Xhieron

Jesus is real. I love you. Those who hate you speak for neither Him nor for me.

The Gospel of Christ is love, and woe to those who knowing it use His name to cause suffering and death.

I’m sorry that people hurt you. That’s not what Jesus taught, and that’s not what He lived and died for.

I mean–it’s your game. Your table are the only ones who have to be happy, and you certainly know them better than a bunch of internet strangers, so take all this stuff with a grain of salt.

For what it’s worth, I’ve personally made the mistake of trying to rein in the insanity for high level characters or just broken splats, and the result was just discovering a new suite of toys for the PCs to abuse–or worse, outright resentment. Take care that you don’t mistake for assent or consensus what is in reality just player unwillingness to openly voice their unhappiness. After all, most folks will rather play watered down D&D than no D&D. And if nothing else, developing the ability to write plot hooks that can survive Plane Shift, threats that overcome Permanent Contingency (no longer a thing in 5e), and Wish outcomes that feel both amazing and terrible is how excellent DMs are made. Do what’s best for your group, but you’re also part of that group.

The PCs won D&D. Let them enjoy it. PCs who cast 9th level spells break reality, and breaking reality is okay. This is the thing they played to win, so let them enjoy the fruits of their effort. They’re going to tear apart your prep, and you need to get comfortable with that. Expect to improvize.

There are still challenges you can throw at them, but they have many tools at their disposal. Your job is to give them opportunities to use those tools–not remove them. Anything they can do, an NPC can do back.

Combat speed and pace is a different animal, and the best advice I can give is to forbid bookkeeping on turn, at least for level 17 experienced players: if you have to look something up when it’s your turn, you get skipped. Know what your stuff does if you’re going to do it, and use the other turns to decide on your action. If you need to read something from the PHB on your turn, you need to already be on that page ready to go when you come up.

Ultimately, you’re the DM, so you can say what is or isn’t allowed and what’s a reasonable turn length. But you still have to honor the social contract. If a player made a wizard and played it for 17 levels because he wanted Wish, the time to adjust Wish for your table was 17 levels ago–not the session he’s finally got it.

I mean, sure, this is a propaganda piece by a not-at-all-trustworthy rag that might as well be an extension of the IDF in this context.

But anyone who thinks women aren’t getting raped in war has never studied history. Are Oct 7 captives being sexually assaulted? Of course they are. Are Gazans also being sexually assaulted? Again, yes. Are female Ukrainian POWs being sexually assaulted? Almost certainly. Russian female POWs? Also yes. Anywhere there’s regular violence, sexual violence doesn’t follow far behind.

Every state, paramilitary, terrorist organization, and militia that has ever fired a shot in anger wants to be seen as honorable fighters with a righteous cause who respect the rules of war, and yet there’s not a single one of the same groups who hasn’t also been shown to torture and kill children, civilians, and POWs, and rape and sexually abuse women, both combatants and civilians.

No war but the class war.

Christ, this asshole.

It’s actually Rama, this asshole, apparently.

US bad. Got it.

So you’re suggesting that North Korea is demonstrating its ballistic missiles solely in order to deter the United States from unilaterally launching an unprovoked surprise nuclear strike against North Korea. …

Okay.

Let’s talk about this, I guess.

In the universe in which the US launches an unprovoked surprise nuclear attack against North Korea, I’d like to think we could all agree that the rest of the world, including other nuclear powers, would be united in retaliating, NK ballistic missiles or not. Sure, it’s not impossible that the US government could become irrational, but that’s I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that nuclear deterrence is about more than that.

Even allowing ad arguendo a Hiroshima-like escalation scenario, we don’t actually need the US’s nuclear arsenal to do that (see: Tokyo and Berlin bombing campaigns). That is to say–to the extent that NK being a nuclear power might play in an actual deterrence scenario, it’s redundant. In all other scenarios, we’re not using 1945 military doctrine anyway.

Citation needed.

What’s there to deter? Anything NK could do to the US that would serve as a deterrent would immediately result in the US glassing Pyongyang. Lil Kim isn’t Putin. He doesn’t have a half-century of stockpiles to rattle at the US to pretend MAD is still a thing. And neither Putin nor Poohbear would lift a finger to stop it either, because NK’s friendship just isn’t that valuable, and it won’t be for another several decades of pouring the entire GDP into buildup, if ever. US war hawks don’t care about North Korea because they don’t have to.

The behavioral crisis is the failure of ordinary people to riot, shut down factories and refineries, and hang greedy CEOs. The research is correct insofar as it suggests people should become more conscious of the fact that a few individuals are marching humanity into oblivion, but the time for more research is past. We already know what needs to be done. If human psychology predicts that humans will never voluntarily give up consumption–and it does–then we ought not be targeting mankind’s goodwill toward the planet or even its foresight. Rather, our efforts–that is, the entire focus of every free society–should be directed wholly toward the annihilation of the institutions on which that consumptive philosophy depend and, where and as called for, the burial of those men who refuse to give them up.

Reason and education have proved insufficient. The remedy of a slave is not to break his shackles, but to kill the masters.