On the bright side, if the AMOC shuts down, which early indications seem to say it might be, you’ll also have way colder winters in Europe to balance things out. I guess that should also get the eastern seaboard of the US hotter as well? So fun for everyone!

Just hasn’t been my experience, man, and I’ve introduced maybe 2 dozen people through that system to ttrpgs. 2 bounced off. That’s a pretty good success rate imo.

I think it feels fiddly to people who already know a thing or two about mechanics, but most of the fiddliness can easily be ignored or barely paid attention to and you can still manage to play and have fun. It’s a lot easier to just hit straight brick walls in games like pathfinder or shadow run where the player is so lost they just can’t play. I’ve started 5e games impromptu at parties for people who’ve never played and been up and running in 30 minutes with drunk people and had a blast lol. That’s hard to pull off in a lot of systems imo.

The ones I referenced that wouldn’t learn to roll dice weren’t confused by the system… they just honestly didn’t really like to play as much as they liked the idea of playing through popular media. The hobby just wasn’t for them, I can’t really see them engaging with any system.

I’m not saying there may not be other systems out there technically better suited… but 5e is pretty damn good at it while also being popular enough that people have heard of it and are interested in trying. That last part is just as important as being technically good on paper.

Spoken like an upper middle class person.

In fairness, it’s often false thrift to move to an area you need a car with the hopes of saving money on rent… that all ends up going into the car. I hear you as someone born into poverty in a car centric place that this often isn’t a choice, that’s fair, but all else being equal my experience that needing to maintain a car was a constant albatross around our neck as a family. Once I moved to an area with good transit and didn’t bother with a car, I could save way, way more money even considering higher rent…

It’s by design. It’s just meant for more casual play, that’s all. I play Shadowrun (pre Anarchy) so I’m no stranger to crunchy systems, but 5e is nice for just getting together with friends, drinking some alcohol, and having fun role playing without having to pay too close attention or needing a group that’s really dedicated to learning the game deeply. More tilted towards friend groups and less towards gaming groups, if you will.

I’ll say as a GM, the low bar needed for learning and playing 5e is much easier to get people on board with and even then that bar isn’t always reached… I’ve had to kick people for just refusing the learn what dice to roll after months of sessions. 5e is a great gateway drug to get people into TTRPGs though, and then when you start finding out who is really getting into the hobby, you can spin that group off into crunchier systems and keep 5e around for the more casual role play enjoyers.

Relax, amigo.

Look, I’m not sure if there’s a language barrier here, so I’ll try to rephrase this simply: if trains have fencing on either side, there are almost always man gates every so often so that a) the tracks can be accessed for maintenance and b) in case of an emergency ( like we’re discussing, ahem ) there is an exit to get people out and off of the tracks.

Is your expectation for emergency egress that sidewalks are required along the entire route in order to have emergency exits from a fenced area???

What you suggest is like letting people leave a plane and walk along the tarmac.

Buddy, this is exactly what sometimes happens. What do you think they do? Sometimes a plane just isn’t able to be fixed on the spot and you have to disembark on the spot. Shit happens.

What I want is to get from point A to point B safely.

Then why are you driving? That’s statistically way, way, way more likely to end in a fatality for you and it isn’t even very close.

Southern Europe cosplaying as western Europe for the purposes of feeling superior to eastern Europe is legitimately funny though, especially since I’m from a place where both would be considered barely functioning countries lol.

That being said, you seem to really be getting up in your feelings with this since we’re devolving to both unearned and mistargeted national pride, so I think now is probably a good time to block and move on :) . Been fun, amigo, but maybe get one of your countrymen to pass a J and loosen up a bit, eh?

Drive safe!

I generally agree, but there is a level of ignorance where you don’t even really know what questions to ask, and subjects complicated enough that you just aren’t equipped to understand an answer without needing a lot of background education first because they just aren’t intuitive at all by nature. At that point, is there really much value in asking the question?

Determining where that line is is hard sometimes, but I do think it’s there.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: this kind of “elitism” is literally just division of labor which is basically required for a modern society to function.

Oh, come on. It’s not bad if you play something fantastical like cyberpunk… that’s a world so far removed from reality, we’re talking corporations running the world, harsh police actions driven by corporate interest, commodification of basic health services, constant death and destruct…tion.

Well, shit.

Walking through the woods is not what I would call “a better [train] experience”.

What are you actually wanting here? “They won’t let us off the train, we’re cooking in here” and then “Oh they let you off the train, what an awful experience”? Pick a lane here, guy. Being let off the train sounds a lot better to me than heat stroke… I’m still not sure what you really want in this scenario.

I’d still like to know when this actually happened? A breakdown, sure. But trying to keep people to stay on a clearly dangerous train? Hard to believe.

Do you not have mandatory gates every x km in Spain? We have plenty of sound barrier fencing, and all of them have gates a short distance apart exactly for safety reasons.

Glad to hear you had a good experience overall!

They will not open the door you dufus.

No need to be prickly :).

They will indeed do exactly this in my experience. We even had a sort of viral video of this happening here in Hungary… train broke down, they opened the doors and walked people through the nearby woods to the nearest village.

If Hungary is managing a better train experience than Spain… I would understand your frustration, the situation must be pretty damn dire there.

But again, I doubt this has happened at all… even aside from physical, can you cite a situation where conductors would not “let people off the train” when it was getting dangerously hot during a breakdown? It’s hard to believe that Hungary would handle this better…

You can get a fine for using emergency exit.

In a non emergency, of course.

they will not let you leave the train

?

Man, I’m surprised to hear that. International travel is infamously shit, that’s part of why so many Europeans fly. The trains themselves are fine, but there’s a mishmash of standards, electrical systems, booking systems, etc, and every country just wants to engage in protectionism and refuses to harmonize with others. Trying to book travel through multiple countries is usually seen as a bigger headache than it’s worth, not to mention more costly, than flying which is just backwards in terms of incentives.

Maybe if you’re getting one of the tourist Eurrail pass thingies it isn’t so bad, but for regular international use (aside from just going to one country over, so just one journey) Europe really needs to standardize its rail travel much, much more.

the AC stops working, the windows don’t open and it gets real hot real fast unless it’s some extreme situation they will not let you leave the train

That sounds to me like an extreme situation.

All trains have emergency releases on the door to allow manual opening. Practically, if it is actually getting hot to the point of danger, no conductor is going to physically stop you from leaving the train. More likely they’d be the ones to let people off.

I’d need to see a news story of this happening where they were trying to force people to stay on a dangerously hot train. This sounds like a made up scenario.

Either pay the price asked because you want that game or movie so bad, or say the cost is too high and walk away entirely.

I don’t entirely disagree with this regarding newer content, and I personally don’t pirate that… but I will happily subvert a system of near perma-copyright that was never meant to exist, goes entirely against key concepts around copyright when it was first conceived, and only exists due to extreme regulatory capture. It has been perverted far beyond its intent.

7 years. Copyright was meant to last about 7 years. There was, at that time, an acknowledgment that culture belongs to society as a whole and shouldn’t be monopolized by one person, stifling innovation (I mean, Disney is basically founded on reworking others’ stories; would they ever have hit it big if they couldn’t have done that? Hard to say…)… copyright was seen as a sort of necessary evil to give an artist a few years of a legal monopoly to incentivize art creation.

That’s about the cutoff I use. If it’s older than 7 years, you’ve had your chance to make a buck. Even moreso today… 7 years is far more time today to actually exploit your monopoly, information is just so quickly disseminated. I tried to show my kid Charlie Brown Christmas this last holiday season… absolutely criminal that people can still gatekeep that for money, that kind of thing should belong to society as a whole. Zero qualms about going to the high seas for that kind of thing.

tl;dr I think the ethics of piracy are nuanced, but I absolutely do not buy the argument that the current law around copyright is ethical as it stands and as an unethical law, it should be subverted.

There would need to be major structural changes in how investment works in Europe IMO. With markets so fractured, you just can’t muster the kind of capital you can in the US, so companies that get successful in Europe often end up bailing to the US to get traded for the greater availability of investment capital.

I’d love to see the EU really put up serious competition to American tech services, but I just can’t see it happening without that getting addressed first.

“Dang.” adds two new email aliases.

Stop eating avocado toast!

Wait, not like that.

Eh, it depends. Faster bike traffic shouldn’t really be in such close proximity to pedestrians. On a lot of city streets, a fast bike is way closer to the speed of a car than to a pedestrian. City centers, especially non arterials, I’d say they should be in the street if there’s no path. I’m not particularly fast at just under 30kph and it’s rare for traffic to be much faster downtown here, especially non arterials I’m often passing them. I think that’s generally too fast to safely ride on a sidewalk, but a safe speed there would make cycling not very practical for me.

Which I can assure, unfortunately, no cycle paths is often the case in my part of eastern/central Europe

Not directly but cost:fun ratio definitely comes into play which often favors indies. A $5 game will get a lot more leeway than a $60 one.