Who said anything about “five nines”? All we know from the article:

A couple of hundred claims a week would be a lot in normal times, he says. When the coronavirus hit, millions of claims suddenly were being filed and hitting the front end, which could not handle the massive increase in volume.

I’d say it wouldn’t be that critical if was down half the time.

Not sure of these “millions of claims” were submitted within days, weeks, or months. So we have no clue about the volume. Maybe a single server would be fine. But who am I kidding, the cheap Javascript guys will probably build a distributed cloud monster anyways…

I don’t understand why they need COBOL programmers when it is a frontend load problem. Let some cheap Javascript guys write a new frontend with a cache.

He has been “playing one campaign or another since mid-2014”. Also, “Of the last three years, one was spent entirely on a level 1-10 campaign of Pathfinder 2E, with the other two years jumping between Shadowdark, Mork Borg, Blades in the Dark, Monster of the Week, and finally a Heart: the City Beneath campaign that’s ending next week.”

Also, he writes “with the exception of PF2E, all the other systems I’ve tried are less mechanically demanding.” So he seems to have at least a vague understanding of multiple systems. Enough to voice an opinion at least.

Nothing is wrong with just saying it. In practice, it sometimes doesn’t work out though.

For a very public drastic example, look at the Far Verona rape:

The reaction of the other players at the table while the scene plays out is telling. It appears that no one expected this storyline to go where it went.

Yet, nobody said “I don’t like where this is going.”

To be clear: I don’t blame them for not saying it. Probably, I probably would have been quiet in that situation too. I believe that safety/communication tools are usually not necessary but in rare cases they are. Thus, it is a good practice in general and worth some overhead.

I looked up the rules. According to my understanding, here is roughly what happens in a pistol duel:

There are three checks, quite similar to D&D. Who goes first (initiative), hit determination, and wounds. I can see the shared heritage.

For each of these, you have a base number from your stats. Then various modifiers are applied depending on range, movement of shooter, movement of target, wounds, weapon type, and more (e.g. hipshooting is +5 for first shot but -10 for hitting). Collecting and adding all the modifiers is what makes it complicated.

Initiative does not require a roll. Hit determination takes one percentage die roll (d100). The wound takes two d100. Example from the rules: “A first roll of 49 would indicate a wound in the left shoulder, and a second roll of 72 would mean that the wound there was a serious one.” A serious wound means -7 to your strength attribute and shows up in later bonus calculations.

Such a serious wound will take seven weeks to heal assuming proper medical treatment.

Fun fact: The rules contain more than five pages of stats for historical figures like Billy the Kid. :)

Wow, awesome story!

It seems the GM brought a lot to the setting (“I already knew quite a bit about [Tombstone, Arizona]”), so most people would not be able to create such an experience with just the game document.

Ok, we get it. John doesn’t care if she gets addressed with the right pronoun.

Nice! I wanted to this for quite a while but always stopped when I didn’t find pragmatic material about DNS. This course should help a lot with knowing where to start.

I hope Lemmy will become this. Here is my strategy:

1. Create a Lemmy community (for example !automotive@discuss.tchncs.de).
2. Submit something every few days. Not much quality control. Quantity over quality for now.
3. Hope for a community to form.