The level scaling in Oblivion and Skyrim are worse, true. It’s kind of impressive how bad an idea and execution the level scaling in Oblivion was. They place enemies based on your total level, so if you leveled up from non-combat skills then you’ll have a bad time. It makes exploring kind of pointless, because you’ll never find anything interesting. And then there were the bandits wearing thousands of GP worth of equipment mugging you for 100gp.

one of the original developers recently came out and said it was a huge mistake: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/elder-scrolls-4-oblivions-level-scaling-was-a-mistake-says-designer-so-why-is-it-in-the-remaster

In morrowind, not much scales with you so it matters less. You can’t raise a skill above its stat, so you can kind of paint yourself into a corner with bad leveling. (Though I think you can use fortify-attribute to get around that at trainers)

Morrowind’s combat system is… if you’re feeling generous: weird. if you’re not: bad.

You click on an enemy and it rolls dice to see if you hit. Your chance to hit is determined by your skills and stats, and your fatigue. yes, fatigue. If you’ve been sprinting and your fatigue is empty, you’ll probably miss more. This combos badly with the glacial movement speed of the game.

You also want to hold the attack button a little longer to do more damage.

If you start with a good axe skill (like 50), you can often hold to attack and knock people over, then finish them off. You might want to set “always use best attack” to true in the options- weapons typically have like a few moves, but one is usually better.

The “bound weapon” spells are also good- they’re kind of cheap, and give you a high damage weapon that also boosts your skill by 10. There’s a merchant that sells a couple weapons that turn into bound weapons in Balmora.

Blocking is also just a dice roll. I think it’s better to just get a giant two-hander and kill them faster, but opinions differ.

Also fun: If you damage someone’s strength to 0, they can’t move. If you have a spear, your reach is probably longer than theirs. You can kill almost anything this way.

also, while i’m here, the native leveling system is bonkers. You gain levels when your major skills improve. You get three stat increases based on any skills that went up. You can get up to +5 for each stat increase. This is not retroactive. If you level up and pick a +2 in strength, that’s what you get. This creates some utterly bizarre incentives. People would pick skills they don’t want to use as their major skills so they can control leveling, and pay trainers to bump skills tied to stats they want to increase. It’s horrible. You can kind of ignore it, but you’ll be much weaker than you would be if you play into it.

Are you including stock stuff in this calculation?

I had a recruiter reach out to me for a job that was focused on facilitating people using stock as collateral to get personal loans. I think that’s one of the mechanisms rich people use to leverage their non-cash wealth without paying taxes. I told him that sounded like it should be illegal, and that was the end of that.

I used a lot of mods, but I don’t remember all of them right now

“Natural growth and decay” I think was the one I got for stats, because I didn’t want to deal with the original’s insane leveling system. It was pretty good, but had some bugs. Once you got money to pay for training, the wheels fell off because you could rocket up all your skills and stats.

Once you have the skills for Frenzy100 and a spear, you can get unlimited money by taking out the guards that carry ebony weapons. Ok, that kind of wackiness is a little charming.

I also got a mod so NPCs had more money, because hitting every merchant in town and advancing time so they refresh is really tedious.

Oh, and I got one so Magicka regenerates, because constantly sleeping or chugging potions is tedious.

And one so you can have up to 12 marks saved.

If you have any recs let me know

I keep hoping this will spark some sort of anti-capitalist zeitgeist. But labor might be too scattered and individualistic.

Like, why are we all scrambling for a handful of jobs when the rich have so many resources?

games? I found a civilization port for the phone and it sucked up a lot of time. Turn based so you can do it for a few minutes at a time: https://yairm210.itch.io/unciv

learn a language? duolingo and other apps are out there

People should probably protest this. go in person and demand to speak to your rep. or whatever. i don’t know how to organize a protest. i just go when i hear about them happening.

https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Ald'ruhn#Notes

It’s the Ald’ruhn fighter’s guild. Apparently it’s not a full set, but it’s a lot of it.

This is a time of political crisis. The US government is upending decades of alliances and economics. The right wing is globally on the rise, and that means people’s lives are in danger. The environment is becoming more unpredictable and less supportive for humanity.

There’s a lot of important political shit to talk about. If we were living in a boring utopia, there’d be less, probably.

Also, what do you even consider “political”? Some people will tell you that a story about a man and a woman getting married isn’t political, but a story about two men getting married is. That’s a really low quality analysis there.

Like. Why was this bs ever illegal in the first place?

Us answer:

I believe Nixon realized they couldn’t make it illegal to be against the war and otherwise left wing, but they could make things correlated with that illegal. And thus the war on drugs was born. It also lets the state enforce white supremacy.

Recommend reading “the new Jim Crow” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Jim_Crow

I think “what’s good for me right now” is fundamental to the right wing viewset. Hypocrisy isn’t a factor because that doesn’t typically intersect with “is this good for me right now?”

You can point out they said X and now they say Not-X, but that’s going to be as effective as someone telling you that your math is wrong because yesterday you were wearing green and today you’re wearing brown. it’s just a non-sequitur to them.

Reminds me of my first big success at work. There was a weekly report that people wanted generated - it showed how much like each operator had done, how much each warehouse had shipped, how many orders we lost from stock issues, etc. it was a low tech company, so they had someone going through the limited UI, looking up each thing one at a time, copying it into excel, and making the report that way. It took hours, and was error prone from stuff like mis-pasting or accidentally skipping a user.

Took a look at it and was like you could definitely automate this. Used some very primitive scripting to pull all the info out of the system’s UI and dump it into a TSV. Took like a couple minutes to run it, import into excel, and add the colors. But it was super janky because it was manipulating the UI like a user instead of, like, directly querying whatever underlying data store it was running on.

Still, management was impressed. I later learned no one actually looked at the report most weeks, so that took some of the wind out of my sails.

This is an ancient joke but they replaced the original pigeon with a blue thing instead. :confused:

You know, I replayed it recently (with OpenMW) and for 2002 yes, but by more modern standards not really, not for me. The leveling system is really bad. The combat system is an awful mix of dice rolls and action, where neither is satisfying. Movement is glacial and it takes a long time to either level speed or get mark/recall. NPC interaction is minimal.

It certainly has a lot of cool stuff in it. Spellcrafting is cool (if janky). Enchanting was like spellcrafting, but better. Alchemy can get bonkers. The world is huge, and because it was less level-scaling and procedural-generation you sometimes could find really interesting things. Like breaking into a room in the fighter’s guild and finding a full set of glass armor. Super cool. Of course, the illusion of a believable world immediately shatters when you walk right out wearing the stolen armor and no one reacts.

So, yes and no. Amazing, for 2002. But also kind of limited, and sometimes kind of bad, and they haven’t really reached new heights in the past 23+ years. All of their games handle stealth badly. They all handle damage badly. There’s just not two decades of improvement by them.

I knew someone who refused to look up what words meant. If she didn’t know one , she’d guess or infer from context, but never just look it up. I think she had some unaddressed trauma from school or childhood or something

The more I play Bethesda games the more I realize they’re not actually good. Fun sometimes, but also kind of bad.

Opportunity costs still exist

saying he’s treated like a nazi so might as well say he’s a nazi.

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/8/8/1786532/-Cartoon-You-made-me-become-a-Nazi is kind of timeless

Where is “here” out of curiosity?

I’ve read that most of the lead from leaded gasoline is still in the environment, where it does cause harm. It it’s in the soil, and that can get into people through a variety of means.