Lianodel @ Lianodel @ttrpg.network Posts 1Comments 359Joined 2 yr. ago
I kind of did the same with The Heritage Foundation.
They have a page cataloging every single instance of voter fraud they could find, and they're up to... 1,474. Total. Since 1982. Regardless of party. In the same span of time, just looking at presidential elections, over 1.1 billion ballots were cast.
This is an abjectly evil "think tank" behind Project 2025, which actively pushes the big voter fraud lie to push mass disenfranchisement, and even they could only find an astronomically small rate of voter fraud.
Fair, I guess it depends on what the afterlife looks like in the fictional world. :P I actually didn't get that far in the series, what with real life getting in the way, but I enjoyed it and mean to return to it.
That would also lead to some interesting questions if you give it a divine aspect.
If it's all arcane magic, obviously sure, that all works.
But what if they need a cleric? That means there's a god out there who condones this sort of thing. And that god can do this with the souls of unbelievers... unless they prepare the condemned by making them believers, possibly through gruesome means.
Honestly it's more grimdark than I'd usually run a game, but it's entertaining to think about. :P
Yeah, I used to use it to fix my RPG PDFs. (Seriously, it's astounding how many publishers either omit or completely fuck up bookmarks.) I found out it went to shit when trying to help someone else do the same, and the newer free version was significantly cut down.
I started reading Jhereg by Steven Brust, and it takes resurrection magic into account with the world building. Part of assassination involves hiding the body until the resurrection window passes. IIRC, the legal penalties for murder are also much less severe if you just kill someone, rather than make sure they're permanently dead.
There are also "Morganti" weapons. They're pretty much the Black Blade from Elric, so they eat souls. So not only do they make resurrection impossible, but the victim is extra dead, not even existing in an afterlife. As a result, using one is a high crime, punishable by death... by Morganti blade.
Yeah, it's such a frustrating conversation.
Yes, as long as people are having fun, that's all that matters.
But it's also fair to point out that hacking D&D to do something fundamentally outside of what it's designed to do is going to be a lot of work for little pay off. Take it from people who are familiar with other games, it would honestly be easier to learn something new. (And most games aren't as hard to pick up as 5e!) That's not gatekeeping, that's just advice based on experience. The juice isn't worth the squeeze, so unless you like the squeeze for its own sake, maybe try something else.
Also, to speak on the system not mattering if you have a good DM: sure, that's technically correct. That also doesn't invalidate criticism of a set of rules. Yeah, a skilled and experienced DM can fix things, even on the fly, but maybe the entire system shouldn't rely on that. 5e has notoriously bad DM-facing material, and after years of running it, I got burnt out. The DM is playing the game, too, and their time, effort, and fun matter just as much as anyone else's. I'm sick of 5e's approach that the DM will either figure it out or take the blame. The fact that it's so hard to be a new DM is, in my opinion, the likely reason there's a DM shortage. You don't get the same problem with other games!
So yeah, like you said. System matters. Even if you don't use a system per se and go FKR, that's a choice you made on the structure of the game.
My experience with FitD games is the same. I appreciate them, I'm glad they're there, but after trying them out a bunch, realized it just wasn't the experience I wanted, nor what my group wanted.
Obviously for a lot of people that isn't the case, and if they're having a fantastic time, great! It's just a personal preference.
If course! That's always the number one choice, when possible. Sadly, it's just not an option as frequently as I (and plenty of others) would like.
Those minis and terrain look rad, too! I also like that part of the hobby in and of itself. I could spend hours just painting minis and making terrain while watching or listening to something.
I'm just afraid that Hollywood execs will take exactly the wrong lessons from it, as they usually do. They won't see it as a successful fantasy adventure movie that underperformed because it came out between Mario and John Wick, but as a failure because it wasn't mostly a carbon-copy of modern Marvel movies, and trusted its audience even a little bit.
Wikipedia lists him as a founder
Does it? I expected better of Wikipedia, so I checked, and both Musk's page and Tesla's avoid simply listing him as a founder by explaining the situation, i.e., that he was an early investor. Even the sidebar for Tesla, Inc. just links to a subsection rather than listing names.
Just a note to add, addressing a related talking point that inevitably comes up:
It's a very common piece of misinformation that he was determined to be a founder in a court of law. That never happened. It was part of an agreement to avoid a lawsuit. It's a lie that the relevant parties could all live with as part of a larger settlement.
I like to ask Musk apologists, "Do you need to found a company to be that company's founder, yes or no?" If they waffle or say "no," there's no point continuing in good faith, because they're not serious people. It's not hard to say "Okay, that's a bit of a fib, he should be called an honorary founder, but blah blah blah..." But if they can't even do that, then they aren't operating based on reality.
The conversation around this topic always seems directly or indirectly framed around a zero-sum framing: what's better and what's worse? Which side wins? Even if you disagree with the premise, that's what's shaping the conversation. I don't think the article suggested there's a "correct" answer, but it was clearly inspired by people who think the author was doing things wrong.
It can simultaneously be true that there are successful long-term campaigns with and without high character turnover due to death. It's a mater of personal preference and successful execution. The only thing categorically false is the idea that character deaths, in and of themselves, are inherently bad for long-term play.
Very true. Subjectively, it just seemed to have a bit of a peak not too long ago. It was one of those right-wing talking points that got popular before they realized it was embarrassing and didn't work.
And yeah, I'm real sick of reactionary armchair "experts" who think they know more than people who actually study (and experience) the things they talk about with such confidence.
See also the "We're a republic, not a democracy" talking point that swelled a year or two ago (and was even repeated by a senator). It's patently stupid to anyone who knows the meaning of those words, but it was also testing the water for overt anti-democracy rhetoric.
You're right that multiclassing an optional rule, but in practice, I think nearly every player assume it's in use unless the DM says otherwise (and they will likely complain if the DM says otherwise). So I'd bet that if a ruleset basedo n 5e disabled multiclassing, people would either complain about it, or ignore that part and then complain when it breaks the game.
I guess as the devil's advocate, the publisher put out both. So it seemed like it was the high-effort way to both create a bespoke system, and appeal to the people who are completely stuck on D&D.
Lowering HP would absolutely go a long way, you're right. I think limiting or disabling multiclassing would also help, but that would be an extremely unpopular change that most people would ignore anyway. :/
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Off, mixed feelings here.
On the one hand, it shows how antagonistic DMing is silly. The DM can just make stuff up, and the reason we're all playing is to have a good time. If you want a competitive game that's (at least ostensibly) balanced, you can play one of those instead, like a board game or a war game.
On the other hand... modern D&D is built around ostensibly balanced set piece encounters, usually combat, usually intended to tax but not kill the characters. So the fact that it absolutely sucks at being a balanced game is an absolute nightmare to DM (assuming you want the game to be fair & fun).
Fair point. I think it would still take a lot of work, though, since Diablo includes a lot of fast-paced, high-powered stuff, while 5e kind of falls apart and turns into a slog at higher levels. To put it another way, it handles up to the heroic level fine, but the epic levels can feel like a drag, and WotC's solution was to mostly publish adventures that stop at level 15. Cutting HP would be a part of it, maybe streamlining some stuff, creating a different inventory system...
So it can be done. But the fact that it's not D&D also means there's a higher floor to how much thought was put into the game, you know? Sometimes designers put the work in, but sometimes they just pick D&D to be lazy or as a cash grab.
Speaking of Adventures in Middle-Earth, I haven't played it, but I heard the 5e edition is actually pretty good. You're right in that Tolkien's fantasy is way different from the high-fantasy superheroics of 5e, but I heard it had great rules for going on a journey, which 5e mostly glosses over (at least in practice).
Oh for sure! It's really just treating D&D as the default that I have a problem with, not using an existing system per se. Sometimes it works, but a lot of the time making D&D support a radically different style of play is a bad idea. It also tends to suggest that either the designer doesn't really know that much about RPGs, or the publisher doesn't care and just wants to cash in on what's popular. If they picked even another existing system, that at least suggests they're aware of other games, and probably picked something they thought was a good fit.
Again, this is just speaking in generalities. There are good games based on 5e. It's a red flag, but not a deal breaker.
More surprising is the confirmation that Diablo: The RPG will be built on a new “unique” gameplay system, rather than slapping a Deckard Cain mask over Dungeons & Dragons 5E or something.
At least there's that. It might still be terrible, but I immediately lose interest in any game that's just reskinning "The World's Most Popular Role-playing Game."
I love that, in a competition between a corporation worth hundreds of billions of dollars and a FOSS project, all Google managed to do was annoy uBlock Origin users for like a week. I just had to manually update the extension and restart my browser a few times.