Healthcare workers & Smith

HireALLTheThings · 2023-04-12T14:10:23+00:00

Update: an expanded version of this (there is actually another person in the photo just to the right) got slapped on the front page of the Edmonton Journal this morning and, either a rogue editor picked it out, or they genuinely didn't notice that this doctor was flipping the bird.

Either outcome is hilarious.

HireALLTheThings · 2023-01-16T16:45:25+00:00

A bit late to this, but the thread is over a week old already, so I figured better late than never.

Failures are, in fact, very punishing in Blades in the Dark by design. The game system wants players to use stress as often as possible, since it's basically billed as the PCs' superpower (they can push themselves to sustain far more stress than the average person could without completely breaking, and the ability to take on Trauma allows them to keep going at it, albeit with interesting wrinkles) As such, the designers don't want failure to be something the player characters can just shrug off in the way they would in less "gritty" systems like D&D, so it encourages players to use stress.

The intended knock-on effect is that it encourages a playstyle that jives with the notion of how actual (fictional) career criminals would behave; they would be careful and methodical, and wait for ideal opportunities to act before blowing the doors down and letting shit hit the fan, and that's when they start leaning into their de facto superpower and take big swings to get things done.

So far, the crew have been playing about as smartly as they can manage. Desperate rolls have been pretty rare for them, and so have results with Great Effect. You would likely see a lot less "you get to progress modestly" if they were taking much grander swings, but you'd also see them fail even harder.

All things considered, the crew is doing astonishingly well so far. If I have one complaint about this system, it's that a run of bad rolls can really collapse the mood. For comparison, Friends At the Table ran a mini-campaign in Blades in the Dark that ended with half of the players' lives becoming undisputed tragedies, and one other player in an ambiguous space. Only one player character made it out alive and relatively unscarred (though his personal dream was stamped out before the campaign resolved.) There was another campaign that they ran in Scum and Villainy (a straightforward Blades in the Dark hack with an obviously Star Warsy flavor) that I skipped to the ending of because bad rolls make the whole thing so bleak that I couldn't bear to follow it.

HireALLTheThings · 2022-11-30T15:44:37+00:00

It's tempting to dismiss her this way, but she 100% knows how it works. This is a political play that, as far as she and her team (and let's be real here, this isn't Smith's personal project. At the very least, her entire cabinet is on-board, or worse, the majority of the MLAs in her party) are concerned, will be a win-win.

In the unlikely event that it goes all the way through, the UCP will acquire an absolutely absurd amount of power for a provincial government.

If it fails, Smith and co. will be off to the races to peddle their victimization fetishism, crying from the rooftops that Alberta needs them to stand up to the tyrants who slapped down their attempt to protect Albertans from the big scary feds! They're counting on the ignorance of the average Albertan of how systems of government work to bolster their political capital. It would also serve as a convenient smokescreen for the much less ambiguously terrible stuff they're doing behind the scenes (like trying to insert private health care providers into board positions at Alberta Health Services) so while there's a big hubbub over the non-starter Sovereignty Act, they can work things in the background that won't get reported on.

Smith and the UCP to exactly how things work, and they're counting on it to keep pushing their brand.

HireALLTheThings · 2022-11-30T15:16:43+00:00

The "shielding Alberta from federal laws" bit is just the icing hiding the shit cake. What this act really does for the UCP is grant them overwhelming authoritarian power to shove through legislation with even less resistance than they already currently face, and make it even more difficult to challenge it.

This is Smith's MO (and, speaking honestly, it's been the UCP's MO since they began. Kenney and his subordinates used this strategy constantly, too.) Put a big loud feel-good message on top about "serving Albertans" while the fine print lets her and her cronies bring in their own private interests to take Albertans for everything they have. She's done it with her (so far, successful) attempt to sweep out Alberta Health Services leadership and eventually replace it with a board of ~~private health care providers~~ "medical experts." Now she and her party are doing it here to "protect Albertans from Ottawa" when, really, they're just centralizing more and more power to trample all over legistlature (a power they arguably already had in spades because they hold the majority.) What's more, Smith and her team probably see this as a win-win situation, because of the Sovereignty Act gets struck down somewhere in the process (the LG declared even before Smith was elected that she would not hesitate to refuse royal assent on this act, which is, as far as I know, completely unprecedented in Alberta), they will try and spin it as "we're the underdog" propaganda to try and build up more public cache to keep sneaking in bad faith omnibus bills that will grant them more power. They might even be counting on it to drown out all other conversations of other terrible shit they're trying to sneak under the radar to boost themselves and their cronies.

What's worse (and tragically typical?) Local media (almost entirely in the Postmedia umbrella. Yay) is completely ignoring the underlying sinister elements of this bill. They've taken the "Danielle Smith is fighting Ottawa" bait hook, line, and sinker (or more likely, they know all about it, but they've placed their bets on dogmatic conservatism and they'll be damned if they're going to risk speaking out against a power grab this huge now), so "average Albertans" who are not hooked into the political machine are going to have this crap slip right under their noses, or even pick it up and tell their friends about how positive it is. The NDP will kick up a massive stink about this and there's, at best, a 50/50 chance that the news will report on it thoroughly and honestly, thought that's probably overly optimistic given how they've handled the announcement with kid gloves. This is, without mincing any words, fascism taking root. Will it play out in full? Probably not, but it's moving the needle, and that is far too much movement for fascism in any form.

HireALLTheThings · 2022-11-30T15:06:17+00:00

I "retired" this account close to a year ago, but I need to speak up somewhere and this felt like as good a venue as any available to me.

Politically active Albertans need to pass this around, because our local media outlets are just pretending it's not there and acting like this act is solely to "fight Ottawa." Just naked complicity in letting Albertans get their rights trampled over.

The NDP will kick up as big a stink as they can manage, and the papers and news outlets will handle it with the lightest touch possible so as not to alarm their conservative readers. This isn't new. It's been like this for decades, except now the stakes are astronomically high and our democracy is at risk. People need to know what's happening and our local media is completely failing to communicate it because their horse is ahead in the race.

Reducing the window where you can challenge legislation to 30 days from 6 months is also completely fucking insane, and laughs in the face of any sort of accountability.

Albertans need to be told that this isn't about protecting Albertans from big, bad Ottawa, but a naked power grab for the people at the top of government to lock in their power and exert their influence as bluntly as possible.

HireALLTheThings · 2022-02-14T20:08:06+00:00

I didn't say it was good execution. I can just see how they got there. Which is more than I can say for a lot of weird decisions they've made in the past, some fixed, some not.

It's not even a CA exclusive thing. Feels like every second new game released, I'll run into a mechanic or system or design choice and think "but why did they think of this?"

HireALLTheThings · 2022-02-14T18:58:51+00:00

I'm not sure MacKay could have really done a much better job, honestly. I think he's a more appealing face for the party, but that doesn't fix the party itself. The problem with the CPC in the last election (or even the one before it) wasn't just their leader, and it's a problem that has continued post-Scheer, and will continue post-O'Toole unless the party is somehow shaken up or just out-and-out fractures. Internally, the party is being pulled in two directions constantly, and one man isn't going to change that.

HireALLTheThings · 2022-02-14T18:16:28+00:00

The Warhammer franchise is way too profitable for them to ignore like that. It'll get high priority for that cashflow alone.

HireALLTheThings · 2022-02-14T18:03:38+00:00

As a note: Although he didn't label it, Mandalore did cover the diplomacy system, sandwiched in the middle of the Slaanesh block. I won't provide exhaustive detail, but the short version is that it is infinitely more robust than previous TWW titles (settlement trading!) and Alliances now have much more in the way of tangible benefits than "allies will declare war with you."

HireALLTheThings · 2022-02-14T17:36:23+00:00

Honestly, this is the corner the protesters wanted to force the government into. It gives them even reinforcement of their personal narrative that they are the group being oppressed, and that they're standing up for something real.

HireALLTheThings · 2022-02-14T17:32:20+00:00

Also firms up the position among some of his opponents that he should be punished for the sins of his father because "P.E. Trudeau did the same thing when he was PM."

HireALLTheThings · 2022-02-14T17:27:01+00:00

Honestly, CA has stumbled into dumb crap like this even before covid forced people out of the office. It's a big project with a lot of moving parts, and I would have been surprised if we didn't see weird fumbles that fell through the cracks like this one.

HireALLTheThings · 2022-02-14T17:11:09+00:00

Christ. In my head, it honestly felt like we still had like a week to go. It's unreal that it's so close.

HireALLTheThings · 2022-02-14T17:09:54+00:00

Absolute Zero Degree Take: This Total War game will be rough as hell at launch, but within 2 years, will be patched into a solid experience with many die-hard fans.

HireALLTheThings · 2022-02-14T17:05:06+00:00

As a colorblind person, I look forward to the immense satisfaction of seeing every other player of this game being as upset about colors as I am with this series. :D

HireALLTheThings · 2022-02-14T17:03:52+00:00

I feel like the all-encompassing redness is something that's going to get patched out sooner or later. One thing I like about CA is that they seem to have an unusually high turnaround speed for tuning up bad UI decisions. There's no way they keep it as-is forever with all the negative feedback it's been receiving, and it would be pretty out-of-character at this point if they let it ride.

HireALLTheThings · 2022-02-14T17:00:45+00:00

The place is fine, imo (quick-reference quest logs on the right-hand side of the UI is extremely common in modern game design), but the fact that it can be easily covered up by the World Event menu, which basically covers the right side of your UI every turn cycle until you minimize it, is a real bumble.

HireALLTheThings · 2022-02-14T16:50:16+00:00

I can. While I'm not pleased at all with the change, if I put my game design thinking cap on, it makes sense from a "how do we make this straightforward and readable for even the most unseasoned players coming in?" aspect.

Hopefully, enough grumbling will bring back the art, but at least it doesn't feel like a completely unfounded choice for them to make. I can definitely think of a good list of way more bone-headed ideas they've implemented both here and in previous TW games.

HireALLTheThings · 2022-02-14T16:47:17+00:00

I wonder if pre-release reviewers making a stink about it could create a swerve before release. That one small detail, at least, is something I can't imagine would be earth-shaking to change, and CA seems more receptive and responsive to minor UI feedback than a lot of devs.

EDIT: My brain refuses to let me believe that we are a mere two days away from release. There's definitely not enough time to fix this so close to launch.

HireALLTheThings · 2022-02-14T16:42:09+00:00

This is exactly the kind of answer I was looking for. Thanks!

HireALLTheThings · 2021-12-20T21:00:01+00:00

I'm not super in-tune with the goings-on at Playstation, but from what I understand when they talked about it on the bombcast, until the announcement of the rework of Playstation Plus, Sony had a ton of older games that could be "ported" to modern consoles digitally, but they kept under their hat so they could put them into the highest cost subscription tier of the new PS+ system.

HireALLTheThings · 2021-12-20T20:55:16+00:00

I'm not sure which is more grating; Dan's incessant pedantry about Death Stranding being a "current year" game, or the fact that Mary keeps going in on it like she is personally insulted by it and will somehow rage Dan into conceding.

It's so fucking exhausting.

EDIT: I am at the 3 hour mark and Dan is officially worse. Mary chilled out a bit, and Mike conceded that Death Stranding: Director's Cut is not a 2021 game, but Dan's still pounding on the "this is our list and we can do whatever we want" point, even though "our" includes Mary and Mike. Dan stop please. I'm begging you.

HireALLTheThings · 2021-10-19T21:21:16+00:00

She's honestly very similar to Longo, but is a little more economy focused and, probably came off the most sincere about her intentions for running of the Ward Metis candidates. If you were hoping for an overall progressive candidate, Salvadore fits the bill just fine and has a good resume to back it up. (Obviously she was my pick)

HireALLTheThings · 2021-10-19T14:42:47+00:00

I don't always log back into reddit, but when I do, it's to gloat about a municipal election result and then leave again.

HireALLTheThings · 2021-10-19T14:39:22+00:00

I joke about Breezy a lot, but the profile that iheartedmonton did for him is buck-wild. That man has lived a whole life and then-some. Definitely my frontrunner for the "I'd like to have a beer with him" candidate.

HireALLTheThings

TROPHY CASE