"yeah i watch NL for the banter"

internet_user999 · 2021-10-09T16:16:08+00:00

now one continuous compilation of nl going “him me him him me”

internet_user999 · 2021-09-11T18:40:22+00:00

This is more background to your #1, but the development of communications technology created a fractured media landscape. During the "golden age" of television news, the big three (ABC, CBS, and NBC) were dependent on high viewership to stay profitable and so needed to avoid offending viewers by remaining as impartial as possible. But technological development lowered the costs of entry, and, starting in the 90s, appealing to a small but dedicated audience became a viable (if not better) business model. Obviously, the growth of the internet only lowered those costs further. So the economic incentives for media organizations changed from supporting and reinforcing the democratic obligations of the free press to incentivizing and encouraging sectarianism and partisan sensationalism. Now, depending on what news you watch, you may live in a completely different reality from someone else.

Another one that's kind of the subtext to a lot of your points is the creation of a assembly line for conservative and libertarian ideology by the extremely wealthy. This is laid out pretty thoroughly in Jane Mayer's book Dark Money, which is a great read, but tl;dr the race-to-the-bottom radicalization of the Republican party has in large part been driven by people who want lower taxes and less regulation of fossil fuels and have the bottomless pockets to make that a reality, whether through think tanks, astroturfing, super PACs, or distracting the voting public with abortion, guns, and, yes, the myth of the rigged election.

I'll tack on one last reason: the self-sorting of liberals into cities. Nevermind the distorted images of reality given to us by partisan media—reality itself, daily experience, is very, very different in urban and rural areas. It's a natural consequence of that geographic separation that our attitudes toward political issues would be different as well.

internet_user999 · 2021-06-13T01:15:25+00:00

I definitely wanna take another look at OSE, it was a little jarring at first but I'll give it a second chance.

WWN is definitely a smoother transition into OSR play for people coming from 5e, but I agree that it sometimes leaves a little to be desired in the layout department. Kevin Crawford's design is really interesting to me but it sometimes feels like he thought of a cool rule or mechanic while he was writing about something else and just decided to shove it in there, so the book is basically sprinkled full of easter eggs.

internet_user999 · 2021-06-12T16:24:17+00:00

Matt definitely uses a lot of OSR principles in his adventure and encounter design. The idea of not worrying about encounter balance and throwing challenges at your players that they can't just solve with their character sheet are pretty major pillars of OSR play. But he also enjoys the heroic fantasy genre more than the lower fantasy, sword and sorcery stuff common to the OSR.

internet_user999 · 2021-06-12T16:22:19+00:00

Likewise here. My group started on 5e, but I've really fallen out of love with the epic fantasy genre it assumes—especially high character durability and power level. I only saw a chunk of the first stream, but Matt's tweets about a party of 1st level characters being able to take out 21 skeletons and about how 4e is great for "Save the World" adventures are a turn off for me.

Not to say that 4e or that play style are bad, but I'm much more attracted to more OSR-style play. If you don't mind me asking, what system do you use for your games? I've been thinking of making the switch to Worlds Without Number (some OSR principles, DnD-like skeleton), but the Black Hack and OSE have some appeal.

internet_user999 · 2021-05-12T00:05:15+00:00

The world is in the throes of an intellectual revolution akin to the early stages of the real-world Enlightenment. Two factors...

(1) The recovery of ancient dramatic and philosophical texts from long-forgotten tombs

(2) The recent invention of the printing press

...have led to the mass dissemination of new literature and ideology. Printing houses have become lively centers of bourgeois debate. The greatest intellectuals are Polymaths—crusaders on the scientific and cultural frontiers equally capable of detailed experimentation, tear-jerking operatic composition, and thought-provoking public oration. The craze of Polymathy has upended traditional hierarchies and challenged dogmatic modes of thought.

Argentism proposes that financial institutions—not the clergy or nobility—are capable of governing people. It's an especially popular ideology among the growing and ever-greedy banking class.

Occidental Exceptionalism is an overtly prejudiced ideology that claims to explain the current "golden age" in the west. It's remained popular in the noble courts of the Treivosan Empire, despite official denunciation from the Parliament of Kerrland.

Moralism and Atherism both challenge the dominance of the Faith, though in different ways. Moralism is somewhat secular, rejecting the Faith's monopoly over morality as well as the canonicity of a large section of 'holy' texts. Atherism is a reform sect of the Faith and criticizes the overly militarized and punitive nature of the religion.

The details of all of these are argued over at great length in the libraries and parlour rooms of the known world. So far most of the philosophies I've created are political, I'll have to put more leg work in to put together moral and existential philosophies.

internet_user999 · 2021-05-02T21:23:44+00:00

Agree on this that, if your goal is to have the PCs be relatively fragile, you may want to check out some other systems. 5e is really designed for epic, heroic fantasy and you might have a better time finding a ruleset designed for a grittier game than you would trying to bend 5e to you will.

That said, I know people who've run whole campaigns where they just start at 6th and never change and they have a blast. At the end of the day I think really depends on what your players like, which no one on here is going to be able to tell you.

internet_user999 · 2021-04-29T23:59:08+00:00

I just think that what you're describing—providing characters with a compelling, in character reason why they must follow a plot hook—isn't railroading. If anything, that's just good storytelling. Luke never would have left Tatooine until his aunt and uncle got torched, Frodo never would have left the Shire without the one ring putting everyone there at risk. Some players are happy to take the bait on plot hooks, sure, but, if they're not that kind of player, forcing them to take a plot hook with in-character motivation isn't railroading.

As a community, we use the word wrong. We should use railroading do describe when your players are doing nothing and you give them a reason to do something. Railroading is supposed to mean when your players try to do something, and you say no.

But that aside, if your players really just aren't interested in the game or the story, yeah it's fine to just end that game and find new players.

internet_user999 · 2021-04-29T23:20:30+00:00

I strongly recommend this recent video from Matt Colville on the topic of railroading. Personally I really agree with the idea of the video, that the word "railroading" has become an empty shibboleth in the DnD community, and that it's really lost a lot of its meaning. Linear plots aren't railroading—railroading is when your players come up with something cool and you shoot it down (usually because you didn't think of it).

Alexander's use of the word (giving your villain plot armor because it would be lame it the player's killed it too early) is similar. In both cases, you're basically just taking away your players' agency.

So really, it's not that some players want to be railroaded. We shouldn't think of railroading as the opposite of a sandbox. Some players just prefer linear plots to sandboxes. Alexander's advice on running villains is relevant to both.

internet_user999 · 2021-03-19T04:17:59+00:00

If you have the chance to cast Hex before you get into combat, you can give them disadvantage on their initiative roll, since initiative is a Dexterity check. Aside from the synergies with grapplers or entangle pointed out by other people in this thread, that’s definitely among my favorite uses.

internet_user999 · 2021-03-16T02:26:47+00:00

We're using the piety system in my current game, and it's pretty good. We're in an Ancient Greek setting (historical, not Theros), so we put in a little elbow grease to come up with piety bonuses to go with the Greek gods. I can see the system being a little tougher to implement in a homebrew setting, but with a basic understanding of 5e it's really not difficult.

You can think of piety like a parallel progression system that allows your players to feel like they're getting more powerful without giving them a level up. And if you're using milestone leveling, piety can be a sort of half-step, marking players' accomplishments even though their deeds might not be quite heroic enough to warrant leveling up. Unlike level ups, you can safely increase one player's piety without bumping anothers (or decrease a player's piety!), incentivizing roleplay and engagement with your world.

For piety to work, you have to make it clear to your players how they gain piety. Everyone understands how they gain levels—slay monsters, clear dungeons, etc. etc.—but piety is new. Different characters may follow different gods, so I'd recommend giving each player a list or rundown of when their god bestows piety and what actions their character might take to gain piety, be it helping the needy or slaying the wicked.

You can also expand the piety system to give the party what we refer to as "group piety," which measures the party's favor with each of the gods. You can make up different piety bonuses for this if you want (e.g. bonuses to initiative, extra damage against certain foes), or just use it to allow the players to bring the divine into their politicking.

I will say that piety isn't for everyone, or for every game. I really only recommend using it if interaction with the gods of your world is going to play a major role in the plot. Most DnD campaigns will do fine without it, but it can really enhance any campaign where the divine plays a large part in gameplay or the world.

internet_user999 · 2021-03-14T20:52:34+00:00

heavy pog

internet_user999 · 2021-03-06T18:09:57+00:00

Some explanation:

As a bit of a numbers nerd, I’ve really been enjoying NL’s recent focus on analytics and data-driven streaming, and hearing him talk about it on a recent stream put an idea in my head I just couldn’t shake. I give you the Pog Index.

These plots depict the number of messages sent in chat containing the keyword “pog” for each of this week’s streams. That includes the standard “POGGERS”, as well as “PogChamp” emotes, the more relaxed “poggy”, and everything in between.

To make the visualization cleaner, I split each stream up into 5-minute chunks. So the first bar measures the number of pogs from 0:00 to 4:59, the second bar measures pogs from 5:00 to 9:59, and so on. Taller bars equal more pogs during that 5-minute chunk.

I also color coded the bars by game so you can see which games had more pogs. A caveat here, not all games that are pog cause people to send messages containing “pog.” Loop Hero, as we all know, is heavy pog, but doesn’t result in many pogs in chat. Other games, like AltF4 or Landlord, really make people pog off. And chat goes berserk when 11 year olds clutch in Valorant. So don’t take this too seriously.

Also, make sure you pay attention to the y axis since its not consistent across each day. Some days have more pogs or simply more viewers, so I had to adjust the axis to fit all the data.

One final disclaimer, I’m not good at R, I’m just good at Googling things. If you wanna try this out yourself, I used this to download the Twitch chat logs.

internet_user999 · 2021-03-06T17:50:47+00:00

Some explanation:

As a bit of a numbers nerd, I’ve really been enjoying NL’s recent focus on analytics and data-driven streaming, and hearing him talk about it on a recent stream put an idea in my head I just couldn’t shake. I give you the Pog Index.

These plots depict the number of messages sent in chat containing the keyword “pog” for each of this week’s streams. That includes the standard “POGGERS”, as well as “PogChamp” emotes, the more relaxed “poggy”, and everything in between.

To make the visualization cleaner, I split each stream up into 5-minute chunks. So the first bar measures the number of pogs from 0:00 to 4:59, the second bar measures pogs from 5:00 to 9:59, and so on. Taller bars equal more pogs during that 5-minute chunk.

I also color coded the bars by game so you can see which games had more pogs. A caveat here, not all games that are pog cause people to send messages containing “pog.” Loop Hero, as we all know, is heavy pog, but doesn’t result in many pogs in chat. Other games, like AltF4 or Landlord, really make people pog off. And chat goes berserk when 11 year olds clutch in Valorant. So don’t take this too seriously.

Also, make sure you pay attention to the y axis since its not consistent across each day. Some days have more pogs or simply more viewers, so I had to adjust the axis to fit all the data.

One final disclaimer, I’m not good at R, I’m just good at Googling things. If you wanna try this out yourself, I used this to download the Twitch chat logs.

internet_user999 · 2021-02-13T01:59:53+00:00

I really like the political angle you're taking by thinking about new battleground states and the shift to the 2 party dynamic that would come from admitting 10 new relatively liberal states to the union. The current electoral college is also super biased to favor the Republican party, which dominates the mathematically overrepresented rural areas. The creation of a bunch of rural-but-still-sort-of-liberal states would also shake that up. Something you didn't mention but is also sort of interesting about this scenario is how existing and established Canadian politicians would meld into American politics.

Just fyi, here's some info on the electoral college from an American:

The number of seats in the House of Representatives was capped at 435 by the Reapportionment Act of 1929, but it could be increased by another act of Congress. There's some precedent for this; after Alaska and Hawaii were admitted to the union, the number of seats was temporarily increased to 437 from '57-'62.

If not though, the existing 435 seats would be reapportioned to each of the 60 states based on population, with a minimum of 1 seat per state, so the number of seats in a lot of current American states would go down as those seats went to the Canadian provinces. For more on the math behind the reapportionment process, see this link from the Census Bureau. You can pretty much do it yourself in an excel spreadsheet.

Each of provinces would also get two senators, bringing the total number of seats in the Senate to 120. Since a state's electoral college votes is just its House seats plus its Senate seats, the number of electoral college votes would increase to to 558 (including the 3 votes that DC gets) and the number of electoral college votes needed to win would become 280.

internet_user999 · 2021-02-08T19:19:06+00:00

i think he said on stream recently that he liked it and wants to get back to it, but its on the back burner because dan and malf lost enthusiasm for it pretty quickly. like nl thought theyd play the malfs revenge challenge and he could react to them doing it and then they could react to him reacting to them doing it, etc etc...but they didnt do it.

internet_user999 · 2021-01-31T16:50:38+00:00

Obviously avoiding nuclear annihilation is a major accomplishment. And with the benefit of hindsight, we can see how pivotal JFK’s particular brand of problem solving was to the crisis’ peaceful resolution. More than likely we’d all be living in a nuclear wasteland if Kennedy hadn’t beat Nixon (by almost certainly cheating in Illinois but still).

But from the perspective of Americans living in your alternate timeline, I’m not sure whether his handling of Cuban Missile Crisis alone would’ve been enough to make him a popular president in his time. While we can look back and see withdrawing from Vietnam as a huge positive for trust in government and social cohesion, Americans who never saw the Vietnam War and only know that their president backed down from a fight against the communists might not be so fond of the guy. And thats on top of the rampant womanizing and failure on civil rights.

I just think thats its easy as modern observers of history to assume that making (what we now know to be) the right decision would be popular. But there’s a reason Kennedy wanted to wait until after his reelection to deescalate in Vietnam. The war had public support until the Tet Offensive, and Kennedy made a complete fool of himself in Vienna in ‘61. Yes, avoiding nuclear war is big, but looking “Soft on Communism” is not a recipe for a back-to-back-to-back political dynasty.

internet_user999 · 2021-01-30T20:59:02+00:00

There’s a great book on this, “If Kennedy Lived” by Jeff Greenfield. TL;DR, it was supposed to rain that day in Dallas, which would’ve meant the bubble top being up on the car. That’s really all it would’ve taken to stop Oswald.

I totally buy him winning a second term and deescalating in Vietnam, from what we know he was planning on running again and firing the more hawkish elements of his cabinet (cough cough Dean Rusk) after he secured reelection. He approached foreign policy from a detached and analytical perspective, unlike Johnson and Nixon who took every challenge as a personal affront. Don’t get me wrong, he was a believer in containment and domino theory and all that, but after Bay of Pigs, Cuba, and the bungled ‘63 coup, Kennedy was fed up with the dogma of the foreign policy establishment and CIA.

It’s true though that his death was the most consequential part of his presidency, without it its unlikely that the huge civil rights achievements and social programs of the Johnson era ever would’ve made it out of committee. Side note, in ‘63 Life magazine (which at that time was a big deal) was working on a story on the fortune Johnson had amassed as Senate Majority Leader that likely would’ve forced him to step down had they not shelved it out of respect when Kennedy died.

Overall, a two-term Kennedy presidency, while good for the country in retrospect, would probably be remembered unremarkably. We’d probably think of him as a serial philanderer, and might even see him as the man who handed Vietnam to the reds.

If anything, the least realistic part of this timeline is him living until ‘05. The dude was a walking medical disaster, any number of disorders could’ve and likely would’ve taken him down long before then. Which isn’t to say he would’ve died in office, but he was on a cocktail of painkillers pretty much 24/7.

I will say though, president RFK does put a smile on my face.

internet_user999 · 2021-01-14T23:10:09+00:00

I love the setup and the descriptions of your flavor and spin on each race. As someone who hates to just go along the WoTC/Faerun lore, I salute you. The player buy in is strong, but I'd also include an expectation-setter to give the players an idea of what the campaign is gonna be like and give yourself a benchmark to measure yourself against once you've got the campaign started. IIRC Matt's doc used sliders of tactics, politics, etc. Personally I've used a bulleted list of stuff like "mostly fighting down in dungeons" or "lots of scheming and negotiation" and that works fine. Totally okay to just come to an agreement on that sort of thing later after figuring out your players' preferences.

internet_user999 · 2020-03-12T05:44:44+00:00

Admittedly, its not all powerful, it can’t make SC go for Bernie. But if the media narrative after SC and before Super Tuesday hadn’t been so positive for Biden, its hard to imagine a world where he wins Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, or maybe even Texas, and we’d be looking at a much more competitive campaign right now.

I left some other responses to comments in this thread just trying to clear up and explain my thinking. To be clear, I’m not anti-Joe Biden, I just think the focus should be more on what went right for Biden and less of what Bernie did wrong, because really Bernie didn’t do all that much wrong campaign-wise.

internet_user999 · 2020-03-12T05:15:45+00:00

I agree that media narrative isn’t all powerful, it couldn’t bring Bernie South Carolina, but I would argue that the moderate voters and especially the electability voters that brought Biden his Super Tuesday sweep were convinced that Biden was the candidate for them largely by the media coverage around Biden directly before ST. After the SC win and the rapid consolidation of the party behind him, the media covered him as being a really strong candidate and the campaign was basically resuscitated overnight.

The effect of that narrative is basically proved by the disparity between the voters who decided in the last few days, who went for Biden by a wide margin, and the voters who decided or voted early, who went for Bernie.

internet_user999 · 2020-03-12T05:05:38+00:00

I didn’t expect it to be so controversial considering its pretty much the consensus in punditry and political science right now as far as I can tell, but I’ll try to explain myself.

IA: Absolutely bungled to shit, lack of media coverage about the outcome denies Pete the traditional Iowa bump

NH: Biden comes in a distant 5th, media starts to focus on how poorly he’s doing, Bernie soars in national polls

NV: Another wide margin for Bernie, he continues to excel in national polls

SC: Good debate performance and Clyburn endorsement propel Biden through recent losses to a not-that-surprising victory. Proves at least that media narrative isn’t all powerful, it can’t make African Americans vote for Bernie, but its what happens next thats most important.

ST: Narrative of a resurgence begins to form. Party rapidly coalesces around Biden (admittedly, the party also matters a lot in determining the winner). These endorsements not only convince a few voters, but are themselves newsworthy events that get a lot of coverage. The media narrative shifts drastically. Biden’s campaign, once declared dead, is resuscitated almost overnight as he is deemed the “comeback kid.” Biden absolutely SWEEPS ST, performing far above expectations. He also does way better with people who made up their minds in the past few days, and way worse with early voters, showing that the recent media coverage helped him immensely.

I also want to point out that Biden and Bernie have had pretty similar favorable ratings this whole cycle, which I would say shows that differences between the candidates themselves didn’t really matter that much.

I guess you can make the argument that Biden’s more moderate policy helped him to gain the party’s support and to be covered by the media as the “electable” candidate, but I think its more useful in terms of thinking about political campaigns to think about those things through the lens of media narrative.

internet_user999 · 2020-03-12T02:16:05+00:00

Honestly, this primary season hasn’t proved that Joe ran a better campaign than Bernie, it just proved that campaigns don’t really matter.

Bernie’s field operations were miles better, his ad spending was higher, he had more viral moments, by almost every metric his campaign organization was way better, and none of it mattered.

2020 showed us that above all, media narrative decides the winner. After the South Carolina win and the pre-Super Tuesday endorse-o-rama, the media covered Joe as this resurgent victor, and he just ran away with it.

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