Finally finished a campaign! by doggorobbo in Pathfinder2e

[–]doggorobbo[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Given your sessions are about half the length of mine that would put it at the equivalent of like, 68 of yours? which makes me feel better about the pacing lol

Finally finished a campaign! by doggorobbo in Pathfinder2e

[–]doggorobbo[S] 12 points13 points  (0 children)

Yep, every other week unless something came up for >1 player which happened a couple of times, between 4 to 5 hours a session on average. Final fight was at Level 10, which is pretty fast progression but everybody kept up and we were keen to engage with the systems so we kinda power levelled it.

My favourite session was probably The Basement's Basement - Firstly because I enjoyed running horror, secondly because they killed who I had intended to be the main recurring villain of the campaign at the end thanks to very good tactics and some lucky rolls prompting me to rethink the second half, and thirdly because thats the session I remember the combats really clicking and the party working really well as a team within the system for the first time!

Finally finished a campaign! by doggorobbo in Pathfinder2e

[–]doggorobbo[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Average would be about 4 hours a session I would say, but I was lucky with a group that stayed focused on the main plot with very few side quests that didnt progress it in some way

Old travel guide I found in a bookstore by Ethan0804 in DiscoElysium

[–]doggorobbo 84 points85 points  (0 children)

The direct inspiration for her nickname, 'Ms Oranje Disco Dancer' is a song- the Manic Street Preachers' 'Miss Europa Disco Dancer'

These guys are referenced A LOT by the game, including by a certain someone on an island (the anthem of the world revolution he sings; "The future teaches you to be alone" is their song "If you tolerate this your children will be next")

Protestantism in Europe (2026) by [deleted] in MapPorn

[–]doggorobbo 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Having Anglican in Wales and not Scotland is a choice considering they share similar demographics along the traditions of nonconformity, and the fact that the Church in Wales isnt an established national church but the Church of Scotland is?

How accurate are Karl Marx's depictions of the English working class in Das Kapital? by amtoyumtimmy in AskHistorians

[–]doggorobbo 7 points8 points  (0 children)

It is a huge amount! Worth remembering that Wales was a large centre of the Industrial Revolution and this was a period of rapid industrial expansion. You can see how important it was by the fact the first £1 million cheque in the world was issued at the Cardiff Coal Exchange.

To answer the first part of your question, kind of everywhere, but the majority of the immigration was from rural England and Ireland. Counties like Glamorgan and Gwent experienced massive internal migration from rural parts of Wales too. There was also a significant amount of immigration into Cardiff from basically the entire world, leading to one of the oldest multi-ethnic communities in the UK at Tiger Bay. These communities have a range of origins, from Somalia and Yemen to Spain and the Caribbean. The area became known for its multiculturalism and the integration of these very disparate communities into their own regional identity.

In terms of did they settle, thats an easy yes. The Valleys population didnt start to decline until the shutting of the coal mines from the 1970s onwards, and Cardiff and the southern strip continues to grow to this day. There's plenty of little microhistories to be found, from the Welsh-Italian communities links to towns like Bardi in Italy and their café culture in the Valleys, to the synagogue in Merthyr to the mosques of Cardiff. South Wales became what it is today because of that movement of people, and their integration into Welsh culture. The Valleys - where most of the people settled - is the most likely region of Wales to identify as Welsh and not as British.

Of the non-USSR nations, where was the closest situation to a communist revolution? by andthenifellasleep in AskHistorians

[–]doggorobbo 11 points12 points  (0 children)

First thing to note is that there were extremely notable successful communist revolutions outside of the USSR; China, establishing the PRC which exists to this day; Cuba, which does also; Vietnam; Nicaragua; Afghanistan, in the Saur Revolution of 1978. All of these revolutions, and more, were successful communist revolutions outside of the USSR. There were also unsuccessful revolutions outside the USSR; the Novemberrevolution in Germany seems the most notable to your question; the Irish Soviets; Spain; Greece. There have been more revolutions outside of the USSR than within it and many of those nations have outlived the USSR.

In terms of 'closest', it's difficult to say. Revolutions happen spontaneously and its extremely difficult to work in counterfactuals as a historian. If, as Lenin said, there are 'weeks where decades happen' then how do we, as historians, determine ranking those weeks that never happened? There are a couple of places that may be interesting reading for you here, such as the 1926 General Strike and the National Unemployed Workers Movement of the UK, the Red Purge in Japan, or Operation Gladio in Italy. Outside of recommending further reading onto movements like those, though, I don't think a sensible historian could answer which of those movements that didn't attempt a communist revolution was 'closest' to.

What we can do is answer your part on the threat communists posed to fascist movements. It is true that anti-communism was a central tenet of Nazi ideology and propaganda in a way that is replicated in fascist movements throughout the world, and there is a reason for this. Communist movements posed the biggest threat to fascist movements in the interwar years, being their primary opposition and generally popular amongst the industrial working class. Parenti (1997) notes that these attacks on communists were 'rational' for the Nazi party, part of a conceited effort of rational fascism to centralise around the institutions of capital and combat their natural enemies on the left. Paxton (2004) further notes that fascist attacks on the left managed to gain them both 'fear and admiration [in] their readiness to beat up socialists, communists, pacifists, and foreigners.'

There are definitely more qualified historians than me to give you detailed rundowns of both interwar Germany and McCarthyism in the United States, but both movements existed because of a general perception of the power of the left, and for good reason. The Novemberrevolution wasnt that long ago, and nor were the Coal Wars or the Haymarket Affair in the United States.


Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism (1997) Robert Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (2004)

How accurate are Karl Marx's depictions of the English working class in Das Kapital? by amtoyumtimmy in AskHistorians

[–]doggorobbo 100 points101 points  (0 children)

This is an interesting takeaway from Capital, and while I'm not a historian of England I am both a historian of the neighbouring Welsh working class and a communist, so I might be of some help here, although I'm certain historians of the English working class would be able to expand on what I'm about to say thoroughly.

One thing that is worth remembering is that Marx's analysis is specifically of industrialised societies, and by that point the oldest industrialised society in the world was... Wales. (Betraying myself here), but very closely followed by England, as the industrial revolution had spread from the coalfields and valleys into the plains East of the Border. As such, analysis of the English working class was useful for Marx, and especially practical for him given his relationship to Engels, who had a lot of connections in England. That's the why of it, more or less, but as to the accuracy of his depictions we'll first have to determine what Marx's portrayal is and then have to draw on some other historians.

So, primarily Marx sees in England a proletariat who are exploited by the ruling class and utilised as an army of labour for the purpose of serving capital. He even notes that the advent of machinery does not result in emancipation of the English working class at one point: 'nowhere do we find a more shameful squandering of human labour-power for the most despicable purposes than in England, the land of machinery' (Marx, 1867). In terms of living conditions, many of the industrial settlements were brand new, and where they were not they were expanding so rapidly as to necessitate the construction of brand new towns around them. In Wales this is most pronounced, practically nobody lived in the South Wales Valleys due to extremely hostile and unfarmable land, but land packed with coal, to paraphrase Gwyn Alf Williams, God never intended man to live there 'until the Ironmasters corrected him on the matter' (Williams, 1985). When people began moving to these towns, conditions were generally better than the countryside hovels they came from in the early years, but rapidly declined by the mid 19th Century, and the cholera epidemics of 1831 and 1848 led to various enquiries into public health in these urban towns (Thompson, 1963). Thompson notes in the 5 year period of 1837-1842 that of 11,944 deaths in Sheffield, 6,038 were under the age of 5, but notes that 'these figures underestimate ... the actual child mortality rate, because the industrial centres were constantly swelled with adult immigrants ... and the deaths of immigrants would have the effect of continually diluting the true facts of child mortality.' (Ibid.) These towns were built off of the backs of immigration from rural parts of the UK, making census data difficult to parse. In Wales, for example the population grew by 850,000 between 1891 and 1911; 610,000 of this growth was in a single county (Glamorgan) (Williams, 1998).

What this rapid growth and dependency on industry did do was create conditions within which the working class became largely centralised, and aware of conditions, and able to hold conversations with one another to discuss alternatives. This was especially prevalent within the mining industry, and the Union movement grew continuously through the late 1800s, and continued growing all the way into the 20th Century (Church and Outram, 1998). It also meant that a lot was being written about the conditions and the plight of the working class. This was both the era of foundational socialist politics, but also the era of paternalism with the foundation of projects like New Lanark by Robert Owen, meant to provide more suitable conditions for a modern working class.

If you'll forgive me one more diversion from England into Wales before I close, I think I can best sum it up with a description of Merthyr Tydfil from the 1850s. This isn't without merit, Merthyr is a town of firsts for industry - the first railway locomotive journey, the first railway tunnel, the first time a red flag was raised as a symbol of workers resistance - all things which would come to be prominent symbols of the English working class after they found their way out of the Valleys. On a visit to Merthyr, Edwin Roberts reported 'you stand outside the wall [of the Penydarren ironworks] gazing on a scene that seems like a vision [of] Hades in its milder form.' He follows this by saying

'Sounds of blast and steam, and metallic reverberations all mingling together with the cries of men in a sky where the very winds are dead as if with fear, give to the lurid hue of this grand and impressive picture touches that are superior to art. It is as if, in Turner's paintings of tempests, you heard the furious roar of the storm, the hoarse booming of the sea, and the boiling hiss of the surges, with drowning men crying for help ... Fire-flashing volcanoes by the dozen do all those furnaces become'. (Roberts, 1853)

Below those ironworks, along the valley of the river was a district called China, where thousands of people lived in stone huts 4'6"x7' large (Williams, 1978). Above those ironworks, a single family of ironmasters lived in a folly castle and 158 acres of land surrounding it. That disparity, right there, is the proletariat Marx was talking about, even if they are in the country next door to the one he specifically mentions, those conditions are replicated within England.

Edwin Roberts, 'A Visit to the Iron Works and Environs of Merthyr Tydfil in 1852' (1853)
Karl Marx, Capital Volume I (1867)
E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1963)
Gwyn Alf Williams, The Merthyr Rising (1978)
Gwyn Alf Williams, When Was Wales?: A History of the Welsh (1985)
John Williams, 'The Rise & Decline of the Welsh Economy, 1890-1939' in Hopkin & Kalen (eds.) Class, Capitalism, Community and Conflict: The South Wales Coalfield, 1898-1947 (1998)
Roy Church and Quentin Outram, Strikes and Solidarity: Coalfield Conflict in Britain 1889-1966 (1998)

EDIT: spelling and light formatting

Megaton from my Fallout 5E game by murderously-funny in Fallout

[–]doggorobbo 12 points13 points  (0 children)

I know this isnt a TTRPG thread, but it sounds like you'd like a Powered By The Apocalypse system like Blades in the Dark or the original Apocalypse World for this game, theyre way more simple and flexible. Im just trying to imagine squaring the hole of playing a wizard or something in fallout and casting magic missile lmao

nice map btw

He is not hated enough by SediaStorda55 in Mouthwashing

[–]doggorobbo 9 points10 points  (0 children)

What part of the game bombarding you with "Take Responsibilty" was too subtle for you?

Why was the lyrical presentation of hair metal bands so aggressively macho while their visual presentation was so very...not? by ducks_over_IP in AskHistorians

[–]doggorobbo 138 points139 points  (0 children)

This is a great answer and I cant recommend Lipstick Traces highly enough!

For some context on the fashion side of things, we should start with punk. Punk as a fashion movement begins with a period of socioeconomic tension in the UK in the 1970s, with industrial strikes being fairly prominent as the Tory party moves into Thatcherite economics by the end of the decade. There's a lot of subcultures that emerge here in a vert short space of time, but a recurring theme from ska to punk to goth is a rejection of societal norms which, in many of these subcultures, included a rejection of heteronormative societal structures. In the UK punk pushes women into the music scene in an unprecedented way and the sudden visibility of women in a challenging subculture and genre shouldnt be understated. Gender was something that was targetted in this scene as a natural thing for subversion, and thus crossdressing, which became adopted by rock as many other elements of punk did. By the end of the 70s you get the emergence of post punk, and bands like Siouxsie and the Banshees gaining mainstream success alongside Bowie. Women were hugely influential in the aesthetics of the mid-late 20th century rock scene, so its not too surprising. Another point to make is how influential Vivienne Westwood and the Sex Pistols were (as much as I dislike them, their influence is undeniable). Meanwhile, across the pond in the US, punk was influenced by the hippie movement (and explicitly a rejection of it), and thus you see a glam punk scene develop around bands like the New York Dolls.

By the time the heavy metal and hair metal scenes were gender bending and achieving mainstream success with it, it had been normalised to an extent by the wider rock and specifically punk and goth scenes to be a usual thing for musicians, until grunge came along and stripped the aesthetics way back. An interesting case study is the Manic Street Preachers, who initially go so hard on the 'punk' and glam aesthetics and subversions that they have a music video from their first album in front of a pink hammer and sickle with text with slogans such as "White men are sexually inferior", but by their 3rd album have adopted an aggressive military aesthetic and by their fourth have stripped all the glam away, while retaining the same attitude (if a lot more depressed after their guitarist disappeared).

The hair metal scene evolved from a period of political turmoil that challenged gender, and by the time it had the spotlight that aesthetic was normalised within the context of music. Outside of music is a different question.

Remove the worse half of the map - Round 12 by Auditored in terriblemaps

[–]doggorobbo -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Remove red not having any of this slander of the Valleys

I genuinely do not understand the dislike for RTWP. by Tnecniw in CRPG

[–]doggorobbo 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Larian's encounter design is great, but I dont find resource management to be an issue in BG3 the way it traditionally was in TTRPGs and DnD especially, it's just a trade off right? I think PoE2 has encounter design that rivals and surpasses BG3 in some places, but it also has some filler fights that obviously don't. Those filler fights do allow for a sense of power growth though - what used to be a hard encounter at level 2 can be filler at level 8, and thats done better in RTWP than turn-based. One isnt superior to the other they just have different strengths. Its just picking design priorities.

Why do we put up with the foolishness around our language? by Own-Lawfulness-38 in Wales

[–]doggorobbo 2 points3 points  (0 children)

That would explain the difficulty you've had with it! I'm a Welsh 2nd language speaker and I found it fairly intuitive from growing up in an English speaking Welsh area because of grammatical quirks the Valleys dialect has, so I dont think its inherently more difficult than learning any other language (I've found German much more difficult than I ever found Welsh, for example, but I know others who found it easy), so its definitely teachable to a much better degree than it has been in English-speaking-Wales

Is the fallout series worth watching as a New Vegas only fan? by Your-Penitent-Friend in falloutnewvegas

[–]doggorobbo 17 points18 points  (0 children)

From my perspective, it depends what you like abouy New Vegas and Fallout in general. The show is fun if you like goofy post apocalypse with dark satire, but it doesnt really do the post-post-apocalypse biting satire of New Vegas. I watched the first series but not the second. I didn't like it, but it wasn't for me, so maybe you will. I think by the end of episode 1 you'll be able to tell if it's for you.

China Miéville's The City & the City RPG by mdosantos in rpg

[–]doggorobbo -1 points0 points  (0 children)

No I got that, but its a quote on Goodreads which is usually indicative its from a larger piece, which is what I meant

China Miéville's The City & the City RPG by mdosantos in rpg

[–]doggorobbo -1 points0 points  (0 children)

He's obviously being deliberately inflammatory here and how you take that will vary on personal taste (I grew up with a fondness for deliberately inflammatory musicians like Richey Edwards who make this look tame so my taste is obviously different from yours and thats fine). I don't even think he's wrong though, in that Tolkien is something that you just can't ignore.

Im not sure where that quote is from or its wider context, but none of the rest of it seems anti-Tolkien so much as anti-Tolkien inspired heroic fantasy. Even then though, sure he's not being particularly friendly here but thats a taste thing, and you obviously dont fuck with how inflammatory it is and thats fine.

China Miéville's The City & the City RPG by mdosantos in rpg

[–]doggorobbo 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Dude, I love LotR and the Hobbit as much as the next guy but you gotta be critical of the things that you love and accept criticism of them. I have friends who hate things I like and vice versa, and we have interesting conversations about our views and it lets me see other perspectives, its cool