Humor, jokes, memes about TTRPGs
The "good" coffee machine at my workplace was updated, so you have to use your phone to select the coffee
Mind you, it has buttons. And a full color screen. It worked fine before. But now you need to scan a fucking QR code that opens a slow ass website, just to press a button
My home coffee machine has a resistive heater for its water cylinder and no other electronics. It's an otherwise fully manual lever machine
Though I use an electric kettle to heat the water and an electric grinder to grind the coffee beans
Age verification for that cupa joe.
Citizen, we need to know it's you for the social demerits. Caffeine is a vice, and costs social cridt points, citizen.
Literally saw someone at my work scrolling through their phone for like 5 minutes trying to get one of these "smart " coffee machines to work. Like bruh. It has buttons, just push them.
Cool guess I’m quitting coffee in that case.
Yeah, that basically was my reaction when I saw it the first time
At least it's not an app. yet
Reminds me of when we had a free and paid snack area when I was at Lowe’s. No camera in the break/locker room, a nice private place to put your stuff in your locker and eat in peace.
Then they ‘upgraded’ so instead of tap pay you had to go up to a facial recognition camera, sign into an app, buy shop cash, and buy your snack through their app via the ‘aided smart teller’ where you scan your items and do a self checkout situation that took 4x longer than before and kept your change since you have to buy their cash.
Snacks started rotting in place, the once busy room was almost always dead save the few seats outside the camera field of view.
Most folks went in the door harder to be seen from but there were only two slim corners and three seats where you weren’t watched the whole time.
That's... Disgusting. I'm so sorry.
It was vandalized a bit after I left, and associates used to cut people discounts all the time. They paid in others ways, the staff in general started quitting around then too.
I'd like to point out that the water fountain is, in fact, not on the network.
You can thank the decker for that.
It's been hacked
How distracting!
Phil's not wrong that it's fucking stupid.
Phil was wrong in thinking that corps wouldn't make such blatantly stupid choices and products
I remember there was this whole period where tech savvy Shadowrun GMs on Dumpshock were grappling endlessly with the "unrealistic" gameplay concessions that riddled the hacking rules and trying to come up with solutions that allowed for a balance of good gameplay and believable IT design.
And then reality just YOLO'd itself off a cliff of utter insanity and it turned out the rules were right all along.
The one thing none of us had accounted for was how incredibly stupid businesses are capable of being.
this article came out just after I started GMing shadowrun. I let our decker do damn near anything he wanted after reading it: https://www.forbes.com/sites/leemathews/2017/07/27/criminals-hacked-a-fish-tank-to-steal-data-from-a-casino/
Art imitates life, and sometimes, life looks at art and says "hold my beer"
We were playing a game and my players wanted to release a bunch of bees into the airducts to clear out a public space and I asked where they would get a bunch of bees; you'd need some sort of special contact or something. One of my players pulled out his phone, and sure enough we could just buy bees that day on Amazon. Now any seemingly contrived plot is met with "we can just buy bees on the internet today"
Friend of mine was playing Cyberpunk 2020 and needed a shotgun in-game. He decided that since his character didn't have a record yet, he would go buy one at wal-mart.
It's the dystopian future. Of course there's wal-mart.
No one foresaw that wal-mart would stop selling firearms.
And they haven't. They reduced selection and the number of stores, but my local Walmart still sells shotguns
Oh hi Phil
You're tearing me APART, Andrew!
I did not hit him i did not. Oh hi Viking.
Unexpected !TheRoom.
I would just say #cyberpunkisnow
https://mastodon.social/@muhanga/116410824461315165 (For context, see the parent of this post/toot)
Thanks, I hate it
PS, that the water fountain is internet connected
Her name is Bevi and she’s the best fucking water dispenser in the world. I hate IoT with a passion but Bevi fucks. Carbonated+electrolytes cucumber, black cherry, key lime, and some of the seasonal flavors are soooo good.
But why does she have a pimp that makes your her life miserable?
Originally I thought Watch_Dogs was super unrealistic with how its hacking worked and what it worked on, but pretty much the only thing you couldn't do right now IRL is make a grenade explode remotely. At least for now.
I'm honestly no longer convinced that some California tech company couldn't sell the US military on a wirelessly connected grenade.
Is it an objectively stupid idea? Yes, absolutely. But then so is using Claude to run your strategic planning and they're doing that, so I guess everything is on the fucking table now.
I won VIP tickets to a music festival and the bathroom had screens connected to a network to show up the show. It wasn't working, so it had this IT guy with a notebook connected to the uniral trying to fix it, while everyone else was trying to piss
Let the man try, if he rolls a nat 20 the fountain not only overflows but also starts a bunch of different music at the same time with the fountain trying to match the different beats. A nat 1 turns on all the lights making it much harder to hide.
Not a fan of the "lol natural 20 zaniness happens" trope. That's 5% of the time.
Also Shadowrun doesn't even use d20s
Every RPG is D&D and every D&D game is a marvel movie.
That's why I like Shadowrun's rolling system for skill checks better than d20s: It weights the rolls so that middle-of-the-road rolls are much more likely than the extremes on either side, which feels more true-to-life. It also makes upgrades to your dice pool more meaningful than a simple +n modifier with a D20.
I am a huge fan of dice pools and absolutely done with "roll one die vs target". The flat probability you get from one die doesn't give results that feel good.
I was a big fan of the nWoD's S10 system. Add up your stat, skill, and relevant bonuses, roll this many d10s. Every one that comes up as {8, 9, 10} adds to degree of success. Roll another die for every one that came up {10}, possibly repeating if you keep rolling 10s.
You get pretty consistent results. Someone who's a professional will throw ~6 dice on average, so they're very likely to succeed on basic tasks. Much less of that "lol the wizard rolled a 1 and forgot how to read" or "barbarian rolled a 20, I guess he can speak infernal?" weirdness. You still get freak outliers every once in a while, where someone rolls like six 10s in a row and everyone's cheering. But not 5% of the time, and not so binary.
Plus there's other "dice tricks" you can apply for different circumstances. "Reroll all failed dice once", "reroll 9s like 10s", etc.
1d20+stuff is just so basic and threadbare. It's not even easier. nWod's dice pool you don't even have to add. You just count. We all know players that can't add 16+7, but they can probably count to 4.
Phil will never hear the end of this, and that is the righteous and just outcome. Few things in life provide the satisfaction and pleasure of being able to say "I told you so!"
Everything in Shadowrun should be online, spying on you, and prepared to kill you. Or for it to try and scuttle away to get time to upload to motherbase.
I love to shit on IoT but we have these Bevi dispensers at work. You can add flavoring, carbonation and vitamins to your drink. The network connection is probably to let the vendor know what they need to refill
The network connection is probably to let the vendor know what they need to refill
...and waste perfectly good user telemetry and that whole screen devoid of ads?! In <current year>???
:p
My go-to for players is that in any remotely realistic setting, sufficiently cobtrived abd stupid bullshit is always possible.
Broke your "n" key on "sufficiently" huh?
this is why offline n-keys are the way to go, lest it gets hacked mid sentence.
