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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • Reminds me of a thing from work that I think about pretty often.

    I worked someplace that prided itself on being “data driven”. They put stuff on the company tshirts like “Data > Feelings”. Real pretentious shit, but they seemed to pride themselves on making reasonable decisions based on facts and evidence. They’d made fun of other companies for doing stuff based on the whims of CEOs.

    One of the many articles came out about 4 day workweeks being beneficial for everyone involved. At one of the company meetings, someone brought it up and asked the CEO if we could look into it. He just said, “We’re not doing that.” Didn’t ask to read the article. Didn’t look at data. No discussion. Just a snap decision: no.

    People are emotional creatures and many of them are stupid, too. Stupid and spiteful.












  • I didn’t use the word realistic. I called it unsatisfying.

    Also, it’s kind of tired to be like “oh you want rEaLiSm in your game about elf magic??”. You know what people mean when they say that. Given the premises presented, nothing is contradictory enough to break suspension of disbelief. People use “realistic” as a shorthand. Sometimes people use “Verisimilitude” for this.

    Having NPCs react reasonably in some cases (eg: scripted encounters, some law breaking) and not in others is jarring. You see the NPCs standing around the tavern having a chat and you go, “That’s a reasonable scene. I can imagine this.” Then you explode one of them, and they all run around in a panic. Still pretty reasonable. Follows from the premises given. But then you run away and come back, and all of them are back to drinking and chatting. All of them except the one you exploded, who’s still a bloody mess on the floor. For some people, such as myself, this is too much. It’s too high a contrast, and it foregrounds the limits of the game too much to easily suspend disbelief.

    I don’t know what to say. Are you trying to say it clashes with the design? Are you saying every game should have every feature and ‘StarCraft’ should have the nemesis system from the ‘shadow of’ games? I don’t get it.

    I don’t feel like you tried very hard to “get it”.

    The game has a stealth and murder system you’re encouraged to use. I’d like for them to have gone a little further with it. The NPCs sometimes look for you if you fire from stealth, but it’s janky. The rest of the game is generally pretty immersive-sim, but the wheels fall off if you play one of the main playstyles. Unsatisfying.

    I’m not a game developer and I expect you aren’t either, so I don’t know how complex it would be to make the responses to stealth more robust. Maybe add a “There’s been a murder!” state to scenes. But they did a lot of other stuff to cover more niche scenarios, so it wouldn’t be out of character.


  • I’m still kind of disappointed and irritated about an old D&D group. The guy ran a game that was literally patriarchy.

    There was a king who died. He had a daughter, who was ruling competently presently. But he also had an infant son. Now a civil war is brewing because some people want the son on the throne, because that’s the male heir.

    And he just played it straight and seemed to expect us to be like “Oh, obviously the son has a legitimate claim to the throne. and also absolute monarchy is unremarkable”. To his credit he did let us decide which faction to support, but it was kind of exhausting getting a constant stream of “no, absolute male hereditary rule is good and normal”.

    It was a pretty fleshed out setting in terms of details and subfactions, but the core of it was just so very basic and unexamined. No one else seemed to give a shit, though. I did not gel with that group.

    Meanwhile, some time before that I’d had a blast running a game. The players came upon an anarchist collective that had overthrown the old despot, but now there are counter-revolutionaries lurking that want to return the now undead tyrant to the throne. Also the neighboring state is rattling their sabers because they ideologically do not approve of a state without a king.

    So I guess the lesson is games are better when you vibe with the group?



  • While that is fascinating and worth considering, I think the way it’s implemented in the video games is kind of unsatisfying. Specifically, how the NPCs just go back to their idle routine even if that means standing casually on the bodies of their friends. For days.

    The “for days” part is also particular to DnD. You can sleep for days while the world remains static. The rite of thorns never completes. The prisoners are never executed. Not even if you kill half the guards and take a snooze.

    I think the Batman video games did a better job of NPCs freaking out and not just calming back down, but most games don’t invest in that.

    Also bg3 specifically let’s you teleport to safety once you’re 30 meters away, which is extra cheesy.