BedbugCutlefish

Mmm, psionics, Shadow Weave Magic, Initiate of Mystra.

A min-maxed character is one with dumpstates and weaknesses. A powergamed character is one with fewer weaknesses than a 'normal' character. Anything that can challange an OP build will wipe the floor with a party of 'standard' characters.

If they're actually powergaming, the likely answer is: "No, I'm immune." Or: "okay, with my buffs, I get to add +200 to this."

It really depends.

I'm thinking about 3.5 in particular, where an optimized wizard will be able to do the job of the rest of the party (assuming they're built to be fine, but not power-gaming), better than them.

There's no real in-world way to balance that. Either the DM Fiats the power-gamer weaker, the DM tells the power gamer "no", or the rest of the party power games to. Its just too unbalanced.

If we're talking 5e, that's all out the window then. If 3.5's power runs from 0-10, the strongest 5e build is like a 6, and the weakest is like a 3. Its still extra work for the DM to balance, but can be done all in-world without needing to rely on metagame fiat.

And, of course, there's lots of other systems out there, where the above can be more true or less true depending on what kind of game it is, though 3.5's power ceiling is probably higher than 95% of the systems out there.

Eh, disagree. Unless everyone is power gaming to the same degree (which can be fun!), an OP character being adequately challenged will probably result in all the other players feeling irrelevant.

I fully agree. If you read my first comment, I pretty clearly as much as the new ones are pretty bad (story wise), the two Jaffe worked on are even worse in that regard.

I mean, I too would be unhappy with the new games' stories. They're not very good stories overall.

But, they're better than the vast majority of video game plots, because that's a low bar.

Still, Jaffe seems to imply the old stories in GoW were any better, when they were pure drivel. I might still be very underwhelmed by the story in the two new God of War's, but I at least like that they're trying (even if I think the direction of relying heavily on animation and visual flair is the wrong one, as far as telling good stories goes).

I agree. I'm very much for more research into fusion. I'm still somewhat skeptical of it ever being 'infinite cheap energy'. But even if it never becomes a 'good energy source', the advancement of knowledge is valuable. So its not like I think fusion is a scam overall.

But I think this particular company is.

That is what I think the owner is doing here. Scamming venture capital firms for a tech that cannot work.

And I mean, its not like I have any proof. I can't read minds; maybe he is a true believer.

But this company feels like those companies back in the 80s that sold tickets to mars, for the rockets they were 'just about to build'; a scam.

This isn't a research firm. This isn't trying to find the exact settings and layouts to make fusion possible. If the article can be taken at face value, this is a company to make a commercial fusion plant. And I find that, in 2023, patently absurd.

I hope it works.

But I'm skeptical enough to say that I think this is a scam. We're closing in, research wise, on getting fusion to generate more power than it takes to run. Which is awesome!

But its still a far trek from that figure, to producing enough power to be practical (I've heard it said you really need to aim for 10x more production than input, minimum, for it to make any sense).

And that is still a trek from making a fusion plant competitive with existing grid power.

I'm skeptical if this plant they're building will even generate power, which is like three steps away from making commercial sense at all.

Overall, a good video. I'm definitely opinionated about rpgs and editions of DnD, and don't share his blanket love for each edition, but he's right that the vitriol over edition wars are silly.

I don't really agree with his WoW take; of just, being able to hop from DnD to WoW for a few months to have fun. I hate WoW, from a personal enjoyment level. I don't knock anyone for enjoying it, but I'd rather do just about anything else. My friends jumped onto it on launch in highschool, and I joined them for a week or so, and I genuinely do not see the appeal. I'm not trying to be bitter or anything, so much as saying I am not able to just, go and have fun with WoW, or frankly any MMO I've tried.

But, there's no RPG I've ever touched that I feel that way about. I don't really like 4e for several reasons, but overall, if my group otherwise really wanted to play more of it, I know I could have fun playing or running it. Outside of truly dogshit 'games' like FATAL, I'm sure I could have fun playing just about any RPG, and even a FATAL one-shot could be fun, despite the rules (though, it'd veer awfully close to just laughing at a live-reading of the rules than really 'playing the game')

Still, I have no real interest in 5.5. Frankly, I currently have no real interest in 5e at the moment, though that's more from 'edition fatigue'. Like, I have many complaints about 5e (I'm not sure if you could play a lot of 5e and not notice it's mechanical flaws), but I played it enough to get tired of it, which is a compliment in a lot of ways.

But I love playing new games. I've fallen in love with PF2e recently (though with 2 campaigns hitting level 14-ish, some fatigue is creeping in), and we've giving ICON a run. I'm looking forward to trying Exalted Essence and the new WoD stuff when a rpg slot opens up (running 3 games right now as it is). And I'll probably return to DnD at some point, but nothing from 5.5 feels like it really 'fixes' the issues I have with 5e, or otherwise 'sparks excitement' in me. But also, it looks fine.

Though, if the really do centralize it to an official platform, I definitely won't be touching it; I hate DnD beyond as it is, and how there are no PDFs for the 5e books (officially), which is a bummer but able to be worked around. And, even if they try to centralize 5.5 digitally, there will definitely still be books, and probably still be PDFs able to be found, though I'll probably want to avoid the edition on principle anyway if that is the case.

Yeah, they got that 'no pores' look that selfie filter give, that's somewhat uncanny looking.