• 0 Posts
  • 17 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 4th, 2023

help-circle
  • I’m on EndeavourOS, which like CachyOS, is a derivative based on Arch. They smooth over a couple of the things that make Arch difficult: the installation, and initial packages.

    Part of what makes Arch difficult is that it updates its repositories very quickly. That’s good in many ways, because you get new features and new drivers more quickly, but sometimes things are buggy or break. From what I’ve heard, it’s honesty fairly rare nowadays, but it’s still a best practice to check archlinux.org before proceeding with a major update.

    Anyway, I’m in a very similar boat. I’ve bounced off of Linux for various reasons in the past, but between Linux getting better and Windows getting worse, Linux is the “just works” option for me. It’s not perfect, but any snags I’ve had have been smaller, less frequent, and more often fixable.










  • Exactly what just happened to me with Tabletop Simulator. Every single fucking Magic card that I or anyone I played with was saved.

    Even better, I couldn’t delete the files to get rid of the low storage warning. Changing the directory TTS uses didn’t work. Deleting the folder didn’t work, no matter how much I tried, because clearly MS knows better and I must have done it by mistake. I had to log in and use their web interface just to fucking say “yes, delete it, yes, I fucking mean it.”

    Not that I’m upset about it or anything.


  • It’s extremely funny that she ruined her own career, including a likely spin-off starring her, because she wouldn’t stop comparing the criticism of conservatives and their beliefs to the mass persecution and murder of Jews during the Holocaust.

    It’s also extremely funny that she went on to make a movie with The Daily Wire, no one saw it, it got called woke for being an action movie starring a woman.

    To top that off, it’s also extremely funny that The Daily Wire is FULL of people who couldn’t cut it in Hollywood, so they kept self-financing their own shitty movies, and are now in financial trouble.







  • Mostly because the rest of 5e is built around an assumption of relative balance.

    Adventures in modern D&D tend to consist of a series of more-or-less balanced encounters, usually combat, that will tax but usually not kill the player characters. If you tune it to be too easy, that makes for a boring session, or one where the DM runs out of content because the set piece encounter didn’t last as long as it should have. If it’s too difficult, you might have PCs die in a way that doesn’t match expectations. If most of the time combat encounters are supposed to be balanced, and a player has invested in their character’s backstory, and there’s clearly an arc they’re supposed to follow to the end, it sucks to have them be eaten by feral dogs.

    “The DM can fix it” is always true, but a cop-out. If players avoid a set-piece encounter in 5e, it feels like they’re avoiding the whole dang adventure. And while XP doesn’t have to come from combat, that’s the bulk of it, and the most clearly supported by the rules.

    And other systems just don’t have the same problem. Narrative games, like Blades in the Dark, have characters face consequences but not die unless it would be narratively satisfying. Other games just aren’t built on the assumption of balanced encounters, so it doesn’t throw a wrench into things if players get an unfair advantage, or bypass an encounter altogether, or just plain run away. And something like PF2e, which is in the modern D&D model, does have a functional balancing system.

    A functional balancing system also doesn’t really have the problem of constant, perfect balance. D&D’s CR system will let you design encounters that are Easy, Medium, Hard, or Deadly, and PF2e’s Threat levels include Trivial, Low, Moderate, Severe, and Extreme. It’s just that one works better than the other.

    Obviously all of this is “fixable” by the DM, but still, that puts a lot of work on the DM just to make the game work as intended.