Is it still compatible with all the money I wasted on 3.x Hasbro D&D?

While technically the answer is “no”, people who emphasize the difference don’t apply the “Rule of Cool” as liberally as I did.

I re-used all kinds of D&D 3rd Edition resources while switching to Pathfinder.

Sure, we absolutely shouldn’t just dogmatically use the numbers given in a 3E book with Pathfinder.

But I didn’t find it terribly hard to whip up Pathfinder monster and NPC number adjustments based on my 3E source books, more or less on the fly.

Many numbers given are close enough. Most abilities are easy enough to convert in a way that is fun. The Challenge Rating isn’t tuned as carefully, but i find the usual GM toolkit can address that. For example, throwing in a few extras baddies from over the hilldside can scale an encounter up, and awarding the players various story advantages “for good role playing” can scale an encounter’s challenge down.

If my napkin translation went too badly, I threw “Rule of Cool” at it, and just made sure the players were still having fun.

I will say, I relegated 3E stuff to filler encounters, just as I do with anything else I homebrew.

I don’t mind being on my GM toes for a quick encounter, or a short story arc. But I don’t like having something poorly balanced have a recurring role in my campaigns.

All to say I have used 3E source books liberally in my Pathfinder campaigns, and I’m not sure any of my players have ever noticed.

This is such a perfectly Lemmy exchange, thank you. Silly is fine, but also real advice incoming.

“Does this salary offer from Google look fair to you?”

I feel bad for not trying hard or smart enough

People who have accounted for their own spent time often feel the coupons are wasteful. That’s before accounting for the costs of purchases made that could have been skipped, or where the discount led to buying a worse product, and needing to rebuy a better one later.

wondering if there are privacy trade-offs.

I’m not familiar with that service, but it’s a safe bet that it has privacy costs. People don’t set up and organize discount programs out of kind heartedness. At best they plan to sell us something we don’t need. At worst they’re selling everything they can learn about us to anyone with a nickel.

He caught the wave*!

Spooky. I thought that was my fridge for a minute, but this is just silly. Guns go in the crisper drawer for freshness.

I’m pleased to report that all those other promised utopia frameworks turned out perfect, and aren’t in any way still a huge daily pain in the ass. I expect no less from this time around. Computers are finally smart. It’s great.

It’s the AI that is prone to delusions, or was that just me?

A little more time and a lot more money. But the savings will be huge. The savings will make the current era of extravagant burning piles of money look like a sound investment. You’ll be glad you got in on the ground floor…

We do need a little more time, though. And money.

Linux Mint is so nice.

I would turn off “Secure Boot” in BIOS before doing the upgrade.

It officially works, but can throw in unnecessary challenges - and Mom probably isn’t traveling with national secrets next week anyway.

I played in that party in second edition!

This one really shows Larson’s willingness to put the work in to convey a silly joke with only the art details.

That’s a pretty good description of what GrapheneOS does with the sandboxed Google services.

I have found that the only apps that don’t work well with Samdboxed Google services are ones that work hard to invasively probe their runtime environment.

Thwy usually fall into these three categories:

• Bank apps that do it “for my safety”. Nevermind that a website version exists for attackers to target without the same (dubious, invasive) “protections”.
• Streaming apps that do it “because this paid subscriber might be some kind of dark web pirate and we need to protect our content from being uploaded to the dark web one more time.”
• Apps whose developers are shitty at writing code for memory management. But GrapheneOS has good options to allow these to run, anyway.

That looks like exactly what I’m looking for in my next phone. Thanks.

Do you have access to credit unions?

The GrapheneOs team is quite particular about hardware.

I would gladly purchase a phone that came preloaded with LineageOS.

“Better than we have now.” often wins over waiting for perfection.

CoMaps is quite nice.

There are also still companies selling navigation devices that mount in a car windshield, assuming the car doesn’t already have one built in.

Pro tip - those navigation devices also often have an accident camera that records if it feels an impact - which is a good idea anyway.

GMS apps work fine. The only ones that don’t work are ones that act invasively enough to notice they are sandboxed and disable themselves.

Mostly bank apps. Which is irritating, since they all have mobile friendly websites that work fine without needing to know my location and everything else about my phone.

Google has made it extremely hard to degoogle.

Just remember that there are no nice reasons why they are working this hard to keep your phone captive.

We can argue about how bad it will get, but there’s only worse things coming from this effort.

“Glorified Search Engine can copy and paste from stack overflow with the best developers, as long as the best developers are babysitting it through the process.”

Modern AI is impressive in certain ways. This isn’t one of those ways.

Uh…so they’re giving people years of weapons and hand to hand combat training and then fucking up their ability to retire in a quiet dignified way?

That is… Not how I would have handled that situation.

Edit: I’m just… processing that people can make stupider choices than I thought possible.

This feels like the “poking a sleeping bear for no clear reason” special kind of stupid.