TBH, 5e hates secret roles. (yes, i know this is not a 5e specific post, just a personal gripe)

There are way too many abilities that trigger on a failed roll or can be used after a roll that this kind of play style straight up conflicts with.

One of the worst ones for this kind of thing is the soulknife rogue’s Psi-bolstered knack (that they get at level 3), with both triggers explicitly on a failed roll and refunds if the extra dice if it doesnt make it succeed so you cant even include mystery if the reroll made it a success.

Dex would be super important for them too. Cannons of all flavors aim with dex due to being ranged weapons.

I have issue with almost all of your points.

• Dex & wisdom would be the important stats for sailors IMO (i am not saying strength and con are useless, but just not as important, they would be 3rd and 4th IMO).
• Darkvision wouldn’t do a damn thing, its range would barely get off the side of the boat.
• Poison resistance is not disease resistance.
• Some spoiled food would be poison, but some would also be disease (depends on how it spoiled and the food).
• In order for short stature to be relevant to ship design, they would need a completely custom designed ship tailor made for them, which would have benifits but sounds unlikely for what pirates would be sailing. (That being said, a dwarven merchant ship designed speciifcally for their stature would be a massive pain for normal height characters to battle on)
• lower speed means they swim slower too which means going overboard is even worse.

EDIT: dwarven submarines!

• short stature actually hugely relevant as submarines are notoriously cramped
• darkvision means no need for lights in the sub, beneficial for multiple (admittedly somewhat minor) reasons.
• honestly no clue what stats would be important for a sub, no argument here
• toxic gasses less of a problem thanks to poison resistance
• Dont even need to go to the surface, a fully underwater submarine port could be connected to existing dwarven settlements near the ocean with the correct design and planning.
• Also benefits from legendary dwarven engineering.

One thing that will be the biggest general qol for your new build is likely to get a M.2 NVMe for your games and OS

Civ 6 is pretty flexible and dwarf fortress will run on a potato, basically anything remotely in the gaming market will play them fine. Civ 7 is more intense, but being turn based cpu tends not to be the bottleneck

Do you have any preferences (distro, cpu/gpu manufacturer, etc) and a budget? Most of the games on your list I am familiar with and will run on damn near anything remotely modern.

Lacing direction, with the fairly low requirements (from what i recognize), and assuming you are price conscious id suggest you poke around the used gaming PC market (either gamer friends, or failing that online), which will also completely bypass the tariff issue too.

PopOS is pretty solid for linux gaming and has a distribution specifically for Nvidia too which handles most of the headache with Nvidia if you go that route.

EDIT: Poked around the requirement pages of the ones i wasn’t familiar with, i didn’t see a single game that had a requirement of anything newer than 10 year old hardware, depending on your friend network, you could get a computer that could play those games well for a song. Civ 7, your ‘evenutally’ game, is the only thing listed that has strongish requirements, and would be what i would pay attention to if you are aiming higher.

Whats your use case?

Was somewhat recently considering a linux laptop myself and ended up deciding the steamdeck fit my needs well.

A dock + portable keyboard & mouse for when i need to do typing or w/e, and a fun handheld console for when i want fun.

That being said, depending on what your “older” laptop is, it might not actually be much stronger, or it might be wildly overpowered for what you need.

I wonder if the steam deck will work for you. Its sacrifice of physical keyboard for portability will probably be the deal breaking issue if I were to guess, but not sure. I’ve seen plenty of people use them as computers for various field projects not game related. It’s cheapest is 350 if you don’t need a lot storage on the device and the storage is upgradeable. It’s compatible with normal USB c hubs for if you do need a physical keyboard or w/e. There are definitely some hangups that may make it undesirable and from what you described some of them are definitely possible, ie if you want to pull it out in the field and do a lot of typing without setting up a dock and whatnot, it won’t work for your needs. But if the fieldwork with it is mostly just start a program and connect a USB data source, and most typing will be somewhere with a desk (home office or w/e) then it may work.

I was personally looking for a Linux compatible laptop a while back (admittedly I asked the wrong community), and eventually came to the conclusion that my wife’s steam deck was actually a great solution for my needs, the main times I needed a keyboard I could just setup a simple dock and plug one it (though if you get a USBC or Bluetooth keyboard the only use for the dock is for holding it upright or additional peripherals), and most of my on the go use of it doesn’t need a lot of typing.

Very similar here, windows 11 being shittier and forced further pissing me off as windows 10 was supposed to be their last release shifting to a service model.

I’ve still yet to see a convincing reason windows 11 is an improvement in any way over 10.

Then steam decks came out with a solid proton version, and my only reason to stay on windows evaporated. I didn’t even try dual booting windows.

Works great for moon druids too, to give them a ranged option in wild shape.

Honestly, if they caught the hint, understood what it meant, and took action, that would be a miracle and would totally be worth some cheese.

It does, but giving a warlock enough dex (which considering they dont get heavy armor prof is reasonable) to pass a dex save occasionally and like 18 hp is all you would need for this to be a major issue.

You keep doing that to older DnD players too, except you drop hints that the enemies are in a cult that has been giving them power and when the wizard does fireball them, the wizard gets hit by a dozen hellish rebukes from all the young warlocks they just hit.

As written in the spell description of dispel magic, a 3rd level dispel magic also can dispel a 9th level spell with only a check, that didn’t stop them from writing some things that explicitly stated that dispel only works for that effect if cast at 9th level.

Reborn tabaxi artificer armorer with a mechanically different though RP similar “living armor”. The living armor is the reason i was “reborn” as its keeping me alive longer but the curse of the living armor is of divine nature as i stole it from an evil cult, so removing it required a monumental effort (high level NPCs basically didnt exist).

The character reached an actual satisfying conclusion as there was an “enlightenment” challenge we managed to find that was heavily skill based and artificers are obscenely good at skill challenges (dm also liked tool checks where relevant, and was lenient with the skill training rules, reborn helped too, resulted in being able to roll d20+stat+prof*expertise+int+guidance(d4)+reborn(d6) on checks i needed to push). The enlightenment ultimately lead to access to enough divine power to break both the curse of the armor and of my undeath.

Ultimately though, despite how fun the RP around it was, it was one of my more OP characters considering how much it trivialized skill checks which that DM really loved.

I tried and failed to tone it down with my next character, which thanks to party dynamic became the single most OP BS i ever made even if it wasnt crazy good alone. Wanted to make a magic infiltrator and went with changeling + aberrant mind sorcerer. Ended up getting a shadowfell shard too. Mindsliver leading to a subtle quickened shadowfell shard boosted CC spell (fav was psychic lance since it wasnt concentration and almost nothing is immune to incapacitated, though hold person, and hypnotic pattern, and the like were also thrown frequently too) was an obscenely powerful combo, and since another new player made a DPS rogue+gloomstalker build, the only way for anything to have any chance of living is lots of legendary resistance and an obscene health pool. This was also a crazy fun build, that the power of it ended up being its downfall as everything we fought ended up being several CR higher than anyone of our level had any right to tangle with. (also yes, i know you can’t normally subtle + quicken, read the Psionic Sorcery power of aberrant sorcerers)

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Do they just want attention? Or are they malicious actors from those that consider Lemmy competition?

I’ve played 2 campaigns that went from 1 to 20, both became a chore late game just trying to keep track of all the items and threads. IMO, a game should stay bound to 2 tiers at most (the tiers being 1-4, 5-10, 11-16, and 17-20), going from peasant to world ender is just too much baggage. Maybe 3 tiers if you do want a complex and difficult to manage, but still possible to manage end game.

Extra credit here being that you are a shit load more likely to actually complete the story you want to tell

To be fair, I didn’t really focus on the biggest annoyance I’ve had with spaces in the file name: going between terminals and the GUI, most filenames you can copy and paste with wild abandon, but filenames with spaces always require special care, sometimes stripping the auto completed escaped space from file names from the terminal, or quoting or escaping the space when taking one from the GUI.

You are correct, that is how I worked around the issue and why I mentioned that work around in my original post