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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 22nd, 2023

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  • Is it still compatible with all the money I wasted on 3.x Hasbro D&D?

    While technically the answer is “no”, people who emphasize the difference don’t apply the “Rule of Cool” as liberally as I did.

    I re-used all kinds of D&D 3rd Edition resources while switching to Pathfinder.

    Sure, we absolutely shouldn’t just dogmatically use the numbers given in a 3E book with Pathfinder.

    But I didn’t find it terribly hard to whip up Pathfinder monster and NPC number adjustments based on my 3E source books, more or less on the fly.

    Many numbers given are close enough. Most abilities are easy enough to convert in a way that is fun. The Challenge Rating isn’t tuned as carefully, but i find the usual GM toolkit can address that. For example, throwing in a few extras baddies from over the hilldside can scale an encounter up, and awarding the players various story advantages “for good role playing” can scale an encounter’s challenge down.

    If my napkin translation went too badly, I threw “Rule of Cool” at it, and just made sure the players were still having fun.

    I will say, I relegated 3E stuff to filler encounters, just as I do with anything else I homebrew.

    I don’t mind being on my GM toes for a quick encounter, or a short story arc. But I don’t like having something poorly balanced have a recurring role in my campaigns.

    All to say I have used 3E source books liberally in my Pathfinder campaigns, and I’m not sure any of my players have ever noticed.


  • I grew to love Linux because I was hating Windows, I don’t hate Windows because I love Linux. And I don’t want to hate Windows, I wish they were slowly becoming anti-user, but they keep adding (forcing) features that are so unfriendly to the user.

    Yes. If Windows was still like Windows XP, I don’t know if I would have ever switched. It used to be fun, not soul sucking.

    There’s lots of other reasons I’m glad I switched, of course.













  • I feel bad for not trying hard or smart enough

    People who have accounted for their own spent time often feel the coupons are wasteful. That’s before accounting for the costs of purchases made that could have been skipped, or where the discount led to buying a worse product, and needing to rebuy a better one later.

    wondering if there are privacy trade-offs.

    I’m not familiar with that service, but it’s a safe bet that it has privacy costs. People don’t set up and organize discount programs out of kind heartedness. At best they plan to sell us something we don’t need. At worst they’re selling everything they can learn about us to anyone with a nickel.






  • That’s a pretty good description of what GrapheneOS does with the sandboxed Google services.

    I have found that the only apps that don’t work well with Samdboxed Google services are ones that work hard to invasively probe their runtime environment.

    Thwy usually fall into these three categories:

    • Bank apps that do it “for my safety”. Nevermind that a website version exists for attackers to target without the same (dubious, invasive) “protections”.
    • Streaming apps that do it “because this paid subscriber might be some kind of dark web pirate and we need to protect our content from being uploaded to the dark web one more time.”
    • Apps whose developers are shitty at writing code for memory management. But GrapheneOS has good options to allow these to run, anyway.