I'm simultaneously shaking my head at the utter naive fabulism of imagining they could "arrest" congresspeople with no guns and the cynical ruthlessness of thinking the could sway Congress floor votes by implying they're killing reps.
I just... I'm trying to imagine the headspace of someone who believes they could rush the floor of Congress and abduct people off it and that they would then be left alone *and* Congress would keep counting votes and voting on accepting votes after that point.
And I want to say that there's no way a person could sincerely put that forward and this therefore is somebody who was trying to encourage people to storm the capitol by spinning out a non-violent fairytale where they get the vote overturned by "keeping them honest".
But the sheer level of "that's not how anything works" that I have seen from this kind of crew... I don't know. Maybe they really thought it would work.
I mean, there's a thing in right-wing circles of unironically referring to people they don't like as "NPCs" (referring to computer controlled characters in a video game, who have no actual intelligence and can only make limited and mostly scripted responses).
So maybe they thought that the members of Congress they didn't abduct would continue counting the votes because that's their script.
Or maybe they assumed if they "arrested" all the "bad guys" in Congress then the ones who were left would cheer them for saving the day and then happily declare Trump the winner.
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If he wanted to make a statement that says he's disgusted with Trump but cannot in good conscience leave his post in a pandemic, I'd be like, yeah okay whatever. But to make a statement that he's resigning and then stay in his job until it ends anyway?
Yeah, Trump is really the king of "let's not and say we did".
*low chaos* "Technically this doesn't count as stealing because I'm going to use this 37 cents to fix the economy."
*high chaos* "Technically this doesn't count as stealing because I murdered the owner and the dead can't own things."
I think my least favorite thing in Dishonored games is how finicky cash registers are to interact with and how they have, like, three coins in them that you have to aim the reticle at very precisely or you'll accidentally close the register trying to take them.
It could definitely use a "loot all" mechanic for cash registers where you just hoover up the contents as it opens.
One of the features of the TTRPG combat system I'm working on right now is that the enemy/NPC side gets a number of actions each round based on (not always strictly even to) the number of combatants on the heroes/player side.
This helps balance combat on the fly, and can result in situations that emulate TV Tropes like "Mook Chivalry" (the enemy's reserves stand around cheering and jeering instead of all rushing at once) , or where there's waves of minions popping up until the central problem resolves
It also provides for an analog to the 5E concept of bosses with "legendary actions" where the solo big bad can make additional attacks in between player turns while waiting for its actual turn. A big solo threat facing five PCs would attack like five separate creatures would.
The idea that Trump's actual reliable base is closer to a third of the electorate than half of it, as they so often love to claim, continues to bear out.
Like, these numbers shouldn't be seen as a direct translation to where Senators will fall, but... if 40% of Republican Senators voted to convict him (20 out of 50) and 96% of Democratic Senators voted to convict him (48 out of 50) then that's 68 votes, which is enough.
Noodling around with tabletop game design today and I think I've found a lens I like better than narrativist/simulationist/gamist: the story/world/game distinction.
I think it's probably easiest to explain this distinction in terms of death. If you make a game that doesn't have rules for dying -- character death will never be an outcome of any result from applying the rules -- that's a game where no one dies.
Some people encountering a game system like this for the first time will immediately go, "So in this world, no one dies? That's ridiculous. Why is the villain sending assassins after the heroes? They would surely know death is impossible in this world."
Oof. I've had a bit of a scary time with my insurance this year. Resolved now, but.
First, due to the mail sabotage, I didn't get my paperwork until 1/7/21. I could have figured out the online stuff without it and made payment before January 1st, but. Everything happens so much.
When I got the paperwork and set up my online access, it said my coverage was voided for non-payment and could be cancelled, but it was also asking me to make a payment to activate. So I did. First try, it gave me a confirmation number but never went through.
I didn't write the confirmation number down because I expected it to be emailed to me as well. Another silly mistake on my part. There was no email, no authorization or deduction on my bank account, and it didn't show up in my payment history.