I’ve said it many times, but for as much shit as the Chibnall era gets on writing, the scripts aren’t actually that bad. Oh, I mean, the nods to the Cartmel Master Plan, the Forgotten Child nonsense, like that was all bad, but the bread-and-butter scripts were mostly just average.

Which the book had the good grace to point out was a stupid business model, but the creator didn’t care- it was a proof of concept for something that they could monetize someday, somehow, making it the most realistic thing that happened in the book.

Minus the NFTs, this was a key plot element in the rather ridiculous (but, to me, enjoyable) REAMDe, by Neal Stephenson. A genius technerd launched an MMO where the world had realistic geology and if you wanted iron for a sword, you had to go mine it. Same for gold for your currency. So players in poor countries could…

Gina Carano did a speedrun from “mildly popular bit actor” to “conservative troll”. Same arc as Kevin Sorbo but in a fraction of the time. Like, I respected her stuntwork in the otherwise boring-as-hell Haywire, and she was getting some pretty major gigs up through the Mandalorian, and she couldn’t wait for her career…

As somebody who does more improv than is healthy, I loathe the Interdimensional Cable episodes. It’s all of the worst aspects of improv, that go-for-the-joke, lol-so-random nonsense.

I mean, I agree with your stance on mechanics, but Advantage/Disadvantage is a blunt instrument with none of the flavor that, say, Aspects in Fate can give you, and hit points have always been a design mistake. I’ll die on that hill: I hate hit points.

I mean, 5e is bad design- it’s a bland, boring game (and I don’t like earlier versions of D&D much better, but for wildly different reasons, so this isn’t me being an edition snob), and I do think it’s design is looking towards computers automating the boring rules so that players end up doing more improv absent…

You seem to be mistaking a general statement (computerizing RPG design) with a specific thing (this particular shitty VTT). There are a lot of people looking to bring computerized tools into the gaming table in ways that aren’t just VTTs, though of course VTTs remain the centerpiece of the efforts.

My underlying problem with computerizing the math of a game is that it paves over badly designed mechanics. The underlying mechanics should be simple and easy to explain and not really require much mental space for the player. If you “fix” bad mechanics by having a computer offload some of that mental effort, all…

Actually, the perfect D&D movie was “Your Highness”, and before you say, “but that movie sucked”, yes, it did, but it also accurately captured what RPGs played like when I was growing up.

My hot take: structurally, Logan Lucky and Inception are two heist movies following the same rough pattern, and of the two, Logan Lucky is the better movie.

“Nordic Empire Games”. Oh, they’re definitely Nazis, right?

Honestly, I’d kill for a new game that lifts the best parts from L4D and updates them, instead of layering on progression systems and collectibles. I understand that online games in 2022 need to be goddamn treadmills, but what was great about L4D was learning the maps, learning to read the AI Director spawns, and just…

Blood Quantum is a notable exception, as it positions a very distinct perspective in the zombie apocalypse: turns out (for whatever reason), First Nations people (in at least the town where this movie takes place) are immune. It does take some detours down into more traditional zombie gore and gags, but the core…

That’s funny, I don’t remember when Steam was called a scam. Oh, people resisted it because it was different and who wants to install an extra client to run the game you just bought? But everybody understood the value proposition. And MP3s? Users all instantly understood the value proposition, and so it was just…

The “magic” ingredient is labor exploitation. Same as it always was.

To the contrary, the relationship of seconds, minutes, and hours, is actually quite wonderful. Hours to days is less so, but still pretty good. And the reason is simply this: I don’t like decimal points. A third of an hour is a whole number. As is a sixth. And 12 is a 5th of 60, which is why while days isn’t great, it…

Which is why there are 10 seconds in a minute.

You can just convert D&D to metric yourself, as you can just do your map as 1.524m squares. Or, I guess, 1.5m if you’re lazy. Maybe 150cm if you want a nice non-fractional number.

While I agree that it’s not uncommon for certain services to be relatively unsecured on the private side of your network, that’s still a gigantic fuck-up that you have to wonder about how that still happens. I mean, you even have internal users you don’t want seeing, say, financial payouts to your contractors. So that…