• 0 Posts
  • 31 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 15th, 2023

help-circle


  • Many channels I watch have already been mentioned, but one comes to mind that hasn’t been: if you like Stuff Made Here and NileRed, you’ll love The Thought Emporium. Dude is a mad scientist, for real. His current long term project is trying to make a neural net that can play DOOM… except he means real neurons. Biological neurons grown in his self built lab, sourced from rats.







  • A 1-800 number is immune to long distance charges, free to call by anyone in the US— the owner of the 800 number pays any fees associated with the call. Traditionally, 800 numbers are owned by companies in order to sell stuff. (The 1- portion of a 1-800 number means that it’s a long distance call… which was a thing when I was growing up in the 80s/90s, but basically isn’t a thing anymore in the age of cellphones)

    The opposite of an 800 number is a 900 number. The person calling a 900 number has to pay, usually by minute, and most of that money goes to the owner of the 900 number. Famously used for phone sex lines.






  • It’s a failure of properly understanding intersectionality. Intersectionality says that the combination of societal status does not equal the sum of each individual status, but may in fact be its own unique thing. A black woman has unique challenges and experiences even compared with “women” in general, or “black people” in general, even though black women are black, and are women. This is a weird idea and hard for most people to wrap their heads around, so it’s not surprising that this comes up.

    Jews (of which I am one) have a particularly troublesome social status intersection that creates a unique combination that leads to some troubling conclusions for modern left leaning Americans.

    Consider the following two premises: oppressors, that is, the strong, should be fought against to prevent the weak from harm. And white people have historically been the oppressors.

    Hopefully, these two statements are non-controversial and make sense.

    Then come Jews, who, apart from their Jewishness, are basically considered white in the modern day. So jews are oppressors and must be fought against to protect the weak, right?

    Ah… but there’s a nasty historical coincidence— the oppression against the jews has always been that they are secretly powerful and oppressing others. The elder protocols of Zion and other nonsense permeates the culture. Hundreds of years of jews being the evil bankers (because we were forbidden from having any other job). Constantly given garbage and unfavorable positions, and any success we reap from that is then used as ammo against us.

    So the intersection of whiteness and Jewishness creates a self-reinforcing messy cycle of increasing hatred that is really hard to untangle.






  • If you want to make them think a little differently, try a blackjack-esq dc. Set a RANGE they have to hit with their collective skill checks (that add together). If they roll below the range, or above it, either way the control doesn’t quite work— maybe a different consequence for too low or too high. Let them also choose whether to increase the sum or decrease it with their skill check, in the case of overshooting.

    And make a variety of skills they can use to control the godling, so that they can strategically try to use the most appropriate bonus to get them where they need. Maybe using certain skills requires doing something on the battlefield too, like standing in a certain spot relative to the godling or some such. Or perhaps doing that sort of tactical movement can let you manipulate the roll or take 10.

    That’ll get them thinking different! But if you make it fiddly like this you’ll need to make the payoff for successful control powerful enough to make it worth it.


  • In the end, using your idea will only work if you really know your players. With an arbitrary random group, I figure the result would be either 100% success rate (they all agree with each other and coordinate perfectly) or a close to 0% success rate (they rarely cooperate). Neither situation is what you want.

    Luckily, when you want a certain percentage of success, that’s exactly what dice are for! Now, my group tends to be one of those “cooperators” so I’d tend to want to balance it assuming the party will always agree on what they want the godling to do. Then, maybe use a combination of religion, arcana, and diplomacy checks across the party to determine whether their characters are able to successfully pull off coordinating themselves to control the nigh-uncontrollable thing. I’d still use the “they have to agree on the action it will take” thing but then use the dice to add uncertainty.

    If, on the other hand, you expect a lot less agreement amongst your players, you can still use dice, but this time, make the skill check determine whose commands get followed, with close results or consistently low results across the whole party leading to no one’s commands being obeyed and it doing something random and chaotic instead.

    In the case of a cooperative party, we’re using dice to lower the success rate. In the bickering party, we’re using dice to increase the success rate. But in both cases, we have in mind a certain target success rate, and it is dice that will get us there.