hmmm, not sure what to do now. My question that has been closed as a duplicate seems to be a bit more relevant now. I just finished combing through the links provided in the answers to the question I duplicated, yet lot's of the links are dead due to the question being 4years old
should I start a bounty on the old question, or do I go about getting my question reopened after some edits?
The maxim about keeping similar answers together applies even if some of the answers are outdated--perhaps especially because otherwise one of the possible search results is a trap.
the thing that annoys me to no end is that even after combing through all of my internet history i STILL can't find the youtube video that had people playing on a virtual table top program
I wasnt too thrilled with the GM so I didnt favorite the video and now that I need the video to see if the description tells me what program they used, i cant find it! I remember it only vaguely too, which is a problem. and the more I look at roll20 the more I am sure that it probably isn't roll20 I am thinking of
i wanna say isometric? I know it wasn't top down. The characters were in a tavern and I remember seeing the characters as more of a profile and you could see into the fireplace
i wanna say there was an included rolling system in the program
but from what I remember they were just fooling around talking to NPCs getting quest info from the GM.... nothing worthy of a diplomacy check or anything i can remember
I will check that out later on tonight... but for now my eyes feel like they are on fire from re-rereading my internet browser histroy looking for that damn video
I am gonna step away from the computer and go make some dinner
Given that this question has twenty-two deleted answers in addition to its twenty-three visible answers, I think there's substantial evidence that it's not specific enough for our site's standards. Voting to close.
I don't think it's a standard way to play AD&D, but it's legit for any game where it makes sense.
Yeah, it's awkward, and it repositions the player/GM dynamic in ways that seem unhealthy to modern gaming sensibilities. But it lifts the burden of system literacy which is a major barrier for many potential players.
In my groups I at least hand the players the dice and tell them to roll 'em, but I'm not sure the Community group could play D&D any other way than how Abed's doing it.
Because we're part of the United States of America, but we aren't actually one of those United States, we're often overlooked by copyright/license agreements.
@MC_Hambone That's lovely, but I suggest you keep such notions to a minimum on permanent chat rooms which are automatically fed to Google's search drones.
Being "not a state, but not international" is a major pain. Amazon won't ship software to us.
it's crossed over from the realm of nerds into a more broad public appeal, and to retain massive viewer counts I feel like they have to make fun of the nerd stuff
And while, yes, fictional positioning is --at best-- of tertiary importance in 3.5, it exists.
> Some creatures, such as many aberrations and all oozes, have no heads. Others, such as golems and undead creatures other than vampires, are not affected by the loss of their heads. Most other creatures, however, die when their heads are cut off.
I'm trying to figure out how to make this post be less than 50% devoted to "D&D3 is a pile of enticing lies about how you can model everything with mechanics that don't require judgement calls to be made by real people in play."
The thing I hate about D&D3 in particular is that it takes simple-ish streamlined systems and then packs them with weird is-it-simulationist-if-it-doesnt-model-anything detail until you have the worst of both worlds.
Abstractions are leaky, full stop
In the software world, there's something called the Law of Leaky Abstractions:
All non-trivial abstractions, to some degree, are leaky.
The basic idea is that abstractions hide details, but sometimes those details are important, so pretty much every abstra...
It's actually a vulnerability that will let people issue arbitrary commands to your database if you don't deal with it. Or just let them generally mess around. That includes logging in as an administrator or just telling the database system to delete everything.
at least in our case, though, that just means a bunch of people are a little bit fat, or a bunch of people have a moderate beer gut, rather than a significant portion of the population needing a motor to move them around
I always think of the irony that I work at a job and live in a place where abundant food stuffs and lack of physical labor to make a living means that I need to do physical labor in my own time.
I thought rpg means like an RPG you shoot out of your hand, and the people who make those guns are obvious rocket scientists and those guys kow all about math
@SSpoke not sure if you'd really be able to get help with a for money gambling site on any stack exchange given the US laws covering online gambling sites
and how can they make something illegal that they didnt create thats like making fertilizer illegal because it smells like shit just cause they dont like it doesnt mean they can make it illegal
we got statures of limitations in place, we got laws, constitutuins, the first ammendments, declaration of independence and who knows what else, and no one is gonna take that away from us doesnt matter if its obama, george bush, or cheyney, the founding fathers put down the laws to stay for eternity
@sspoke I dont know if you know how gov'ts work. With regards to bitcoins its a non-backed digital currency heavily used in the drug and human trafficking trades
US dollars are heavily used for the same things and even worse they are used for war but for some reason they dont make their own currency illegal, if I go to court that right there the judge will say case closed
and I'll just walk out
whos problem is it that people want to use bitcoins as real currency, its those people who should be thrown in jail, I just use it because I can trade it for USD I just sell it I never hold it because I know it will crash at any moment and turn into the next myspace
@SSpoke Civics is not your forte, also war is not the great evil, but lets just agree to disagree. If you have any questions related to pen and paper roleplaying games feel free to discuss them here otherwise I suggest you look in other stackexchange chatrooms for help.
@SSpoke Actually I'm withdrawing because the purpose of this stackexchange (even in its chatroom) is to discuss pen and paper rpgs. My discussion with you isn't on topic.
@SSpoke [squints eyes] I'm not sure if you're a troll, or clueless, but either way you've been asked to keep your comments on-topic or leave the chat; if the latter, however, I would gently suggest that it's unwise to argue legal pablum with strangers on the Internet while you're losing thousands of dollars a second.
To veer this slightly on topic, it's interesting how many cyberpunkish ideas - and BitCoin can certainly be seen as such - were totally unforeseen by cyberpunk writers.
Though Bruce Sterling came relatively close in Islands in the Net.
if I was the owner of mtgox it would still be in business for another 20 years at least, these "CEO"s nowadays, fuckin california hipsters still have the minds of 13 year olds, they see a lot of money they decide to scam everyone, I can control myself and live off the fees is good enough
My main gripe with cyberpunk is that a lot of people seem more interested in reifying the original 1980s-based bits of the genre instead of updating it to make sense as modern-day social commentary.
@alexp though you and I disagree on this (and I think we talked about noir as well) a bit. To me they are like the western you can put a twist on it but the main genre conventions are there for a reason
While in literature, you have things like Doctorow's Little Brother, which would have been cyberpunk if it was published in 1990, but is just a realistic techno-thriller today.
@AlexP Then isn't it doing yourself a disservice to complain that cyberpunk isn't staying current? Shouldn't you rather be crying out for an abandonment of cyberpunk in favour of modern genres with contemporary (rather than updated) aesthetics and themes?
@lisardggY yeah I usually don't like neo genres that much. Its weird when I think that LA Confidential is billed as neo noir dispite taking place in 50s la
Like, my big problem with modern-day rehashes of 80s cybeprunk is that the 80s conception of what a big bad corporation looks like is so dated and irrelevant.
@JoshuaAslanSmith No, I mean like how everyone wears suits and is office drones and whatever. Whereas really you can dress casual and have your "20% time" and be super-trendy and cool and rolling in the startup money or whatever and still be a terrible corporation that is destroying society.
the corporation as de facto villain is one of the main things I ignore about Cyberpunk stories and or avoid its a genre convention but its not used in every story
@alexp oh yeah totally coughgoolgecough
writers in general tend to be super non-conformist and they probably did a sucky data entry job before they broke into writing for a living so to them big companies are a sort of evil embodied in real life
The 80's were a decade where multinational corporations made a huge impact on people's lives. An explosion of information technology brought a lot of it to people's attentions, and it became something that bothered a lot of people.
You can't take a cultural sentiment and say "Oh, it's just those writer guys that had bad experiences with corporations".
@JoshuaAslanSmith I think it's more accurate to say that they see many kinds of jobs as unrewarding because for them those jobs were a stepping-stone / placeholder while trying to get into the career field they actually wanted to be in.
@lisardggY im not specifically talking about cyberpunk so much as entertainment media in general the company/corporation as an antagonist, negative force, and bad guy is sort of a trope going back to the industrial revolution
Basically I think maintaining the 80s cyberpunk aesthetic allows upper-class-ish folks with techno-utopian ideals to look at cyberpunk and imagine themselves as the punks rather than the baddies, which is doing a disservice to the core ideas of the genre.
specifically with cyberpunk as a genre yeah it latches onto a lot of US culture fears at the time japan, multinationals, the loss of the cold war and takes them to the worst possible conclusion as an excuse to write the kinds of stories it wants to
@JoshuaAslanSmith Yes, but saying "the writer dislikes corporations because he had a bad corporate job" is basically an ad hominem rejection of criticism, ignoring the possibly-legitimate criticism of the corporate economy by saying it's just a personal peeve.
@JoshuaAslanSmith [blink] I can point you to the insane number of obviously-conservative speculative fictions authors, or I can point you to the flood of interviews where writers of novels and scripts talk about changing their stories for --or having their stories changed by--executives and editors in order to make any money at all.
Either way, the notion that writers tend to be socialists is pretty silly: first, they don't; second, a writer's social views are often not accurately reflected because they want to eat.
Affluent American liberals -- which is a lot of Hollywood -- pretty much aren't socialists, categorically. They're much more devoted to social issues than economic restructuring, because fundamentally being well-off makes economic inequality seem like it's not at all a pressing concern for them.
I mean, a lady who was prominent in Occupy and self-describes as a "champage tranarchist" wrote a petition about how we should disband the US government and "Appoint Eric Schmidt CEO of America."
> Explaining on Twitter why she thinks anti-capitalism is compatible with promotion of her employers, she argued that “Tech companies expropriate ad money from capitalists to build a superintelligence & don’t pay dividends!”
This is exactly what I mean with the cyberpunk dig. Keeping it in the 80s makes it all about hating on stodgy corporations (and being kinda racist towards East Asia). But you can still pat yourself on the back and say that Steve Jobs isn't like that, he's a man of the people!
To me, the cyberpunk hacker hero is fundamentally usurping technology from its upper-class masters.
(That's how you end up with the black-market body modifications or whatever. It's not for you, originally. It's for someone with more money, more connections, or at least more willingness to sign their life away.)
@AlexP Secretly the nicest thing about that 100+ answer I made on SO is that it's bringing me a lot closer to never having to deal with SO's edit review queue again.
Abstractions are leaky, full stop
In the software world, there's something called the Law of Leaky Abstractions:
All non-trivial abstractions, to some degree, are leaky.
The basic idea is that abstractions hide details, but sometimes those details are important, so pretty much every abstra...
