It’s not that much slower. Our 20a outlets give 2,400w, while yours gove 3000w. And, it’s still faster than a stovetop kettle. Its more that we don’t make hot tea very regularly, while drip coffee was the dominant hot drink for so long.

Eh, apples to oranges.

A 60$ game today is so unlike a 60$ two or three decades ago.

No physical medium. Much larger market and (potential at least) sales volume.

Proliferation of game engines; games don’t need to ‘reinvent the wheel’ each time, or write machine code anymore.

On top of that, there’s many other revenue streams. Not that I think this model is ‘fair and good’, but look at the mobile market, where a sale cost of $0 is king.

Something to be said about ‘lower cost incentivizing bad practices’ (as the article discusses), and yeah, some games could raise their price. But it’s far fron 1-1, as ‘sales volume’ trumps ‘sale price’ in importance.

I’m talking about the stuttering, caused primarily not recalculating shaders. Something I just dealt with the entirety of my first playthrough of ER. But the fact that it still isn’t fixed really makes me not want to play, or to pay them money.

Yeah, I’m holding off for a sale on this one. I liked Elden Ring well enough, but the performance issues are infuriating. Baffling that it still isn’t fixed.

Short answer: read Jack Vance’s ‘tales of a dying earth’. It’s the reason dnd magic is called ‘vancian’.

Longer answer: in that series, magic works by just remembering words, and then saying them. But these magic words are powerful things, weighty in the mind, hard to carry. And, when said, they tear themselves out of your mind, causing you to forget them.

So, not ‘spell slots’ per se, but the idea is you’re prepping spells almost as a ‘potion’, something you carry in your mind, and consume to cast out a spell.

Mmm, psionics, Shadow Weave Magic, Initiate of Mystra.

A min-maxed character is one with dumpstates and weaknesses. A powergamed character is one with fewer weaknesses than a ‘normal’ character. Anything that can challange an OP build will wipe the floor with a party of ‘standard’ characters.

If they’re actually powergaming, the likely answer is: “No, I’m immune.” Or: “okay, with my buffs, I get to add +200 to this.”

It really depends.

I’m thinking about 3.5 in particular, where an optimized wizard will be able to do the job of the rest of the party (assuming they’re built to be fine, but not power-gaming), better than them.

There’s no real in-world way to balance that. Either the DM Fiats the power-gamer weaker, the DM tells the power gamer “no”, or the rest of the party power games to. Its just too unbalanced.

If we’re talking 5e, that’s all out the window then. If 3.5’s power runs from 0-10, the strongest 5e build is like a 6, and the weakest is like a 3. Its still extra work for the DM to balance, but can be done all in-world without needing to rely on metagame fiat.

And, of course, there’s lots of other systems out there, where the above can be more true or less true depending on what kind of game it is, though 3.5’s power ceiling is probably higher than 95% of the systems out there.

Eh, disagree. Unless everyone is power gaming to the same degree (which can be fun!), an OP character being adequately challenged will probably result in all the other players feeling irrelevant.

Overall, a good video. I’m definitely opinionated about rpgs and editions of DnD, and don’t share his blanket love for each edition, but he’s right that the vitriol over edition wars are silly.

I don’t really agree with his WoW take; of just, being able to hop from DnD to WoW for a few months to have fun. I hate WoW, from a personal enjoyment level. I don’t knock anyone for enjoying it, but I’d rather do just about anything else. My friends jumped onto it on launch in highschool, and I joined them for a week or so, and I genuinely do not see the appeal. I’m not trying to be bitter or anything, so much as saying I am not able to just, go and have fun with WoW, or frankly any MMO I’ve tried.

But, there’s no RPG I’ve ever touched that I feel that way about. I don’t really like 4e for several reasons, but overall, if my group otherwise really wanted to play more of it, I know I could have fun playing or running it. Outside of truly dogshit ‘games’ like FATAL, I’m sure I could have fun playing just about any RPG, and even a FATAL one-shot could be fun, despite the rules (though, it’d veer awfully close to just laughing at a live-reading of the rules than really ‘playing the game’)

Still, I have no real interest in 5.5. Frankly, I currently have no real interest in 5e at the moment, though that’s more from ‘edition fatigue’. Like, I have many complaints about 5e (I’m not sure if you could play a lot of 5e and not notice it’s mechanical flaws), but I played it enough to get tired of it, which is a compliment in a lot of ways.

But I love playing new games. I’ve fallen in love with PF2e recently (though with 2 campaigns hitting level 14-ish, some fatigue is creeping in), and we’ve giving ICON a run. I’m looking forward to trying Exalted Essence and the new WoD stuff when a rpg slot opens up (running 3 games right now as it is). And I’ll probably return to DnD at some point, but nothing from 5.5 feels like it really ‘fixes’ the issues I have with 5e, or otherwise ‘sparks excitement’ in me. But also, it looks fine.

Though, if the really do centralize it to an official platform, I definitely won’t be touching it; I hate DnD beyond as it is, and how there are no PDFs for the 5e books (officially), which is a bummer but able to be worked around. And, even if they try to centralize 5.5 digitally, there will definitely still be books, and probably still be PDFs able to be found, though I’ll probably want to avoid the edition on principle anyway if that is the case.

I think it should just crib notes from PF2e; make it a bonus action, and also a 1st level spell. Though, they should also rewrite the confusing ‘no slotted bonus action spell with non-bonus action slotted spell’ bandaid too.

I miss 3.5’s cloistered cleric. I’m glad PF2e included it as a core option, and I wish Onednd’s holy order subclass choice separated it out further, making ‘robed scholar’ clerics a central option, instead of just an objectively worse choice than wearing the heaviest armor you’re proficient in (usually medium).

Yeah. It was worse in 3.5 ironically; despite casters having more downsides than 5e, spells were overall stronger. It did leave this narrow window at levels 1 and 2 where martials were basically strictly better, but caster quickly skyrocketted in power, especially if you were playing with prestige classes.

Spell power was reigned in for 5e, and pretty sharply at that (most notably from adding Concentration). But, they also washed away caster downsides, by making cantrips at will, casters not quite so fragile, and by softening Vancian casting. 5e is still absolutely more balanced than 3.5, but that’s not saying a lot; 3.5’s power level was all over the place.

Still, I feel like 5e’s levels 1-5 are pretty balanced, and the martial/caster imbalance doesn’t really become painful until like, level 12.

I think the more important balancing is just ‘making battlemaster maneuvers resourceless and available to all classes’.

But I’m not against ‘limit break’ as a short rest ‘charge’ available to most martials.

TBH, the above is basically the way PF2e handles martials; at least half of their class feats are more or less ‘resourceless maneuvers’, and many martials have access to ‘focus spells’, which are basically just short rest charges for exclusive class features, that just happen to mechanically be considered spells (though, notably, PF2e doesn’t give fighter focus spells, making them nearly 100% at-will).

Personally, I think the most important fix to the martial-caster imbalance is to nerf casters, who just are too strong, but A) that’s basically what PF2e already did, and its largely complained about (though I love it). And B) Its not strictly necessary, if you buff Martials by a large margin (though, imo, that starts to get into like, demigod territory that I don’t love).

In the older editions, like the ones you’re talking about, casters had serious downsides. Between being very fragile, spells being interrupteable, and sometimes having different XP amounts, casters were kinda ‘glass cannons’, and needed a martial frontline.

In 3.5 and 5e, casters have had these harsh downsides decreased or removed, while not otherwise losing power. They are more or less strictly better than martials, in the sense they can do 90%+ of what martials can do better than they can do it, while also doing several other things. And the few things martials do do better, it’s by slight degrees.

It’s not just that casters are powerful, it’s that they’re powerful and flexible, able to be top tier in several different roles at the same time, and can change what roles they cover by resting and swapping spells.

Whereas martials can sometimes build to be top tier in one role, but they’re largely locked into that one role, or can build to be okay in several roles (and be outclassed by casters in all of them).

I dunno, I really don’t get either of them. They just seem like dreadfully boring games. Played like, 6 hours of each, and I just, don’t get the appeal, at all.

Movies and TV are boring. In the past two decades, there’s been a small handful of stuff that’s watchable, but most of the media is like, painfully boring.

None? I’ve never really understood the appeal of ‘rewatching stuff’. My favorite movie(s) are the LotR ones, and I’ve probably watched it through… three times over my life?

Consuming content illegally is by definition a crime, yes. It also has no effect on your output. A summary or review of that content will not be infringing, it will still be fair use.

That their use is infringing and a crime is your opinion.

“My opinion”? have you read the headline? Its not my opinion that matters, its that of the prosecution in this lawsuit. And this lawsuit indeed alleges that copyright infringement has occurred; it’ll be up to the courts to see if the claim holds water.

I’m definitely not sure that GPT4 or other AI models are copyright infringing or otherwise illegal. But, I think that there’s enough that seems questionable that a lawsuit is valid to do some fact-finding, and honestly, I feel like the law is a few years behind on AI anyway.

But it seem plausible that the AI could be found to be ‘illegally distributing works’, or otherwise have broken IP laws at some point during their training or operation. A lot depends on what kind of agreements were signed over the contents of the training packages, something I frankly know nothing about, and would like to see come to light.

I mean, you can do that, but that’s a crime.

Which is exactly what Sarah Silverman is claiming ChatGPT is doing.

And, beyond a individual crime of a person reading a pirated book, again, we’re talking about ChatGPT and other AI magnifying reach and speed, beyond what an individual person ever could do even if they did nothing but read pirated material all day, not unlike websites like The Pirate Bay. Y’know, how those website constantly get taken down and have to move around the globe to areas where they’re beyond the reach of the law, due to the crimes they’re doing.

I’m not like, anti-piracy or anything. But also, I don’t think companies should be using pirated software, and my big concern about LLMs aren’t really for private use, but for corporate use.