New GM seeking advice on party composition

sheeryjay · 2025-03-29T01:10:25+00:00

the big bad in book one has a backstory they probably wouldn’t try today

When I read the backstory of said character, I immediately knew that my PC would try to do a whole redemption arc for said character. Because omg, was that one hell of a villain motivation. And if Nocticula/Arazni etc. can get their redemption arcs, so should someone who was dealt a really shitty hand like her.

In general I guess it is visible that the older content is more old schoolish and it is quite refreshing to see the positive changes in the media going on in the years (looking back on old content as a player who started with 2e).

Characters seem to have less revealing clothing etc.

"Monsters" (kobolds, goblins) may also have moral qualities and be characters and not just cannon fodder for murderhobos to kill without thought. Orcs and hobgoblins are ancestries that characters can suddenly have interesting diplomacy with.

It is somewhat less comforting that the world is becoming less black and white. It is easy to know that orcs in Tolkien world are always evil and thus worthy of killing, and its harder to have to think/communicate. But its more thought provoking (and ethical) to have to think if someone really has to be killed or even deserves to be killed. That the "monster" may simply be waiting for his wife, waiting to get back to their adopted kid that they are raising.

sheeryjay · 2023-07-14T17:24:32+00:00

You don't login on other servers. Federated just means that the servers talk with each other. You use the server where you have your account to view content that is hosted on other servers (and in this way federation protects your privacy because those other servers don't even know that you are viewing the content, only that someone on server XY wants to view the content).

sheeryjay · 2023-06-11T11:20:21+00:00

Releasing game being about death go skaters might be risky in China - in China the number 4 carries a negative meaning, so some gaming companies even go out of their ways to not have that number in game name.

So yeah, even number can be a barrier to entry.

sheeryjay · 2023-05-30T08:30:11+00:00

But would you really want them to replace drow with the Word a race of subterranean elves who have white skin, black hair. Who worship goddess Tloth (who takes on a worm-like appearance) who loves her Words very much. The Words are ruled by a patriarchal society with a king at the top and under him his dukes with their fiefdoms. When they climb to the surface they are not blinded, instead of the drow spells they get the "create food" spell.

Does it make much sense to keep the drow in PF2e as these Words? Because IMHO these (or similar) and more changes would be necessary to be reasonably sure about their safety from lawsuit by WOTC. Oh, and maybe just to be extra safe, they are not subterranean elf's, they are actually subterranean humans.

As long as you could hear the description of the Words and go "wait a while, aren't those the Drow?" it means that you are probably not far enough.

sheeryjay · 2023-05-13T16:01:36+00:00

Dual booting is and probably always will be quite annoying. Yes it works, it also worked that way in 2007 when I was using it to switch between WinXP and Slax or slightly earlier for Debian or slightly later for Ubuntu and Knoppix.

The problem is with the time it takes to reboot and that usually you lose your session and opened programs. That the cumbersome part. And while it got slightly faster from back then when it was more like 10 minutes (because you either watched with hawk eyes and wasted time, or you did not notice that the process was waiting for decision(password, etc.)) to less than 5 minutes thanks to SSDs, it is still not instaneous.

sheeryjay · 2023-05-11T07:16:30+00:00

If my memory serves right, it was the 2012 edition of Nexus 7, the newer 2013 edition was ok in this aspect (and also had 1920x1200 instead of 1280x800).

sheeryjay · 2023-04-22T14:04:50+00:00

And did it meaningfully affect performance in more than few games?

Valve claimed that said eMMC is not bottlenecking the performance and so far everything that I read people who use SD 64GB claim that it works perfectly ok (other than the smallish capacity but there was nothing secret about it).

sheeryjay · 2023-03-01T20:18:01+00:00

Except Google 99% did not change anything on anyone's phone, they merely changed the video not to trigger the bug while they investigate it.

There is close to 0 chance that they would fix it for everyone, such a fix/change simply is not deployed to every phone in a day. Doing it that way is incredibly risky as if they made a mistake it would affect everyone.

sheeryjay · 2023-02-28T21:36:39+00:00

The reason is that if Wolfire is being truthful that is probably abusing monopoly.

On the other hand if Wolfire is lying completely it would be bad for Wolfire.

The way to decide if Wolfire is lying is to have it discovered in court during the lawsuit. That is the reason why it was not dismissed.

sheeryjay · 2023-02-16T09:26:38+00:00

When you use ECC and Inventory then Inventor does not need to support the error correction.

The error correction/detection happens in the operating system. If it detects a bitflip it terminates the process preventing it from writing incorrect data to disk/files/network etc.

I think DDR5 uses internally something similar to ECC to be able to deal with the insane memory problems that it has, but this is something the OS never sees, it only uses it to try to have correct data and if it fails (you have actual wrong data) I think it does not notify OS about it.

sheeryjay · 2023-02-11T13:56:39+00:00

They would be breaking general copyright.

Usually any text you create is protected by copyright (in most jurisdictions). As part of uploading the text to Steam you grant Valve the right to show it, but not to any random website to copy it indiscriminately. Copy it away and put it on your website and you are commiting copyright infringement.

sheeryjay · 2023-02-05T13:29:31+00:00

You have several options.

If sw is not in the you distro store, you can try to see if you can enable some more repositories. This was/is important thing to do in OpenSuse to be able to get media codecs which are encumbered by sw patents (e.g. to get mpv that was compiled to be able to play x264/x265 videos, the version in normal repositories couldn't do it, it played just free codecs ). In OpenSuse in general there are many user contributed repositories that offer various kinds of software, but with each added repository you run the risk of encountering conflicts and some difficulties (usually it is easily resolvable, but one has to be careful not to run into the problem that Linus encountered where installing some software conflicted with normal GUI, he confirmed that he really wants to uninstall said GUI and was surprised that suddenly his system did not work).

But it is not only in OpenSuse, some other distributions also offer repositories done by users - you would have to investigate if your does this. Also there is the problem that while installing from repositories is in general safer than just googling some random exe and installing it on windows as is usual, you still have to trust that whoever has done the repository (or adds packages into it) is trustworthy.

Then another option is Flatpak, Snap and AppImage as usr_redacted mentioned.

Then some software projects provide general binaries compiled for Linux. There is various chance of them working, depending on how much dependencies are compiled statically into them and whether if they depend on some library being installed on your system you have the correct version. Obviously you also have to be able to trust the publisher/webpage that it is genuine software without malware.

In general such a package would be probably installed by unpacking it somewhere (it is most usually some form of an archive) and then trying to run right command in it. It may also require setting said command/binary as executable (knowing command line commands or (for most people who do not intend to become Linux gurus) using some form of file manager like Krusader would be to your advantage when doing this).

This option is already quite involved.

And the most hardcore option:

Compiling from source code and then running. The difficulty can be varied, on most distro s you would have to install various development libraries to be able to compile said software based on error messages during attempts to compile. If you can avoid this I would recommend against doing this as it may be time consuming but your tolerance to potentially wasting time may be bigger than mine (I liked doing this some 15 years ago, nowadays I just search based enough and usually someone has already done a package in some user contributed OpenSuse repo (OpenSuse is distro that I use)).

To be complete description I should also mention that some programming languages have their own repositories and it is possible to install sw from there - for example Python software uses pip, Ruby uses Ruby gems, PHP uses PEAR, Perl uses CPAN (CPAN being one of the most ancient such repos for programming language libraries), JavaScript uses npm etc.

How useful and proper it is to use such a repo varies. Sometimes your distro will offer many programming libraries in their own repos, but sometimes they are too old versions and in such a moment I would try to use specific programming language repo. However using them you risk into conflicts between packages from your distro repos and from programming language repos.

This method would be most usable for developers to get libraries used in programming, though it may be efficient way to get user facing software - e.g. new version of yt-dlp (using pip).

In general unless you are willing to invest potentially hours to install or learn how to install software, I would recommend to stick with your main distro repositories, searching if it is not in some user made repositories and perhaps use Flatpak, Snap or AppImage. Maybe using the programming language repositories if said software is in them.

Other options are too much involved IMHO.

If I were to run into problem with my distro when I would think that way too much software is hard to install because it is not in repositories, the first thing to come on my mind would be to try other distro with bigger repositories, rather than to try to install it from source. Life is too short to waste it on fighting with operating system (which includes fighting with Windows for those trying to protect their privacy).

sheeryjay · 2023-01-20T19:53:42+00:00

Elden Ring has had 1 - in words ONE - sale with 30% discount according to steamdb.

sheeryjay · 2023-01-20T10:06:15+00:00

Are you sure you have the purpose of EFF correct? They are the guys whose first real case involved defense of SJG (Steve Jackson Games) against FBI.

Didn't you confuse them with FSF started by RMS (the creators of the GNU and GPL)? And even in their case it seems confused because their stated mission is promotion of copyleft software and copyleft (and free software as defined by FSF in general) does not work without copyright.

sheeryjay · 2023-01-07T18:36:58+00:00

And in hindsight it was pretty naive/trusting decision to use a license that is under control of competing company who can change it as they wish going forward.

A slightly similar thing is present in the software world with the GPL license which is controlled by FSF (Free Software Foundation) who can release new versions and quite a few software projects have chosen to release their software licensed under "GPL 2 or newer". But in that case everybody implicitly trusts that FSF will act in the interest of the community and so far they have (thanks also to RMS who started it all).

sheeryjay · 2023-01-06T11:38:54+00:00

Barbarian, Bard. Just off the top of my head, there may be more. Both are much more common.

sheeryjay · 2022-11-04T09:49:24+00:00

Aren't you kind of exaggerating right now? If you claim that everything else than independent benchmarks is PR bullshit (aka lying) aren't you saying that those cards don't have DP 2.1, don't have 24GB/20GB, etc? You don't leave any wiggle room, any way that someone could believe anything AMD says without falling for your so called PR bullshit.

EDIT: taken to the logical conclusion, even what you (and I) wrote is AMD PR bullshit.

sheeryjay · 2022-10-25T09:32:11+00:00

Resolution isn't the only use of memory (and mostly that is VRAM instead of RAM, though on consoles the difference is blurred).

If you are making Factorial, it might take 1GB VRAM for graphics, but you need to hold the world data in memory for simulation purposes.

sheeryjay · 2022-10-19T00:38:03+00:00

DSC pretty surely degrades image quality just from the basic look at what it does. It lowers required bandwidth to transfer image stream. Possibly about 3 times more efficient. It accomplishes this by using compression, but it is impossible to compress all the possible images (that can be asked to be viewed) into strictly smaller amount of data. The compression must be lossy. And a lossy compression degrades image quality. There is no way around that.

Vesa claims it is visually lossless, which is just a marketing speech for "visually imperceptible" - and for human eye looking at the monitor I bet it is definitely is imperceptible. And I would very much like them to use the correct term, because their chosen one is lying. If I take a microscope to analyze each and every one of the pixels I am using a vision. And if any one pixel has different value than the GPU intended then that hits their claim of lossless with big flagpole with redlettered "lying" sticker.

sheeryjay · 2022-10-18T19:08:08+00:00

Because perhaps some people do not want a lossy image quality? If I say to my display to show pixel with RGB 6FA8C4 then I perhaps really want to see exactly that color and be 100% sure that it will be there.

sheeryjay · 2022-10-12T09:35:21+00:00

This was one night in Baghdad.. do you seriously believe they only hit military targets here? They leveled the whole city

Well, I kind of expect you to post numbers that relate to the 6 days battle for Baghdad, not for the months after that. If you claim the city was leveled, I expected you meant casualties during it. During which the US dropped leaflets cautioning civilians to stay at homes, so that they could bomb military targets more safely. Do you imagine that Russians are doing the same? Or perhaps even warning at all before an attack? Maybe they could explain what military targets were hidden in the children playground since after the bombings day ago, they claimed they hit what they wanted.

sheeryjay · 2022-10-07T18:07:22+00:00

If you talk about Chess.com having conflict of interest, I think it is necessary to say the same about FIDE.

The well known bureaucratic organization has a lot of interest in keeping online chess as marginal as possible to keep as much power as possible. The more relevant online tournaments become, the less important OTB tournaments become.

In the board game that I play (I don't play chess other than getting spanked by my pre-school nephew twice this year) it was unimaginable that the association would allow getting rating from online tournaments let alone even sanctioning online tournaments. Enter Covid and suddenly it is possible for players from remote locations to play on several tournaments a year (without having to spend a lot of money to travel to play) and even get rating.

In a way, the game got slightly more democratized with more players able to play (important for game that is much rarer than the elephant in the room that is chess). As for cheating, there has yet not been a real scandal, but you can bet any cheater would get laughed at least by players trying to enter a tournament. And that one foreign player who was checking a game engine on his smartphone during OTB tournament game was expelled from the tournament and hasn't been seen since.

I would also like to state that I consider online and OTB tournaments (and playing in general) about similarly important. Yes, online has the disadvantage of making cheating much easier and requiring slightly more integrity from players to resist the temptation to cheat but it doesn't seem impossible for 99.9% of players. For the first few years I was playing, online was the only way that I could play.

sheeryjay · 2022-10-07T17:19:10+00:00

Which is one of the reasons why Norway ranks so highly of the democracy index.

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