I agree, strong typing is for weak minds. I work with a weak mind so I want strong typing.

There’s no difference in speed between typing disciplines. In point of fact, there cannot be. You must know the structure of your data to program against it. Whether you write it down explicitly or implicitly changes nothing but the location you wrote it down.

My guess is that this is really a measure of how much abuse the language will tolerate. C# probably lets you get away with a bunch of things (like checking for nulls) that F# requires.

Rather than saying it’s better than say Oblivion, I’m saying it’s closest (among the ES games) to being what I’d want out of an “ultimate” ES game. Oblivion has mods that fix its bixest shortcoming (OpenCities and various magic mods) but I’m not inclined to give Bethesda credit for the work of modders.

Even Skyrim wasn’t bad. I put like a thousand hours into it. It’s just not exactly what I’d call “ultimate”.

Oblivion was good. It’s dated at this point and like Morrowind combat is not comparable to say Elden Ring. Oblivion solves the whole open world (as in OpenCities) thing in mods, but Morrowind has it to start with. Which is why I think Morrowind is the closest the series has been to my ideal.

Also ES has some of the best, deep, insane lore. The series is at its worst when it tries to be grounded.

Even Skyrim ends with you going to the afterlife to gather aid from the dead and fight the embodiment of the cyclical nature of time by imposing the concept of mortality on it. And somehow that was a bog standard dragon fight.

Unless they’ve made some major engine changes… I feel like it’s going to be hard to top games like BG3, Elden Ring, or even Breath of the Wild.

BG3 has the deep story and npcs. Elden Ring has the emphasis on combat. Breath of the Wild freeform exploration.

Yes, I want a game that combines all of those and in the ES series the closest was probably Morrowind (combat being perhaps the most notable lack.)

My understanding of their desire is to be able to hold onto rights related to their settings and characters (and by extension you hold onto your own settings and characters) while forcibly sharing (SA) mechanics and to do this in a single license.

This is a goal that CC (BY) (SA) can’t solve simply due to the one license requirement. The intent was (though the execution failed) that you’d say ORC everything but <these names> and the result would be people could borrow the ORC mechanics and any improvements could be backported if it was good.

That said, I haven’t been following ORC very hard as I have no real interest in it. My own work I’m perfectly happy with CC-BY-SA on everything.

Polynesian for the original source of mana as a loan word would be cool. I also find stuff like Aztec would work really well for an RPG.

If I had a wish though, it would probably be to make a scaled down world that samples most of the historical cultures of each continent. Then do something where quests need you to do a bit of syncretism to solve them.

It would have to be motivated by the indie scene. Ideally with support from like Godot so people can just build games for the VM and have “native” support.

I’ve always thought we should have some sort of standard emulator format for games. I get that cutting edge graphics are always going to be too much to run through a virtual machine, but a lot of indie titles in particular could do it without problem.

We might need a few generations of emulators but it would still let us preserve games by just porting the VM instead of every game.

Even that definition is myopic. The Dems only want to return to 2016 in the same way I want to return to 1933 when minimum wage was actually valuable. It’s not a focus on the past when your actions wouldn’t change even if the past wasn’t there.

I finally got around to emulating Breath of Fire 4, though I restarted to play on the computer since some friends were interested in watching.

To play a little bit of devil’s advocate.

People do have an ingrained instinct for in/out groups and dehumanizing and even wishing for harm to befall the out group is very much a part of human nature. That there is harm being inflicted on the in group by the out group (perceived or true) will of course reinforce this.

Having said that, most people will agree that we should be more than our base instincts and use at least logic if not compassion in our decision making.

Yeah. A hack is usually a little more than just a modification, but there’s no strict definition or anything.

I basically like the way Knave is, but there’s a few things that I found didn’t work well at my table.

• Item choice paralysis. Do you buy/carry a hammer? Nails? Chalk? Ink? An hourglass? … There’s like 36 odds and ends in the game (100 in 2e.)
• One use per day spell books. Knave 2e solves this with Int uses of spell books but I mixed it with:
• Ability to lose items. A character built around a concept should retain the ability to use that.

So I changed some things.

• We use item kits. These are quantum bags of items related to a purpose. Say a climbing kit or an alchemy kit.
• Item kits can be tracked with item slots as they are, but most kits will be like 2-3 slots so it makes more sense to cut the number in half and stop varying size of items.
• Having cut the number of things to track in half, Art slots are added back in. These represent proficiencies/abilities that can’t be lost. Most of them literally are just kits but they can’t be taken away. So a Climbing Art does what a climbing kit can do (save for things like pass an item around since this is a personal ability).
• I use a standardized art point system so all arts consume these points to activate.

There’s some knock on effects too. So I have different ability scores for instance.

I’m working on getting yet-another-Knave-hack together. Also beating my head against its inability to write lists without getting very bored.

Fair enough. Though everything gets extra salt in this household already, ironically because of that very med.

I have an air fryer by proxy. Is that good enough?