makes everything turn into the rules lawyer heaven hell.

👹

As a personal experience, mutants&masterminds is just, so, horrible about the arguments for how powers interact, and they didn’t help by mixing fuzzy and binary rules

I’ve never played. But if that’s the Palladium version and it’s adjacent to Rifts… ye-gods. Why even have game mechanics at all? Just give us the setting material and a bag full of random dice mixed with cheetos and Chucky Cheese tokens.

I remember people excitedly snapping up the d20 version of Exalted back in their 2e, almost entirely because they adored the world but despised the White Wolf mechanics. Also seen some decent mileage taking games like this to FATE or Big Eyes Small Mouth, just because it does become much more of a narrative auction than a dice game.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preventive_war

My enemies are ontologically evil and we have to fight them over there so we won’t be fighting them over here.

Cool that they let George Bush Jr have a Fourth Term.

“I cast invisible”

“The hydra takes an AoO”

Queue from the top

It’s the same argument. The fundamental problem is that magic as a system doesn’t play well with rules as a concept

I tend to find an 2:1 or 3:1 combat/non-combat gives people a good mix of the action/adventure elements and the high drama. Combat just tends to take longer than drama, so even when you try to minimize it, you can often find yourself in a time-suck.

I also tend to feel that any “withering encounter” should resolve as soon as the players are more-or-less assured of victory (like, 2-3 turns, unless things go disastrously wrong for the players). Big center-piece boss battles can take longer, but need some kind of high drama element (exploding volcano, NPC dangling off a cliff, evil wizard powering up a death ray, etc) that (a) gives players a puzzle or drama point to resolve and (b) gives someone an opportunity to do something passionate or wacky (swinging in on a chandelier, flinging themselves on a hand grenade, asking their beau to marry them in the middle of a sword fight).

Any encounter that’s just “roll the dice, pass the turn” is a waste of everyone’s time, IMHO.

your turn should be no more than 1 minute at the longest

“I cast Invisibility”

“You can’t”

“Yes I can”

“No, you can’t, you’re in the Antimagic Field”

“No, I’m not. I’m on the edge of the field. Look at the table.”

“There’s still a corner of the field in the square.”

“Then I don’t stand in that corner.”

“The rules say it doesn’t matter.”

“No they don’t. It has to occupy at least 40% of the square.”

“Yes it does. Look, its right here in the DM’s guide.”

“That’s the 4.32 manual. You need to check the rules updates from 4.71”

“I’m not using 4.71 rules.”

“You referenced a 4.82 rule just a turn ago!”

“No I didn’t, that was a house rule.”

“That’s not anywhere in the house rule guide! I was just reading it before I cast my spell.”

“Well, I sent out an email two months ago.”

“GUYS! Just make a decision and move ON!”

“Okay, fine. I take a five foot step and cast Invisibility.”

“My hydra gets an AoO. I roll a 43 and deal 290 points of damage. Your wizard dies.”

“THIS IS BULLSHIT!”

sorcerer DM

I’ll also spot you that turn one is generally basic bitch shit.

It’s turn seven, when the wizard has gone through six prior Save or Sucks only to find out the DM has introduced another creature on which none of them work that they’re fumbling around for options.

by level 10 you should already know what spells you took and what they do at minimum

As often as not, the control wizard is trying to figure out if they can drop the AoE template to just hit the bad guys. Blaster Casters tend to have less of a problem because every turn is “Does it have fire resistance? Yes: Magic Missile / No: Scorching Ray”

The really annoying wizards are the Summoners, because “it’s my turn so let me add another 1d4+1 turdlings to the battle field and take 6 attacks with the gumbas currently out here”.

The used car market imploded when vehicle production dried up after 2008

You will never own an EV for under $80k

Putting on my D.A.R.E. T-shirt and clutching my state issued copy of the Ten Commandments and snapping an Amazon Ring Camera on my front door, so I help the state identify any of those nasty, America hating Antifa I’ve been hearing so much about.

I’m helping!

“You’ll never own another computer cheaper than $500”

Chinese tech firms produce high end computers for less than $500

“SANCTION! TARIFF! EMBARGO!”

Apologies if I’ve touched a nerve.

Again, not clear how the US plans to neutralize long range missile capability of Iran.

Target the depots and destroy them with artillery.

You quite literally have no clue regarding the subject you’re opining on here.

This was established decades ago in excersises the US has been running since the Cold War Era.

The goal isn’t to defeat Iran in a quick war, but to neutralize the nation’s long range artillery and turn it into a free fire zone for American and Israel armies.

Ukraine isn’t Iran. It has a firm rear guard of support from the NATO block, supply lines that can re-arm and re-staff depleted arsenals and positions along the eastern front, and allied agencies ready to pick at Russia’s flanks - by seizing cargo shipping, assassinating ranking political leadership, and blowing up critical domestic infrastructure.

What the Iranians lack, at the end of the day, is friends. Nobody in the Russian, Pakistani, or Chinese government is going to send saboteurs into Israel on their behalf. Nobody is going to help them keep the Straight of Hormuz shuttered. Nobody is going to blow up Saudi desalination plants or bomb peripheral American military bases.

Once Iran military can no longer produce and deploy new ballistic missiles, the country just becomes target practice for its enemies. We (probably) won’t see a Rumsfeld-style blitz into Tehran, like they managed in Baghdad. But we will see Iranian airspace closed, critical infrastructure destroyed, and population centers targeted to effectively break up the political face of Iran into its component parts.

What becomes of a nation without a central bureaucracy, an intercity municipal system, or a functional electrical grid? This was a country already in a water crisis months ago. It is a nation functionally under siege by the most sadistic and savage militaries in history. People are going to die by the millions before this is over, simply due to disease, drought, and famine. It’s going to be a country the size of Germany experiencing what Israel has done to Gaza.

Quite literally bombed into the Stone Age.

I can explain in basic terms what is happening there. Does that help anybody?

Really depends on where the bug lives.

I would argue that it doesn’t because almost everyone writes code in higher level languages.

Most people write mediocre code. A lot of people right shit code. One reason why a particular application or function runs faster than another is due to the compilation of the high level language into assembly. Understanding how higher level languages translate down into lower level logic helps to reveal points in the code that are inefficient.

Just from a Big-O notation level, knowing when you’ve moved yourself from an O(n log n) to a O(n²) complexity is critical to writing efficiently. Knowing when you’re running into caching issues and butting up against processing limits informs how you delegate system resources. This doesn’t even have to go all the way to programming, either. A classic problem in old Excel and Notepad was excess text impacting whether you could even open the files properly. Understanding the underlying limits of your system is fundamental to using it properly.

Similarly, I could explain to you how long division works but the next time you need to divide two numbers you’re still going to reach for a calculator instead of a pencil and paper.

Knowing how to do long division is useful in validating the results of a calculator. People mistype values all the time. And whether they take the result at face value or double-check their work hinges on their ability to intuit whether the result matches their expectations. When I thought I typed 4/5 into a calculator and get back 1.2, I know I made a mistake without having to know the true correct answer.

One of the cruelest tricks in the math exam playbook is to include mistyped solutions into the multiple choice options.

What then is the point of lamenting the loss of knowledge that no one uses directly?

It’s not lamenting the loss of knowledge, but the inability to independently validate truth.

Without an underlying understanding of a system, what you have isn’t a technology but a religion.

I think the plan is to have Iran’s arsenal of ballistic missiles demolished before then.

I don’t think I have face blindness, but if a woman that I don’t know particularly well changes her hairstyle, sometimes I get confused.

I mean, if you’re not intimately familiar with someone there’s going to be things you don’t notice. Late night, at the club, they just call this “Beer Goggles”. Everyone starts looking hot because you lose your ability to focus on more than “You’ve got tits and hair, that’s close enough”.

Like my wife will be watching her housewife shows and I’ll be like, “Who’s this lady? She’s new.”

And my wife will be like, “That’s the same woman. She changed her hair for the talking head segment.”

Well, like with the Netflix question, you can keep going deeper until you hit the unknown. At some point, the person asking the question doesn’t know the questions to ask to get to that next level, though.

Stupid cephalopods. Learn to breed without dying, idiots!

Idk if I’d call it a “strength”. Feels more like a weakness.

But sure. This is the reason bureaucracies exist. Knowledge accrual, organization of specialties, long term investment planning, and distribution of surplus… as critical today as it was 8,000 years ago.