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The question no one dares ask: what if Britain has to defend itself from the US? | George Monbiot
  • This is what the US have encouraged Taiwan to do. Taiwan wanted to purchase a few incredibly expensive fighters and ship from the USA, but basically all war simulations just had China target these and secure a fast win. The USA instead encourage Taiwan to take the "porcupine" technique, spreading many small weapons, particularly handheld anti-aircraft type weaponry across the country. The plan is to make invasion too inconvenient. The flip side is that without a reliable way to show a display of strength, anywhere the larger aggressor does pick on (USA to UK China to Taiwan) can focus on one part of the country and reliably cause massive damage there.

  • Study finds bullies have more children than non-bullies
  • I think being assertive and more socially active meaning you're more likely to be a bully is a bit of a myth. Although the cliché school or work bully may be assertive and socially active, there are many unpopular and awkward people who bully those around them, and it just goes unnoticed.

  • Nobody beats Jesus's record
  • I got in to fasting on Reddit about 5 years ago, which was stupid but I was super overweight at the time, and young enough to be resilient. It's not something I'd recommend to others but I was blown away by how much safer it is than it's often portrayed to be.

    There was a whole tag on the subreddit for the "longer then jesus club". For the vast majority of people it's dangerous, but if you have the weight to lose, drink plenty of water and take salt, magnesium and potassium supplements, one month is fine. Humans, along with most animals, are surprisingly resilient to starvation, because of course we are.

    Although of course, if you don't have the weight to lose, it gets potentially deadly very quickly. This is why I'd not recommend it to anybody.

  • Finally ordered an upgrade to my GPU
  • I'm on a GTX 980ti and my plan is to pick up a 4000 series, maybe a 4080 super, when the 6000 series is announced.

    To be fair, my 980ti has been amazing at punching unreasonably far above where it should.

  • Sonic the Hedgehog & the declawing of art
  • I saw an announcement from Sega a couple of months ago saying that they're looking to return to their MO: Being the punkrock to Nintendo's mainstream pop. I think this is really the difference between Sega's Sonic Vs Paramount's Sonic. Paramount want to make a mainstream Sonic movie and mainstream mean filing off the rough edges.

    I don't think it's got anything to do with today's political landscape as much as the nature of all high budget cinema. Never mistake the film industry as anything but venture capitalism, with art being incidental and anarchic messaging being a facade and only existing for profit. Any for-profit art, particularly a $122 million cost piece of art, is going to only care about the most profitable choices.

  • UK ‘one of world’s least work-oriented countries’ claims BrewDog founder - as he slams obsession with 'work-life balance'
  • I've been told by literal Brewdog barstaff that if they know he's coming, they need to encourage their female staff to either dress moderately or not come in, to minimise his sexual harassment.

    I don't know how true that is, but the city I'm based in, which is pretty happy to boycott assholes is filled with people who boycott Brewdog.

  • Fallout and RPG veteran Josh Sawyer says most players don't want games "6 times bigger than Skyrim or 8 times bigger than The Witcher 3"
  • I do think a huge world with an engaging and dense design can still be made worse with size. In some games like Skyrim, Breath of the Wild or GTA 5, you could probably drop me anywhere and I'd know where I was, half due to good and differing region design and half because the map isn't that big.

    Back in 2015 I'd dream of a GTA 5 expansion that adds San Francisco and Las Vegas to the map, turning the north and east of the map in to a 500 yard straight of water, but in reality, two more large cities and their surroundings suburbs and wilderness would have never kept it's memorability like the first region.

  • I've seen enough: No more forcing singleplayer studios to make mediocre live service games
  • The execs probably get away fine from it as well, even if the company sinks, they'll end up high up somewhere else.

    Online service games are just peak venture capitalism, grinding a small studio to dust and causing massive misery followed by unemployment for a 1/50 shot at making a money printer.

  • Anon's PC works
  • I built an overkill PC in February 2016, it was rocking a GTX 980ti a little before the 1080 came out, and it was probably the best GPU out there, factory overclocked and water cooled by EVGA. My CPU was an i5-4690k, which was solidly mid range then, but I overclocked it myself from 3.5GHz to 5.3Ghz with no issue, and only stopped there because I was so suspicious of how well it was handling that massive increase. I had 2TB of SSD spaceand like 8TB of regular hard drives and 16GB of ram.

    Because I have never needed to think about space, and so many of my parts were really overpowered for their generation, I have always been hesitant to upgrade. I don't play the newest games either, I still get max settings on Doom Eternal and Read Dead 2 which I forget are half a decade old. The only game where it's struggled in low settings is Baldurs Gate 3 unfortunately, which is made me realise it's ready to upgrade.

  • Lemmy more social than Mastodon or Nostr
  • I've never understood what twitter style websites are actually for. They seem to have a tiny niche of celebrities and known personalities making a statement with no reasonable conversation stemming from it.

    I don't understand how that structure was once one of the largest social media platforms in the first place.

  • Which system new to you are you aiming to play in 2025?
  • If you get around to Microscope and enjoy it, it recommend both The Quiet Year and For the Queen.

    When I played Microscope, I found that the game was a little too unconstrained and it was very hard to keep things from becoming totally silly, then in the close up scenes, everyone would basically want to default to playing a super rules-light generic TTRPG, and two or three of those scenes would dominate the session. I feel that it may get better with frequent play, but that's not really what it's designed for. Ben Robbins, the creator is a very talented game designer and is also famous for the West Marches style of D&D play, and has made numerous GMless TTRPGs since, and I've only ever heard great things about them.

    The Quiet Year is a game with a more constrained setting, that basically uses a map you fill in as you please and a bunch of prompts tied to playing cards to play out the 4 seasons of a small settlement moving from it's founding to a final point where either the settlement is implied to die out, or is a fantastic springboard for a traditional TTRPG to take over. There are plenty of hacks online that move the tone from a post apocalypse feeling survival focused game to basically anything that charts a settlement for a year, including one by the creators called The deep forest which I understand to be a decolonising focused and a bit more cottagecore / cottagecore. I preferred this to Microscope mostly because of the fact that it's prompts constrain the tone from becoming all out silly.

    Finally For the Queen has been one of the best games I've ever discovered. I've played the first edition but there is a second created by the same creator, Alex Roberts, produced by Critical Role's Darrington Press. If you're Critical Role averse for some reason, the first edition was not tied to them at all. This game is by far the easiest to teach new players, and is the first game I'd bring to play with absolute TTRPG newbies. In my opinion it generates the best story, although rather than being solely worldbuilding, it places a primary interest on your characters and relationships to a queen figure. I find that despite this, the world's that comes out of it are far more evocative and exciting to develop than other GMless TTRPGs, and a large part of that is the hard to hack reality that it's just got good prompts. Despite that it's got the most hacks of the original of anything here, as the original game is so streamlined and well playtested, which really shows while playing it.

  • Pathfinder reinvents D&D necromancers with a NEW CLASS! (Rules Lawyer)
  • I think modern TTRPGS in general steer towards things like temporary summons because of how it lets the players actually use them in combat. Nobody wants to play the necromancer who is suddenly just some guy because there are no corpses available where the battle kicks off.

    I have an enormous soft spot for narratively putting in the legwork to assemble your undead hordes, and when I'm the GM, I'm always keen to set up good moments for the necromancer to build an army, but it's so easy for that to set up a situation where a player doesn't get to actually use their features. Making them temporary summons from nowhere in particular is the easiest fix.

  • What breaks if you let a monster have multiple actions?

    This is for D&D 5e.

    I'm currently making a reoccurring antagonist NPC that is a master thief. It's CR 6 and I want it to be capable of making three attacks per round like multiattack but also have their thief subclass's enhanced cunning action with fast hands.

    This would normally mean they'd get 3 attacks and a varying options for bonus actions, however I'd want them to be able to trade up to three if these attacks to have more uses of cunning action (this would of course stack the ability to dash 4 times per round but I'd just not do that while running the monster). They also have a special once per day ability that I'd want them to be able to swap a single attack for.

    It got me thinking, instead of trying to make an unwieldy combination of multiattack, a special action and cunning action, could I just give them three actions?

    The simple way this NPC works that I want them to pick 3 options from:

    • Dagger
    • Crossbow
    • Special action
    • Dash
    • Disengage
    • Hide
    • Make an ability check
    • Use an object
    • Use a set of tools

    At this point, what do I actually lose from letting them take 3 actions? They aren't a Spellcaster so I'm not worried about them throwing out three fireballs or the like.

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    Khrux @ttrpg.network
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