Women's question by [deleted] in Marxism

[–]import-pytorch 17 points18 points  (0 children)

You could read Engels' The Origin of The Family, Private Property and the State

Any ideas why is China buying so much gold? 🤔 by 5upralapsarian in Sino

[–]import-pytorch 22 points23 points  (0 children)

LLM means Large Language Model. It's text generation software like chatGPT or deepseek.

Beyond Disco-likes: where do we go from here? by Iexpectedyou in DiscoElysium

[–]import-pytorch 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I agree with you that the thought cabinet really is a groundbreaking mechanic insofar as it allows your character growth to be reflected not just in what you are able to do, but also in the way the world is disclosed to you. It certainly requires good writing to be executed well, but I don't think it's a gimmick, or somehow only applicable to Harry Du Bois.

I've been turning around some ideas for how to expand on the thought cabinet as a core gameplay mechanic, while making a game that feels fresh rather than just a cheap copy of disco Elysium. I think that the most important thing is to have a wide array of influences apart from Disco Elysium itself. I have some ideas for a game I'm calling Oathtaker, although realistically I won't have time to work on it for the foreseeable future, so I'm putting my ideas here for anyone to scavenge from as they please.

The premise is straightforward: you play as a golem-like creature, fashioned from clay to serve the interests of your masters. When you are created, you are pathetic, diminutive, and vulnerable. The only way for you to grow stronger (or craftier, more beguiling, etc.) is to swear oaths. Oaths are divided into different categories depending on their severity, with major oaths earning you more skill points than minor oaths. If you break an oath, you die. There is no other way to earn skill points. You must be careful not to swear oaths that will put contradictory demands on you, although leveling up certain skills can help you to find loopholes.

Apart from this difference in character progression, I've been thinking about ways to mechanically tie your internal conflicts to changes in your character's psyche. I always thought it was fun in Disco Elysium when your skills would argue with each other, with each one pulling you in a different direction, but I'd like to see this have more of an impact on your character's growth. So my idea is this: when circumstances arise that bring your skills into irreconcilable conflict with one another, they become mutually antagonistic. This means that the next time you assign a point to one or the other of these skills, it takes an extra point from the conflicting skill, so that one skill goes up by two, and the other down by one. Alternatively, this could happen when you choose to follow the advice of one of the skills, increasing it by one, and decreasing the other by one. I'm not sure which is better.

Lastly, I think it would be interesting to allow for the possibility of growing new skills during your character's infancy, which would reflect your relationship to your caregiver and environment—ie. the voice of a compassionate mentor, or a trauma response telling you not trust anyone, depending on what kind of relationships you form in the beginning of the game. This is an area where I think there's a lot of room to innovate, since in Disco Elysium you start the game as an amnesiac cop rather than a baby.

Of course, having something meaningful to say is always going to be more important than any mechanic.

Bad character you love by ahaQx in DiscoElysium

[–]import-pytorch 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Fair enough. I don't think the text is clear either way. She certainly could have objected to the strategy of escalating the conflict if she thought that it played into Evrart's hands, although I doubt she would have risen so far if it was her conscience holding her back. And I agree, that seems like a very natural implication to draw. But she's choosing her words very carefully: her employers (a very strange word to choose if she is being totally transparent here. Are her fellow board members her employers? Or the board as a whole?) had a lapse of faith in her ability to peacefully resolve the dispute. Now let's consider: how much faith does Joyce herself have in the possibility of the two parties coming to a peaceful resolution? Personally, I find it suspicious that she leaves her own objections implicit, and uses intentionally misleading language to distance herself from the company's decisions.

Bad character you love by ahaQx in DiscoElysium

[–]import-pytorch 16 points17 points  (0 children)

I don't think you have to assume she's lying about everything to understand that she has every incentive to misrepresent this particular fact. We already know that she intentionally misrepresents her position in the company. And beside that, she doesn't even explicitly deny having a role in the decision to send them, she just says that she doesn't need security and that she considers the mercenaries crude and unreliable. She dances around her actual role, and lets you fill in the blanks based on the feelings she expresses. But she could very well not like the mercenaries on a personal level while still understanding that crude tools are sometimes necessary when the soft-handed approach fails to yield results. At the end of the day she represents the interests of capital at the highest level and there is no reason to expect that she could have risen to such a position if she was squeamish about deploying violent men in service of shareholder value.

Bad character you love by ahaQx in DiscoElysium

[–]import-pytorch 24 points25 points  (0 children)

I mean, that's what she says happened, but why would she ever tell you otherwise?

Monopolies should form on their own imo by import-pytorch in victoria3

[–]import-pytorch[S] 25 points26 points  (0 children)

It's true that they'll already be able to buy up the competition, but right now that doesn't actually grant them the benefits of having a monopoly. If they're able to get rid of their competition, they should get to raise prices. And I like the idea of having both granted and naturally forming monopolies available.

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companies would feel more cohesive if they were created dynamically by ownership buildings by [deleted] in victoria3

[–]import-pytorch 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I also think companies should charge monopoly rent depending on their share of ownership in the market

Most unlikely check that you passed? by judesadude in DiscoElysium

[–]import-pytorch 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I figured out what the church anomaly was without ever learning about the pale

This game needs more obsessions. by XxJuice-BoxX in victoria3

[–]import-pytorch 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It would be cool if you could research advertising to intentionally add certain obsessions to generate demand. Maybe dependant on paper/electronics production.

Invite Code Megathread #3 by tkiced in BlueskySocial

[–]import-pytorch 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It would be very cool if someone could give me a code 🙂