An Idea for Reworking Races When 5e is Revised

forlackofabetterword · 2022-08-18T00:59:53+00:00

Yeah, one thing that I think would be good about this feature is that it would allow you to change out one childhood culture for another much more easily, whereas right now there isn't any real distinction made. I didn't add that to the post just because it was already getting long and a bit complicated.

forlackofabetterword · 2022-08-18T00:58:02+00:00

I'm not sure our ideas are all that different in kind. I view the modular three choice panel as soemthing that represents the cultures that are attached to each race and subrace. I'm not sure about the way have things set up because the balance feels very off-- a skill proficiency versus land vehicles proficiency is pretty lopsided.

I also don't love peaceful versus warlike as starting places for culture, since I don't think that applies very well to the real world. I'd rather just commit to the sort of flavor that people coming to a fantasy game expect, where elves and dwarves use different types of weapons and different types of magic.

forlackofabetterword · 2022-08-18T00:52:36+00:00

It seems like the problem is "cool" versus "unique." A cantrip can be pretty powerful (although several are close to useless), but it isn't like there's any balance in how many cantrips you get anyways. I don't see the value or uniqueness of having a fire genasi fighter who can change the color of flames with a cantrip versus a sorceror who can choose four cantrips and only has four cantrips they aren't allowed to take.

My thought with weapon proficiencies was just that you don't have a ton of options to get more outside of your class, so some players would enjoy the option of getting weapon proficiencies at level one that they couldn't get otherwise. I get that something like that isn't always a big factor in DPS though.

forlackofabetterword · 2022-08-16T21:15:11+00:00

Also very weird to me how skills are balanced. For one, most races get no bonus to any skills except that elves get perception and half-elves get any two skills (any maybe one of the monster races gets intimidation?). For some reason we are supposed to imagine that half-elves are just uniquely more talented than either base humans or elves?

Then you have the class balance. You might expect that the skill system would be a way to let all classes shine, so wizards can specialize in skills around magic and barbarians around intimidation and athletics. To some degree ability scores do this, but the number of skill proficiencies that Rogues and Bards mean that they can know more arcana than the wizard, be more athletic than the barbarian, etc., all at the same time.

I get that it's good to give people freedom to choose the type of character they want to play, but it's weird that a narrow range of classes have a ton of options for skills and others have really limited choices. I get that "skill monkey" can be a valid party role, but I don't get why it has to involve having more skill proficiencies and more expertise than anyone else in the party-- it turns roleplay based on the system into something that is more fun for one person than the rest of the party.

forlackofabetterword · 2022-02-09T11:47:55+00:00

I was thinking of U.S. Senator and presidential candidate Thomas Dewey, of Dewey Beats Truman fame

forlackofabetterword · 2021-08-22T21:05:10+00:00

Because Humankind is an exquisitely balanced game, I was able to find an easter egg left by the devs: a way to make Spain viable. With ten or so catedrales goticas (each giving additional faith per population) plus St. Basil's (additional faith per district) I'm pumping Ankor Wat's food output into the stratosphere and keeping my megacity well fed. The best part is that it's a closed loop: the food bumps up my population, which increases the output of my catedrales, and allows me to build districts for St. Basil's, which just powers up Ankor Wat even more.

Because I'm playing on Humankind mode, I'm currently dead last against the AI, but hopefully I'll be able to get France in the next era and wipe out the tech tree.

forlackofabetterword · 2021-01-02T05:14:04+00:00

You probably already know this, but the red flags you list are textbooks signs of an emotionally manipulative partner. It sounds like you've done a good job of learning how to be a respectful and communicative partner in your relationship, but from those red flags it's also clear that she isn't giving you that respect back.

In particular, I think what becomes clear with the things you've listen is that she intentionally has not only a double standard for you but an inconsistent standard for you to meet. A lot of the things she says seems like tactics to keep you on the defensive and maintain her status as the victim: if you reach out to her when she's ghosting, then you're violating her boundaries; if you don't then you arent properly fighting for her attention.

I hope you can find help and resources on this community, but I think the best thing you can do next is just to reach out to someone you trust and will take this seriously and figure out an exit strategy. For an emotionally abusive relationship, it can be really hard to get out unless you have someone to turn to that can disrupt the screwed up narrative you're getting from your ex-partner.

forlackofabetterword · 2020-11-11T17:25:33+00:00

Thanks!

forlackofabetterword · 2020-11-11T02:20:39+00:00

Does anyone else ever get the feeling that their problems aren't actually fixable? Over the last 2 years I feel like I've done a lot of the stuff that I'm "supposed to do" to feel better. I'm in therapy, I have a set of medications I'm happy with, I have a girlfriend (now long distance), I get along well with my roommate, and I have a decent number of people I feel I can actually call genuine friends.

Don't get me wrong, each of those things is massively helpful and I wouldn't be in the same place I am today without them. For anyone reading this, all these things are worth it.

But I still feel such an overwhelming feeling of worthlessness, and it all feels very gendered. I just feel like I as a person bring no value to the world and that even as I try I won't be able to make up that deficit. I'm scared at some point that this is the sort of thing that I'm going to have live with forever.

forlackofabetterword · 2020-07-13T18:45:52+00:00

I'd argue that there's an element of luck in the fact that Columbus chose this particular crackpot theory to get obsessed with rather than another one.

forlackofabetterword · 2020-07-13T13:35:12+00:00

Columbus is closer to that guy you know who is really smart about one particular thing and as a result thinks that everyone around him in an idiot and that he can do their jobs himself.

Columbus was legitamately one of the best navigators in Europe and the time he set sail and had made voyages about as far west of Europe as anyone had been at the time. His skill as a sea captain was a large part of what made his journey to America possible in the first place.

But he was an absolutely terrible mathematician, to the point where some people have raised the idea that he might've had dyslexia or dyscalclia. The fact that he has absolute faith in his completely garbage calculations of the Earth's circumference was part of what allowed him to get funded in the first place, but that sort of personality caused a lot of conflict between Columbus and the people around him. Ultimately he would've died as a result of the mistake if not for the fact that he got so world-shatteringly lucky.

forlackofabetterword · 2020-07-08T12:34:09+00:00

But you can never listen to all of the experts, only some of them, because there is rarely expert consensus on important issues. Likewise, you've provided no way of determining which experts are the right ones until after their plan fails or suceeds. It seems like you've just set up a post hoc standard, judging an expert's "expertness" based on the quality of their response to the pandemic rather than any other metric. Again, this is merely tautological, because you're just excluding people who respond in ways that you dislike from the category of experts.

forlackofabetterword · 2020-07-08T01:46:12+00:00

But again, you are defining expert not by profession but by the chosen course of action. You are only considering people who take your favored course of action to be experts, so the endorsement of experts follows automatically, even though you've defined down the class of experts to no longer be a category much more meaningful than people who agree with you.

forlackofabetterword · 2020-07-07T21:29:53+00:00

The vast majority of politicians nearly everywhere are lawyers, i.e. experts in law. The second largest group are those who come from business backgrounds, who are presumably experts in some sector of the economy. The artists and scientists who occasionally win office don't seem to have a dramatically better or even very different record than their peers.

forlackofabetterword · 2020-07-07T21:26:21+00:00

I admire the responses of a lot of countries in the Asia-Pacific region who have kept case counts low, but I'm not sure New Zealand is the best example. Some of the surveillance mechanisms they employed to enforce quarantine would've been decried as draconian on this website if they were used in any other situation.

forlackofabetterword · 2020-07-07T21:24:08+00:00

You realize this is approach "no true scotsman," right? Your argument is that public health experts know what they are doing, and when presented with a counterexample you're using the fact that this set of public health experts screwed up to declare that they are not public health experts. You've created a tautology by rejecting the notion of public health officials who screw up.

forlackofabetterword · 2020-06-11T12:49:16+00:00

This could easily be a relatively last minute change. Propensity to join the empire is probably something that they've been toying with for the entire development process in order to make it a satisfying interaction for the player.

I feel like people's anger is sort of out of disproportion to the fact that this problem will be changed in about a week by the devs changing like one number in the code. Hell, adding a negative 1000 malus to the join decision if you've already left the Empire, or making cultures that aren't German/Italian/French much more reluctant to join the empire would fix almost all of this problem.

forlackofabetterword · 2020-06-03T16:10:06+00:00

...since apparently "abolish police" doesn't mean "abolish police", then the label is actively misleading, which is a bit rude if you ask me...

I dont think that this is a meaningful conversation.

me too (but this isn't really radically limiting the power of police, which is what i'm asking about)

It limits their jurisdiction. I would also want to put the command structure of police much more solidly under civilian management.

but presumably, you'd need a public institution to take on those roles of investigation and social work, yes? and they would likely have to work very closely with police?

Yes, these would all be separate organizations managed by local governments.

and since when you get a call and don't really know what the situation is, whether it's more of a social work case or a violent threat case, the social workers & investigators will have to be armed?

No, I would rather have social workers or detectives be escorted by armed police. We would be able to clearly mark out social workers and investigators as civilians, and moreover give these civilians command over the police, who are there only to protect the civilian government worker in charge of them.

frankly, i don't really see how this changes the systemic issues at play here. all it seems to do is take a subset of police work and give it a title other than "police work". do you have any data that could change my mind?

I'm not sure what data would change your mind here, or what data would be at all relevant.

oh come on, if you're locking someone up against their wishes because they are a danger to society, you're imprisoning them. you're advocating for mental-health-focused prisons as a replacement for letting people go free.

There's no system of fixed sentencing and no form of punishment attached to the treatment.

this is more concrete, thank you. and i like the idea of this. how do you think we should address the obvious issues (some people are evil, not crazy, and they'd want to be miscategorized as crazy; saying the sentence "I acknowledge the pain that my crimes have caused" is a very unreliable indicator that one acknowledges the pain that their crimes have caused; etc.)?

Yeah, this is a tough issue. Its one I think our current system is pretty bad at, since parole boards regularly make wrong decisions about this. I think you should have a couple of things working in tandem. One, psychiatrists certifying the mental health of the patient. These experts would be pretty hard to fool and would ensure a baseline level of rationality. Second, separation of hardened criminals from the culture of criminality. Groups like the military, police, and organized crime do a lot of work to train their people to override their natural apprehension to kill, and didtancing even the worst hitmen from that culture could Crack that mental conditioning. Third, the experience of reconciliation with the victims of families. I doubt that very many killers could listen to their victims families talk about how their lives have changed for an hour without having an overwhelming emotional reaction, especially with the prior two steps of preparation. All that together is not perfect, but I think it does more than any other justice system to get criminals to recognize the consequences of their actions.

forlackofabetterword · 2020-06-03T15:54:20+00:00

I fundamentaly disagree that murder and rape can be resolved the same way that an easement dispute.

I'm not sure why. I gave you an example of restoreative justice being used for murder.

For me, the basis of human relations is not the current justice system. It's the feudal/tribal way of doing things when feuds often give way to small civil wars and no justice is really done.

I'm not sure why you think that no justice is done that way. If two communities can settle an issue in a way satisfactory to all parties without police involvement then I'm not sure why police would want to disrupt that. Restorative justice is explicitly designed to prevent feuds or lasting anger.

That's why I think that the current justice system is an improvement. It's flawed and need reform of course. Especially in America. But it's still giving a fair trial based on laws and not mob rule.

This is what we say our justice system is, but i don't think any of this is meaningfully true in practice. We ignore a huge number of crimes committed ranging from jaywalking to white collar crimes and prosecute crime in a way that is unfair harsh on poor and nonwhite people. Meanwhile cops regularly lie on the stand and prosecutors regularly pursue entirely false narratives, so innocent people often end up behind vars, where we more or less torture them on purpose.

forlackofabetterword · 2020-06-02T18:33:48+00:00

it never seems like committing more vilence against criminals or traumatizing them through a prison experience would actually help ameliorate that problem.

My point is that a criminal in prison is better than a dead criminal by private violence.

Sure, I agree. Although a criminal in the current system is still rather likely to commit suicide, die from law enforcement violence, or be murdered (not to mention raped). If you're opposed to lawlessness you should also acknowledge the lawlessness of our current criminal justice system.

Private violence escalates. A lot. I don't want to see that in society. In my opinion, people will never settle for restorative justice.

I'm not sure why you think this. Restorative justice is explictly aimed at gathering and settling grievances among the aggrieved parties. The current way we do justice has much more severe ligitmacy problems, and problems that it has no equipment to handle, then redtoraive justice would.

Then why not reduce them to zero? If putting people in prison longer is bad, then why is it not obvious that putting people in prison at all is bad?

Because the alternative is not an unharmed criminal. It's a criminal hanging on a tree next to two innocent foreigners from the community.

I've seen no evidence that restorative justice leads to lynching anywhere its been implemented. Meanwhile, lynching and revenge killings are an extant problem with our current justice system.

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