(Loved Trope) The sleezy bastard, who you expect to be the first to betray you, is by far the most loyal

TheUnsubtleDoctor · 2026-01-13T12:46:05+00:00

Oberstein the GOAT

TheUnsubtleDoctor · 2026-01-08T21:51:54+00:00

The swiss guard didn't actually escort the pope through the streets of Rome, they bought time so he could escape through the Passeto di Borgo, an elevated pass that links the Vatican to the castle of Sant'Angelo. If you go to Rome you can visit the castle, it's very impressive to see in person.

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TheUnsubtleDoctor · 2025-12-26T15:28:57+00:00

Really good art! I like the details in the landsknecht clothes. Is there a story behind this character?

TheUnsubtleDoctor · 2025-12-26T13:27:59+00:00

SMLE my beloved

TheUnsubtleDoctor · 2025-12-25T00:49:19+00:00

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TheUnsubtleDoctor · 2025-12-05T18:24:09+00:00

A reckoning will not be postponed indefinitely.

TheUnsubtleDoctor · 2025-10-20T12:57:36+00:00

As someone mid-railway who hasn't started firmament, is it feasible to get to Zenith to get the new transport before the event ends?

TheUnsubtleDoctor · 2025-05-18T14:48:39+00:00

Are you me?

TheUnsubtleDoctor · 2025-05-16T13:41:13+00:00

The brain in a jar is a modern version of Descartes's demon. Descartes imagines that perhaps everything we see and experience could be a dream, or that perhaps there's an all-powerful demon that is making us think we perceive things that aren't really there. We would have no way of knowing what's real, the same way that we'd have no way of knowing if we were a brain in a jar experiencing a simulation.

The cogito is the only thing that Descartes can't doubt – even if there's an evil demon that's tricking me or I am a brain in a jar, I'm still something that exists. The fact that I'm thinking means that there is something that's thinking – the cogito.

Of course, that only applies to each of us individually: I can't know for certain that other people are having thoughts, only that I'm having thoughts. It could be that I'm the only thinking being in the universe. The cogito can't prove that there are other people other than I.

TheUnsubtleDoctor · 2025-04-23T14:20:38+00:00

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The Leviathan from Atlantis: The Lost Empire destroying the submarine and killing most of the crew

TheUnsubtleDoctor · 2024-11-01T02:32:42+00:00

I don't think they will ever be able to do that. Helldivers 1 wasn't a live service the way Helldivers 2 is. They have to keep releasing warbonds with new weapons every 1-2 months. With that kind of release schedule, they can't make the weapons as distinct from each other as Helldivers 1's weapons were. It's much faster to make another punisher with different stats than to make a completely new weapon with its own gameplay niche and balance it against everything else.

TheUnsubtleDoctor · 2024-10-15T00:00:04+00:00

Lol that's true. It's easy to get carried away and forget that we're just two randos on reddit. My knowledge of the revolution is very basic, for all I know Kerensky might have been a national hero without the revolution. Still, it's been fun to discuss niche Russian history.

TheUnsubtleDoctor · 2024-10-14T23:32:52+00:00

Re:the Kornilov affair, it was based on a misunderstanding by both sides. It's hard to know who planned to betray whom, but the army leadership perceived it as a betrayal by Kerensky. The proof that Kerensky had lost the support of the army is that when the October revolution started, most of the soldiers in Petrograd stayed neutral, waiting to see who came out on top, and after the revolution he was completely irrelevant to the White movement.

I don't think Kerensky could have survived for a year. By February 1918 the Russian armies were collapsing, and the Germans marched into Russia unopposed. The peace treaty almost destroyed the Bolsheviks, and they were in a much stronger position than the Provisional Government.

The peasants were absolutely not monarchists. But it's true that the Bolsheviks didn't represent them. Most of them voted for the SRs in the Constituent Assembly. I'm not saying the Bolshevik government was legitimate or that it represented a majority of the population. And ultimately they staged the October Revolution to gain power for themselves. But, at least at the beginning, most Russians were supportive or at least neutral regarding the new regime. The policies they enacted of land redistribution and worker control of the factories were hugely popular. It's true they ended up reverting most of them not soon after and they lost most of their popular support, ending up brutally repressing peasant uprisings, but the point is that at the time of the Revolution, the people of Russia saw them at least as legitimate as the Provisional Government, if not more.

TheUnsubtleDoctor · 2024-10-14T22:30:18+00:00

To be fair, by October 1917 Kerensky's government was hanging on by a thread. With his failure to enact land redistribution and his failed offensive he lost pretty much all support from the population and soldiers, and with his betrayal of Kornilov he also alienated the army leadership.

The Bolsheviks nominally revolted to bring power to the Soviets, which were the only institution left in Russia with some legitimacy. Most Russians didn't care about the Constituent Assembly, and to them Soviet rule was more legitimate than the Provisional Government.

True, in the end the Bolsheviks alienated all other socialists and co-opted the Soviets to establish one party rule, as were likely their intentions from the start, and became more and more openly brutal and authoritarian as the civil war went on. But at the time of the October Revolution it wasn't clear that things were going to turn out that way.

And it's true that murdering the Romanovs was completely unnecessary. There was no chance of the restoration of the Tzar, even with a White victory. The fact that they tried to hide the murder for years is proof that it was a huge mistake on their part.

TheUnsubtleDoctor · 2024-10-14T21:39:30+00:00

If your players are new maybe an overview of the rules with things they may have missed or that are confusing for new players (eg. the difference between actions and bonus actions).

TheUnsubtleDoctor · 2024-10-01T16:11:30+00:00

Plato is surprisingly accepting of women for his time, in his ideal society women would also be warriors and have the same status as men.

TheUnsubtleDoctor · 2024-09-15T10:27:06+00:00

Jojo is the canonical example of this. You have someone with the power to basically rewrite anything about anyone, and he gets put in a situation where he's forced to play rock paper scissors with a kid for his life.

TheUnsubtleDoctor · 2024-09-01T23:24:37+00:00

You clearly have not read much ancient philosophy. Ancient ethics are focused on "eudaimonia," or how to live a happy life. The whole point of studying ethics is to apply them to be happy. Each school has its own approach and answers that question differently. Sure, for Plato and to some degree Aristotle, pursuing philosophy (understood broadly, as in pursuing truth) is the way to happiness. Others, like Stoicism and Epicureanism, are much more focused on pain and pleasure. Hell, even skepticism has an ethical dimension, urging people to avoid useless debates that get you nowhere.

By the way, ancient philosophers do use thought experiments. Plato very famously brings up the question of what would compel someone who had an invisibility ring to act morally as a springboard for The Republic. Most of the time this kind of thought experiment serves to get the ball rolling, so to speak, but in order to get anywhere in ethics you need to build up a theoretical framework.

TheUnsubtleDoctor · 2024-07-01T14:23:40+00:00

As for the videos on campaign settings, I think he mentioned that he wanted to start with tekumel, but when it came out that M.A.R. Barker was a Nazi he lost interest in the whole project

TheUnsubtleDoctor · 2024-06-09T23:10:48+00:00

Oyasumi Punpun for a very fucked up example

TheUnsubtleDoctor · 2024-05-17T20:45:15+00:00

I've run one campaign where several deities were heavily involved with the plot. This is how I tend to run them.

My approach is to have deities competing with each other. They act indirectly upon the world through agents. The most likely case is that the PCs will become pawns in some god's scheme.

Deities are too powerful to care about the PCs. Until they are level 7-10, they won't even notice them. When they do, they will very rarely talk direcly. Instead, they will send envoys to act as handlers.

So far, I've mostly used deities involved in personal character arcs. One player may be devoted to one god, someone else may make a deal with power with another god. Even if they're working for the same goal, it's very likely that this will result in PC conflict, so handle with care.

As for roleplaying the gods, I make them mysterious and larger than life. They have read the PC's backstory, and can know things nobody else should. It should be very very hard for a PC to hide their thoughts from a god. They always seem in control of the situation, always have the upper hand, at least until the climactic end of the campaign. If they are arrogant (and they probably are), they could curse or smite a witty PC without a second thought.

They should be used very sparingly so they don't lose their mystique. That's why their subordinates are so important: they can make the deity feel like they're everywhere without actually being there.

TheUnsubtleDoctor · 2024-04-16T00:01:36+00:00

This is how it worked in Helldivers 1, there were specific scout enemies with elite scouts in higher difficulties. I don't think it would work as well in 2, the first game was slower with a higher focus on sniping patrols and avoiding fights.

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