People do not all have the same working definition of “politics”. Many people seem to use it to mean “overt content about contemporary issues”, but that’s not really a good definition.

If your game has sentient creatures with agency and desires, it has politics.

For example, if your game has a king, there’s politics. Having the people accept monarchy is a political statement. It’s not as hot-button as, say, having slavery, but it’s still political.

You might not be surprised if your players react to a world with chattel slavery by trying to free the slaves and end that institution. The same mechanism may lead them to want to end absolute monarchy. They see something in the setting they perceive as unjust, and want to change it.

A lot of people are kind of… uncritical, about many things. They don’t see absolute monarchy as “political” because it’s a familiar story trope. They are happy to accept this uncritically so they can get to the fun part where you get a quest to slay the dragon. (Note that the target of killing the dragon rather than, say, negotiating or rehoming it is also political)

People then get frustrated because they feel stupid, and they’re being blocked from pursuing the content they want. They just want to, for example, do a tactical mini game about fighting a big monster that spits fire. They don’t want to talk about the merits of absolute monarchy or slaying sentient creatures.

It’s okay to not always want to engage in the political dimension. That doesn’t mean it’s not there. If someone responds to the king giving you a quest with “wait, this is an absolute monarchy where the first born son becomes king? That’s fucked up” they’re not “making it political”. It already was political.

If you present a man and a woman as monogamously married in your game, that’s political. That’s a statement. If you show a big queer polycule, that’s also a statement. The latter will ping the aforementioned uncritical players as “political”, because it’s more atypical, but both are “political”.

Some of this can be handled in session 0. But sometimes you learn that some people in the group have different tastes and probably shouldn’t play together.

Well, thankfully I included examples other than magic.

However, I do think trying too hard on “martials should be like real life” easily leads to harsher limitations for them. It’s not always intentional. But when someone says “I want to leap 15 feet over the chasm” some people get all “you can’t do that! I can barely jump five feet and I’m athletic (they’re not)” and you have a whole digression where someone looks up human records and then argues about if 16 strength is really Olympic class and what about all your equipment and blah blah blah.

It’s much rarer for that kind of argument to come up with wizard types, in my experience.

Clearer rules up front help, though I feel like half of DND players have never read the rules.

I guess I’m lucky almost no one I know is trying to side hustle slop their way into money. I don’t think I would put up with that happily.

“it seems silly that you can just go around the corner and suddenly you’re hidden. They know you’re there”

This was rebutted with “they know I’m somewhere over there, but not exactly where or when I’m going to pop out. I’m a 7th level rogue, I’m sure I have tricks you and I can’t even think of”.

Sometimes people get like selectively simulationist. They’ll ignore most of the game’s gamey bits (inventory management, hit points and recovery, magic) but some things throw them off. Usually things that are closer to lived reality. For example, someone having no problem with a wizard hypnotizing an entire room, but balking at a fighter climbing a tall fence.

There was also: “It seems like a lot of damage…”

“I’m pretty sure rogue is balanced around doing sneak attack almost every round. The fighter gets multiple attacks, but I don’t. Almost every other class gets a resource to burn like spell points or ki points or superiority dice. I have nothing. All I do is sneak attack. Without it, I’m a particularly accurate peasant that can run away real good. And I still miss about a quarter of the time, which means my whole turn accomplishes nothing”

I wonder if the DMG or something published expected damage per round or per encounter somewhere.

I had a dm once say he was thinking about saying no about my rogue’s “I shoot, move, bonus action hide around the corner” loop. But then he said he realized if he said no, my character would suck and it’d be no fun.

I think that was the right call.

I think most people are kind of bad with money, and I think that scales with income.

I think a lot about some old coworkers (six figure salary). We all wanted to go out for a party after work. A bunch of then paid like $80 for a car. I paid $3 for a subway ride. Got there at the same time.

Maybe that’s not so much “bad at money” exactly as have incomprehensible to me values.

People believe based on feelings, not facts. That’s all it is.

Full time Linux here. No complaints.

Been playing expedition 33 and vampire survivors.

Even in the capitalist hellscape of tech startups, we have like a frontend group that makes decisions about the front end code that’s separate from the entire engineering org. Likewise there’s one for the backend, for devops concerns, and so on.

Some orgs are disorganized and require a lot of vertical approval steps, but that’s not an inherent nature of committee

Usually some people will take initiative and some people will delegate their responsibilities. Form committees , that sort of thing.

My dad said something like this a couple months back. He didn’t think workers could run a business. When I pointed out all the bad decisions I’ve seen my bosses make, especially the ones made over the injections objections of workers, he didn’t have much of a response.

People believe things emotionally. (All of us are susceptible to this, sadly.)

Edit: fix strange autocorrect of injections instead of objections

I feel like every retro I’ve attended has been a farce.

“What went bad? We said doing it this way would be harder and more risk prone. Management insisted we do it that way, and it took longer than and caused a site outage.”

"What should we do differently?’

“Listen to the team next time”

“That won’t happen”

There’s definitely a lot of cargo cult* thinking in software. People don’t understand the why of things but they want the results. That’s why most “agile” I’ve seen is a waste of time.

*Is there a less problematic phrase for this?

I’ve wasted entire days with people like that because they couldn’t be fucking arsed reading error messages and figuring things out by themselves.

I’ve had a couple interview tasks that are like “clone this repo and run it. Try to do [action]. Tell us any errors you find and how to fix them”

One of them was some sort of redux app, and the problem was a state mutation. Another one, the CSS had some weird so stuff rendered crazy. Both were pretty easy to track down and fix. You could probably also do something that’s like an error thrown, but people would probably just feed that into an AI now.

One of the guys I worked with said be prefers the chatbot because stack overflow always made him feel stupid when he’d ask for help. The emotional dimension is big for some people.

I just recommend checking things from the live boot environment. I found out once that some things didn’t work (HDMI , Ethernet, Wi-Fi) only after installing, and it was a hassle. Ended up switching to a different distro that did work out of the box.

The worst is when people don’t know how the system works, and then won’t listen to answers

Like I was at a job and product was going on about “our system has no concept of project owner. We have all these projects but there’s nothing unifying them under a single owner. We need to build this!”

I was like “… what? That’s just not true. There’s a “company” object that does that. It’s got a foreign key with project in the database. I guess it’s a weird name but it’s there”

It took several back and forths over multiple meetings. They eventually got on the same page and I saved us doing a whole useless project, but they did insist I rename it to “account” in the database and code. I would’ve rather left it because that could’ve been dicey, but alas. (The rename did go out fine, but I had to go looking for every reference.)

Cuphead is a great game. The co-op is fun, too. It’s local co-op so you only need one copy of the game.

Yeah, I can’t find a 2br for $1k anywhere outside Flyover Country,

I know nothing about philly and can’t vouch for zillow, but a zero effort search found a bunch of hits: https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_rent/?searchQueryState={“isMapVisible”%3Atrue%2C"mapBounds"%3A{“west”%3A-75.19186800188812%2C"east"%3A-75.13255899615082%2C"south"%3A39.954194027975525%2C"north"%3A39.997933180083415}%2C"filterState"%3A{“fr”%3A{“value”%3Atrue}%2C"fsba"%3A{“value”%3Afalse}%2C"fsbo"%3A{“value”%3Afalse}%2C"nc"%3A{“value”%3Afalse}%2C"cmsn"%3A{“value”%3Afalse}%2C"auc"%3A{“value”%3Afalse}%2C"fore"%3A{“value”%3Afalse}%2C"beds"%3A{“min”%3A2}%2C"mp"%3A{“max”%3A1000}}%2C"isListVisible"%3Atrue%2C"mapZoom"%3A14}

How are you searching?

any savings from not driving is largely offset by the cost of not having a garden, unless I wanted to eat lower quality produce.

I don’t really know anything about gardening, sorry. Some places have backyards, and there are community gardens in some cities. Cars are really expensive, though. Insurance alone is probably like $50/month. Probably more.

What do you do for work, and how did you get there?

Now? Software development. When I moved here, customer service (answering the phone, livechat, etc). Though I’m a cheapskate and still basically live like I’m making $45k. I eat a lot of rice and beans.

I was lucky that my second CS job was at a place that trained people an promoted internally, so I was able to move up in my career. They hired whole “classes” of CS people to onboard at once, and almost my whole cohort went on to do like marketing, management, software development, and other higher paying stuff. A couple of my friends have done the same, but it seems like AI is eating a lot of those jobs.

I don’t think most of my friends are living in luxury apartments. Though there are many shitty apartments, shittiness is not an innate attribute of apartments.