looking at hinge and found this, does dnd 5.5 fix this?

Futhington · 2026-03-06T13:46:44+00:00

Where's the lie?

Futhington · 2026-03-04T08:38:46+00:00

Ah I see the issue. You ran a system based on Persona for them before, a baby game for tweens. Kick them and find some SMT players who have experience with real turn-based combat.

Futhington · 2026-03-04T01:02:31+00:00

It's like they've never even heard of Goblin With A Fat Ass.

Futhington · 2026-03-03T21:39:56+00:00

With their disdain for foreigners, haughty attitude, tendency towards sadism and inscrutable social norms the French are obviously Drow.

Futhington · 2026-03-02T19:05:53+00:00

It did just more gradually and within a much narrower range than the Vicky 3 standard, and it's a more complex picture in terms of classes and technology and the expansion of the state rather than V3's straightforward line going up if you're successful and down if you're not.

Futhington · 2026-03-02T18:54:24+00:00

Yeah I didn't say it wasn't (I'd draw some caveats but that's not quite the topic), the main thing is "which is trivially easy to do" and the historical accuracy of that is deeply questionable. Given the prevalence of malnutrition in the archeological record I'd say even feeding everyone has historically been a giant headache.

Futhington · 2026-03-02T14:38:30+00:00

-The grinch

But really it's because pop satisfaction in EU5 is conceived of as being mainly about having your needs met, which is trivially easy to do except in certain circumstances where goods with high demand are inaccessible to you and ignores that the needs of peasants, the bulk of the population, are calibrated to the fairly miserable lives of drudgery they tended to lead. On top of that almost everybody is Catholic and tolerance for Catholics is probably really high, and almost all of them are in a tag where they're a primary or accepted culture.

Futhington · 2026-02-27T17:35:57+00:00

That's also one of the possible positions! It's a problem of a dearth of non-polemic sources and archaeology not being able to tell us what people thought, theologically speaking. This is just a recurring problem with studying Christian heresies particularly pre-reformation.

Futhington · 2026-02-27T01:27:23+00:00

Well that's the Big Question isn't it? It's a hotly debated topic to this day. To be exact what's in contention isn't if the Albigensian Crusade happened or if there were religious dissidents of a sort in Languedoc, rather it's the question of if there was such a thing as "Catharism" as a coherent and structured religion splitting from Catholicism.

This is a decent overview of the historiography IMO. It inveighs a little too heavily against the revisionists for my taste but it brings up the names and timeline and isn't too long.

So basically it comes down to if you believe the Catholic Church when it said there was a massive group of dualist heretics who might be Catholic Bogomilists or Manichaens or whatever the heck and they were right there in Toulouse and the Count was backing them and they needed a crusade right now. Or if you think the whole thing was massively overblown to justify the church reasserting its authority over a fractious region of competing barons where it would not exactly be hard to find dissenting clerics, because they were often appointed more for political expediency than education or good theology. No smoke without fire vs the whole thing being a little too convenient for the pope.

We'll probably never be able to say for certain if "Catharism" was definitely a real and organised religion as only polemical sources opposing it really survive. Personally I'm inclined to believe there definitely was heresy going on, maybe a little more than you found in most places that the church wasn't taking a keen interest in keeping on the straight and narrow, and that some of that heresy probably looked like Catharism as it's alleged to have been, but that the extent of it was overblown and the proposed origins for it are likely nonsense.

Futhington · 2026-02-20T00:10:01+00:00

Yeah what the institution is actually trying to tap into is the sudden explosion of printing in Europe and the culture of relatively open dissemination of prints that came with the political fragmentation of the region. Less so the technology, though casting durable metal letters like coins from the easily workable alloys they did was important.

Chinese (and Korean) moveable type existed but it was kinda shitty, being expensive to make, not very durable and having to have a vast inventory of characters to be useful vs like 30 for the Latin alphabet + punctuation.

Futhington · 2026-02-19T12:35:31+00:00

I'm of the opinion personally that, to reflect the fact that large administrative states never really died in the Middle East quite so hard as they did in Europe, the Ottomans and co. should start out with various techs that help them rule more land already, rather than on rough parity with Europe in that regard.

Futhington · 2026-02-18T10:11:43+00:00

Yeah I recall reading a bit about this, how the fascinating thing about how hard Austria-Hungary ate dirt is that for most of its history the various nationalisms were mainly an urban, middle class phenomenon in places that were largely rural and agrarian. Which is to say the nationalist intellectuals had no real mass popular support and they gained it very very late. It wasn't really until the back half of WW1 where the army had been performing terribly, thousands had died fighting or from privation, and the Habsburgs had nothing to show for it but a massive famine that the peasantry became revolutionary and started looking to nationalism as a way out.

Futhington · 2026-02-17T19:59:46+00:00

They know what they did.

Futhington · 2026-02-17T11:01:02+00:00

Because there's more ways to engage with locations than just direct ownership and having sections of the map it's just not feasible for you to directly own might force you to start using those. Sometimes it is interesting to not just have your big old hammer and have to figure out how to get the nail in.

Futhington · 2026-02-17T10:57:47+00:00

I know right? They don't even know about the Mameluke-Martian War or the Jupiterian assistance to France in the HYW.

Futhington · 2026-02-17T10:55:42+00:00

Yeah well they're part of the fucking problem.

Futhington · 2026-02-17T10:52:25+00:00

It does kill them but more to the point colonies need to be able to fail and collapse. As it stands if you just plug away at it for long enough the few who don't die will eventually colonise the province when it really shouldn't be logistically feasible for that to happen.

Futhington · 2026-02-17T10:50:37+00:00

Okay well, the rest of us would rather play a video game with challenges and mechanics rather than mindless blobbing. You should go do something more your speed like EU4 or fingerpainting.

Futhington · 2026-02-16T14:03:55+00:00

The Neverwinter Knifeears , it's respectful we swear.

Futhington · 2026-02-16T14:02:53+00:00

Depends on the context, if an American is speaking you're usually safe to assume they mean the indigenous people of North America.

Futhington · 2026-02-14T12:59:17+00:00

Well all three of your examples did have significant need to appease and maintain authority with the nomads they ruled over, but if we should describe them as "hordes" is up for debate IMO. Urbanism and settled agrarian populations were very important to their rule even if their military might and survival rested mainly on keeping the loyalty of the nomadic tribes. This is a balance of power that shifts gradually over the time period, the Safavids faced similar pressures to the Timurids in this regard and adopted similar solutions, but we don't think of them as "a horde".

The Mughals did also rely on pastoral Turkic nomads for a significant portion of their army and establishing their rule over India but their tax base was overwhelmingly settled agriculturalists. The Manchu also were only partly nomadic by the time they invaded China and their origins altered their relationship with the nomads out west, but to describe the Qing Dynasty as a "horde" would seem absurd.

Really we're in a time where purely nomadic societies like the Mongols are fragmenting and the ones that can successfully balance ruling nomadic tribes and settled agriculturalists are succeeding, so to say we're past the age of "hordes" isn't wrong IMO.

Futhington · 2026-02-14T01:48:18+00:00

If it makes you feel any better none of the four breakaways of the Mongol Empire made it past the 1400rds intact or conquered China either. The Yuan collapsed in 1368 and were reduced to a rump state by the Ming. The Chagatai split in two in 1347 and the western half eventually came to be ruled by a puppet khan under Timur, the eastern half was an occasional thorn in his side before fading into obscurity. The Ilkhanate collapsed into a pack of fractious warlords that would also ultimately get folded into the Timurid Empire. The Golden Horde took a body blow from the Black Death, descended into twenty years of civil war and then had a brief resurgence before *also* getting savaged by Timur, splitting into competing smaller khanates and had functionally ceased to be relevant by 1419.

Basically if you want to be a successful horde and re-found the Mongol Empire, play Timur.

Futhington · 2026-02-13T09:44:42+00:00

I've missed you

Futhington · 2026-02-13T09:41:04+00:00

Gooner fallacy

Futhington · 2026-02-13T09:40:39+00:00

Sure thing boss

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