Posts made by Ominous

@ganymede

Are you hiring? I ask for a friend. Maybe a few dozen friends.

@littlelizard

It looks like Adventure Time met My Little Pony with Hexus from Ferngully doing a cameo as the badguy.

@derp

Items 1 and 2 call out rude and angry. Item 3 seems to be written as a catch-all for anything the legislators failed to consider when writing the law. And I wouldn't pursue the criminal charges. I would point out "Hey I was totally assaulted but instead of ruining the assaulter's life by pursuing criminal charges, I'm being lenient and seeking monetary damages like every other red-blooded American would."

@ganymede

I'm going to second what @ganymede said. Start documenting shit, get a paper trail going, then lawyer up. In some states, you could make the argument that the unwanted touch is assault.

Texas Penal Code Sec. 22.01. ASSAULT. (a) A person commits an offense if the person:

(3) intentionally or knowingly causes physical contact with another when the person knows or should reasonably believe that the other will regard the contact as offensive or provocative.

@jinshei said in Dabbling, Mastery, Dunning–Kruger etc:

As well as that, a lot of recent effort in the UK has gone into devaluing experts and education that provides people with basic critical thinking skills. Liberal arts etc, for example (as @ominous says). Even in my field, the push from the external forces is towards task-based skills rather than critical thinking (which might be a good thing in nurses, yanno?).

We can't have the meat-based assembly line robots thinking for themselves. They might realize they're just a stopgap until the plastic and metal robots are able to take their place.

Then again, my two best friends are professors of anatomy and their students, who are almost all trying to get into nursing, are for the most part complete idiots. If we set the bar for nursing students to "able to think critically," our nursing shortage is going to get a lot fucking worse than it already is real fucking quick. We just don't value education much anymore if we ever did. Kids blow off learning in school then they get to college and college drops their standards, because failing half of your students is equal to losing half of your paying customers. Accreditation is a joke, because universities will just switch to a different accreditation agency. The only things you can rely on really are standardized tests and we're doing our best to eliminate those too for equity reasons.

@runescryer said in Dabbling, Mastery, Dunning–Kruger etc:

We have more information freely available to humanity than ever before. But it's just as important that we know how to understand the information presented to us. How to separate out the facts from the opinions that are presented as 'facts'.

And liberal arts degrees, the programs that are most devoted to critical thinking, are becoming less and less regarded. I have met so many engineers who consider themselves smart and can math and design an efficient system thoroughly, but couldn't figure a way out of a wet paper bag. Get them out of their wheelhouse and they are complete morons.

@arkandel

I kind of want someone to make a parody of LOTR that is that.

@reason said in Weird or unrealistic gaming... stuff:

As far as weird/unrealistic gaming stuff, I hate how characters in d20-based worlds mature and grow their skills to increase success in 5% increments. Linear probability is garbage, and game systems that adopt it should be ashamed of themselves.

-r

The problem there is finding a resolution system that includes enough of a range of sigmas, while also making it so that a +1 bonus is still meaningful without being too meaningful.

@too-old-for-this

Oooh, intriguing! I prefer immersive MMOs that don't have sign posts for things like that.

I can't get into MMOS, because I played the best MMO ever made, Asheron's Call, back when it was released in '98. Until other MMOs manage to have a continual updating story with monthly updates that make alterations to quest lines, geography of the world, etc, they're stuck in the pre-AC days of EQ, which is simply a glorified fantasy theme park.

I don't know why ruby is so hard, but I am pretty sure diamond is harder.

@kestrel

It's much more common to write dialogue in a more realistic manner on RPIs from my limited experience on them, since short poses aren't only encouraged, they're a good idea, as there is no pose order and things tend to happen in real time, such as combat.

@ganymede said in FFG L5R:

Enemy: Is that your champion?
Leader: No, that's our shugenja; she's the least violent one of us too!

I had a D&D game go like that. The strongest fighter squared off with a hobgoblin warleader's right hand man in a sort of duel in front of the warleader and his "retinue" and managed to win. The warleader scoffed and said "Your strongest is only barely stronger than my second." Without missing a beat, one of the others chimed in nonchalantly "Strongest? That's my apprentice." The negotiations proceeded very favorably for the PCs from there.

Things @Ganymede has broken...

...my heart.

I play old-school D&D with the above average items and item rarity from the Black Company campaign setting for 3.5. Encumbrance is a thing, because figuring out how to get the treasure back to civilization is half of the challenge; xp is earned from returning gp to town; and is worth way more than killing monsters, so the smart thing is to get the gold without a single fight; monsters rove in packs and roll reaction, so not every encounter is a fight and fights can be talked out of; the above average items means an upgrade doesn't have to be a magic sword; the item rarity system means that backwater towns have very little adventuring worthy gear available to buy; etc.

And HP is hard-to-hit points for us. When you get to zero, every hit beyond that you roll first not to die instantly, then you roll not to pass out. After combat, the total damage below zero is rolled against to determine what sort of wounds the character has after the fight that need healing or if they die instantly as soon as the adrenaline of the fight wears off.

@songtress

Seconded.

@derp

Yeah, A New Hope was basically Flash Gordon, Dune, Dam Busters, and Kurosawa films thrown into a blender with George's wife making the results into a delicious meal.

@ganymede said in RL friends:

I tell law students constantly: the practice of law is applied Dungeons & Dragons.

And the practice of tax law is applied Magic: the Gathering.

@squirreltalk

They could be the bad things themselves.

@pyrephox said in Alternative Lords & Ladies Settings:

Which isn't to say such a game would fail or be a bad idea, just that it probably would need to consider its audience, because some of the immediate appeal of the genre for a lot of players would be absent. You DON'T see people lining up to play political games centered around guilds or senates or free cities, even those would be valid settings and even easier to have a wide variety of characters in a MU* setting.

I fucking would if a decent one was available somewhere! That's right in my wheelhouse.