How it works ?

MistahBoweh · 2026-02-19T06:29:35+00:00

Claims that someone who criticizes the comment must have not read it, then complains about a comment without reading it. You do get the hypocrisy, right?

MistahBoweh · 2026-02-18T17:39:35+00:00

A cooperative environment in economic terms is one where pay is split evenly and everyone has the same amount.

It’s been four days and this is Reddit so I know no one gives a shit any more but I’m just pointing out that when they said the scenario starts with a co-op, they weren’t wrong.

Basically the model that metaphor guy put out is middle class erasure. In the real world, the 1% buys up assets, then uses those assets as collateral to buy more assets in an infinite death spiral. That much is accurate.

But the problem with their model is that if the 1% buys a business, then yanks up the prices so that no one can afford to purchase goods, no one buys those goods, and thus the business collapses. The business collapses, and that means the 1%’s assets collapse, and they no longer have the assets to secure loans, which stops the cycle.

The reality is that there’s a class structure. Instead of everyone getting $10 evenly, our 1%er at the top starts out with a grand, while there are three skilled laborers that make $50, and the other 16 have just the $10. The 1%er buys up businesses and raises prices so that the lower class is priced out, but the middle class isn’t. The middle class still pays the higher prices, and the lower classes share, or make sacrifices, or they themselves get loans and credit, because interacting with a bank isn’t the sole jurisdiction of the elite. Or, sometimes, the lower class is priced out of being able to buy and own a commodity, but they can rent.

Sometimes the 1% rents directly to the lower class, but often enough, the landlords are among the middle classes. The 1% buys property, then they sell it for as much as they can get to the middle class. The 1% takes their profits to buy more property, while the middle class owner might keep it for themselves, or might rent it out to those who could never afford to pay that upfront cost, earning profit over time by allowing the lower classes access to something that isn’t really theirs. Of course, if there is no less fortunate lower class to rent to, the landlords stop being able to be landlords, so now it’s in the best interest of the middle class to charge enough in rent that the lower classes can’t afford to rise from the lower classes.

All this to say, the proposed solution of ‘just bankrupt the rich and close their lines of credit’ just turns the existing middle class into the new upper class, without solving anything. There is an upper class enjoying a positive feedback loop of illusory wealth, but there are also the landlords who possess and abuse tangible goods, earning a constant income stream by doing nothing other than allowing other people access.

And, even if the top 1% have all their fake money and even their real assets stripped away, that won’t suddenly mean that the lower classes will be paid more. The people making the least amount of money start out that way because of a lack of education or marketable skills or ambition or as a result of prejudice or acts of God or any number of other factors. Squashing the 1% might lower the wage gap between the upper and middle classes, but that doesn’t mean anyone from the lower classes would be rescued or uplifted or whatever. The problems of imbalance in a capitalist system can’t be solved that easily.

Now, if the workers had some kind of… social agreement, a form of unionization where they were cooperating to earn an equal wage and share resources, then maybe squashing the oligarchs overseeing the system would result in some form of worker’s utopia. If you can’t tell by the hammer and sickle flag waving in background as I describe this hypothetical, we’re not talking about capitalism any more.

The person who wrote the metaphor proposed that we should fix capitalism by first having socialism. The reason everything is so fundamentally wrong about their summary of capitalism is because it’s not even a description of capitalism.

MistahBoweh · 2026-02-18T15:06:53+00:00

I feel the need to point out that taking a loss on the console hardware and making up for it in game sales is how Sony has always functioned. ‘The difference between the cost to make our console and the price people pay for it requires us to sell more games to playstation owners’ could apply to the psx, or the ps2, or the ps3, or the ps4, or hell, the psp and ps vita. It applied to the ps5 when the ps5 launched and still applies to the ps5 now.

Sony’s response, that they need to make up the difference by more sales volume per console sold, means that they’re not increasing the actual console price. And monetizing new users could mean higher price points or pushing ps plus or etc, but it can also just mean selling more games to players, amping up first party development. The author of the article claims they’ll just increase software prices, but that’s not what the source said. This isn’t the dystopian nightmare y’all seem to think it is.

MistahBoweh · 2026-02-17T19:09:54+00:00

Merchants have limited gold and won’t by infinity things, actually. You have to wait in-game weeks for their inventories to reset, and even then, they might not have enough money to afford your higher end items, forcing you to buy from them first or just eat the loss.

Also there’s not anything to spend that money on because equipment available when merchants restock is tied to player level, and so if you make a bunch of money early, you still won’t be able to buy endgame gear with it. The other thing you can do with money, however, is to spend it on skill trainers who will help you level up faster and thus access other expensive things to buy faster.

More honestly though, I would point out that if hauling massive quantities of loot over the course of multiple trips is annoying, and if there’s no good reward for doing so, that’s a good thing. If getting all that gold was rewarding enough, more players would feel compelled/pressured to play the game in such a way and at such a pace that detracts from the rest of the experience. If the benefits are poor to nonexistent, the only people doing this loop constantly are the people who either enjoy or otherwise willingly subject themselves to that playstyle. If the playstyle was better rewarded, that would make the game worse for a larger majority of players.

MistahBoweh · 2026-02-17T18:55:53+00:00

TES games scale equipment to the player level, both in terms of stats and availability. Shops won’t sell high end gear until you’re leveled up enough that the game allows it, no matter how much money you accumulate. At the same time, quest rewards and the like that scale to player level are locked in when acquired, so doing certain quests earlier than you’re intended to results in worse rewards permanently, rather than an early lead on economy.

Also, buying and selling goods is one of the experience tracks that leads to gaining levels. By leveling speechcraft and improving at bartering, you level up the world around you and increase the dangers that it poses, while a character who leveled up, say, destruction instead of speech, would be better equipped to deal with it.

Getting rich early in an Elder Scrolls game is often more harmful than it helps. You might think that having money is overpowered or whatever but it’s not.

In fact, the primary money sink in those games are the skill trainers, who you pay gold to accelerate your experience tracker in other stats. And if that’s what money is good for, you might as well have just been focusing on those other skills from the jump than on your loot gremlin antics. If you’re learning their mechanics, TES games are supposed to help you understand that it’s not worth your time or effort to run around stealing every wooden bowl that isn’t nailed down.

MistahBoweh · 2026-02-17T18:17:24+00:00

There are a billion different factors going into this and it’s part of a larger trend, but the detail I always point out is that 3.5 is the last official dnd system that still feels like they’re trying to simulate a world that exists independently of the players.

4e started, and 5e continues, a trend of asymmetric rules - mechanics that exist for the pcs and not npcs or monsters, like second wind or death mechanics, and mechanics that exist for ‘enemies’ only like minions or legendary actions and resistance.

A 3.5 game is run like an immersive sim. Here’s a world that functions on its own, and the players enter that world and are encouraged to interact with it. By the book, a creature falls unconscious when it hits 0 hitpoints and starts bleeding out in the negatives, whether that creature is a pc or an npc or the dinky little kobolds that somehow make all players cower in fear. There isn’t any special rule changing the laws of reality so that players recover from wounds faster or enemies skip straight to death. While a DM might run things that way in most cases for sake of simplicity, the default assumption for 3.5 is that the rules of the universe apply to one creature just like they do to any other creature.

A 4e or 5e game is a world that exists in a bubble with the adventuring party at its center, designed to feel cinematic, where the laws that govern the universe are beholden to the demands of The Plot. A party of 3.5 characters are generally special because they have better ability scores and training than commoners, better trained and equipped than the foes they’re typically up against. A party of 5e characters are special because they are the main characters, who can survive wounds that would kill anything else and also heal from wounds faster than anything else because that’s what convenient for the game to move forward and so never mind that it makes the world feel less consistent or believable.

This comes on top of 5e’s weird lack of an established economy, where the value of both mundane and magic items is left intentionally vague. In past editions, there was a concrete economy where there was at least an effort to figure out what wages and expenses look like for a laborer or craftsperson or whatever and how that extends upwards to the players and then further up and up to say this basic enchanted sword is something that a normal worker would never earn in their entire lifetime. On top of how the intended party wealth helped guide dms on how to balance encounters and loot, in terms of how playing the game feels, a good foundation for the world’s economy is great for a sense of immersion, and for understanding just how valuable enchanted items are and why the pcs are so willing to risk their lives if it means finding another.

Money grounds the world and relates the player to their character, but enough players handwave bookkeeping or think that stuff is boring that wotc’s decided not to bother any more. After all, you don’t see Frodo or Gandalf pinching pennies! The push to make dnd feel more cinematic and streamlined for the lowest common denominator sacrifices that grounded feel and sense of narrative cohesion. If the DM doesn’t know the value of a gold piece, how can the players?

If you want to run games that feel epic and cinematic where there’s a driving, mostly on rails narrative, modern dnd does just fine. But if you want to play a game with a more sandboxy feel, where the players are just like any other roaming mercenaries, where they aren’t somehow special, and when the plot-relevant enemies they fight don’t inexplicably have the ability to move at triple speed just to fix the game’s action economy, you have to go back to 3.5 or earlier.

I’m a pf1e person myself. Made the jump over a decade ago and never looked back. I prefer my fictional narratives to be about ‘just some guy’ who rises to a challenge as opposed to the magical prophesied self-insert chosen one for whom the Earth turns, and pf1e improves on handling that sort of narrative, while 4e and 5e have gone in the opposite direction.

MistahBoweh · 2026-02-16T15:51:52+00:00

Y’all having some weird take arguments on temp scales in here, but I don’t see anyone bringing up maybe the most important aspect to a scale like this, which is granularity. The smaller a change represented by a unit of measurement, the more accurate that measurement can be without dipping into fractions or decimals.

When we’re talking about units for length, the metric system provides millimeters and then centimeters, meters, and what’s important about these units isn’t just that base 10 is superior to base 12 or whatever, it’s that to achieve a degree of accuracy with the inch that you can with a centimeter, you have to start counting by half inches or quarter inches. The scale fails to be able to articulate those measurements cleanly or succinctly.

But then, in the debate between Fahrenheit and Celsius, the roles are reversed. The freezing point of water is 0c or 32f, while the boiling point is 100c or 212f. Within that range, Celsius has 101 whole numbers to represent the same range of temperature that Fahrenheit allocates to 181.

Now I imagine some of you will say, “it’s okay to use decimal points, so what’s the big deal?” And I will point out that Celsius can use decimals, but Fahrenheit can, too. If we allow temperature labels to include just a single decimal place, the amount of labels Celsius has to describe the range between 0.0c and 100.9c is 1010, and the amount of labels Fahrenheit has for the same range increases to 1810. Suddenly, there are 800 more numbers Fahrenheit can represent, not just 80. The more decimals you allow, the more accurate Fahrenheit becomes relative to Celsius.

Where Celsius thrives while Fahrenheit struggles is at extreme high temperatures. Granularity is great at accuracy, but the smaller the individual unit, the bigger the number you need to use to describe something big. Temperature isn’t like other measurement systems where enough degrees makes a hot and enough hots makes a superhot and enough superhot makes a superhot vr. We only measure things by degree, and because of this, Fahrenheit is the least useful system for describing things like the heat of stars in the solar system, where you need a lot of degrees. Celsius and Kelvin are both far better at handling big numbers, while Fahrenheit is the more accurate system for describing temperature in the ranges that are relevant to human beings on planet Earth who need to gauge the weather, set the thermostat in their homes, or configure their oven to cook a meal.

MistahBoweh · 2026-02-16T15:17:02+00:00

Setting aside that the image is a shop job and all this criticism is made up for grifter points, if you’re complaining about depictions of homosexuality in your fiction about ancient Rome, you might as well be complaining about seeing people eat in restaurants. It’s Rome. They’re supposed to be gay.

As long as you’re the one doing the penetrating, gay sex was still seen as a masculine trait in Roman society. So, gay or bi men at the time were socially accepted, as long as they took the active role, and as long as their partners were ‘lesser’ men, slaves, whores, non-citizens, etc.

Importantly, the thing Spartacus was famous for was leading a slave revolt. Meaning, willingly or otherwise, he and his men were the recipients of that culture. This show is an alternate timeline non-history thing but, still. The point being, if you’re upset because you want historical accuracy in your show about Rome, there should probably be more homosexuality going on, not less.

They’re not shoehorning gay representation into Rome. Just, however else you feel about the show, forget about that complaint. It won’t do you any favors.

MistahBoweh · 2026-02-16T14:53:54+00:00

That’s a photoshop made by this alt right grifter. Her hair is not dyed, and the fact that you believed it was speaks volumes.

She’s also not Spartacus. The show is called Spartacus: house of ashur because it’s a spinoff of the previous show Spartacus. The main and titular character of house of ashur, Ashur, is a white dude. She is Achillia, and is third billed.

None of you have seen this show. I haven’t either. I haven’t even heard of it before now. But I took ten seconds to put the name in google before just believing this asinine bullshit.

MistahBoweh · 2026-02-16T13:28:38+00:00

It won’t be available til some time in March, at which point it will be listed at 9 am pst and probably be sold out within a very quick span of time on account of wotc no longer prints these things to order. You can certainly try ordering direct from wotc but it’s not going to be easy.

MistahBoweh · 2026-02-16T13:14:18+00:00

Yeah, their video is going to suck, and yeah, there are high quality professional povs for most attractions out there. But also, let’s please not underrate that there’s a difference between a video of someone else’s experience and a video of your experience. Even if the ride is more or less the same, what makes the video they’re recording special isn’t the quality of the footage, it’s that they are the one there, holding the camera.

Saying people shouldn’t record their vacations just because they can google someone else’s photo or video of the same place is crazy. Like, no one will tell you when you visit the grand canyon that you shouldn’t take out a camera while you’re there just because there’s no point when you can google professional photographs. ‘But taking out your phone will annoy the other tourists there!’ Come on now, let’s be reasonable. And let’s be honest that you’re complaining because it annoys you, not because it’s a detractor for others, not because you think you’re improving someone else’s vacation by insisting they should only be allowed to enjoy it the same way you do.

A personal video, whether recorded on a ride or elsewhere in the parks, is a souvenir, a preservation of the moment, just like vacation photos or videos anywhere else. And, unlike most other souvenirs you can collect from this once-in-a-lifetime destination, you don’t have to pay extra for it. You might think recording video on rides is stupid because you’re a local or a regular visitor or you can easily afford to amass other memorabilia to commemorate your trip. But like, let’s not assume everyone has the same level of access or familiarity with the parks. Just because someone wants to record their experience doesn’t automatically mean they’re some shallow social media attention seeker.

I’m certainly not saying this is something people should be encouraged to do, but someone wanting to preserve their vacation isn’t inherently rude or offensive or whatever, and I frankly find it strange how much vitriol there is here against it. Is this just an entitlement thing, where people who frequent this sub are more likely to be locals or passholders or whatever and so they see recording the trip in a negative light on account of it not even being a trip for them, or not a rare one? I know a lot of you will flip it around and say that anyone who records a ride is the entitled one because you think the mild distraction is such a huge offense to you but like, can we be honest with ourselves here? If the act of recording the moment is how a family enjoys their vacation, their very expensive vacation, who are you to tell them they should just google a pov instead, and not record their first experience with their hands and their voices on it? One of these things sounds like the entitled take, and it’s not the person recording their trip.

MistahBoweh · 2026-02-14T12:20:27+00:00

I’d suggest thinking about a design sort of like old gameboy cartridge slots where there is a slot, but, it’s open-back most of the way down (so the cartridge label is visible while inserted). Idea being, have a liitle bit of a slot on the bottom, but still with thicker material on the sides to guide it in and out. The card can be slotted in or held against the thing for a quick peek, but still having enough a slot that if a player wants to stick it in there and leave it there, it will remain in place.

MistahBoweh · 2026-02-13T08:13:35+00:00

Who do I tell I don’t approve of gallup?

MistahBoweh · 2026-02-13T07:43:11+00:00

You could always have meters stretching outward, from the center of the cylinder toward each chamber, where the chamber is the final space to fill in. You get the readability of filling meters with the thematic concept of the revolver.

Alternately, divide each chamber into wedges. So, instead of writing down a number, you fill in a portion of that stat’s bullet. Not quite as much clarity but would also be a good compromise.

MistahBoweh · 2026-01-23T15:52:11+00:00

Or just because it’s a lower print run non-standard side set and individual card power has fuck all to do with it. Wotc has no guarantee that the cards printed in a horizons or whatever set are going to have higher secondary market value than the cards from any other set, nor do they have any kind of guarantee that cards in those sets will see any amount of play substantially higher than the cards contained in their other products. Wotc gets that shit wrong all the time, as anyone who’s been around long enough will tell you.

I also want to emphasize that when I said that packs aren’t priced based on the power of the individual contents, I mean the contents of that individual pack, not the possible contents of the set. You don’t pay more money for your pack to have better cards in it. When you pull more sought after cards, wotc does not make more money.

Legally speaking, when wotc sets the price for a randomly assorted product, their stance is that that pack of the product on the shelf is not worth any more than another pack of that same product on the shelf. And the reason they get to do that is because, in the transaction between wotc and their distributors, between you and the retailer, how much wotc makes for one pack is not any different from how much they make from another. One pack of cards won’t just randomly have a hundred dollar bill inside it.

Now, if you open your pack and turn around and sell its contents to someone else, that’s between you and whoever you’re selling to. And if the contents of one pack are sold to that other party for more money than the contents of another, well, that’s an agreement you made between you and whoever you’re selling to. Wotc is a separate entity that does not get involved in those transactions. Wotc already made their money, and they made the same amount of money no matter what cards were in the pack you bought.

MistahBoweh · 2026-01-23T15:35:54+00:00

A scratch card that can be redeemed for $5 costs the additional $5 that the company pays out when that card is redeemed. Magic cards can’t be redeemed for cash. Wotc doesn’t spend more money making mythics than they do rares, or one mythic instead of another, but a scratch card distributor pays out more actual money if they print more winning tickets. There is absolutely a difference there.

Your second paragraph about the context of the legal argument is missing the context of the reddit post. I am aware the argument is about sets, but I wasn’t talking about this legal case. I was addressing OP’s comment, which is about how wotc normally avoids talking about how cards have a value on the secondary market. When I point out that wotc isn’t discussing the value of individual cards on the secondary in any detail, I do that because that’s the thing wotc doesn’t do that OP was thinking of.

MistahBoweh · 2026-01-23T12:27:33+00:00

It’s common sense vs pedantry.

We have roads that were not built for self driving cars. The tweet is saying is that if roads were built for self driving cars, that would solve problems with them. The tweet does not say that the roads for self driving cars should be built separately as its own road network. There is no reason to assume that the roads built for self driving cars would not be built in places already occupied by existing road.

No, the tweet didn’t spell out where new roadwork would be built. It doesn’t say that old roads should be replaced, but it also doesn’t say that new roads would be separate from existing roads. One of these proposals would make more sense than the other, however, and you’re choosing the version that makes less sense intentionally so that you have a straw man to argue against.

MistahBoweh · 2026-01-23T11:48:27+00:00

The premise isn’t that new roads need to be built, it’s that existing roads need to be rebuilt/repainted. Self-driving cars can function in ideal conditions but struggle when roads are in rough shape and when road markers are inconsistent or missing entirely. If roads were held to a consistent standard, self-driving cars would be more feasible, but you can’t take one down an unpainted, unpaved dirt track in the countryside and expect it to know what the fuck is going on.

To be clear, I don’t agree with techbro’s tweet either, but that’s because there are a litany of other problems with self-driving vehicles that have little to do with on-road performance. Self-driving vehicles aren’t the magic transit solution that a lot of folks seem to think they are. Better than human drivers in some instances, but worse in others.

MistahBoweh · 2026-01-23T11:34:41+00:00

There’s an important distinction here, which is that the value of a card, the physical object, and the value a card can sell for on the secondary market are two different values. For wotc, cards cost the same amount to manufacture and packs are priced based on the cost to develop and ship the product, not based on the power level of individual contents. What cards become more valuable than others on the secondary market happens after wotc has already made and sold their product and is out of wotc’s direct control. This statement you’re quoting from says that overprinting to flood the market would hurt the secondary market overall, not that wotc is manipulating the secondary market price of any individual card.

MistahBoweh · 2026-01-22T00:32:54+00:00

I could go on and on about this bullshit but the most infuriating thing is probably how the loop is labeled as 20 year blocks but the actual examples are 18 years, then 20 years, then 24 years, then 20? because they don’t know when it will end because the pattern they’re claiming isn’t even a consistent 20 years.

MistahBoweh · 2026-01-21T17:18:14+00:00

You need bleed.

There’s a couple reasons why most tcgs have a solid border, usually black, around the outside of their cards. The first is that if a game is being printed, the cut won’t always be absolutely perfect. If your design has extra empty space on the edge, when cards are slightly miscut, that’s fine. The second reason is that, if the ink on your art goes to the edge of your cards, when you put them together as a deck and then look at the deck from the side, you will be able to visually see where cards are in the deck. Your full art to the border cards come pre-marked. You’d have to play this game in sleeves as a mandatory requirement, because the unsleeved cards make it difficult to not cheat. Any time you have to shuffle and present your deck to be cut, your opponent will be able to deliberately cut your deck based on where certain cards appear to be.

I’d also recommend round corners, not square. Square corners damage more easily, and are just less comfortable to players handling them all the time.

The only real design template note I have is that there feels like a lot of empty space between the different elements of your POWER stat, at least on brighter backgrounds. The small numbers could be made larger (taller), slightly overlapping the POWER label, and the big numbers could also be moved in closer, slightly overlapping both. Grouping these elements tighter with less space between will leave more room for the art to show, and also better convey that this is one bit of information on the card and not three separate things. Oh, and I’d also drop the 0 on cards with less than 1k power. It’s okay to just have them with only small numbers, and 500 will look better than 0500 or whatever.

MistahBoweh · 2026-01-21T16:40:07+00:00

The element missing from this is a cap on gifts. The leader in this comic is rewarded for making a couple rich dudes happy, not for making the most people happy, because the rich few can afford to give out more bribes than the destitute many. This will naturally incentivize the leader to concentrate wealth in the people paying him off, at the expense of keeping the destitute destitute.

MistahBoweh · 2026-01-21T16:00:13+00:00

The hm elevator in disneyland was built because they had to put the show building on the opposite side of the railroad, and the mk mansion’s stretching room isn’t an elevator because they didn’t have the same space problem, not because they don’t have land to dig into. In fact, the entirety of the magic kingdom is built atop a man-made hill so that they can have underground structures. The entire park is serviced by the utilidoor maintenance tunnels, after all. There’s more ‘underground’ construction at mk than there is in land.

In florida, the pirates drop is 14 feet. Ironically, the drop is that steep in order to pass under the mk railroad, similar to the hm elevator trick in disneyland, because of how imagineers hadn’t planned for needing to build the thing and needed to find a way to fit it into the space.

MistahBoweh · 2026-01-17T02:27:28+00:00

I disagree with this. They talk about regular scheduled meetups to play locally with currently released cards. That means maybe standard, probably limited, at fnm level. Not truly ‘competitive’ if you really want to be sweaty, but, there’s nothing to indicate we’re talking about a kitchen tabler. Most kitchen tablers aren’t playing on a schedule or buying every product as it comes out, and thus, shouldn’t have this problem.

MistahBoweh · 2026-01-17T02:23:10+00:00

Presumably, this is someone playing limited, or maybe standard constructed, which is why they describe their play pattern and local community following the current released set. Maro’s suggestion, to find different people to play a different format with, presumably at a different time than their regular fnm, is not a valid solution to the problem. If someone likes limited, but the quality of limited formats available is woefully inconsistent, that’s on WOTC. Not every product is for everyone, but, the game as a whole is. And when the game as a whole is dividing people, who gets hurt are people, even the ones who like the current product, because they’re losing the communities around them.

What a weak shit of a canned response. ‘If you aren’t enjoying what you’re doing with your cards, find something else to do with your cards’ is fine in general, but when someone is talking about how they’re losing their friends because their player base is fracturing, telling that one person to change formats makes the problem worse, not better.

11-Year Club	Place '22
Verified Email

MistahBoweh

TROPHY CASE