JohnBrownsBussy2 [he/him]

The proposal is for a globally-levied tax. Where exactly is capital going to fly to?

It’s buried in the article, but yep it’s a Boeing.

I agree that D&D will always exist, I am just personally uninterested in the direction the game is going with the OneD&D, and I think the source of this muddling path is do to the failure of the original business maneuver with the OGL revision. I don’t really see things getting better under Hasbro, so any major shakeup might be a good thing overall.

Kinda .

I don’t think Tencent would be a particularly great owner for the D&D brand, but they might have been more hands-off than Hasbro went it comes to mucking with the business model, and a major shakeup for D&D could be good. Honestly, WotC (or just D&D) could be doing better if it was an independent operation as opposed to subsidizing the Hasbro revenue sink.

Hasbro has no clue what to do with the game since their games-as-service, closed ecosystem plan went kaput after they backed down on the OGL revision (which would have been necessary to shut out other VTTs and ensure player & DM subscriptions). I think the recent lay offs of senior people in the D&D related teams suggests this as well. This article doesn’t seem well sourced at all, but a shake-up would be very interesting at this point.

Side-stepping some of the speculation and impact on the traditional market/fanbase, I am curious about the interest in D&D in China, as a Tencent acquisition would presumably make it much easier to market the game there. From the searching I’ve done, there doesn’t seem to be a ton of interest in D&D, and there’s no official translation into Mandarin. The movie didn’t do great at the Chinese box office, although Baldur’s Gate 3 did fine? Obviously, if Tencent does put together a subsidiary to design a version for the Chinese market, I’m not sure if they’d want to start by translating/adapting existing books or using the ruleset to design a bespoke version (either with a fantasy setting or based on relevant Chinese IP.)

Obviously, these attacks are bad, but the impressive resistance by the Jenin fighters (as well as the reconciliation between Saudi and Iran, and Israel's domestic turmoil) do give me some hope for a renewal of the Palestinian liberation struggle.

I don't really care about the honor of Rian Johnson, but I don't think your points are correct.

why are there suddenly cloaking devices in star wars

Cloaking devices were introduced in Episode I

why don't the imperials hyperjump in front of the fleeing rebels?

The tracking device makes hyperspace jumping a game of hopscotch. There's not really a point.

why can several characters leave a chase in progress visit some planet and come back to the chase still in progress?

Yeah, this one is kinda dumb, but it'd be possible for a small ship to escape unnoticed and get out of range in order to jump to lightspeed.

the holdo maneuver breaks several in-universe rules about how hyperdrive works.

Those rules are established in the books/supplemental materials, which aren't canon to the film series. The film-makers have no obligation to respect them. Episode 7 also breaks/rewrites the hyperspace rules.

Luke's character "development" happening entirely off-screen (and throwing out better character development from decades of books) makes the flashback scene completely unbelievable.

None of the books are canon. It makes sense that people change over long time skips, and they did outline the rationale for his mindset changes in the flashback.

It's also fitting the vanguard of America's descent into fascism will one of the earlier places (in the US) to be rendered uninhabitable by the climate change.

Fascism is a death cult.

I don’t understand the logic here. When the putsch occured and then ignomously fizzled out, I saw Putin as weak for letting Pringles walk out with a (relative) slap on the wrist. Taking Prigo out of the picture was overdue. Obviously, anyone would feel threatened by an semi-autonomous mercenary army, so removing its leadership and breaking it up is just a rational course of action that probably should have been done sooner from that POV

That’s a bit more dramatic than polonium. He was going to get got sooner or later after his tantrum/half-baked putsch.

It was a shock reaction image that became popular on r/cth and kind of became a mascot for the sub & then later for chapo.chat/hexbear.

Honestly, we all got so used to it that it became a nothingburger internally, just a way to tell someone to eff off. I was surprised to see it actually affecting people post-federation, but that’s also attributable to the emoji bug.

CW: Article on the source of Pig Poop Balls

I think Nigeria could still invade (and drag ECOWAS with it), but hopefully that helps take the wind out of its sails.

Glad to see that your instance filter is working. Everyone should be free to curate the content they see.

For the benefit of others, checking your comment history, it is hilarious to me that you’ve never posted in your home instance even once and have the audacity to call us brigadiers.

We all live together in the posters’ gulag in Yakutsk where we are forced to post incessantly for the glory of the post-Soviet motherland.

We we see a bad post we all gather around the collective 2004 Gateway laptop and laugh at it.

You see, brigading is when content that I am interested in is algorithmically prioritized in my feed and I interact with it. The more algorithmically prioritized the content is, the more it’s an inorganic brigade.

To be technical, did the US actually fund the Taliban when it got started? The Pakistani intelligence service did, and the Taliban were only able to take power because of the US-backed Mujahideen alliance rapidly descended into civil war when the Soviets pulled out and the Afghan government fell, but idk.

???

I’m obviously biased as an accursed tankie myself, but looking at this thread:

• 1.) The article wasn’t even posted by a hexbear user.
• 2.) The level of discourse seems to be pretty level between hexbear natives and other users.
• 3.) The failure of the US to fight illicit opium production in Afghanistan, despite it being a public aim of the US and its allied government in Afghanistan, is well documented. Just doing a quick look, here’s a New York post article (I know, I know, but it’s well sourced, and certainly not leftist): Why the only winner of America’s war in Afghanistan is opium . It cites the Afghanistan papers and a variety of US and Afghan officials, and illustrates a timeline on how every program implemented by the US to combat opium production only intensified cultivation. The success of the Taliban government in cracking down on it despite far more limited resources suggests either gross incompetence or malice on the part of the US government.

EDIT: I will also point out that the harshest criticism of the US here is from a user from your own instance. That wouldn’t even be allowed on hexbear, so glass houses.

On alternative to traditional hit points can be seen in OSR/NSR games derived from Into the Odd. The game still has HP, but it stands for “hit protection” instead of health/hit points. In Into the Odd, there are no attack rolls, you just roll damage dice. HP is then a buffer that resets after an encounter to absorb a hit or two. After that, characters and monsters start taking all damage to their strength stat, which provokes critical damage checks that can knock them out of combat.

So, the result is that combat is very fast, a couple rounds at most, and very decisive/deadly without having the classic OSR issue of your 1 HP wizard dying because they ran into a cat.

I think that should be okay. People have fun with Genesys and other die systems with special colored dice. Only having two dice types should be okay, and in a VTT the hope v. fear check would be automated anyways.

Looks interesting but a bit finicky. The 3-page character sheet looks somewhat cumbersome, but it could be okay if all the rules and actions/ability a player can take are on it so that they don’t need to reference anything else.