It’s a good joke

But half because the logic is so terrible. That’s not passive income. It’s retail

The competition was convincing Obama to send them the shuttle instead of Virginia, by aligning with Obama’s legislative priorities. Again, this was effectively a political gift to Congressmen who supported his budget priorities in '09 and '11. Republicans tried to filibuster everything he advanced to death, so he cut their states out of the Shuttle museum program.

But now Dems aren’t in the majority anymore. So Republicans are earmarking funds to move the Shuttle to a red state.

The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin and The Poppy War by R. F. Kuang are notably influenced by the Harry Potter Wizarding World. Both include wizarding schools that do a better job of explaining where and how students are organized and regionalized.

Also, there’s the age-old standby Earthsea.

But yeah, this is the same problem as with Quidditich. When the story is about One Special Boy around which the rest of the world revolves, the resolution of non-Harry adjacent people and places gets blurrier and blurrier the farther you get from him. One reason the setting could have used a sequel (or prequel) series that has characters doing some world traveling, rather than cloistering themselves around the implied history of the original.

I am a professional encoder and I always put all my codes in a single big file marked EXE for faster execution.

I don’t think they won the bid

There was no bid. These were given out to Congressional Reps in exchange for their support of the Obama Era economic aid packages.

isn’t Texas all about pulling up their bootstraps and going for it?

No. Texas is about taking enormous subsidies from the government to not grow alfalfa, to not drill for oil, and to not build a wall on the southern border. Then we spend the rest of the day complaining that we’re not as popular as California.

I mean, Houston did not receive one of the four space shuttles for public display when the shuttle program ended in 2011, which was sort of a raw deal. That largely came out of the Obama-Era politics of Texans pissing in the Congressional punch bowl and reaping what they sowed.

But now Congress is stacked with Texas-friendly Republicans. I would not be surprised Randy Weber (TX-14) or Troy Nehls (TX-22) or even Senators Cornyn or Cruz pulled some strings to get a Shuttle back down here.

Furthermore, it was unclear if Congress even has the right to remove an artifact

I doubt that’ll slow anyone in the current administration down.

being against authoritarians

Big Government Authoritarianism is when you administer a message board incorrectly.

obstinate immaturity

My guy you have chained yourself to the front door of a community that won’t let you in.

You are the Laura Loomer of Lemmy communities.

they are being boycotted

They’re not. You’re having a temper tantrum, but it’s having no impact on traffic.

this whole community is to highlight the bs of tankie

You’re doing a bang up job. Very convincing.

My guy, this whole post is about boycotting .ml after this sore loser got a 30 day suspension.

How are you going to boycott a place you are upset you can’t post in? You’re like a bunch of abusive exes

If they play a system, they probably like that system

I don’t think you’ve ever actually gamed before.

Expires in 30 days

It’s so bizarre to see people get a time out on a community they hate and fume because they’re temporarily prohibited from yelling at people they say they don’t want to talk to.

I will answer this question with another question. “If I don’t take the blindfold off and find out who is doing the Lord’s work, how do I get this person to do it again?”

single player games don’t come any where near the profitability of these multiplayer games

True, but they are still very lucrative. You can make them, release them, generate a healthy surplus, and roll that into making the next game with plenty of cash to spare.

Also, you don’t have half your dev team stuck supporting a legacy release, constantly fixated on juicing engagement and monetization. There’s a lot less overhead involved in a single-iteration.

Fortnite

Call of duty

World of Warcraft

Apex legends

Had truly phenomenal marketing budgets. It’s the same thing with AAA movies. 25-50% of the budget goes to marketing, on a title that eats up hundreds of millions to produce and support.

You didn’t need $100M to make BG3. You didn’t need an extra $25-50M to get people to notice it and pony up. These bigger titles have invested billions in their PR. And that’s paid out well in the end. But it also requires huge lines of credit, lots of mass media connections, and a lot of risk in the face of a flop.

For studios that can’t fling around nine figures to shout “Look At Me!” during the Super Bowl, there’s no reason to follow this model of development.

I mean, MMOs were supposed to be continuously supported and developed during the enrollment period. Earlier iterations of the model had live DMs running encounters, active continuous releases to expand the game world and advance the storyline, and robust customer support to address the bugs and defects. Also, just maintaining the servers necessary to support that much data processing was hella-expensive on its face.

Games as a service don’t need to be a scam.

But eventually, the studios figured out they can do the MMO business model on any game. Justifying a fee for Everquest was a lot more reasonable than justifying it for a glorified Team Fortress knock off. Or a freaking platformer.

DnD has often been portrayed as appealing to the kind of nerdy rules-lawyers that like to argue

Not a totally unfair critique, but also not unique to D&D.

I’d say the bigger issue tends to be around certain players feeling creative or desperate and trying to lean into the plot/setting with less respect for the rules. So, for instance, “If I can’t move the big rock with a Strength check alone, can I get some ropes and set up a pulley system?” <throws a bunch of math at the table> “See? This should give me a 3x multiplier to my Strength, so I should be able to move it easily?” And the DM just looks at that, shakes his head, and replies “All that’ll do is give you Advantage (and if you move the rock you’ll derail my plot)”.

But more broadly, I’d say the problem with D&D is that it’s inevitably the same Medieval High Fantasy setting in one way or another. The format of the game is geared towards the classic Journey to Mordor, with challenges and story beats and pacing to match. It doesn’t play well with modern settings, because modern and futuristic technology tends to trivialize magic (especially under the Vancian system). It doesn’t play well with the Horror genre, because the game rewards “winning” rather than “survival”. It doesn’t play well with PC antagonists/betrayers as the class system puts you at a huge disadvantage when you’re not working as a team, so heel-turns and dramatic reveals can leave players with a sour taste in their mouths in a way a game more explicitly geared towards Finding The Traitor does not.

But DnD is in the unique position of already having proven with 4e that it can nail down a rigorous set of principles and a style guide that leaves ambiguity behind, courting a whole section of RPG players who desire that, and then retreating from that position with a new, fuzzier, system document.

As I understood it, 4e was an attempt to bridge the gap between the strategic tabletop genre and the D&D style of play. It was a kind-of Return To Chainmail, with this whole vision of the game really going back to these very grandious geographical set-pieces and large army combats, with the heroes playing as champions of great armies rather than rag-tag murder hobos. Very much inspired by Warhammer and Warcraft.

5e was more of a back-to-basics dungeon crawling game, keeping the streamlining of 4e but reintroducing a lot of the customization and flavor of 3e/2e/1e.

But they were still ultimately board games in practice. Positioning your models to flank or ambush or avoid a fireball remained a pivotal part of the game. Hell, the very act of flinging a fireball or swinging a sword to resolve a conflict was a fundamental cornerstone of the game.

Compare that to a game of Vampire or Call of Cthulhu, where a lot of the story is about investigating a conspiracy and surviving when you are surrounded by people who want to kill (and very likely eat) you, who you cannot trivially club to death in response. That’s the real bridge that you have to get people over. This idea that you’re not going into the spooky old house to simply loot it and bludgeon to death everything you find inside. The idea that you’re not playing in a world where Good Guys and Bad Guys are these equal-but-opposite forces clashing together along a territorial border. The idea that magic isn’t natural and meddling with these kinds of arcane forces comes at a terrible price.

Nevermind how the character sheets are all topsy turvy and new players - especially players coming from D&D - simply do not know how to build/play a character that isn’t geared to punch every problem directly in the face.

Why is this a “problem” for DnD specifically?

It’s a problem with any game that abstracts away reality in favor of dice and event tables, but still expects the players to Theater of the Mind their way through the abstractions.

You don’t get invited out to the Sonoma Valley Wine Cave by being mean to the Fossil Fuel industry.

“Well, fuck them then”

Isn’t what I said. But if that’s what you’ve heard, you’re illustrating my point.

D&D isn’t just a game anymore, it’s an identity signifier

Which is part of the problem. Like talking to someone who only drinks Coca-Cola about trying a new bag of tea you brought over.

attacking their identity

If you’ve wedded yourself so deeply to the brand that you feel attacked whenever someone levels a critique, you’re probably not mature enough to be at my table.