Kichae

@Kichae@lemmy.ca

@Kichae @Kichae @Kichae

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Kichae , (edited )

You can see the discussions that inspired the Comic Book Guy.

Kichae ,

World governments wouldn't be able to stop the LGM from just landing in the middle of Tokyo for all to see. They have no control in that situation.

Discovering microbes on Mars might be one thing, but it's also the kind of thing the general public wouldn't give a shit about.

Kichae ,

Look at the positions of d and k on the keyboard. _ema_es.

kde , to KDE
@kde@floss.social avatar

Pledges coming from proprietary software companies mean nothing

https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/15/24157496/microsoft-ai-carbon-footprint-greenhouse-gas-emissions-grow-climate-pledg

Get behind the community that is really fighting to curb climate change:

https://eco.kde.org/get-involved

@kde

Poster announcing KDE Eco's monthly meetings, in which like-minded people, like yourself, get together to work on reducing computing's impact on the climate.

Screenshot of a headline of the Verge. A photo shows Satya Nadella talking about Copilot at some bullshit Microsoft event and the headline itself reads: "Microsoft’s Al obsession is jeopardizing its climate ambitions" The introductory paragraph reads: "After pledging to slash its greenhouse gas emissions, Microsoft’s climate pollution has grown by 30 percent as the company prioritizes AI."
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    • Kichae ,

    It's not. It's obliged to work in the shareholders' interests. That can mean many things.

    The board just chooses to take a narrow interpretation of those interests.

    Kichae ,

    Wow, that race is one of the more bloated pieces of kit I've read in a while, just from the point of view of empty word count.

    Also, only available from level 10 on? Wyrmlings start at CR 1! That's what? Level 2 or 3?

    The BattleZoo people have been focusing on playable dragons lately. They probably have something much less fussy and unwieldy than this.

    Kichae ,

    do AI tools understand such a license text and evaluate if they can or cannot use the material?

    So, this is the fun part: AI tools don't auto-ingest material to process it. The developers choose the materials to feed into the models.

    And while the tech bros can understand your licenses, they don't give a flying fuck, because they think they'll be billionaires beyond consequences by the time anyone discovers that their work in particular has been ripped off.

    Kichae ,

    The NSFW isn't to be taken literally. In this case it''s a "I don't want to spontaneously see your weird ass bug and vampire kink bait when I didn't subscribe to anything that would reasonably have it, thanks". The tag gives viewers the ability to opt in.

    Kichae ,

    So you better spend your time adapting.

    They already ruined web search with SEO. Now it just won't be worth searching for websites at all. We can either accept whatever nonsense the syntax generator spits out, untethered from fact, or we can stop looking altogether.

    That's what you mean by adapt, right? Accept not having access to real information ever again?

    Kichae ,

    I don't know, this doesn't sound very reflective to me at all. The poster is just making a lot of general statements about games it's not clear they've even played.

    Every one of these games is as simple or as complicated as we want to make them. They can be pared down or beefed up at will. How much investment you need to make at the table is dictated more by who's sitting around it with you than what's printed in the book. And most of these games have much, much smaller books than 5e.

    And the one that I play that doesn't, doesn't require any more investment than 5e if you don't want it to.

    With less popular games, though, you tend to get more fanatical player bases. It may be harder as a lone player to find a chill table. But if your already chill table is trying to convince you to try something else...

    Like, no one needs to play apologetics for 5e. It's the biggest TTRPG of all time. A case for it does not need to be made. The fans of every other game are just trying to sell their own interests to the largest known market for the genre, because they want people to play with, too. D&D does not need people to justify it in response.

    Kichae ,

    All that balance does in a pen and paper game is provide predictability for the GM. "If I hit them with X, it will take Y to overcome it using A,B, and C". That only leads to homogenization if the GM doesn't do anything meaningful with that knowledge.

    Way, way too many people view this shit as "demands from the designer" rather than "tools to use for your convenience," and I super don't get it. If you want some of the players to outshine others, you can predictably boost their power level if the game is balanced.

    But I guess just flexing on friends is what many people really want out of the game.

    Kichae ,

    Choosing to miss the forest for the trees here, I see. Being pedantic only brings something to the table if someine doesn't know the details you're being a pedant over.

    Everybody here knows that legislative bodies pass laws.

    Kichae ,

    If the shareholders can't capture all of the value for themselves, it's not going to catch on.

    Can somebody explain why game makers don't start their own companies together?

    It seems like every other week a game studio is massively laying off employees; sometimes after years of development. What I'm reading is that it's a quick way to lower expenses and pad the investors' pockets, flooding the market with developers and reducing their value, to then hire them back a few months later at lower...

    Kichae ,

    They don't fulfill the fantasy of being a rent-seeking social parasite.

    Kichae ,

    No? I said the opposite of that.

    The question I was answering was "why aren’t there more employee owned companies?" And the answer is it's a lot harder to get seed money for those, because the rent seeking parasites don't want them to exist.

    Kichae , (edited )

    Yes, but a long ass time ago. What's happening here is that he's not getting his way over something, or he's gone and done something that we haven't heard about that will stain the company and he was removed, or he was told his farts still smelled, and he threw a tantrum.

    This has all of the hallmarks of a billionaire baby being told "no" over something for the first time in a while.

    5e has an advantage of not requiring doctorate in quantum physics to run ( ttrpg.network )

    I would usually be sad to see another original RPG go 5e compatible but Neuroshima was infamously poorly designed ruleset, possibly worse than Shadowrun. I probably won't be running it, but may steal statblocks for my 5e game if I need weird stuff again.

    Kichae ,

    Have you seen the installed customer base? An independent publisher would be extremely hard pressed to walk away from that.

    We have seen branching out since the OGL fiasco, though, which is nice. More system neutral or OSR versions of modules and statblocks, or multi-system statblocks.

    Kichae ,

    It claims that diversity among dragonkind is reductionist?

    Yeah, I got a couple paragraphs in and couldn't take any more. It was incoherent noise from someone whose personal dragon fantasy comes from being scared of them as a toddler.

    Kichae ,

    No, then you have many compounding and interacting variables. Maybe it's free snacks that improve mental health. Maybe it's the features of the room. Maybe it's specific adventures.

    Even with large numbers, experiments need some controls. You either need to know the context details so you can account for them, or ensure they're the same across all observations.

    Kichae ,

    With a large enough test, you could provide several adventures, several systems even (there's zero reason to make the claim specifically about one commercial product when TTRPGs are a whole hobby category), with or without snacks, in a controlled environment, with a set roster of GMs. It would just take many thousands of participants over years to run the study.

    Kichae ,

    Money

    Kichae ,

    Yes.

    The board must put the interests of shareholders above other stakeholders, but those interests consist of a lot more than just immediate revenues.

    Kichae ,

    keep selling books through those channels

    They need to start writing books worth buying again, first.

    Kichae ,

    All I wanted from the Switch was a console-only version. I know why it didn't happen, but I picked mine up on launch day, I've played on it every week since, and I've used the screen like, a handful of times on one trip the first year I had it.

    I haven't disconnected it from the TV since then. I really didn't need the handheld form factor.

    Kichae ,

    This isn't both concerning and also totally in line with every move Gargon's made along the way. Nope nope nope!

    Kichae ,

    There are any number of Mastodon forks out there. Misskey and its forks are really good. Pleroma and Akkoma are good, and so is Friendica.

    Mastodon has always been an exercise in attention and influence seeking for Gargon. The rest of us don't need him or it. It's just a trademark.

    Kichae ,

    There are no platforms on the Fediverse that do that. There are servers that are refusing and will refuse to communicate with other servers, and that's their right. If you don't like their policies, you can pick a different server.

    Your power as a user is to select your administrators, by selecting whose server you want to log in to. You don't get to decide whose content they mirror. If they don't want to host content from Meta, or from Mastodon.social, or from anywhere else, they don't have to, and you shouldn't be able to force them to.

    This isn't a mainframe and client system. There's no "fediverse" server out there that the different instances are gating. There's just 10 thousand partial mirrors, each offering local access to that mirrored content.

    If you want complete and total control over what content is being hosted where ever you're logged in, host your own server. That's your other option.

    Kichae ,

    It's story time with dice, so the story tellers don't know what's going to happen next, so there are meaningful moments of suspense.

    Critical Roll is probably actually a bad example here, because it's produced and designed as a TV show. Podcasts with reasonably sized episodes can make for good tales that I can listen to in the car or while at the gym.

    Kichae ,

    Publicly traded companies are not compelled by law to maximize profits. That's a long standing myth.

    Kichae ,

    Every community needs moderators it seems and here it seems they need to be KDE contributors

    Those don't really seem like related skillsets. Community managers aren't usually asset contributors.

    Kichae ,

    I don’t think the USA is at the point where we should all worry about arbitrary arrests.

    "All" may not need to worry, but there are plenty of people who do experience them.

    Kichae ,

    Pick up a copy of Flee, Mortals, or port some Pathfinder creatures over (use the Proficiency Without Level options on Archives of Nethys). Or dig up a 4e monster manual and port those over.

    Kichae ,

    Fancy! I've been meaning to pick up the tomes of beasts, but other shinies keep getting in the way

    Pirate Site FMovies Rivals Major Streaming Platforms in U.S. Web Traffic ( torrentfreak.com )

    Every month, many millions of Americans visit pirate streaming site FMovies to bypass paid subscription services and watch movies and TV series for free. The platform is a thorn in the side of the movie industry and a prime exhibit in the quest for local site-blocking measures. According to SimilarWeb's Top 10 chart of U.S....

    Kichae ,

    Let the free market run its course and let pirate sites compete with streaming services to improve their services.

    Hate to break it to you, but regulatory capture is the free market running its course.

    Kichae ,

    Host the project in a country where IP laws don't give Nintendo any teeth.

    Kichae ,

    Discord has no uses that isn't already covered by other options, though. Their biggest feature is publicity.

    Kichae ,

    Karma is a net negative for actual community creation and meaningful discussion.

    Kichae ,

    They have a whiff of the possibility of AIG becoming a reality.

    They also had a wiff of NFTs letting them sell and claim royalties on JPEGs. This isn't about some grand vision if humanity's future, it's about becoming the next Silicon Valley billionaire, or dethroning the richest man in the world. If the next big tech get-rich-quick scheme comes along, the novelty of their very expensive autocomplete and JPEG mashup projects will be dead, and they'll take their dollrs on to the next fad.

    He's looking at this as an echo of past Silicone Valley bubbles. It so much more than that.

    Citation-fucking-needed.

    Kichae ,

    Starfinder. I was looking into adventures with Starfinder 2 was announced, and just shelved it, because of course I'd rather play the new, shiny space game, rather than the one built on a 20 year old chassis.

    Kichae ,

    No one owns ActivityPub

    No, but they can become the biggest, most influential voice in how it contimues to develop.

    The methods of regulatory capture work well beyond regulatory bodies.

    We have entered the time of Reverse Mercer Effect ( ttrpg.network )

    Another thing I noticed is getting more common among RPG Horror Stories. When once it was common to see entitled players complaining the GM is not running the game like Matt Mercer runs on Critical Role, I have lately seen quite few stories where problem GM tries to use that to deflect criticism. It's usually the type to be...

    Kichae ,

    I've been edging away from the "storytelling game" (group or otherwise) framing of things for a while now. It's... well, it's not wrong, but I've found that the framing centres things like plot and even performance in everybody's mind, and that has had some perverse side effects. It negates the collaborative effort in peoples minds, linearising the game, and shifting agency away from the PCs and the table, and to the GM during prep.

    It's the connotational difference between "telling a story" and "running an adventure", and it's mostly invisible.

    Kichae ,

    This is, on the whole, a good thing. One should be able to have access to their politicians via piblicly accessible means, and the fedi is exactly that.

    It's a giant shame that it's still being moderated by a tech billionaire, though.

    Kichae ,

    Importantly, "vote with your wallet" is also straight up enabling discussion where those who have the most dollars have the most votes is taken for granted.

    This is not how we want to run a society. We can already see the results of it, and they're incredibly not good.

    Quests from the Infinite Staircase will cause such a shitstorm ( ttrpg.network )

    B4: The Lost City is a classic module for D&D. At one point it (in)famously stops giving full description of the rooms but instead lists monsters in each area and tells the DM to figure out why they're here themselves. Once the reprint will show up in new anthology, I'm sure people who complain online whenever WotC uses "ruling...

    Kichae ,

    There is leaving space for the DM to inject some creativity, and then there's deciding that you don't need to actually produce a complete product because you know your customers will do it for you anyway.

    I mean, it's not like any of the published rules are mandatory. Just because they're in a book doesn't mean you need to use them. But them being in the book means you don't need to come up with your own half-baked, undocumented, and inconsistent "rulings" if you don't want to.

    And, frankly, it's not a symmetric situation. Published materials are suggestions that, ideally, are crafted by experts and well play-tested that may be ignored if chosen. Unpublished materials cannot be opted into.

    Kichae ,

    Any rules they did get are rules of thumb and aren’t something to use without thought (like CR)

    And combat encounter building is a core pillar of the game. It should not be a loosey goosey "rule of thumb". If anything, it should be the most reliable set of instructions in the book.

    Kichae ,

    But some monsters are strong against certain builds and weak against others.

    That sounds like a party composition problem, then. Don't everyone play ice mages and then walk into a volcano.

    Some monsters are stronger in certain environment and entirely nullified by others.

    Sounds like monster creation rules need to be figured out before publishing the books, then.

    Some monsters are stronger given certain allies and weaker when alone.

    Again, monster creation rules should be reliable. And they shouldn't include context buffs that absolutely wreck the power curve.

    I lowkey hope these stories are fake or it's all the same guy ( ttrpg.network )

    I noticed increased frequency of posts in places like r/rpghorrorstories, that describe a situation where the player brings a tiny veiled or just a shameless copy of a popular fictional character - Sokka, Scanlan, John Snow, Walter White - except "more based" or "less of a cuck". What follows is a story of the player doing some...

    Kichae ,

    "Ah, so you've invited me to cuck the shit out of your character. Got it."

    Kichae ,

    My experience is that, in practice, players actually like secret checks more often than they don't. The feel-bad of "player agency" loss (what agency is there in rolling a die? It's literally an agency destroying mechanic) occurs at the conceptual level, long before ever experiencing it at the table. Telling a player that just hid that they don't think the guards can see them really heightens the immersion, and players tend (most of them, most of the time, on average) to get into that.

    You can't have tension when the player knows they rolled a 19 on the die.

    Kichae ,

    Searching

    Literally the worst possible usage. They're syntax generators, not search engines, and not knowledge fonts.

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