OliveTapenade
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User ID: 1729
I... really don't see anything of significance here?
You like Donald Trump a lot, and... okay? There's no substance here, no argument, no predictions about governance style, or anything like that. Often from the left you hear the accusation that Trumpism is a personality cult, and I don't think that's true of most people who vote for him, but this post? This is pure personality-cultism. What do you expect me to say?
OliveTapenade
1yr ago
I think that's particularly an issue early in BG1, to the point where I would actually recommend just using console commands to start BG1 at level four or so. Level one play in AD&D is extremely limited and dangerous and BG1 doesn't handle it well.
AD&D has a common issue in most of D&D, which is that casters start out fragile, weak, and extremely limited in what they can do, but become overpowered in the late game. The result is that there's a kind of 'sweet spot' of AD&D combat where fighters and casters are competitive, and there's excellent gameplay at that point, but both very low level and very high level gameplay are broken and boring. I suspect that part of BG2's sterling reputation comes from the fact that you start BG2 around the beginning of the sweet spot, and end it just when you're starting to exit it. Around levels eight through fourteen or so is 'the good bit' of AD&D, where characters have enough options to be interesting, casters are powerful but still have meaningful weaknesses, and fighters are still essential.
BG1 and Throne of Bhaal are noticeably weaker than Shadows of Amn just because the system is unbalanced. It sucks, but there are ways to work around it. XP is on a weird scale in AD&D, so if you just start BG1 with a few extra levels, you don't actually end up that overpowered by endgame - you just remove a lot of the early pain. And once you hit epic levels in ToB, wizards are overpowered, but they're not as overpowered as in the tabletop game due to the limitations of the Infinity Engine (the game can't handle, to pick a very simple exploit, constantly flying; and it certainly can't handle most of the degenerate combos AD&D allows on paper), and because using a wizard effectively requires a lot of tedious spell management, you can and perhaps should manage by still letting extremely-well-equipped fighters do a lot of the work. ToB is not that difficult a game, so you don't need to abuse the extremes of power that much.
OliveTapenade
1yr ago
Sorry, to be clear, I consider BG2 the best RPG.
NWN is a fantastic toolbox, and SoU and especially HotU are good, but I don't think the official NWN reaches the high levels of BG2. (BG1 is... interesting. I think vanilla BG1 doesn't measure up, but modded BG1 does become almost a match for its sequel. If you have Tutu and a number of the NPC mods, I think BG1 becomes a very respectable companion piece to its sequel.)
I agree entirely that NWN has some amazing modules and adventures that beat out anything the studio published.
OliveTapenade
1yr ago
I still consider it the best Western RPG ever made, and if you have Pocket Plane and Gibberlings Three to upgrade it even further, it's very hard to match. There are some other competitors, but it's definitely up there in the top few. It's right in the middle of Shamus Young's Golden Age of PC Gaming (though I'd expand it to all gaming) - there was a sweet spot there, around 1998-2002 or so, which reminds me of Alan Jacobs talking about moments in time that bring particular arts to a height. There was the right balance between enablement and resistance for digital creativity to flourish.
Is this just nostalgia for when I was a teen? Perhaps. You can certainly point to a lot of excellent games outside of the 1998-2002 period, or perhaps 1997-2004, or however widely we cast the net. But I feel like there's something to it, because that period did birth a number of masterpieces, many of which have had sequels or revisits that try to capture the magic, and fail. Final Fantasy VII in 1997, Starcraft in 1998, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time in 1998, Age of Empires II in 1999, Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri in 1999, Baldur's Gate II in 2000, Deus Ex in 2000, Diablo II in 2000, Grand Theft Auto III in 2001, Halo: Combat Evolved in 2001, and so on. I could easily go on! I choose these titles because they've all had modern sequels - FFVII remake, Starcraft II, all the Zelda sequels, Age of Empires IV, Civilization: Beyond Earth, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Diablo III and IV, GTA IV and V, the entire Halo series up to now, and so on, and while the new generation is definitely much more technologically advanced, it's hard to look at what we have now and see the same kind of inspiration. Several of these games have had a lot of spiritual successors. Dragon Age: Origins was a spiritual sequel to Baldur's Gate, and of course Baldur's Gate III now exists, but while they may be good in their own right (DA:O was great, no comment on BG3), I think it's safe to say that none of them are BG2 levels of good.
Am I being unfair or just cherry-picking the best games of that period, or was it a real creative peak?
OliveTapenade
1yr ago
I can't really judge BG3 fairly, but I have a sneaking suspicion that, in hindsight, Neverwinter Nights is the real Baldur's Gate III - it still has that late-90s D&D culture, BioWare's writing style is still pretty close to what it was in the originals, and it evokes the Forgotten Realms setting as it existed at the time. NWN vanilla doesn't impress me that much, but once it hits its stride in Shadows of Undrentide and Hordes of the Underdark, I'd argue you do get something that's visibly kin to BG2.
From what I've heard, if one is interested in something more authentically in the style of Baldur's Gate, the Owlcat Pathfinder games are much closer, both in mechanics and in terms of writing?
To change subject somewhat...
I count myself a Dragon Age fan, but I'm definitely put off by everything I see in Veilguard. As it is, I loved Origins and Awakening, though 2 had a handful of interesting ideas but ultimately was an unsuccessful game and laid the groundwork for the series' pivot away from Origins' style, and then Inquisition had its share of good moments, but was definitely a game at war with its own design. I can imagine rescuing 2, and I can imagine splitting Inquisition into two different games, both of which might be good on their own merits but which do not successfully fuse, but neither of them ultimately work as a whole. More concerningly, I'd say that Inquisition, despite some superficial similiarities, is a different genre to Origins, and then Veilguard seems to have reinvented itself yet again. I find it a bit hard to talk about Dragon Age as a series - I'd argue that Origins/Awakening essentially take place in their own little continuity, and they work best as a stand-alone game like Jade Empire. Inquisition refers to things from Origins sometimes, but it's clear that it's not the same world.
To me, Veilguard looks like a passable action-adventure, plus some cringeworthy woke scenes that everyone is fixated on, but one that has nothing to do with any previous Dragon Age game beyond a couple of proper nouns. So I'm inclined to give it a miss. I doubt it has much to offer a Dragon Age fan.
OliveTapenade
1yr ago
I'm a firm supporter of RTwP over pure turn-based, at least in isometric RPGs like this. RTwP allows me to set the pace of combat as appropriate to the challenge - minor threats can be bowled over without even pausing, more serious threats require a bit of pause and tactical decision-making, and serious threats might become effectively turn-based. It's a gearshift for tactical combat, so to speak? Going from RTwP to purely turn-based, to me, feels like being stuck in first gear for the entire game, even when I want to go faster.
OliveTapenade
1yr ago
At times I've been morbidly curious about BG3, but as a huge BG2 fan I just fear it's going to ruin what I remember playing through so many times. I worry that it looks like a product of the post-5e D&D culture, which I don't care for at all. Would you say that these concerns are justified?
OliveTapenade
1yr ago
Doesn't this risk being a just-so story? It's not clear to me why a civilisational collapse or dark age would necessarily favour smart people with a higher time preference - you can probably argue just as easily that it would favour impulsive and violent people, because short-term aggression is more valuable in a time of instability. Long-term planning and building is more valuable in a time stable enough for generational or intergenerational investment to bear fruit.
Crises tend to favour fast strategies - and surely you could argue that fast strategies will value IQ less than slow strategies, and so you might expect average IQ to go down through a crisis.
To be clear, I'm not asserting that this is definitely the case. It just seems at least as plausible to me as the theory that crises favour people with higher IQs. I have no strong opinion on how crises influence the genetics of IQ.
OliveTapenade
1yr ago
Personally I'm surprised by it not because of any rules about word count or padding, but confusion about why you would trust a chatbot about any information about the real world to begin with. I would never assume that anything an AI tells me about a real world matter is true - not without first checking it myself, or asking a human expert. AIs are just too unreliable.
OliveTapenade
1yr ago
Right - the conscience veto didn't work in the case of marriage because it was only a small handful of people willing to stand up for it. It's different when you're looking at most of the bureaucracy. The president can fire them all, but if so he's destroying his own state apparatus and thus his own ability to act.
There's an obvious rebuttal here - "If I fire the bureaucracy I won't be able to act? But I'm not able to act now! My choice is a bureaucracy that refuses to do what I want, and no bureaucracy that does nothing. At least with no bureaucracy, there isn't an institution actively impeding me, and I can get started on the long, difficult process of building a new state apparatus."
But that's where I worry about the election cycle. Four years is not long enough to rebuild the entire federal bureaucracy.
OliveTapenade
1yr ago
If you had to be based to post here, I would never have managed to register!
OliveTapenade
1yr ago
I tried to edit it, but it seems to automatically re-add the distorting part of the link about the Motte. The link should be - www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-the-rise-and-fall
OliveTapenade
1yr ago
In both cases, "if you really believed X, you would Y; you don't Y, therefore you don't really believe X" is an insincere rhetorical tactic. Factual belief X does not in fact necessarily imply strategy Y, all the more so because, in cases like these, strategy Y would most likely be counterproductive.
In the "Trump is Hitler" case - it may be worth the reminder that the spread of violence was a factor in Hitler's rise, as one fellow's ACT review noted. If you really think Trump is Hitler, "let's not recreate the circumstances that allowed Hitler to seize power" seems like a sensible move!
In the abortion case, it's fairly straightforward - is bombing abortion clinics an effective way to reduce the number of abortions? No? Then maybe it's a bad idea. And this isn't even considering that many pro-lifers have a deontological commitment not to kill, or even to to take actions that plausibly risk killing. They're pro-lifers: being against killing is the point! Some make exceptions around cases like criminals or in war, but nothing that would apply here.
"You're not fighting this the way I think you ought to fight it" is a bad faith dismissal, that's all.
OliveTapenade
1yr ago
Devereaux's citations for defining fascism are an online dictionary and Eco's points of ur-fascism. Neither are a serious analysis of what fascism is. Devereaux writes as an academic, but he didn't think to look at a single academic definition of fascism? He's a historian, and he didn't make any historical survey?
The post is lazy. It should not be taken seriously.
OliveTapenade
1yr ago
I would certainly not describe the Iliad or the Odyssey as 'rambling'. They're extremely well-honed texts, refined over generations of repetition and modification.
OliveTapenade
1yr ago
This comparison may not generalise, but this always makes me think of the first collapse of One Nation over here.
For the unfamiliar, One Nation is/was an anti-immigrant Australian political party. It was founded in the 90s as an expression of protest over immigration, and took some bites out of the ruling centre-right Coalition's right flank. This continued... up until the Coalition adopted a hard-line policy on illegal immigration, communicated that (cf. the Tampa and Children Overboard, both in mid-2001), and by doing so completely smashed One Nation. Without their flagship issue, One Nation's other problems (corruption, incompetence, etc.) became more visible and they declined heavily.
You can defeat the populist/nativist surge - you just have to address the issues that are motivating them.
(One Nation have made a post-2016 comeback, rebranding as a more generic far-right or nationalist party. In the 90s they were basically an anti-immigrant party who worried that Australia was being "swamped by Asians". In the last decade they pivoted to anti-Islam for a bit, and then anti-wokeness, and are generally still flailing boobs. The larger issue remains - One Nation do well when there are issues that large segments of the electorate care about but which the major parties are not responsive to. One Nation are a symptom of political dysfunction. As with most far-right parties, then, it's foolish to try to attack them by attacking the party itself. You have to attack the underlying policy failures that give the party credibility. Once that's done the party's inherent weaknesses tend to come out.)
OliveTapenade
1yr ago
Transpacificist, in my case. I'm writing from Australia.
We do have some options in the relationship with America, but the most America-critical voices in our domestic politics tend to be pro-China, and whatever bad things I may say about America, I much prefer the United States as an ally to China.
OliveTapenade
1yr ago
Sometimes I wish I could vote in American elections, for how much they shape the world, and how significant they are even for us.
I don't wish that for this one.
If I had to, I would feel genuinely awful and miserable voting for either of those candidates. As it is, I'm going to watch from the other side of the ocean and hope that whoever gets elected doesn't screw everything up too much. It's a bad time to be American; it's a bad time to be an American client state.
OliveTapenade
1yr ago
The best kind of upvote!
OliveTapenade
1yr ago
Anecdotally, in the circles I move in, while concerns about stolen training data and artist livelihoods are real, I think the biggest factor is a combination of the aesthetic (i.e. AI art just looks bad) as well as what I think of as purity concerns. The way people treat AI art reminds me a great deal of Jonathan Haidt's purity foundation - people react to it the way they used to react to GM foods, or just way they reacted to junk, heavily processed foods in general. It's gross. It's icky. There's a kind of taint or poison in it. Real art is made by an artist, and involves creative decisions. Algorithms can't do that. People hate that sense that the image is inauthentic or 'not real', and if the AI art is curated well enough that they don't notice it's AI, then they were fooled, and people hate being fooled. If I say I hate AI art, you show me a picture, I like it, and you reveal afterwards that it was made by an AI, I don't conclude that maybe I'm wrong and AI art is fine. I conclude that you tricked me. You're a liar, and I condemn you.
That may sound uncharitable, though for what it's worth I'm anti-AI-art myself. Part of my concern is indeed aesthetic (the majority of AI art is recognisable as such; maybe high-quality human-curated AI art can escape this, but most of it is samey trash), and part of it is ethical (I admit my skin crawls a bit even to think that my writing might have been included in AI training data), but honestly, a lot of it is instinctual. AI art, like AI writing, is... well, impure. It feels dirty.
OliveTapenade
1yr ago
There's no set closing time, even based on state?
Here, for instance, polls always close at 6 PM, in every state. I believe if you are in the line (the website says "still in the polling place", but since the place may be outside or split between several buildings, e.g. at a school, it is usually interpreted to mean anybody who's present and wishes to vote) at 6 PM they will stay open just long enough to empty the line, but no more will be admitted. In my experience (having worked as a polling official), it is extremely rare for that to matter, and usually at 6 PM there is nobody around any more.
Thus my usual experience of voting, when I'm not working at the polls, is to stroll down the road on Saturday and usually I can be in and out in five minutes.
OliveTapenade
1yr ago
That makes sense in the US context - I'm Australian, so here voting is always on Saturday and legally compulsory, so if you work on Saturday, it is very likely that your workplace will make arrangements for everybody to go and vote. Or failing that, early voting is relatively easy here. I understand that voting is usually more of a hassle in America?
OliveTapenade
1yr ago
The ad is targeted at men who already support Kamala. The goal is to remind them to go out and vote. It's not supposed to win new converts to the cause.
Right. I note that they don't ask the man who he's going to vote for - they ask whether he's going to vote. They ask him if he "has a plan" to vote (which sounds weird to me, because you shouldn't need a plan beyond "rock up to a polling place", but maybe it's playing on ideas about voter suppression?). It's turning out the base, not persuading unsure voters.
OliveTapenade
1yr ago
Well, taken as a realistic depiction of a speed date, it's ludicrous. Certainly my experience dating has been that you don't talk about politics at all, especially not when first impressions are on the table. Occasionally it is worth soberly reminding ourselves that most people find discussion of politics actively unpleasant, and avoid it wherever possible. There are minorities who are interested in politics, and I'm sure that the sorts of people who make and approve political ads are disproportionately drawn from those minorities, but most people don't like politics, and don't bring it up unless they feel they have to.
Aside from the realism of the scenario itself... I suppose I think there's potentially an interesting strategy here, particularly in light of the increasing gender gap on politics. Women do swing a bit more to the left on average, and men a bit more to the right. But men and women usually want to attract each other. "Come over to my side, it'll make you more attractive to the opposite sex" is a crass but perhaps effective strategy. You can see the echo of this strategy in those "don't be weird" ads, portraying right-wing men as repulsive and unattractive to women. Insofar as being attractive to women is something a lot of men value, is it a useful tactical approach? Perhaps.
(One might wonder a bit about the opposite, but I think female attractiveness tends to work differently to male, and certainly is presented or constructed differently socially, so it's not a mirror image. And in general I'd expect to see less of this just because there's less conservative media in general, and significantly less of it aimed at women. Evie is trying her best, but it's a different field, and in general I think women's attractiveness tends to be more self-focused, more you-are-the-belle-of-the-ball, whereas men's attractiveness tends to be more other-focused, look-at-all-the-people-you-can-attract. So strategies have to be different.)
I realise I'm pretty late on this, and apologies, but I'm curious how you'd compare it to older WRPGs, from the 90s or early 2000s?
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