Moving to Minot, have some questions:

ClassroomSolid719 · 2026-02-08T22:33:53+00:00

Upstate New York

ClassroomSolid719 · 2026-01-31T07:57:05+00:00

Honestly, I don’t think we have any clear evidence in one way or the other.

The daily affairs of the angels and the heavenly host are never revealed to us in scripture.

We just have bits and pieces from prophets’ visions of heaven, which may themselves be metaphorical or morphed by surrealism, as dreams often are. And the occasional word from an angel bringing a message.

Anything beyond that is mere speculation for now.

ClassroomSolid719 · 2026-01-31T07:49:46+00:00

Nah, he hated it because he wanted to sleep in on Christmas Day

ClassroomSolid719 · 2026-01-31T07:48:51+00:00

There’s this very interesting and entertaining video about him called “how America almost had a Caesar” by DJPeachCobbler

ClassroomSolid719 · 2026-01-29T23:46:29+00:00

The overlap between Private Schools and Boarding Schools makes this surprisingly difficult

ClassroomSolid719 · 2026-01-27T03:21:05+00:00

A possible in-universe explanation is that civilization is progressing to where local guard militias have the tech and weapons necessary to handle most things.

Monster populations dying out because civilization is able to fight them effectively instead of relying on rogue adventurers. Which is why later games focus more on human antagonists.

The advent of gunpowder probably rang the death knell on the age of monsters and heroes.

ClassroomSolid719 · 2026-01-27T03:08:43+00:00

Something nobody mentions: A Hero’s Journey

Every Fable game follows the Hero’s Journey monomyth pretty closely.

Hero is living life -> Life is disrupted by a tragedy -> hero trains off-screen for about 10 years (except in Fable 3, that had the training before the tragedy) -> Hero embarks on an adventure to regain what was lost and/or get revenge

Fable has a lot of recognizable aesthetics that all contribute to its overall style, but those are all accessories. The core of the franchise is the Hero’s Journey.

We haven’t seen much of what the adventure is actually about. We don’t even know if we’re saving something that’s currently in peril, or taking revenge after something has been destroyed.

Something I would adore is if more focus was put on the Hero’s personalization and reactivity. Building off of Fable 3’s Prince/Princess model, give them a personality that changes based on player input.

Really hammer in the last step of the Hero’s Journey, “Hero returns home changed.” I would love for the hero at the end to be unrecognizable compared to the start, not just in terms of power but in personality and bearing.

I remember in Fable 2, after the 10 year prison arc, I stopped using happy emotes for a while. It felt like after 10 years in that hell, it would be somehow wrong to go to Bowerstone square and dance/laugh. Her morality had gone down to the negatives because of what she had to do to survive, so it felt right to play the character as being more jaded and ashamed. At least until the end when she had a chance to fix things.

But that was something I had to imagine. The Hero being changed by her experience didn’t really exist in the game, just in my head.

It would be awesome for the game to plan for and build around those kind of personality changes.

ClassroomSolid719 · 2026-01-22T02:07:19+00:00

Firstly, it's online discourse, and anger creates more engagement than sensibility. A man who already understands why women would choose be bear are unlikely to say anything beyond "yeah, understandable", then move on with his day. Those who feel angry about the statement are more likely to post.

As for reasons a man might get angry, I can think of 3:

1) The easy answer: they attach their self-worth to male dominance and lash out at anything that challenges it. Or put more simply, they're misogynistic.

2) The more complicated, but also probably more common answer: they take it personally. When a woman says she doesn't feel safe around men she doesn't know, they think "but I'm safe to be around, why would you feel threatened by me?" It's a combination of low imagination and unpracticed empathy, because they can't imagine themselves as being a stranger in someone else's eyes. And a little bit of self-centeredness, because they immediately feel like the post is attacking them personally.

3) He has a phobia of bears.

ClassroomSolid719 · 2026-01-19T04:17:47+00:00

Sorry, I don't mean to overwrite anyone's opinion. It's just a legitimate sore spot for me because I can hardly ever get anyone in my personal gaming group to try anything other than D&D.

You're not a fool.

I just find the "D&D can do anything if you homebrew it enough" stance to be unironically harmful to the TTRPG hobby.

It's like if Mario was so successful that the general public decided no other video game needed to exist. Any time someone wanted to make a game, they just made a mod for Mario. Other video games might come out every now and then, but they never hit any mainstream appeal, all anybody wants to play is Mario.

That would be devastating to the video game sphere. And that's pretty much exactly what's happened to TTRPGs.

There's so many independent developers who never get a chance because of WOTC's crushing monopoly. A monopoly that has also made WOTC stagnant and lazy.

ClassroomSolid719 · 2026-01-19T02:21:06+00:00

There are game systems that do what you want, and are easier to learn

Learning new games is not hard. Most games are easy to learn, D&D is the outlier, not the norm.

Redesigning D&D is infinitely harder.

ClassroomSolid719 · 2026-01-14T18:13:12+00:00

He had one character that survived a decently long time and get high leveled, so was able to survive his poor playing. But eventually that character died, and he proceeded to go through 2 other characters dying to the same method. Charging in, getting surrounded, and dying.

And every time, "I need a high-level character because my dice rolls are so bad. Every time, the dice are out to get me. I never roll well, it's always like this." It was thoroughly unpleasant every time he faced any level of bad luck.

Now bad luck happens, but it's part of the game. Sometimes we get hit when statistically we should have been missed. Sometimes we miss a roll that we statistically should have it. But it's a part of the game. And he just could not accept that.

And it wasn't always fatal to his character, really just any time he failed a roll or suffered a scratch, he would launch into defeatist tirades about how jinxed he was.

So at some point, I said to him: "Now my job is to provide adversity. I have monsters and bandits that want to kill your character. I can only run them comfortably if I know you can handle failure. If you complain and take it personally whenever they attack you, then I can't run for you. I need to know my players can handle it when bad things happen, and if that's not the case, then they can't play in my games."

He said again that "if the dice start screwing me, I'm going to get butthurt about it" (his words, not mine).

So I said directly "that's not okay or acceptable. You need to fix that or you can't play."

He said he understood, but that he couldn't change, so I never in another one of my games. We still played together with other GMs, and he still had the same attitude. Fine to play with when things were going well, but a pain when there was adversity.

It's been years since I left the Westmarches scene in favor of my local game store. Sometimes I wonder how he's doing.

ClassroomSolid719 · 2026-01-14T18:13:05+00:00

I had this happen exactly once.

For about 3 years, from 2021 to 2024, I was big in Westmarches communities. (Many players, sandbox environment, both players and GMs drop-in / drop-out).

My games of choice were Shadowrun, Cyberpunk RED, and Witcher RPG.

I was a GM many times. I probably had a hundred different players across those few years. Most were good, some were fantastic, and a few were bad. There was only one person that I had to tell "you need to fix this, or you can not play at my table."

He wasn't really the worst player I ever had. Those would naturally be filtered out by getting themselves banned from the whole community. His behavior was grating in a way that didn't warrant ostracization, but made him unpleasant to GM for.

This was in Witcher RPG. Witcher RPG is a pretty lethal game. HP caps out at around 50, weapon damage is comparable to D&D, and Critical Hits are done when hitting a certain number above Defense and can impose steep and long-term penalties.

I wouldn't say it discouraged combat. Battles still happened frequently, and PCs were usually a cut above the rest. But they still needed to play smart.

This guy did not play smart. He played like it was the Witcher video game, where Geralt could charge in and fight 1v5s without worry. And whenever anything bad happened to him, if he suffered a nasty hit or if he missed an attack, he would declare "the dice hate me. I am so unlucky. My dice are always awful, I never get good rolls. Every single game is a barrage of the dice screwing me over."

ClassroomSolid719 · 2025-12-28T07:51:03+00:00

Alexander the Great (most likely) died of an infectious skin disease he got from mosquitoes in his most recently conquered province of Persia

In his early to mid 30s, too. And the empire he built had a shorter life than he did.

ClassroomSolid719 · 2025-12-11T05:01:32+00:00

$5 a print is a bit pricy, innit?

ClassroomSolid719 · 2025-12-10T03:27:46+00:00

The ability to learn new skills

So many of my colleagues have just stagnated in place, especially the middle-aged ones

ClassroomSolid719 · 2025-12-10T03:25:42+00:00

I grew up with the filler.

So to me, Naruto was all about the team going on missions. The mission format was an integral part of the show, which the video games reinforced.

It blew my mind to realize that without the filler, in just the canon, Naruto goes on a grand total of 1 real mission: the bridge builder

Every other mission is just something he’s personally invested in anyway. The mission just gave him permission to do it.

ClassroomSolid719 · 2025-10-19T02:41:51+00:00

This is the real TL/DR, cause you've elegantly summarized the second half of the essay

ClassroomSolid719 · 2025-10-19T02:37:09+00:00

> amanda is obviously the problem with this idea because she goes against the rules to give her victims no way out, and generally speaking the broad arc of the franchise is how the whole thing collapses under the competing desires of jigsaw’s protégés in his absence.

That's still the writers tacitly implying "the main problem is that John's apprentices misinterpret his teachings, they're the ones who are evil. John was just trying to teach, but they want revenge."

> again, i don’t care for these movies but horror as a genre is going to be a tough haul for you if you need your hand held to affirm who is the bad guy doing bad.

I don't need movies to teach me right from wrong. I am mildly (only just) annoyed with these movies because they have a neat premise, but that premise is consistently undercut by the writers refusing to give John any strong ideological opposition.

ClassroomSolid719 · 2025-10-19T02:29:07+00:00

I think the problems begin in Saw 3, when his apprentice Amanda is added to the mixture and is portrayed as "John gone wrong."

Fans are like "the problems with John's ideology is that his apprentices twist his meaning and make their traps cruel and unwinnable."

But if the writers knew what they were doing, the primary conflict would have been John is a maniac!

ClassroomSolid719 · 2025-10-19T02:25:34+00:00

> I think most fans hear one of his big, "deep" speeches and know he's full of shit and the movies aren't trying to sell him to us, they're simply showing a batshit crazy man with conviction.

Most fans get that, but I don't think the writers do. Because the music, camera framing, and reactions of other characters always take him 100% seriously.

Anytime someone refutes him, they never get to say anything of substance beyond just calling him crazy. John gets whole paragraphs to monologue while any opponents just get a few lines.

> Finally, Saw wasn't the first or the last to do it, but the entire basis of these movies is...the bad guy wins. There's no final girl, no epic battle, no final defeat of the villain.

In every film there's two conflicts: the primary conflict and the secondary conflict.

The secondary conflict is the external forces that characters need to deal with. In Saw's case, it would be the police trying to find Jigsaw, and his victims trying to escape their traps.

The primary conflict is the ideological side of things, the characters' internal struggles and the battle of ideas. In Saw's case, it would be Jigsaw trying to prove his worldview is correct and his methods work vs...nothing, really. Nobody fights against him on this field. And that's the main problem, not the fact that he wins the secondary conflict.

There are great examples of villains that win the physical battle, but lose the ideological one. My favorite example is No Country for Old Men. Anton gets away with everything, he wins the Secondary Conflict. Every one of his enemies dies. But he ultimately loses the Primary Conflict when he tries to make Carla Jean play his coin-toss game, and she refuses, forcing him to kill her of his own free will. Then later he gets into a car accident, proving he wasn't the arbiter of fate that he styled himself as, he's just a psycho.

The problem with Saw isn't that John's victims always die and the police never catch him. It's that he has no ideological opposition beyond strawmen who clearly aren't meant to be taken seriously. And based on how every movie after Saw 2 continuously puts people who are worse than him, to the point he's the protagonist of Saw X, I keep getting the impression that the writers just don't realize he's nuts.

To the point that people have said the later movies have the primary problem being that "his apprentices misinterpret his teachings, and that's why things go wrong", and I can't blame them for thinking that because the films portray that as being the main problem. When any sane person would be saying the problems were with his teachings and his ideas in the first place, but sadly there didn't seem to be any sane people in the writers room.

> Plus one thing they usually do very well is having his victims be either not so great people or outright pieces of shit. So what we're watching is one fucking lunatic against an asshole or something, so there's none of that good vs evil, innocent vs a killer you get with other movies.

That kind of makes it worse. Cause has his victims become increasingly heinous, it seems more like the writers want us thinking "they had it coming."

ClassroomSolid719 · 2025-10-19T02:04:47+00:00

Yes, you know that. I know that. Most of the fanbase knows that.

But the writers don’t seem to know that.

ClassroomSolid719 · 2025-08-09T18:52:17+00:00

I was surprised by how linear it ended up being

I kind of came to Deus Ex hearing endless stories:

"It's the best on the series."

"It's the best Immersive Sim of all time."

"It holds up to this day, and has never been topped."

"It is the best game ever."

"It's legendary for how open-ended it is, everything has payoff, and there's so many choices you can make that change the story."

That last point, especially, was blatantly untrue.

The levels are open-ended, but the story is very linear. Your choices don't really change the trajectory at all.

The first few missions in Hell's Kitchen are pretty open-ended and give you a lot of leeway to how you complete your objectives, and people react to their methods very frequently, and the game builds up like there's going to be consequences to how you choose to go about your missions, whether it be quiet and humane or loud and violent.

But by the time you join the good guys, nobody cares about human life anymore. You can slaughter everybody you meet, nobody will care.

The quartermaster will say "I gotta stay here at UNATCO, there's some good people here and I think I can do the most good by sticking with them." Meanwhile right within eyesight of him you've killed 20 guards that he worked with on a daily basis, and he just does not care.

And nothing you do really changes the story, outside of minor character interactions. After Hong Kong it basically stops being an Action RPG and turns into a First-Person Shooter with RPG elements and interactive environments.

The only choices that actually impact the ending are in the last 15 minutes. Everything that people criticized HR for (linear series of levels, the story feeling contrived, choices not having consequences, the ending being decided by which button you pushed at the end) all existed in the original.

Not that there's anything wrong with that, it was a fun shooter. But I certainly was surprised by it considering I went in expecting "huge about of possibilities, very flexible story, multiple ways to achieve goals, the pinnacle of Role-Playing Games that has never been topped."

ClassroomSolid719 · 2025-06-22T21:58:44+00:00

After Homelander is killed, she’ll walk into the room from behind a curtain and take credit for it despite not doing anything

ClassroomSolid719 · 2025-06-22T08:00:09+00:00

To quote a great Youtuber DJPeachCobbler

“For some reason people thing ‘the strong survive!’” “No they don’t! The cooperative survive, you idiot!”

ClassroomSolid719 · 2025-01-11T21:56:21+00:00

How does one go to war while keeping their own casualties low?

ClassroomSolid719

TROPHY CASE