Paranoia, the game where every character is technically engaged in a crime punishable by death at basically all times, and you’re given a number of clones because you are expected to die…a lot. Also the R&D gadgets, like the personal disintegrator which does exactly what it says on the tin - disintegrates your person.
Schadrach
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Cake day: July 11th, 2023
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Like forcing the players into an encounter where all their toolkits are nerfed. Close quarters for casters, magical monsters that can’t be harmed by melee, or NPCs that are way OP for the group and they stick to the Monster Manual to the letter.
When I GM, it depends on just how narrow and just how powerful your particular toolkit is. I’m not going to ensure that you can do whatever your thing is at absolutely every opportunity, and if your schtick becomes well known, enemies capable of planning will plan around it when feasible. The more narrow your schtick is, the more scenarios you might encounter where it does not apply simply by chance (for example, if you’re a flying archer every room in a dungeon won’t gain a minimum 30’ high ceiling to maximize your use of that). The more disproportionately powerful your schtick is compared to other party members, the more likely I am to specifically come up with occasional scenarios meant to make it not apply so someone else gets to shine.
Sometimes I will signpost something is a very bad idea, and if you do it anyways (or do something else absurdly dangerously foolish) I’m not going to pop up a guard rail to save you at the last moment - retrieving your body from somewhere adrift on the astral and your soul from the gemstone the archdevil you pissed off is keeping in his treasury to try to save you is the next adventure hook.
You encounter a huge, elaborate tome, on a concealed lectern, in a library connected by a hidden door directly off the bedroom of a powerful wizard, you detect magic and get extremely powerful auras of conjuration, transmutation and evocation maybe “I flip it open to a random page and start reading aloud, I’ll sound out any words I don’t recognize” is not, in fact, a wise decision. The copy of “Words You Mispronounce And Die: A Primer For Apprentice Wizards” you saw on one of the shelves on the way there, the references to a cursed grimoire of terrible power, the book being bound in the skin of an angel covered in burns and scars, etc, etc should have maybe hinted at that.
Ah, FATE - it’s F.U.D.G.E. with extra icing!
“Where are my testicles, Summer?”
I think the Bible fails on the role-playing game front and I don’t remember any voodoo, but otherwise yeah?
She was religious and this is from the early 80s. It’s not even in the top ten most batshit things she said or wrote. From an early 80s Christian conservative standpoint homosexuality is basically just a more narrow category or sex perversion. She was also one of the big voices in the Satanic Panic in general and considered a subject matter expert, including writing things like interrogation guides for law enforcement.
Here’s a couple of examples of her lunacy:
THE WHO WHAT WHEN WHERE AND HOW OF TEEN SATANISM WHO 1. Adolescents from all walks of life. 2. Many from middle to upper middle class families 3. Intelligent Over or Under Achievers Creative/Curious Some are Rebellious Some have low self esteem and are loners Some children have been abused (physically or sexually) WHEN does this occur? It appears the ages most vulnerable are 11-17 WHERE? 1. Public places such as rock concerts, game clubs in communities or at school. 2. Private parties at a friend’s home. HOW? 1. Through Black Heavy Metal Music 2. Through fantasy role playing games like Dungeons & Dragons (R) 3. Obsession with movies, videos, which have occult themes 4. Collecting and reading/researching occult books 5. Involvement with “Satanic Cults”, through recruitment 6. Some are born into families who pratice “satanic cult rituals” TWO BASIC PRINCIPLES APPLY HERE “Law of Attraction” and the “Law of Invitation” WHAT can be expected? 1. Obsession with occult entertainment 2. Minor to major behavior disorders 3. Committing crimes and status offenses such as: A. Running away B. Graverobbing (such as bones) C. Breaking and entering to steal religious artifacts or sometimes stealing small items to prove loyalty to the group D. Defacing public or private property using “Satanic Graffetti” or related Graffetti E. Threatening to kill (self or others, self mutilation is very common) F. Aggression directed towards family, teachers and authority figures G. Contempt for organized religion H. Supremist attitudes I. Kidnapping or assistance in kidnapping J. Murder K. Suicide pacts among members of the group WHAT can we do? 1. Document all information relating to occult involvement (even if it does not appear relevant at the time) 2. Keep an open mind 3. Stay objective 4. Never assume that an individual is acting along until all other information surrounding the case and individual has been fully investigated. 5. If individual is involved in “satanic activity,” he/she will deny a great deal to protect other members of the group as well as the “satanic philosophy”. 6. Have a team approach, work with a therapist, a clergymen and other helping professionals. 7. Educate the community so that potential tragedies might be avoided.
Don’t forget the woman whose son committed suicide so she created an anti-D&D group called Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons. Her group described D&D as “a fantasy role-playing game which uses demonology, witchcraft, voodoo, murder, rape, blasphemy, suicide, assassination, insanity, sex perversion, homosexuality, prostitution, satanic type rituals, gambling, barbarism, cannibalism, sadism, desecration, demon summoning, necromantics, divination and other teachings.”
Don’t forget Tom Hanks first leading role in the movie Mazes and Monsters, originally titled Dungeons & Dragons, but forced to change it when TSR sued them.
14·7 months agoYou may have nothing to fear right now, but you never know who’s going to be in office soon.
The way I always explain it to people - take any additional government power or access to information you either don’t care about or actively support. Now imagine whoever you oppose/hate the most taking office and trying to use that against your interests. Are you still OK with them having that power? Same principle applies regardless of what power or who’s pushing for it.
It’s like due process - you don’t want any category of alleged violation not to be subject to due process, and if you don’t understand why then it’s time to wrongfully accuse you of doing that so you understand the problem.
6·11 months agoI mean it sounds like it could be video from the charging facility
I mean that’s what I assumed. I can’t imagine a reason one would want a camera watching you charge - like that’s an expense for little if any benefit. And if it was charged at a charging station owned by Tesla, I would be shocked if there wasn’t camera footage or if Tesla didn’t have access to it.
but what the actual fuck they can unlock your car.
I would imagine any car with keyless entry can be unlocked by the manufacturer if they have your VIN. They build the system and pair the keyfobs and locks, they’re bound to have that ability in case something happens to your keys.
You do know there’s a big difference between a “default” option and a “mandatory” setting, right? Specifically that you do, in fact, have a choice to change a default?
Not forcing the user to proactively make a choice is not the same thing as denying the user the ability to choose.
Search engines other than Google seem to be able to index reddit just fine though. I thought the Reddit deal was about API access to make for easier AI training data, also I hadn’t seen anything saying that such a deal would be exclusive to Google.
Who do they have an exclusive deal with? Are there sites you can currently only search on Google? Or browsers or similar that require you to use Google?
The problem is, if one company dominates search, you have no way to evaluate whether they are doing it well.
You could just go to other search engines and run the same queries and compare results.
For example, I did a search on 6 different search engines earlier today looking for a specific Reddit thread related to an update to a certain Skyrim mod without quite naming the mod (because I couldn’t remember the exact name of the mod, and was hoping to find the Reddit thread to get the mod name or Nexus link). All 6 had the Nexus page for the mod itself within the top 3 results, and all of them but Google and Yandex had the Reddit thread in question on the first page.
Google can be REQUIRED to give users A CHOICE of Search Engines.
Don’t they, err, already do this?
I mean a search engine is literally just a website and absolutely nothing prevents you from just going to duckduckgo.com or bing.com or wherever. Don’t think Chrome prevents you from accessing other search engines in general, and last time I used it (admittedly a while back) it had a setting to change the search engine used by default if you just typed something into the address bar.
There’s an argument to make that digital data is by default a post-scarcity sort of thing and that in a post-scarcity environment communism is the only reasonable system. But we don’t operate in a post scarcity environment for physical goods and services, and there’s really not anything we can point to historically that suggests a communist takeover doesn’t do terrible things to availability, quality and variety of food available.
Want to reduce the rushing and door kicking? Take your design cues from AD&D modules S1 and S6. Aka the Tomb of Horrors and the Labyrinth of Madness. Especially the Labyrinth of Madness.
At one point, “cheese pizza” was a term they apparently used on YouTube videos etc due to it having the same abbreviation as CP (Child Pornography).
This in turn was why the Podesta emails led to the whole pizza gate thing - there were a bunch of emails with weird phrasings like going to do cheese pizza for a couple of hours that just aren’t how people talk or write and so internet weirdos thought it was pedo code and then it kinda went insane from there.
I thought female rat, and he was about to tell them his college hookup story and see if they could get his girlfriend awakened, too.
My answer in that case is “You detect no aura” from the non-magical chowder (or maybe they do detect one if it was flavored with prestidigitation), unless it’s an edition where the effect is a cone, and they are sitting across the table from their friend blinged out in magical gear, in which case they are definitely detecting an aura. Several of them. And they’re going to have to take time, focus, and make checks to recognize that none are coming from the chowder.