My expectations of Bethesda, since Oblivion, has been as a mod platform.

Gimme a new engine with updated graphics and great mod support and let the community does what it does best.

I’ve thought of this, but don’t have the wherewithal to actually make a project come to fruition.

I’m also not a lawyer, but I’ve read multiple articles on this, and it doesn’t seem like any legal violation. Corporation got lazy, didn’t confirm where 10m in royalties went and under what circumstance, and got burned.

Finally a corp gets scammed by the common man.

I say good on him.

The last group I was with ran mostly DND 5e. However, our DM needed a break, and another player took up the reigns for a Star Wars Table Top.

It was not serious. Homebrew and the rule of cool made it a blast - Think Guardians of the Galaxy comedy in a Star Wars wrapper.

The DM for that set goal posts. Like around a certain level, force sensitive classes would get their first light saber.

My character was a bounty hunter who finally got his Mandalorian armor where I could customize “components” like a hand mounted flame thrower, or a shoulder cannon, or what the fuck ever. We spent more time dissecting statistics to get it balanced than anything thematic.

Totally home brewed in that system.

I think that was my best table top experience, and I’m an old school DND nerd. I feel like some days I can barely do my job, but I can quote how THAC0 works on a whim.

I don’t understand statistics unless dice are involved, and no that does not extend to gambling dice games. Utterly useless, but I can go into an ADHD hyper focus on anything that is not actually beneficial to my life in a tangible way, lol.

In my state, with my employer, yes absolutely NSFW.

I don’t agree, just saying what the GOP leaning corpos are making rules of.

That would be the Variant option for human in 5E, , I believe, which means its up to DM discretion.

So, it inherently isn’t a super safe option if you’re relying on that feat for some reason if you’re a nerd who just workshops builds at various levels for fun.

I wish I had that option in a previous campaign.

We even had a rule set, if your character dies, you can reroll a new character. Same level. Gearing would be similar (in power, not the same gear).

I hated my character. Mechanically I just did NOT enjoy playing them.

Being a mentally ill character (GOO warlock, Cthulhuesque patron of madness, part of the pact) I turned to depression, fool hardy risks, etc. The DM just would NOT let that character die.

I just wanted to play a character that better fit the party and campaign. Having a “Face” character in a campaign with a stupid barbarian (both player and int score) that solved every problem with a great axe, and if there wasn’t a problem created one, was useless.

Got stopped by guards at the gate of a new town? Instead of just talking for 30 seconds, the party wound up jailed and forced into trial by combat. It didn’t end well. Then I (the host for every session, but not DM) changed jobs and schedules and no one else would host so it died.

Don’t work in medical IT.

It has been literally life and death before.

Depends on the lore of the demons it was learned from.

What did the paladin offer for this knowledge? How does that impact their oath?

That being said, I’m sure there are plenty of nerds wizards or other scholars who could teach it.

Social engineering, arguably, is one of the harder things to learn.

It’s a collection of soft skills, and if you’ve been paying attention to rank and file tech jobs, places are looking for people with soft skills because they’re so impractical to train.

This goes down to your basic help desk tech.

Anyone with an interest in computers can sit down and learn how to analyze and exploit weakness in code. In fact, it’s a fun puzzle. Dealing with other people, let alone establishing oneself as another person and fucking SELLING that character enough to get what you need?

People write off social engineering far too quickly. It’s quick, it’s effective, and if done well, the person you exploited doesn’t even realize they’ve been tricked.

As a person who sighs dramatically as a reflex, it doesn’t work in real life like it does for Astarion, lol.

Not my first campaign, I started in 2E with my mom as the DM lol.

It was everyone else’s first time, including the DM.

Our first session zero had characters created and we were going to run the mines of phandelver. Except the entire party was evil aligned, and thought that meant they should just go straight murderhobo on anything that breathed, and ganged up on my gnome illusionist and murdered him. House rule, no evil aligned characters. Re rolled to lock with being a face in mind, based on the party composition - I decided to handle whatever hole popped up in the party, and just roll with it. I’m the type of player who has half a dozen character sheets generated just because they like character building, and being table top as opposed to a video game, backstories were relevant to the overall plot (in theory)

But whatever, had some fun, enjoyed the experience overall. Glad to see people interested in the game.

Just… the the player of the Barbarian had his own negative INT modifier to work with, if you catch my drift. No one else needed consistent help with the simple math involved of low level combat (and we got wasted the whole time, he didn’t drink for religious reasons) and no one else consistently made stupid decisions that were also completely out of character after like the second session. Yeah, there can be a bit of a learning curve, especially separating character from player, but it got pretty decent and OOC chatter had a gesture associated to it, so people would pop in and out of character and make meta commentary OOC to good comedic effect, enhancing the overall experience even though a poor decision was made, it was in character - at a certain point someone made the gesture and just said “I’m so sorry,” long story short a diplomatic situation that was being handled peacefully was interrupted by a consistently tardy wizard who was well educated, but lacking in wordly experience, and raised on tales of romanticized monster slaying and a very black and white view of morality threw everyone’s favorite problem sovler - fireball. We all cracked up as soon as he said sorry out loud. Poor tactical decision, completely in character, well accepted.

I’d do it again, just might not invite the barbarian and another person (attendance issues).

While I agree that rules should be used more as guidelines, the last campaign I was in allowed crits on skill checks, and it my my lock (built partially around filling a “face” role, as everyone else min-maxed for combat) and I felt absolutely useless.

Our negative modifier int and cha barbarian player had a lot of lucky rolls, and thus was better than a cha based character with proficiencies in all the speaking skills…

I often felt left out of all aspects of the game really. Lock spell slots are limited, but is made up for by the short rests… If your party ever takes them. Bah.

Half orc Paladin.

I mean, you could do worse, but you could do better.

Some path of Vengeance AGAINST full blooded orcs who raped his mom could be cool.

Performance isn’t key. But I like performance, lol. I also wasn’t aware of their more recent practices. So thank you.

I’ll have to check out the HP mini. As I said, just barely scratched the surface on researching this, and its more of a thought than a project at the moment, lol.

I just can’t afford (and cool) enterprise level stuff at home. It was free (to me) so no big loss other than buying a better CPU used ~50 bucks. I’ve spent more on worse ideas lol.

Cost and a personal bias, also I’ve seen more helpful communities amongst Linux and FOSS advocates than trying to deal with a big brand.

I’ve done a lot of IT stuff in my life, even before working in IT.

I’ve seen too many issues from big brands, and its usually caused by the company.

I have a Pi 2 from way back. I’ve thrown so many distros at that thing over time, and without fail I don’t run into any problems I didn’t personally create while learning or through human error.

I understand all too well that those big brands have support for businesses, warranties, etc. It makes them cost effective long term for business. At a personal level I just don’t see the benefits outweighing the negatives.

Again, personal bias. Same core reason I avoid apple products, bias, though I mainly dislike apples cost combined with their closed off, well, everything.

I’ve got enterprise level hardware, rack moubtable all that jazz.

Between the cost of power, and the heat it generates (which uses more AC and thus power) its not feasible to run it.

I’m looking into clustering some raspberry pis for a more power (and heat) efficient hardware as my next project. Barely scratched the surface of research though.

So hey, if anyone has any tips or links, it would be much appreciated.

Personally I prefer simple connectors, but I’ve been making cables for 20+ years.

I understand OPs frustration though.

Then again, I’m the type to put in my own drops at home, and include a service loop so I can repunch/crimp whatever I need to without yanking the cable from upstairs to down lol.

Not just ISPs, it can be blocked at the enterprise level in a few clicks.

I was temping at a place during the pandemic when my hospitality based IT job shuttered. With their set up, I could just block a country in a couple clicks.

I didn’t do the clicking, but we were getting hit with a DDoS from a nation we had no business in, and it was just blocked in a matter of minutes once the meetings and BS were attended to. Those took hours over days.

I was more thinking it’s to test the waters.

A buck is affordable to most everyone who has the means to access Twitter.

Of course next year it’ll be Twitter++ subscriptions for 20 bucks a month, as they phase out the 1 dollar tier.

I never cared for Twitter, and watching Musk’s spin on it has been hilarious as someone with a long history in corporate IT.

Pre-edit: At the moment I’m refusing to refer to it by a tween edgelords name~ Musk’s name for it.

Honestly it seems like a lot of Aronofsky films are deeper than they appear at surface level.

Loved Pi back in the day.