I’dv deleted the default, it’s never come back.

Oh, I’d only do that if the players are similarly powergaming. If they’re not it’s unfair, if they are the base game balance becomes koring. The challenge should scale to the party!

Pretty much how I DM.

Bosses have prep time. Glyph of warding can be cast on a page in a book, with trigger conditions specified by the caster. E.g. when a good-aligned creature with ≥8 int comes within 10ft of it.

Explosive runes are 5d8 damage (dex save for half) per glyph.

Nothing says it can’t be cast on more than one page.

A 50 page book with a glyph on every page means 100 dex saves for 5d8 each. Evasion is nice but you’ll fail a save eventually.

Your “friendly” neighborhood lich has had time to prepare dozens of these. That tempting library full of magical books might just be a TPK.

As a “consolation prize” at least the player gets to roll 100 d20s at once! Multiple times if they survive the first book.

Budgerigars (small parrots).

They’re active, smart, and social. They fly.

So I made them a flight cage that takes up most of the room they’re in. I’d prefer a full walk-in aviary, but don’t have room in my apartment.

Cleaning isn’t bad, I just shop-vac out the litter tray & refill it with a 20lb bag of corn cob bits. Fresh food in the mornings, take it out & replace with pellets around noon. Clean water daily. Millet treats when I let them out (about an hour per day to interact with them).

Feathers get everywhere when they molt. And feather dust. Their room has its own HEPA filter.

Vet appointments are more expensive for exotics than cats & dogs. There are fewer exotic vets, and I always go to a board certified avian vet. Boarding when I go on vacation is also more expensive (about $50/day), especially since they’re flighted.

They’re not anywhere near as loud or destructive as larger parrots, but that doesn’t mean they’re quiet. Just means they might not damage your hearing from the next room. They wake up with the dawn, and let you know about it.

They’re extremely sensitive to airborne toxins (avian respiration is rather different from mammalian). That means absolutely no teflon cookware use, no air fresheners, etc.

Plan 9 From Outer Space.

Or anything Ed Wood directed, really.

DoH looks identical to normal website traffic. If it’s slow, it’s probably the DoH provider and not the ISP.

The players know that. Their characters don’t.

You mean SNI, not ESNI. ESNI is the Encrypted Server Name Indication that gets around that, though the newer ECH (Encrypted Client Hello) is better in many ways. Not all sites support either though.

Intimidation is a charisma skill. A hulking half-orc barbarian with violent tendencies is less intimidating than the party bard.

As a piper, obviously, the bard could threaten to play the bagpipes out of tune so I can see where WotC were going with making it a Cha skill, but still.

Many cameras these days have AI autofocus for subject detection. Phone cameras use AI image enhancemnnt by default.

I use wireless headphones. However, I like to have non-distracting background music at work (open-plan office), and I won’t put my personal files (music) on a company-owned laptop. So I run a wire from my phone’s headphone jack to the laptop line-in, and can thus play music without any mixing of data.

It isn’t that hard.

A soft-G gif believer! Heretic!

This poem by Jef Raskin includes several dozen exceptions:

“I before E
Except after C,
Unless pronounced A
As in ‘neighbor’ or ‘weigh’”
Education is forfeit for reinforcing such rules!
Sound a feisty reveille while eyeing the schools!
Neither will our heirs be agreeing to deceptions
Once seeing, herein, these sufficient exceptions:
We were seized by a feeling
For fleeing on the ceiling
To a leisurely meal
With Keith, Sheila, and Neil
We drank madeira, so foreign, in steins
Along with a surfeit of weird blueish wines
Being foolish, took codeine, ate ancient proteins
Therein guaranteeing these ogreish scenes
Wherein we’re canoeing to a new sovereign state
While deicing a kaleidoscope on a hot jadeite plate
And kneeing obeisance to an overseeing king
Our plebeian lips kissed his counterfeit ring.
Then we unveiled their sleight-of-hand trick
Deifying a heifer, with effect atheistic
And falling from the heights with a loud seismic crunch
We reignited the nonpareils we had heisted for lunch.
So I before E
Except after C
Unless pronounced A?
False decreeing, I say!

Tasha Yar dies due to the Exxon Valdez.

I can’t remember a particular first game. Nethack, various MUDs, Descent 1, Starcraft, and Unreal Tournament (1999) were all reasonably early.

Descent 1 here. I miss that series.

Knot Tying. Sure, there’s an International Guild of Knot Tyers, but it’s a rather small group.

Good old Magic User class.

PC.

2TiB NVME, 1GiB EFI boot, the rest split between NTFS for Windows and ZFS for NixOS.

Second 2TiB NVME.

8TB HDD for bulk storage

24TB NAS (4x 8TB HDDs in a RAID-5) for storing raw photo backups.

Several flies will seek you out to bite you. Horse flies, for example. Not to mention ticks & lice & mites & other parasites.