Broadly, where the optimal path is the boring or tedious path.

Imagine an action game where you fight monsters and get coins for defeating them. Coins can be exchanged to buy new moves, advance the plot, and so on. Basic game loop.

Now imagine that you get triple coins if you wear the red shirt when fighting red monsters. Every time you see a red monster, you could go into the menu, into equipment, into body armor, swap on the red shirt, exit all the menus, and kill the monster. Then repeat all that for blue shirt and blue monsters.

This is a made up example but some games do shit like that, where you have to do something tedious for a big payoff.

I bought a couple things on epic early on because I thought competition would be good. But epic kind of sucks and has no Linux support, so I stopped.

I tell people about lemmy and send them links. Mostly people don’t care about anything. Abstract or remote things like “should a platform be owned by one asshole?” just doesn’t even enter their brain.

Where are the comics about people being happy to be social? I guess it’s like they say and happiness writes white

That’s why I did it too, but let’s be fair, dice are supposed to be random.

Yeah, I realized in my older age that I don’t actually like a lot of random. I liked new Vegas where you either had the skill or you didn’t. In tabletop games I like dice pools to make the results less evenly distributed among all possible outcomes, and then options like fate points and “succeed at a cost” on top of that.

Some people I guess really like the random dice effects, but usually it just makes me grumpy. To each their own.

I’ve thought about switching. I do like the password saving and syncing between Android and desktop that Firefox does, and I’m not sure if the forks do that.

No regrets on switching to Linux here. Almost all of the time I just use the GUI to launch steam or Firefox. No AI nagging me (aside from whatever nonsense Firefox is up to)

Most of my save scumming comes from being annoyed at the random factor. Like I have a +8 on Skill and it rolled me a 3, failing? Nah that’s stupid. Reload.

Less random, less save scumming. You can have good systems with low random factors.

Inspiration helped in bg3, but it’s a pretty limited resource and can still fail.

I did save scum once in a fight where I rolled four natural 1s in a row. The odds of that are too low for me to believe that was legitimately random.

A free market isn’t really the same as “the owners keep the profits”.

I think it’s kind of fundamentally unjust that the owner keeps all the profits from what labor produces. That’s capitalism. Unions and government are bandaids on top of that.

I didn’t get one because it’s too expensive.

Steam deck was a little pricey but it has a backlog of games going back like 50 years, and I already have a large library. Plus the games are cheaper.

I was just telling a friend about my how cat was so annoyed today I wasn’t sitting at my usual desk. He was yelling and standing on it until I sat down. Now he’s snoozing in my lap, at the desk, as intended for this time of day.

I’ve sent this to many coworkers.

I wanted to introduce a jar where every time you sent a useless “hello” message you had to put double whatever you put in last time (starting at $1). People are empty headed idiots maybe losing +$1000 will wake them up.

That’s an interesting point you make and I partly agree. There are certain undertones and sometimes you can create a better story by engaging these undertones and creating a monster in noble clothing and a metaphor for the societal corset women are forced ro wear.

Well, I’m glad we’re approaching some common ground.

No one here is making the argument that you’re seriously “encouraging mindless slaughter of people based on some regular dungeon crawling”. No one’s saying you’re, like, recommending people go out and do that in real life. The argument is there is a message, even if it’s unintentional.

But other times I just want to enjoy a trash movie or 15$ airport library book.

There’s little wrong with enjoying a trash movie, but

And the undertones there are purely accidental and shouldn’t be taken too seriously.

Why? What authority says subtext shouldn’t be taken seriously?

There’s a lot of rich material for analysis, for talking about what our society values among other things, by looking at the messages in pop culture. Imagine two societies. In one, all their pop culture and trashy airport novels are about murder and plunder. In the other, they’re about cooperation and building a better world together. Do you think that would mean anything? Do you think you could infer anything at all from that? It says something that we’re cool with “then I killed him and took his stuff! Rock on!”. We’ve all played that kind of game, but if you think about it that’s a horrible story.

Surely there are stories that would be on the far side of the line for you. “I killed the men and enslaved the women! Look at all these points the game gave me!” would probably make most people uncomfortable. Why is the line there, but murder is fine? Does the placement of that line mean anything?

And again, this doesn’t mean you can’t play a beer-and-pretzels half-brained game about tactics, strategy, and extermination. But to wave your hands in the air and say it doesn’t mean anything is absurd.

I dunno man, you’re the one that said the players can’t talk focus on gay rights now. there’s a demon invasion. Which, again, maps pretty cleanly to that kind of attitude. But I think you might be the kind of person who doesn’t understand subtext, or maybe text.

you choose to lead a gay rights movement while the world is being overrun by the demon king’s hordes.

This maps kind of easily onto “We can’t fight for gay rights right now. They just blew up the twin towers!” or similar “wait your turn for justice” arguments.

I get the impression that you don’t see that kind of thing, and furthermore don’t care. You run whatever kind of game you want, but I would be surprised if your settings weren’t full of unexamined biases and defaults.

Have you taken any literature or maybe other media classes at the 200 level?

Sometimes people say really weird things and I wonder if they just don’t know any better. Maybe they’re a teenager.

But like “fact from fiction” is irrelevant here. No one’s saying Dracula is non-fiction, but you can still read it and take meaning from the text. Furthermore, it’s not just a story about a guy who bites people. The read on how women are expected to behave is pretty obvious, for example.

You don’t have to care about the subtext of “kill all the goblins and take their stuff”, but saying there is no subtext or “no one cares” is absurd and self-centered.

Some CS rep said to me the other day when I was asking about a bogus charge on my account, “thank you for being part of our family”

I said “family doesn’t usually charge money, but go on”

I got a partial refund.

People do not all have the same working definition of “politics”. Many people seem to use it to mean “overt content about contemporary issues”, but that’s not really a good definition.

If your game has sentient creatures with agency and desires, it has politics.

For example, if your game has a king, there’s politics. Having the people accept monarchy is a political statement. It’s not as hot-button as, say, having slavery, but it’s still political.

You might not be surprised if your players react to a world with chattel slavery by trying to free the slaves and end that institution. The same mechanism may lead them to want to end absolute monarchy. They see something in the setting they perceive as unjust, and want to change it.

A lot of people are kind of… uncritical, about many things. They don’t see absolute monarchy as “political” because it’s a familiar story trope. They are happy to accept this uncritically so they can get to the fun part where you get a quest to slay the dragon. (Note that the target of killing the dragon rather than, say, negotiating or rehoming it is also political)

People then get frustrated because they feel stupid, and they’re being blocked from pursuing the content they want. They just want to, for example, do a tactical mini game about fighting a big monster that spits fire. They don’t want to talk about the merits of absolute monarchy or slaying sentient creatures.

It’s okay to not always want to engage in the political dimension. That doesn’t mean it’s not there. If someone responds to the king giving you a quest with “wait, this is an absolute monarchy where the first born son becomes king? That’s fucked up” they’re not “making it political”. It already was political.

If you present a man and a woman as monogamously married in your game, that’s political. That’s a statement. If you show a big queer polycule, that’s also a statement. The latter will ping the aforementioned uncritical players as “political”, because it’s more atypical, but both are “political”.

Some of this can be handled in session 0. But sometimes you learn that some people in the group have different tastes and probably shouldn’t play together.

I imagine if all you do is watch films, you get tired of common stuff. You’ve seen it before. But if you only watch films sometimes, some of that is still interesting to you.

Kind of like how some video game nerds will be only “only double soj 2x blan Blah is viable” but like other builds do fine for everything except some optional mega bosses