Keyrock

Turns out those ads with J-Lo urging the Latinos to vote and Barack Obama subtly urging the people to vote Democrat and Michele Obama not so subtly telling people to vote straight down the Democratic party line didn't work. Who knew? My favorite part of the Barack Obama ad: "While my name isn't on the ticket this year, the progress we've made together is..." Wait, what progress? Edit: In some really sad news, Gary Johnson didn't manage to get the 5% necessary to secure funding for the Libertarian Party. I guess we gottas try again in 4 years. This needs to happen sooner or later. Sooner, preferably.

And I wake up to... President Trump. He took almost the entirety of the heartland (including virtually all the swing states) and in the end the west coast and the northeast weren't nearly enough for Hillary.

It's looking like Trump is going to take Florida.

Libertarian Party has some candidates for other positions than President and VP, down to the state level (perhaps even town level in some areas).

How many write-ins were there for Ben and/or Jerry?

Trump winning would be the more interesting of the 2 outcomes. If for no other reason then to see how many of the people that swore they would leave the country if he won actually go through with it. My guess is around 1%.

authoritarian right and authoritarian left actually are shockingly similar. They both basically believe that people need to be regulated as much as possible so that they can be saved from themselves and live the right way. They basically just have a different opinion of what "living the right way" means.

Regardless which terrible president we wind up with, I hope at least one of the independent parties garners enough of the vote to reach a threshold that would get them some of the perks and rights that currently only the Dems and Reps enjoy. I'd rather it be the Libertarian Party (if only one does it), but I'd still rather the Green Party makes it rather than neither party make it. The current 2 party system doesn't work any more (at least not for the general public) and we desperately need a shake up in the status quo. Maybe not something quite as drastic as burn it to the ground, figuratively speaking (though that thought has crossed my mind), but a major change is needed.

Slightly right, fairly strongly libertarian, as I expected. I'm mostly of the what people do in their private lives is their own damn business, let the market mostly run itself and keep Washington's fingers out of it, but we do need a few (emphasis on few) regulations for really egregious stuff to keep thing from becoming the wild west type.

LPs and Twitch streams are too spoilery for my tastes. I only watch LPs of games I have no intention of ever playing (like DA:I) or can't play because it's on a platform I don't and will never own (like Uncharted 4). Once in a blue moon I'll see an LP or stream of a game and it convinces me to give it a try, in which case I immediately stop watching, usually, though, I just watch the LP and never play the game. Since I intend to play Tyranny, that means no watching Tyranny videos beyond character creation and non-spoilery reviews.

We had Moon Patrol in the computer lab where I went to school many eons ago, monochrome monitor and all. That and Moria. I used to play those game sometimes during study hall.

Hillarda the Deceiver

Green Bay lacks an identity. It's like they don't know who they want to be.

The Boys are now 7-1. Beating the Browns is not a big deal, though I was a bit nervous as this was the perfect setup for a trap game (coming off a big win, facing a vastly inferior opponent). One thing I really like about this team is that they do not play to the level of their opponent (like so many Cowboys teams have in the near past). When they face an inferior team they ****ing stomp them, like they should. Anyway, as promised, here's your weekly helping of Uncle Jerry:

I'm 40 hours into Mad Max now. I could start the final mission at any time, but I'm holding off to finish getting all the upgrades for the Magnum Opus. I basically just need to finish upgrading the V8 and the Thunderpoon and I'll have the car maxed out (pun intended). I also want to get all the territories to threat level 0 before starting the final mission. Jeet's lands are already at 0 and no one else's are above 1, so there isn't that much to do. The timing is pretty perfect. Tyranny will be out within a day or two of when I will likely be done with Mad Max.

RPS making wild leaps of logic, using creative interpretation, and altering information to serve their narrative? Why I never!

Renown Explorers is pretty damn fun. They really hit on something with the combat system and the mood balance system. There is quite a bit of strategic depth to encounters in trying to manipulate the overall mood of the battle to gain advantages and make your better abilities more effective. I wish we could have Alpha Protocol 2 so that Obsidian (or someone) would take that excellent dialogue system and expand on it, making it an even bigger and more meaningful part of the game. It makes so much sense for an espionage RPG as charming, bluffing, intimidating and other forms of manipulating people mentally is such an integral part of playing a James Bond archetype.

Well I suppose it depends on what your definition of a filler encounter would be, for me I'd be something along the lines of "Encounters that neither push the story forward in any way nor challenge the player". And their purpose is... Basically, if all you did was present player with a long string of challenging encounters, player would grow tired of your game relatively quickly. That's why most games don't have linear difficulty curve, what you want to achieve is basically this: You want to have challenging peaks to test player's skills and then less difficult encounters to give player a feeling of empowerment, which feel especially important in RPG with character power progression. And while I suppose it would be possible, it's rather difficult to make these downs meaningful in a readily apparent sense. Thus, trash encounters, those enemies you mop the floor with when you master a new mechanic/your characters get new gear or level up, become rather important. Still, you can't keep the difficulty down for too long, otherwise the game'll become boring. Incidentally, this is another thing Pillars of Eternity does incorrectly: Not only is there far too many of these "downs", the way combat is structured essentially means that the moment you let your guard down and make a couple of mistakes, you can get a party-wipe. Which is stupid, because instead of being relaxing power romp, trash encounters just continue to tire player out as opposed to help him relax. This brings up another issue I have with RPGs in video game form; I'm not a fan of how much combat dominates the focus of video game RPGs. I'm not sure how your PnP RPG sessions went, assuming you played PnP RPGs, but in my experiences, regardless of who was GM, combat was a fairly small part of the overall experience. If video games more closely mirrored PnP then it would be feasible to handcraft every combat encounter to be a unique experience, but since early on someone seemingly wrote a rule that states that video game RPGs must have at least 10X as much combat as PnP, that's just not feasible.

Please elaborate as I disagree and fail to see a purpose for filler battles beyond padding game length (not a worthy purpose IMHO)

I tend to favor turn-based, though I can enjoy RTwP under the right conditions. I think RTwP is fine for single character RPGs. For party-based RPGs I generally only tolerate RTwP so long as the party size is no higher than 3, unless the companion AI is really really really good (which it virtually never is). In any party-based game I'll always prefer TB, especially a large party, as I find the organized structure of TB much less tiring than the chaos of RTwP when having to constantly micromanage a group of characters.

Combat was only one of many factors that made me eventually hate Pillars, though it was the biggest one. I made several key mistakes when playing Pillars: 1) I played it at launch 2) I tried to do a completionist run 3) I played it on Hard difficulty (because I always played IE games on Hardcore D&D). All 3 mistakes contributed to making the game overwhelmingly tedious for me. The higher difficulty setting combined with no companion AI made every combat encounter a slog that took 5X as long as it needed to. The game, even when going through a minimum playthrough already has waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too much pointless filler combat, trying to be completionist only made this much worse. Finally, the main story was just plain boring. The writing style was generally quite good as were the flavor and lore bits, but the main story arc completely failed to sink its hooks into me. By the time the initial nostalgia/new IE style game hype wore off and I sobered up to the grim realization that I would never grow to care about the main story, I was extremely worn out by the, quite frankly, sadistic amount of filler battles. The only reason I finished the game is that I was running a LP of it and was deep enough in the game that I felt obligated to finish it (abandoning the completionist route in the process). Speaking of archaic anachronism that need to go, filler battles. That garbage needs to die in a fire.

I seriously doubt taking Fallout in a different direction is an option.Big settings only change when sales fall into reboot territory. Agreed. Why would Bethesda do a 180 when they're making money hand over fist with their increasingly FPS and devreasingly RPG offerings?

Really cool concept. I have strong doubts about it working out well in practice, though.

The Dak vs Romo "problem" is a pretty good problem to have. A lot of teams out there don't have a legitimate starter on their team and are trying to decide which backup quality QB gives them the best chance to win. The Boys are trying to decide which starter quality QB to play. This seems like the kind of problem that will work itself out over time.