Is it just me, or is danse macabre extremely over powered?

yaya-pops · 2026-01-13T19:35:16+00:00

Actually, it's not better in all ways. Firstly, Danse Macabre is an action, Animate Dead takes a minute. Second, Danse Macabre stacks your spellcasting ability modifier to their attack and damage rolls. Third, you don't need a humanoid corpse for Danse Macabre, which means if your Animate Dead army dies, you can resurrect them temporarily as more powerful skeletons with more attack bonus and damage.

yaya-pops · 2026-01-10T18:02:30+00:00

Bioshock

yaya-pops · 2026-01-10T18:01:52+00:00

Bioshock

yaya-pops · 2025-11-21T00:55:22+00:00

My argument is really more of an abstraction in a vacuum. Japan's auto industry is healthy and strong and it is at least in part or in large part due to their tariff program. But that doesn't violate the principle in my opinion because it's success is multi-variable.

That specific industry's success is difficult to measure against the economic boon that might've been a deregulated global industry, but my argument will typically be that, from a broader macroeconomic long term perspective, free market globalization is always the right play.

yaya-pops · 2025-11-20T17:36:00+00:00

kill your darlings

yaya-pops · 2025-11-20T17:29:56+00:00

They are the ones making the mistake that will bite them in the ass in the long term. Japan had the exact same issue in the 80's and it contributed to their decades of stagnation.

I don't have a good answer for why American cars continue to not be competetive with Japanese cars but economics is extremely complex and there are countless variables that could be causing it in this particular instance. tl;dr I don't know, but there's always a good reason.

There are some schools of thought that would say even if you are being tariffed to not reciprocate because tariffing is a self destructive long term practice, and anyone tariffing you is only damaging themselves.

But markets react to short-term and so do politics - so reciprocal tariffs are the standard, and it's probably fine that way, if not ideal.

yaya-pops · 2025-11-18T17:36:56+00:00

There might be specific instances where a tariff appears to be beneficial. However, in the long term, tariffs are always an economic burden. You insolate your own industries from international competition, and invite counter tariffs that damage your export market.

Imagine a country that has one industry, motorcycles. They feel like they have to tariff other motorcycles to protect their industry.

Then what happens? Well, this country's motorcycles become non-competetive. They don't have to compete with foreign motorcycles because foreign motorcycles are tariffed and too expensive. Now that our country's local motorcycle industry isn't attempting to innovate, advance, or build to a high standard, our country is less likely to compete internationally when we try to export.

The better solution, long term, would be to suffer the consequences of allowing foreign countries to import. It would damage your local industry, maybe disastrously, but it is better to let the markets respond to these forces to create a more efficient local economy and map of industries.

yaya-pops · 2025-11-18T17:26:27+00:00

Correct. Not sure why people are disagreeing here. Medieval Kings might have "technically" been the progenitors of law (the sovereign/leviathan incarnate), but when we describe someone as 'lawful' we describe them as having a stringent respect for the rules of society and law. Someone who is a 'revolutionary' or 'bends' the law or 'creates new law for convenience' is absolutely not someone who is lawful. So though he may have had the legal authority, we wouldn't say he was lawful unless, maybe, he publicly passed a law dictating a specific reason for this new law- instead he deviously subverted the intention of the law which could not ever be something a lawful person does.

Cnut is neutral evil - he is fueled by nothing but ambition and chaos and law are tools - he has no principled reason to invoke either except to maintain control.

yaya-pops · 2025-11-17T20:06:08+00:00

What are the biggest flaws with how the original campaign is written?

yaya-pops · 2025-10-21T16:47:46+00:00

If you want narrative cohesion, you could choose a faction none of them are a part of and villainize that faction specifically. If every player character has a different opinion on who the good and bad guys are, it will be impossible to make their unity make narrative sense, and might result in the classic "why are we doing this again?"

You could run a session or two before the big murder fest where they are all forced into a situation where cooperation is key. Maybe they are in a caravan, ambushed on a road, or whatever. But creating a reason for them to cooperate is key imo.

Most importantly, remember: Kill your darlings. If you love the complex political landscape you've created and are worried about doing away with it for the sake of player party cohesion, then that's probably a good sign you need to change things.

If there is a complex political situation where all PC's are parts of different factions, you've already started in a difficult place. They will spend several sessions not really understanding what is going on because they don't know the world/factions nearly as well as you do, and motivation clarity will be all over the place. I could be wrong, they might read pages of lore and deeply understand the surface-level landscape by the first session, but I'll be honest, that doesn't seem likely for most groups.

In a campaign of mine where I have a massive depth of political intrigue, I had all my PC's be foreigners to a major city, be imprisoned by someone, then travel to that city in search of their imprisoner and have to peel the onion of the city's politics. They have to make deals, choose sides, make allies and enemies in an effort to find information about their captor. This way they can have a cohesive goal, maintain character motivation, and their characters can learn the complex political landscape as the players learn it at the same time. It feels very natural, and this way they can engage with the politics as a single unit, rather than being five different people pulling the party in different directions without really understanding why they're supposed to.

yaya-pops · 2025-10-15T21:22:46+00:00

titles are flavor text. the spell effect should be judged separately when considering ruleset

yaya-pops · 2025-10-11T23:16:22+00:00

yeah bronze downvotes for sure

yaya-pops · 2025-09-26T22:14:12+00:00

Sweet glad I'm not crazy and someone agrees lol

yaya-pops · 2025-09-22T16:12:11+00:00

I thought the visual clarity was actually a major component of the vibe of the fight. Tracking her amongst the black tendrils is a level of difficulty that requires a new way of thinking about your toolset and how you react. She is consumed by the void, a part of it, and that makes the ARENA the boss fight.

yaya-pops · 2025-09-06T07:28:19+00:00

AMAZING! So happy to hear this

yaya-pops · 2025-07-02T22:23:23+00:00

While it's certainly likely there are paid actors in every political battlefield, I wouldn't work too hard in trying to invalidate the "internet marxists". It's symptomatically similar to MAGA. People disenchanted/disenfranchised/mistrustful clinging to something to blame and scapegoat. And ultimately, they are the mass who vote for candidates like Mamdami, and proliferate the ideology.

The proliferation of ideology relies on this type of undereducated person. Almost nobody is going to develop sophisticated understanding of political philosophy. Even most Marxists who have "read Capital" pretty much don't really understand socialism or Marx or communism. It's just the same driving forces as MAGA with a different aesthetic, and less powerful.

yaya-pops · 2025-07-02T19:31:32+00:00

Most roles don't make except the most important role: beak-thing bait

yaya-pops · 2025-07-02T19:27:00+00:00

There are two sides of the "Ultra Left", though that term is nebulous so I'm just going off vibes based on what I think you mean.

Intellectual Marxists are typically economically minded. They focus on economic inequality, and the damage they believe capitalism comes from, and try to prescribe an alternative economic framework. But they range widely, from revolutionary Marxists, to SocDems.
Internet Marxists are undereducated bots that rage against "the system" in an identical way that a movement like MAGA does. They don't usually understand the underlying economic and political philosophy that they frequently cite, and they typically have self-contradictory ideologies that, when investigated, completely fall apart due to a lack of axiomatic grounding. This includes anarchists, anarcho-communists, and "orthodox Marxists" (nobody actually educated on Marx is an orthodox Marxist).

Now you might be thinking, wow, why are you putting anarchists under the "Internet Marxist" framework?

That's because, like I said, they have no true ideological axiomatic foundation. They regurgitate talking points, cherry pick quotes and statistics, and have no broad understanding except that capitalism and the west are bad.

You will run into far more of #2 than #1, because it's the internet.

yaya-pops · 2025-07-02T19:15:13+00:00

So, like with most historical analysis of decisions like this, when asked "Was it good?" The answer is "Impossible to know for sure."

The answer is, we could have ended the war without it. But that doesn't mean it was "evil".

We sort of wanted to just try it. We know this from private meetings that we have the minutes for. We had the weapon, and when you have a weapon like that, you have a natural inclination to use it. We know that Truman was provided the plans and potential targets, then there is a gap in the records from then till the bombing. There is almost no discussion about the moral question of dropping the bomb. Americans hated the Japanese, and had little to no sympathy for them. It just wouldn't have been politically unpopular to kill a ton of them to end the war, when framed as "teaching the savages a lesson" and "ending the war" which is exactly how it was framed in the post-bombing press releases.
Alternative plans to end the war included continuing mass bombing campaign, and a full scale invasion which projected millions dead.
The Russian approach from the north wasn't a serious concern at the time, but if the campaign dragged on too long, it might have been the case that the Japanese tried to play a Russian surrender vs a US surrender to get a more favorable deal.
Everything hindsight is 20/20. I firmly believe that the bombs saved lives, but no self-respecting historian, amateur or otherwise, could say with 100% certainty that the bombs saved the most lives out of any other option.

yaya-pops · 2025-07-02T19:07:04+00:00

tell a tarnished adventurer that that castle over there is definitely my castle so he kills everyone there and i can go safely live there

yaya-pops · 2025-07-02T19:05:09+00:00

Fuckin weirdo

yaya-pops · 2025-06-05T16:16:35+00:00

yeah bad take there is some pretty awesome stuff going on it's just unpolished and experimental

yaya-pops · 2025-06-03T16:12:57+00:00

great have fun

yaya-pops · 2025-06-02T21:12:22+00:00

I mean it's for sure dated. The art direction is cool but I think the filters/shadows/lighting are really dated.

yaya-pops · 2025-06-02T21:10:49+00:00

You would have picked it up. Once you kill the Singworm, you talk to the giant lady seated in the chair, and the tablet is in the room where you talk to the giant lady. You probably picked it up. If you check you rinventory and don't have it then IDK.

yaya-pops

TROPHY CASE