Sudanna

I don't know that very much was surprising, but I laughed at the ridesharing section.

If that had been a required question with only cis and trans radio buttons, I would not have submitted the survey. So you tell me how much more useful data that generates. That is not close enough.

This is only occasionally what transgender means in theory, and never all that it means in practice. Regardless: I and at least several other respondents are neither(not just "yeah i'm cis but eh") and I at least resent attempts at annexation.

Calref: a place for low-class queer failures.

FWIW, I was one of the responses that chose "I prefer neither", and its presence means a lot to me. Cis people not wanting a word for cis to exist is a thing, and surely the majority of those responses to the poll, but people that are clearly not cis and also clearly different from trans people are also a thing. Or maybe it's just me. Still though.

I think it's clear that the survey was constructed in a reasonable way with a lot of consideration given to various priorities but that a notable portion of participants think two or three questions could use rewording or additional options. The minor issues people have had - really, mostly just the political categories being unclear or seeming misapplied to some - are not condemnations of the entire effort of survey-making and aren't calls for any kind of major restructuring or change in ethos. Like, the rationale you have supplied for these minor criticisms is reasonable and I think everyone gets that you aren't any kind of weird survey tyrant. Just, maybe reword them for next time?

Yeah, I became a minister through American Marriage Ministries to officiate Neb and Sylae's marriage and it was real simple and inexpensive. I think I had to send one letter to the governor's office and most of my expenses were a voluntary donation. And, I mean, technically and legally AMM is a religious organization, but it's clear that the actual purpose is to enable anyone who wants to officiate a marriage to do so. There are at least two large nationwide organizations that do this. Probably the intent of the law is to privilege religious officials, but in practice the definition of "religious official" is so arbitrarily large as to be pointless. Something something first amendment.

It was obvious to me what all of these are. Mainly, I echo Sylae: I don't know why you would expect these to sell on shirts. By default, things do not sell, and I dunno what would move these from that baseline. I've never really liked graphic tees, and less and less so as time goes on. I'm really picky about clothing, though. There seem to be two ways to sell a graphic tee to the masses. Cheap as dirt and not overt, so people who subsist on a wardrobe of graphic tees will buy it at random when one of their old ones dissolves, or ludicrously overpriced and of genteel branding, so band people or sports people or other nerds with more money and identity than sense will buy it to signal gang affiliation. Alternative strategies such as "look nice" are supplemental at best. Frankly, I don't know of any individual that makes a living selling T-shirts they designed through a store connected to an online T-shirt printer. Online stores like that are almost always supplemental tie-ins to some other thing that person does that makes people want to pay attention to them and give them money. I do know one person that makes a living hand-painting weird artist designs on shirts and selling them out of a booth at fairs and stuff. I have one of those. It's nice.

Clearly, it's just that both trans stuff and video games tend to have disproportionate numbers of people on the autism spectrum.

It looks like Discord, in proud tech startup tradition, for a long time didn't make any revenue at all but ran on investor money with eventual plans to add monetization. They do have a $5/mo premium service now and probably are gonna start selling emoji packs or skins or something similar pretty soon. But hey, Twitter and Youtube have never ever been profitable, so maybe it'll just stay how it is.

That has been one of the several topics in each of our posts, yes. The first time I brought it up, it was mostly about this specific situation. The second, mostly about Slarty's response, as Chessrook had just said what the difficulty is for him.

I like your scenarios. They're some of my favorites. I didn't say it was unreasonable for designers to make major balance changes. I said that it's reasonable that players wouldn't expect them. Major balance changes across a single game is not something that really happens much, even in constantly-tweaked modern competitive multiplayer games. The most obvious analogue to BoA is a tabletop group that takes the same party through multiple campaigns. While tabletop games do change from low to high levels of play, it's more gradual over less of a distance than some BoA scenarios. Most players do not know a thing about scenario designing or what BoA is or is not capable of, and any likely transferable experience would not lead one to expect that level of change. People gravitate towards doing things in certain ways, whether it's playing a game or fixing their plumbing, and unless they specifically ask or feel like they owe something to someone else, they are -rarely- asking for corrections. Everyone's dad would rather swear at the plumbing for six hours than have someone tell them what they should be doing instead. That level of frustration is not usually the kind that gets satisfied by having someone else solve your problem for you, especially for people that typically play games. I would say: a 1-in-5 chance of instant failure is way too dang high. Other than that, though, fine. If the idea was to introduce the combat changes, that's fine. It's just, in the post I was responding to, you seemed to indicate it was intended to produce a mood, and difficult RPG combat itself is not a great vehicle for horror. Is there a difference between bad game design and game design that players do not like? Just degree of consensus?

If the winning strategy of a game, or the way that it's trying to get you to play it(which may be different things), are ways that you do not enjoy playing that game, then that is a valid reason to dislike the game. I would just as often rather brute force a game to completion with the methods I actually enjoy using or naturally gravitate towards as adapt to whatever it's trying to get me to do. If it's trying to get me to do things I don't like and don't want, I am annoyed, and if it makes those methods the only viable means of completing it, I am resentful. That BoA is a game itself, with its own default game balance and strategies for success that players might reasonably expect to be broadly upheld across scenarios, surely doesn't help when someone comes in with a bright new rebalance for their scenario. That you're having this problem with Kelandon's scenarios, which have long been held by many members of the forum to be particularly irritating, taxing, or unreasonably difficult to play through, is not surprising. I like the different kinds of scenarios BoA has made. Don't be so flabbergasted that not everyone does or that not everyone wants to engage with them the way you want them to. "You're playing it wrong" is only a decent response if the person is actually more interested in "the right way to play" than they are in enjoying themselves. Player deaths are widely recognized as a terrible way to communicate horror, by the way. Horror in particular is a genre very reliant on immersion, on the player regarding the characters' situation as stressful and dangerous and, somewhere in the back of their head, real. Characters dying and being made to reload instantly shatters any engagement of that kind. Oh, yeah, I can just reload. It's definitely not real. Now I just have to fight this same guy again. What's so scary, then? What have I got to lose? Dying a lot defuses tension, because something has to be real damn scary to still be scary the third time you see it. The fourth time. The fifth. Unless the dying is in-fiction and/or you've got something else to lose by doing so.

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Mods with less than an obsessive amount of effort put into them are okay to have around, Slarty. Most people playing games don't pay a whole lot of attention to analyzing game balance, just to what feels fun or good. They don't expect more than that out of their mods, either. If someone plays G3-5 and thinks "I want melee attacks to do more damage", and they get a mod that adds a haphazard amount of damage to some melee attacks, they may well be satisfied with that.

The Guardian graphics are somewhat androgynous, and you'll fairly frequently find women Guardians throughout the series because of it. The Agent graphics are very feminine, so all the Agents we see are women, but the non-Shaper mage graphics are on a masculine end of androgynous and are usually used for men, though not always. There's no reason to think of the class graphics as reflective of gendered skill inclinations in GF.

You don't have that I've met Slarty.

Age of Decadence has a -heavily- branching story, moreso than Spiderweb games. Even if you had infinite skills, you couldn't possibly see most of the game in a single playthrough. The story branches can sometimes seem almost unrelated to each other. You have to pick a path regardless of skills. Though the character progression economy doesn't naturally allow you to do even all of the universal sidequests, or make a character equally qualified for each branch. That said, you could just cheat if you want more skill points.

Go to your Geneforge install directory. There should be a folder called Data in there. Copy and paste all of the images from this download to that folder. When prompted, choose to replace old files with these files.

Oh, no, I say Geneforge properly now, and I have for like nine or ten years, but still when I show it to people without them osmosing the pronunciation from me first, either because it's over the internet or because I only said it once or twice beforehand, there is a strong tendency towards Jennaforge. And most SW/CR people totally knew Geneforge and pronounced it however they pronounced it long before we shared pronunciations with each other, the pronunciations among that group of people who've used the word around each other a lot are mixed.

Among the non-SW people I have personally introduced to Geneforge, and SW people I've had the chance to hear say "Geneforge", and my ten-year-old self, Jennaforge is overwhelmingly the pronunciation people use when they see the word.

Jenna-forge is very common.

The fall of the Roman Republic was preceded by generations of wars, civil wars, and political purges. The slave population grew to drown out almost all other economic activity. Caesar, growing up, saw the prosciptions of Sulla and the dismantling of several centuries of Roman legal and civic development. His entire generation did. Roman culture more or less collapsed under the weight of its conquests, and dramatically, and for a long time. It is perennially tempting to compare any bad political thing that happens to the fall of the Roman Republic. It is perennially a poor comparison. Caesar, though interesting and unique in his own right, was not the avatar of tyranny. He was not even the first person to successfuly declare themselves dictator for life. And, honestly, his rule was probably the most reasonable, most successfully progressive, most humanitarian thing to happen to Rome since the fall of Carthage, so pointing to the events of Caesar's life as an example of a bad thing is maybe not even a good point to try to make in the first place.

maybe they're learning that blaming everyone but themselves for everything just makes everyone else not like them.