I had read your initial comment as insinuating the previous commenter was supporting hamas, and when someone directly challenged you on it, you didn't reject that accusation.
So if you just wanted to point out the irony, consider my comment as much a non sequitor as your comment on its irony, which is - I suppose - at least irony-adjacent in itself.
Do you get mad at geologists for explaining why volcanoes erupt and kill people?
There's a difference in understanding and supporting, or considering something morally correct.
As another example: I understand why some folks get sucked into gangs. If someone grows up in a crumbling school system, falls through the holes in whatever is left of a social safety net, has no proper familial support, and sees nothing but violence and economic despair day-to-day, joining a gang suddenly becomes a viable path to prosperity. Exceedingly dangerous, but this hypothetical teen can look around and see they're likely to have a shit future regardless, so why not take that chance, right?
So this isn't me saying that I support gang violence, but I can understand why it happens. Which is why my politics are what they are: we don't need to just beat the shit out of gang members in the streets, but give folks support so they don't feel like joining a gang is the only way to survive.
The other poster is (I think) making a similar kind of argument. What the fuck else is some kid in that situation going to grow up to be? Some folks will make it out alright, sure: but on the whole it's a recipe for despair, which often leads to horrific acts. It doesn't make the acts right, but we can understand a little more about the why.
I'm all for it! Balancing by buffing rather than nerfing seems to be best, in most cases.
Right? Would be easy enough for a DM to just improvise if they don't want the players using everything. Big ticket items have inscriptions that terrify anyone they try to sell it to, which is itself a plot hook. Maybe it's all cursed. Or they get arrested by the local authorities on suspicion of trafficking in stolen goods. Or even just have another adventuring party steal it from them somehow.
Depends on the abilities of the party, but snatching away their spoils after they get away sounds even more fun than not letting them take it in the first place.
Minotaurs, if anything like their brahman brethren, can get nutrition from all kinds of roughage that us puny primates can't. So while we're scrambling around for nuts and goodberries, they can make a meal of all the weeds sprouting in terrible soil, and the odd hay bale lying around to feed someone's horses.
TL;DR: They could feasibly turn what we consider indigestible garbage-plants into calorie-rich milk.
I don't see it as delusion, but being realistic.
What you and I do today is meaningless in the grand scale of the universe, and likely has a tiny effect on what happens to someone living a hundred years from now.
That doesn't mean that what we do doesn't have a more immediate impact.
Make your neighbor's day better, because while it won't matter in a million years, it matters now. So who cares if it costs you a few extra minutes of your life, it makes theirs better, and nothing means anything in the long run anyway, right? So why not make it easier for everyone else here, now? Making other people feel better feels good, so everyone wins, and we can better enjoy what time we have.
Reminds me of a great pair of line from a Warren Zevon song: "I can saw a woman in two, but you won't want to look in the box when I'm through."
It’s not disingenuous. Jewish people literally just weren’t there until very recently. You’re talking like 1000+ years ago.
This is the central question everyone can't agree on, right? Which group that conquered the region and eradicated their enemies has the "rights" to the land? I'm seriously ignorant on the subject, and more than happy to delete this comment if it's not really adding to anything, but we're calibrating our standards of who has the rights to a region based on what the latest Empire said, be it Ottomans or Romans or however far back we want to go, until we're talking literally Neolithic folks showing up, right? I'm not religious, so there's a critical part of this conflict I simply cannot fundamentally understand.
The difference between making claims based on occupation in the late 1800s versus late 800s seems arbitrary, to me. That said, I know that can sound patently ridiculous, since we're talking generations we can count on one hand versus the same number of Empires controlling the land: so this is where I throw my hands up and just cry a little. Solidarity to everyone suffering oppression and terrorism, in whatever forms they take.
Good guess, but doesn't look like it: July is when the Earth is at its furthest point from the sun.
“True enough, there are such things as laughless jokes, what Freud called gallows humor. There are real-life situations so hopeless that no relief is imaginable.
While we were being bombed in Dresden sitting in a cellar with our arms over our heads in case the ceiling fell, one soldier said as though he were a duchess in a mansion on a cold and rainy night, 'I wonder what the poor people are doing tonight.' Nobody laughed, but we were still all glad he said it. At least we were still alive! He proved it.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country
I've got some student loans....