We could do a lot for climate change, world hunger, homelessness, disease prevention and eradication, and so on with that much money.

All of these people are doing mass murder via opportunity cost, and I hope they pay for it.

Emotions aren’t good (or bad). They’re often like a heuristic. Fast but inaccurate. This is great when it’s like “a bear wandered into the house” and emotions say “RUN” and cold logic would be like “what? Why? How?” until you get mauled. It’s not good when it’s like “climate change makes me feel bad so I don’t believe in it”

teenager who acts like a dick all the time would be equally annoying.

Was Morrigan popular when da:o was new? She’s an extremely edgy teenager.

This topic would be great for a dontnod game that could appropriatly handle that topic - not an RPG.

I really don’t think queer stuff needs to be banished from the realm of RPGs.

Several times I’ve set the max warnings to whatever the current warning count is, and then decreased that over time.

Most people I talked to have refunded the game on steam. Nobody really had fun with it, except for one person that was completely new to dragon age. However, I don’t think she finished it either.

Meanwhile, the 3 people I know who played it all enjoyed it. Anecdotes!

I don’t think so. The writing of Taash was so bad and uncomfortable for the most part that I genuinely didn’t know if they were trying to mock trans-people with this representation. It felt like they were just looking at a terminally online twitter user and modeled the character after that. I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that taash is the worst character I’ve ever experienced in a triple A production.

Taash’s scenes seemed okay to me. The storyline with their mother is pretty close to what a friend of mine is going through now.

I don’t know how to solve this problem, but I kind of don’t believe what people say. I mean, I think sometimes they dislike a thing for reason A, but the words that come out are reason B. They say a character is badly written (B), but really they find the queer subject matter uncomfortable (A). This may or may not be the case, but fundamentally I do not believe the average internet video game fan has the introspection and honesty to say “A” here. There’s no way to know.

Veilguard, on the other hand, doesn’t get better. It just stays bad and even confusing at times.

My problem with Veilguard is the difficulty fell off a cliff and never climbed back up. Other than that it was fine.

If the players want to do something I don’t feel ready to do (either because it’s not prepped or I don’t feel up to winging it), I’ll tell them.

“That’s cool you want to go to so-and-so, but I haven’t given it any thought. We can end early, or I can try to improv it with no quality guarantee”

There are some kinds of planning I don’t do, like making specific maps and stat blocks, so some kinds of “going off script” don’t hinder me much.

Sometimes I’ll ask the players for input. “Ok, what sort of rites happen at this midnight ritual [that we just made up] that you decided to crash?”. I don’t really like the player mode where they just want to sit back and be told a story, nor do I much like the mode where they’re super zoomed in on their character without engaging with any other level. I’ve had players like that, where they want to really immerse in their character and feel like answering setting details takes them out of it, but that’s not really how I like it.

Yeah, I’d give it a shot. I’d hire a bunch of experts instead of just shooting from the hip though.

Climate change is a big priority.

I saw a cop pull up and park illegally to go into a Dunkin donuts. It was like seeing a political cartoon in real life.

One of the reasons I don’t think I’ll ever want to live outside of NYC. I walk every day. Sometimes take a bike. It’s much nicer than the car world of the suburbs I grew up in

Do they do imports from like betterment and vanguard?

At my job, me and another guy were given stuff to work on. But unknown to product, there’s a lot of shared code there.

In my imagination, it should be someone’s job to coordinate this. Instead, I finished a chunk of mine, he finished a chunk of his, and then there was confusion. Maybe that’s just a technical team lead’s job.

I want to give this more thought because this is an interesting idea.

Off the top of my head: extraction. The players are told a location and time window, and told they need to get the thing from there to a safe location.

Usually this means getting into an office building, finding the server room, defeating the IC, dealing with any security / police they alerted, and then getting out with a flash drive.

There’s room for social content. They can talk their way through a lot of conflicts here

They can also play it like a dungeon crawl. Just go in hot and get out before an organized response hits.

They can lean into planning and heist stuff if they’re into that. Find staff schedules, maps , HVAC, that kind of stuff.

You can also add a twist like “the thing you’re extracting is actually a person, and they don’t want to leave”. Or the thing is super dangerous: vials of a superflu. Radioactive stuff.

They also may have been set up. Maybe they’re a distraction for the real job, and they weren’t expected to make it.

If you have the right players and genre you can add more twists by giving them secondary, possibly contradictory goals. One player is secretly contracted to kill the target, not extract them. One player knows where there’s valuable data that’s not related to this job, but they’re the hacker: everyone will believe them if they say they need to hack a little longer, right?

Lots of ideas.

…what do you mean by using dev containers? Are your people doing development on their host machine?

I really want to do a game that’s like a riff on Shadowrun. Near future transhumanism, magic, and the players go and blow up a board room full of oil executives or health insurance leadership or what have you.

Yeah we finally set up a workflow where we get production data available in a staging environment. This has saved a lot of trouble via “well it worked on my local where there were 100 records, but prod has 1037492 and it does not”

Huh. That’s neat I guess.

My initial guess was it would somehow capture the energy from hitting keys. I guess that’s implausible? Too little energy without making the key press resistance too high?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Food_and_Drug_Administration provides some historical context.

You can also read The Jungle by Sinclair

Without the FDA, you’re going to get sawdust in your bread and worse.

I’m aware but worth pointing out. It’s easy to forget. Also to forget that our personal experience is not universal.

I had really bad anxiety in my youth. I’d get nauseous. Staying inside alone made it worse. So much worse. Taking the plunge and actually going out, talking to people, engaging, regularly, that lead to progress. Even if it meant throwing up in the bathroom sometimes. But that probably won’t work for everyone.

But I guess some part of me has a visceral reaction that’s just like “you’re making it worse! You’re just hiding from the problem and it’s never going to get better this way! Just go outside and nothing bad will happen, and you’ll stop freaking out eventually!”. But that’s not everyone.

But yes, to your point, a lot of the time it seems like they’re not even trying, and I can’t know their inner world. Sometimes they’re not, sometimes they are.

I don’t think it’s an accurate assessment to say “everyone is doing their best” though because some people certainly are not.

This was a useful perspective for me. Thanks.

No, it’s “I don’t think you’re doing enough to deal with your problems” first.