I dunno, there some necessary context here. I think Requiem for a Dream is a better movie then Iron Man, but I sure as hell wouldn’t pick it as the only movie I’m ever going to watch again.

You’re right that you can come up with pretty good ways to challenge players with certain spells. The problem is that it can be pretty difficult to do on the fly. Assuming the party goes in a direction you haven’t really prepped for, they’re are a lot of abilities that can make it trivial if you forget about them.

There’s a really big, tedious, ongoing discussion on exactly how overrated 5e D&D is and what type of game it wants to be, but it’s fair to say the system has a lot of small things that trivialize challenges. Goodberry means you never have to worry about food ever again. Fly means physical distance is not much of a problem. Pass without trace means stealth will almost always work. Leomunds tiny but means sleeping is almost always safe.

All of these examples can be fixed. Goblins can stack a bunch of rocks on leomunds hut for example. The problem is that it gets repetitive and forced to counter everything all the time.

I agree though that the developers have done a really good job trying to handle all the complexity of turning a tabletop RPG into a video game.

You’re right, you can’t. My bad. Still, a party containing two players who can cast these spells is pretty common too.

Mage hand is the kind of spell that is incredibly useful and dynamic in actual ttrpgs, and incredibly difficult to design around in a video game.

A GM is going to consider the distance and weight limits of the spell, and determine of it makes sense of not. If you stole The One Ring from Frodo, for example, the GM can pivot and make the world react to that.

The video game has to program all possible uses of the spell while also trying to keep a prewritten story on track. If you steal The One Ring from frodo, the game would have to reinvent the plot dynamically, which isn’t really possible. The end result is that they have to severely limit the uses of Mage Hand.

Because Mage Hand is so potentially chaotic, it can’t be as useful as it would seem. The same would go for the spells Fly and Invisibility. Imagine the Black Gate of Mordor. If there was a level 6 wizard, they could use fly + invisibility to get everyone safely over the wall. Now, sure, it would take a while waiting for spell slots, but this is supposed to be the most fortified pass in the entire world. Even GMs have problems with this. Suddenly every remotely secure area needs a mage on staff detecting intruders, or permanent enchantments. At that point, Fly might as well not exist.

Edit: I forgot that fly and invisibility both require concentration. Oops. Still, now you only need a level 6 mage and a level 4 mage, which is still pretty easy to pull off.

You don’t think voting demographics would change radically if people could go out and vote on legislation directly instead of a bribed politician voting for them?

Representative Democracy*

Importantly, New Vegas was not made by Bethesda

We didn’t expect the story to be bad? The only games of theirs that had good stories were Daggerfall and Morrowind. Oblivion’s story was… fine at best. Skyrim’s was hot garbage. Daggerfall’s story is pretty impenetrable too.

I honestly can’t remember more than a handful of characters in any of their games. Of the characters I do remember, I think the jester assassin from the dark brotherhood is the only one I had any kind of affection for.

Bethesda games have always been incredibly shallow. How is there anyone that doesn’t see this?

Alts aren’t throwaway accounts though

There’s a tonne in there, and a lot of spoilers.

Have they made any improvements to split screen? It’s pretty unplayable right now.

I’ll die before I install Facebook Messenger

Some things should only be connected to the intranet

Is this bad? I really wouldn’t want YouTube to recommend me random garbage if they didn’t know what I already watched

Thank dog. I love that both platforms get reports, but it sure was hard to find the right ones

I definitely agree that they do stupid things because of short term gains and narcissism. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if they’re just grumpy bosses mad that it’s harder to boss people around.

I also worry though about portraying executives as buffoons. Most of their short term decisions that look stupid make a lot of sense when you look at it through the lense of them just not caring that it makes life worse for other people. It’s honestly probably a combination of a bunch of dumb and greedy things.

Sure, but if everyone who can goes remote, all that rent money dries up. Most also don’t directly own buildings to rent, but rather have investments in companies that do. If those other companies go under then they lose money on investments. I don’t have any inside knowledge though, this is just the conclusion I’ve been able to come to. Other than just being control freaks.

I don’t think there’s some shadowy Illuminati organisation behind it. They are pretty blatent when they manipulate things.

That said, I do think there are a lot of investors and analysts that have come to the same conclusion and are talking to each other and passing info to their clients.

A lot of large companies and executives have investments in real estate. If everyone stopped using offices all of a sudden, they would lost a bunch of money because the space wouldn’t be in demand anymore.

They’re going to have to buy me a car and pay for gas and parking before I’ll take a job where I’m full time in the office