Zagorath

Zagorath , 12 hours ago

But then for some reason, another company went back and restarted publishing the old lines

I think it was the same company. White Wolf published World of Darkness games using its Storyteller system from 1991 until 2004. They then made the move to Chronicles of Darkness (a retroactive title the only came about in 2015, until then they were also called World of Darkness officially, known to fans as "new World of Darkness") in 2004. CoD changed some of the lore around and drastically cut back on how detailed and complex the metanarrative was.

CoD used their new "Storytelling" system, and did not perform very well commercially. Probably some fans didn't like it much, but mainly they decided to stop selling in stores so there was no discoverability. During the CoD era, White Wolf still published some WoD material, such as the 20th anniversary editions.

The most important detail here though comes in 2015–2018. Up until this point White Wolf has been bought and sold a couple of times, most recently by CCP. In 2015 they are bought by Paradox Interactive. In 2018 they release VtM 5th edition. In response to allegations of some very problematic material in V5, Paradox dissolves White Wolf and brings WoD production into Paradox Interactive.

I think that only Vampire, Hunter, and Werewolf are currently supported in the latest edition of Storyteller, but I may have missed something.

It's true that Onyx Path as a separate licensee has published books for White Wolf/CCP/Paradox. But they've done 20th Anniversary, CoD, and V5 stuff. The actual decision to go back to WoD was White Wolf/Paradox's.

Zagorath , 10 hours ago

So, my context here is that I've never played any WoD or CoD games. But a couple of years back I was almost part of a group that was going to play a V5 campaign before it fell through. (I forget the timeline...might even have been December 2019 or thereabouts...) So I bought and have read through the V5 Core Rulebook. I obviously don't have earlier editions to compare it to, but I thought the system itself seemed really elegant. The kind of beautifully simple game design that first attracted me to D&D 5th edition. (Unfortunately having not played V5, I couldn't say whether I would eventually get tired of that simplicity in the same way I got tired of D&D 5e.)

From what I understand, they seem to have changed the metanarrative quite a lot from previous editions. Seemingly for the worse, according to a lot of people who really liked the old lore. Which might mean it's for the better (relative to old WoD) if you preferred CoD?

Zagorath OP , 3 days ago

I dunno about "higher level" maths, but there is one bit where you're asked to solve a simple year 8–level algebra equation (which is still a much higher level than any other RPG I've ever played asks you to do). It's also in one of the more explicitly NSFW parts of the system.

Specifically, you have to solve for y: (BT – 80)^2^ = –4y + 120, where BT is a number arrived at in an earlier step, using (CM / CV/A ) × 100. I will not be defining what CM and CV/A are in this forum in order to keep the comments SFW.

Zagorath OP , 3 days ago

Part of me agrees, but another part of me says...there are far too many rules in this about sex...including illicit forms thereof...for me to want to play this with anyone I know IRL.

And also no part of me wants to spend the multiple hours this would probably take to roll up a character. I Googled looking for digital character generators, and they supposedly used to exist, but the official FATAL website no longer exists.

Zagorath OP , 3 days ago

Oh don't worry. There are a lot of tables in this system.

Zagorath OP , 3 days ago

Yes to circumference, but no to damage. Ripping is a possibility the book discusses, but this formula is for quite the opposite.

Zagorath OP , 2 days ago

Well, that's not exactly surprising…

Zagorath , 4 days ago

I think my most intense one was probably from the very first campaign I ever played (after a couple of sessions experience in a kinda ad-hoc fashion). D&D 4th edition.

We were a rather big group of (I think) 6 players plus DM. The main campaign was fairly standard. DM set us up with some prophecy stuff and we set about fulfilling it.

Everything was going pretty normally, until I got the weird sense that there was something else going on. Outside of session I spoke to the DM to have my character try and investigate. It turned out that weird sense was correct. Another player was setting up their own schemes between sessions. So I started setting up my own schemes, and roping other players into them.

It's the kind of thing that looking back on it now, most would probably consider a major red flag. There was no Session 0 or any out-of-character discussion about doing these kinds of things. It could have been incredibly toxic. But we loved it. It added a whole extra layer to everything we were doing during the sessions, as well as giving us the ability to converse with the DM and each other to play more of the game asynchronously between sessions.

In the penultimate session, we defeat the BBEG on another plane, and then arrive back in our world. Another week of last-minute scheming, before the actual final session was a massive PvP battle where the player openly turned against the rest of the party. One of the other players unexpectedly (to me at least) turned and joined them, as well as some NPCs on both sides. "Intense" is the perfect word to describe that session and the build up to it. That physical, heart-pumping feeling the same as when you're hyping yourself up for your first time trying a dangerous sport or something similar.

We ended up pushing back and winning the encounter for the good guys, but didn't actually kill or capture the betraying PC. They fled, and their player took over as DM for our next campaign.

Zagorath , 4 days ago

I know this is a controversial take, but I really intensely do not like Half Life.

I have issues with it from a narrative perspective. I have no idea who it is I'm fighting or why. It feels like an incredibly forced "oh, we need an excuse to throw some baddies at the player" premise.

But the main problem I had was mechanical. It's just not a fun game to play. The gunplay was fine, but then it forces itself to throw a bunch of puzzle and platforming mechanics at you, and just…why? It's so, so terrible at them. Running up to the edge and jumping will more often than not really in you falling because of a misalignment in perceived location and where the game's engine says you are. Boxes, which you have to move around to solve the puzzling, fly around at a million miles per minute, making the fine control needed to successfully solve the puzzles very, very difficult. And ladders…don't even get me started about ladders.

I couldn't bring myself to finish the first Half Life, let alone start on the sequel.

Zagorath , 4 days ago

I'm not a big shooter player. I had played a fair bit of Battlefield 2 multiplayer, the CoD4 campaign multiple times, as well as games like Star Wars Battlefront 2 (the first game with that title...) and Mass Effect (I think at the time I had played only 1 and 2).

I actually thought I had played the Source version of it, but my Steam history says otherwise. I was playing the OG version, in 2014.

Zagorath , 4 days ago

Sure, and I am in no way suggesting that it was a bad game in its day (especially now that I know at least one of the issues I had with it was a bug introduced long after the fact). But I am suggesting that it doesn't hold up nearly as well as some people like to insist it does. It's the "Seinfeld is unfunny" trope, except that that relies on the idea that people today don't find Seinfeld very funny; the difference is that I regularly see people saying that yes, Half Life is still an excellent game if you play it today.

And for what it's worth, the game I have put the most hours into on Steam (and by 2x the 2nd place game—which is a more recent entry in the same franchise) was released just 10 months after the original Half Life. Granted, I'm playing on a 2019 remaster with upgraded graphics and some new QoL features, but it's the same basic game, and had a vibrant community still playing on the 1999 version all the way up until the '19 remaster. It's a game that I think really does hold up very well today, albeit in an entirely different genre.

Zagorath , 4 days ago

Thtat's the one! (And my #2 is AoE4. AoM is #3, and AoE3 is #5. All these considering only Steam play time.)

Zagorath , 4 days ago

Haha yeah, when I was young I played a fair amount of Age games, but never playing them in their normal intended fashion. A lot of using the cheats, playing the campaigns on easy mode, and some custom scenarios that largely don't use actual economy management that's at the core of the game.

Only got into the more competitive side of the game after the DE release in 2019.

Zagorath , 5 days ago

Debugging spells isn't like the fancy debuggers in your modern IDE. You gotta compile the spell with debugging symbols and run it through the spell equivalent of gdb direct in the command line.

But most wizards just go with the ol' "add print statements everywhere" method of debugging.

Zagorath , 8 days ago

YouTube Premium costs as much for just two months as Nebula does for an entire year (if you sign up through a creator's code—US prices. Australian prices it's about 2.6 months) Highly recommend, probably the best bang for your buck option.

Dropout is quite a bit more expensive than Nebula, and narrower in range of content (basically comedy panel shows, sketch comedy, and D&D), but it's still only 5.4 months' worth of YouTube Premium in cost (for your second & subsequent year—4.3 months for the first year discount), and you're directly supporting the creators. Still a very good deal.

If you've got both of those, that's 8 months of YouTube Premium's cost, leaving 4 months worth that can be spent directly on individual creators' Patreons, Kofis, one-off donations, or on their merch.

Zagorath , 8 days ago

Nebula is US$50 per year if you go straight to the website, but $30 per year if you click through any one of the creators' own referal URLs. No region-specific pricing as far as I know (but YouTube does have region-specific pricing, which is slightly cheaper in Australia than America using current currency exchange rates, which is why Nebula is more expensive here than in America, in YT-months).

The vast majority of Nebula content is available on YouTube, albeit with sponsors/ad reads removed, and sometimes a week or so early.

There's a fair amount of Nebula "Plus" content. Extra or supplementary material to videos that are otherwise available on YouTube, or an extra video in a series where most of the series is on YouTube but this episode is not.

There are also Nebula Originals, where Nebula themselves helped fund the project and the video is exclusive to Nebula. There are quite a few of these, but they're less common than the other categories.

The entire library is available to browse for free without an account if you go to their website and hit Explore so you can see for yourself. Look for the Nebula logo star for Originals, the + sign for Plus content, and the lightning bolt for Nebula First. You can also use the filters near the top to see only those, if you want. To give a rough sense of the relative abundance, my tablet displays up to 9 thumbnails per screen, and when sorting by most recent, the oldest I see without scrolling is 20 March for Originals, 30 April for Plus, just 9 May for First, and when unfiltered it only goes as far back as 19 hours ago, including 2 Nebula First videos.

some companies just convert dollar values to local currencies

This is what Dropout does I think. It displayed some weird numbers like $91.74, but didn't actually say anywhere that this was AUD until I read the fine print, so I almost started out comparing it to the US YT price. I assume the US price is a more round number.

Nebula just displays US prices and charges US prices regardless, I think. It's been a while since I actually looked at how they do it.

Zagorath , 6 days ago

Oh damn yeah. I was comparing YouTube Premium in countries like Australia (US$11.07/month), US ($13.99), and UK ($16.41). If you're somewhere that it costs a tenth of that, it definitely changes the calculus.

Zagorath , 10 days ago

I had one of these with a new account recently. I forget what platform it was, but it wasn't anything from Meta. Didn't need to move your face in any specific way, but it was obviously doing some checks for signs of life so a simple photo wouldn't work. I found a video of some random dude on YouTube just staring at the camera, and I pointed my camera my computer screen while that played. Difficult, considering they only allowed the front-facing camera to work.

Zagorath OP , 10 days ago

I'm afraid I don't get it.

Zagorath OP , 10 days ago

And if the answer to that is yes...is it more or less gross than if the centaur borked a human?

Zagorath OP , 10 days ago

Depending on which version you read, the sphinx was either so shocked by him solving the riddle that it threw itself from a cliff or was simply slain by him

omg this part I did not know. I just thought it...let him pass.

But anyway, what does that have to do with the "pun battle" as posed in this story?

Zagorath OP , 10 days ago

So if you grossly mispronounce the word, it becomes a pun? I don't think that's a very good pun, tbh...

Zagorath OP , 10 days ago

RP might use a similar vowel, but even most modern British people don't seem to pronounce these very similarly based on this pronouncing dictionary's advice and sample clips. And I can confirm as an Australian that Australian English accents don't pronounce them remotely similarly.

Zagorath OP , 10 days ago

which is roughly equal to English “Oh boy…”

English also has the phrase "oh man" with pretty much the same meaning. Plus, though this is slightly archaic today (depending on context), "man" can be a gender-neutral word meaning "human". So the same pun could work perfectly in English.

It's very clever, thanks for sharing!

Zagorath OP , 10 days ago

Oh man, that's what I get for replying from my inbox and not checking the latest in the thread.

Zagorath OP , 10 days ago

😜

Zagorath OP , 10 days ago

Would a centaur have two navels?

Zagorath OP , 10 days ago

Photo showing a white horse stepping on a large keyboard where the keys are large enough to be easily usable by a horse hoof.

Zagorath OP , 9 days ago

Riderless horseracing maybe, but surely never horseless horseracing.

Zagorath , 11 days ago

Video game RPGs often have little minigames for things like this, with your stats helping you manipulate the game in some way. KCD, for example, doesn't have any stats which help you, but you can acquire cheat dice to improve your odds.

It could be fun to play a session like this at the table. Actually play a game of poker or blackjack or something against NPCs, and let players make rolls to help. Some thoughts (using PF2 skill actions):

• Palm an Object (thievery): swap your given card for one you've hidden on your body (requires establishing ahead of time that you've got cards hidden)
• Lie (deception): convince your opponent to bet big when you have a strong hand, or to fold when your don't (DC scales with how good their hand is)
• Create Forgery (society): if they use some unusual or non-standard cards that you couldn't just buy, use this to create your own set for use with Palm an Object. If you're bringing your own full deck you can also subtly mark the back of cards so you know what they are.
• Perception: spot the card that has been dealt
• Perception: read an opponent to see if they're bluffing

I might also allow some sort of intelligence check to do things like knowing your odds of winning, or to automate blackjack card counting, especially if the characters would be better at that than the players are.

Zagorath , 11 days ago

I like that this kinda inies Razira just needed to be trying harder in order to win. It's cute.

Zagorath , 11 days ago

mod, singular.

They were "active" at least as of 4 days ago, though before that one post their previous post is almost a month old, and they haven't left a comment in 6 months, so it's doubtful that they're active as a mod.

You're probably best off going to !firefox which seems more active.

Zagorath , 20 days ago

I can see how one might interpret it that way, but it could also be that Linus is important and deserves introduction, where this other Dirk guy just serves as facilitator and so doesn't warrant introduction.

Zagorath , 21 days ago

Honestly I couldn’t tell you. I know what I play and my friends play, but I wouldn’t even know how to find out what’s popular among strangers in my country.

On shelves at game stores D&D definitely takes up the most space. I think I’ve seen a decent amount of Pathfinder and VtM. So presumably those are selling well.

Zagorath , 23 days ago

Gonna be honest, there's no price I'd be willing to pay for YouTube Premium.

I used to pay for YouTube Red. I didn't cancel it because it was too expensive, I cancelled it in retaliation for all the other shitty things YouTube has been doing. If YouTube wants me to return as a paying member, they need to reinstate the ability for small accounts to monetise their YouTube accounts; they need to stop demonetising/restricting educational content that might be related to war, weapons, sex, or sexuality; and they need to change their copyright policy to make it much, much harder to abuse false claims.

Zagorath , 23 days ago

I have a static IP now, but I used to have a script in my cron that would update the IP address my Cloud Flare points to if it needed to. It was super easy.

Zagorath , 27 days ago

that’s not that right way to get paid

I don't know a whole lot about what Audacity is up to these days, but the same company owns MuseScore, and it sounds like they're doing kinda similar things in terms of monetisation. The core software itself is still free, but there are optional cloud services on top of that which you can pay for.

I don't see what's wrong with this. Cloud services provide a convenience. Some people like that convenience and are willing to pay for it. Others might be perfectly ok doing it themselves and won't pay.

It helps that the new head of design for both of these products is a guy who really knows his shit. He's already taken MuseScore from an application that nobody in their right mind would use if they could afford the commercial competitors, to a legitimately great music engraving application, and he's been on Audacity too since 2021.

Zagorath , 27 days ago

Foss should encourage privacy and freedom. Cloud storage doesn’t normally do that.

Then don't use it? It's that simple. If it makes money for them and some users like it, there's nothing wrong with that.

Zagorath , 27 days ago

I couldn't tell you for sure, because I don't use it or its commercial competition very much. That said, personally when I have needed to use it, I've always found the gap between Audacity and its pro equivalents in terms of basic usability to be much lower than in other creative fields. GIMP, in particular, is nigh unusable compared to Photoshop.

If you're interested in seeing more, here's a video where the new lead announced that he was taking it over. And the official Audacity YouTube channel has been posting overviews of its updates since then. I think it likely that the first two updates (3.1 and 3.2) contain some of the most critical functionality.

Zagorath , 27 days ago

I'm really glad to see that text transcriptions of image posts are much more common here than on other sites, but clearly still not common enough.

Zagorath , 27 days ago

Holy shit we almost had Python in our browsers instead of JavaScript‽ Please can I switch timelines!

Zagorath , 1 month ago

Most traffic these days goes over secure channels. Any time the website you're accessing is HTTPS, they can see that you're accessing that website, but they can't see which pages you're on our read what they say, or what you submit.

The exception is if they get you to install their own certificate to allow them to man-in-the-middle you. Laws in some authoritarian countries already require devices have root certificates that allow the government to spy on everything. And the EU is currently considering the same. Which should be a major concern for any European residents.

Zagorath , 1 month ago

I believe the reason the 5th is usually referenced is that this usually comes up in situations where the 4th is already not relevant. Either because there already is a warrant, or because you're crossing a border (which IMO seems like an incredibly sketchy excuse and would likely not have been accepted by those who originally penned the 4th amendment, but is at least well-established law at this point).

With the court order, you must give the passcode and/or unlock the phone

The thing is, case law has determined that this is not the case. Passcodes are fairly well protected, from what I've heard. You cannot be made to divulge them anywhere in the US, because of the 5th amendment, even with a warrant. Case law is more split on whether biometrics should be offered the same protection.

Though again, this is all my understanding of it having heard it third hand from Americans. Mostly from Americans who themselves are not legal experts, though I think I've at least a couple of times heard it directly from lawyers.

Zagorath , 1 month ago

then quickly just dropping the pictures

Could even poke a camera-sized hole in the picture. And disguise it by putting that hole over something similarly-coloured.

But anyway, but of it is really that you can be held in contempt for refusing to unlock with biometrics, if they've got an appropriate warrant.