aluminiumtrioxid

Well StB and I am sure that KGB said the bolded thing the whole time as well I am sorry to tell that, but I really do not know, if I should laugh or facepalm about your naivity. Infinite power corrupts infinitely, and mass surveillance of your own citizens is a pavement made out of sweet talks and fearmongering into the acquiring infinite power... The real problem with using mass surveillance to fight terrorism is that the very idea hinges on an insanely paranoid projection regarding the number of domestic terrorists. With the population of the US, if there aren't tens, maybe even hundreds of thousands of terrorists working on domestic soil, the number of false positives you get is certain to drown out any relevant information you could possibly gather. "LOOK AT WHAT YOU MADE ME DO!" When you sound like an abuser in search of excuses, maybe it's time for some introspection, eh?

My problem is more along the lines of "Thinking in-character, both of these figures sound like a massive liability to keep around, much less trust them with my life. Why would I ever want to hang around with such horrible people?"

My problem is that the Kerrigan we got is pretty much the most interesting character of SC2, but that's not an endorsement of her, but an indictment against the rest of the characters. I love the idea of her (if you squint, she's basically transhumanist female Elric!), but the potential has been so very wasted.

She really got the short end of the stick, didn't she. It's almost painful to see such an amazing character get wasted like that, first in HotS, now here.

Definitely this. I thought the "no combat xp" paradigm meant the devs would cut out meaningless trash fights entirely, not that they would add a ton of them and have them be fairly unrewarding to boot, dammit!

...Book five was all of those things. Incidentally, that's the book where darkness-induced audience apathy kicked in.

> not dark and gritty at all > graphic torture of POV character described in great detail, 214 instances of rape (somebody actually counted!), child murder, pretty much everybody is either an **** or dead u wot m8

Oh god that ending, it was downright painful. That's some weapons-grade stupid we have here.

So according to you, there are no asian boys, they're all cleverly disguised girls. Because, as we know, the education system has been changed to make women and minorities succeed by sabotaging boys with the constant push to tie kids to chairs. Thus, we can conclude that white boys do worse than asian and chinese boys because they're secretly girls! It all makes sense now!

Do you even know what the GCSE is? But even if we accept your - frankly pretty absurd - supposition, we're back to "these grades are actually not a very good predictor of competence".

Maybe because GCSE scores of today don't predict top industry positions of today... they predict top industry positions in 30 years. So you're saying that 30 years ago, white women were, on average, literally dumber compared to their male peers than they are now? Because you can maybe explain the race issue with vigorous handwaving and "30 years ago, we had a less numerous population of them" (which I'd respectfully doubt, but it's not like I'm willing to look for statistics on the academic success of Britain's nonwhite population in the '80s), but the fact that white women have much better GCSE scores than white guys yet they're not exactly prevalent in top industry positions might be an indicator that those scores predict exactly jack and **** about who will fill those positions 30 years down the line. Well, that, or the intellectual capabilities of women somehow managed to improve dramatically faster in the last 30 years than those of men. But my money is on the former.

Well the problem with your position is that we either take the GCSE grades as a poor predictor of overall future competence and subsequent life success, in which case the statistics do little to "debunk the narrative of white males having all the privilege in the world" (which mainly only exists in the imagination of those who never bothered to familiarize themselves with the subject of privilege in all but the most cursory manner, but I digress), or we take it as a good predictor thereof, which raises the question why are white males so disproportionally represented in high-paying, high-prestige positions when, based on our predictor, they should be the second least numerous (assuming such positions are awarded solely on the basis of merit alone, of course).

Yeah, but "shoot the core themes of your source material in the foot" generally doesn't make a good adaptation. Like... in a D&D game, you kind of expect at least some dungeons and possibly a dragon or more. The expected core experience is centered around exploration of hostile territory and killing monsters to take their stuff. Conversely, in Vampire, you expect lots of scheming and backstabbing and desperate clinging to the remains of your Humanity, where combat is usually a fail state and the result of your ineptitude at the aforementioned activities. Desperately clinging and scheming? Yeah... try making a 30 hr game consisting of nothing but that. It's not happening, and if it did, it'd most likely be full of it's own set of issues, and be worse off, but hey, that's all good because it's true to source. Tabletop GMs have done campaigns spanning multiple years about vampire politics, so I'm not particularly worried that a 30 hr game by the top narrative designers of the industry would somehow fail to stay entertaining. I'm pretty sure PST had at least 30 hours' worth of content consisting of nothing but talking to people. Of course I'd rather have them shoot for a 10-20 hour long experience with a ton of reactivity and replayability.

...Said he, somehow managing to miss the point completely. Aside from having fun with the narrative breaking apart when facing reality, i do hope that this development will be reversed, because otherwise we will have a quite bumpy road ahead of us. "Development"? You seriously think poor people haven't always got the short end of the stick as far as their options go in life? That this is some sort of revelatory new development? Not to mention that the data, if anything, supports the existence of privilege.

Because a/ their disciplines allow for great build diversity, b/ they map well to the current pop culture image of vampires, c/ by being vanilla, they let us focus on the core themes of Vampire without the additional, more specific sub-themes of the clans you'd use, d/ they have wider mass-market appeal, easing the introduction of the brand, and e/ fixed protagonist means the "boring" aspect doesn't really have to stick; a decent Vampire character's Clan is the least interesting feature about them. That said, if the budget allowed for multiple protagonists (TOR-style), I'd definitely stick in non-traditional clans as well. Btw. I'd be curious about your reasoning how not having a fixed protagonist could possibly be less work than the alternative. Not less work but not as big as you would in other games, since there are shared disciplines across clans simply by creating 3 clans you could have another one clan in the game without the added workload. For example if you implement Brujah and Toreador then you only need Dominate to make a Ventrue. Also, you will have other clans in the game since I expect you're planning to have create fights with enemy vampires. It would actually be cheaper to create the Disciplines that to have different sets of enemy classes. Minor nitpick: if you implement Brujah, you only need to implement Auspex to make Toreador, but if you have both, you still need Fortitude and Dominate to make Ventrue. More importantly, since we're starting out with an existing social structure in the game, into which our main character gets slotted instead of the blank slate of Bloodlines, every additional clan we implement would necessitate a ****ton of unique dialogue depending on the nature, allegiance and social standing of the Sire. Now, if the writers' time and VA budget is no object, it can be done, but I'd argue if it isn't less work, per se, it definitely is a lot more expensive than in other games. There was a reason Bioware decided to go with a fixed protagonist in subsequent Dragon Age games instead of offering a choice between different origins. As for fights with enemy vampires, I wouldn't worry too much about that. Enemies don't need to play by the same rules as PCs, and anyways, implementing just the combat-relevant dots of certain disciplines (*cough* Protean *cough*) is way less hassle than trying to balance effects like "you can meld into earth for an indefinite duration" or "you can transform into a gaseous form that makes you pretty much invulnerable and lets you squeeze through any opening gas could conceivably diffuse through".

Yeah, but "shoot the core themes of your source material in the foot" generally doesn't make a good adaptation. Like... in a D&D game, you kind of expect at least some dungeons and possibly a dragon or more. The expected core experience is centered around exploration of hostile territory and killing monsters to take their stuff. Conversely, in Vampire, you expect lots of scheming and backstabbing and desperate clinging to the remains of your Humanity, where combat is usually a fail state and the result of your ineptitude at the aforementioned activities.

...Said he, somehow managing to miss the point completely.

Yeah, basically this. Not every build needs to be equal, but every build needs to be viable. Also, the game should clearly signal what you're getting into.

No, I mean, the fact that the game pretty much mandated picking up reasonable competence in it is a weakness of the adaptation. In a proper Vampire game, you should always have the option to make others kill your enemies for you.

He's a weird, weird man.

I'd argue that was a weakness of the adaptation, not a necessity arising from the needs of the universe.

Because a/ their disciplines allow for great build diversity, b/ they map well to the current pop culture image of vampires, c/ by being vanilla, they let us focus on the core themes of Vampire without the additional, more specific sub-themes of the clans you'd use, d/ they have wider mass-market appeal, easing the introduction of the brand, and e/ fixed protagonist means the "boring" aspect doesn't really have to stick; a decent Vampire character's Clan is the least interesting feature about them. That said, if the budget allowed for multiple protagonists (TOR-style), I'd definitely stick in non-traditional clans as well. Btw. I'd be curious about your reasoning how not having a fixed protagonist could possibly be less work than the alternative.

You peaked my interest. Please elaborate on why his rhetoric is correct? Basically the core idea is that by being part of the culture, it is impossible to also be an impartial outside observer to it, thus it's futile to pretend that you can be "neutral". Your concept of neutrality itself has been influenced by your culture. It feels pretty self-evident and not at all controversial to me. Also, what he said about Yudkowsky's following more or less holds water.

Really, practicality is your only concern with this? You see nothing morally wrong with renouncing fairness, espousing close-mindedness and thought control, and rationalizing the dehumanizing of and assholishness towards those not deemed "on your side"? If you look at it closely... - It isn't actually renouncing fairness, it says "fairness is picking the right side and fight for it" (which isn't, in itself, morally wrong - if you have a fight between, say, people who think slavery is rad and people who'd rather have none of it, it's pretty clear cut there is a right side there and fighting for it is the correct moral choice) - It isn't espousing close-mindedness and thought control, it's espousing thinking deeply about cultural assumptions you were brought up with (which, in traditional Chu fashion, he of course frames as "purging myself of dangerous unthinkable thoughts", but it's just a fancy way of saying things like "I've been raised with and deeply internalized the idea that homosexual people are sinful and disgusting, and it takes active cognitive effort on my part to fight against this assumption"). Also note that these are not his words, he's paraphrasing Yudkowsky here. - It actually doesn't say anything about people who aren't on "his side" except that "they aren't going to win because they aren't participating". That's... not exactly a call to dehumanize them and justify being an **** to them. If anything, it encourages not doing any of those, because they're not active participants in the battle of memes, thus wasting effort on them when there's a clear enemy to fight would be stupid?

Oh, that is just precious Weirdly, he is right in many places, but where he goes wrong is the idea that being a "social justice stormtrooper" is an inherently worthy pursuit. I don't find it funny at all, its this type of rhetoric that undermines real SJ change and effort Well the point is, his rhetoric is more or less correct. Just terribly, terribly impractical to actually use as a guideline of real life behavior.