Randoms!
A few random thoughts bouncing around my head...
How the heck do you get politicians who focus on the job of governing? I get that the founding fathers of the USA laid a lot of governmental groundwork with the specific mindset of breaking up absolute power to avoid an effective monarchy. I'm not sure if it's really gotten worse over the decades or it's just perception (probably some of both), but it's not inaccurate to say these days most congressfolk and even first-term presidents spend more time working on image and messaging toward re-election than on actual governance.
Why does this come up? Well, I watched a few minutes this morning of the hearings congresspersons called Mueller in for. Theoretically, he's there to answer questions about his investigation. While I only heard a short bit from two representatives, I can leave specifics out and still say it was apparent from the rambling statements and not giving him questions to actually answer that the slice I watched was all about pushing political narratives. I feel like any normal person in Mueller's position there would have rolled his eyes and asked "do you really need me for this?"
But is there an answer? Less frequent elections might take some campaigning pressure off, but invites more corruption. Hard term limits might help in some ways, but would cycle out experience, which has its own drawbacks. It feels like a Catch 22 in governmental design.
And totally unrelated, we've leveled in our 13th Age game, which reminds me of oddities in game design there. I think it's pretty clear the game wasn't made for multi-classing, because the classes are so front-loaded. Oh, they added rules for it, sure, but I'm looking at my character advancement chart and saying "okay, so there are some more feats as you level up, and some more bonuses, but not really anything particularly new and exciting. I've seen this before, but it's in stark contrast to Pathfinder: Kingmaker (which I picked up during the Steam Sale), which is an evolution of D&D 3E - a game system that made a particular effort to portion things out over levels so mixing between classes was viable, appealing, and even critical for some things like certain prestige classes.
On the other hand, and maybe I need to actually look more, but I don't see a lot of other classes that fit for my character. On some level that bothers me, because I feel like it would be much more advantageous to dip into other classes for some other capabilities, but my core character concept is largely complete at level 3 (and pretty much was at level 1). We have all these optional expansion rules from implants to now magical Western-style weapon modifications (which kind of class with gauss weapons), and it's actually not even just overwhelming in the number of options so much as feeling like piles of stuff that doesn't even make sense for me to consider. I mean, between the last sessions, we were given license to basically pick any two low-tier pieces of gear or magic item from half a dozen or more books and I only grabbed one because nothing else really "fit."
And yet, I feel like I "have to" consider it to avoid having a redundant/ineffective character. There is some (lay) irony in that.
How the heck do you get politicians who focus on the job of governing? I get that the founding fathers of the USA laid a lot of governmental groundwork with the specific mindset of breaking up absolute power to avoid an effective monarchy. I'm not sure if it's really gotten worse over the decades or it's just perception (probably some of both), but it's not inaccurate to say these days most congressfolk and even first-term presidents spend more time working on image and messaging toward re-election than on actual governance.
Why does this come up? Well, I watched a few minutes this morning of the hearings congresspersons called Mueller in for. Theoretically, he's there to answer questions about his investigation. While I only heard a short bit from two representatives, I can leave specifics out and still say it was apparent from the rambling statements and not giving him questions to actually answer that the slice I watched was all about pushing political narratives. I feel like any normal person in Mueller's position there would have rolled his eyes and asked "do you really need me for this?"
But is there an answer? Less frequent elections might take some campaigning pressure off, but invites more corruption. Hard term limits might help in some ways, but would cycle out experience, which has its own drawbacks. It feels like a Catch 22 in governmental design.
And totally unrelated, we've leveled in our 13th Age game, which reminds me of oddities in game design there. I think it's pretty clear the game wasn't made for multi-classing, because the classes are so front-loaded. Oh, they added rules for it, sure, but I'm looking at my character advancement chart and saying "okay, so there are some more feats as you level up, and some more bonuses, but not really anything particularly new and exciting. I've seen this before, but it's in stark contrast to Pathfinder: Kingmaker (which I picked up during the Steam Sale), which is an evolution of D&D 3E - a game system that made a particular effort to portion things out over levels so mixing between classes was viable, appealing, and even critical for some things like certain prestige classes.
On the other hand, and maybe I need to actually look more, but I don't see a lot of other classes that fit for my character. On some level that bothers me, because I feel like it would be much more advantageous to dip into other classes for some other capabilities, but my core character concept is largely complete at level 3 (and pretty much was at level 1). We have all these optional expansion rules from implants to now magical Western-style weapon modifications (which kind of class with gauss weapons), and it's actually not even just overwhelming in the number of options so much as feeling like piles of stuff that doesn't even make sense for me to consider. I mean, between the last sessions, we were given license to basically pick any two low-tier pieces of gear or magic item from half a dozen or more books and I only grabbed one because nothing else really "fit."
And yet, I feel like I "have to" consider it to avoid having a redundant/ineffective character. There is some (lay) irony in that.
13th Age has bad design, got it
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