Think about how quickly the entire WWWIII (Wizarding-World War III) would have ended if all of the good guys had simply armed up with good ol’ American hot lead. Basilisk? Let’s see how tough it is when you shoot it with a .470 Nitro Express. Worried about its Medusa-gaze? Wear night vision goggles. The image is light-amplified and re-transmitted to your eyes. You aren’t looking at it—you’re looking at a picture of it. Imagine how epic the first movie would be if Harry had put a breeching charge on the bathroom wall, flash-banged the hole, and then went in wearing NVGs and a Kevlar-weave stab-vest, carrying a SPAS-12. And have you noticed that only Europe seems to a problem with Deatheaters? Maybe it’s because Americans have spent the last 200 years shooting deer, playing GTA: Vice City, and keeping an eye out for black helicopters over their compounds. Meanwhile, Brits have been cutting their steaks with spoons.

Remember: gun-control means that Voldemort wins. God made wizards and God made muggles, but Samuel Colt made them equal. Now I know what you’re going to say: “But a wizard could just disarm someone with a gun!” Yeah, well they can also disarm someone with a wand (as they do many times throughout the books/movies). But which is faster: saying a spell or pulling a trigger?

Avada Kedavra, meet Avtomat Kalashnikova. Imagine Harry out in the woods, wearing his invisibility cloak, carrying a .50bmg Barrett, turning Deatheaters into pink mist, scratching a lightning bolt into his rifle stock for each kill. I don’t think Madam Pomfrey has any spells that can scrape your brains off of the trees and put you back together after something like that. Voldemort’s wand may be 13.5 inches with a Phoenix-feather core, but Harry’s would be 0.50 inches with a tungsten core. Let’s see Voldy wave his at 3,000 feet per second. Better hope you have some Essence of Dittany for that sucking chest wound. I can see it now…Voldemort roaring with evil laughter and boasting to Harry that he can’t be killed, since he is protected by seven Horcruxes, only to have Harry give a crooked grin, flick his cigarette butt away, and deliver what would easily be the best one-liner in the entire series: “Well then I guess it’s a good thing my 1911 holds 7+1.” And that is why Harry Potter should have carried a 1911.

Ah gotcha, I was wondering where I might’ve lost the thread. I would agree with everything you said there. But, putting a pin in that and going back to your original post, what are the lore changes that you dislike? I understand what you said regarding inter-species complications, but feel like I might have lost what you were saying after that.

Honestly, I’m a bit more confused now. I definitely agree that humans have a tendency to dehumanize others, but I wouldn’t consider this a good or healthy thing that we should just accept. So having a ruleset that says, canonically, “this group of sentient creatures is inherently evil” and not “this group of sentient creatures is believed to be evil by this other group” you are encouraging the players to take an unnuanced view of the world.

However, as a gamemaster you have to allow your players to make two choices:

1. Are the monsters we are fighting people or not?

2. Does my character agree with me?

Isn’t this what the lore changes encourage, by not making a factual statement about the groups, so the players should ask themselves this question on a case-by-case basis and not simply based on what type of creature they are? And I’m not sure how the changes would prevent the narrative approach you describe. Saying that goblins and orcs live in human-like societies doesn’t prevent you from telling a story that’s analogous to what has happened between human societies.

Maybe we’re working off of different data points, what WotC material are specifically referring to for the changes?

A game about combat needs a world full of things for the players to mow down but also not feel bad about killing, and sometimes you need a bunch of Violent Dungeon Fodder that can think and plan and make tactical decisions and potentially be negotiated with.

I’m a bit confused by this. Why not have them be any other species, or combination of them? If they’re capable of being negotiated with shouldn’t the players feel as bad about killing them as anyone else? I feel like “self-defense” can do a lot of heavy lifting in dungeon crawls, I’ve never really noticed my players feeling bad about killing bandit dwarves or whatnot.

Microsoft has fired two employees who organized an unauthorized vigil at the company’s headquarters

But they contended that Thursday’s event was similar to other Microsoft-sanctioned employee giving campaigns

Seems like employer approval is an important piece.

But I think the most interesting part of the article is

Nasr said his firing was disclosed on social media by the watchdog group Stop Antisemitism more than an hour before he received the call from Microsoft. The group didn’t immediately respond Friday to a request for comment on how it learned about the firing.

I was confused at first, I thought it was trying to say whether the driver defaults to the Nvidia proprietary, and I thought that was already the case

Yeah, I feel like the article would be more persuasive if they gave any examples of what research they are doing which requires these specific old games.

I disagree with one of their points

Network firewalls can also be configured to deny inbound and outbound traffic to and from the physical interface. This remedy is problematic for two reasons: (1) a VPN user connecting to an untrusted network has no ability to control the firewall and (2) it opens the same side channel present with the Linux mitigation.

Sure, they can’t control the network firewall, but why would you do that when you can change your local firewall? Set an iptables rule to drop all traffic going out the physical interface that isn’t destined for the VPN server. I’m 70% sure some vpn clients do this automatically.

For your specific case, sure, but for that quote, I haven’t had those issues in years. I’m also running Mint, but on a desktop and have had zero issues. Mouse “just works,” extra monitors “just work,” and (most surprisingly to me), printer “just works,” games on Steam “just work” with all they’ve done with Proton. I switched to Google docs a long time ago, so at least for me the Office thing isn’t relevant. It natively supports discord, my password manager, Spotify, everything I’ve wanted. I switched my wife’s Mac to it years ago since it had gotten slow from bloat, and she’s been just fine despite not being very tech literate.

Facebook is literally the fifth most hated https://www.axios.com/2023/05/23/corporate-brands-reputation-america

My thought was that it was going to be just about WiFi internal to the house and it was an issue with interference from neighbors (which then gets shut out in the rain).

Look into my eyes and it’s easy to see One and one makes two, two and one makes three It was destiny

I disagree. DM’s always have the ability to put in their own choices and, in this case, room descriptions, regardless of what a module says. But that is work, and one of the things you buy a module for.

To make an extreme example, imagine I sold a campaign module called Blank Slate, where every page just says “and then you decide what happens next” and “decide what rooms are in this dungeon and what monsters are there.”

That’s awesome, reminds me of one of my favorite scenes from the Bourne movies. Bourne knows some agents are coming after him to the building he’s in, so he picks up a phone, calls the police and says “I heard gunshots, I think they’re Americans” and then throws the phone against the wall, fires a few random shots, and leaves. The police then catch the agents sneaking up to the building and arrest them.

I think breaking the illusion would remove the concept of “blame” or vindictiveness from the judicial system, but not punishment. If a cog is broken in your watch, you remove it and get it fixed. You don’t remove it as punishment because the cog chose to misbehave, you do it because it’s necessary to get a fully working clock. Bringing it back to the court example, you put them in jail, not as punishment, but to protect society, rehabilitate, and/or set an example for others.

That’s true, I should have been more careful with my use of the word “rights.” What I meant regarding free will was whether or not they’d have all the same rights as a human. The Animal Welfare Act I think is a good example of where we convey a more limited set of rights to things which can experience pain, but don’t have free will*.

• This is obviously all super debatable and opinions vary, but I think there are at least a decent chunk of people who believe humans have free will and animals do not, Descarte being a famous example.

That would be correct, the judge and jury have no more choice than the murderer, which is none. Hypothetically, the appearance of choice doesn’t mean there is choice or free will. As a slightly tortured analogy, like “perfect” loaded dice, which appear that they could be anything but always give the same result.

Just wanted to plug in case you weren’t already aware, isthereanydeal is a pretty great one stop shop for looking for sales across a ton of storefronts. Pretty easy to import a steam wishlist to it as well.

I definitely agree there, as most philosophical subjects don’t really matter in a real sense. To me, though, this has some real implications regarding (pretty far in the future) AI development. If we were to say/prove humans have free will, that would be a potential bar to clear for when an “entity” is entitled to rights. It’s all largely arbitrary, though, as (at least in the US) we aren’t super rigorous to which animals are entitled to which rights. For instance, the Animal Welfare, which regulates when you have to use anesthesia, defines animals as

Animal means any live or dead dog, cat, nonhuman primate, guinea pig, hamster, rabbit, or any other warmblooded animal, which is being used, or is intended for use for research, teaching, testing, experimentation, or exhibition purposes, or as a pet. This term excludes birds, rats of the genus Rattus, and mice of the genus Mus, bred for use in research; horses not used for research purposes; and other farm animals, such as, but not limited to, livestock or poultry used or intended for use as food or fiber, or livestock or poultry used or intended for use for improving animal nutrition, breeding, management, or production efficiency, or for improving the quality of food or fiber. This term also excludes falconry. With respect to a dog, the term means all dogs, including those used for hunting, security, or breeding purposes