Schadrach

Detect Magic telling someone “it’s chowder” is a cop-out, same as a DM saying “you failed the skill check because you looked suspicious.” If a spell exists to reveal a magical aura, use it to reveal an aura, not to sass the player.

My answer in that case is “You detect no aura” from the non-magical chowder (or maybe they do detect one if it was flavored with prestidigitation), unless it’s an edition where the effect is a cone, and they are sitting across the table from their friend blinged out in magical gear, in which case they are definitely detecting an aura. Several of them. And they’re going to have to take time, focus, and make checks to recognize that none are coming from the chowder.

Paranoia, the game where every character is technically engaged in a crime punishable by death at basically all times, and you’re given a number of clones because you are expected to die…a lot. Also the R&D gadgets, like the personal disintegrator which does exactly what it says on the tin - disintegrates your person.

Like forcing the players into an encounter where all their toolkits are nerfed. Close quarters for casters, magical monsters that can’t be harmed by melee, or NPCs that are way OP for the group and they stick to the Monster Manual to the letter.

When I GM, it depends on just how narrow and just how powerful your particular toolkit is. I’m not going to ensure that you can do whatever your thing is at absolutely every opportunity, and if your schtick becomes well known, enemies capable of planning will plan around it when feasible. The more narrow your schtick is, the more scenarios you might encounter where it does not apply simply by chance (for example, if you’re a flying archer every room in a dungeon won’t gain a minimum 30’ high ceiling to maximize your use of that). The more disproportionately powerful your schtick is compared to other party members, the more likely I am to specifically come up with occasional scenarios meant to make it not apply so someone else gets to shine.

Sometimes I will signpost something is a very bad idea, and if you do it anyways (or do something else absurdly dangerously foolish) I’m not going to pop up a guard rail to save you at the last moment - retrieving your body from somewhere adrift on the astral and your soul from the gemstone the archdevil you pissed off is keeping in his treasury to try to save you is the next adventure hook.

You encounter a huge, elaborate tome, on a concealed lectern, in a library connected by a hidden door directly off the bedroom of a powerful wizard, you detect magic and get extremely powerful auras of conjuration, transmutation and evocation maybe “I flip it open to a random page and start reading aloud, I’ll sound out any words I don’t recognize” is not, in fact, a wise decision. The copy of “Words You Mispronounce And Die: A Primer For Apprentice Wizards” you saw on one of the shelves on the way there, the references to a cursed grimoire of terrible power, the book being bound in the skin of an angel covered in burns and scars, etc, etc should have maybe hinted at that.

Only way to fight back in the War on Christmas, which like the Palestine and Israel is mostly just an excuse for the alleged victim (Israel) to attack and take territory from their neighbors.

Here Christmas has invaded so far that there are occasional sightings before the equinox.

Just wait for a few generations of brain implants down the line. Then you will believe what you are programmed to believe. Opposition will be literally unthinkable.

Ah, FATE - it’s F.U.D.G.E. with extra icing!

Doesn’t need to be a sole cause to be a cause. See cancer, where smoking causes lung cancer, but not all lung cancer is caused by smoking. But again, needs more study.

Eh, it’s not totally baseless. Hell, there’s even a non-zero chance it’s true. It’s way too early to claim it as true though, since studies on the topic are few, have mixed conclusions and correlation is not causation. I refuse to give it any more credence than “not totally baseless” though.

The law in question only prohibits biological males from participating in female sports. It does not prohibit females from joining boys teams.

There’s a simple reason for that - the second sentence is required under current interpretations of Title IX, while the first is not. The argument for that is about girl’s sports being a sort of protected space for girls, so it’s OK to bar non-girls (however your jurisdiction chooses to define that) from girls sports, but “boys” sports are actually for everyone who can compete.

“Where are my testicles, Summer?”

Hey, now, she’s a Democrat. Even ran for office as a Democrat, even if she never got past the primary. Just because she’s shitty doesn’t automatically make her a Guardian Of Pedophiles, even if most of them would accuse her of grooming if she got within 100 yards of a child.

I had no idea who Brianna Wu was until I read your post

I’m old enough that I remember her as the game dev with the intensely shitty mobile game I tried at PAX one year.

She is quite important in contribution to the society, but when we talk just about working people, we overlook her.

…even then, since her contribution is to her own household should that marriage collapse society decides that not only is she owed a share of their produced assets to date but also a share of his future production for her part in enhancing it to date (alimony), including the requirement that he must continue to produce at that level at a minimum (aka alimony is based on what a judge believes you can earn, not what you actually are earning). Sometimes this also includes a share of any future retirement income as well.

Everyone should be able to live without poverty.

Ultimately, what you would consider living without poverty requires the labor of some number of people to maintain, and eventually the question of why they do that labor for people who don’t do that labor will be asked, by them if not by you. Usually the answer is that those people are doing other labor which benefits the first group, usually abstracted out to some generalized representation of debt (aka money).

This corny meme implies that philosophy majors become flat-earthers, etc.

No, most philosophy majors still believe in gravity. While flat-earthers cease to believe in gravity once they realize that a flat earth is incompatible with gravity. They replace it with this notion that the earth disc (and the rest of the system) is accelerating upwards through the void at 9.8 m/s^2.

Though I’ve come across some interdisciplinary studies types who would probably argue that gravity is a social construct because we describe it with language.

The set of all primes is the same size infinity as the set of all positive integers because you could create a way to map one to the other aka you can count to the nth prime. Reals are different in that there are an infinite number of real between any two reals which means there’s no possible way to map them.

Like, most kids in the US had Tylenol. Most kids don’t develop autism.

Except the claim being studied is that Tylenol might cause autism when administered to the mother while pregnant. There are a lot of drugs that will cause a problem to a fetus when administered to a pregnant woman, but do not cause that problem when administered to someone outside the womb. Building a human from scratch is a fiddly process.

Or they WANT them to feel pain.

In their myths, a woman explicitly incapable of knowing the difference between right and wrong strayed from absolute mindless obedience to sky daddy, so all women have to suffer forever, and anything that reduces that suffering is inherently evil for opposing the will of sky daddy.

Not to defend RFK, but this argument is dumb.

People from everywhere it doesn’t natively grow developed cancer long before they had access to tobacco. That doesn’t prove tobacco use doesn’t cause cancer, it just means it isn’t the only potential cause.

Female streamers don’t have that fake obnoxious rage yell/scream the guys do.

Eh, guys with the fake rage scream are about as common as the ladies who see Twitch as essentially a starter camsite/way to advertise their OF and are trading on boobs more than anything else. There absolutely are streamers on Twitch that are exactly what OP suggests, but they’re far from a majority and probably not the one used in the picture.

“remember to eat your roadkill!”

It’s explicitly legal to do so in my state. To be fair, when everything around you is forests, mountains, and forested mountains a surprising number of game animals get hit by vehicles, their meat is mostly fine outside the impact location, and it saves the state the cleanup.