Is Homestuck a LitRPG?
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No
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Three Goblin Art
taylor price
Misplaced Lens Cap
Show & Tell
One Nice Bug Per Day
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
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blake kathryn
hello vonnie
Claire Keane

Love Begins
h
wallacepolsom
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Aqua Utopia|海の底で記憶を紡ぐ

roma★
ojovivo
trying on a metaphor
Monterey Bay Aquarium
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@multicore-processor
Is Homestuck a LitRPG?
Yes
No
See Results
My thoughts about game design are rarely less charitable than when I'm getting skill-issued by a boss. Today I'm having a though I've had many times before: why does this game have a health bar with three digits of precision when all of the bosses are going to kill me in one or two hits anyway?
In some parts of the country, voters complain that there aren't enough jobs. In other parts, voters' implicit complaint is that there are too many jobs - accommodating all the workers would require building more housing, which would ruin the historic neighborhood character or something.
Therefore there's something socially efficient about congressional pork-barrel spending. It moves government jobs to the districts whose constituents have "more jobs" as a major priority.
ok i am curious. how long is the longest song in your library (not counting tracks that are like several songs in one file like a full album mix or symphony recording or whatever) (also if it is longer than 20 minutes say the name in the tags i am curious)
how long
< 3:00
3:00–3:59
4:00–4:59
5:00–5:59
6:00–6:59
7:00–7:59
8:00–11:59
12:00–15:59
16:00–20:59
21:00–24:59
25:00–30:00
≥ 30:00
ok i would like to clarify it has to be music and it can't just be a short song that's been looped a bunch. that still counts as several songs in one file, it's just several of the same song in one file. no audiobooks no podcasts no plants vs zombies theme 2 hour loop
My employer: Be careful of clicking links in emails, especially links with suspicious domain names.
Also my employer: To access this important document, click the link in this email and enter your corporate username and password into "microsoftonline.us".
One of the controversies around Subnautica 2 is that it's taken the first game's "no guns" stance and escalated to not having any way to kill any of the creatures that are constantly trying to kill you.
It's funny to me that this is motivated by the designers' personal anti-gun beliefs, but the actual experience of playing the game makes every player go "I really could use a gun here, actually".
And in the story (at least of the first game), the lack of weapons in the PDA blueprint database is clearly a case of your dystopian space capitalist bosses imposing their luxury beliefs on workers who pay the price for them. The developers expected the players to agree with the evil space capitalists here?
Just like you can't make an anti-war war movie, you can't make an anti-gun survival game.
It's interesting that the major AIs each have a different type of name:
Claude: Human name
GPT: Robot name
Gemini: Mythological name
Grok: Alien name
this would be a wonderful little case study in brand differentiation and positioning iff i believed all four of these AI companies were interested enough in brand strategy to have been thinking it through at that level. tbh though if i had to bet $7 cash money about it i’d bet they named their shit on vibes and gut instinct and it just happened to fall out like this
99% certainty about that for grok. 60% for claude and gpt bc i’m unclear on those companies’ size and structure at naming time. i’m assuming “tech startup” fits better than “global hyperco” and tech startups often assume any fool can do marketing and kludge it. no money down for gemini. that’s a big enough, old enough, historically diversely focused enough company for properly built out commercialization, product naming, positioning, etc. if only for the global legal vetting part of naming! but also, my own brand-strategic assessment (and i’m speaking as someone who works in high science biopharma, and not directly on naming except for a little trial work, so admittedly my expertise here is a bit adjacent. nevertheless) is that gemini is the least compelling name of the four. i suspect the classic giant company shenanigans where someone in senior leadership shows up at final and upends eight months of rigorous strategy work using vibes and gut instinct; the outcome could be worse
"GPT" (Generative Pretrained Transformer) comes from OpenAI's earliest papers using transformers in 2018. It's a name for the entire class of models, so using it for a specific model family is a bit like an early software company just calling itself Microcomputer Software.
So rather than an amateurish marketing decision, it's a decision to just keep using the name that was originally meant for an audience of fellow ML researchers.
The most likely reason for that non-decision is that OpenAI did not intentionally decide to pivot to mainstream. They'd been doing experiments for months seeing if there was any significant commercial use case for GPT-3 variants with lukewarm success, and suddenly their experimental interface "ChatGPT" became the fastest-growing product in history. After that, GPT was the name the public knew and it was hard to change.
I have no special insight into the other three names.
It's interesting that the major AIs each have a different type of name:
Claude: Human name
GPT: Robot name
Gemini: Mythological name
Grok: Alien name
Bowling For Soup's 2004 hit "1985" is about a middle-aged woman named Debbie obsessed with the music artists of her youth, including Bruce Springsteen, Madonna, and Motley Crue.
That song's release is now closer to 1985 than today.
If someone made a new version today, it would be about a woman named Tiffany who's still obsessed with Nickelback and Evanescence.
My friend just sent this in the group chat, we got the new gay or European 2026 update
A rigorous diagnostic. 15 questions. One uncomfortable truth.
okay.
I got the reverse
I saw a post on here recently calling the Confederacy the "biggest losers in American history", and while I agree they're strong contenders for that title, most ways you could operationalize "biggest losers" someone else would have them beat.
Absolute size of the losing faction: this would be something more recent. The Confederacy only had a population of ~9 million, but, for example tens of millions of people voted for a losing candidate in the latest presidential election.
Relative size of the losing faction: This would have to go to something that was hegemonic across the whole country before it collapsed, like the Temperance movement of the early 20th century or the segregationist cause pre-1960s.
Completeness with which their ideology was rejected by future generations: There are other strong contenders like the eugenics movement or NAMBLA.
A whole "civilization" and "way of life" being wiped out: Obviously this goes to various native american tribes throughout the 1800s.
One category the Confederacy does win is "sheer destruction involved in the conflict they lost". And I suppose if you combine all these operationalizations into a gestalt score they could win the biggest loser contest overall.
Are there any angles in which LitRPG "game-like" tropes are genuinely divorced from contemporary game design, or is it all legitimately just pulling from parts of the games ecosystem that aren't popular in the Anglosphere?
to go on a bit of a tangent, there's plenty, but a lot of litrpg tropes relating to mmo elements derive from a time where "mmorpg stories" were a thing people actively told, because most people did not (and could not) play them, so they're true, but not to any particular game
there's this old meme about how the most fun way to play EVE is hearing people recap what happened in it, but this was also just as true of a lot of other games. that's crucial to understanding why some litrpg mmorpg tropes don't map despite wide presence. excluding the rpg mechanics I already talked about, half of these stories by volume were composed of lies to make the narrative more interesting to someone who wasn't playing mmos. mmorpg stories are, fundamentally, fisherman's tales
every story you've ever heard about something cool a guild did or something neat a player discovered, while likely true to some extent, is also full of these kind of embellishments. they're more true to what the players felt than they are to what observably happened
this is why people wanting mmorpgs that play like litrpg always come up disappointed. it's like going out on your first fishing trip and realising it's mostly sitting around, not catching leviathan
as a random example, take how every large pvp game of yesteryear has at least one story of a player-killing guild getting their comeuppance in one decisive blow. what's that look like logistically?
the player isn't killed in real life, and while it's dramatically convenient to describe everyone angrily logging off as they lose their Big Time/Gold Investment, "owning someone so hard they ragequit and delete their account immediately, then their friends all quietly quit over the next few days" warrants a bit more scepticism when divorced from the context of a bygone mystical game that you can't play anymore
but that's not interesting to someone who doesn't play the game. "we beat a guild in pvp and then they kinda fell off playing over the next few months" is a reasonable experience to expect, but it's not fun to listen to, so that story gets exaggerated to ring more true to emotion
Could you name (without looking up) the poem by Dante Alighieri of which Inferno is one of the parts? Do you expect most people could? ('I didn't know it was part of a longer work' counts as not being able to name it)
Yes I could name it, Yes most people could
Yes I could name it, No most people couldn't
No I couldn't name it, Yes most people could
No I couldn't name it, No most people couldn't
I have never heard of Dante's Inferno
Curiosity brought about because i have formed the impression that English speakers on the internet talk about the Inferno specifically more than about the whole thing, whereas in other places it's more common to talk about the entire poem. i have no idea if this impression is accurate.
Expecting "most people" to know any fact at all about classic literature is some xkcd 2501 style overestimation.
Europa Universalis 5's design is pretty eurocentric in some ways, but a funny exception is the game having five Hegemon titles held by the most powerful country worldwide in terms of army, navy, economy, diplomacy, and cultural influence respectively.
In a typical campaign these titles will be held by China, China, China, China, and China.
you dont get it, i know that in real life bad people actually have stupid motivations and act cartoonishly and behave like over the top villains, that is why i want nuanced, smart, complex antagonists on my stories, it’s escapism
I just finished Esoteric Ebb, a game that's very clearly taking enormous inspiration from Disco Elysium, but with D&D. It's got a detective, his sidekick, a bunch of politics, the voices in his head, a similar sort of humor ... I think what's shocking to me is that it actually works?
That is, of all the games that you might be tempted to take heavy inspiration from, Disco Elysium seems like one where that ambition is most likely to go wrong. And here, somehow, it has not.
The dev wrote a post about it on /r/gamedev
A few months later, Disco Elysium came out. Within thirty minutes of playing it, I realized that they had managed to do three things: 1. Solve every single problem I had in my design document. 2. Sell a big CRPG without traditional combat. 3. Do all of that, while also creating the most compelling piece of interactive writing since Planescape: Torment. The next month and a half I spent playing the game and researching. Just diving in, trying to learn how and why they managed to create this genius design. Immediately I started to understand that the one thing that really made the game so good wasn’t just the writing, even if that’s what you’d naturally focus on. The non-linear design itself was the thing that (in my subjective opinion of course) really made the game pop. That, along with the talking skills - I call them Chimes - which allows the player to actually get the GM’s voice whispered directly to them, through the filter of dynamic character-based content. Fucking genius.
Turn based tactics games have the concept of the "action economy". Each side of the battle has some number of units who each get some number of actions per turn. If all else is equal, the side that collectively gets more actions per round is favored to win.
Of course, all else is not always equal. Alice and Bob the level 1 peasants aren't going to beat the Elder Dragon just because they get two attacks per round and the dragon only gets one.
A deficit in the action economy can be counteracted by an opposite advantage in some other factor. If the heroes have twice as many actions per round as the monsters, the monsters can keep up by doing twice as much damage, or starting with twice as much HP, or having twice as much chance to hit.
As long as people are only spending their actions on dealing damage, that is.
Where the action economy really rears its ugly head is when units can spend an action to entirely nullify an action from the other side. This can transform a small advantage in actions per round into a crushing advantage, or even lock the other side out of acting altogether.
If Alice spends every turn throwing a net that takes the Elder Dragon its one action per round to get out of, while Bob pokes away every turn with his pointy stick, the Elder Dragon is going to have a bad day.
(Which is why the game designer will usually modify the Elder Dragon to have Immunity to Nets)