Brutticus

Mormons are the only group of people Im prejudiced against.

Well, them and evangelicals.

So I think you're right in a lot of ways. But I think your understating a few things.

First, OGL. OGL was great for 3.x edition. It spawned a cottage industry of 3rd party content creators, which by the end of the life cycle, had created content that which was smoother and more refined in the engine than anything WotC ever produced. This allowed 3.x to dig in and become immensely established. The problem is is that it cuts both ways; in 4e era, WotC's biggest competitor was actually Paizo.

I liked 4e, I think its better than 5e. But WotC became way harsher on piracy and 3rd party content in that era. The way powers were structured and templates, it became impossible to keep up with everything without their builder spoon feeding it to you. They were really pushing their "adventure tools." These were buggy, half of them never came to fruition, and they didn't run on mac (even though they were browser based). They only stopped pushing them after they bought a third party site (D&D beyond, which I actually ban from my games). I'm just saying that 3.5 was an accessibility dream, and 4e was actually behind lock and key.

Meanwhile Paizo had the immensely easier job of selling 3.5 weirdos back 3.5, and WotC couldn't stop them because of the OGL. For a while, I thought Paizo was actually doing worse damage to the industry; I was afraid no one would want to innovate if people were just going to play 3.x until the end of time. I guess I was right, because 5e is basically 3.5 will all the interesting parts cut off. And thats why WotC was trying to kill the OGL last year, in the weird way they did. They want the control, but they want the 3rd party support too.

The other thing you understated was just how many grognards there were for 3.x. I literally had a 5e baby pitch to me a cyberpunk 2077 game that he would run in starfinder, but 3.x guys refused to try out 4e. Their complaints were as many as they were meaningless. Orcs aren't core? All classes get spells? I can see the WoW recharge timers! A lot of enfranchised gamers simply did not want to play a new game, and then PF came along, and they did not have to. I saw it happen in my game group, but this also was borne out in paizo's ascendancy in this era.

I want to say one thing to your point @[email protected], that 4e had too much bloat; 3.x had a ton of bloat as well. At least every power in 4e was like, functional. 3.x had dozens of base classes and hundreds of prestige classes that were traps. Hundreds of feats that were not good. I think 1200 officially published spells (at least you could swap those out). The only reason 3.x combat wasn't a crawl was because it was rocket tag; high level spellcasters usually end the fight in one move.

I play 3.5 for a few years. One of my groups swore by it. It was... textured. When you call it a steaming pile of shit, I see your point and honestly agree with you. But I will say it was... completely what it was. It wasn't well designed, but it was immensely interesting. 5e is all of 3.x, but with the interesting parts sanded down. In my estimation, that makes 5e the lesser game.

My mistake.

Maybe its just me, but I see @[email protected] moon a lot. They post sovereign citizen stuff, which is what i see regularly, but they are also a pretty good poet.

They helped me with a DIY question!

Yeah, brain plasticity is really fascinating. One of the guys I work with, its the only way to teach him anything. He had a heroin overdose like 15 years ago. He has basically no short term memory, but I've been able to get him to retain things via repetition. Mostly repetitive physical tasks, but social media, with advertisers constantly pinging him, has also been a very powerful reminder. He's big into the EDM scene and he remembers events, both past and future, because social media keeps buzzing him and reminding him. I wish there was a way to harness that power for good.

But obviously, I've never seen his brain before.

Based on my neurology classes, I feel like we have some idea what some parts of the brain do. Obviously full on experiments would be unethical, but we can like, observe which neural pathways formed in people with the same life style (so Taxi Drivers have larger and more developed sections focused on navigation). We can observe what happens to people who take the same kinds of damage, and occasionally we get lucky and we can see what happens to people with grievous injuries or rare maladies. Also, we can do experiments on creatures like snails which far less complex brains.

The brain is certainly an interesting a weird black box, but we do have outs to learn some things

It could be interpreted that way... I think? The language it uses refers to seeds.

וְנִזְרֳעָ֥ה זָֽרַע

The situation (infidelity, the graphic imagery of swelling bellies and rupturing thighs) naturally implies abortion, but the 'Nezre'ah Zerah' implies the potion will cause barreness.

That is... a stupefying description of what is written. I had to read the torah in primary school. Half a day, every school day, one book per year, (two for Leviticus), in Hebrew. I was confounded. I thought maybe Rabbi had us skip that part.

The part you are referring to is referred to as "Sota" which describes a magical ceremony where in a man would bring his allegedly unfaithful wife before a Beis Din, and she could drink a magic potion, snickeringly referred to as "sota water," to prove her innocence. The logic goes that if the woman was unfaithful, "these afflictive waters shall enter your innards, causing your belly to swell and your thigh to rupture" . This could be taken mean an abortion, but in my grade school class, we were very giggly, because we thought it meant she would explode.

Further, the potion is described being water, dust from the tabernacle floor, and an invocation written down and dissolved in the water (Number 5: 17, and 23), and is explicitly stated it won't hurt an innocent woman. (28). This passage does evoke abortion. But it describes a magical ritual that it claims will only cause abortion in unfaithful women, and the potion provided wont cause anyone to abort (although it is gross). Claiming in instructs an abortion is a massive stretch.

I went to my banking account page, where I can make transfers and look at my money. My ad blocker had blocked a GIANT ad in the center of the screen.

Hypnotic Pattern. Damage is for chumps. Mass save or suck for me