It wouldn’t be my first choice, but it’ll probably do the job. Depends on what you want to do with it. There’s fewer people choosing this path, which means that when things go wrong, you’ll have fewer sources of information to help.

Some old Dell office PC with a good amount of RAM and an SSD would be just as well.

What are you even on about? If there’s a flaw in the system, the best that can be done is make it clear to the group that we shouldn’t abuse this, and hope the official rules are changed at some point.

If nothing has happened, then nothing needs to be done. I sometimes float exploits in the rules past my friends for various games, but make it clear I have no intention of playing that way.

I even tested something in Terraforming Mars this past weekend. I made it clear with the group ahead of time that I wanted to try something, what the strategy was, and how I would be playing. They were all fine with it, and it turned out the strategy was broken as hell. Won by 12 points against a fairly experienced group. It’s also a boring way to play that game and I wouldn’t care to do it again.

That’s also how I know that it’s fruitless to expect rules to avoid these situations entirely. They must be handled socially. Any other tool is inadequate.

What we infer from it all is that someone is using a rule in a way that’s detrimental to the group. We may want to change the rule, or it may be time to have a talk, or it may be time to kick them out.

As far as assumptions go, that cuts both ways All I’m saying is that we don’t take any of the options above off the table.

Yet ostracizing people is a more acceptable position than a rules patch?

Yes. If you can’t get someone to knock off bad behavior, the rules do not matter.

If the rules aren’t something to be changed, why do they charge so much for the rules revision they just put out?

There are good reasons to change rules. People breaking social norms is not one of them.

DnD isn’t just a set of rules, though. It is inherently a social activity, and that means there has to be a certain level of expectation for social norms. If your group has toxic people in it, they will be toxic while playing tic-tac-toe.

The solution is to employ social pressure or ostracism for those people. We can certainly modify rules that have proven abusive in the past, but enforcing rules of conduct must always be the first line of defense.

If it’s enough negative thoughts pile up, they’ll eventually breach a threshold where people avoid the company. I was looking forward to Metroid Prime 4, but I’m thinking of skipping it now.

Right, I think that achievement only happens in the sequals.

deleted by creator

I’m not so sure. It’s possible Nintendo opted for a carrot rather than a stick in this case.

This doesn’t seem to have been started with a public C&D letter like usual. Yuzu (the previous Switch emulator that was taken down) incorporated some proprietary Nintendo information, which is why Nintendo had a legal lever against them. They don’t have one in this case, yet it still came down. Plus, everything seems to be have been going on very quiet behind the scenes.

If you were an emulator writer and Nintendo came and offered you life changing money in exchange for ending the project, would you take it? I would have a very hard time turning that down. Nintendo also doesn’t want a flood of yokels trying to start the project up again hoping to receive the same offer; most would fail, but one or two might take off. Better to let the threat be implied.

This is just speculation, of course, but something about the way this has unfolded feels a little different.

There are only so many programmers who are good enough to create an emulator, and a lot of them are already doing other projects. The Switch is also a very complicated system, and it needs a small team to pull it off.

I actually love rules lawyering, but it has to be done away from the table, and done with a certain amount of good faith. And don’t get mad when others rules lawyer you back.

In 7th Ed 40k, I found a way to make the Tau Stormsurge to be even more ridiculous than it already was. It clearly conflicted with RAI. I had to talk it out with another Tau player, who was a real lawyer, to find a way to invalidate it. He had to pull out actual lawyer tricks of carefully reading the rule to disentangle it, and he agreed it wasn’t at all obvious.

But I never played with that interpretation, and never intended to. Tau players already have a reputation for playing like dicks.

You are 100% free to live out your pile of dust fantasy. I let you be a pile of dust. Isn’t that what you wanted?

If a guy is doing what you’re doing in this thread at the table, then yeah, I’d support them in leaving you there.

That’s probably the path I’d take as a DM if I had a player insisting on rules lawyering like OP. OK, you get to “play” as a pile of dust. Have fun sitting there until random wind currents blow you around.

I think there’s a way to reconcile it, but it requires people to behave themselves. It can still be under a CC license, but also behind a pay link for the author. Yes, we could get it from somewhere for free, but that takes more effort and we’re not supporting the original creator.

This is basically mutual aid applied to non-physical goods. We know you still need to make a living in capitalism, and we’ll agree to exchange useful things for money under that system until we have a better one.

There’s also an argument similar to the one for streaming services (the one the services themselves have forgotten in the last few years). Yes, we can pirate it, but that takes effort, the sites involved have all sorts of shady advertisements and try to infect your computer with Windows XP viruses, and we can get all we want and more for ten bucks a month.

That’s more of a Japanese company thing than something specific to Nintendo.

Not that it makes it OK, but this is a country that looked at how workers are treated in America and decided the problem was not going hard enough.

Some people really don’t understand layered security.

Too many of them are programmers.

In a capitalist context, sure.

The idea of a socialist society is that there isn’t a burning need to work beyond what’s needed to keep life going. You can focus on art, or writing, or anything else creative. There’s no particular need to legally protect what you create, because you’re doing it for the pure enjoyment of creativity in the first place. Your livelihood isn’t threatened by someone else copying it. If anything, you’re delighted that someone else takes enjoyment from it.

And if someone wanted to feed your art to an AI model, that’s fine, too. Who cares? That machine can’t replace your personal creative drive. This is only a problem now because capitalism forces artists to make money off their art or do something else to make ends meet.

There’s a model that id used for open sourcing their engines. The source code is open, but the assets (textures, models, sounds, etc.) are still copyrighted and you still have to buy the game to get them legally. This means the company still sells copies on Steam or wherever, and games that replace all the assets can still sell them without any licensing costs, too.

I’m a little surprised this model never caught on. Even id only ever published the engine to the previous game–Quake 3 was open sourced a little after Doom 3 was released–and the practice seems to have stopped when John Carmack left.

Possibly because nobody has tested it in court, or some other subtle legal issue?