Being proud of something you had no part in creating always seemed weird to me.

Write a novel. Perform a song. Win a race. Makes sense to be proud.

Happen to be born someplace? Big fucking deal. Most of the people who go on about being proud of the US are going out of their way to make it worse

I guess that’s fine.

It’s by design.

This is true. However,

It’s just meant for more casual play, that’s all.

It’s kind of bad at that goal. It’s really fiddly and full of friction points. What bonus do you get for 16 strength? Why do they insist on keeping that mapping.

I’ve had to kick people for just refusing the learn what dice to roll after months of sessions.

Further evidence of it not actually being great at casual play.

Which leads me to

5e is a great gateway drug to get people into TTRPGs

Counter argument: it’s actually really bad at that. It’s so specific and idiosyncratic it pushes people away. Uncountable players just bounce off the whole genre because their first impression is fiddly “what does 15 strength mean again?” and “sorry, you can’t fit your cool idea into this class/level system”

Fate Core or Accelerated would be much more in line with how people think about this sort of stuff.

Yeah, but unfortunately they kept 5e’s design principle of “you barely get any feats”. I want my characters to be interesting because of who they are, not because of what glowing doodads they looted from more interesting dead people.

Also class + level is so coarse. I’d rather be able to, like, buy individual things I want. Get XP for doing a quest, buy more sneak attack. Or a spell slot. Maybe hit dice. Really let me mix and match.

But DND 5e is designed to have a small decision space in builds. They want the half paying attention guy’s character to perform about as well as the optimizer, instead of the huge gap between those archetypes that 3e had.

It’s funny because while 5e has simpler math than the predecessors, it’s still kind of clunky. 1d20 + proficiency + modifier isn’t that bad, but I’ve seen a lot of players who can’t correctly add 16 + 7.

I really liked the nWoD system where you roll a bunch of d10s and just count how many came up >= 8. No addition or subtraction.

Also 1d20+stuff is flat probability, which feels bad.

I think that a ruleset optimized for computer RPGs would probably look somewhat different.

But also 100 times this. You could do so many things that would be painful to do by hand at the table.

5e is a great system for a “Rule of Cool” style of DMing. That’s amazing for a decent DM and inexperienced/less technical players.

It’s not even that good at that. Fate, for example, is a much lighter and better system for that. Aspects are a very simple system for setting expectations and letting players do wacky things based on them.

If I was going to run a game for new players I would absolutely not reach for 5e. It provides too much fertilizer for “can I move that far?” and “if he’s flying 30’ up can I still shoot him?” minutia.

I enjoyed bg3, but DND 5e is not a system I enjoy nor want more of. It’s surprisingly shallow.

Unfortunately people would rather die and be emotionally satisfied than be uncomfortable for a while.

We are ruled by large children and idiots.

The US has always fallen well short of its stated ideals. Many people who have national pride don’t know shit about fuck. Don’t want to talk about racism. Don’t want to talk about the problems of capitalism.

Right? Where are they going to go? You can’t take your real estate with you. You can’t pick up culture and move it.

The problem has never ever ever been words per minute. That is a completely irrelevant metric. A distraction.

Anything the AI produces is going to need to be evaluated by a person, and that is a more difficult, less rewarding task.

And if it doesn’t need to be reviewed by a person because it’s magically flawless, that’s extremely anti-labor so fuck that.

That’s not a general problem with trains that proves they suck. The suck is places have been built out for cars with other modes as after thoughts.

I live somewhere with much better train and bus coverage, and it makes it easier than driving for the vast majority of trips.

The day to day suffering is because of cars. So fuck cars. Fuck the culture that made them primary.

These justices need to go, and all of their decisions should be thrown out.

Every coworker I’ve seen that uses AI code tools heavily is bad. They produce (or at least push) nonsense code they don’t understand.

I would rather have a team that goes slowly and understands what they’re building than a team of excitable slop pushers going a thousand lines a second.

“There must be in groups for the law to protect but not bind, and out groups to bind but not protect”

For certain kinds of people, hierarchy is good and natural. Those people often put women as Lesser. So they feel compelled to do shit like this

One of many reasons the entire GOP should, at the very least, be barred from ever holding office or working with government again.

I just don’t want to compete with other people. I used to play a lot of quake and team fortress, but it just feels kind of pointless now.

Have you ever been on a train? It sucks, a bus 10000% more, buses fuckin suck so much, I’m sorry for you to hear this in the echo chamber which features ‘fuck cars’.

Have you?

Trains and buses, when funded, are fine. Millions of people take them every day.

I work from home but I used to daily commute by train. Walk to station. Wait a few minutes. Get on. Arrive at destination. I read so many books and finished so many games.

I was curious so I tried to find average sizes in NYC. The Internet is full of slop and I hate it. anyway, I found

Average apartment sizes in NYC in 2026:

Studio: 400–550 sq ft (37–51 m²)
1-bedroom: 600–800 sq ft (56–74 m²)
2-bedroom: 850–1,100 sq ft (79–102 m²)
3-bedroom: 1,100–1,500 sq ft (102–139 m²)

But at least in the city you get a walkable living place with mass transit. Very few goats, however.

Do you have the same fear about trains?