Wafflecopper posted:

you can't really go wrong with your build. the only thing close to a trap is a build that only gives you 1 mental or physical hitpoint which you've avoided. you'll have 2 physical hp, just save often, make sure you have healing items on hand, and remember you have a few seconds to activate one between losing your last hp and actually dying

also beware the thread, untagged spoilers are rampant

Heavy Metal posted:

Ok, I bought the game on PS5, been interested for quite a while! Any newbie tips and character build stuff if you probably are only doing one playthrough and don't want it to be notably tough? I know messing around and failing at stuff is part of the charm too.

And here's my haven't played it yet idea for my character build:

Intelligence - 4
Psyche - 4
Physique - 2
Motorics - 2

Signature skill: Suggestion (in Psyche)

Also want Empathy, Inland Empire, Volition

Int: Visual Calculus, Conceptualization

Physique: Endurance (health),

Motorics: Perception, Composure,
Hand eye coordination,

Based on just random tips I saw somewhere and what looked interesting to me. Are these stats and things sensible, or should I do something else?

Zulily Zoetrope posted:

the only thing I'd recommend against is doing a 3/3/3/3 stat spread, and you're not doing that, so you should be good to go

Qtotonibudinibudet posted:

populist largesse to manage your reputation is generally a feature of organized crime, especially where state institutions are weak or corrupt

it's the other drug kingpins doing all the murders and the corrupt police stealing from the everyman. you're just a hard-working local businessperson who wants to contribute back to the community, and any unsavory aspects of your work are far away and easily ignored

Orange Devil posted:

Orange Devil posted:

Anyway wanna do a post about the state, organized labour, organized crime, the police and socialism.

Organized crime comes into existence in those areas of society in which the state has either never asserted control, or has retreated. In liberal societies, that means the districts of the poor and downtrodden, both the lumpen and the working poor. The people capital still wants to extract from, but which it has deemed unncessary to provide essential services to in return. By lowering the expected standard of living of the worker, capital can increase its share of the surplus value, aka, increase profit.

All sorts of things can get cut, youth services, dental care, mental care, physical health care, education, benefits, child services, you name it. The main one that will let organized crime take over though, is protection. You see, in liberal society the function of the police and the judicial system is to protect the property rights of the capitalist class from everyone else. All the stuff they do that looks good on TV (investigating murders and rapes etc) is basically PR, and a cost-effective way to get buy-in from the petit-bourgeoisie and the part of the proletariat that has some bargaining power (the middle/upper middle class basically). But that poo poo is actually difficult and costly if you really want to solve all those cases, and especially if you want to give everyone equal protection under the law and legal recourse against everyone else when they feel they've been wronged. Especially if this lets the poor sue the rich for whatever. So that's not how the system works. There's barriers deliberately put into place to make sure the poor don't get to access to the law to protect themselves. The law isn't for them, it's to control them.

Anyway, when enough of that happens in a concentrated enough geographic area, it creates a power vacuum. People are still going to get into disputes with one another. Disputes which need to be resolved. And having any kind of society at all revolves around having some kind of authority which everyone agrees on as the accepted way of resolving those disputes. If you don't have that, poo poo gets real violent real fast as people get desperate and have nowhere to turn to. So a local heavy with some goons can set up an organization to provide "protection" to local businesses, and become a generally accepted mediator of disputes. You see if they "own" a place they now also have an interest in keeping down the violence in that place lest they attract unwanted attention. Plus it would undermine their perceived authority in the eyes of the community. They can also use the capital they are acquiring to basically provide financial services, another sector of society the poor and downtrodden are often denied access to. Now to be clear, these people are going to be heavily exploitative, but they are still providing something that literally noone else is, and also is required to function. If states magically disappeared overnight, and absent alternative organizations existing, it is very likely that organizations that look a hell of a lot like mob organizations would spring up nearly immediately to step into that gap and be the starting points of the development of a new state. The negotiation between what those in charge get to do and what the rest of society owes them is class struggle, and also the history of all hitherto existing societies.

Organized labour then is trying precisely to prevent the state run by the capitalist class from cutting back on their living conditions to the point where things get that bad. They also used to try to win further victories to improve their lot, but we haven't seen much of that lately. Organized labour is also both, well, organized, and able to command labour power. That means they, too, can bundle some of the surplus value they have managed to win for themselves and create some capital with it, and they can *do stuff*. Like for example, crimes. Especially profitable ones, to acquire enough capital to, well, fight capital, but even more imporantly, to create a parallel structure. You see, when the state retreats, the mob boss is really only interested in filling in that most dire gap from which he can extract the most money for himself, protection, and to act as a capitalist in illicit trades, again to make maximum profit. In that sense the mob boss acts primarily as a capitalist. The mob sometimes provides some semblance of social services, but also primarily as a PR exercise, in a calculating cost-benefit (to themselves) kind of way. But organized labour, especially if lead by a vanguard party, can take the capital labour has managed to capture, and take the labour power of the workers, and start filling in all those gaps the state left behind. Education, health care, conflict mediation, protection, soup kitchens, a youth center. Not to primarily benefit themselves, but to benefit their community, because they *are* the community. This is the earliest work necessary in building communism.

This also means, if the state were to vanish overnight, a parallel structure already exists. So the would-be mob bosses won't find a vacuum to fill. Instead there will be an organization ready to become the new state, already being composed *of* the people and working *for* the people. From this seed a dictatorship of the proletariat can bloom. This is what the Claire's are building, and why, to the uneducated outside observer, it looks like a mob organization. It is also why they *want* it to look like a mob organization. You see, the mob organization is not a threat to capital. In fact it operates in a way indistinguishable from the capitalist, but only gets to pick up the crumbs the capitalist has deemed not worth pursueing, and meanwhile it keeps people in line. But what the Claire's are doing is a direct threat to the continued existence of the primacy of capital, of capital controlling the state, of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. So they do everything they can to make sure they don't look like the threat that they are, until the time is right.

Now if only there was some way to have a state vanish.
"Torson?" "Yes." "McLaine?" "Yes." "Heidelstam?" "No." "Vicquemare?" "Yes." "Du Bois?" "Of course."

Epic High Five posted:

Uncritical support for Evrart Claire. It's ultimately either him or Sunday Friend. Easiest choice ever.

Orange Devil posted:

panko posted:

great post. follow-up question: you hold a lower opinion than most of kim. do you think, if charmed by harry into joining the 41st, he would participate in the second revolution? why or why not?

panko posted:

great post. follow-up question: you hold a lower opinion than most of kim. do you think, if charmed by harry into joining the 41st, he would participate in the second revolution? why or why not?

Lasting Damage posted:

By his own description Kim has fallen out of love with Moralism, and his cause is Revachol first and foremost. If the city rises up to seize hold of its long denied self-determination, he'll be right there with them.

Epic High Five posted:

Uncritical support for Evrart Claire. It's ultimately either him or Sunday Friend. Easiest choice ever.

ulvir posted:

it’s like everyone is ignoring that Claire is directly responsible for importing hard drugs into Martinaise, the same hard drugs that Cuno, a literal child, is addicted to

he is no better than wild pines

Orange Devil posted:

ulvir posted:

it’s like everyone is ignoring that Claire is directly responsible for importing hard drugs into Martinaise, the same hard drugs that Cuno, a literal child, is addicted to

he is no better than wild pines

ulvir posted:

it’s like everyone is ignoring that Claire is directly responsible for importing hard drugs into Martinaise, the same hard drugs that Cuno, a literal child, is addicted to

he is no better than wild pines

Turpitude II posted:

eh, i'm not an expert, but i thought the thing about drugs is that if you want people off drugs, you don't get "rid of drugs", because prohibition doesn't really work, they will get and do whatever substances it's possible to do. if you want drugs to not be a problem, you establish support systems to 1. remove the dire circumstances that cause people to fall into a drug habit (bad home life, poverty, homelessness, lack of education, etc), and 2. allow things like decriminalisation and regulation of supply, so the people who are on drugs aren't in danger while they're on drugs (from the black market street supply of drugs, OR from law enforcement) and have safe methods of getting off them and staying off them.

if you give cuno a stable home life and a future that doesn't just look like "running away from home to join the child-scavenger-occupied catacombs" or "fed into the legal system, either as a junkie criminal or as an officer in an organisation that is known for doling out fines as demands for bribery, excessive violence and murders in enforcement, etc" then maybe riding the lightning might not look so necessary.

panko posted:

great post. follow-up question: you hold a lower opinion than most of kim. do you think, if charmed by harry into joining the 41st, he would participate in the second revolution? why or why not?

Orange Devil posted:

But my read on Kim's background from his reaction is that ultimately Kim's life has been relatively comfortable. Sure, he lives in a lovely part of the world, and has to deal with racism and homophobia, but I don't think any true tragedy has befallen his loved ones.

Ghost Leviathan posted:

And the strong themes that with enough money, you can pretty much buy your way out of the consequences anyway, see Revachol's kings being downright admired for their drug habits that make Klassje, Lely and the protagonist look straight edge in comparison.

Railing Kill posted:

(Although I did learn that Sylvie broke the taxidermized bird. I assumed Harry did in my first playthrough and helped replace it. I also noticed the SpeedfreakFM radio button on Kim's car this time. My character was too bad at Motoritics to notice it before. I'm already learning new things!)

Orange Devil posted:

Kim and Cuno