Zoraptor

Oh no, you can most certainly romance the skellington in DOS2*. Not absolutely sure since it's been a while since I played and my memory is a bit shaky but I think you could romance every companion, at the same time. *+1 for DOS2 over Kingmaker, where's the Jaethal romance option Owlcat?

Calling it Baldur's Gate is fine. NWN was a MMO, then two SP(ish) games. Then an MMO again? So out of the loop with MMOs I'm not sure. Not like the IPLY BG3 was going to be a sequel either. Publishers love their brand recognition, and BG has brand recognition which hasn't yet been tainted much. This is most certainly the correct answer. Not a useful comparison for computer D&D unfortunately, whether TB or RT, though I wish it were.

No you aren't. Non taxpayers pay for healthcare in most countries with a universal system- though most normal treatments are considerably less expensive than in the US even at 'market' rates. Visitors are supposed to have either travel or medical insurance to protect them from medical costs.

Pathfinder Kingmaker still, and no real feeling of slowing down at all. Definitely a worthy successor to the Baldur's Gates in terms of boss fights, you either get your party wiped or wipe the floor with them. Fought some dudette that spammed destruction spells and I'm sure the AI scripting told her to target the PC preferentially just because a failed saving throw instantly meant she 'won' the fight via game over. So you hide the main character and she gets chunked in about twenty seconds after a couple of lucky criticals instead...

I've often- well, occasionally, if a bit bored and thinking vaguely on the subject of game combat systems- wondered if a WeGo system would work well for D&D type games. ie you do the planning for each character as if they were operating in a turn but the turns all execute/ resolve 'simultaneously'. In theory that would allow for the detailed planning possible in a TB system without the potential slowness involved in waiting for 20 rats to each take their turn crawling and mostly missing their 20 individually animated attacks. (The answer is probably it wouldn't work well for D&D, but I'd like to see someone try at some point. And yeah, in theory that is more or less what Infinity Engine RTwP was with the pause at round end option selected)

They are toy soldiers on a battle map, when in combat and in computer RPGs. In D&D overall though they're meant to be more than chess pieces, they are meant to have personalities and skills beyond that. You can't get a chaotic evil pawn that decides it would be fun to kill his own side's queen because she's a bit snooty, obviously has money, and tried to get him killed...

I think you'd also have to question how committed the Democratic Party is to getting out the youth vote for the nomination process though, as compared to older demos. It's all very well to blame youth, but if older voters are being actively courted and encouraged to turn up and they aren't it does make a difference too. As a strategy it's immensely short sighted and was a major problem last time in the presidential election when youth didn't turn out for the enthusiasm black hole that was Hillary Clinton, but it's not exactly surprising that a party establishment that wants to blame Russia, Bernie, anyone but themselves for losing last time will repeat the exact same mistakes again. Even with South Carolina being an open primary the focus would be on getting turn out from D party members who tend to be older, more little c conservative and intrinsically less prone to vote for Bernie. Overall I get the distinct impression that some of the more ludicrous talking heads on especially MSNBC are representative of mainstream capital P Party thinking- they'd expect and prefer 4 more years of Trump rather than a Sanders nomination. The great thing about suppressing the youth vote is that you always have someone to blame- those feckless zoomers who were far too busy doing ice box challenges and planking to vote as they're meant to for the awe inspiring, totally hip and not at all 1990s option of Bloomberg/ Clinton or whatever charisma singularity they favour.

Is that 3% mortality for infection or world population? Because most of the figures I've seen have a 8-10% mortality rate for those infected by Spanish Flu, with about a quarter of the world's population at the time being infected. The covid19 figures are for death rate of infected, so about 1/3 the rate of Spanish Flu rather than the same.

Kind of amusing watching the media spin the SC result as being the Berniepocalypse. Much as last time with Clinton and her winning in the south it's completely irrelevant to being a good candidate overall, since the only scenario in which the Dems win SC vs Trump is a landslide one where they win anyway. And Biden did atrociously in the states which they'll actually need to win to beat Trump. A brokered convention would be hilarious and cringe/ facepalm inducing, in equal measure.

What was his plot element on the prison island? Unlike all (?) the other P/NPCs I could only remember his plot starting on the 2nd island, which would have explained how someone who didn't play much would get the impression he had no plot compared to the others.

Amazing how much my view of Larian's environment system varies between the two DivOSs- first one, yes, nice overall if a bit overpowered/ silly in some cases; second one was either irrelevant or annoying. But their annoyance to you/ irrelevance to enemies in DivOS2 was largely due to the stupid armour system, which won't be the same in D&D*. So I'd be expecting more of the DivOS1 approach, and thus a net positive from the reactivity. *Epic gnolls with 25/25/25/25 fire/ acid/ cold/ electricity resistance incoming...

Turn based should be fine as long as there isn't massive amounts of pointless filler combat. It was fine in DivOS1 and the issues in DivOS2 weren't due to it being TB. Larian is also pretty good at designing unique feeling encounters via their environmental system, so even if you're fighting orcs or undead for the twentieth time it doesn't feel stale. If you have to stop every twenty seconds to fight a rat which crawls slowly across the screen for a few rounds while you crawl slowly towards it over the same few rounds then it takes your characters half a dozen rounds to hit so that the encounter takes ten minutes then that would be a problem, but I don't think we'll see that.

I'd disagree, but it doesn't really matter if it is or isn't anyway. Obviously a lot of people enjoy it, and if they enjoy it that's fine with me whatever I think of its quality. But even though it wasn't me making the original comparison I'd say that a comparison of obsessive Twilight fans to obsessive Bioware fans is certainly a comparison that has merit, because a lot of those fans get the same type of enjoyment out of both. There was a fair bit of crazy around before ME2, though that is definitely the high water mark and the time at which it became the (stereotypical) Bioware fan's distinctive trait. It's very much a result of Bioware's development system of NPCs up to ME2 which culminated in a game which was, essentially, NPC recruitment and loyalty missions stitched together by a haphazard main plot which ended up with you fighting a ludicrous Terminator Reaper hybrid made of soylent greened people. There wasn't much crazy at all for BG1 because the NPCs were very basic cyphers with a dozen lines each, a bit for BG2 as the NPCs developed more and so on as the system progressed and especially as the idea of romances progressed. They're not so much nerd porn as variable quality relationship simulator porn. Bioware definitely played for this, indeed they actively developed character archetypes that were the same through multiple games because of it- the Anomen (Carth/ Sky/ notAshley) archetype of whiny damaged love interest, the Korgan (Canderous/ Black Whirlwind/ Wrex) amoral mercenary, the vulnerable love interest, the tough love interest etc etc. I liked DAO a lot, but there was definitely some obsessive behaviour around Morrigan/ Leliana/ Alastair even though they'd toned down the biostereotypes a bit. OTOH, Inquisition and Andromeda both came across as if they'd written their characters based on a list of traits written on a whiteboard that they thought would appeal to different subsets of fans instead of writing them as 'real' people.

Back when the Bioware forums existed it would be very, very easy to point to equivalences to Twilight class fandom especially in the Mass Effect fandom (eg Talimancers and the infamous sweat analysis). Later Bioware games' NPCs were almost entirely service for various subgroups of obsessed fans so much so that I'm not at all sure it would count as an unpopular opinion.

Finally saw the trailer having spent the 10 seconds required duckduckgoing. Skipped some bits because 20 odd minutes but it was OK I guess. Glad it's a tentacle ship wreck this time, that changes things up from the bog standard water ship wreck significantly. Don't care about the graphics as I wouldn't be buying the game for them, don't really care about some of the gameplay oddities and departures either. It looks very much and sounds a bit like DivOS 3, but expecting anything else is unrealistic. The major problem with DivOS2 was the stupid late development tinkering with sequence and physical/ magical barriers, and hopefully being D&D that cannot happen here anyway.

Hmm, so what I get from the screenshots is that you're on a ship at some point, hear voices and have to build a party out of the people on the ship? That's pretty much exactly how DivOS2 started. (Highly amused that the trailer embedded in the previous page is age restricted, when I can go and watch real people getting blown up on youtube with nary a care)

That bombing was near 100% Russian not Syrian as the Turks are saying, as have most of the previous attacks targeting the Turks. Turks just say it's Syrian government as that's better to sell and they can then claim to have killed eleventy billion in retaliation. Technically the Syrians do have the capacity to do precision strikes at night, but it is very very limited. Indeed, there are only two (both suspected not acknowledged) uses of precision munitions by the Syrians in the entire civil war- the 2014 strike that killed Ahrar ash Sham's leadership and the 2016 strike that killed Zahran Alloush the leader of Jaish al Islam. As per the Military thread, it comes after the Turks again tried to shoot down a Russian jet with a Stinger, which lead to them getting bombed by Russia last time as well. The plan seems to be to leverage European NATO into supporting Erdogan by threatening to flood Europe with refugees again.

Khalid had the double whammy of being whiny and having rubbish stats. Jaheira was OK though. Pretty much every BG2 party I ever had included Edwin, Viconia and Jan as I found them most entertaining and least annoying.

At least 22 Turkish soldiers killed after some bright spark decided to try shooting down a Russian plane with a Stinger again. The 22 is a confirmed official figure, apparently the HQ for Turkey's whole Idlib operation may have been hit with up to 100 total casualties. It also looks like Turkey may be trying to leverage an Article 5 response from NATO- which should not apply as Article 5 is for mutual self defence, and cannot be used if you're invading someone else. While not absolutely confirmed it's been reported by both Reuters and Al Jazeera that Turkey will allow all refugees to transit Turkey again into Europe in the hope of forcing the hand of Euro/ NATO countries- especially Greece- to support them.

December 21, 1998.

I'm not sure what is even the point of discussing up to 50-60 trillion of spending as if it would definitely be 50-60t is anyway. The article itself has M4A being more than half the 60t upper limit, and notes that the lower estimate for that policy's cost cost is, well, a far more manageable 31 billion instead of 34 trillion. There's no basis for real world discussion when the estimates vary by a factor of 100. The article title is basically clickbait, something that wouldn't cost that much unless you took the highest figures for everything. Having had a look at the report the 34t figure (over ten years, for those who didn't read the article) of extra cost is based on I'm... exceptionally skeptical. 3.4t per year is already the approximate existing total cost of both private and public healthcare combined in the US. Public spending is already about 40% of that figure, private expenditure is 60% or ~2t*. So they're essentially saying that that 2t if 'nationalised' is going to expand to a 3.4t average cost or around 70% increase to existing costs, and increase overall health spending to a cool 4.8t p/a, or about 16k p/c. Essentially, they're saying that the system used in multiple other countries will cost 3x as much in the US as there, 4x the OECD average and pretty much 2x the closest country (Switzerland), in p/c costs. If you're going to claim that you need pretty strong evidence as to why. *And of course that existing 2t private healthcare cost is currently being paid by someone- someone who wouldn't be paying that if it gets 'nationalised' even if their tax bill goes up.

It's extremely unlikely that anyone checked Iraqis for anything other than direct injuries anyway. Whether they'd prove anything either way is moot if the stats simply don't exist. No Iraqis died, there's never been any suggestion that they did. The main question for anyone skeptical of the number of TBIs or their presence at all would be why the US would make up the injuries and numbers. I've been highly skeptical of US claims in the past, but I can't come up with any reason why they'd lie in this case and plenty of reasons why they wouldn't- it's probably more in their interests to lie about there being no injuries if there were some. The Havana Ray, if it exists, almost certainly isn't Cuban. It just makes a nice place to test things because you know Cuba will be blamed. It's probably Chinese.

Funny thing being that 3 billion is by no means a big deal, even tiddly little NZ has spent nearly that much on US hardware this year. Nothing, nothing at all. Coincidentally I'm off to learn the words to our new national anthem: "Krishna Bharat and Modi"

Dunno about anywhere else, but that video is definitely unavailable here.

I can recommend John Oliver's Last Week Tonight segments on Modi. I'm not massively keen on Oliver's style most of the time but it's a lot more palatable when skewering someone I dislike. Might not be able to find the latest one though, BJP stans have been running around the internet trying to copyright strike or label it as objectionable for the last day.