• 2 Posts
  • 22 Comments
Joined 3 months ago
Cake day: March 12th, 2025
  • modernangel@sh.itjust.workstoRPG@lemmy.ml•How do you keep your players from reading published adventures online?English
    1·
    2 days ago

    It’s not always easy or free to access published material - a lot but not all Adventurers League stuff is on Scribd, and there’s a lot of third-party content on DMsGuild that’s just a little too obscure for liberators to bother de-fingerprinting. If you can’t find a free copy of a title within the first couple pages of web search results then at least you’ve set the bar for spoilers at having to pay for them.

    As someone who has played through adventures after having read or even DM’ed them… It’s not hard to take a back seat to other players who don’t know the surprises and twists of an adventure. Encourage your players to make a choice, if they must read ahead then at least don’t trivialize the adventure for the players who don’t.

  • modernangel@sh.itjust.workstoFuturology@futurology.today•The US state of Montana is to allow people to buy experimental drugs and treatments, that haven't yet been FDA approved.English
    2·
    20 days ago

    The snake-oil part is solved by prohibiting scientifically unproven claims. Laudanum was sold as a cure-all; obviously as a society we don’t want to allow opiates to be marketed for everything from allopecia to zika.

    Mexico’s pharma industry works like this to some extent. You can walk into a .mx pharmacy and get yourself antibiotics, boner pills, a CPAP machine, hormonal birth control, and much much more without a doctor’s note. Purity doesn’t seem to be a big problem; you generally don’t have to worry that it might be 10% opium or whatever. International travelers can bring up to 3 months’ personal supply back to the U.S., which would be tricky if border officials’ drug-sniffing dogs routinely flagged contaminant drugs of concern in medication inspections.

  • modernangel@sh.itjust.workstoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•What are you most basic principles for life?English
    1·
    22 days ago

    I don’t think you can boil it down further, and that’s why Western law is an evolving patchwork of codes and penalties that vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Too many nuances, situational factors, edge cases and value priorities that vary from persn to person (and culture to culture) to decide every imaginable scenario consistently.

    If you’re not familiar, you might gain some perspective from a summary read about Goedel’s Incompleteness Theorems. Goedel’s Proof deals with systems of logic, where logic is something we hope for in systems of law. Goedel’s Proof shows that a “sufficiently powerful” system of logic is necessarily incomplete - that is, we can pose problems in mathematical-systemic terms that have no solutions under that system.

    In mathematical logic we have “axioms” like “1+1=2” or “a triangle is a plane figure defined by exactly 3 lines”. In law, axiom-like propositions are called “maxims”, often stated in Latin, and convey foundational legal principles like “contracts must be honored”, or “people can own things”. In a hypothetical properly Communist society, and by “proper” I mean to exclude failed would-be Communisms like the USSR or PRC, “people can own things” isn’t necessarily a maxim; they might instead have a maxim that codifies “things belong to the State” and exclude any notion of individual ownership.

    The implication for legal systems is that there are inevitably legal disputes that can’t be decided strictly by the letter of the law, so we have to fall back on fiat of judicial opinion.