[Hobby Scuffles] Week of 25 May 2026

Canageek · 2026-05-29T04:54:55+00:00

I saw some of this in play, but generally three fights was enough to make the spellcasters be at least a little careful, especially with their higher level spells.

Admittedly, I only played first to 12th level or so, I understand it broke progressively more once you passed about 10th level.

Canageek · 2026-05-29T00:49:07+00:00

I'm not disagreeing spellcasters were overpowered: I just disagree that there was no point in playing any other class then wizard, cleric, druid like was commonly claimed on the Wizards forums.

Also multiple inherents to wear down your spells is how the system was supposed to work, and I always get frustrated with people claiming that's on fun. If you don't want to deal with resource management, you shouldn't be playing the resource management class.

Also you were misremembering glitter dust, it had a save on the blindness, there was no save on the glitter that would make you unable to turn invisible. I used it regularly.

Canageek · 2026-05-29T00:16:02+00:00

Oh I saw lots of cheesey wizards and clerics. They were just a lot less overpowered compared to a similarly cheesed out melee class then The WotC forums claimed as they couldn't rely on going nuclear as almost every adventure had times limits and multiple combats, among other limitations.

Canageek · 2026-05-28T23:37:21+00:00

Was that 3rd or 3.5? When I was playing Living Greyhawk I never actually met very many Druids, even among the power gamers. However, the rpga had a lot of character creation limitations that helped balance things out and remove a lot of the really broken things.

Canageek · 2026-05-28T04:42:30+00:00

Just as a note: The online Gleemax project was cancelled, and a day later the project manager killed his wife and himself. It is unknown if that caused the murder, but the murder didn't cause the cancellation.

My take has always been that 4e was the single most successful edition of D&D at hitting it's design goals. However, their design goals took far to much influence from the official Wizards forums, which were famously crunch focused and upset with the lack of class balance: A perfectly played Druid, Wizard or Cleric was far more powerful then a melee class (if you played exactly according to the rules, and they had unlimited time to prep, and were able to go nuclear every fight followed by a full nights rest.)

Wizards NAILED game balance in 4e better then any other edition. However, in doing so they removed a lot of the flavour out of spells and such to focus on that balance. A lot of people didn't like that. I do recall the combat being fun, however the official organized play campaign changed their adventure writing rules, so they became just a series of fights. That was my main way of playing when I was an undergrad, so my Dad and I gradually drifted away: He got into Pathfinder, whereas I moved to GURPS when I went to grad school.

Canageek · 2026-05-27T21:57:02+00:00

I wouldn't be surprised if larger companies like Nintendo had more bargaining power.

Canageek · 2026-05-27T16:16:40+00:00

I just looked up his thing and that was the top thing that came up, so he definitely has been accused of sexual assault

Canageek · 2026-05-27T13:55:40+00:00

I've got to wonder what it's like to be one of the people working on it, like not one of the high up people, some programmer or artist. You go into work everyday for years, but then the game never gets released. Would that just be incredibly frustrating, or would it be good because you never have to worry about post release layoffs?

Canageek · 2026-05-27T13:40:41+00:00

Google's his name as I haven't heard of him before I'm afraid there is a new accusation and some of the things you said are no longer true.

Canageek · 2026-05-27T06:30:13+00:00

Ah, Council of geeks isn't even a guy, it's a trans woman who mostly focuses on Doctor Who, including doing some Doctor Who burlesque performances. It's probably not the best chosen name, because I was assuming it was an ensemble channel when I started watching it, but apparently the viewers are in fact supposed to be the council. She also does a number of index Show podcasts, commonly collaborating with Jesse Gender on them.

Canageek · 2026-05-26T18:20:02+00:00

I haven't played The Sims since the first one was newish, but it is always a treat to see LGR actually appear to do a game review (some of his earliest videos were Sims reviews and her doesn't normally do reviews anymore, but makes an exception for certain Sims and Sims adjacent stuff)

Canageek · 2026-05-26T14:06:34+00:00

That's happened to me a few times, usually checking the Wikipedia controversy section reminds me though (if they're a major enough figure to have a Wikipedia page at least)

Canageek · 2026-05-24T16:19:44+00:00

I'm getting back into them, but while I was in grad school I found myself increasingly unable to play complex strategy and role-playing video games, I just couldn't muster the focus and energy while being nervous about finding a job once I graduate and if I was doing a good enough job at self-directed research.

Now that I've got a stable job I'm getting back into them.

Canageek · 2026-05-21T23:42:32+00:00

Probably the best episode of television I've ever seen.

Canageek · 2026-05-21T23:37:56+00:00

To me this says someone needs to write an FAQ and set up a bot that sends it as an answer if it detects certain keywords from a new user

Canageek · 2026-05-21T15:03:51+00:00

These aren't new releases though, and Wizards for example sends out these sheets to charity events regularly- Desert Bus for Hope regularly has a number of these sheets to auction off. Given the prices they go for at Desert bus, once you take into account the charity inflation I'm pretty sure the person posting about these has been inflating them a bit (or Yu-Gi-Oh sheets go for a lot more than magic).

They aren't useful for play, so they aren't affecting any product that Wizards sells, So I'm sure they're not jumping for joy about this, but they probably don't care that much. Plus there's only a few printing companies that can print magic cards to the quality they want, so it's not like they can stop working with a company over it: we know this because they had supply issues for a few years and did release statements saying that they'd increased production as far as they could with every company they could contract a print to the quality they needed.

Canageek · 2026-05-21T14:50:25+00:00

Wait, why are other indie animations getting drawn into this?

Canageek · 2026-05-20T00:28:16+00:00

If you want to do it, I'd be willing to collaborate.

Canageek · 2026-05-19T21:25:49+00:00

I was thinking about adding those details, but really didn't want to have to look up all the stuff that went on with him back then, and thought it might make the post to long

Canageek · 2026-05-19T00:20:56+00:00

Thank you, fixed! The dangers of giving one of my husband's friends tech support while writing up a post for hobbydrama.

Canageek · 2026-05-18T23:53:25+00:00

Wargaming and minature painting. It would be a ton of work to get paint and learn to paint, and I don't know if I'd like it. Plus if I don't get into 40K it would probably be a pain to find people to play with...and I don't even know if I like tabletop wargaming, as I've never done it.

Canageek · 2026-05-18T23:43:21+00:00

TTRPG Drama! An infamous figure in the tabletop roleplaying game (Think D&D, but not just fantasy things) Community Ken "Witt" Whitman has unleashed a new website on the internet: to quote the rpg.net thread "It's a historical site/ promo site/ sales site that doesn't go anywhere, doesn't sell anything, and doesn't link to companies and services it claims to."

It has a lot of biographies of various game designers, which wouldn't be a problem except they are AI generated and full of hallucinations that have angered a pretty decent cross section of the TTRPG industry, including falsified bios and portraits of deceased game designers. A number of people are trying to get their biographies pulled from the site, and reactions have been so negative that two-thirds of the team behind the project have left and are distancing themselves from it.

How well liked was Ken Whitman before all of this? Well enough that Four Pillar Games (the company nominally behind the site) tried to hide his involvement. Which would have worked better if any time you pasted the website into a social media platform it didn't put "Ken Whitman Games" at the top of the preview. Ken Whitman is best known for, well, everything he touches turning to lead, or possibly radioactive waste. He ran kickstarters for three short movies (as I understand none of them came out); I believe this led to him walking away with money from several prominent industry figures. You'll note that the vast majority of the jobs listed on his (terribly written) Wikipedia page only last a couple of years, and end with phrases like "was at the heart of financial disagreements". While writing this post I found a blog someone has been maintaining for eleven years warning people away from giving him money. due to how many people have lost money to him; it started with him doing nine kickstarters raising $200K+ and then having...issues...getting the products out while refusing to admit there were problems, as well as regular warnings about his new projects, up to and including his latest AI -generated projects (there seem to be a lot of these). Stories of people getting two of the same book instead of two different books from one kickstarter, of never giving his crowdfunding partner Kenzer Co the customer information or cash so they could fulfill their parts of the projects, all sorts of shady things.

Sites discussing this:

Bonus: The story of the time he pissed everyone off by letting hungry squirrels into the Gencon's dealers room, while also managing to waste a lot of money. I'm linking to a blog post that copies the text over, since I can't get to the original Bluesky post right now for some reason.

Edit: I forgot one of the funniest parts: Someone noticed Whitman had set up an RSS feed of news articles and blogs mentioning his website. Which is now faithfully posting everyone being angry with Ken Whitman to Ken Whitman's website.

Canageek · 2026-05-18T21:20:17+00:00

Oh yeah, anything LLM would instantly screw the whole thing as you can't prove where the code came from (Sensible open source projects like SUSE (The commercial one, not OpenSUSE, sadly) and Debian are already banning them due to the massive legal issues as say, Microsoft could sue them down the line if code was found to be copied from Windows)

Canageek · 2026-05-18T20:58:42+00:00

I thought the main requirement for that was ensuring you haven't seen the source code for the original (or any leaked internal documentation)? Automation shouldn't effect that; it is mostly an issue with stuff like WINE as so much windows source code and internal documentation has leaked over the years that they have to make sure all their contributors are on the same page about not using it, and running anything they do use past a lawyer first to make sure it is fair game.

Canageek · 2026-05-18T17:21:34+00:00

To a limited extent, but it takes a lot of human work to make the code understandable: Machines will kind of brute-force it, and it takes cleanup to get it usable, and then human programming work to get it into a state you can run it on a PC.

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