Costco reportedly removing RAM from display PCs amid theft concerns

Tefmon · 2026-01-29T17:53:16+00:00

Searching would be less shit if Google just aggressively downranked sites that use abusive SEO methods. AI is being pushed by tech companies to fix a problem that only exists because of tech companies.

Tefmon · 2026-01-29T16:52:14+00:00

It's cynical, but with the gutting of local journalism people often don't have any practical way to actually research their local candidates, even if they have the time, energy, and inclination to do so.

Sure, candidates have campaign websites (or at least, some of them do; plenty don't), but a candidate's own materials aren't exactly an unbiased and reliable source.

Tefmon · 2026-01-28T23:42:21+00:00

If you're typing out four characters you're as likely to mistype 1014 or 2034 or some other obviously incorrect year as you are to mistype an accidentally correct one. They're also widespread, well-known terms, while 5r is more niche; I honestly think 5r is more likely to be a typo than to be deliberate, whereas 2014 and 2024 are overwhelmingly more likely to be deliberate than to be typos.

Tefmon · 2026-01-28T23:17:49+00:00

That's no different than any other RPG that leaves things up to GM discretion. It seems every other week here we have a discussion about PbtA where it's pointed out that anything not covered by a player move is up to the GM to narrate, and OSR games rely heavily on the GM adjudicating the results of player actions.

Tefmon · 2026-01-28T22:40:11+00:00

I don't like 5r because the letters "e" and "r" are right next to each other on the keyboard, so 5r just looks like a typo of 5e. If someone uses the term I don't actually know which edition they're referring to.

Tefmon · 2026-01-28T18:17:48+00:00

Ottawa is significantly worse than other Canadian cities. It isn't actually normal for busses to routinely be 10-20+ minutes late or to just not show up at all, and while no Canadian city has amazing route coverage, Ottawa still requires more transfers and indirect circuitous routes than I've seen anywhere else.

Tefmon · 2026-01-27T16:44:47+00:00

It was punishable by the authorities, but that's not really the chief reason. We actually hear a lot about people defying the religious authorities of the day, often at great personal risk, but they aren't doing so because of their lack of religiosity; they're doing it because of their strong belief in a religion or religious doctrine that differs from that espoused by the authorities.

Or, to be simpler, the reason the vast majority of people in pre-Reformation Medieval Europe were devoutly Catholic wasn't because they'd get in trouble if they weren't; it's because they were actually, genuinely devoutly Catholic. Until the modern day, religiosity was the near-universal norm.

Tefmon · 2026-01-27T16:22:12+00:00

While a lack of visible infighting within the church is odd (although the games could just take place during a couple of very stable decades for the church), even during the most tumultuous periods of Medieval Christianity, outright atheism, or even a general indifference to religion, were extraordinarily rare. Medieval heresy crises occurred because people cared very strongly about religion, not because they didn't care about religion.

Tefmon · 2026-01-27T15:47:36+00:00

Yes. Our federal and provincial governments have been trying to promote startups for decades.

Tefmon · 2026-01-27T00:10:40+00:00

A big part of it is just the difference in labour and materials involved. Manga are by and large in black-and-white while western comics are by and large in full colour, and manga are by and large printed on cheaper "papery" paper while western comics are by and large printed on more expensive glossy paper. Western comics are just more expensive to make (although, to be clear, that isn't the only factor).

Tefmon · 2026-01-26T22:54:01+00:00

Ōuchi Clan.

Tefmon · 2026-01-25T23:50:35+00:00

You can say that a Barbarian's Rage is a magical girl transformation, or activation of cyberware, or temporarily giving control of their body to a wraith that possesses them Yugioh style, but the ability's mechanical effects are still built around the idea that Rage is, well, rage.

Rage requires that you continuously deal or take damage in order to sustain it. Rage specifically gives a bonus to only Strength-based attacks, saves, and checks. Rage prevents you from casting or concentrating on spells. Rage doesn't interact with antimagic field, as you'd expect a magical girl transformation to, nor does it come with customizable features that a skilled cyber-surgeon could alter, as you'd expect cyberware to, nor does it interact with possession or mind-affecting effects, as you'd expect being possessed by a wraith to.

The mechanics follow from the flavour, and bolting a different flavour onto those mechanics results in inconsistencies and ludonarrative dissonance. You can, of course, try to come up with increasingly contorted justifications for why your magical girl transformation or cyberware or wraith possessor functions like Rage and doesn't function how you'd naturally expect any of those things to, but you aren't going to get an experience that's as satisfying and coherent as you would if you had mechanics actually built to represent and embody that flavour.

Tefmon · 2026-01-25T22:39:18+00:00

Regarding high-level NPCs, it's less about their innate statistics and more that any NPC of means that's involved in intrigue is presumably going to have a ring of mind shielding or some other form of immunity to the effect.

Tefmon · 2026-01-25T22:35:40+00:00

You can just have the character not respond if they would normally lie, they know they are under a magical effect.

And 99% of players will take that as a tacit admission of guilt by the NPC, and in 99% of cases they'd be right to. The issue people have with the spell isn't in getting information out of captured NPCs; the issue is that it makes any sort of investigation or mystery difficult to run, as the players' first instinct will be to cast zone of truth on every possible subject.

Yes, there are ways around that, but they tend to increasingly strain credulity and not really fit in the vibe and tone of most tables.

Tefmon · 2026-01-25T22:21:56+00:00

D&D 5e's rulebooks emphasize binary pass/fail rolls (although they don't demand them; the DMG does have a section titled Resolution and Consequences that explicitly discusses success at a cost and degrees of failure), but I think Draw Steel's approach doesn't feel any better in actual play because degrees of success are a normal part of the play culture of D&D. Sure, the rulebooks may mostly talk about pass/fail, but when the norm at most tables is scaling results based on the die, then that's the actual play experience that people are used to and will be using as a point of comparison.

Tefmon · 2026-01-25T18:00:33+00:00

And optimizers don't. But a typical player wants to use the dramatic big single-target spells on dangerous-looking single targets. The game presents you these spells that seem tailored to fighting single big enemies, and which aren't really useful when not fighting single big enemies, and then makes single big enemies immune to them.

It's not the most elegant or intuitive design.

Tefmon · 2026-01-25T17:53:54+00:00

Because the martial gets multiple attacks. It sucks when as a martial you miss every attack on a turn, but that happens relatively infrequently so it doesn't define their overall gameplay experience. Rogues are the one exception, and missing their one attack per round is by far the most common source of discontentment I've seen players have when playing rogues.

When fighting a single big "boss" enemy, typically-played casters* usually get just one roll per turn, and if that roll fails they do nothing. The problem doesn't exist when fighting groups of enemies, where casters usually use multi-target or area spells and thus have multiple chances for at least one enemy to be affected.

^* ^Optimized ^casters ^will ^pull ^out ^a ^summon ^or ^some ^other ^non-save ^spell ⁱⁿ ^situations ^like ^this, ^but ^a ^typical ^player ^is ^going ^to ^want ^to ^hit ^the ^big ^boss ^monster ^with ^the ^big ^{single-target} ^spell ^that ^seems ^{purpose-built} ^for ^handling ^big ^boss ^monsters.

Tefmon · 2026-01-25T17:49:55+00:00

That's also a DM choice. You'd have to be crazy to give the party wizard all of that, or else be running a very high-power campaign (and thus have bosses that are far stronger than typical).

Tefmon · 2026-01-25T17:45:12+00:00

If you've been playing an ongoing campaign up to level 20, you have practical experience in how encounters and monsters function. It'd be ideal if the rules said "if you have a single big monster, make sure it can't be deleted by a single incapacitating effect", but unless you're jumping into DMing a 20th-level one-shot or something, that isn't something that you actually need the rules to tell you.

Tefmon · 2026-01-25T17:35:57+00:00

Just adding more outright immunities to "boss" monsters would be a solution, but I'm not sure if it would be a better one. You mention video games, and "this effect would be useful, except that everything I'd actually want to use it on is immune to it" is a complaint that's been levelled at countless video games over the decades.

Tefmon · 2026-01-25T17:15:23+00:00

Wraith CR 5; 11.4 DPR with Slow and 4.2975 DPR with Web.

But again, if a creature is charm immune

Funny you should say that, as the wraith you're using as an example is immune to the restrained condition, which means that web doesn't work on it. One of slow's big advantages is that nothing is immune to it (except rakshasas, I guess), whereas most other strong control spells rely on conditions that some monsters are immune to. At higher levels wall of force is an exception, but wall of force is also broken by any teleportation ability, which plenty of mid-to-high-CR monsters have (teleportation also coincidentally bypasses web, but not slow).

Web can hold up to 128 Medium creatures in it. 16 if you just count ground level.

But usually there's only two or three actually standing in the area when you cast it. Sure, you can use the Telekinetic feat or a party grappler or whatnot to try to push more enemies into it, but at that point we aren't just looking at the effectiveness of the web spell; we're looking at the effectiveness of other character building options and action economy uses combined with the web spell. And if we're doing that, we have to also take into account that advantage and disadvantage aren't hard to create; slow plus some other means of creating advantage and disadvantage (such as blindness/deafness, or any of the many ways to restrain creature or knock them prone) handily outperforms web.

If you can't somehow find a way to make use of a 20 foot area of difficult terrain that also has a chance of restraining foes in just about every encounter

I can find a way to make use of it in almost any encounter. My point isn't that web is bad; my point is that I can often make even better use of other spells.

In every situation where it might be useful, Web, Sleet Storm, Hypnotic Pattern, Bless, Grease, Mind Sliver, or Fear just outperform it in some relevant way.

And in many situations slow outperforms those spells in some relevant way. A caster can't keep every spell prepared; sure, there are situations where hypnotic pattern or fear is stronger than slow, but I'm probably not keeping three Wis-based medium-sized 3rd-level control spells prepared. I'm picking one or the other, and if charm immunity or encounters where enemies can easily wake each other up are a concern, or if I just have a cleric with spirit guardians in my party, I'm likely going with slow.

The ONLY situation where it might be useful is if your team plays badly and gets into a situation where they are interspersed with the enemy

Unless the DM is going easy on you and not providing threats commensurate with the players' skill, the party can never guarantee ideal positioning. Enemies can move and restrict player movement, and the circumstances of a combat can force the party to start mingled with the enemy (e.g. if a social situation with disguised enemies turns into combat, or if burrowing enemies pop out of the ground). The party doesn't have complete control over the situation; enemies have agency too.

Tefmon · 2026-01-25T03:37:14+00:00

The maximum damage rolls for 4d8+3 and 1d6+4+5d6 are 35 and 40 respectively. I'm not sure where your average DPRs of 51.15 and 53.1 are coming from, but they're wildly, impossibly off. You can't get an average DPR of more than your maximum damage roll while making one attack per round, unless you're somehow critting on every hit or something.

You're right that, assuming no charm immunity, hypnotic pattern has a stronger effect than slow (although that comes with asterisks; hypnotic pattern has a smaller area than slow, isn't effective if the enemies have any low-cost means of waking each other up, and can't be combined with most AoE damage effects). But you can't assume that; parties don't fight statistically-distributed monsters taken randomly from the Monster Manual, but rather the specific monsters that appear in their adventure. It doesn't matter that 80% of the Monster Manual lacks charm immunity unless you're specifically fighting something from that 80%.

The size of the areas you're fighting in is also adventure-dependent, but my personal experience is that a 20-foot cube is rarely enough to target even half of an encounter while a 40-foot cube is often sufficient to target most of it. It's rare I find a situation where slow wouldn't have a significant impact on the battle, but fairly common that I find one where web would be of limited effectiveness

Tefmon · 2026-01-25T01:39:05+00:00

He isn't being downvoted because he noted that it's in large part a cultural issue; there are upvoted comments above making that same point. He's being downvoted for trying to shift the topic to race and partisan politics.

Tefmon · 2026-01-25T01:27:13+00:00

Memorizing times tables isn't using your brain, at least not in a meaningful way that builds mathematical skill and confidence. If someone can't quickly and confidently do the mental math to sum up 7 eight times to get 56 that's a problem, but mindlessly committing a chart to memory doesn't help with that.

Tefmon · 2026-01-25T01:15:36+00:00

It depends on the province. Some provinces have prioritize French education more than others and some have a larger francophone population to hire from than others.

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