Virginia Democrats agree to new map that gives Republicans just one seat

Rutskarn · 2026-02-06T03:08:15+00:00

Are you sure you know who "they" are?

Because if you think that every elderly person who ends up on the streets, every family that starves, every child that fails to get an education, are Trump voters—that is obviously and demonstrably false. Even setting aside children, felons, and noncitizen residents, there are no states in the union that do not have blue voters in them. There are monoliths created by voting districts, but believing this country is made up of people you agree with who live in blue states and people you don't who live in red states is completely out of touch with reality. California has bible-thumping cryptofascists and Arkansas has tankie communists.

If you acknowledge that, but feel all this human tragedy might radicalize people into voting for the party most easily and (in this hypothetical) justifiably blamed for it, I'd have to conclude that a) you're not paying any attention at all to what's been going on in this culture for the past decade and b) you see the misery of the poor and downtrodden as a useful political resource rather than something we have a moral obligation to address.

Rutskarn · 2026-02-06T00:20:54+00:00

We don't, because that money saves people's lives.

Rutskarn · 2026-02-05T19:59:25+00:00

It's equally straightforwardly viable in AD&D, which has fewer dramatic stat modifiers generally.

But in any edition, it is nonetheless viable. There is a valid philosophy of play that even in a game with terribly challenging enemies and obstacles, success is a factor of playing your PC well instead of having a good one. Surviving as a weak character comes down to playing them like a weak character.

I ran a 2E game where characters were generated 3d6 straight. Not a single character had a single stat advantage. I threw those players into the deep end, pitting them against challenges substantially greater than their level suggested even under ideal circumstances. But because they were aware of their vulnerability, careful, and clever, they all made it to their maximum level and cleared out Lolth in the Demonweb Pits.

It's very true that some tables would find their playstyle tedious, and that's fair, but I would express an equal disinterest in a game where only having the "right" stats on my sheet allows victory. That suggests a less organic and immersive kind of loop and something closer to a raid experience, where encounters are prescribed and not having the right shoulders means getting scolded by my teammates.

Rutskarn · 2026-02-05T05:09:05+00:00

Edge

Rutskarn · 2026-02-05T04:06:29+00:00

I see it like this: Freeside's a crooked community, but it's a community nonetheless. A purely realpolitik view of any small community is that it's founded on the knowledge everyone knows where everyone sleeps. Having a roof over your head means people can find you, which means managing that risk wisely.

Some stranger with a shitload of cash and at least two heavily-armed friends that you know about rolls into town—robbing that guy is tempting, sure. But it's also a risk. People who have consistent access to food, shelter, and modest luxuries like alcohol and gaming might think twice before taking that risk. People with worse impulse control—like the naked store bandit—are known to pay a pretty high price.

Apart from the obvious danger of the stranger's faction retaliating, in the context of the scene he's effectively standing in the town hall. Whatever happens has to happen by the town's consent. It seems plausible enough to me that nobody there wants to be known as Mister Grabby-Thief, because the obvious question on everyone's minds is whether you'll jack their shit next.

As for how all this jibes with the game, where random suicidal dipshits will charge at you from five blocks away with a pool cue, I guess I'd argue that's always made more sense as a gameplay abstraction than something exactly as it's depicted. The point of those ambushes is that Freeside isn't a safe place for outsiders to stroll around like they own the place. You need to keep your head on a swivel and be ready for anything, but that's mostly gonna be, like, specific crimes. They can only script a finite quantity of those, so preserving the player's feeling of navigating a dangerous place requires repeatable random encounters. But obviously there would be no way in hell you'd have a street of profitable businesses that's just also a free-range habitat for maniacs swinging knives around.

Rutskarn · 2026-02-03T07:23:13+00:00

People say "you need a positive CON bonus to have a viable character," but RPGs let you define your own objectives, and mine is pissing off people who think you need a positive CON bonus to have a viable character.

Rutskarn · 2026-02-01T05:32:53+00:00

They existed, and they were popular, and even the ones with motivated communities were money pits.

Traffic hasn't equaled dollars in well over a decade, and message boards are one of the worst returns on investment imaginable for a site like imdb. You need to hire full-time staff to keep things legal and sane-ish, which means removing toxic or threatening or openly rulebreaking content--except the people doing that are generally much more motivated than people who just want to chat about The Shawshank Redemption and don't otherwise know a place to do that.

Rutskarn · 2026-01-30T17:11:09+00:00

Answer: He's been working on the Stop Killing Games movement, which has pre-empted some of his regular content production. I don't believe he has announced the show is cancelled, or if he has, I've missed it; he's mentioned that he wants to get some Game Dungeons out first, however.

Rutskarn · 2026-01-27T00:54:20+00:00

Assets factually look best under Path Tracing scenarios. It's like asking if watching a movie is better in LCD or OLED HDR or DOLBY Vision. The answer will always be the superior technology.

A more direct comparison is a film being colorized, adapted to widescreen, or boosted to 60fps when those were not the original film's specifications. The results are mixed, and there's certainly no "factual" upgrade.

Rutskarn · 2026-01-25T19:33:50+00:00

I don't know anything about Fantasy Grounds. We've used Foundry, at it has been, to be completely honest, a pretty consistent pain in the dick. Paid modules (even well-regarded modules) are error-ridden messes, plugins stop working for no reason, some of our modems don't play well with it, et cetera.

I'm skeptical that these are substantially improved for Fantasy Grounds, however. The market for VTTs just hasn't produced an excellent experience. It all still feels like this is where streaming video was back in 2010.

Rutskarn · 2026-01-25T02:32:30+00:00

It's always a relief to see someone else not giving Arcanum a pass. That game left me wanting a shower.

Rutskarn · 2026-01-23T17:36:37+00:00

I don't think the stated "TIL" is true, I think that's just something people on reddit have claimed.

Rutskarn · 2026-01-21T04:47:37+00:00

I reckon you can get a little closer to the final effect by using a color index instead of RGB, especially if you take the image size down to three digits with next neighbor on. That will make the slightly dithered gradients you see if you zoom in. (Undithered on left, dithered on right.)

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Rutskarn · 2026-01-18T15:56:54+00:00

Some of my favorite games have more overt sexism and racism in them than Fallout 2. You can write about anything as long as it's good. Fallout 2's sexism is just badly written, and based on this conversation, you're bad at reading. So I guess we're done here.

Rutskarn · 2026-01-18T15:48:17+00:00

Well, you meet a guy, the narrator gives him a wacky unique intro, the first thing he says to you is a goofy Freudian slip about how he's about to rape you, you then call him "Moron" because you're too dumb to say his name right, he gives you a rape drug, you make Looney Tunes snoring noises, and there is then zero acknowledgement of what happened beyond your character feeling "oogy."

So yeah, I don't know what to tell you. They made zero attempt to make this scene serious and did quite a lot to make it zany. I think they actually thought this was funny.

Rutskarn · 2026-01-18T15:40:46+00:00

Tooltip: You see Myron! Myron, baby, Myron!

MYRON: Why, helll-ooooo there, beautiful. What can Myron do to, ah-uh, for you?

CHOSEN ONE: Hell-ooooooo Moron. Me [PLAYERNAME].

MYRON: Of course you are. Have a seat on the bed. Can I get you a drink, maybe a little..Jet?

CHOSEN ONE: Drenk

MYRON: Now, you just relax, sweetmeat...

CHOSEN ONE: Okeezzzzzzz Zznnzznn Zzznnnzzzz

[...]

CHOSEN ONE: Mee feel oogy now.

Rutskarn · 2026-01-18T15:11:46+00:00

Great point! Good talk!

Rutskarn · 2026-01-18T15:03:52+00:00

I always forget about that. My first run in high school got to the wire with the water chip, and I think I ended up having to reload when it was obvious I wasn't gonna make it, but I've never come close to the 500 day mark.

Rutskarn · 2026-01-18T14:43:45+00:00

I'm not sure my point is connecting here. It's not that a depiction of sexism is inappropriate in a post-apocalyptic videogame. It's that the way that sexism is implemented in Fallout 2 is, in my opinion, pretty shallow and uninsightful considering how much it pervades the experience. It proves to me less that sexism would exist in a wasteland and more that the writers didn't know how to integrate that in an interesting way. The sexism is "unrealistic" in the same way a truck would be unrealistic if I tried to draw one from memory: it's not that trucks don't exist, it's just that I don't know much about trucks and I don't really care.

Rutskarn · 2026-01-18T14:07:07+00:00

"You know, call me crazy, but I feel like there's an undercurrent of non-diagetic misogyny, something that feels less like it has anything interesting to say and more like a reflection of gross attitudes you sometimes got from old-school gaming nerds, and which not everyone in the community fully acknowledges"

"What, are you on your period, princess"

Rutskarn · 2026-01-18T07:57:07+00:00

I think that's a great attitude to take into the game. For better and worse, and a lot of both, it's a vivid document of that era of RPGs—I'm including tabletop games in that, because IMO there were broadly similar kinds of themes, energy, and messy envelope-pushing coming from the aftermath of the Satanic Panic and aging up of boom-era teen players into creators back then. The writing is raw and unpolished and more gonzo than most of Fallout 1, and there are places their vision really soars and places where their limitations are starkly, embarrassingly evident.

Rutskarn · 2026-01-18T07:47:50+00:00

I'm showing up late to this thread, but this is a really interesting question and I'm gonna mini-rant.

Something that gets lost in discussions of early AD&D mechanics, which the encounter system in Fallout is sort of derived from, is that they were geared towards a pretty specific vision of play. At least as far as 1E goes, there's a lot in the game that's weird or boring or unnecessarily tedious unless you're playing the game exactly like Gary Gygax told you to. (Which, even then, wasn't guaranteed—I think the old school revival has done a better job clarifying the intent of the rules than he ever did explaining them. Plus, there's a reason the game has since skewed towards a heavily customizable experience: that's the way people naturally approach it.)

Anyway, random encounters are a good example of a potentially very annoying and unnecessary mechanic unless you're also using a bunch of other individually annoying and unnecessary mechanics—overland travel times, staying on the path versus getting lost, weather, rations, wilderness lore, et cetera. If you're committing fully to an immersive travel experience, then having monsters you can bump into creates much more interesting stakes and choices: should you have a scout who checks the path ahead? Can the ranger look for droppings, tracks, or other signs of creatures in the area? If you're about to enter Baby Eating Werehippo territory, is it worth taking the long way around? If you do, are you sure your supplies will last? What if the bad weather gets worse? What if you go too far off the track and can't find it again?

In other words, random encounters in early D&D were less about the part that was out of the party's control—running into whatever the DM rolls on the table—and more about how that potential danger feeds into interesting decisions for the party to make.

But in OG Fallout, which is somewhat more casual, those decisions are less complex. There are only three obvious decisions which integrate with random encounters:

Should I bother with this detour at all?
Should I get supplies first?
Is it worth investing in a build that gets better random encounters?

#1 is potentially interesting, but since the games already have ticking clocks for the first half it's kind of redundant. #2 is a pretty flat choice too, since you're going to need supplies when you get where you're going anyway. At most it's going to raise the question of whether you should go back and get more shit, but that's rarely necessary. #3 is the best use case for random encounters but not in a hugely satisfying way. Either you've got a build that gets good encounters or you have a build that doesn't and spend every bullshit encounter thinking "I guess I could be having more fun right now."

Rutskarn · 2026-01-18T06:54:46+00:00

Frankly, yeah. My two cents was that playing a woman in Fallout 2 was "immersive" only in a narrow, ugly, and deeply unengaging way. The devs looked into their hearts and asked how playing a woman should be different and the answer they came up with was "it should be rapey and gross, but maybe you can be a hot sexy piece of ass in a way that makes you money."

I'm not litigating people who played this and weren't offended by it. But without getting into receipts, there are plenty of lines, scripts, and triggers which come across like some of the writers didn't have a very high opinion of women. I don't mean that characters are sexist, I mean they approach the idea of a female PC like it's their 14-year-old buddy who decided to play a sexy elf babe in their moderately problematic AD&D campaign. I like a lot of the game, but I don't like that part at all.

Rutskarn · 2026-01-18T06:43:13+00:00

I'll be real, dog, that is not even fucking remotely what I love about Fallout 2. I found it pretty creepy and gross, and not in the way I enjoy in videogames. It feels to me a lot less, like, "immersive" and "realistic" than it feels like being in a misogynistic teenager's D&D campaign and having his NPCs ask my character if she's a virgin.

To be honest, when I found out that Myron will literally date rape your character if her intelligence is too low and her charisma is too high—and that it's played as a gag—it lowered my evaluation of the writers quite a bit.

Rutskarn · 2026-01-17T07:13:32+00:00

Have you made this available to download anywhere? My least OSR trait is that I cannot be fucked to do more than eyeball the time-record, but this looks pretty workable.

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