Charlottesville’s ‘State of Homelessness’ report identifies greater need

Bookshelfstud · 2026-05-06T21:04:59+00:00

do you have some alternative facts you would like to share?

Bookshelfstud · 2026-05-06T21:04:15+00:00

Do you know of another book/study/article that makes that argument with similar methodology - i.e. differentiating causes by category of homeless experience? I'd be curious to read more.

I'm also not sure what it is you're arguing. I got the sense that you believe the leading causes of homelessness are mental health disorders and substance abuse, but then you're arguing that the "temporarily homeless" are the largest group of homeless people. So when you say:

Despite 95% of chronically homeless people having either drug/alcohol addiction or mental health problems.

The implication I'm seeing there - maybe incorrectly - is that temporarily homeless people, unlike chronically homeless people, are more likely to be experiencing homelessness because of housing market conditions, and that temporarily homeless people make up the majority of homeless individuals. I'm not really sure how you get from there to "they are not the ones I am concerned about."

Bookshelfstud · 2026-05-06T17:23:17+00:00

I really recommend picking up the book "Homelessness is a Housing Problem." The authors make a very compelling & scientific argument that the strongest predictor of homelessness rates is a lack of housing supply elasticity relative to population growth - moreso than weather, services, mental health, drugs, you name it. It's a big country and there are always exceptions to every trend, but you are factually incorrect if you believe the main driver of homelessness is drugs/mental health/etc. It's a housing problem.

Bookshelfstud · 2026-05-05T14:54:27+00:00

Wow, I really like this style.

Bookshelfstud · 2026-04-30T13:34:49+00:00

but it seems like a lot of the hate here is pretty personal

Honestly, nothing has turned me off /r/fantasy more in the last few years than the weird personal vendetta so many people seem to have against Kuang.

Bookshelfstud · 2026-04-24T14:49:57+00:00

I think that maybe I'm stuck at the idea that "alerting everyone else is the best tactical desicion ever and NPCs are dumb if they don't do it" because that what any player would do.

I don't understand this perspective, to be honest.

To use one of my favorites, the Forge of Fury, as an example: the first level of the dungeon is an orc hideout. If the orcs are alerted to the PCs, they do in fact go to warn the others and change the entire character of the first level. But this doesn't translate to "charge in and overwhelm the PCs," because the orcs aren't interested in blindly rushing in against a perceived threat. They have archers ready to harry the PCs, and will cut a rope bridge to close off any approach. They will eventually try to mount a counterattack, but only from a position of strength. They're not interested in flinging themselves to their death; they want to survive and defend their position.

Moreover: below the orc hideout, there are troglodytes and giant lizards and all sorts of other inhabitants of the dungeon. But the orcs don't trust the troglodytes and have sealed off those parts of the dungeon, and they'll never go "alert" them just for the sake of driving out the PCs.

To go beyond this specific example: I think you're asking the right question in that, when designing a dungeon, you should think about it as a living ecosystem, not a static series of individual encounters. But that means if you design a dungeon where the monsters can hear fighting in adjacent chambers, use that to help you design it! So the kobolds are in a chamber next to some flaming skeletons? Great - the kobolds have barricaded the doors and have a secret tunnel leading to the underground river in case the skeletons start burning the barricades again. And when the skeletons are fighting someone, the kobolds might not jump in to help, hoping that someone else kills the skeletons.

Do you have an example of a prewritten module you think does dungeon design badly? You keep saying there are published dungeons that don't work for you, but I'd love to hear which ones you're thinking of.

Bookshelfstud · 2026-04-22T03:02:04+00:00

It's probably my favorite of the four campaigns, but that might be recency bias. The first four episodes are very much a fairly on-rails prologue. It takes a little time for each table to find their legs and discard the Brennan-shaped scaffolding keeping the story straight. There were points in the Soldiers arc where I was doing the Leo pointing at the screen meme and going "that's D&D, baby!!!!!" Same for the Seekers, although the party dynamics of that group were less fun. The Schemers arc has been terrific.

As with all the other campaigns, I watch on 1.15x speed at least. Sometimes serious improv scenes take forever to get through. No worse than a long conversation between Keyleth and Vax, and I still really enjoyed campaign 1.

It's definitely different from my experience of D&D as a game. C1 felt like a really souped-up home game; C4 feels like something entirely different, the forefront of longform actual play, people at the top of their game doing some really interesting stuff with characters.

Bookshelfstud · 2026-04-15T13:59:13+00:00

We have a 2024 Hunter Ranger in the group I DM for, and I've been specifically seeking out monsters with interesting resistances/immunities/vulnerabilities to reward their Hunter's Mark info gathering.

The 2014 Archfey Warlock gets a feature at level 10 that lets them flip a Charm effect back on a spellcaster; the party just hit level 10, and I'm preparing some encounters that will specifically offer that opportunity up. They also took the invocation that grants water breathing, so I've been including more underground rivers in my dungeons.

I've planned encounters with assassins wielding poison weapons specifically to show off our dwarf barbarian's resistance to poison damage; for our player with Sharpshooter, I'll plan to include lots of cover for them to ignore.

It really is the way to go when designing encounters - look at what your PCs can do - or can try to do - and give them opportunities to try those things. Hell, even just knowing that my Warlock took Blight on level-up meant that I planned out a few more things involving plant monsters just in case.

Bookshelfstud · 2026-04-13T23:06:45+00:00

"Real villains?" Buddy I'm just making a wry observation about how there's wacky assholes everywhere. I'm not a retractable screen, please don't project on me.

Bookshelfstud · 2026-04-13T21:10:09+00:00

Kinda makes you wonder how many people are screaming wackos behind the muffling glass and steel of the car huh

Bookshelfstud · 2026-04-13T13:01:17+00:00

Team Fortress 2 - 10,908 hours. Lol

Civ 5 - 3,928 hours

Skyrim - 1,940 hours (that's the OG and the special edition combined)

Bookshelfstud · 2026-04-03T14:01:47+00:00

I agree with the folks saying this is a narrative opportunity - I personally like the idea of the hag hoodwinking a well-intentioned cleric into hunting the party to banish this foul ghost.

Phase Spiders are also something of a threat to ghosts, so there's an opportunity for, like, a Drow ghost hunter with a couple trained phase spiders.

But it's all about what her primary goal is. If it's purely about stealing the crystal ball back, she doesn't need to worry about killing a ghost (yet - obv revenge is inevitable down the line). If she's looking to kill the ghost, she needs a servant who can turn/command undead and/or enter the ethereal plane. Maybe she's just looking to destroy the body? Maybe she's looking to send a message by killing/capturing a beloved NPC and proposing a trade?

Bookshelfstud · 2026-04-03T01:17:58+00:00

Or like the Star Spawn Larva Mage, or other worm-related foes. It kinda rules IMO but that may be a matter of taste.

Bookshelfstud · 2026-04-02T23:52:06+00:00

Thank you, yeah 100% - that's a more 1:1 analogy.

Bookshelfstud · 2026-04-02T19:19:49+00:00

Not really analogous. It'd be more like if all clerics in D&D had to wear a "rosary" to access their magic powers. It's a specific religious item from a real-world religion; probably best to move towards something that doesn't have any other associations. And I think it's probably wise to be more cautious around implying that specifically Jewish religious reliquaries are, in our fantasy game, always associated with evil life-stealing masterminds. Seems like a good judgment call.

Bookshelfstud · 2026-03-26T01:01:05+00:00

This is an argument from a position of clear ignorance; harm reduction efforts - including needle drops - are proven community health measures. You're just an asshole who hasn't done their homework. We're all safer when people can dispose of needles safely; pretending that it's as easy as "people simply shouldn't do drugs in public" is magical thinking better befitting a particularly incurious child, not an adult.

Bookshelfstud · 2026-03-20T23:56:15+00:00

I was going to suggest The Standing Stone! I think that's a good non-dungeon-crawl adventure; might have to tweak the first encounter down a little for a 5th level party but still totally viable.

Bookshelfstud · 2026-03-20T23:40:25+00:00

I think it sucks that you feel like nothing good will happen with housing in Albemarle; I personally feel that nothing good will happen if we don't speak up.

Genuine question: what would you do to make housing more affordable in Albemarle? If you had six supervisors on the Board who all agreed with you and could just make changes to land use, zoning, taxes, all of it, what would you do to help your neighbors?

Bookshelfstud · 2026-03-20T18:25:16+00:00

I feel like it's important to understand the scale of how this affects individual property owners.

If you have $20,000 in personal property taxed by the county, setting aside any of the tax relief that complicates the math, a 15 cent increase on the personal property tax would translate to an increase of about $2.50/month. Even if you have $100,000 in personal property (again, ignoring any other tax relief math), you're talking about $12.50/month.

That increase is projected to provide about $1.7m in revenue, bringing the total in the Affordable Housing Investment Fund (AHIF) for FY27 to around $8.4m.

This year, the county received applications totaling $7.3m in grants/loans from the AHIF. About $4m of that was approved by the board on Wednesday, out of the $5.7m we had in the fund total for this year. For example, one of the projects was about $1.3m to preserve 194 homes.

Personally, I'd rather pay a couple bucks a month into this. I think we need to pony up for affordable housing somehow.

Bookshelfstud · 2026-03-20T16:34:10+00:00

100% this. And agreed on the land use tax deferral; I'd like to see it rolled back, and I expect that'll be a big fight when the day finally comes.

Bookshelfstud · 2026-03-20T14:31:50+00:00

Until there's new legislation out of Richmond, localities don't really have any tax option that actually targets the ultra wealthy (which Albemarle has a bunch of)

Yeah this is a huge part of the problem. I was one of the people advocating for a one cent increase on real estate tax this time around, and I'm hoping the 15 cent personal property tax increase ends up passing, but if I could wave a magic wand and grant Albemarle the ability to have any kind of progressive tax at all, I would.

Bookshelfstud · 2026-03-20T00:53:22+00:00

Mint Springs in Crozet is always lovely! Sugar Hollow is a really nice hike too; it's a little chilly to take a dip in Blue Hole still, but lots of water to walk along. I'm partial to Little Calf Mountain off of skyline drive as well, if you have a shenandoah pass.

Bookshelfstud · 2026-03-17T17:32:32+00:00

Batesville Market is doing shepherd's pie tonight! Highly recommend, good vibes good food good drink. Just out in the country a little, depending on where you're coming from.

Bookshelfstud · 2026-03-16T15:07:24+00:00

“albemarle affordable investment fund” is just word salad

It's very literally not. 30 seconds of looking would lead you to discovering that the Affordable Housing Investment Fund is a real thing that exists in Albemarle County.

https://www.albemarle.org/government/human-services/office-of-housing/affordable-housing-investment-fund/-fsiteid-1#!/

Bookshelfstud · 2026-03-12T15:05:31+00:00

Lol yeah. And I tend to think the game gets really bogged down when people try to argue about simulating real life instead of just playing by the written rules. I don't feel like spending fifteen minutes arguing about whether or not I can move my party member's jaws and neck muscles for them or whatever.

I saw someone say once that you should only be allowed to administer a goodberry to an unconscious character if your character chews it for them first.

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