“I’ve told you before, Ensign, call it life support when on the bridge.”

I kind of suspect this was an attempt on the IA’s end to get parts of copyright struck down by court ruling. Laws can be clear and still found to not be in the public’s interest, or in violation of some other legal doctrine, and sometimes you’ll see groups come at them sideways.

Ownership laws are really tough ones to chip away at, and IP law in particular has been getting worse and more unassailable over time.

Sure, but if you install DR, then you have DR to do other things. Like chase that YouTuber dream, or field annoying calls from your great aunt who knows you can edit videos to digitize her parents super 8 family videos that are have rotten.

carve out Wizards as a community

I don’t know where the idea that WotC is worth saving keeps coming from. These are the MTG people. It’s a shock that monsters, NPCs, items, and feats aren’t purchased via booster pack.

D&D isn’t a game, nor is it a community. It’s just a brand. We can let it go.

Excited to have backed. Congratulations on a successful Kickstarter!

I’ll be honest: I have very little patience for “you can homebrew this game that does’t do what you want, so you should never play something else” folks; it is probably the thing I hate most about 5e stans. This is the equivalant of telling someone not to give up on a show they don’t like because “you can always write fan fiction!”

Why should I recreate the game when I just spent $150 on it? Isn’t that what I just paid for? For people who actually know game design to supply me with a game that meets my needs? Instead of someome who doesn’t know game design and also paid for the experience?

There are so many games out there that could do what people want, but everyone’s way too invested in WotC maintaining a monopoly on people’s tables.

The point of 5e is to sell as many books as possible with nothing in them while convincing the customer that they’re game designers.

I mean, they are religious defenders. Knights Templar and all that. That’s the core concept and fantasy they’re aiming for.

Guardian Sorcerer or Guardian Oracle or something probably fits other concepts better.

“Roll acrobatics, I guess.”

“Natural 20!”

"Ok… You contort your body in ways that no humanoid creature should be able to, and successfully fit inside the jar.

"Can I get everyone else to make a Wisdom saving throw, please?

"Uh huh. Uh huh. Uh huh.

“Ok, everybody else now thinks you’re a djinni.”

Ad soon as they go public, their product is their share price. And even before then, since most growing private companies seek out private investment long before going public.

Yeah, there’s plenty about how Mastodon frames itself and its features that are frustrating. That “easy mobility” requiring an 80 step process that involves downloading and re-uploading a bunch of files kind of anchors you for seeing how disconnected some developers are from the user expectations they set.

But does there?

This comes back to what federation and “the fediverse” is, and why trying to hide its nature is harming it.

No one expects their Facebook post history to follow them to Reddit, or to a forum, or to Lemmy, because they’re different websites. Just as no one expected their Twitter history to come with them to Mastodon.

But because it’s framed as “Mastodon” and not “social.website.com” the expectations are different.

Yaaaaas! This is what the Fediverse is all about! Niche websites that broadcast to the whole web, not big central hubs that don’t need to broadcast at all.

List the LAP communities in the sidebar we can easily find them from our home instances, if you could.

Federation isn’t a mess, it’s just… messier. And too many federated services do their damnedest to hide that they function differently, meaning people treat them like they’re perfect drop-in replacements.

It results in a lot of questions about “Why can’t I ____?” and answers of the “Because this doesn’t work that way” variety.

Like, look at Mastodon. It bends over backwards to hide the fact that it’s 10,000 different websites. The result is that people could not understand what the big deal was, nor why it wasn’t as easy to see everything from some other website as easily as they could from a single website that everyone was using.

This further led to centralization of the Mastodon ecosystem, which… I mean, at that point, you’re just abandoning the central concept.

“Just use this thing that you’ve already rejected for X, Y, and Z.”

“Have they fixed X, Y, and Z yet?”

" Fuck you for asking."

The point of federation is to publicly share what you want to publicly share, not to have unfettered access to whatever you want to consume.

“Futurologist” is a self-appointed honorific that people who fancy themselves “deep thinkers” while thinking of nothing more deeply than how deep they are. It’s like declaring oneself an “intellectual”.

How often does “a bunch of non-devs flock to a half-baked community FOSS project and suddenly gain a bunch of devs” actually play out?

The one reasonable possibility is that they might pick up a designer or two, but how many community FOSS projects seriously consider non-code or non-art contributions? Because based on the FOSS software I’ve used, it’s a vanishingly small number.

Coders over-value code, and under-value everything else.

I think much of it comes from “futurologists” spending too much time smelling each others’ farts. These AI guys think so very much of themselves.

“None that you can see” is a fun response. Especially on a high roll, if you’re rolling knowledge and perception checks in the open. Gets 'em good and weirded out.