massive blocks of people moving around should kick us a huge dust cloud in their wake, making them easy to spot but obscuring what’s behind them. A unit standing directly behind another unit should be hidden unless you have high-quality scouting in that area. Cavalry should almost never stop moving, since doing so is pretty much an instant death sentence, with light cavalry automatically circling and using hit-and-run tactics while heavy cav simply attempts to trample their way through whoever they’re attacking.
The biggest piece that would need work is sieges. Sieges should take place primarily at an abstraction level that allows them to play out over in-game days, weeks, months or even years - but then when the action ramps up you can switch to the normal battle scale to cover moments of interest. Both players should be constantly engaging in building and tearing down fortifications - Alexander’s causeway to Tyre literally caused that city to stop being on an island, and you the player should be able to build similar earthworks. Huge ramps up to the walls, a second set of walls around your own troops ala Alesia, capturing water sources, digging tunnels, dropping hungry bears in the tunnels, etc.
Every time your army is on the march it’s should be like playing Oregon trail, where your main goal is preventing as many of your troops from dying of disease before the battle as possible. Scouts give you conflicting information about the enemy’s size and location and you have to sort it all out, river crossings are an ordeal forcing you to build rafts or a bridge or just risk wading through, food relies on supply trains to the mother country and a lot of foraging (ie stealing from local farmers), non-allied cities that you come across will preemptively surrender if your force is large enough and send you aid, and so on.
I’m not sure if you can do a “grand campaign” with all of this detail, so I would start with just a few specific ones, Hannibal in Italy, Caesar in Gaul, etc. Each one only has a few battles and a lot of events between them, with alt-history that can occur based on your choices and how well you play.
Talk of advertisements in the Windows app menu was the last straw for me. I don’t use any programs that require Windows so I don’t have dual boot or anything - although I do have a KDE theme that mimics Windows 95/8 because that was what I grew up with and I’m super nostalgic for it.
That said, I’ve always been attracted to “third options”. My favorite phone was a Windows Phone, my motorcycle is from a small manufacturer, etc.
I think it’s just regular Operant Conditioning, but the reward of finding half a pie was so strong that the association will stick to this bush for a lot longer than if it was a smaller one.
There’s this constant tension with D&D where it wants to be medieval and it wants to have easily-reproducible magic. Follow the magic through to its logical conclusion and you get essentially modern technology with a mystical/medieval aesthetic, ignore it and you get big blatant plot holes.
I haven’t used many, but after fucking with Ubuntu, Pop OS and Mint I switched to base Debian 12 and it’s the cleanest my desktop PC experience has ever been. My computer doesn’t do anything I’m not expecting it to, it doesn’t have any bloatware, every program I’ve installed has worked clean out of the box exactly as advertised (except for the occasional Proton/Wine wrangling which is universal).
Anyway I think he’s pretty good. He’s been making content since before he was a socialist, and even then he was making content for a while before he started really identifying as a Marxist-Leninist, so there’s no shortage of bad takes in his archive - but as he comes off now in his podcast he’s pretty radical and well-informed. The most recent objection I’ve seen to him is disagreement with his belief in MMT, a topic which I don’t know enough about to meaningfully comment on.
The blasters used in the movie era are… Basically unstoppable? They’re the pinnacle of weapon tech as far as mass arming is concerned.
AFAIK no source goes into this, but I’ve always interpreted the Star Wars universe as having basically invented every single thing that it’s possible to invent in their universe. Technology gets better or worse generation to generation based on how unified society is and the proximity of the manufacturer to certain hyper-rare resources, ie the Empire was able to build the Death Star not because they invented a really big laser, but because they centralized enough military manufacturing in one place to actually be able to build it.
Anyway that’s the only way I can think of to square the universe’s technology being basically indistinguishable between the three trilogies and stuff like KOTOR.
There’s a little detail in Tie Fighter media that I like, where the Tie Fighter pilots love the fact that they don’t have shields or any fancy fly-by-wire stuff in their fighters because it makes them “real pilots”, compared to rebel pilots who have astromechs, shields, and hyperdrives. Extrapolated out a bit, and you could interpret the Empire as constantly sabotaging its own military effectiveness because of a toxic bravado that has been allowed to infect its military at all levels, which is pretty compatible with the Empire’s implied fascist ideology (that the movies don’t go too much into detail about).
So storm troopers could have Heinlein-esque power suits, but they all think that having something like that is for wimps, all the way up to the top of the chain of command.
6÷2(1+2) (programming.dev)
zeta.one/viral-math/...
I'd prefer to have the unlimited plan (startrek.website)
... and you feel nothing. (lemmy.ml)
No Sign Of Forced Labour At Xinjiang Site, Says VW (www.barrons.com)
Whats your such opinion (discuss.tchncs.de)
What do you mean I have to learn a new system?! (lemmy.ml)
5e is fine but I also love indie games and creators
What is a video game that you'd love to play, but no one has developed yet?
A brief lapse in logic (startrek.website)
Did Taylor Swift Attend a New York Jets Game to Detract From Her Private Jets? (www.vulture.com)
what caused you to get into Linux?
What caused you to get into it, are you an evangel and are you obsessed?
This needs to be a well-defined psychological principle. I do stuff like this all the time (programming.dev)
Get good loot from a toolbox in Fallout? Gotta check them all now
Legal loophole (startrek.website)
holiday savings with this simple trick (lemmy.ml)
which distro and why do you prefer it over others?
What are your opinions on the self-proclaimed Socialist YouTuber Second Thought?
Most DMs will adjust to your AC... (startrek.website)