Hello, Canadians of Lemmy! Down in the USA there is a lot of conflicting information regarding the efficacy of y’alls healthcare systems. Without revealing my personal bias, I was hoping for some anecdotes or summaries from those whom actually live there.
In the us it’s a pretty standard strategy for the right wing to underfund or sabotage a program, say government doesn’t work, and then try to privatize it.
The wizard in my D&D group tends to be somewhat frivolous with his spell slots. As someone who looks at D&D as a resource management game (BECAUSE IT IS), this often gives me pain.
If you want to play a game where you do cool wizard shit on the regular, probably don’t play the game built entirely around “you should save your spells for the big fight.” And if wotc don’t want to induce “but what if I need it later?” anxiety they should fucking fix that, and make powers per-encounter or something.
DND is not a narrative game first. It has very few rules for narrative stuff. The bulk of its attention is spent on resource management and combat. Because the bulk of the game is centered around managing resources (spell slots, HP, sometimes gold), I say it is a resource management game.
It’s not very good at facilitating good stories. It’s just missing a bunch of tooling like you’d find in Fate or other games. You can still play make believe but you can do that with anything. The rules aren’t really helping very much. They often don’t care at all about the narrative.
I’ll remember stuff like him blowing hold person on a retreating mook when the expertise-in-grapple rogue could have just grabbed him, sure, but not happily.
Can someone ELI5 why 0.1 + 0.2 fails, but 1+2 doesn’t? There’s probably a reason you don’t represent the decimal portion like you do integers, but I’m tired and not very mathy on a good day.
I am Ganesh, an Indian atheist and I don’t eat beef. It’s not like that I have a religious reason to do that, but after all those years seeing cows as peaceful animals and playing and growing up with them in a village, I doubt if I ever will be able to eat beef. I wasn’t raised very religious, I didn’t go to temple...
I do think some of the stuff from the Christian Bible would be great if people followed it.
pray in private, not where people can see you
help other people. Like, go read the good Samaritan again. It’s not long. That dude goes way the fuck out of his way to help someone he’s never met. And some people do some fucking intense mental backflips to justify "no it’s a metaphor man you don’t have to like actually go near a poor person
you’ll be judged by how you treat the least among you. Yeah, anyone can be nice to their friends, or suck up to wealthy. But how you treat the poor and vulnerable? That’s telling.
Part of what makes the religious right in the US so infuriating is they spend so much time being mad about gay people and comparably no time on poverty.
Every mega church should be condemned as heretical and repurposed as housing or something for the needy.
Republicans are so hostile to laws protecting the safety and well-being of children that they’ve even blocked the U.S. from ratifying the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, making ours the only nation in the world that doesn’t recognize the human rights of children.
We should probably do something about republicans.
did a bot write this? what are you even trying to say?
Are you one of those people that thinks anything that’s not straight cis white is “identify politics”? That anything that isn’t your world view is “political”? If so, please go fuck yourself. If not, I have no idea what you’re on about.
Apparently nexus mods has some sort of ad sharing with mod makers. Could be a grift. Grift is popular among right wingers, possibly because they are on a fundamental level stupid.
Some grifter makes an anti “woke” mod that probably took 5 minutes. A bunch of stupid chuds download it to pwn the libs. Grifter makes money. Chuds feel good about their shitty lives.
Well, my friend, he’s kinda poor he can’t afford some books and some streaming services, so he pirates. He pirate books, audiobook and videos and other stuff. Sometimes he buys books he likes a lot out of loyalty to the author (yeah, I don’t understand it either), he likes to read physical books, but yeah, if he hates the...
I don’t pirate video games. Steam, Gog, or even epic are easy and not too expensive. Steam’s refund policy isnt terrible.
I don’t pirate music. I buy stuff from smaller artists on Bandcamp, and use free Spotify/YouTube/old stuff I ripped myself from CDs (I’m old). Though honestly I don’t have a problem with pirating music that’s like 10+ years old. Copyright law is too long.
I don’t pirate books. I get them from the library.
I may have downloaded some RPG books because I wanted more of a skim than I could find online, didn’t really trust reviewers to have my exact set of preferences, and didn’t want to pay the whole amount for a game I wasn’t sure I’d like. The ones I did like and use I bought.
I don’t really watch anything so it didn’t even occur to me to list it.
It indirectly is making me want to leave my current DND group more. I love rpgs but DND specifically makes me grind my teeth. Bg3 is a great game but honestly it would be better with a different rule system. And the fact that DND is so popular that it sucks all the air out of the hobby just frustrates me.
But at the end of the day it’s just a game, and if people are having fun they’re having fun.
Fate is my current game crush I want to play more, but I haven’t had much opportunity. I got my D&D group to try it as a one-shot twice, and both times didn’t really sing.
Back on Christmas Eve of last year there were some reports that Elon Musk was in the process of shutting down Twitter’s Sacramento data center. In that article, a number of ex-Twitter employees wer…
Needing to fudge dice usually means the rules have failed.
A common trope is “I don’t want my PC to die!”. Fine. Reasonable. You can have rules about that. Look at how Fate handles “concede” and getting taken out. Look at how DND does jack shit.
Many games also have a fail forward mechanic. You don’t need to fudge their check if the rules have mechanics for “if you really want to succeed but luck isn’t on your side, here’s what you can pay to succeed”
Also, there totally isnt like 5 different ways for the players to rez a pc.
Depends on character level, setting, game tone. Not a universal solution to a universal problem.
And lets forget about habing NPCs do the rezing as a sidequest.
Not every game lends itself well to an unexpected sidequest. Also what is the dead PC’s owner to do in the interim? This introduces a lot of questions and is also not a universal solution.
Did you read how defeat works in Fate? You can have death.
In a conflict, before a roll is made, you can Concede. This is a Player action, not a character action. It means that you give up the conflict, but you get a say in what happens. You don’t get whatever you were fighting over, but so long as the group agrees it’s reasonable you can get something like “taken prisoner” or “left for dead.” You also get a Fate point, which is nice. (D&D also has an extremely lackluster meta currency system, but that’s a separate discussion). Note that it’s not the DM just deciding what happens to you. That’s for getting Taken Out.
If you instead let the roll happen, and you take more stress (damage) than you can hold, you instead get Taken Out. When that happens, you have no say. Barring normal social contract stuff, whoever was coming at you has free rein to just be like “And the spell explodes your head.”
This is in the rules. To me that’s much better than D&D’s wishy-washy “maybe the DM will do this or that” standard. I don’t want to hash this out at every single table I join from first principles.
D&D kind of sucks because it leaves a lot of important things up to the DM, so you get wildly different experiences depending on whatever half-baked whims this table has. And you have to have these conversations over and over again. And some people never will know there’s other ways things could be, and leave the hobby or just be unhappy.
Some people might say “leaving more up to the DM is better” but that’s wrong. Clearly going maximum calvinball “whatever the DM says in this moment” is not the platonic ideal of a game. At least not for me or anyone I know. Some rules are important. D&D is missing some important ones. And has too many rules in other places.
I’ve also seen players devastated by character death. The correct advice is to check in with your players about what they want to do with possible character death. Don’t just spring it on players who don’t want it.
I had two player characters foolishly break into a vampire wizard’s office to try to steal something. It was a series of incredibly foolish decisions, starting with “let’s split the party”, and it escalated to violence. When it was looking especially grim, I asked them if they would be okay with character death. They said yes. The two characters died.
The in-game funeral for them was fantastic. Real tears. But the important thing is they consented to this. If they had wanted these characters to live, it would’ve been a dick move to be like “nah they dead”. There’s no reason to make the players real-life extra upset. I don’t have the hubris to think I know better what kind of story they want.
This is aggravated by DND being mega popular. Many people who would enjoy some other kind of games don’t get to play them . Or don’t even know there are options. Or the alternatives they find are close relatives of dnd that don’t change much of the fundamentals.
Many new players may not even know that you can have a “hey I don’t want my character to die unless I consent in that scene” conversation. If that was in the rules, they would likely know!
But DND simply doesn’t address this. At least not in the phb. It’s very cut and dry “if you drop to 0 hit points and fail your saves, you die.”
That’s a very specific style of play that’s not appropriate for the most popular game.
I think I’ve blocked out most of the bad ones, and most of my coworkers have been good or okay.
This one guy I remember though. This might only be relevant for people who live in software.
He refused to name his tests. Normally with jest or mocha you have tests like
describe(“user settings page”, () => { it(“allows the user to change their name”, () => { etc
But he refused. He’d put empty string in both spots. So you’d open a test file and there’d just be a dozen anonymous unlabeled tests and you’d have to puzzle out what they were trying to do.
He was a reasonably nice person when we talked, at least. But this drove me crazy.
He said that the test names were essentially comments, and “comments quickly become lies”. Which, fine, we’ve all seen bad comments. But the test names are more like file names than comments, and no sensible person is going to suggest we get rid of file and folder names. Except the other guy who responded to me with the shell scripts with no names that each call each other, maybe.
He was on a different team at a large company so I didn’t get wind of this right away. We had a meeting scheduled to hash it out, but then there were mass layoffs that day and I left shortly after. For all I know he’s still there
Google and JPMorgan have each told staff that office attendance will be factored into performance evaluations. The US law firm Davis Polk informed employees that fewer days in the office would result in lower bonuses. And Meta and Amazon both told employees they’re now monitoring badge swipes, with potential consequences for...
According to Hans-Kristian Arntzen, a prominent open-source developer working on Vkd3d, a DirectX 12 to Vulkan translation layer, Starfield is not interacting properly with graphics card drivers.
Or maybe it is if you meant how many weird and inefficient things living creatures have because it was good enough. Think about that the next time you accidentally choke on nothing
Ooh that reminds me of the fantasy heart breaker phenomenon. It’s where like someone who has only ever played DND (and probably just one edition of it) sets out to make their own RPG. They’re full of passion and energy!
And the game turns out like shit because all they knew was DND. Like if someone who had only ever watched the Lord of the rings movies went to make their own film, and it has horses no matter the genre because don’t films always have horses?
Like every part of DND has something that makes me grind my teeth and yet it’s so popular! People say it’s “easy” and simple and I’m like “WHAT BONUS IS 15 STRENGTH? WHY??”
Spanish climate activists sprayed red paint across a superyacht owned by billionaire Walmart heiress Nancy Walton Laurie in Barcelona on Friday, the second time the yacht has been the target of protests in the past two months.
I’d like the “show context” link to work. Maybe that’s just me? It used to work but no longer. It’d be helpful when I go to a post from the reply notification thing. (viewing this on the web in Firefox)
So I met this girl by chance and we really hit it off, once I learned of her age I decided to just be friends as I think that 19 to 25 is an age were we mature a lot and I remember myself as a 19yo and I was not mature enough to be a good partner and to be good to myself....
Like pretty much everyone else said, your relative positions in life matter. A 25 year old who’s already on their second job and making $125k/year should almost certainly not be dating someone who lives with their parents and is about to start their second semester of college.
Also like many people alluded to, the age gap matters less when you’re older. There’s not a lot of difference between a 35 year old and 30 year old, but there’s a huge difference between a 10 year old and 5 year old.
On the other hand, conservatives (in the US, maybe elsewhere) are so consistently and universally wrong, if they all died we’d be better off.
The disagreement isn’t like “Should we get pizza or tacos”. It’s like “Should gay people exist?” “Is climate change a thing?” “Is slavery good, actually?”
Pretty much every problem we have is made worse by conservatives fighting to keep the status quo or reverse progress.
Fuck them. We would be better off if they were dead.
No, I am serious about this. I wish to get back into the learning of reading, but as a beginner I am repelled by the intense use of vocabulary, literary devices of classical literature books or intense and difficult-to-follow storyline of modern day fiction. I want to read a book that is clearly made with people like me in mind....
I don’t know where you live but the Brooklyn public library has a free service where you can ask something like this, and a human librarian will try to find books for you: www.bklynlibrary.org/bookmatch
With one exception, everyone I’ve dated has been through an app like tinder.
Early on it was because I didn’t really know how to be a person, and meeting people in real life was hard.
Now it’s more that I do ethical non monogamy, and that’s hard to check for when you just meet someone in the world most of the time. Also a lot of people have strong adverse reactions to it, and/or think it’s something it’s not.
Today I posted a picture of a stamp with an animal in it and they said the picture contained nudity and made me take it down, but I reported a photo of a guy with a fully visible swastika tattoo and they said that’s fine....
Reach out to the people you only talk to through Facebook and give them your contact information.
It’ll be awkward and you might lose some people, but every person who quits makes it easier for everyone else to quit. Quitting is better for your health and happiness.
I concede that it’s hard to find people to play other systems, but not impossible.
I don’t think “I shouldn’t read this system because I might like it less” is very sound. If you applied that to everything, no one would try anything new. Why listen to a new band when Mozart is fine?
I will die on the hill that DND 5e is actually pretty bad, though. It’s complicated in all the wrong ways, the combat is surprisingly shallow most of the time, the adventuring day tries to force it into very specific cadences, it’s shallow in its customization, it has a martial caster divide problem, the math is bad (flat probability can fuck itself), the magic system is incoherent, its support for the non combat “pillars” is lackluster… Pretty much every single part of the game makes me grind my teeth.
The only thing going for it is it’s popular, and it’s shallow in some ways that sometimes make it hard to make an ineffective character.
People complain a short rest at one hour is too long. 4e had it at like 5 minutes.
People complain martials mostly just do their basic attack. 4e had every class have cool powers on the same recharge cadence. This also helped address the martial caster divide.
The other day I saw someone iteratively come up with “the attacker should always roll instead of confusingly sometimes the defender rolls. You could figure out like an AC for reflexes and fortitude and roll against that”. Which is how I believe 4e worked.
It didn’t have bounded accuracy, so changes to that tend to reinvent 4e, 3e, or Pathfinder.
That’s off the top of my head. I’m sure there’s more.
gta going woke (i.redd.it)
Hey, Canadians. How's your healthcare?
Hello, Canadians of Lemmy! Down in the USA there is a lot of conflicting information regarding the efficacy of y’alls healthcare systems. Without revealing my personal bias, I was hoping for some anecdotes or summaries from those whom actually live there.
We've all been there (media.mas.to)
Spellslot well spent (lemmy.world)
Happened at our table a couple of months back.
0.30000000000000004 (feddit.de)
Atheists, is there anything religious that sticks with you to this day?
I am Ganesh, an Indian atheist and I don’t eat beef. It’s not like that I have a religious reason to do that, but after all those years seeing cows as peaceful animals and playing and growing up with them in a village, I doubt if I ever will be able to eat beef. I wasn’t raised very religious, I didn’t go to temple...
Another Christian influencer arrested for child abuse: Why conservatives keep falling for these cons (www.salon.com)
Nexus Mods Fine With Bigots Leaving Over Removed Starfield ‘Pronoun’ Mod (kotaku.com)
Do you pirate? And do you justify pirating? i.e., what is your piracy philosophy?
Well, my friend, he’s kinda poor he can’t afford some books and some streaming services, so he pirates. He pirate books, audiobook and videos and other stuff. Sometimes he buys books he likes a lot out of loyalty to the author (yeah, I don’t understand it either), he likes to read physical books, but yeah, if he hates the...
Texas power prices soar 20,000% as brutal heat wave sets off emergency (markets.businessinsider.com)
Texas power prices soared 20,000% Wednesday evening amid another brutal heat wave....
How the IT guys see the users (lemmy.basedcount.com)
The BG3 to DnD pipeline
How many people do you know who got interested in the game because of BG3? I imagine I’m not the only one....
5:01 and Done: No One Wants to Schmooze After Work (www.wsj.com)
Office happy hours, client dinners and other after-hours work gatherings lose their luster as more people feel the pull of home...
The Batshit Crazy Story Of The Day Elon Musk Decided To Personally Rip Servers Out Of A Sacramento Data Center (www.techdirt.com)
Back on Christmas Eve of last year there were some reports that Elon Musk was in the process of shutting down Twitter’s Sacramento data center. In that article, a number of ex-Twitter employees wer…
And they'll likely only read parts of it (startrek.website)
Fudging Dice is DMing for Satan (ttrpg.network)
Who was your worst coworker?
Starfield user score drops to "mostly positive" on steam (www.pcgamesn.com)
Why are CEOs still so intent on taking worker attendance? (www.bbc.com)
Google and JPMorgan have each told staff that office attendance will be factored into performance evaluations. The US law firm Davis Polk informed employees that fewer days in the office would result in lower bonuses. And Meta and Amazon both told employees they’re now monitoring badge swipes, with potential consequences for...
Open source community figures out problems with performance in Starfield (www.destructoid.com)
According to Hans-Kristian Arntzen, a prominent open-source developer working on Vkd3d, a DirectX 12 to Vulkan translation layer, Starfield is not interacting properly with graphics card drivers.
What hobby of yours do you wish more people were into?
Activists spray red paint over billionaire Walmart heiress's superyacht for a second time (www.cnn.com)
Spanish climate activists sprayed red paint across a superyacht owned by billionaire Walmart heiress Nancy Walton Laurie in Barcelona on Friday, the second time the yacht has been the target of protests in the past two months.
If there is one thing you can change about Lemmy, what would it be?
Is it wrong for 25M to date 19F?
So I met this girl by chance and we really hit it off, once I learned of her age I decided to just be friends as I think that 19 to 25 is an age were we mature a lot and I remember myself as a 19yo and I was not mature enough to be a good partner and to be good to myself....
Phoenix breaks heat record as city hits 110F for the 54th consecutive day (www.theguardian.com)
Saturday’s temperature had triggered an excessive heat warning across Arizona as lows were expected to range between 80F and 86F...
Can you recommend books with meme culture humor?
No, I am serious about this. I wish to get back into the learning of reading, but as a beginner I am repelled by the intense use of vocabulary, literary devices of classical literature books or intense and difficult-to-follow storyline of modern day fiction. I want to read a book that is clearly made with people like me in mind....
Save scumming is disgusting! Buut.... (sopuli.xyz)
How did you meet your significant other?
Metal with soft or no vocals?
I’m developing some pretty odd taste in music…...
Todd Howard asked on-air why Bethesda didn't optimise Starfield for PC: 'We did [...] you may need to upgrade your PC' (www.pcgamer.com)
You heard him 4090 users, upgrade to a more powerful GPU.
Facebook is a hot pile of garbage that should be fired into the sun.
Today I posted a picture of a stamp with an animal in it and they said the picture contained nudity and made me take it down, but I reported a photo of a guy with a fully visible swastika tattoo and they said that’s fine....
[POLL] Do you use/require a headphone jack on your phone? (strawpoll.com)
Alternatively, if your current phone doesn’t have a headphone jack, do you wish it did?
Well, yeah... (diyrpg.org)