Here's how a band of unlikely heroes defeated Vecna and save the Forgotten Realm
My team seized this strip of land, under the guise of establishing a “humanitarian corridor”
We also brought in Russian doctors and journalists, to increase the number of civilian casualties if NATO hit back.
Most subtle NYT war crime apologia
"I played the war game from the perspective of an evil-doer evilly doing evil for evil reasons, like Putin."
I think the "rules-based international community" made it very very clear they don't give a fuck about civilian casualties.
I guess the NYTs writers have to keep up the pretense.
I think the "rules-based international community" made it very very clear they don't give a fuck about civilian casualties.
At this point they actively seem to revel in civilian casualties and use them to numb further reporting about a conflict, if how they kicked off the Iran war is anything to go by
Biden blew that up by sending bombs to Isreal during an active genocide. What happened to R2P? Trump dynamited the foundations. Now it's just naked power.
Well, when the author did it, it was fine because it was a game and not real humans and doesn't reflect their real life values. But when Putin plays, his strategy must exactly reflect his real life strategy.
One thing I was shocked to find from participating on boardgamegeek back in the day is just how many people really do take games seriously and don't understand it's just a game. "My mom always liked my sister better so I always attacked her in any game." "I was in college before I knew a game could end without someone flipping the board and throwing punches." I didn't even know what flipping the board meant or that people commonly did it when they figured out they were going to lose.
I've gotten mad during a board game cause I was the one being constantly attacked by someone even to their own detriment. When someone would rather I lose than them win, I will be mad at them. I've for sure made people mad, my favorite games are Cosmic Encounter and Diplomacy and board games are my Safe Space for being a deceptive little shrew. Lying is totally allowed in both games and is basically a necessity in Diplomacy. If during a Cosmic Encounter negotiation if I say ill trade my strongest attack card for your weakest, it probably means I dont have any attack cards and tricking you into agreeing to giving a card away and allowing me some defense until I can draw again.
Super long games where someone gets a runaway lead and you're just playing out the inevitable for hours gets frustrating as hell if your group doesnt do mercy rules. Sometimes you could have another game in the time it takes to reach a slow but inevitable defeat and unless theres a way to play for 2nd place or whatever it stops being fun
How do people keep reading shit like this and not have even a moment if self reflection.
Honestly, I ended up in one way discussion on db0 yesterday regarding the Ukraine war, and it was withering...
Ukraine is the thing people in those spaces are MOST irrational about by far
I always question anarchists on this line by asking "do you believe the people of Eastern Ukraine in Donbas and Crimea have a right to self determination?"
It doesn't often work online but I have definitely been effective in person with that one.
What really gets to me is how can they just not admit they were wrong now after a fucking decade of this russiagate bullshit?
Especially in the last couple of years it should be abundantly clear that Russia isn't the country that had the most influence on 2016 or any US election in my lifetime
Tho I suppose that would mean admitting they don't actually care about 
or Ukrainians and furthermore that their hatred for Russia in the first place came from a place of desperation because they couldn't accept the truth that Hillary lost all on her own
Please don't call everything D&D. They don't deserve that much space in your mind palace that you would call all make believe D&D.
Yeah. D&D truly only persists because of corporate inertia and the nostalgia that our current crop of film and television producers shovel onto our heads
It's astounding what first mover advantage does. Within years of the first books there were already far, far better systems like Tunnels & Trolls or RuneQuest. But no, people still today play the worst one.
D&D wasn't even the first IIRC. There were other role-playing games at the time, including fantasy RPGs. D&D was among the first fantasy RPGs to have a commercial release. A lot of games were unique to each DM, running their own homebrews.
Then there's all the wargames and detective/mystery games RPGs grew out of that existed for decades (in some cases centuries) before D&D.
But yeah. It's like the worst system. The more I hear about it and its history, the more I want to continue never playing it.
You know, Pathfinder fixes this...
and is unionized!
Yea. And if that is too numbers for your liking (it certainly is for me) there is World of Darkness, Fabula Ultima and countless other games that are simply better then D&D.
I played Putin in Call of Cthulhu and you WONT believe what that tells us about society
Putin ended the game with only a sanity score of 13. This demonstrates he has a predilection for mental instability.
It's a wargame but some people don't have room for abstractions like that. Wargaming has been a part of military planning since Clausewitz.
Then we opened a dialogue with the White House, insisting that Russian soldiers would be immediately withdrawn once the Europeans accommodated our demands. Chief among them were a rollback of NATO military infrastructure in Europe and nonexpansion of the alliance — pretty much what Mr. Putin demanded before invading Ukraine. Our position was simple: Give us what we want, or prepare for another war that could go nuclear.
God damn I hate these people.
I played this game as a NYT oped writer and summarily executed an entire kindergarten class, here’s why everyone at the NYT needs to be locked up
My Putin was a master of seduction with a very deadly velociraptor animal companion. That is what's coming.
Fleshrakers OP
That's just the Putin isekai manga
Ты знаком с Борисом? 
It would be way less embarrassing if they actually played DnD
Then the entire article would be about how Putin is an Infernal-pact Warlock or some shit.
I misunderstood the headline and thought that this guy played against Putin in a game in the past and that supposedly gave him insights into Putin's mind. But no, the German military made up a war game and in the game they made up, Russia was scary and NATO needed to be more prepared and strengthened to win.
I would love to play Candyland against Putin
Well, you truly cannot understand the cunning and strategy of a foreign leader's mind until you face them in Shoots and Ladders.
sit down for chutes and ladders game against Putin
He makes me climb a ladder and then shoots me
I fall into a pit of snakes
This is indicative of how the Russian is untrustworthy in a genetic sense. Yeah, I've actually got some calipers right here to show you what I mean.
I got to do one of these things at GenCon. Our scenario was Putin suddenly dies of cancer. The guys running it got mad that the Communists took over. They were the only ones promising to expand military funding so we did a coup and nobody could stop us.
I love when they discover something that's been around since the 1950s. Wargaming got big when Tom Clancy played a lot of Harpoon and discovered how the G-I-UK gap was going to be huge in any Hot Cold War scenario.
He wrote a whole novel about it, Red Storm Rising.
unfilmable so they did Hunt for Red October instead.
Red Storm Rising
I know clancy is low hanging fruit but this is some great brainworms: the US stumbled into the dominant position in NATO unlike those dastardly Soviets who intentional took the dominant position in the Warsaw Pact which they did because they're evil and not as a natural consequence of having the largest military of the constituents
Also a military alliance having a single mutually intelligible language for effective cohesive communication is Authoritarian
He also wrote a lot about how the next world war would be us v Europe v Russia and china. Obviously Europe is an American puppet but they have been getting feisty lately
He's one of those writers who only had two novels in him. The rest are crap. Tolkien only had two novels in him, both of which are in the top 5 in the English language.
unfilmable so they did Hunt for Red October instead.
I read the book and was kinda amazed how they made that turd of a book into actually good movie. They had to cut off like 3/4th of anticommunism and russophobia from it lmao. On a side note, if the Annapolis cadets really used that book as a textbook in the 80's, i'm not even surprised how that generation which is now runing US Navy is crashing it to the ground hard.
Also fun GIUK fact: it played certain hilarious role in Cod Wars
Guy playing Hearts of Iron at work. "No boss, I wasn't playing video games on company time, I swear! I was...doing research for my next article! Yeah, that's what I'm doing!"
I played Khorne Warriors in a Warhammer Fantasy game. The most skulls for the skull throne may be coming.
If Putin summons Skarbrand we are fucked, they'll push from the frontlines to the Fulda Gap in minutes.
Fulda deez nuts
Is this anything?
Putin is playing Kislev and got a doom stacks of bear hussars, he will roll the entire Old World.
Writing an article that came to me in a dream and immediately getting a NYT book deal
Ok, but wargaming has been a part of military strategy for ages?
The US did one called Millennium Challenge which simulated war with Iran in the Persian Gulf, and the US could only win, if they rigged the game entirely in the US' favor.
Fast forward 20 some years, and we see how instructive that wargame ended up being...
Fuck the NYT though, they can suck my girl cock fr
I like how there was a bunch of coping and seething the Millennium Challenge wasn't accurate because the "Middle Eastern" team commander cheated or whatever the fuck. Then it turns out the guy was right and none of the people who doubted him are saying shit right now lmao
This podcast is dumb, I saw it once. Wearing stupid hats and dumb accents. Besides WOTC came out with their own official campaign.
Yesterday I was double screening and I saw the headline in a Bluesky post. I thought it was a joke at first until I realized the fucking NYT had posted it itself.
For posting all the anonymous reactionary bullshit that you can't post anywhere else.
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