Sometimes I feel like everyone who would care already knows , and everyone who doesn’t care won’t care no matter what the facts say.

You could prove definitively that LLMs summon demons that eat live babies, and they’d shrug and dismiss it.

It’s hard to say. I think too much can lead to the kid not appreciating how much things cost, or how hard it is for other people.

My parents paid for most of my education, and that made a big difference. I entered adulthood without massive debt. (Low five figures seems low compared to many of my peers, anyway. USA! USA!)

Generational wealth is powerful. Many of today’s richest people became super wealthy because their parents paid for stuff when they were getting started.

I think the most important question is if your kid is going to be a kind and decent person, or a scumbag who says “I earned all of this! no one gave me a handout” whild voting to gut aid programs.

A friend of mine was sincerely advancing the idea that it’s better that trump wins, because less-bad candidates like Harris just let people coast by without doing much as the world gets worse. He thinks something like Trump will be really bad, and people will demand more radical change. I think you can call that acellerationism. Pretty easy position to hold as a wealthy professional who owns property, I guess.

Personally, I’d rather people organize and try to make the world better without the worst people in the world having most of the power. Seems easier that way to me.

Fuck. Add me to the list of people who were fooled until the last sentence, and even then I had to read it twice.

I think calling it “Alligator Auschwitz” would be more effective, except one of my old coworkers sincerely asked me “What’s Auschwitz?”

On the one hand, maybe. On the other, many states (mostly red ones) are also cruel and incompetent.

Also, the federal government has vastly more funding power than the state government.

Went to protests, volunteered for better candidates, tried to get other people involved. The bare minimum, perhaps, but more than another run of Baldur’s gate 3.

This whole conversation is at least using the words “DND” even if one could argue they’re not actually talking about DND specifically. Thus, I was making the point that if you do want a system that rewards creative players DND is not a good one.

What system are you thinking of that stands in contrast to dnd’s “explicit permissiveness”?

I’m not even sure what you mean by the “permissive interpretation”. Is that the Calvinball mode? Games can definitely go badly when it turns into an inconsistent, unpredictable mess. Games have rules so we don’t argue like children on the playground going “I hit you. No you didn’t. Yes I did. I have a force field. Well I have an anti force field laser…”

My current plan is to wait for my basic coworkers to have kids, and those kids to be old enough to ask “what did you do in the 2020s to fight fascism?”. They’ll lie and say they did a lot, and I’ll burst through the wall to shout “NO THEY DIDN’T. THEY DID SHIT. THEY STAYED HOME AND PLAYED VIDEO GAMES. YOUR DADDY IS A COWARD”.

Hopefully somehow this will result in my coworkers dying alone and unloved in a pit of shame or something.

But the reality is their egos are indestructible and they will always think they’re good people, and their kids will probably be the same.

Personally I rather dislike “5% of every attempt will be wacky”, especially when multiplied by “higher level people are making more attempts, and thus are having more wackiness”.

The fighter who makes three attacks a round is going to have three times as many “hilarious fumbles” compared to the lower level fighter only making one.

This is part of why I prefer dice pools over a flat single die system.

If you have a machine that runs Windows and the hardware is still good,

Linux is often more forgiving on hardware requirements. I recently put Mint (with xfce) on a like 2013 laptop and it’s fine. That’s not even an especially lightweight distribution.

D&D is great because it allows for creative freedom

This is not something unique to dnd! In fact, DND is not even especially good at this!

It’s like people are saying “mayonnaise is great because you can add it to any meal”, which is technically true, but meanwhile salt is right there being ignored on the shelf.

It’s funny because the character who said that was very verbose, if I recall

Well, maybe. I think some people on the inside are embarrassed, and they then lash out or deflect to cover that up. “Yo reading is stupid”, the guy says, crying on the inside because it’s hard for him and he’s too ashamed to ask for help.

But maybe some people are just regular proud to be illiterate

I think of lot of people are semi illiterate and embarrassed by it

But dnd’s paradox is it is both open ended and rigid. My problem is it’s too open ended in many ways (eg: social conflict), almost completely missing rules in other parts (eg: meta game mechanics, conceding conflicts), and too rigid in others (eg: Eldritch blast targeting rules, unarmed smite and sneak attack). That’s not even going into the bigger problems like the adventuring day or how coarse class+level makes many concepts impractical at best.

On top of that, it is so mega popular many players have no other reference points and don’t realize its assumptions are not universally true. It’s like people who have only ever watched the Lord of the rings movies, and they’re like “of course movies are four hours long and have horses. That’s just how movies are.”

The main things DND 5e does well are popular support, and the very small decision space for players makes it hard to make a character that’s mechanically very weak or very strong. It brings nothing special to the table for roleplaying.

Compare with my go-to example of Fate, which has simple systems to encourage it. CofD, my second favorite, also does.

DND is a team game, and both have agreed upon rules. Not sure I follow your objection

It’s the thing conservatives do. They just say stuff for effect and don’t care about truth or consistency.

The Constitution is a perfect document that must be upheld when it suits their goals, and a living document that must be updated when that suits their goals instead. They are liars. They should not be accepted in polite society.

I’m pretty sure the browser has more sandboxing than a desktop app running as me. The desktop app could do anything. Firefox tries to prevent webpages from doing nefarious stuff.

There’s a spectrum of play that runs from strict rules-as-written to complete calvinball. Calvinball can be fun, but it’s not really a transferrable game. It’s very particular to that moment and that group.

Sometimes people post wacky calvinball moments (eg: rolling damage against the floor, a free action to eat tiles, a +2 bonus to hit) as if that’s baseline RAW DND. It is not. Many tables would be like “wtf, that’s not how this game works”. So it can be kind of weird when it’s presented as obvious, as if it’s raw, when it’s just make pretend.

Imagine if the post was “we were playing basketball and I missed the shot, so I got in my car and drove up close so I could jump off the roof and dunk”. Like, wacky story but not how you’re supposed to play the game.

Furthermore, DND specifically is kind of bad at creativity. It’s very precariously balanced, with specific rules in odd places and no rules in others. Compare with, for example, Fate, which has “this thing in the scene works to my advantage” rules built in. DND is almost entirely in the hands of the DM.