Gormongous

I don't want to believe that. Who is petty enough to hold a grudge like that for weeks and spend a non-trivial amount of their time bothering unrelated parties in order to make some insignificant point? These forums have to be better than that.

I agree. Ben, it is really, really unhealthy to interrupt every conversation that goes in a direction you don't like with pointless requests to lock the thread. It's neither useful nor funny, I have no idea why you're doing it, besides maybe a long-term project satirizing the supposed tendency for small internet communities to become self-policed echo chambers. It definitely seems like an object lesson of how risk-adverse companies can be harmful to women's and LGBTQIA rights. Ultimately, protecting the bottom line means protecting the status quo, which is always somewhere between indifferent and hostile to the condition of the oppressed.

I hate it when I see people say that. It's such an obvious fantasy and not the way that Sanders should win, if he's going to win.

Side topic: http://www.clickhole.com/blogpost/sorry-bernie-bros-your-candidate-just-doesnt-have--4201

A New York Times chart two weeks ago shows that Clinton's still getting more than double the coverage that Sanders is getting. There's no systematic attempt to record what proportion of that coverage is positive, but for all the sexism and tone policing that Clinton certainly faces, she's not having any incidents like the New York Times stealth-editing positive coverage of Sanders into critical coverage and the Washington Post publishing sixteen negative articles (and two neutral articles) about Sanders in the space of sixteen hours. Basically, it's hard to say and depends on how much you believe that any press is good press.

Yeah, time for them to start pulling their weight! We'll give them a starter set of a dozen nukes and leave them to twist. America first! But not the way Lindbergh meant it. Except maybe a little.

Not that anyone's surprised, but Trump's interviews on Sunday with the New York Times and the Washington Post on foreign policy (as well as critical reactions to them) are astounding. Highlights include: Blocking the access of uncooperative countries like Saudi Arabia and China to American markets in order to force them to comply with the global strategic policies of the United States. That's right, we're going to stop buying Saudi oil even though we're not energy-independent and China's going to stop expanding its military coverage because it can't export trinkets to American grocery stores. Withdrawing the American military presence in Japan and South Korea, allow them to rearm, and encourage them to start their own nuclear programs to counter China and North Korea. Literally no commentary is necessary here. Gut NATO and generally start asking other countries to foot the bill for American involvement in their affairs. You know, because Vox's Max Fischer really says it best:

Oops, my bad! Justin did say that he was Chaotic Good at some point during the Ram and Raven arc, that's what set me off on that mental path of roleplaying alignments. Up until then, I'd thought that fifth edition got rid of what was never frankly a particularly good system for constraining player behavior anyway.

The conversational cruelty to NPCs swings between funny and sad for me, but I'm particularly thinking of the time that Taako ordered a charmed Tom Bodet to step in front of the next train to come into station. That was, uh... Well, it'd probably be an instant alignment shift in one of my games, unless there was a great reason for it, which I don't think there was?

Oh, that'd totally be a problem for me as well, were I a player, but it's funny enough for me as a listener, as opposed to Griffin's intermittent excesses of NPC-on-NPC storytelling, which mostly break even for me. Also, it might not be fair, but I blame Griffin a little for not tailoring some of the encounters better to his players' skills, interests, and avenues of growth. A murder mystery on a train is cool, but if only one of your players is interested in solving it and even then only after a lot of prodding... I don't know. Everyone's got a lot of room to grow, for sure. At the very least, I ought to give Adventure Zone a lot of credit for improving my opinion of Travis, who's definitely the weakest chair in MBMBaM but is so down for anything in the Adventure Zone that I can't help but love him for it. Side note: I'm a little curious about an alternate-universe Adventure Zone where Griffin polices his players' alignments more aggressively, because Justin is definitely Chaotic Neutral leaning towards Chaotic Evil by the third "scenario" of their campaign, rather than Chaotic Good.

Yeah... I've only gotten so far as the end of the Raven vs. Ram arc but, as I mentioned in my "Other Podcasts" post that I made because I forgot this thread existed, I'm a bit tickled by how passively cooperative the players' behavior is in Griffin's game, especially considering how vocal Justin in particular is about getting to the action. At least twice, an NPC inserted themselves into the players' story to do what they couldn't, which one time involved another of the great GM sins: suddenly-appearing incurable poison. It's honestly impressive how everyone just rolls with Griffin's occasional detours into his spoken-word fantasy novel; I think the only person to complain about it is Travis, who's called Griffin several times on saying no to perfectly workable ideas and on doing things in combat with his NPCs without rolling (or when Angus resisted Merle's "Zone of Truth" spell with a Charisma of at least 22). Like I said in my other post, it's fun to hear it play out, but any group that I've ever played with would basically be turning this into DM of the Rings really quick.

??!?!!!??!?!??! I am fuming that I never figured this out. I was waiting days for the rain to wash away the furrows...

Also, I just caught up through the "Raven and Ram" arc of the Adventure Zone, and I was almost struck dumb by how lucky Griffin is to have such passive and cooperative players. In any game that I've ever run or played, introducing a "kills instantly with no cure, not even magic" poison would have caused riots at best and, at worst, the complete overthrow of prior campaign objectives in favor of finding more of that poison and harvesting it for use. Still, possibly the funniest that Taako, Magnus, and Merle have been, and that's including the episode where they were relentlessly cruel to a railway employee.

That's a hard question to answer, honestly. Mostly, I have found, there are always going to be optimal strategies in high-complexity games, with one of those optimal strategies being even more optimal than the rest. I think it's a natural consequence of Sid Meier's "interesting decisions" school of design: it's perfectly normal to expect that the moment-to-moment dilemmas of gameplay are going to have better and worse options to them, else player choice is irrelevant, but for some reason it's not expected that a series of better choices than others should coalesce at the highest level into a better strategy than others. Player choices should matter, but not to the point that one strategy is appreciably more effective than the other. I think that this is probably an insoluble tension in high-complexity game design. There is always going to be at least one best way that a system should function, whether or not it's known to its designer, and trying to make it otherwise generally just produces a system that doesn't function well, period. If they want to avoid this latter case, in my experience, game designers have the choice between making the optimal strategy knowledge-intensive or time-intensive. Knowledge-intensive optimization is satisfying all along the curve to mastery, because a player's facility with the game grows as their understanding of it does, but it seems to be a boring end-state once you've reached high-level mastery and "solved" the game, leading to restive forum communities like the Paradox forums. Time-intensive optimization has the advantage of being equally inaccessible to beginners and experts, but it rewards boring and dogmatic play instead of expertise, understanding, or inspiration, which usually loses players with high-level mastery anyways. If I had to answer, I'd say that the Civilization series handles the above tension the best: have multiple success conditions that permit each optimal strategy to have its own developer-recognized end-state. Sure, Civilization as a series also has the problem of "infinite city sprawl" being an optimal meta-strategy for all success conditions, as Sulla points out in the review that Sclpls linked, but when a game supports multiple paths to victory, the fact that one path is slightly more effective while also being less thematic and more tedious is mostly acceptable, absent a more specific fix. Honestly, even if there is only one success condition, I'd like more developers to be tolerant of an optimal strategy resolving around their design, because it is the sign of a functional system that's accessible to player agency. The most important things are i) the optimal strategy does not involve bypassing core mechanics, unless those core mechanics are broken and/or boring and need to be redesigned anyway, and ii) the optimal strategy doesn't violate the aesthetics of the game or the themes they create. In the case of Darkest Dungeon, which imagines its own version of small-scale neo-medieval combat, it's perfectly thematic for two opposing companies to bash into each other until the front line falls and the rest run or are slaughtered. It's fundamentally the expected result of a system based on the inspirations at hand. The problem is that its solution wasn't what the developers envisioned, so instead of programming responses that validated that player strategy with reactive and thematic effects, they tried to prevent the strategy entirely — sinking the thematic resonances somewhat, in the process.

Yeah, another reason I really enjoy it is that the hosts usually know what murder the other is talking about before it even gets said, a phenomenon to which I'm accustomed with history graduate students talking about medieval kings and queens but not creepy serial killer incidents.

The second and third episodes are much less morbid, if that matters. I'm finding it funny right now, but maybe because I've been in a bad place this week.

I've only listened to one episode, but my girlfriend turned me onto My Favorite Murder because she's a total ghoul. And it's... pretty good? I don't know if it's a permanent entry on the RSS feed, but if you're looking for lighthearted discussion of awful murders and kidnappings from the last few decades, with a focus on telling those stories in the voices of those that grew up around them, it's a really interesting listen.

I get that, but as someone who's not on Twitter, it felt really upsetting at times for Sean to have disappeared from the podcast about a year ago and for there to be absolutely no discussion of it. Like, I get being busy and far be it from me to be throwing shade because of a personal decision, but there were episode where Sean could clearly be heard yelling things from the other room and it just... I don't know, I don't think silence about it's been the best decision.

I've always loved how Children of Men seemed completely rooted in the time of its making, yet it's felt more relevant every time I watch it, even a decade later. I also agree that Owen's excellent, maybe beyond his natural ken. He's probably one of the better "high-functioning alcoholic" characters I've seen in recent years, insofar as you don't notice how much he's drinking and how it influences his behavior unless you're looking for it.

Yeah, I had figured that the chaos of the four- and five-person episodes was part of why Sean hasn't been around, but it's a real shame. I don't know the numbers, but I think that the four-person episodes of Chris, Jake, Steve, and Sean near the end of the second run are maybe the best episodes of video game podcasting ever made, and a big part of that is Sean, with his Skipper Croft and his Snoopy Flying Ace. The past twenty or thirty episodes, I've really missed his voice, and I hope that circumstances conspire to get him back on the podcast soon.

Hearing Nick describe singleplayer RPGs (to which I'd add 4X and grand strategy games) as board games that you bring home to learn and don't want to change once you've learned them really helped me articulate why RPGs and strategy games tend to have backlashes over even minor changes, more so than many other genres of video game. For me and for many other high-level players, I imagine, the pleasure of those games comes from knowledge and mastery of their systems, so when a developer changes a system and robs you of that knowledge and mastery, it really does feel like something's being taken from you: your time with the game and your special understanding of it. I think that high-level players focused on mastery do tend to intuit fairly quickly when a developer's change weakens their game's design, because they are already familiar with the process of acquiring mastery over that particular game and its systems, but they can also react in a generally poor way even when the change strengthens the game's design, because they're inevitably comparing their current incomplete mastery with their past complete mastery, so... I don't know. I think I've just been a big fan of games the past few years where developers with an imperfect knowledge of their games' systems and dynamics have used the "silent majority," which is often the fifty percent of people who don't even get fifteen minutes into Darkest Dungeon, as an excuse to paper over reasoned feedback by respected members of the community. I'm sure it swings the other way plenty, though.

I don't really play EU4 anymore, but I saw that one of the developer diaries for the upcoming DLC expansion, Mare Nostrum, introduces the idea of "states" versus "territories," with the former being considered the central part of the nation and the latter being treated as overseas possessions within the game's systems. I think we can say now that we've officially reached Peak Paradox Feature Creep, with two systems for "cores" now being laid on top of each other with little in the way of logical interaction between them: when you acquire a province outside of your starting region, it is initially a territory that you pay to core, but eventually you'll probably upgrade that region to a state, at which point you basically have to core the province again or suffer an autonomy penalty (autonomy, of course, being a softened re-implementation of over-extension that exists alongside the latter mechanic). Two tiers of cores: core cores and non-core cores! Also disappointing is that EU4 has basically borrowed the "realm size" mechanics from latter-day CK2 patches, but that's only fair when CK2 borrowed aggressive expansion and coalitions from EU4 a few patches back.

Interesting historical comparison: this Rolling Stone article in favor of Clinton and several others have said that this election is a tipping point in American history "like none since before the Civil War," but they have not actually teased out the connection that they're making there. After the Dred Scott decision, there were broadly two camps of anti-slavery advocates in American politics. On the one hand, there were the abolitionists, a motley crew espousing a "revolution" to abolish a fundamental but morally corrupt fixture of social, political, and economic life in America. On the other, there were the doughfaces and other moderates, the more "reasonable" group who argued for compromise and for working within the system to effect slow and incremental change. President James Buchanan—who, as a former secretary of state, senator, and ambassador, was easily one of the most "qualified" presidents in American history—hailed from the latter camp. Driven by the political demands of his party and his country more than by personal conviction to address the repercussions of the Dred Scott decision, he cooperated heavily with Southern slaveholders, tapping into his longstanding political relationships with many of them, to try to finesse conflicts over the expansion of slavery in the west. Instead, he severely miscalculated the depths of the division between pro-slavery and anti-slavery advocates and the particular intransigence of the former, tearing the country apart and making the Civil War all but inevitable. His most famous quote and selling point? "What is right and what is practicable are two different things." Buchanan's attempt to find a "reasonable," "gradual," and "bi-partisan" solution to the issue of slavery has repeatedly been rated the worst mistake of any president in American history. I don't know how history will judge the attempts of the American political establishment to deal with the issue of income inequality, but I still think about this example a lot when people tell me that Clinton is "experienced," "practical," and a "dealmaker." Yes, it's important that the Know Nothings don't get their candidate in office, but being a bad president (or the wrong president for the wrong time, at least) is not just a matter of being inexperienced, ignorant, or immoral.

Yeah, this episode is the gold standard for what it's within the power of Three Moves Ahead to achieve.

Dude, I really don't like Clinton either, especially after her heinous speech at the AIPAC, but this thread is really tedious as the "How Can You Vote for a NeoCon Hypocrite like Hillary" thread.