The review gives a lot better overview than the website does, so thanks for linking.
> Basically, the first shards that were found (jumpstarting the Modern Age)
> came from an enormous crystalline meteor, so large that thousands upon thousands
> of shards were able to be cut from it. They all connected together to form the
> Shardscape, which quickly became the lifeblood of the world's communications and
> commerce.
> So yeah. You cannot win. There’s no way to reduce risk, no way to stop the
> inevitable – just keep fighting until the Risk Eaters are literally willing
> to nuke you from orbit, just to get rid of you and your friends.
If I was running a game, if the party ever got to risk 100%, this would be the point where the aliens show up, safe in the knowledge that they know literally every secret and every truename on the planet. "Things can always get worse." --dang[1]
This reminds me of the time my party argued about how much modern information theory we were allowed to use in D&D. We wanted to maximize the amount of information to communicate using Sending which states that it sends "twenty-five words or less". Can I use a form of encoding and a compression algorithm? Or can we make up words and can they be arbitrarily long?
Compression schemes (in the form of code books) to save on telegraphy costs have existed almost as long as the telegraph itself.
From [1]: "Elaborate commercial codes which encoded complete phrases into single words were developed and published as codebooks of thousands of phrases and sentences with corresponding codewords... Cable tolls were charged by the word, and telegraph companies counted codewords like any other words, so a carefully constructed code could reduce message lengths enormously."
Is D&D set in a world where the telegraph exists? I've always gotten the impression that insofar as it's linked to our history of technological progression it is set well before that invention, while after the times of e.g. the Caesar cipher.
Good point. So here is a compression scheme from about 350 BC, describing how to pass messages from one mountain peak to another, using a torch and a water clock [1][2]:
"The water-clocks are an early long-distance-communication-system. Every communicating party had exactly the same jar, with a same-size-hole that was closed and the same amount of water in it. In the jar was a stick with different messages written on. When one party wanted to tell something to the other it made a fire-sign. When the other answered, both of them opened the hole at the same time. And with the help of another fire-sign closed it again at the same time, too. In the end the water covered the stick until the point of the wanted message."
Well if players want to get pedantic, in typing, a word in "words per minute" in considered 4 or 5 characters, so as the DM, clearly it's your prerogative to use that definition.
As a German: I feel that while this would potentially increase the average length of the words you "send", it probably will keep or even decrease the amount of information transferred..
This is very nice artwork. I wonder if this is the same Chad Walker who worked on Age of Empires and BloodRayne? They've done some pretty cool stuff too at http://www.walkerboystudio.com .
While it's a guess, appears to be less than five, since the "Pregenerated Character Sheets" from the downloads page includes only five characters:
http://cryptorpg.com/pregen_sheets.pdf
Is there a place for tabletop gamers to organize? I've always wanted to get into it, but just not with the Doritos+MtnDew sort of people. A bunch of infosec professionals playing this game would be highly entertaining, I think.
Seems pretty legit to me: it's of interest, both actually and conceptually, it could inspire discussion, and it's just flat-out cool.
Besides, HN is full of ads: hiring boards, show HNs of products HN users have worked on, various nonsense from HN startups, ads from other companies popping up on the front page ("hey, our new product launched this week"), and so on. And that's not even mentioning all the advertising for projects that users do inside threads: How often have you heard kaz essentially advertising TXR, his project? (although to his credit, he only does it when it's relevant to the discussion, or if TXR would help with a problem another user mentioned: many are less restrained).
As long as what is shared follows the guidelines, that's literally all that matters.
Everyone once in awhile you'll see something that's clearly attempting to exploit HN to promote whatever they're pushing, put I don't see anything that fits a pattern like that and appears to be well within the scope of the guidelines.
I think you're right that that is not the point of HN, but I think HN attempts to automatically (and the HN moderators attempt to non-automatically in some cases) detect various kinds of voting abuse, including that kind. It's possible that these detection mechanisms are flawed and that this story was upvoted in that way but managed to get past those mechanisms, but another possibility is that people found the concept interesting and upvoted for that reason (or hoped for it to produce some interesting discussion). Many of the other comments (most of which do post-date your original complaint, of course) do seem to support the hypothesis that some HN users would find it interesting.
With that said (and assuming you have sufficient karma to flag stories), I think that believing a story to have reached the front page via such abusive voting would be a good reason to flag the story, which will bring it to the attention of the mods, who hopefully would be able to determine whether anything improper was in fact going on.
So do you think the mods are paid more than the marketers pushing stuff to the top? As a person who has benefited from having posts on the top of reddit I can tell you that there is a massive incentive to manipulate the system and that mods do not really have enough incentive or resources to stop them. It is basically like trying to keep drugs from crossing the border. The people who make money from the drugs can marshal massive resources in order to get the them across the border, and the will/resources just aren't there on the opposing side to really stop them.
r/gaming is massively gamed, r/news the mods are in on the gaming and have made it illegal to post links that don't lead to big news sources. This was done under the guise of making r/news more legit I guess, but it is hard to believe the fix wasn't in. Also mods of r/gaming are probably also in on it because there is just too much money at stake. Try to contact some of the users posting gta 5 gifs on the front page and see how real they are if you don't believe me.
It strains credibility to believe that this post had a massive number of upvotes in the first 3 hours and almost no comments, and it is a pretty blatant advertorial. I think it did gain some real traction after that, but when you boost something into a high visibility position it always generates some decent numbers. The question is would it have actually gotten to the top on its own? I really doubt it.
There is no smoking gun here and there never will be. It is incredibly easy to make 100 accounts on proxies and make some comments with them and then upvote a post. We are talking about one employee for less than a week of work. The payoff is very large and it is basically untraceable by mods. It happens all the time on reddit and hn.
"This seems to be the sort of thing that would come to the top on its own."
Maybe, but not in that time period.
"Also, this isn't Reddit. The commuity and moderation are pretty different here."
If anything Reddit does more to defend against this sort of thing.
"do big advertisers even know about us?"
I have seen so many posts on the top of hn talking about "the hn effect" It is ridiculous to think that people in pr and marketing aren't paying attention to that, while gaming product hunt and reddit.
I own a software studio that makes software and I am noticing how vulnerable HN is. Other people have obviously noticed as well.
So are you proposing that Hacker News, a website that regularly covers startups with millions of dollars of investor money, has chosen to fake upvotes to shill for an ultra-niche one-man tabletop game?
Or are you saying that HN is somehow able to detect and deflect vote manipulation for the former but not the latter?
'Cause I think "HN readers are into cryptography/security and tabletop RPGs" is a way more likely theory than either of those.
I looked. I actually don't see that art pushing many of the fantasy art sex trope buttons:
1. Wearing what looks like not-outrageous closes.
2. There is no obvious cleavage.
3. There is no willing-come-hither smile at the PoV
4. Indeed, they are ignoring the PoV.
Look, that whole Male-Gaze thing is not about erasing all aspects of feminine form in art. That'd actually be a worse outcome if our goal is better and fairer representation. It's about pointing out that Cindy from FFXV is a pretty manipulative and somewhat denigrating trope in fantasy art.
Think about how many _male_ body types have become acceptable in fantasy art over time. Old men, fat men, emaciated men, short men, slouchy men, skinny men. We're getting progressively more comfortable with men of color in fantasy art as well (although still a long way to go here in many ways). Healthy or sick, brown or pale, native or imperialist, writers find a way to make identifiable and enjoyable protagonists out of a lot of male archetypes, and for what it's worth most of that is great.
But when it comes to women, we see WAY fewer allowable templates and they tend to skew towards what the male consensus finds desirable. When we really sit down and see what's fair game for these genders, obviously that's not terribly fair.
That's the principle complaint people are trying to redress. By locking every female archetype to what a 25-year old man fantasizes about, we create fewer opportunities for a real and textured world and create a sensation of isolation, distance and difference among those ignored groups.
I mean, the not-so-subtle imagery of a sexy elf woman sort of pushes buttons on introverted, gamerish masculinity in a manipulative way that seems at odds with notions of hackerdom.
Advertising everything with oversexualized women is a real problem, but that character is not at all sexualized. You seem to be saying that games should only depict men or ugly women. That is really not what anyone needs or wants.
That's only sort of true (male elves in art tend to be slender and androgynous, but still identifiably male) and anyway beside the point. Yes, that elf is probably intended to be female, and that's okay.
