It’s interesting how Discord absolutely nukes its own trust by pretending to be more than it is. I loathe discord, to the point I’d use a competitor (not teams) just to evade it. I’m sick of finding a hobby group using it as a Frankenstein forum / chat / info hub when it’s only built for chat.
Discord is fine for this use, but I’m getting used to the distrusting it so often that it blends into reasonable use.
Purple: Magic??
Green: Life/death??
Red: Life/fire??
Blue: Magic/cold??
Honestly the only colour I don’t feel uncertain about is orange, that’s always bad.
Also on the topic of health potions, a great piece of advice I once heard was that if your players are in a foreign land, remove health potions. Give them health biscuits and watch them reconcile with God.
I’m the opposite, I want romance, character death, low magic, a later era (1700s theming more than 800s), safety tools out the wazoo and in-game bigotry that my party can rebel against.
In my own opinion, it’s Disney good.
Early Simpsons was slightly edgy, not in a shock factor way, but in a way where it could explore mature themes without any tonal whiplash, while still being entertaining for kids and adults.
As Fox deteriorated, so did the Simpsons, presumably from bad producing and low funding. Pretty much as soon as the Disney acquisition happened, quality began to climb again, and people have been saying it’s good for a few years.
But I can’t shake the feeling that the real feeling isn’t that it’s good, just that it isn’t bad anymore. It’s as inoffensive and bland as many Disney IPs, but doesn’t carry the true badness of Fox. I don’t trust that Disney is able to give it the ingredients for it to be great again.
Oops, you’re right. It is copying something of its time because it’s all my dad would tell me when watching it growing up, but I can’t remember which film.
In time is absolutely an idea that I wish would get revisited for a TV show.
When I was a kid, for some reason, I loved the original West World movie, which is about 20% high concept and 80% “how do we copy terminator when all we have are a bunch of random Wild West, medieval and classical back lots?”
Obviously a few years ago HBO picked it up for a show, and that first season explores some of the richest philosophy I’ve seen on TV, in the way only Sci-Fi can; by building characters and technology directly around their philosophical takes and stress testing them. Also simultaneously it created an incredibly compelling story and characters. All of this stemmed from the idea “what if there was a wild west theme park manned by perfectly realistic animatronics?”
In Time may not have the cult classic reputation of the first Westworld but it’s got appeal and charm, while being basically only interesting in it’s high concept, and therefore perfect to pull apart and explore an HBO style branching plot. I bet you could get Justin Timberlake to appear in it again too, for added audience appeal. A show like this can also explore multiple characters in different classes, and those who interact with both. It’s just wasn’t that suited to a movie.
Just to ask, nobody understood the full picture of what they were making? Or was there someone who created the concept but intentional obfuscated it from everyone else via bureaucracy?
Green flame blade is a great horde killing spell while still feeling cool. IMO everyone picks booming blade because it’s more useful against single targets, which is more fun against a larger range of enemies, from bosses to your equals, plus thunder is rarely resisted compared to fire.
Some people implement minion rules where overflowing damage from killing a weak enemy flows on to the adjacent enemy, which of course is simplified and incorporated into green flame blade. One of the hardest things to capture in the standard D&D rules is that in fantasy, the warrior (Aragorn, Holga, Achilles) typically cuts down hundreds of mooks while the mage battles the giant powerful monster who cannot be defeated by a sword (Gandalf Vs Balrog). In D&D, either it’s totally inversed or the mage is better at both, largely because spells like fireball suit both situations better.
Green flame blade is a very easy option to balance this scale, albeit via magic.
I’m on a GTX 980ti and my plan is to pick up a 4000 series, maybe a 4080 super, when the 6000 series is announced.
To be fair, my 980ti has been amazing at punching unreasonably far above where it should.
I do think a huge world with an engaging and dense design can still be made worse with size. In some games like Skyrim, Breath of the Wild or GTA 5, you could probably drop me anywhere and I’d know where I was, half due to good and differing region design and half because the map isn’t that big.
Back in 2015 I’d dream of a GTA 5 expansion that adds San Francisco and Las Vegas to the map, turning the north and east of the map in to a 500 yard straight of water, but in reality, two more large cities and their surroundings suburbs and wilderness would have never kept it’s memorability like the first region.
Honestly I think these games need more points of interest that are not marked on the map whatsoever, and don’t matter towards 100% completion.
I eventually went through the Witcher 3 post game and got every single marker but it was basically background work while I listened to audiobooks, I didn’t come across anything interesting for hours. However I do acknowledge that those markers aren’t necessary meant to be sought out, but stumbled upon.
It it to wait 30 mins then do it every 10, and pop it in startup, those were the days.
The other was Free_Cupholder.EXE. I miss disk drives for this reason more than for actual use.
The execs probably get away fine from it as well, even if the company sinks, they’ll end up high up somewhere else.
Online service games are just peak venture capitalism, grinding a small studio to dust and causing massive misery followed by unemployment for a 1/50 shot at making a money printer.
I’ve never understood what twitter style websites are actually for. They seem to have a tiny niche of celebrities and known personalities making a statement with no reasonable conversation stemming from it.
I don’t understand how that structure was once one of the largest social media platforms in the first place.
This is Call of Duty 22.
I used to play call of duty way back in the day and fell off around the time Black Ops 2 came out, mostly because I felt like there are too many games and I didn’t need another black ops.
There’s now more Black Ops games than I’ve bought games this year.
To be fair, modern AI voices sound pretty real. Making it artificial would have been a tell in it’s own right.
Also the toxicity that is implied to exist by this post is pretty rare really. Even back when I was using Reddit, toxicity generally sank to the bottom of comment sections, and even more so here. When I got into D&D close to the beginning of 5e, some online voices on YouTube for example carried this toxicity but nowadays, most voices are far newer and friendly.
In general, most people are more interested in what happens at their table instead of all tables, and the rules are just guidelines to aid that.
Do you mean should add RCS as in they’re expected to, or should add RCS as in “that would be wise”?
I don’t mind it being deep, just don’t fill it with your actions and deeds. A big part of fun for TTRPGs is ‘play away from the table’, which for the players is typically making art, backstory or builds for current or future characters. Most long backstories I read don’t invalidate a level 1 character but mostly explore values, just as my real life story could be as deep as I choose to write it and I’d not even have the skills to be level 1.
My suggestion is:
Get people together for a session 0. Only pitch the campaign and tone then, if not construct it collaboratively too.
Hand out pieces of paper or card face down, have each player take 1, and ensure there is one between each player. These cards say Love, ally, rival, or enemy.
Explain that players should make an NPC for their backstory that matches this word, and should make a shared NPC with the person next to them based on the card between them.
Now let them take another card of their choice. They can either make another NPC with this, or use it to make the relationship to one of their shared NPCs asymmetrical.
They can design their NPCs and backstory now or before session 1, up to them.
Finally, explore what the players can choose to do to contribute between sessions to the game. If they don’t do anything, that’s fine, but they should have a way to meaningful contribute to something. Typically I encourage world building and cultural lore, such as unique foods and why that has a thematic resonance.
This is hard to structure, I had a player who was a former forever DM, who played a knowledgeable librarian in a former monster hunter guild. I asked her to make some monster statblocks, as she’d know them inside and out in character.
My advice to players:
Make your backstory show that your character has done no huge deeds yet, and most importantly, have everything that matters in it revolve around NPCs. Not just is this the best drama, but NPCs can move, join factions, be redeemed, betray you, die and everything else.
That cost halfling village you design that perfectly exemplifies your character, but will never be seen in this urban campaign halfway across the continent? Make the most important part of it the mayor’s daughter who happens to be your childhood friend.
The strange necklace that made you stronger but more angry when you wore it? The final time you saw it was when your brother stormed out of your co-owned business after a bitter argument.
The lord who helped you smuggle your liquor into the city? That’s the same lord that wrongfully imprisoned the player character next to you.
One of my favourite scenes from a campaign came when a player, after spending a session getting the chance to meet with a resistance leader, turned to the others and said “this is my ex-wife”. That whole dynamic was interesting too, as both had come from a warrior culture and initially parted due to neither being the “strong warrior”, now both trying to fight against that same faction a decade later.
My all time favourite NPC was a talented tailor in an urban campaign, who owed one player character a favour and was generally fond of them all. Nothing like the party having a go to guy for fancy or silly outfit amendments.