I mean… If I was playing like The Sims and one of the Sims was like “yo can I get a new bike?” I might be like sure bro. From their perspective I’m a god that exists outside time and space.
That’s not really how Christianity talks about its God though, usually. But also like the story of Job does seem like a kid and his friend fucking with their game.
I’m pretty sure that simply putting a picture of eyes in the scene reduces theft. People are emotional creatures , and if they feel like they’re being watched by someone who doesn’t approve of stealing, they’re more likely to refrain.
No other crisis at the moment, but you never know when you’re going to wake up with double cancer or whatever. I try to appreciate the nice moments.
Every night he jumps onto the computer keyboard until it beeps. I tried turning the computer off and he turned it on somehow.
I don’t know why. It’s after I’ve fed him. I always pick him up and bring him to the bedroom after.
I imagine it’s because the Republican party is “absolutely evil turds” and the Democratic party is “everyone else”. Unfortunately, “everyone else” includes some farts and sharts, too.
You might enjoy this 1964 essay “the paranoid style in American politics” : https://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-american-politics/
American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the Goldwater movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind.
Many people are bad at delayed gratification and long term thinking.
Supposed to go to a party this weekend. Last time I went to one with this crowd, it was pretty okay and I made a new guy-i-text-sometimes-friend.
Though the time before that was really dull, so who knows.
Yeah that’s all fine but it’s blocked by one of two major political parties in the US doesn’t believe government should exist. At best they’d support a privatized version of the that siphoned money out and didn’t help people that need help.
We’re going to struggle to get anything done as long as conservatives are treated as if they have any merit.
D&D and Pathfinder are like Baseball and Softball, maybe. But going from D&D to Fate or PbtA is like changing to football or fencing. It’s very different. Trying to get someone who’s playing Baseball to take up soccer is tricky. D&D is baseball. Pathfinder is softball. Easier transition.
This is very often a thing people believe! Especially if the other system they’re looking at is like Pathfinder (similarly complex) or some close D&D relatives that have a different set of arbitrary numbers. Like, in this game a 15 strength is +3! We have 50 feats with similar names but different behaviors! They might not even realize that not every game has six stats, or long lists of “feats”, or anything even like “feats”. And a lot of games (most of them?) don’t have weird tables and mappings.
Like if you’re playing Fate Core, and you want to burgle, you just your burgle score. One number.
But I think a lot of the time when people present that kind of resistance, it’s coming from an emotional place. Telling them facts isn’t going to do much. They might feel embarrassed about not being good at the new game. They might feel bad about spending $80 on the D&D books and unusual dice when the new game has a free book and just uses d6. That kind of stuff. Unfortunately, most people aren’t really introspective enough to surface those feelings quickly and accurately. (I include myself in “most people” there, sadly.)
I had a guy in an old group that once with full sincerity said “The best thing about D&D is we can just try out different house rules, and if we don’t like them we can change something out.” Like, my guy, that’s not a unique property of D&D. If anything, D&D is harder to homebrew because it has oddly specific rules and assumptions.
I haven’t played Pathfinder 2e but my understanding is it had a lot more choices at the turn level and character build level. that’s good if you want that, but I think for a lot of people the shallowness of 5e is a plus. There are other games that would also be a good fit if you’re not looking for deep tactics or builds, though.
Some people never really learned DND either, but kind of get carried along by the group. I feel like you could switch out systems on those people and they wouldn’t do any worse.
But I get it. Some people are more casual. Some people have executive dysfunction. My current strategy is to find people who want to play what I want to play, and it’s working okay. Still makes me a little sad that DND is so mega popular, but okay.
I think it’s an error to treat “I play DND” the same as “I play RPGs”. It’s like “I play baseball” vs “I play sports”.
There are too many reasons to succinctly list why people might be sticking to DND.
In my experience, you’ll have better luck finding players who want to play something else rather than trying to convert DND players.
Well, I wasn’t having much fun with DND.
There are degrees of fun.
But those bots don’t have any intersection with my network, so their trust score is low.
If they do connect via one of my idiot friends, that friend loses credit, too, and the system can trust his connections less.
The trust level is from my perspective, not global.
A lot of my games sort of take place in the same universe, even when they’re different systems or settings.
Like an old DND campaign had the players visit a wizard university, where they met many NPCs. One of them was Reg. He’s kind of a chill party dude. Loves playing wizard pong (it’s like ping pong, but with mage hands)
My current game is a 2050s corporate dystopia using Fate. Heavy inspiration from World of Darkness and Shadowrun.
And Reg is here. He fully believes he used to go to wizard school, but something happened and now he’s here. He’s pretty chill about it, though. Last game, a werewolf was going berserk and Reg was like “Dude. Fucking metal.” The werewolf gave him a knock-on-your-ass high five and Reg lived.
Sometimes people’s priorities, needs, and desires are bad.
The way I imagine it working is if I notice a bot in my web, I flag it, and then everyone involved in approving the bot loses some credibility. So a bad actor will get flushed out. And so will your idiot friend that keeps trusting bots, so their recommendations are then mostly ignored.
I still think targeted ads should be illegal. I would accept static ads that are based on the content of the site rather than me as a compromise.
So like if I’m looking at example.com/cool-bikes you can show me bike ads. You don’t need to know who I am or track me.
It’s good enough for the past few decades (centuries?) it’s good enough for now. The Superbowl doesn’t serve a different ad to every viewer.