Holy sunk cost fallacy, batman. How fucking much does it cost to operate an ENTIRE GODDAMN NUCLEAR REACTOR just to fuel a tech project that nobody wants???

Insane how the Republicans made ‘unconstitutional’ into another meaningless buzzword in order to try and dodge the responsibility for Jan 6th.

I will pay for an adblocker before I pay for an ad provider to stop harassing me

There’s not going to be anything ‘arbitrary’ about those inspections… In a bad way.

They haven’t gone overboard with THIS one, because they already went way the fuck overboard years ago and never got back on board

Man I’m gonna have to bite the bullet and make my next machine a linux one

Fun fact, a Tesla spokesperson describing the car’s features was talking about how they wanted something on the car that didn’t make it to final release and said “But sadly we couldn’t get that law changed”, which does… kind of imply that they lobbied the regulatory bodies into allowing this piece of shit to exist.

Somehow this is worse than Reddit. Sure Reddit isn’t good, but at least Reddit was sane enough to understand concepts like ‘working too much is deeply unhealthy both physically and mentally’ and ‘corporations should not hold absolute power’

In the interest of transparency, I don’t know if this guy is telling the truth, but it feels very plausible.

What about Firefox? Can’t say that I’ve ever heard of Kagi myself, what makes it so special?

Aside from the usual conundrum of “any way to not starve or become homeless that doesn’t involve whoring out to corporations has been removed from society”, Tesla… wasn’t always like this. Musk didn’t found it. Musk didn’t build it. He just bought it so he could pretend to be clever.

Holy fuck. I knew that AI did use above average amounts of power, but THIRTY FUCKING PERCENT added to the total emissions of a data giant like Microsoft??? That’s absurd! How the hell did they create something so inefficient??

Well… that’s probably the most expected thing to ever be expected. It was never a matter of ‘if’, it was a matter of when.

Gotta say, I’m a blue collar who also builds sensitive machinery, have been doing so for six years now.

There is a VERY sharp divide in how well I consider myself to have mastered certain aspects of the job.

Someone fucking kill me: I’m doing this job for the first time and I’m having to spend ages sifting through our processes that may not be documented in enough detail to do the job perfectly. The job is legally safe because I’m following the rules but god I don’t like it. Takes about three times as long as a ‘normal’ task.

This is fine: I’ve done the job enough to know how everything goes together, what torque to use where, and if there’s anything I should really be doing that isn’t in the instructions, or if there’s an instruction mismatch.

Mastery: I can not only do the job, I actually understand the explicit purpose and function of everything I’m putting together on an intimate level, and can use my knowledge of that purpose and function to make god damn sure that what I’m putting out is top quality. As probably the least sensitive example of this, this is stuff like knowing that the particular brand of no-mixing-needed paint we use can sometimes develop a sediment layer of its’ pigments on the bottom that requires you to mix it with a stick for the paint to perform properly, and that you can tell when the paint is experiencing this issue because it’ll be off-colour due to the lack of pigment; and if you don’t resolve this issue the paint won’t adhere to surfaces correctly and is liable to flake off.

I’ve been doing this for six years and there are only a handful of aspects of my job I consider myself to have complete mastery over. I don’t think I’m the best worker out there, not by a long shot, but to me the idea that you can just lose and replace your workforce when dealing with complicated machinery is about as stupid as the notion that AI can replicate the human mind (It can’t unless you abandon the von-neumann computer design).

Yup. Mechanically, what do you even spend money on once you’ve got Platemail? A boat? A castle? Neither of those are especially likely to be of use to a roaming party of adventurers.

I think my favourite example of a really shitty 5e item (that was apparently quite good in previous editions) is the Ioun Stone. If I believe in official item prices (Very Rare items are worth around 50,000gp), then that means I’m paying that much for an item which…

-Has the same impact as a +1 weapon -Uses an Attunement Slot -CAN BE EASILY DESTROYED (Has 20hp, can be hit by enemy AoE attacks. For example… Fireball, dragon breath…)

That said, for what it’s worth, dragons aren’t the only thing I’ve homebrewed. Here, I made it standard practice to assign prices to all my magic items. Feel free to steal some!

https://docs.google.com/document/d/15je74qMiYxSEnF43zp2UkEoSk3LqRymMbxruPVGQ-i4/edit

Actually yes, that’s what I do- I have a ‘sleeping unsafe’ houserule whereby sleeping overnight in a more dangerous setting such as on the road or in the forest only counts as a Short Rest, albeit preventing exhaustion. Getting a Long Rest requires that you sleep somewhere safer where there’s no need for a night watch.

That way, you don’t need to cram 7 whole events into 24 hours, since that’s narratively wack.

All you should know is that if you’re going to use this houserule, make sure your players know ahead of time so that spellcasters know that they mustn’t blow all their spellslots on the first big threat.

Ah, but I have to offer some nuance there- Balance is actually pretty good from levels 2 to 8 (level 1 HP issues lmao).

You’re absolutely right that RP chillers and munchkin power gamer builds are two entirely different breeds, but my point is that as a DM, I’ve seen firsthand what happens if you run a party through an adventure that goes 1-11. AC breaks down at higher levels because hit rates increase so much faster, Saving Throws become guaranteed failures at high level if you’re not proficient in them, and also Flat Damage Reduction isn’t a thing so action economy is pretty rampant.

Anyways I guess my point is that we ran into these balance issues with the pure players who just wanted to vibe. And that’s what makes them a serious issue to me. Some people have fun breaking games and I can respect that. The problem is when the game starts breaking when nobody was trying to break it.

(Also there’s the whole issue with Magic Items not being priced or treated as available in 5th edition)

Certainly!

This will be a slightly edited excerpt from this homebrew I’ve been making here, for Fully Playable Actual Dragons- I deemed the only way to make the dragons actually FEEL like dragons was to build them to start at level 10-11, with the first 10 levels representing the features from their race as a dragon- but that in turn meant that I needed to actually start fixing high level play, as well as writing out a guide in my homebrew for other DMs to help guide them if they wanted to allow a dragon PC. (This template is still a work in progress on the balance front, I’d be honoured if you use it and I’ve been tinkering with it for months, but please don’t expect it to be perfect)

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1eFc2qQTY9P3ym9fyMNYHC_mIogpt9kNrOdm5n_yj1cs/edit

So as preamble, the game balance gets pretty awkward from levels 9 to 12 (which is almost certainly why BG3 caps out at level 12), and completely breaks at level 13.

This is for a few reasons, but there are two main stinkers.

AC at higher levels of DnD does not keep up with hit rates. In official content, then the highest AC given to any creature is 25, seen on the Tarrasque and Tiamat. This ignores the fact that three main things can raise hit rates, and only two things raise AC- Magic items, Ability Scores, and Proficiency. Having no way to add proficiency to AC means it becomes badly irrelevant beyond 13th level for most tank builds, and the problem is only made worse by the fact that the game puts magical armour at a truly massive premium compared to magic weapons.

Below, I’ve created a table of levels against the suggested non-boosted AC for an average creature of that threat rating, which doesn’t factor in magic armour, spells, or AC-boosting class features, but DOES assume that opponents will have level-appropriate stats and proficiencies, and that players will be outfitted with level-appropriate magic items (acquiring enough +3 weapons for the entire party at around level 12). AC should be raised by a further 2-4 points for an enemy with high AC, and if it’s a low AC enemy, just use official numbers lol.

Remember, dragons are meant to be high AC, and Challenge Rating is a fucking awful system, so most adult dragons need a bit of an AC buff.

1: 15 (Compare to an ‘optimized’ first level AC tank, a fighter with chain mail, a shield, and Defence Style- they have 19AC, which is within that 2-4 points for a fairly balanced High AC)

2: 15

3: 16

4: 16

5: 17

6: 17

7: 18

8: 18

9: 19

10: 19

11: 20

12: 20

13: 21 (At this point, martial humanoids should have their first +3 weapon, and a hit modifier of about +13, which can easily shred vanilla Tiamat with a little Advantage)

14: 21

15: 22

16: 22 (Raphael from BG3 is here. He has 26AC and more HP than the Tarrasque, and he’s not considered unfair as a threat to a party of level 11 to 12 PCs, just tanky.)

17: 23

18: 23

19: 24

20: 25 (Tiamat should have 28 to 29 AC in order to come across as reasonably durable for the strongest villain in DnD)

To finish this point, DO NOT think that every enemy must have this much AC or a hitrate to match. If your players have characters (dragon or humanoid) who have 21AC, then never be afraid to give an encounter a swarm of weaker foes who have a measly +5 or +6 to hit. Players fucking love getting attacked ten times and being told that 9 out of 10 arrows simply bounce off them harmlessly, and the tenth that hits them doesn’t do that much damage (This can also help with both encounter pacing and the game’s narrative).

Saving Throws get even more broken than AC at higher levels, and are quite possibly the main reason that BG3 and other official content tends to cap out at level 12. If you don’t have proficiency in a DC19 Save, then your chances of passing are horrifically low, even with a pretty solid ability score to draw on- but +2 to the save from a 15 in Wisdom absolutely won’t cut it. This is why Draconic Indomitability (which is pretty much the same as a Fighter’s Indomitable) exists, as most Wisdom and Intelligence Saves at high levels are effectively instant kills if your enemies are smart about using them. And even then, Indomitable is flawed- Advantage is much less effective with a low base chance of success.

For these reasons, I highly suggest that you introduce your own homebrew for your humanoid players designed to allow them to get some bonuses to their Saving Throws- either make a version of Epic Resistance that doesn’t require them to have Draconic Indomitability, or a magic item that gives them a bonus to saving throws (this won’t be quite as necessary if someone is running a high-charisma Paladin)

Kind of checks out for me. OneDnD got utterly kneecapped by their Pinkerton shit, after they pulled that jackass stunt then community goodwill was at an all-time low, and introducing a system to replace a popular system is REALLY hard even under ideal circumstances, so it’s not a surprise that I’m far from the only DM that hasn’t given OneDnD the time of day.

Couple that up with the rampant powercreep in new 5e books and the utter mediocrity of most premade modules’ storytelling and content (although tbf the true power and appeal of DnD is for a DM to make a world that’s alive and can react to you saying and doing anything, and putting that into a module’s story is also extremely difficult), then I and most other core fans that I know have just been homebrewing absolutely all our content for literally years, even going so far as to manually fix higher levels of play with our own errata (as the game is notorious for being completely dysfunctional in terms of balance once you get past level 9)