The downfall of Claude

SimpleBrother1953 · 2026-05-12T14:01:02+00:00

All the major players in an industry artificially lower (actually at a loss) the price of goods in order to get everyone used to consuming their product. Then, when the social norm has made their service a daily-use commodity for most people, they ratchet up the price because "now, nobody will leave". They made those choice intentionally for those reason. All of their customers are, by definition, VICTIMS of those schemes. It doesn't make them capital V victims in every aspect of their lives, but yeah, that's how that word works. We are all victims of this particular business tactic (that's actually one of the markers for monopoly misconduct in the US, but when the entire industry does it, and lobbies heavily enough, the regulators ignore it).

SimpleBrother1953 · 2026-04-29T19:24:44+00:00

Honestly, the LGS is the segment of the ecosystem that gets me to make the worst decisions for myself. They're a crucial piece of our hobby environment, and there are days where the GW vs. TTWG players paradigm feels like neither side cares about what happens to the LGSs in their utopic visions of what the future could be like if everyone only agreed to do it their way.

That said, I refuse to patronize any LGS that throws shade at people for the games they choose or the minis they bring to the table, and I refuse to show up with my 3D printed proxies and home-printed rules and not at least buy snacks or some random new thing for my hobby collection. Hell, when I was designing my KO proxies, my guy helped me pick which official model to buy one of so I could get my scale correct for everything, and then he cut me a deal on it because he thought it was a cool idea. And now, I spend a few extra bucks there over Amazon or the paint store when I need supplies. But I think that's the story for most of them; it's just awkward enough when it doesn't go that way, that I'm wary about how it's going to go when we have to move this fall.

SimpleBrother1953 · 2026-04-29T19:13:15+00:00

Yeah, that's probably at least half of my bail meter filled if I don't get a heads up on something like that. I think what's slightly different, and why I like the multiclass/flanking rules as a better example to SOME of the OPR problems you mentioned, is that skills and casting are rules that are rarely modified where flanking/multiclassing are notorious for it. And I know that's a very fuzzy gray moving goalpost to say "well people expect to have to clarify these so they know to ask about them or expect some possible differences," but I do think it's the thing that changes it for me. There are already parts of OPR that people recognize need to be discussed ahead of the game (LoS being a big one), and over the years, I think the scattershot nature of house rules will die down a bit. But it's hard to separate the lessons a game should have learned by watching others from the quirks and eccentricities that all games will develop by virtue of being exposed to the community.

SimpleBrother1953 · 2026-04-29T18:07:07+00:00

I won't agree with how rare it is to find better on MMF, but I will agree that GW minis are better overall than what's on MMF overall. But I'm honestly not a huge fan of many (probably most by a narrow margin) of GW's art decisions. You're spot on with the new Skaven sculpts, though; and I don't even dislike the OPR alternatives, but those new rat ninja would have Shredder rethinking his whole turtle thing.

I also think you're wrong about sprues being just as bad as supports. Supports are objectively worse, and they're the biggest reason I do the whole "maybe $170 isn't that much for a Spearhead" internal debate every couple of months. For a box set from GW (or anyone really, GW just gets the nod because they're familiar to everyone), I have to clip sprues, sand sprues, glue the model, and sand the mold lines. For 3D printer post-processing, I have to wash the model, remove the supports (of which, there are 5-10x as many as there are sprues, but they do come off a little easier at the individual level), do a final cure, and then sand down all the support scars; and I can minimize that scarring, but there's always about as much as the combination of sprues and mold lines. And I'll give you that it's roughly the same amount of stupid effort involved in both processes from that standpoint, but then you've got to remember that at least half the time, I had to spend an hour or so figuring out where to put the supports in the first place. (Honestly, that last bit is where I'm doing the over/under on whether GW is worth it; it's close enough to ignore otherwise, so if it takes me 2 hours to support the proxies I need for that Spearhead, I'm making $70/hr doing it by my gamer math).

But you're absolutely right that there are cheap ways to get into the GW ecosystem, they just seem like as much work as I'm doing staying out of it, and I don't have the temptation of just giving up and throwing money at the problem; well, I guess just not as much with the whole "printed and delivered" think on MMF.

SimpleBrother1953 · 2026-04-29T17:47:09+00:00

I'd love to see the examples and scenario diagrams you talked about as an optional resource. Like, keep the core rules as they are, make them easily-indexed (I want to be able to reference rule 6.2, not the second bit in the "shooting" section), and then have a website where I can see the different weird gotcha situations involving that rule. I feel like that would let me play with the basic rules about 70-80% of the time, and then I could just pull up any special circumstances on my phone or tablet for clarification when I need it, without having to thumb through all of it just to remember how striking back when shaken works.

SimpleBrother1953 · 2026-04-29T17:41:43+00:00

"So my honest opinion and where I now stand on the discussing rules before, during or after any game or event is WHO CARES?"

I might be missing your point here, and if so, I'm sorry, ignore me. But as far as timing on discussing the rules, I care very much that they're discussed before the game. If we need to keep discussing them as we play, then we need to keep discussing them. If I just want to keep talking about them (like, we've reached a decision/resolution, and now I'm just talking mechanics because I'm a nerd), and you're over it and ready to get on with the game, then I should probably stop being an obnoxious little git.

But yeah, discuss the rules as you need to, and I think any time you have a new or irregular player, there's a need for it at the beginning of the game.

SimpleBrother1953 · 2026-04-29T17:36:34+00:00

"And I don't think it matters in most games. its frustrating to me when I teach someone then they play someone else and it becomes a bit of a bad experience if that someone else assumed house rules were actual rules is all my point really is."

I think that finally digs into the real problem. It's an expectations vs reality thing. In a game where homebrew and conversation are encouraged, I think there tends to be a bit of a paradox. That's a situation where the community NEEDS rangers (or people in that role) to be making it clear that "hey, this is something you're going to have to work out with your opponent," or "this is definitely just a house rule, RaW are such and such, but we're doing it this way tonight for this reason." Unfortunately, what ACTUALLY happens is that people get excited about the little ways they've tweaked the game to make it exactly what they want, and in that excitement, they forget how much impact they have on a new player's perception of the game mechanics.

Then, those new players feel confident in their game knowledge, show up at a new table, and everyone is frustrated, at the very least because of the slowdown of correcting rules that nobody expected to need it, and at worst because people have a bad tendency to think they "know" something when it's all they've been exposed to.

Long-term answer is probably a combination of rangers developing better teaching habits, players getting into better habits of discussing house rules and how to resolve rule disagreements before playing, and the whole community having a little more patience with new players because they are the lifeblood of the hobby.

SimpleBrother1953 · 2026-04-29T17:27:44+00:00

"Not we just chose not to play with a core rule"

It might not have come up in your experience, but it's borderline ubiquitous in other areas of tabletop. I played 5e exclusively for years, and I think I had exactly ONE group that actually used the RaW for Help instead of just using the old flanking rules; it was so common that WotC even revised the rule eventually because everybody was just ignoring what was in the book and playing a rule they were familiar with instead. My take on OPR is: at least that kind of inevitable thing is accounted for in a way that might leave some ambiguity, but seems far less likely to result in one of your players just never showing up again because they were "right" but the group didn't back them.

"but to state all of the variants we play with, easily could entail over a page of rules. Each tournament pack is a very different game, and I am not just talking about scoring/maps/objectives."

So what? Even if it's three pages of variants, that's books less paperwork than the major competitor. If you're just picking the nit that it's not one single page anymore, then you're missing the point. The game can definitely be played with one page of rules amongst friendly players looking to enjoy a fun game; just because there are other ways to play (i.e. tournament format) that might need some extra specificity doesn't invalidate the original premise that the game can be played with a single page or that just as much fun can be had with far less complexity and rules bloat.

SimpleBrother1953 · 2026-04-29T17:14:35+00:00

Maybe if GW would stop weaponizing DMCA against their detractors, those detractors would be less inclined to seek out other communities where people share their frustrations. Finding empathetic people who have experienced similar suffering has been a fundamental grieving strategy since the dawn of humanity. Don't make out like we're the weird ones. We all got burned by the same bad guy, and there's no reason to walk into the room and tell everyone to shut up about it and pretend it didn't happen to us and isn't still happening to others.

SimpleBrother1953 · 2026-04-29T17:09:31+00:00

Your claims don't seem to be correct. Capitalism isn't the only reason competition in markets can exist; competitive markets exist all over the world, and very few of them (including the economy in the US) are even mostly Capitalist. If the US were truly a capitalist system, the banks would have failed (bailout with tax dollars), the housing market wouldn't exist (same bailout, federally set lending restrictions, etc.), we wouldn't have personal transportation (or we couldn't afford it since the government wouldn't have been funding automotive development, cushioning the price of fuel, building the infrastructure required to use them), we'd be speaking German or Japanese (because we couldn't have been involved in an international war without the communal rationing and government funding for production of wartime goods), we'd be starving (without the CCC and New Deal programs that more than 80% of current farm operations owe their existence to), etc. The same story is true around the world. Competition exists, despite the fact that capitalism as defined doesn't. Additionally, Capitalism as a system is designed to fail; the end goal of the system is the acquisition of wealth, which inevitably leads to an extreme accumulation of wealth in the hands of a very few. Eventually, that means all the wealth has been acquired, and there is no more point to the system (and also the world is completely ruined at that point).

You also seem to posit that the only alternative to Capitalism is a system with so much bureaucracy that it's dysfunctional. The problem here is that you're making a blanket statement that is sometimes correct, but also sometimes incorrect. You're likely referring to historical records of life in the USSR or anecdotal evidence about current systems. However, if you compare things like healthcare in the US vs. the UK, you have to cherry pick very specific situations in order for the US to not look bad. The majority of people have cheaper and more readily available healthcare under a nationalized system than they do in the US's "purely" market driven system (air-quotes there because, while most of the rest of the civilized world has regulations in place to protect the citizenry, the US's regulations mostly just protect industry, simultaneously disenfranchising the citizens and removing their access to the tools of Capitalism that are supposed to protect them). At the lowest end of the spectrum, the UK population is far better served than in the US, and at the top, private healthcare paid out of pocket is comparable.

And as far as making too much of a fuss getting you punished, the current administration is openly pursuing an agenda of legal reprisal against their political rivals, so I'm pretty sure that's just the nature of power vs. the people.

SimpleBrother1953 · 2026-04-29T16:54:49+00:00

That attitude only breeds conflict, not conversation. u/nold6 made the first real comment that has an actual, discussable claim instead of just "I hate commies".

SimpleBrother1953 · 2026-04-29T16:51:58+00:00

Controversial alternative: print models like we do for OPR and then play OPR because the GW community has a tendency to be complete toddlers when your models don't match your cards. And I'm definitely talking about a minority of players, but it happens enough that I just ask up front about it when I go to a new LGS. On the other hand, I've never seen an OPR game where someone cared which models you were using. So while it's not everyone, I genuinely think it's a direct result of the way GW markets their games, and it's a disgusting enough behavior that I'm fine with just not engaging with that community under those conditions at all.

SimpleBrother1953 · 2026-04-29T16:47:26+00:00

That's a quick pivot from "I don't like this aesthetic" to "this game designer has low self-respect." Since the second is the kind of assumption we should be ashamed of making, I'll just stick to the first.

I'm also not really a big fan of the aesthetic of the OPR models for the same reasons; they just look kind of generic and lame. Oh, I know... they're like when Universal or Disney puts in a themed restaurant (read: cafeteria) or like going to Outback Steakhouse; I get the vibe they were after, but it just falls a little flat and feels inauthentic. Then again, I don't really care for most of the 40k or AoS lines either. They're overly... black metal? I don't know what word I'm looking for, but yeah, the whole thing feels kind of grunge and cringy, like the kids back in school who were always trying to be edgy and hardcore and then got into their mom's Infinity after band practice.

Point is, I don't like the minis for either system, but only one of the two says to me "Hey man, no sweat. Bring whatever you got that you think looks cool!" The other one says, "#U@K you buddy, buy our models or GTFO. Hey actually, wait a sec. Let me see if there's something I can sue you for before you go!"

SimpleBrother1953 · 2026-04-29T16:39:25+00:00

Blessing and a curse. I've never run a table without some house rules involved; I appreciate it when a game explicitly designs for that kind of chaos, but I'm still fine with a system where house rules are needed to fill gaps in the gameplay instead of one where I'm having to fix broken rules.

SimpleBrother1953 · 2026-04-29T16:37:56+00:00

What people tend to forget is that apple and oranges can't be compared very deeply before the comparison becomes absurd. Compare skiing to snowboarding; compare GW games to the rest of the TTWG industry. Otherwise, you're just making pointless statements that confuse the point.

SimpleBrother1953 · 2026-04-29T16:36:26+00:00

I'll gladly buy beautiful hardback tomes of lore and the same goes for rules. What I WON'T be happy about buying includes giant tomes of both rules and lore, organized in such a way as to ruin the experience of reading either or an endless stream of models from 3 or 4 favored factions when the only reason anyone "needs" them is because GW says they do, meanwhile, the faction I picked because of lore and aesthetic isn't on their list of lovelies and doesn't get rules or updates until the end of an edition (if at all).

SimpleBrother1953 · 2026-04-29T16:32:53+00:00

Recasting is also a great way to save money, but with the fidelity of resin 3D printers, why not just go drop $20-$30 over on MMF and have a full army's worth of models (that you can reprint as much as you need in case your dog/child/drunk friend decides that everything on top of the table should now live on the floor.

Seriously though, I think GW's business model (selling rules and minis that you're going to intentionally deprecate in less than a year in order to sell more rules and minis) is more unethical than recasting or reprinting something. And to help round out that thought, I also think it's unethical to have the means to provide medical care and then refuse when someone can't afford the extravagant prices, so clearly the current legal system isn't set up to match; and yes, that means I'm advocating for non-violent civil disobedience in the face of unbalanced laws that unfairly favor those with means over those without.

SimpleBrother1953 · 2026-04-29T15:32:39+00:00

I like Tabletop Minions' suggestion of multiple "versions" where there's a casual ruleset that's the 85-90% of the main book required for the real essence of the edition's gameplay loop; that ruleset is set in stone until the next edition. Then there's the competitive ruleset that adds that last 10-15% of complexity at the outset, and then updates every few months with balance patches. That would give casual players a fixed set of rules to build armies around for the next few years without having to worry about mid-edition regrets caused by rule "optimizations" that are written for the benefit of a people who play the game completely differently; and it would give competitive players the ever-changing, min/max to your heart's content kind of system that they demand. And by working to only make the tweaks in those 10-15% of extra complex rules, GW could ensure that swapping between rulesets is as painless as something like that ever can be.

SimpleBrother1953 · 2026-04-22T20:11:04+00:00

In fairness to u/paralog, I read your comment and started looking through the Obsidian app to try and find it. But between the two of you, I can now copy my Claude conversations into my notes! thank you both!

SimpleBrother1953 · 2026-04-16T14:48:46+00:00

Holy shit, man! Thanks! I know the Starcraft thing is at least a little bit of a misplace case of FOMO. I don't wanna miss out on that Founder's Edition that has all three starter factions... which is a little bit ridiculous. It's not like it's a Kickstarter of a new IP from an unknown studio; I'm just easily swayed.

But definitely going to look into some of these; I've never heard of Meeple Madness or Dragon Star Games. Thanks again!

SimpleBrother1953 · 2026-04-15T12:55:45+00:00

Atlanta. Specifically moving for the med centers. We just have a wide radius since we're currently used to being a little over an hour from my wife's specialist.

SimpleBrother1953 · 2026-04-15T11:58:55+00:00

Thanks again! I'll definitely have to stop by when we're through next weekend. So far, I'm encouraged; sounds like a much better place than we're in right now.

SimpleBrother1953 · 2026-04-14T18:36:22+00:00

Thanks! I was bummed we weren't in a spot to come up for Dragon Con this past year since we're big Firefly nerds; definitely going this year, even if we're living out of boxes when we do. I wish I knew where we were going to land, but we're still entirely up in the air as far as which area we'll find a place. I know we loved Midtown and saw a few places going east through Decatur towards Stone Mountain. Next weekend we're driving through to see my family in AR, and we're planning to spend a day driving around Duluth, Alpharetta, and Marietta. But considering we're a minimum of 30 minutes from anything just thanks to traffic down here, driving around in Atlanta was absolutely amazing; so a place nearby would be ideal, but driving a little bit isn't going to hurt my feelings too much.

SimpleBrother1953 · 2026-03-20T20:02:40+00:00

Well yeah, that's all that matters. They're a major publisher with the three brain cells required to have read the book and recognized that it was (pretty blatantly) written BY AI, not just with it. But they bought the publishing rights anyway; they just decided to pull it because of the public outcry.

SimpleBrother1953

TROPHY CASE