Anomander

My biggest complaint is that we can’t just let a more appropriate character take over a conversation. One of my clumsy, dim-witted brawler friends runs ahead by one pixel triggering a cutscene, and I can’t jump in mid-conversation to smooth things over with my bardic talent. This is our most common reason for loading a previous save.

Yeah, we were running into this in my game with my buddy; I’m definitely the dumbass running ahead because I’ve got stealth and dex for scouting, but invisible cutscene/conversation triggers keep catching us and my dunce of a character gets stuck talking to the punters. It’s kind of frustrating that the game encourages players to specialize in that way, but then makes it rather hard to take full advantage of that specialization if you don’t set up the encounter absolutely perfectly.

The other one where that happens is that when a combat encounter ends with dialogue - first Auntie Ethel fight, say - the game picks the character who had the last turn as who Auntie is talking to when the conversation starts. In that case, it’s almost always the party member doing big damage that pushed her past the damage threshold, and they’re generally not built for talking to people.

Those get even more frustrating because there’s an interface option to swap who’s talking, but it doesn’t seem to actually work in the majority of important conversations. It’s only when talking to filler characters that I can hot-swap who’s talking. I’d also love if, in addition to that button working more consistently - it’d tell you if someone in the party has ‘unique’ dialogue options for that moment. I think that having the whole party participate in conversations is chaotic and hard to implement in multiplayer - but a better capture of how those same interactions ‘would’ play out in a D&D game.

Second biggest complaint is the number of things that you can mis-click to destroy your character’s reputation. I’d love to be able to opt-in to an “are you sure” dialog when you accidentally click a random item on the floor while moving around.

It’s very frustrating to get a whole faction pissed at you due to misclicking some ‘owned’ container or accidentally dragging a barrel. Gith creche was a nightmare for that, because every room and hallway is decorated with owned containers. Some measure to make it harder to accidentally loot someone’s mold cheese while they’re standing right in front of you would be really valuable.

Just 2 of those would be fine, maybe 3, but 4 really pushes it.

Yeah. Like, I get that having a little harem of named followers all lusting after the MC slightly is … the sort of RP fantasy that some people want. I appreciate that Larian put that option in the game - and the ol’ “horny bard” trope absolutely comes from very real players wanting to be sexually attractive and competent in their escapist fantasy game. I get that. It’s just not my vibe.

As someone who doesn’t play games for romantic fantasy fulfillment - my biggest gripe with BG3 is that it feels like characters I like hanging out with have no concept of “we are friends” without suggesting romance is a logical next step, and are at incel levels of checking if maybe I’ve reconsidered and we can bang now?

Which also makes the fact that a lot of companion conversations feel like a minefield of “oops actually romance” dialogue options even more frustrating. I’m having a blast RPing an older dude who had a nice settled life prior to the Leech and just wants to get back home and put his feet up, but I’ve chosen a few response options I thought were just snarky or jokes and … oh wait, we’re being romantic now. Goddamn it, F8.

The person you’re responding to is basically making the, “steal a loaf of bread to feed your family” argument. It’s complicated by the fact that loaf of bread was already reserved for saving others,

That’s a spurious argument here, though. This is like not buying groceries for two months, having the cash to buy groceries, then stealing a loaf of bread to feed the family.

These people shouldn’t be there, they’re on evacuation order, and they have safe routes to leave. Not one of their lives is in danger that they haven’t chosen. But they did choose - to put their property ahead of their own lives, and in stealing fire equipment they’re putting their own property ahead of the lives of fire response teams and ahead of all the other properties in the same area. They’re willing to have the whole neighborhood burn around them, to cut off safe evacuation routes, all to try and save their own home.

but it’s stupid to act like they’re a deranged person without a point.

They’re engaging in sophistry and misrepresenting the situation to try and make hindering firefighting efforts into something personally justifiable. It isn’t.

Could kind of see how someone facing down an impending roaring wildfire, then stealing from the same people they want help from, might be counterproductive. The people telling them not to steal fire equipment are there. They’re the ones fighting the fire.

No private resident needs that equipment “to save their own life”. They’re on evacuation order, there are safe routes out, they should not be there, and they chose to stay in order to protect their property. The bridge that sprinklers are getting stolen from, for instance, is protected so there will be a safe passage out of the area consistently even if the fire shifts in that direction.

This is about wealth - not health. Stealing that equipment is choosing to fuck over the entire region and everyone else who needs fire protection, just to better preserve their own home, is selfish and stupid.

UPS is being UPS here.

They’re abandoning packages, then sending her a bill for COD as if she accepted the package but didn’t pay.

The fact that if she digs in and fights it she can eventually dispute each charge is somewhat separate from UPS and their collections contractors harassing her about the ‘debt’, or the new packages that keep showing up.

Tumblr remains impressively Not Dead given its ownership and finance history.

Very much so.

If this coin’s math and mechanics actually work in transferring wealth from rich to poor … it’ll be swamped in poor people wanting their cut, and rich people will want nothing to do with a shitcoin that’s explicitly going to take their money and give it to other people.

I think maybe some of that is on me; I’ve been using “in power” somewhat colloquially and to me there’s a gap between ‘gaining power’ in a soft sense referring to achieving a station that possesses power - and complete seizure of power. The latter is always the goal of the former, but the former is generally a necessary intermediary step.

It seems to me that the current crop of neo-fascist (or fascist-adjacent as you call them) leaders have remained in power for a very long time, even with more or less fair elections. Erdogan in Turkey, Netenyahu in Israel, and Orban in Hungary come to mine.

Those three for sure have held power quite a while - just that they’ve held power long enough I don’t really consider them representative of modern neo-fascism so much as inspirations for it. In the sense I was thinking of when I wrote the above, I was thinking more of the factions and leaders that exist within states that are not clearly semi- or pseudo-fascist in their structure. The ways that Erdogan, Netenyahu, and Orban maintain their power are not yet in place in those other states, but implementing some forms of them are goals within those movements.

The neo-fascists’ I was talking about have to win elections and hold legitimate power within the current structure of the state before they can alter that structure enough to fix elections or bypass them. And in getting that initial foot in door, creating the opportunity to hijack the state, benefits strongly from using populist rhetoric - as genuinely pro-fascist voters are relatively rare, those factions and leaders need to use other causes to win over voters who wouldn’t support their “real” goals directly.

Absolutely, I’m gobsmacked nobody seems to read history.

Although, a lot of these nowadays fascist leaders are being supported by very large swathes of their own populations, as much as 48%, which is the truly shocking thing.

Reading history … that tends to be how it works. Fascism is good at getting popular support for it’s ideas, without overtly being fascism to the people who support it. Fascism’s gateway drug is populism, and populism works best when the ‘common’ population is under strain too complex to address as a single issue.

The worlds ongoing climate crises, economic issues, and political instability within developing economies are all placing unusual and complicated strains on the common populations of developed nations - which in turn opens the door for populist rhetoric and leaders to thrive and gain a foothold on the political discourses in their nations. The biggest single pro/con of populist rhetoric is that it is at its strongest as challenger or as opposition - much like armchair quarterbacking, it’s very easy to criticize what has been done, and even easier to sound like you could do it better, but very hard to deliver on promises from the drivers’ seat. As a result, populism is good for getting elected, but is not good for staying there - or getting re-elected later.

So given that many populist talking points in current economies are fascist-adjacent, pivoting towards fascism makes for an easy and natural segue in the event that they gain power or hold sufficient security of position and supporter base that populism alone cannot serve to maintain.

For sure - bad people can do good things for bad reasons. Hell, bad people can do good things for bad reasons and still be popular and viewed as positive or even “good” by some or even most people affected.

A king being possessive of their crown is a great example - Machiavelli’s prince placed a great deal of emphasis on arguing that a ruler who solely wants to retain power for the sake of holding power must still use their power in a way that is positive and is perceived as positive. The most effective way to keep power for selfish reasons are to keep the economy and the judiciary stable and to keep the common folk happy and pacified. The happier “everyone” is with the King’s rule, the more power can be abused against individuals without leading to revolt.

Just like any party, you need a motivation that’s compatible with cooperation and the narrative in some capacity. The only difference is that in stereotypical ‘good’ parties, players can just default to ‘save the kingdom because it is Right’ rather than having to think about it.

This is kind of what I was getting at there - that good for goodness’ sake is not an inherent motivation for evil parties, so a party lacking the motivation of a moral compass needs alternative motives to replace it, otherwise they wind up directionless. That can still be a self-imposed moral code, like “no women or children” or “slavery crosses a line even for me” - and that can have good or bad or neutral moral outcomes regardless of its motivations.

Just that, above-table, the players and the DM need to acknowledge that need and contribute to addressing it, or evil campaigns very easily degenerate into un-fun gameplay experiences due to aimless normlessness.

One key problem is that a “villain” is generally more powerful than players are for most of the campaign - using that as a starting point can wind up introducing serious issues with normlessness. Becoming a villain should be the aspiration and the apex accomplishment of the campaign, rather than the starting point for it.

It’s more necessary than in other campaigns to model a world where there’s an in-world reason why other parties of higher level aren’t straight-up murderhoboing their way to ruling the kingdom. Or even that they did - but how would those guys respond to your players doing that in “their” kingdom? Worlds need a reason for players to follow the rules - not that they are challenging you as DM and you need to punish them for playing ‘wrong’ - but that the world exists in a state where murderhobo isn’t optimal play, even if you’re evil - that no matter how strong a party of five get, there are still other forces that can put them in check somehow, and when they finally break that rule … the campaign ends. They won.

As a DM, often you need to make sure the game contains bigger and stronger rails in the early stages of the campaign. Maybe that’s some goal that the party agreed to above-table, maybe it’s some context of the party like working for someone bigger, meaner, and eviller - but the call to adventure is much more tenuous with evil characters. For good parties, they stumble through fetchquests and ratting until they stumble across an evil scheme that needs foiling - but for evil characters, there’s not really the same “diabolically good conspiracy” that they need to foil before the timer runs out. They need to initiate, rather than react. Or you need to provide that initiation for them, as DM.

It’s very easy for a directionless evil party to just wander the countryside robbing shops and killing people, if you’re not giving them something more concrete to do and they’re not creating it themselves.

When ye olde Eternal September hit, many new users did not realize B1FF was satire, and thus chose to emulate the coolest dude on the internet.

I always loved the convergence of the various Rustled Jimmies memes popping off, just before Harambe happened.

The other one was manufacturing and engineering teams ‘back home’ would scrawl the Kilroy on parts, like while ships or tanks were being assembled, that would otherwise be inaccessible - which meant that when that thing was hit, or taken apart for maintenance closer to the front, Kilroy was like, inside the sealed-up wall or at the bottom of the engine compartment.

In both your example and this one - both growing the myth that no matter where you went, Kilroy had been there first.

According to my grandpa, it was a myth that they used to feed the new guys and green squads, like a Santa myth, and putting on “genuine belief” in the Kilroy myth was as much of a running joke as the myth itself was. He claimed servicemen were also constantly trying to get commanding officers to unwittingly participate, by doing stuff like submitting paperwork signed Kilroy or that referenced him already being somewhere when troops liberated it - in the hopes that report or news tidbit would be one that COs shared as announcements.

So I’m assuming the duplicate communities are communities of the same exact name in different instances/server. Is anyone else finding this somewhat confusing?

Generally speaking, yes - but also, this is something that will likely fade over time as specific ones stand out. Currently, the plurality is a result of no developed community for that niche existing; as communities settle and grow, less of that sharding will take place unless there’s a crisis in the ‘main’ one.

CR are left in Ye Olde Rock and Hard Place on that one; where people miss out on popular and oft-mentioned content if they take them down - but now that the story broke, the optics are terrible if they leave them up.

The fact that Orym was so quiet and “oh ok” matter of fact about it, while Prism was throwing her soul at him - and Laudna/Ashton were all upset at not getting picked was just … gold. Fearne’s irritation that anyone was trying to claim her best friend was the absolute icing on that moment.

The way they left, they made it easy to rejoin the group, but I think 10-person table is a bit too much. I loved the chaotic energy but I think a couple people were having a hard time.

Definitely. I would love to see another episode down the road that embraces that chaos as the gimmick intended and just tries to cope, but it made for very challenging viewing and it did feel like quieter folks at the table were getting swamped - Christian, Ash, and Tal all seemed like they were both drowned out and struggling to keep up with the several different conversations going on at any given moment.

Like IMO it’d be a riot to watch matt juggle a ten-player combat at some point, but I don’t think it would be nearly as much fun to have that happen during a significant main-plot episode. Make it a one-shot or a sidequest.

So that one subscription is effectively how ‘my’ instance becomes aware any specific community off-instance, in order to check for posts there?

That both makes sense and is rather counterintuitive at the same time.

I think it’s worth addressing that “the right people” are very often going out of their way to be absolutely unreachable by the average joe and are completely impossible for mere poors to meaningfully bother directly. Protest will always inconvenience average people first, because the little people are always affected more than the rich in any action, especially any that would manage to rattle the powerful in any way.

The powerful have managed to structure society and laws alike to make effectively all actions that would target them directly and spare the average joe from any collateral overspill either impractical - or significantly more illegal than protest actions that cast a broader net. The idea from the powerful is to ensure that protest must affect other citizens in order to reach them, and can’t just target them directly. Targeting them, alone, is harassment, or trespass on private property, or … etc.

This reads a lot like you’re kind of working to shit on them, though.

It looks dead.

Ok? I don’t know how you’d get that impression and you don’t really elaborate, but I don’t really see what might lead to that impression.

You can’t even join unless you know someone, to recover your password you need to send an email, and the most upvoted post has 500 votes.

Yeah. Invite systems are a valid solution when you’re looking to limit the pace of growth, and social media sites like aggregators often want to rate-limit growth in order to avoid an Eternal September moment changing their culture. Password recovery is amusingly antiquated. Their scoring works different and the numbers don’t translate 1:1.

The about section has a philosophy section which likely took longer to write than was taken designing the website, and one of the top posts is about how they’re going reorganise everything into their equivalent of subreddits. What’s the point if you only have 100 users?

Yeah. Welcome to Tildes, a site utterly dedicated to high-concept, high-content, participation and engagement - with near every aspect of its design based around discouraging low-bar contribution and encouraging effortposts. If you personally find a long philosophy section and a ultra-simple aesthetic to be disengaging to you - then they’re probably working as intended, and you’re just not the target demographic. They’re reaching about the same growth point as Reddit did when it made that decision themselves, and from what he said in the announcement they’re facing the same problems. They’re sitting at numbers well above “100 users” though, - as mentioned, they’re not trying to be a highly-active and super-busy space. Several thousand users on Tildes produce a much smaller total footprint than several thousand users on lemmy or kbin.

Because the guy who created it, seemingly doesn’t get that times have changed. I mean, the nokia 3310 was a great phone in its day, but it’s 2023.

And I get that they don’t care, but if your main audience is former mods who like organising things without the interference of users, they’re not going to have enough or sufficiently interesting content to attract critical mass and a wider audience.

At which point, you might as well turn your reddit replacement into a wordpress blog and have the same discussions you’re having now in the comment section. Because unlike tildes, people are working on plugins which will allow wordpress to become fully part of the fediverse.

This is the part where it’s just like … did Demiorz kill your dog and fuck your wife or something? Because these read as if it’s coming from a pretty personal set of feelings for you.

It’s a website where you are not the target user. That’s fine. You don’t need to hate them for that. They don’t need to change for you.

If this whole thing isn’t personal between you and them and is simply about the fact that they’re a ‘reddit alternative’ that isn’t the Fediverse, I think playing Websites We Use like it’s sports teams where our guys are the best and everyone else is shit is … kinda juvenile.