I’d like to think there is a strategist in her camp who urged Biden to stay in for as long as he did, and only swap out after the first debate, closer to the 3 month runway mark. And that strategist is just waiting until after the election to gloat publicly about the scheme.

Now that’s a conspiracy theory I can get behind.

In my utopia, Google would be forced to continue to pay out the current annual contract sum, at a decreasing percentage every year, for some number of years, to all affected companies, giving them the opportunity to divest and pivot.

The root problem doesn’t get fixed if the company with enough money to be a monopolist still has the money when this is “resolved.”

Completely agree, and will definitely make that change. As soon as Panera Bread starts selling Chunks.

I find that system inconvenient, as it does not inform me of how I should eat any given item. Classification for the purpose of classification is insufficient. However, an alternative that allows me to prepare my ustensils based on the classification is useful, and therefore I propose…

Soup, salad, and sandwich are the three states of food, and they can go through phase transitions. They are closely accompanied by spoon, fork, and knife, respectively.

• A soup is any food that requires a spoon, and thus includes soups, drinks, cereal with milk, etc. Tipping a container is merely the use of the container as a large and unwieldy spoon, a straw is similarly a spoon when its topology is combined with suction.

• A salad then is anything bite sized that can be forked, and one’s hands are little more than fleshy forks, the fingers prehensile tines. Popcorn, salads, cut up steak bites, a handful of cheerios, etc.

• A sandwich is anything that requires it to be cut in order to be consumed, and one’s incisors are merely built-in knives. A sandwich is thus the vast majority of the cube rule’s content, and only because the cube rule focuses on the physical location of the starch. This is, of course, entirely irrelevant when it comes to the consumption of food.

• To observe a phase transition, one can cut up a sandwich without consuming it, thereby turning it into a salad; can drown a salad to turn it into a soup; can freeze a soup to turn it into a sandwich, etc.

Shredded cheese is a salad.

Meanwhile, Tristaniopsis is a synonym for Santorum, and I’ve never been able to credit anyone who goes by that moniker with any amount of respect.

Do you know how derogatory words work? You’re perpetuating the thing you disrespect with your own comment.

This is really flavorful and fun–I really like stacking features onto skills, and this does this with reckless abandon!

How are you making the Greatsword eligible for Precise Strike, given its lack of Agile or Finesse traits? Am I missing an interaction, or are you opting to forgo both the Precise Strike damage and the Confident Finisher?

Something about English wants me to say it should be “Battle of the Santas Clause,” but not knowing any of the rules, I couldn’t tell you why.

Give https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html a read. Might sway you, might not.

If dropping a database scares you, you are either unaware of the disaster recovery process, or there isn’t one. Edumacate yourself, or the org, as appropriate, so as to increase your confidence when dropping databases.

Post office too. Really any government office where the public is allowed inside.

Underpaid workers trying to explain bureaucratic minutiae (for which they are not responsible) every single day to people who are not versed in that minutiae, do not want to learn it, cannot learn it, and are preemptively frustrated that they have to have this interaction in the first place. There is no winning–mental health isn’t cheap, do the workers’ resilience only lasts for so many years/months/days before they default to hating the clients, and the clients don’t trust publicly available instructions, thus dooming themselves to the shitty interactions.

The only way to fix this is to take both people out of the equation–preprocess everything that might need to happen for everyone, to the point of turning every transaction into a single trasaction. That requires for every city, county, state, national, international agency to federate, so that you never have to file multiple documents to do a thing.

deleted by creator

I had been considering Gnome, for Energized Font, with Toughness, which may be the play alongside scrolls of Mage Armor, thanks for the suggestion. I had hoped to find an alternative Conscious Mind to leverage with Parallel Breakthrough, but Amped Shield and Mirror Image do seem to be better-suited for melee than any of the other Conscious Minds’ cantrip-and-spell combos, at least so far as level 6 play goes.

Capitalism has been touted as superior to the alternatives (Socialism, Communism, etc) b/c it has been claimed to be “self-regulating” and “self-correcting” and “even if we don’t understand why, it fixes itself”–basically the only choice among bad ones that, given our collective small brains, has any chance of sustaining itself and society in the absence of an ability of individuals or government to do so intentionally.

What it really is is an opportunity to stay anonymous while gaming the system, all the while convincing everyone else that they too can game the system (thereby being gamed). It is not a net benefit to society when taken to extremes.

Capitalism is great for the consumer in the micro. If there is a coffee shop on your street that sucks, and you start a coffee shop two blocks away to compete with it with your better coffee, you are participating in the version of capitalism that “works as intended.”

It doesn’t work in the macro. When, instead of continuing to manage your mom & pop business that barely breaks even, you vertically integrate, buy up or otherwise destroy your competition, and then reduce the quality of your product to bare minimums in favor of profits and shareholder value and growth, you take capitalism to an extreme that makes everyone else (the consumers, the workers, the would-be-competitors) have a worse quality of life.

People prefer better quality of life. Capitalism in the modern age is so far in that macro extreme that it no longer makes people’s lives better. East Palestine train derailment as an example… why would they prioritize safety over cost cutting? Bam, a town is cancerous. It’s not unreasonable for people to point at a corruptible system and blame it for the corruption that exists.

Problem is, people are corruptible, so whatever alternative we think is better, someone will come along and ruin it for personal gain.

This is just terrible.

I could maybe see a reason to stack multiple spellcasting classes, e.g. Sorc 1 (Con saves, spell slots, Subclass feature, Silvery Barbs) -> Order Cleric 1 (Heavy Armor, Voice of Authority, more spell slots) -> Wizard 1 (Rituals, more spell slots) -> Warlock 1 (Subclass feature, short rest pact slot, Armor of Agathys) -> Bard 1 (more spell slots) -> Druid 1 (more spell slots) -> Artificer 1 (more spell slots). That gets you to be a 6th level spellcaster and 1st level warlock in terms of spell slots, which you spend on things like Healing Word, Bless, Silvery Barbs, etc to proc Voice of Authority. Out of combat you cast a bunch of 1st level rituals and pretty much all the cantrips. Go with a +4 race that nets you 25ft move speed in heavy armor (Fleet of Foot Wood Half Elf or Mountain Dwarf), upcast Armor of Agathys to 3rd level, and go wade into melee, being obnoxious and begging to get hit.

Make sure you die before you hit level 8, b/c the martial classes offer you nothing with only 1 level each. If you do somehow survive and have to take them anyway, go for Rogue & Fighter first (Sneak attack and fighting style, probably Archery, to sometimes be able to hit with a ranged weapon), then Barb (big hit die, since you’re committed to not dying), Ranger (Expertise), Paladin, and finally Monk (the saddest of all capstones).

Depends on how much you expect sunlight sensitivity. Pack Tactics doesn’t interfere with action economy, so you retain full use of Cunning Action. This would probably be my choice for an Arcane Trickster, especially if your DM rules the +2/+1 treatment for it.

However, MotM offers a sorc cantrip (Booming Blade), which makes it a lucrative choice on any non-AT rogue to combo with CA disengage, or better yet Mobile or Rakish Audacity. The AoE advantage seems good on paper, but it’s only great if you’re going to have a party heavy on attack rolls (EB, Scorching Ray, Fighter, Ranger, Monk, etc).

All that said, races with sunlight sensitivity in a campaign will experience sunlight, which will feel pretty bad.

Goblin Genie Warlock X / Twilight Cleric 2, using Twilight Sanctuary to force dim light onto your target, thereby gaining advantage on your Shadowblade attacks. Take your first level of cleric early to get heavy armor proficiency, but save the 2nd level until after you have Shadowblade available. Genie adds a PB damage rider of your choice of type of damage–Dao may be an interesting play b/c you very much could play this as a Str-based warlock, and pick up Crusher (Str) to even out Str and combo with your allies’ AoEs. Starting stats with point buy could be 15+2 10 14 9 13 13+1. Make sure to take Eldritch Mind as one of your invocations. Goblin affords you another PB damage rider for PB turns per day, to help make you feel a bit more like a rogue with your damage output.

If you want to be ranged, you could throw-and-recreate your Shadowblade every turn, but that is IMO pretty inefficient and feels really bad if you miss. In melee range you could instead be hitting twice with a light Pact weapon, and then once with the Shadowblade with your BA. Handaxe, Scimitar, and Shortsword all have a d6 damage die, so are good candidates. If you decide to get Dual Weilder feat, this build would work really well with a versatile weapon (Battleaxe, Longsword, or Warhammer) so that if you don’t have Shadowblade up for whatever reason, you are doing better damage with your pact weapon. You lose the +1 AC in that case though.

I think some of WotC’s design philosophy with 5.5 is about encouraging faster progression so that more groups do get to 20.

However, their focus on revamping the PHB, rather than the DMG, leaves the onus for balance on the DM, which has IMO always been the limiting factor. Designing encounters for level 17 players is wildly different from level 16 players. If capstones come at 18 and represent anything close to the power jump that 9th level spells provide, that’s two back-to-back power jumps in very close succession. IMO that would actually drive more DMs to end at 17, rather than 18, or even sooner to avoid reaching those T4 power jumps at all. If they delay their BBEG encounter until those powerups, they have little to no experience with their group’s new abilities to accurately balance on the knife’s edge of very deadly, and risk either a TPK or a floppy conclusion if they miscalculate. “Easier to balance in T3, and end there” is, I believe, still the status quo.

Now, if after the PHB rewrite they make it easier for DMs to balance T4 encounters in a DMG rewrite, thst might change things. In that case, spreading the power jumps out still makes sense to me.

Right, which maintains a disproportionate onus on the DM to intervene on every turn (both the monsters’ and the PC’s turns). Deferring success or failure to a bot (avrae) given a shared understanding of the rules allows the players to own their own narration (e.g. I decide how badly I faceplant after failing to jump the obstacle, rather than the DM doing it), and reduces the time commitment that DMing otherwise takes. The DM is already necessary during social and exploration pillars, where the go-then-roll is often required just b/c the check to make is not obvious (unless the DM makes prodigious use of spoiler text and passive skills). Roll-then-go in combat however is, IMO, superior for speed and player engagement.

Reactions need special care in roll-then-go, with strategies being necessary like declaring them ahead of time, retconning, or, my favorite, narrating what actually happened (e.g. to show how the pre-reaction narration was a fork in reality that didn’t happen the way it looked).

It depends on your medium of play, the members of the table, on how much trust there is, and on how crunchy the entire experience is allowed to feel. These days most of my D&D is in play-by-post discord servers, and I tend to stick to ones that are roll-then-go. It lets the player run the mechanics of their actions through avrae and find out successes and failures, and then describe how they do what they do. There is a strong onus on everyone understanding the game mechanics, and only engaging the DM in “can I?” Questions when pushing the envelope with improvised actions. The result is a faster (IMO) game with better writing (which starts to read like collaborative storytelling, especially if everyone uses a literary style).

In a go-then-roll world, the burden falls on the DM to “ratify” each character’s intended actions. “<Char> would try to do an acrobatic flip” would need a “The floor is slippery, and <char> falls flat on their face” followup, and this is just really slow in an async format. Inevitably, this is the most common way of sharing out the results of Perception and Investigation, though I appreciate pbp DMs who rely on passive stats and give things out in preemptively spoiler tags (that’s whete the trust comes in).

“<char> would try” is also a grating construction that feels terrible to read in general–it’s just not a common tense signature. That said, in a low-latency live game, where the DM can roll immediately after learning of the player’s intentions, go-then-roll(-then-go) is much more viable, and is probably preferable for new players who are new to the system.

Oh, certainly! But then, I would avoid coming up with a policy at all until the amount of content reaches critical mass. If you’re not ready for whatever will be the right policy, why bother enacting one that you know you’ll have to walk back or ammend later?