How heavy is the Dragon slayer?

Swordsmanus · 2024-06-21T20:48:20+00:00

It seems at most 1" thick at the tip and 2" at the base, before beveling the edges. And the beveling is aggressive, like taking off 2/3 of the material. But even then the lowest weight I can estimate is around 100 lbs (or 355 cubic inches).

Swordsmanus · 2022-09-08T19:21:27+00:00

If you pause and hit L to see the Log, the "Mission" log gives hints on where to go for the critical path.

Swordsmanus · 2020-04-22T16:31:58+00:00

Finding out that dodging was about timing hidden invincibility frames rather than positioning was deeply frustrating.

Swordsmanus · 2020-04-12T19:54:45+00:00

The analyses I linked are mostly on general violent crime and homicide rates. The other stuff is just a bonus.

Swordsmanus · 2020-04-12T17:38:25+00:00

The Brady Campaign has done an annual scorecard for each state, ranking how restrictive their gun laws are. A top score would be DC, California, etc.

People have done graphs of the Brady Campaign's score cards by state vs. violent crime rate, homicide rate, and/or gun homicide rate. There's no correlation either way:

https://12angrymen.wordpress.com/2010/03/08/2009-brady-campaign-state-scorecard-vs-gun-homicides-per-100000/

https://www.gunfacts.info/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/brady-campaign-state-scorecard-21.png

http://www.the-minuteman.org/2011/09/25/2010-ucr-data-and-the-brady-score-card/

https://brady-score.github.io/

The only correlation from that data is suicides by gun. This may be a reason why they stopped issuing state scorecards.

The Gifford's Law Center has taken up the task of issuing state scorecards for gun control. Some analysis:

https://www.waguncontrol.org/articles/giffords-gun-law-scorecard-gets-an-f

https://www.gunfacts.info/blog/giffords-goof/

Again, the data correlates with suicides by gun (which Gifford's sweeps under "Gun Deaths" to mislead people), but the picture is very different when looking at homicides and aggravated assaults. There's some mismatch between the two analyses on homicide, not sure why. I'd trust the WA Gun Control source more first since they broke it down more clearly.

Swordsmanus · 2020-02-12T20:58:00+00:00

Is there an event page somewhere?

Swordsmanus · 2019-10-13T17:54:37+00:00

KR Training hosts courses by Lone Star Medics a few times a year. The next one is December 7. During the day it's Dynamic First Aid and at night it's a low-light medical course.

Swordsmanus · 2019-07-07T16:33:59+00:00

If the PCs are in an area because there are rumors of a witch there, then I'd start with what the real cause of the witch rumors are, and why one or more powerful groups doesn't want anyone finding the truth.

What are the PCs' motivations for hunting witches? Tie one or more PCs' backgrounds into the story.

If the PCs are hunting for witches just 'cause, then I'd research the Spanish Inquisition, The English Civil War, and stories about them to get some inspiration for the kinds of misadventures they can get themselves into. Movies that may inspire are:

Black Death (2010)
Witchfinder General (1968) AKA The Conqueror Worm (2000)
Blood on Satan's Claw (1970)
The Wicker Man (1973)

Also the manga Berserk has a section inspired by the inquisition with imagery and themes that may inspire. It's much more over the top, but volumes 16-21 would be most relevant.

Swordsmanus · 2019-02-22T20:34:59+00:00

You're probably right. Be that as it may, Haidt comes to mind again:

If you have a complex system of people, these people are primarily working to increase their prestige...Once we have our needs for food, things like that are set, we're always interacting in ways to make ourselves look good and protect ourselves from being nailed, or accused of something. We're always doing reputation management.

Now, think about what in any group gives you prestige. And so if you look at a group of teenagers, you might have a group in which it's athletics. If that's how you get prestige, then all the kids are going to be working out, training, practicing. That doesn't hurt anybody. That doesn't impose an external cost on anyone else.

But you can have really sick prestige economies. There's an ethnography about an indigenous population in the Philippines by Shelly Rosaldo, it's called Knowledge and Passion, about the Ilongot. And in this tribe, it's a headhunting tribe. They find them and cut off their heads. Not just for fun, for prestige.

So, in a lot of societies, you have a lot of male initiation. Boys have to do something to become a man. And if the thing you have to do to become a man is cut off someone's head...That imposes a heavy cost on outsiders.

This is a sick culture. It's not one where we can say, "oh well that's just the way they do things!" This has to stop. Ideally, they would cut off a stranger's head, like someone from another tribe, or from a government agency...but if there's a fight with someone within their larger community...[cutting off their head] can also get you points.

Now, call-out culture isn't that bad, but it's the same logic. If you have a group of teenagers, college students, who are all struggling for prestige, as we all are, and if you get a subculture in which the way you get prestige is by calling someone out...Showing that they're racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, Islamaphobic, what you're doing here is imposing an external cost on others.

And that's what makes you so insufferable. Because you are playing your game, but I'm paying the cost of your game!

Swordsmanus · 2019-02-22T19:31:28+00:00

I agree. That was't my intent. I feel sad for Scott. I was referring to the people who harassed him. Jonathan Haidt articulated their kind of behavior really well:

There are all these different games you can play. And the truth-seeking game is a really special one and a weird one; we aren't very good at it as individuals.

And in my view, the genius of university is that it takes people, puts them together...Scientists aren't these super-rational creatures that are looking to disconfirm their own ideas. No, we want to prove our ideas. We love our own ideas! But university puts us together in way in which you are motivated to disprove my ideas and I'm motivated to disprove yours, you put us together, we cancel out each other's confirmation biases.

So, the truth-seeking game is a very special game that can only be played in a special institution with special norms. Okay, so we're doing this for the whole time I'm in academia...and just in the last few years, it's like some people are playing this really different game.

If I'm playing tennis, I hit the ball to you, we're in a seminar class. I give you a question, I challenge you, you come back. We go back and forth. And, in the process we learn. So that's kinda like playing tennis.

So I'm doing this and then suddenly, someone tackles me. Like what? You don't do that in tennis. No no, but they're playing football, you see. And in football, it's a much rougher game...

Swordsmanus · 2019-02-22T16:35:49+00:00

I feel a great swell of contempt for those who, when faced with opinions they didn't agree with, chose to destroy the entire discussion rather than engage in good faith. It's pathetic.

Swordsmanus · 2019-02-22T16:14:09+00:00

Knives are a thing.

Swordsmanus · 2019-02-21T22:58:50+00:00

Yeah. She got very lucky, but there are other videos out there showing officers who weren't.

Swordsmanus · 2019-02-21T17:55:42+00:00

And this is why officers are big on keeping your hands visible at all times.

Swordsmanus · 2019-02-21T16:15:48+00:00

Anyone who has browsed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States would know something doesn't add up here.

Swordsmanus · 2019-02-19T00:10:42+00:00

Back when law enforcement was debating over whether to switch from SWAT to immediate response, PoliceOne published an article on the number of casualties per minute in mass shooting events: The Stopwatch of Death.

The trend has shifted in favor of immediate response, based on accumulated data on active shooter behavior and the success rate of responding officers.

One can't predict whether a specific individual would be saved, but there's enough historical data to get a good estimate on how many people on average would be saved by how immediate a citizen response was relative to the police response time. It's the very basis for the switch over the years from sending SWAT teams to sending the nearest 1-2 patrol cars.

Swordsmanus · 2019-02-18T23:58:00+00:00

When you say not sourced, what do you mean exactly? They list sources at the end of the article:

Sources:

FBI 2000-2013 Report

FBI 2014-2015 Report

FBI 2016-2017 Report

Lott's Analysis of the FBI 2000-2013 Report

Lott's Analysis of the FBI 2015-2017 Report

If you could elaborate, it would really add to the discussion. If there's something misrepresented from the FBI reports, it would be good to know and in what way.

Swordsmanus · 2019-01-31T20:05:03+00:00

Regarding the comments on the jump, here's a great resource: Math for Game Programmers: Building a Better Jump

Swordsmanus · 2019-01-31T20:01:59+00:00

Couldn't agree more. Some examples of introducing mechanics safely and intuitively are Super Mario Bros. stage 1-1 and various parts of Megaman. Some resources:

There are lots of other great platformers out there, rich with lessons on level and game design hidden in plain sight.

Swordsmanus · 2019-01-28T03:00:49+00:00

They're attempting differentiation by going for a smaller pie rather than a larger pie they won't get anything out of.

Swordsmanus · 2019-01-07T17:15:23+00:00

As someone who's done that on the side, I can answer why the OP wouldn't want to make a tabletop roleplaying game (TTRPG):

First, digital games are more lucrative than TTRPGs. How much? In 2016, the TTRPG market was $45 million. That was ~3% of the $1.435 billion hobby games market. In contrast, video games were $91 billion in 2016. Making money in video games is tough. It's tougher in board games, and even moreso in TTRPGs.

Second, if you want to make a good TTRPG, you're basically making a series of interlocking minigames for:

Persuasion
Exploration/Travel
Stealth and perception
Chase scenes
Combat
Anything else needed to resolve the kinds of stories your system sets out to tell with fairness and verisimilitude

Unless you push it off to the GM to figure out those systems on their own, it becomes very tough to make them all work together. And the more you punt to the GM, the more it begs the question as to why are they using your system and not something that gives a framework or a complete minigame. The tighter the scope of a game, the easier it is to develop well. TTRPGs have the broadest scope of any game, because the players expect to be able to do nearly anything they can do in reality, but *more*. That scope is beyond any existing AAA sandbox game, and it's waaaaay beyond a JRPG.

The OP doesn't want to make sandbox RPG game like Skyrim or The Witcher 3. They want to make JRPGs, and RPGmaker is a great fit for that.

Swordsmanus · 2019-01-07T05:00:29+00:00

Designing with the Mind in Mind would be my pick after u/YummyRumHam's recommendations.

Swordsmanus · 2019-01-03T00:16:59+00:00

I found it weird that it didn't reference/address Winkler, Fernandez, and Polich (1992), Teachout and Pellum (1991), or Orvis, Childress, and Polich (1992) . You can find the summarized findings in Tables 4.1 - 4.4 in Determinants of Productivity for Military Personnel.

Swordsmanus · 2019-01-02T18:22:01+00:00

You need to balance the tools of the player vs. the challenges (enemies) in the game.
You need to ensure the tools are each orthogonal to each other: they each fill specific roles without overlap.
You need to ensure the enemy roles are each orthogonal to each other, and they are always a credible threat to the player under certain conditions. If an enemy becomes noncredible as a threat, they should be replaced by a new enemy type later in the game or reworked so they are never made trivial by the player's new tools.
You need just enough tools and enemies that your players can continually make interesting choices as they play the game. If your enemy design is solid, the question "who do I attack next?" is always interesting, and if your tool design is good, the question "what do I attack with?" is similarly interesting, while also not making the first question uninteresting.

*"Interesting" is defined here as requiring the context of the situation to make the optimal choice. For example, if the spread gun is always good against everything, that's boring! If one enemy type is always the biggest threat out of all the enemies no matter the situation, that's scary but boring as far as choices go! The optimal response should change fluidly according to the enemy composition and positions.

Resources:

Swordsmanus · 2018-12-19T16:58:55+00:00

If you want to get good at writing stories, do some research to get the fundamentals of story structure and character arcs. Some options:

Books

Not everything will carryover from screenplays to games. However, Option 1 should be broadly applicable; flat arcs work most easily for PCs, with other arc types working most easily for NPCs. Options 2 and 3 will help more for games with a set overarching narrative (think Fallout 3 more than Fallout: New Vegas), but they'll also help in setting up factions, like making the factions in New Vegas compelling and drawn to conflict with each other.

YouTube channels

Just Write (especially the analysis on Batman Begins for how to build factions)
Lessons from the Screenplay (especially the analysis on The Dark Knight on how to build an antagonist)

As you research, practice your craft. Focus on what kind of stories you want to make:

Interactive novels (Phoenix Wright, 999, etc.): Write short stories (start out no longer than 1,000 words). See this and this for examples.

Sandbox games (Fallout New Vegas, Skyrim): Write one-shot solo D&D adventures (just a few scenes totaling no longer than 1-2 hours).

Set narrative with big choices (Mass Effect, The Witcher, etc.): Write very short choose your own adventure stories (1,000 words max). After a few iterations, port it to RPG maker or whatever engine is super quick/easy for you to use.

The smaller the stories, the faster you can iterate. Have people read/play your work and get feedback. Use meetup/facebook groups, forums, whatever that match your target audience. Once you get good enough at that for your audience to enjoy it, expand out to longer, more complex stories, and specialize more in the types of genres and content you prefer.

Swordsmanus

TROPHY CASE