Jerry Stratton's Blog, page 17
February 1, 2023
Eddie Doucette’s “Home Cooking” episode guide
A home-cooking handful from Eddie Doucette
January 25, 2023
Three OGLs walk into a bar: The Return of Gruumsh
January 23, 2023
Morning Rant, January 23, 2023 linked on Editorials
You can’t just cut off the invisible hand of economic activity with a lockdown, shut down “nonessential businesses”, pay millions of people not to work, attack the fossil fuel industry which provides fertilizer and transportation, then say, “OK, let’s turn the economy back on,” and expect shelves to magically be full again.
The functioning economy that was destroyed by our best and brightest had developed over many years to provide services, supplies, labor, transportation, etc at the wages and prices that would keep it all functioning. Many years of economic evolution led to the bounty of pre-Covid lockdowns. No person could ever design or command the economy to function as it did, but destructive, ignorant politicians had the power to quickly destroy it. And they did.
Communists and Covidians think that shelves get filled when politicians give the command to allow it [and become] deeply puzzled why the shelves are empty despite giving the OK for economic activity to resume.
Shelves are often empty now because the golden goose of free market capitalism was killed by the Covid response. If government stays out of the way, stops paying people not to work, stops punishing farming and transportation, etc, etc, the shelves will eventually be full again. Eventually.
But golden geese take a long time to evolve.
The Morning Rant, January 23, 2023 linked on Editorials
You can’t just cut off the invisible hand of economic activity with a lockdown, shut down “nonessential businesses”, pay millions of people not to work, attack the fossil fuel industry which provides fertilizer and transportation, then say, “OK, let’s turn the economy back on,” and expect shelves to magically be full again.
The functioning economy that was destroyed by our best and brightest had developed over many years to provide services, supplies, labor, transportation, etc at the wages and prices that would keep it all functioning. Many years of economic evolution led to the bounty of pre-Covid lockdowns. No person could ever design or command the economy to function as it did, but destructive, ignorant politicians had the power to quickly destroy it. And they did.
Communists and Covidians think that shelves get filled when politicians give the command to allow it [and become] deeply puzzled why the shelves are empty despite giving the OK for economic activity to resume.
Shelves are often empty now because the golden goose of free market capitalism was killed by the Covid response. If government stays out of the way, stops paying people not to work, stops punishing farming and transportation, etc, etc, the shelves will eventually be full again. Eventually.
But golden geese take a long time to evolve.
Advancement in Classic D&D linked on Biblyon Broadsides
When I wrote Experience and Advancement in Role-Playing Games, I focused on the mechanical elements of character advancement. That says nothing about the player perspective of how characters advance.
In his latest blog post, Delta collects three statements—two from actual rulebooks—about how quickly Gygax, Holmes, and Moldvay each expected players to see their characters go up in level. Advancement from first to second level, for example, varies between 2-½ adventures (Moldvay) to 9 adventures (Holmes). That’s a pretty big difference.
These differences will reflect more than just a difference in each writer’s vision of how quickly players should see their characters advance. They’re going to reflect different visions about all sorts of aspects of early gaming culture: how often players gamed, how long each session took, even what the definition of an adventure was vs. what a session was!
