Max Nichols

Yeah, you gotta do something like “[4th Grade vocabulary word]”

Bonus points if it has no conceivable connection to the content of the game

Though to be fair it’s been a long time since I’ve seen it given a label, hahah

It’s usually categorized as “edutainment” or “simulation”, in my experience.

One of the worst part about chronic, oscillating arthritis pain is that I can never tell the difference between a repetitive motion injury and arthritis.

My wrists & shoulder hurt! Is it because I’ve fucked them up or because my joints are under attack from my immune system? Impossible to say!

Sounds like a great resource! I bet there's a lot of gold in those pages

The doctors say it's terminal

Normally we keep this clothes hamper around the living room specifically to be his bed. It has a 2-foot layer of cushions and pillows inside for him, but sometimes he feels the need to walk on the wild side

A clothes hamper made out of soft coiled rope is upside down on the carpet. On top of the hamper is a car that's all white except for a grey streak on top of his head. He's sleeping sitting up.

Here, have a picture of Alfador sleeping on his clothes-hamper bed that he turned upside down

Ultimately, even if we draw slightly different lines here, I think blaming children who were coerced into signing up for the military with propaganda and lies, is a waste of energy. They should know better! But we certainly aren’t equipping them to know better, as a society

My thread yesterday:

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They signed up to work at the long-range murder factory, murdering people they can’t see in service of the shareholders of the military industrial complex.

Sounds like a pretty immoral thing to have done right out of the gate.

I am down with saying “a poor 20-year-old who joined up so they could go to college, who was told to shoot at a target they can’t see by a superior officer at pain of court marshal, doesn’t bear full responsibility”

But they sure as hell bear SOME

Do we need to extend grace to people pulling triggers on targets they can’t see?

Does “it was an accident” cut it?

Does “we had a real military target next to it” matter, especially when we are the aggressors?

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At a certain point though everyone bears culpability for the triggers they’re pulling, right? The US military has been an aggressive force that kills civilians in the name of extremely questionable missions for longer than any current soldiers have served. Ignorance isn’t much of an excuse.

The only reason we don't have a draft anymore is because conservative and neoliberal policies have intentionally created enough precarity that they can use a carrot instead of a stick to fill out the military

Oh I blocked the person I was quoting and forgot it would mess up my thread, hah.

It's fine, it was just garden variety "this stuff is bad but the troops, the troops are good" shit

And every time we order them to kill children we destroy their humanity further. Or they didn’t have it to begin with.

You don’t love the troops, you’re just bloodthirsty

Worshiping the troops erases their humanity and struggles, glorifies war, and only hurts them further.

It mythologizes them as people who fight good fights (they do not), people who are willing to accept death for their country (when they’re mostly children coerced into killing&dying for the rich)

A pretty significant chunk of the armed forces in the US join up from economically precarious backgrounds, because there is no social mobility or safety nets. We’ve coerced many into taking the only out they see

Anyone who _actually_ cares about the troops is fighting wealth inequality

It’s awful, yeah. Extremely fatphobic film

I don't know if I was ultimately right or not because I got laid off before we left alpha.

But I think I probably was.

When I was working on a MOBA, Infinite Crisis, the leads wanted us to add... I forget if it was achievements or daily quests.

I was staunchly against it because I thought that, in a game where randos rely on each other, it was a horrible idea to give individuals objectives other than winning

That guy has never heard of the concept of chemistry

People want a version that runs on PC, outside the Playstation ecosystem, and recent big 1st party Sony games have generally been releasing on PC. That's where the desire mostly comes from.

Is Oregon Trail an RPG?

This is very grognard system designer of me. Players are not usually thinking in these terms, or consciously aware of this kind of napkin math happening in the back of their mind. Finding hyper-optimized engines is something only a subset of players try to do. But this dynamic exists for them all!

And if your engine isn’t good enough to get you through a dungeon, are you really strong enough to move on, anyways? xD

Of course we SHOULD consider the ecosystem of purchased, and dropped, items or money to be part of our party’s engine! But that’s a leap players often don’t make.

Are there RPGs that aren’t about overcoming resource attrition? Probably, but I can’t think of any.

So. Though loss aversion may still be a bigger factor, I think this is a huge reason why so may players dislike using consumables in RPGs: they don’t feel like part of the resource engine.

In Trails of Cold Steel it looks like me equipping all the +CP regen items on Rean, giving him a x2 damage for the first attack per battle, and then having him use his super attack to simultaneously 1-shot every encounter and restore his CP from the kills.

See? An engine.

This often looks like, well, healing spells and “restore mana on kill” stuff.

In a game like Metaphor, which tried to make your MP a time limit, it looks like changing all your party members to the Mage class and grinding 80 battles to get +2 mp per kill (and feel like you beat the system)