• 9 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: January 14th, 2022

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  • Started playing recently myself. At the start, recommendations have no idea what victory strategy you are pursing, and don’t get that much better at it. They do seem somewhat OK at recommending things that will solve particular problems that city has (slow growth, lack of amenities, etc), though maybe there are better ways available to you. Or, sometimes they notice that your city geography would support a particular wonder or give bonuses to a particular zone. So, if they recommend something that seems weird, maybe check to see if you are missing some mechanical concept. (VI has a lot of obscure interlocking mechanics that can be hard to see, particularly at first.)






  • Mileage varies, I guess. I’ve also been playing since the eighties (late Seventies, really). I’ve been a forever GM for most of that (not a forever DM, though). I have not been particularly active on game design forums, but still have seen every argument on this list someplace at least once a year, since at least the Forge era (so, about twenty years or so). Less often recently, maybe. Way more often earlier.


  • No team is near me, so I said to myself “I’ll give it a chance and root for the team with the best logo.” But then the teams were revealed and every single one of the logos is terrible.

    Is this superficial and dumb? Absolutely. But I haven’t paid attention since.





  • All of that may be true, but it bears little resemblance to the case the US actually filed against Apple. If you haven’t read the charges, you really should. They are filled with reaches that have long been rejected in similar cases, and a desire for government to broadly micromanage. One type of charge, for example, could easily be brought against any company that makes a videogame for just a single platform.



  • If you ignore WotC as being in its own league, a handful of companies are now the “top tier” of RPG production. I’d include Mophidius there, with Paizo and Evil Hat, maybe Chaosium. Their products have extremely high production values and large (by TTRPG standards) followings.

    The are mostly known for 2d20 games (Star Trek Adventures, Dune), Dragonbane, Forbidden Lands, Mutant: Year Zero, and now publish some more classic titles (Twilight: 2000, Kult).





  • Eh. In these kinds of articles, the story is less “rich seize more wealth from others” than it is “assets already held by rich increase in ‘value’”. Almost everything in this article is “stock price go up” and, therefore, the somewhat imaginary “wealth” number of anyone holding that stock goes up. Basically, the headline could be “changes in stock price make the notional wealth of billionaires fluctuate”. Sort of a non-story to me, because everyone listed in this article could have done absolutely nothing all year, and these numbers would have changed regardless. More interesting (if only slightly) would be an article about changes to their actual assets (i.e. did they increase or decrease shares in their company, etc.). I don’t really get the “let’s keep score” for billionaires thing the media does in any case, but this article is on the more useless end of that useless pursuit.