Gotta have those big numbers with big numbers of dice being rolled to set off players' undiagnosed gambling addiction.

Yeah lmao, it's the only game I've played that gives Shadowrun a run for its money there.

vehicles themselves often have high toughness

They have toughness instead of armor now? I'm recoiling in disgust. I liked 5e's vehicles.

Your strength is either half or less of the target's toughness, less than, equal to, greater than, or double.

I remember it being a simple equation even in 5e, something like 3+T-S, capped at one and six IIRC.

All of this sounds so much worse. I mean I've always hated every TTRPG or wargame edition change from one I was already familiar with, except for Pathfinder 1e to 2e which was great, but this sounds particularly bad. It's like when I looked at Magic the Gathering 15 years ago after having last played it in the 90s and just hated every change they'd made.

You can have titans, primarchs, and aircraft in 2,000 point games.

What the fuck. Like I remember flyers being given normal rules in 6e, but the rest sounds wild. Do the superheavies still have X strength attacks or did they at least get reigned in?

If you've played any time between 3rd. and 4th., you're probably familiar with changes not occurring for years.

5e was when I started, but that was all true then too. Extremely slow to update things, with a lot of army lists being one or two editions old at that point. I remember hearing relatively positive buzz about them starting to issue updated army lists in 6e, but never really got back into it.

What have they changed? I haven't played since 5e and haven't looked at the rules since 6e.

My friends, sobbing: "Nooo, build a real house for once, don't just burrow into the nearest hill like a rodent and dig an inscrutable warren of crawlspaces and deadly pitfalls every fucking time we start a new minecraft server."

Me, wordlessly humming diggy diggy hole:

I binged the entire archive like 15 years ago and it's all about taking these characters who seem kind of mundane but are really tangled messes of weird issues and putting them in situations that are at once banal and absurd so they can react in ways that play off and expand on that. There's also usually a little bit of a buildup to the gags, so just seeing single strips in a vacuum loses most of the impact.

Overall it's a very dry sort of absurdity that sort of wallows in itself. It's kind of like if King of the Hill was a webcomic about anthropomorphic animals and instead of the banal hell of suburban Texas it was some nonsense fever dream world that was at least a few degrees more absurd.

Congratulations, you've successfully gaslit yourself into defining away everyone who disagrees with you as a "bot" and now find yourself haunted on all sides by your shadowy enemies.

And for everyone else: what do you think the odds are some of this unfortunate poster's brainworm infestation was seeded by literal CIA/State Department astroturfing bots? I give it about a 50/50 that that was an important infection vector, and a good 90% chance that they've nodded along while looking at CIA copypasta bot and uncritically believed whatever racist thing it was telling them to.

So you're just gonna double down on the "actually my shadowy enemies are both impossibly more technologically advanced than the imperial core, but also too stupid to use that advantage and instead waste massive amounts of effort specifically in preparation to gaslight me, the main character, due to their impossible prescience that one day I, the main character, would be using a fringe social media website in the middle of the night, prescience that is literally only used for that one purpose and that purpose alone because it so import to trick me, the main character," theory then?

Or you could go and look at the three years of post history the community has, which notably does not revolve around some herculean effort to gaslight a tiny handful of people from sites that did not exist for 90% of hexbear's existence and that no one had any realistic expectation would ever exist.

The entire theory rests on the idea that [insert bad country] had LLMs that were five years ahead of the curve and the supercomputers to run them, and this was devoted to generating massive amounts of content on the speculation that maybe someday it would provide legitimization in a fringe internet community, instead of using that massive technological and material advantage to spam as hard as possible with infinite free burner accounts on mainstream social media sites.

You're talking about one of the oldest lemmy instances, the most active established instance, and the instance with highest per capita activity, at a time when activity has suddenly become higher than ever because suddenly there are a bunch of redditors saying awful shit all over our feeds and we can go dunk on them without needing to bother with accounts on different sites for the first time in over three years.

You're also vastly overestimating what bots require and do: all we have to do is look at the largest and most sophisticated botnets - the CIA/State Department astroturfing botnets - to see how even the laziest and crudest copy/pasta spam is all it takes to completely dominate and drown out opposition. Literally no one needs to be sneaky, just yell the exact same verbatim press release quote over and over from ten thousand firstnamelastname12345 accounts with stock photo profile pics and you control the conversation completely and no one cares if you get caught out, like the CIA/State Department bots constantly do.

You're also claiming that the instance was built up with chatbots more sophisticated than anything there is today - and all of those still-not-coherent most-sophisticated AIs are extremely expensive to run - starting at a time when the most advanced language generating AI was GPT-2, which was only a step or so above old markov chain babbling. You can literally go and look at the ancient post history yourself.

And of course every car there is a suburban assault vehicle too.

The best part was that it was always just the fact we were all terminally online and saw the same frontpage threads as everyone else. It was (almost) never an actual brigade, just the result of having a bunch of very active posters with better politics than the average redditor. That's all it took to make the worst people on reddit

The vast majority of poly relationships I've seen have basically just gone "two people who are intensely in love with each other but also one or both want to sleep around -> one of them gets replaced in emotional importance by someone new -> the replaced party ends up deeply hurt that someone they love doesn't give a shit about them anymore." It's happened to friends of mine, it happened to my ex before we started dating, and then she did it to me in turn. In fact, I've only ever seen one long-term stable polycule and even having barely any contact with them all I see is the ridiculous amount of effort they all put in to maintain that relationship with one another.