Schadrach

…and he very, very carefully threaded the needle and chose his words to avoid perjury. It’s why he had questions like asking them to define “sexual relations” (the definition they gave didn’t include oral, so he did not have sexual relations with her by their definition) and what the definition of “is” was (specifically does it mean currently or does it include at any time in the past).

Detect Magic telling someone “it’s chowder” is a cop-out, same as a DM saying “you failed the skill check because you looked suspicious.” If a spell exists to reveal a magical aura, use it to reveal an aura, not to sass the player.

My answer in that case is “You detect no aura” from the non-magical chowder (or maybe they do detect one if it was flavored with prestidigitation), unless it’s an edition where the effect is a cone, and they are sitting across the table from their friend blinged out in magical gear, in which case they are definitely detecting an aura. Several of them. And they’re going to have to take time, focus, and make checks to recognize that none are coming from the chowder.

Paranoia, the game where every character is technically engaged in a crime punishable by death at basically all times, and you’re given a number of clones because you are expected to die…a lot. Also the R&D gadgets, like the personal disintegrator which does exactly what it says on the tin - disintegrates your person.

Like forcing the players into an encounter where all their toolkits are nerfed. Close quarters for casters, magical monsters that can’t be harmed by melee, or NPCs that are way OP for the group and they stick to the Monster Manual to the letter.

When I GM, it depends on just how narrow and just how powerful your particular toolkit is. I’m not going to ensure that you can do whatever your thing is at absolutely every opportunity, and if your schtick becomes well known, enemies capable of planning will plan around it when feasible. The more narrow your schtick is, the more scenarios you might encounter where it does not apply simply by chance (for example, if you’re a flying archer every room in a dungeon won’t gain a minimum 30’ high ceiling to maximize your use of that). The more disproportionately powerful your schtick is compared to other party members, the more likely I am to specifically come up with occasional scenarios meant to make it not apply so someone else gets to shine.

Sometimes I will signpost something is a very bad idea, and if you do it anyways (or do something else absurdly dangerously foolish) I’m not going to pop up a guard rail to save you at the last moment - retrieving your body from somewhere adrift on the astral and your soul from the gemstone the archdevil you pissed off is keeping in his treasury to try to save you is the next adventure hook.

You encounter a huge, elaborate tome, on a concealed lectern, in a library connected by a hidden door directly off the bedroom of a powerful wizard, you detect magic and get extremely powerful auras of conjuration, transmutation and evocation maybe “I flip it open to a random page and start reading aloud, I’ll sound out any words I don’t recognize” is not, in fact, a wise decision. The copy of “Words You Mispronounce And Die: A Primer For Apprentice Wizards” you saw on one of the shelves on the way there, the references to a cursed grimoire of terrible power, the book being bound in the skin of an angel covered in burns and scars, etc, etc should have maybe hinted at that.

Only way to fight back in the War on Christmas, which like the Palestine and Israel is mostly just an excuse for the alleged victim (Israel) to attack and take territory from their neighbors.

Here Christmas has invaded so far that there are occasional sightings before the equinox.

Just wait for a few generations of brain implants down the line. Then you will believe what you are programmed to believe. Opposition will be literally unthinkable.

It’s weird that both France and Germany are as low down the list as they are, since English is a Germanic language with an absolute fuckton of words rooted from French.

If you’re not “poor enough” to need snap, and you can’t afford to buy whatever food you want, within reason, then either, you need snap and you’re in denial, or you need to learn money management.

There are breakpoints where earning slightly more money can cost you more benefits than you gained in pay. I could also totally see someone being in that range where they’re only a little out of range for SNAP and as such have to eat on their own income while someone earning a bit less gets supplemented to a higher total budget than they have.

Snap recipients are forced to spend the money on food, since that’s the only place that money can be spent AFAIK…

I mean without doing shady shit, yeah. But then in lots of places there are known and routinely practiced ways to launder SNAP into cash. One that was popular here for a time a while back was a convenience store that would buy cases of canned soda of specific kinds from anyone who came in with them for less than wholesale price. People on SNAP who wanted to launder it into cash would go somewhere like Wal-Mart, buy cases, go to this store and resell them at a loss to get cash while the store stocks shelves at a discount.

This is not at all accurate. If a girl wants to play a sport for which there is a boys team but not girls team, she must be allowed to try out and participate on the same basis as the boys (a boys team is really an “everyone” team - this actually applies beyond schools and Title IX as no professional sports league in the US actually bars women from competing). Only girls/women’s teams get to set restrictions with respect to sex/gender. For Title IX, this is a wildly discriminatory interpretation of a low that bans discrimination, but it’s the one that has been in use for years.

And Title IX doesn’t require equal funding, but something much more nebulous about impact and opportunity that makes the whole thing kind of intentionally wishy washy so anyone they need to be can not be in compliance. To make it even more impossible to actually comply, questions of funding and opportunity are not limited to what the school itself supplies, so for example anything donated by parents or volunteers (such as the work of a booster club) also counts. So for example, if you cut funding to a boys team and parents more than make up the shortfall in donations and fundraising, it’s entirely possible based on that you might have to cut it further. Related, this kind of thing is why less popular boys sports are prone to being cut at the drop of a hat - football and sometimes boys basketball make money, most other sports teams lose money so the school is incentivized not to make cuts from King Football or Prince Basketball, but they have to target equal opportunity and impact between boys and girls athletic spending which means they spend what they’re willing to have as a cost on girls teams and cut whatever boys teams they need to cut to avoid cutting into the football budget, because the football budget has an ROI.

Per NFHS website (https://nfhs.org/stories/title-ix-compliance-part-iv-frequently-asked-questions):

FAQ: Does Title IX require that 50 percent of our athletic budget be spent on girls programs and 50 percent be spent on our boys programs? Answer: No. The key to allocating financial resources under Title IX is the overall impact of expenditures – does your school’s allocation of financial resources provide equivalence of athletics opportunities and benefits to boys and girls. Although this will result, in most cases, in an approximate 50-50 budgetary allocation, Title IX does not require a strictly proportional division of dollars.

FAQ: Our school offers soccer for boys, but not for girls. Does Title IX require that we allow girls to play on the boys team? Answer: Title IX requires that in sports where a girls team is not offered, girls must be allowed to try out for the boys team and participate on the same basis as boys. This does not mean that a girl automatically gets to be on the team. She has to try out and make the team on the same basis as any boy would have to try out and make the team. She can also be cut from the team, but only on the same basis as a boy could be cut from the team – for an objectively verifiable lack of ability or a lack of size, strength, skill and experience making participation unsafe.

FAQ: Our school offers volleyball for girls, but not for boys. Does Title IX require that we allow boys to play on the girls team? Answer: No. Although there have been a few, isolated lawsuits where boys have obtained injunctions to allow them to participate on a girls team for which their schools offered no same-sport equivalent for boys, the courts generally rule that the purpose of Title IX is to remedy past inequities of athletics opportunity for the historically under-represented gender – females – and that if boys are allowed to participate on girls teams, they will because of height, weight and strength advantages come to dominate the membership of those teams, and thereby decrease the competitive opportunities for women. Therefore, in the vast majority of cases, the courts have not permitted boys to play on girls teams, even if there is not a same-sport boys team.