That's rich when the Google Play store is full of malware while F-Droid is full of gems.

@technology

My own least favorite edition is 3.x (and PF—which sucks because I like the company, the setting, the characters) but I'd rather play 0e, B/X, 1e, 2e, RC, or 5e over 4E. I was playing B/X (with some of the guys who would later go on to make Mörk Borg) during the tail end of 4E, before 5e came out (which is when I started my own group).

There's a lot of things that's neat and good with 4E. Clarity, balanced classes, interesting–albeit–long-winded fights, neat art and settings, retro vibes.

Some of the problems only apply to the early days of 4E and was addressed as the game evolved:

• A bad initial release and marketing campaign that was seen as disparaging older fans while simultaneously begging "the game will remain the same"
• A fight against other editions and a push that "this is the game now"
• A switch to digital that was plagued with problems due to a horrible tragedy
• Broken monster math
• All classes felt overly similar in their play patterns. Not 100% identical but too similar
• Abilities that felt as if they were spells, like a fighter ability that makes all enemies take a step towards her
• Weirdly flavored / templated abilites that felt like "hitting the play button on a canned action" as opposed to actually doing it

Other D&D (including late 4E): "I have this sword. I'm gonna chop 'em with it!"
Early 4E: "I am going to use this Reaping Strike ability."

To me, that can feel cold and distant. The fact that the powers came on cards that you'd flip as you used them was actually good overall, but it exacerbated this problem greatly. I get a lot of pushback on this from people who had gotten over it and could easily "translate" the abilities into game action, like "I strike them reapingly" or however that would sound, IDK, because I never learned to do it. I can write novels and poems and lyrics but I can't strike reapingly. 🤷🏻‍♀️

4E Essentials (the later edition) get a lot of hate from fans of the original release but it has classes that I actually want to play.

Another issue I get pushback on is that some 4E fans love the "mythicness" of the martial power source. Samson with the jawbone, Flex Mentallo... And that's fine, I'm happy for them. I personally prefer where spells are explicitly marked as spells, as 5E's "Hunter's Mark" ability is or the eldritch knight's "Shield" spell, and magic items are similarly special. Like, we all love Luke Skywalker but he didn't solely rely on the martial power source. He also had ki (or whatever the midichlorian heck is going on).

And some other problems persisted throughout the game's entire run:

• A skill challenge system that was poorly explained (some people were like "always say you're in a skill challenge", others were like "no, just roleplay out a scene and as they are doing checks in the scene, mark progress")
• A skill challenge system that has utterly broken math (throughout all three revisions, including the attempt in the Essentials Rules Compendium). The 5e version, "group checks", also has problems, but fewer.
• Unnatural language. 5e had a push towards using natural language, or language that looked like natural language, over the arcane shorthand. This is a double-edged sword since it also helped with the clarity of 4E. 5.24 is back-pedaling a bit here, with capitalizing rules terms and conditions. Not my preference, I liked the natlang approach. Helps with rules-hacking and glogging and mashing together stuff from various editions the way I like it.
• Overwhelming in play with too many conditions and modifiers to juggle
• Not suited for the type of sandbox play I like. There are 30 levels and huge steps between the levels. So most people built encounters just-in-time, just to fit the party's current level and capabilities (and when you do that, the DM has a lot of responsibility for the outcome of those fights). I prefer making a world with graduated difficulty and set the player characters free in that world; if it's too easy they won't get much XP so they'll see harder pastures, and if it's too hard they die, so they'll try to find a lagom horizon on their own. And, they can freely use resources like town militias, religious warriors, pit faction-v-faction etc (we just came off a long "PCs+lizardfolk vs human slavers" skirmish campaign in our game)
• Killing the OGL!

I like Chris Hayes' take as clipped in this video 43 minutes in:

The way that so many prominent voices have focused so exclusively on colleges feels honestly a bit decadent to me. Like we're doing a paper doll version of conflict because the actual reality of what's happening in Gaza is so horrific, unceasing, and high-stakes, it's more enjoyable to argue about what college kids are doing than to confront the human misery and destruction that's happening in the actual conflict that is, of course, the source of these protests. What seems to be most worth debating isn't campus speech but whether the US government should contine to fund and support an Israeli war in Gaza that has pushed more than a million people to the brink of famine. A war that has damaged half of the buildings in Gaza. A war that has failed to bring home most of the hostages held by Hamas, that has in fact lead to the death of some those hostages.

This is a good video, thanks.
I'm not all onboard with the conclusions: "YouTube & TikTok good" (I believe they're overall bad. Fund Peertube.) and "Socialist sentiment is growing" (I believe the overton window has been slipping & skipping to the right for decades now.)

"Trump world" legal representation is a problem. They'll pressure you into lying for them.

That red one squeezed into the misc row looks painful 🤕

Give everyone a paper list of the games on offer.

Everyone anonymously scores each game from zero to five stars, zero means don't wanna play today and five means really wanna play today.

It's OK to mark a bunch of zeroes and just one five, it's OK to give all kinds of scores, it's OK to have several fives or several threes or whatever. It works anyway.

Then gather up these ballots. For each game, count up the stars. For the two games with most total stars, look at all the ballots again but now instead of looking at the number of stars, count the amount of ballots where one of the two games has strictly more stars than the other.

For example let's say Ticket to Ride has 30 stars, Carcassonne has 25, Uno has 24, Caylus has 18, and Dixit has 5. The two finalists are Ticket to Ride and Carcassonne. And then let's say there are three ballots where Carcassone has more stars than TtR, one ballot where TtR has more stars than Carcassonne, and four where they are tied. Carcassonne won.

Ignoring or handwaving components is 100% legit. DMs and groups should not use so many rules that they get overwhelmed.

We do use a lot of component related stuff in our campaign because we're such hopeless tryhards. A list of magic words for the verbal components, and costs added to the material components low-level food-and-light–giving spells such as Light and Dancing Lights. And the special ink that wizards use in their spellbook.

It's a part of the game I really love 🤷🏻‍♀️
The idea is that when we're counting torches or trying to buy a pearl or incense, our concerns are the same as the character's concern. We are doing what they are doing. There's something magical in that.

That's not to sell anyone else on this philosophy. I love it so we do it—don't do it if you don't love it. Keep it simple and keep the parts of the game that you love.

And we absolutely do use focus or component pouch for all non-costed components so we don't have to track basic eyelashes and guano. We also use the rule from Tasha's Cauldron that even rangers and paladins can use a focus. (That might've just been an oversight in the PHB.)

Now that the concept has caught on so widely, I've often wished @[email protected] had gone with a less scatological term. But maybe that is part of the reason it caught on 🤷🏻‍♀️

@[email protected]

Even outside of home if someone is curious I sometimes just say a scene and ask what they'd do or where they'd go 🤷🏻‍♀️

You're at the edge of a misty, dewey forest at the break of dawn. In front of you is a castle, and there's the forest behind you all glittering from dewdrops on the cobwebs. The nearest village is six miles away; you could get there in two hours or so. There's a well outside the castle a couple of hundred feet to the left of the entrance, which is right in front of you. Whaddayado?

It wouldn't be as blorby as I prefer but it'd be an intro to the main gameplay loop.

Yes, I used to have the same problem. It used to feel like it was full of invisible and unwritten rules that all contradicted each other. Getting bullied if cards are too strong or too weak.

Casual EDH, that is: as you point out, competitive EDH doesn't have the same problem.

What I finally realized was that I shouldn't approach it as a game. I should approach EDH deckbuilding like a crossword maker approaches making a crossword:

To try to create something that is a challenge but beatable.

It's easy to create an unsolvable crossword. Just a bunch of white noise in a grid. But that's just no fun to anyone. A good crossbow maker wants the crossword solver to have fun and to enjoy the puzzle, to tease them a bit but keep it realistic and grounded.

Now, a game of EDH isn't a puzzle, but it's an experience.

I started out making my first EDH deck super weak (it's built around Tolarian Serpent) and have gradually been adding powerful cards or interactive cards or cards where I just like the art or the experience or the memory of when I first opened the card. I have a foil Rethink even though there are a lot better stack interaction cards, but it was just the first foil I ever opened so playing it makes me happy. The deck is still weaker than many of precons are out of the box so I still have a ways to go with it but that can be a gradual process of tweaking and modding.

I hope this helps.

One stereotype to avoid (or lean into, lampshade, or subvert) is that villainous women are manipulative, seductive, using guile, deception, charm, enchantment and so on. Your basic Poison Ivy template. Even Catwoman is sometimes depicted that way (like in @neilhimself's "Whatever happened to the Caped Crusader", albeit in a reference to "The Death of Robin Hood").

I'm personally kinda a fan of the trope and Ivy is my fave Batman-verse character but speaking to a lot of other women I know it's something many are sick to death of. Especially when that seems to be the only kind of villainous woman. (Just like how chainmail bikinis became less of a problem when it was just one of many styles and not the only option.)

I see that a lot of other examples in the thread immediately went for that trope and I don't blame 'em—only goes to show how pervasive it is and how refreshing some other approaches would be.

"No Thanks!" is super easy and fun.

But I've also found with a lot of oldies that they actually like playing the same old games. They often have more depth and complexity than you might think at first glance, and it's difficult to learn a new game of similar complexity later in life and might be dull to swap out for a simpler game. Like, if some whippersnappers were to go "granny, put those delvers and cantrips away and come play some fun Cards Against Humanity with us" I'd probably immolate myself on the spot 🤷🏻‍♀️

Climate change has the same "going through it in real life" trait as Pandemic has.

@boardgames

Amazing game that I replay every now and then ♥

It's so weird that they didn't do this when they introduced the Primaris. Perfect in-universe opportunity.

But the Stormcast Eternals fixed it so 🤷🏻‍♀️

You are correct that they got the power level just right and that they deserve major kudos for that, that can't have been easy 👍🏻

Another compliment they deserve is that they were a very good way to represent all planes (together with a couple of other cards from each plane) truly making MOM feel like it spanned all the planes.

But overall I'm not too fond of them.

Flavor-wise the sieges are weird. So you play a card named Invasion of Segovia (for example). What would you think such a card would represent? It represents… the Segovians fighting back at the Phyrexians—both sides of the card are flavored as Segovians doing Segovian stuff vs them.

OK, so it's called a "siege". Like Helm's Deep. And it's a pro-Segovia, anti-Phyrexia card. So you'd think you'd want to defend it and defend it and defend it, like the Segovians in the story defended agains the Phyrexians. Siege. Simple. But no! You are trying to attack it down to release the sea tyrant Caetus who'll help you fight the Phyrexians.

So when your opponent plays a Siege, that means you are suddenly forced to represent someone who is invading Segovia (Phyrexians, presumably, whether or not you'd ever put any Phyrexian cards in your deck) and trying to defend the—not defend Segovia, but defend the invading force so they can't release the sea tyrant or whatever.

Perfect, thank you!

@costalfy @starfield

💯 correct decision 🫡

It's awesome!

🤷🏻‍♀️

The shift of the political battle from workers-vs-owners to populists-vs-pluralists has been driven by the far right and has been an explicit goal of the right since 1922.

The populist ideology uses intolerance and bigotry as a tool. Hate on a group to get the workers to vote for the rich-get-richer economics the right wing favors.

Ideally a group they can describe as disgustingly weak in one breath and a dangerous threat the next.

So it's de jure the case that the left a.k.a. pluralists oppose intolerance and bigotry. That's what makes us the left.