And if you are talking about provinces that are culturally distinct other provinces of Canada, I would say Newfoundland is second only to Quebec. It’s a very interesting place.

This. If our housing problem was due to a lack of land which could be developed I could see an argument for using part of golf courses (a couple holes). But that’s not what the main bottleneck is in housing.

Parks have a lot of value to the community and these green spaces should be maintained, but made more open and accessible.

I don’t want it as a whole episode, but maybe an opener or ending when relevant. They are talking about events in some town or state, pull out a goof.

As is? no. But I've been thinking of updating it and moving it to google sheets, so maybe I'll do that and share it.

The issue is that it's... not good. It's something I built like 10 years ago that is super fucking janky. It's completely unintuitive, Not well documented what something means. If you make a mistake in setting the biome or something it doesn't give a friendly error, it just breaks, and if you can't read the formula's or VBA it can be hard to trace the errors.

Basically it only works for me because I built it and I know the ins and outs, and it's not something I would want to subject on others.

Both Petty and Vindictive.

This.

While I personally never fudge rolls, I don't think DM's who do are bad or wrong, they are just playing differently from me. And I probably "cheat" in ways that they don't.

I always track the phases of the moon. I built a program years ago that keeps track of tides, moon phases, sunrise and sunset times, and weather.

Most of those are just basic math and were pretty easy, weather was the tricky one, and it more randomly generates weather than just keeps track of it.

I think it adds a lot of flavour and keeps things fresh when I know, for example, that it's the middle of winter and the party is north enough that the sun sets at 6pm and it's a new moon so it gets dark quick. Or that it's a clear, sunny, but very windy day. It can even have mechanical consequences if they are tracking (or being tracked) and it's raining or there is light from a full moon or whatever.

And by "program" I of course mean an overly complicated excel spreadsheet with some VBA.

Being un-counterable would be my biggest concern. Either a sorcery dip as you said for subtle spell, but also consider greater invisibility. It being concentration is a down side, but it can be quite valuable in not having your spells countered.

The community aspect of it is something that (I think) they encourage, but is not core to their business model.

I would disagree with this point. How do you think Dropout gets new subscribers?

I don't want comments on Dropout itself, but community engagement on other platforms seems to be an important part of getting new people on board.

Netflix, HBO, and Hulu don't have the same level of community engagement, but they also have substantial advertising budgets.

Sometimes it's about hours as you've said.

Sometimes it's about pay rate, under the Fair Labor Standards Act there is a separate much higher minimum wage for salaried employees, It varies by state, but for example in California minimum hourly wage is $16/hour while minimum salary is $66,560/year, which works out to twice as much. So if a position is paying $30/hour it can't legally be paid that amount as a salary.

There are other protections for what types of jobs are allowed to be salary or not. Only certain types of jobs are allowed to be paid a salary.

A doughnut hole is a Doughnut, it's right in the name.

It's not the hole of a doughnut, it's a doughnut of the hole type.

It's not good, but it feels more like a lot of shit hitting at once lately. And video game media is, if it's meant to be topical and covering new games, almost impossible to bank episodes in advance for.

I'm hopeful this is just a temporary bad spell.

This is very good.

Another solution I sometimes use is to put the party on a timer and make it clear the stealthier route will take longer. Other users have already mentioned ways to make PWT non-viable, and I might use those on the quickest route, while leaving the slower route stealthable. And ideally the stealth route should still be viable as an option, just have some downsides down the track.

In my setting Wizards specifically are heavily controlled (there was a war 60 years before the start of the campaign blamed largely and correctly on Wizards). Wizard education is globally strictly controlled and regulated, but what that means for practicing wizards varies from nation to nation. There is a highly theocratic nation that requires Wizards to be identifiable and comport to certain rules about spellcasting, there is one nation where wizards are required to do a certain amount of pro-bono work. mostly I avoid that stuff because I don't want to overly punish Wizard players. The big one is that certain forms of magic are outlawed because they are deemed too dangerous, but all the banned magic is super powerful homebrew bullshit and everything in the phb and most source books is totally on the table.

I tried to explain to the police officer that the cat was abandoned, but apparently the agreement that we had made for me to take care of the cat for a "couple months" still holds despite it being over a year and her not caring for the cat whatsoever over that year.

That is not a determination the police are able to make. Ultimately that is a determination for courts to make. Can the police recommend charges to the crown council, yes, but the crown would decide whether to charge.

Specifically since you said she ignored texts. In those texts did you specifically ask her to get her cat? Did you give her any more specific time frame? You may be able to state that you tried to return her property but that she refused to claim it and abandoned it. Generally if property is left in your care, you have to make good faith efforts to return it, but at a certain point it stops being their property and you can claim it. I'm not familiar with the specifics in Sakskatchewan though.

I used to work in LP, if you made it out of the store nothing is going to happen. I don't know where you heard stories about cops being sent based on footage, but that doesn't happen. They do not have the manpower to review footage for every transaction, if something isn't caught live it isn't caught. Amazon wasn't able to actually use camera's and sensor to track product in their stores that were purpose built to do that, so Canadian Tire certainly can't.

Personally I wouldn't even tell anyone, I would just walk in with the item, go to self checkout, and pay for it and then leave. Mostly to avoid an awkward interaction with the customer service rep surpsrised someone actually came back to pay for something.

Something to keep in mind is the more things stay the same (in the fiction of the story and loop mechanics) and the longer the loop; the more you have to keep track of. If everything is supposed to be the same are you keeping track of weather, the locations of various NPC's at various times, everything.

I would recommend either not trying to keep things consistent between loops (don't even try, have things clearly change from one loop to the next) or keep things very contained (a single small village with a small number of NPC's over a short period of time). or both.

I did this once as a story in a campaign I was running, but for my own sanity I kept it contained to a single day in a single large city, and everyone (not just the party) remembered the time loop, so the only thing I had to keep track of were starting conditions and I had a good reason for things to be different each loop.

Windows Defender. Comes standard. It's actually good and you don't need anything else.

There was a time when extra antivirus was essential but that's not really the case any longer. If you have something happen, computer is acting weird or whatever, and you want to be extra safe you can download malwarebytes, install it, run a scan, and then immediately uninstall it. All these products that use to be good and recommended, McAfee, norton, etc, are just shitty bloat these days.

They got their hands on a one time use magic item which could be used to teleport them to a person they named.

So yeah, they magically appear with the absolute thinnest veneer of plausibility. no one fucking cares.

You saying they aren't repressive just shows how completely ignorant you are. I don't have an "inherent racism towards Asians" I'm just not an idiot. I have been to Japan multiple times and will go again, but I will never live there because I'm not a fan of their civil liberties.

I don't have a hard limit on time, but I do prod players if they are silent for too long.

Sometimes players have questions, how far away am I, what would a 20ft sphere look like, as long as they are engaged and moving forward I'm good.

But if they are silently looking at abilities, or hemming and hawing, I try and prod them along gently. Luckily I have a good group and I don't have to do this often. If it was more of a problem I might look at systematizing it more.

Our gaming group will periodically take breaks. We'll play board games or play other RPGs, especially DMless short games like Fiasco

Yes, these repressive states that are severely lacking in civil liberties are much better at controlling drug use.

It's not like these are similar to Canada, except the one thing they do different is not have a massive drug problem. They are massively different systems of governments and massively different societies that most people in Canada don't want to live in.

So what is your fucking point?

The beginning scene and the weird dream scape bullshit at the end. not all of the surreal nightmare, just the parts with people patrolling around that you need to avoid.

Because Saanich doesn't want to foot the bill. They want the province to.

The City of Victoria solution costs the city half a million dollars a year. That's not a complaint, it's a great program, but the way Saanich is suggesting it the burden for those costs would be on the Province.