I played it when I had a free trial to gamepass. 0/10 did not enjoy.
I wandered out into the woods in my jumpsuit with a baseball bat. I was attacked by a pack of dogs. It took me a while to get my bearings, but despite a long time flailing I defeated the dogs and suffered no serious injuries. Not a fan of paper tigers like that at all.
But more generally it felt kind of aimless. When I did find something to fight, it wasn’t fun. Progress felt slow.
As a Christian most of the circles I’m around are pretty chill…no stone-cold fundamentalists. But I have been around people (and even had family members) who are 100% convinced that rock music is evil and will lead people to engage in witchcraft and draw pentagrams all over their home....
Have you by chance read Dante’s Divine Comedy? Or Milton’s Paradise Lost? Just to name two works that are widely considered Fucking Classic off the top of my head. Do you have much background in literature?
One, those are famous works that used characters they didn’t create. Just off the top of my head. Also The Aeneid, which I haven’t read but the internet is telling me is basically Ascended Fanfiction.
Two, you don’t really seem to have an informed opinion on this topic. Which is, like, fine. Most of us don’t know most things. But maybe consider there’s good reasons many people are disagreeing with you.
My experience is that you’re much more likely to succeed if you find people that want to play and make friends with them than you are making your friends play.
If you pitch to your existing friends, they’re more likely to say yes because they’re your friends. They want to hang out. But they might just be saying that to be nice or because they’re afraid of confrontation. They might not realize you’re looking for a commitment on par with joining a sports team. If they don’t already play RPGs, they might not know they’re going to have to do some reading and writing. A lot of people just don’t read and creatively write. That can be difficult and embarrassing.
On the other hand, if you post online or in a local game store, you can find people who are ready to go. People who can already do your schedule and also know the game you want to play. There’s a small risk of getting a weirdo, but a quick screening catches a lot of that.
For most games, three hours is about the minimum to get anything done. It takes some time to get settled and ramp up into the game.
More than five hours is typically too long. Most people lose focus or get bored. Or just have other stuff in their life blocking that many consecutive hours.
If this was the brain to galaxy brain meme, the bottom one might be “a group of 3+ players who want to play more than just DND”
There are so many things I actively dislike with DND, but it’s way harder to find people to play other games. Luckily my Friday group has agreed to try other stuff. We’re currently doing this “year zero engine” thing and it’s great. Whole sessions go by and I have nothing bad to say about the rules. (I think the willpower rules might be kind of janky, but nothing is perfect)
Next up is a forged in the dark game someone wants to run, and then maybe a short go of Vampire.
I would be moderately peeved if the game just decided to let me win. Clearing the sword saint in sekiro was a triumph. If the game made it easier because I was taking a while, it would cheapen the win.
Some people don’t enjoy the challenge and would probably enjoy this, though. Utterly alien to me, but they exist.
For example, most people don’t want to die to the same boss over and over again. That’s just not good gameplay and it’s overall a waste of time.
This is a very subjective opinion stated as a objective fact. I think Sekiro, for example, is great gameplay, even when lady butterfly kicked my ass for hours.
Some people would like the difficulty automatically changing. I would hate it. I do want to lose to the same boss over and over until I get it right sometimes. That’s part of what makes clearing sekiro such a triumph.
The other from soft games are similar, but they have leveling and coop as difficulty adjustments.
But I do recognize that not everyone likes this. Even I don’t like it in every game, probably.
I got an iPhone free from work. Used it until it literally fell apart. (I didn’t drop it or anything. The screen just slowly came off. Weird. Not a fan). Several years.
Bought an android for cheap. Used it until it wouldn’t hold a charge. Also several years.
Bought a new android. Plan to use this until it falls apart. Several years and counting.
A new phone just isn’t on my radar. There’s nothing I need out of a phone that this one isn’t doing.
all of those things only harm the human experience and end up making people live less!! no drug!! why do people like these things if they only harm your body… i don’t understand… gluten is bad for your heart too
Alcohol in low to moderate quantities helps people in social situations. It makes people more, how to say, myopic. A little drink and you don’t think as much about long term consequences. This makes it easier for people to talk about some things, or take risks like asking your date if they want to make out. Excessive drink will fuck you up, though, especially over a long time period.
Drugs are many and varied. I don’t really use any so I can’t speak to them, but generally they make people feel great. There’s a huge cost to pay for some of them, but people chose that for various reasons.
Alcohol in low to moderate quantities helps people in social situations. It makes people more, how to say, myopic. A little drink and you don’t think as much about long term consequences. This makes it easier for people to talk about some things, or take risks like asking your date if they want to make out. Excessive drink will fuck you up, though, especially over a long time period.
Drugs are many and varied. I don’t really use any so I can’t speak to them, but generally they make people feel great. There’s a huge cost to pay for some of them, but people chose that for various reasons.
I’m still slightly mad that everyone wanted to use AIM instead of ICQ, even though icq was better. It had offline messaging and you could change your display name, neither of which aim supported.
Anyone younger than like 30 probably has no idea that those were noteworthy features at one time. You could only send someone a message if they were actively connected at the same time as you.
I have a hypothesis I can’t really test because I’m not into men, but I feel like more men are unattractive than women. I’m going to guess it’s because a lot of men put zero effort in.
I have not seen it, but in some cases one might confuse effortless effort for visible effort.
Effortless effort is pretty universally appealing in most facets of life. The person who casually rides a bike up a hill generally looks better than someone who’s pumping and struggling.
In my mind, with appearance, someone who looks like they’re trying too hard often suffers that as a penalty to how they’re evaluated. But the person who did put effort in without it being obvious will probably come out ahead.
See also: men who say women look better without makeup. Woman comes in to work without makeup. Men respond with “oh my God are you ok? You look unwell”. The woman was wearing makeup, but it was subtle and men didn’t notice.
Though there’s also the halo effect and intimacy. Someone in sweatpants can ping as Hot because that signals intimacy. Different facet of the evaluation.
Someone who’s really good at guitar will ping Hot because of the halo effect. That is- when someone is good at one thing, we think they’re good at everything, where being hot is a thing.
Always use feature flags for risky work! It would have been broken for a lot longer if I didn’t add one and they had to re-deploy the site. The site was continuously pushed all day, but building and deploying could take 45+ mins
This reminds me of the old saying: everyone has a test environment. Some people are lucky enough to have a separate production environment, too.
Also my database tool (the one built into pycharm) warns and requires you to hit submit a second time if you try a delete or update without a where. Discovered this on local where I really did want to update every record, but it’s a good setting.
Finished my legendary light armor. I only really play light armor classes, so I’m not planning on making the others yet. 4 pieces from spvp, 2 from wvw.
Thinking of making the legendary runes. I’m like 2500 gold short to make all six (I don’t count the underwater as necessary). It’s probably overkill. But it would be nice.
I might also make a second conflux. I’ve got ascended rings falling out of my ass, and being able to salvage all of them would free up some space.
I’m not sure if I should make another legendary weapon. I have a staff, greatsword, and dagger, and those cover most of what I play. Might wait to see what the new weapons are like.
Also doing world completion for funsies on a third character. At about 75%
The U.S. Supreme Court's decision to take up a case on the abortion pill mifepristone has unnerved Republicans from swing districts.The court's decision last year to overturn Roe v. Wade limited GOP gains in last year's midterm elections and is expected to again play a major role in next year's elec...
There’s this trope “only Democrats have agency”. It’s where we look at Democrats for failing to do things or making choices, but Republicans are just like automatic forces of nature. We don’t hold them accountable for their actions.
Oh, sure, we probably agree. A distressing amount of people have really bad takes on sex, sex education, gender, history, relationships… a lot of things, really. Conservatives especially have egregiously bad views.
I remember when I first saw This Film Is Not Yet Rated, and I talked about it with some coworkers. An older woman and a younger woman who sat next to me in the office. Both of them 100% felt that they’d rather their kid watch a movie where people’s heads got blown off than one where someone got head. I don’t remember their exact argument (this was many years ago), but I’m pretty sure it was such an axiomatic belief for them it was difficult to articulate why.
I’m not sure what you mean. Parents are ideally involved in raising their children, but there’s no guarantee they’ll be involved, good at teaching, teaching anything true, alive, or anything. Public education is important.
Yeah I used to leave my computer on all the time. Then I realized that’s really wasteful. I shut it down nightly. I shut it down if I’m going to be away from it for like an hour.
My work laptop on the other hand. I don’t know if I should blame docker or macos or what, but I tell it to go sleep and it just won’t. I don’t want to shut it all down because starting local stuff up again is a mild pain.
Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.
There was a book about authoritarian personalities I was reading a while ago that was fascinating and depressing. It had a study that showed right wing authoritarians are also willing to hunt down themselves
Suppose the federal government, some time in the future, passed a law outlawing various religious cults. Government officials then stated that the law would only be effective if it were vigorously enforced at the local level and appealed to everyone to aid in the fight against these cults.
[…]
Who can ’em be? Nearly everybody, it turns out. I started with a proposition to outlaw Communists and found authoritarian followers would be relatively likely to join that posse. Ditto for persecuting homosexuals, and ditto for religious cults, “radicals” and journalists the government did not like. So I tried to organize a posse that liberals would join, to go after the Ku Klux Klan. But high RWAs crowded out everyone else for that job too. Then I offered as targets the very right-wing Canadian Social Credit Party, the Confederation of Regions Party, and the mainstream Progressive Conservative Party of Canada. These were the parties of choice for most authoritarian followers at the time, yet high RWAs proved more willing to persecute even the movements they liked than did others.
Finally, just to take this to its ludicrous extreme, I asked for reactions to a “law to eliminate right-wing authoritarians.” (I told the subjects that right-wing authoritarians are people who are so submissive to authority, so aggressive in the name of authority, and so conventional that they may pose a threat to democratic rule.) RWA scale scores did not connect as solidly with joining this posse as they had in the other cases. Surely some of the high RWAs realized that if they supported this law, they were being the very pople whom the law would persecute, and the posse should therefore put itself in jail. But not all of them realized this, for authoritarian followers still favored, more than others did, a law to persecute themselves. You can almost hear the circuits clanking shut in their brains: “If the government says these people are dangerous, then they’ve got to be stopped.”
Yes, but someone is probably going to play a long rest class and force the entire game to center around that cadence. And the long rest cadence kind of sucks for me.
That seems pretty easy to design around. You could have powers that ramp up over turns instead of being nothing for several turns and then the big effect.
So like a maelstrom spell. The second round reduces movement speed of enemies, the third round does small damage, the third round immobilizes, the fourth round does big damage.
You can tweak a lot of variables there to make it tactically interesting. How many rounds before the first effect. How good are the intermediate effects. Consequences of being interrupted. Choices to make mid-channel. It could be a very cool way of doing spellcasters and it doesn’t need to be per-rest at all.
Spells that need a longer out of combat prep time would also be interesting, like your magical trebuchet.
Honestly if I was going to do a dnd-like game, sorcerers would be like my ramp up and wizards would be like your trebuchet. Wizards would be bad if they were surprised but they could build very specific spells ahead of time.
Fate is a general purpose RPG that doesn’t have any assumptions about a rest cadence. There are more specific games that use its rules (I think there’s a dresden files one that’s popular). Just the core rules work fine, but do require players to be more narratively minded and synchronized for it to really sing.
I don’t know gurps very well but I don’t think it’s built around rests at all.
I don’t think pbta games are generally built around a long rest cadence, either. They tend to have a lot of mixed success on ability use, rather than a hard limit.
The wod/cofd games aren’t centered around long rests, either. In vampire: the requiem, for example, the cool vampire powers are pretty much all at-will, require blood, or sometimes willpower. Blood is mostly narratively limited - you can get it whenever you can find someone to bite, generally. Willpower comes back over time but faster if you hit narrative beats. But generally if you have, say, Dominate, you can just do the vampire dominating gaze on people. The games typically aren’t played as dungeon crawlers though, and the limits tend to be more social or “should you?” rather than DND’s “can you?”.
One of the problems with the long rest cadence is the first fight is typically not a real threat. It’s only the last one where you’re strapped for resources that has real at hand tension. That kind of sucks, honestly. You see posts sometimes where people complain about filler fights that are just there to drain resources are kind of boring.
Making everything per-encounter is probably the easiest fix for a dnd-like game. Make some classes ramp-up, some ramp-down, and some steady.
If you let players take too many long rests in DND 5e it fucks over short-rest and no-rest classes. Long rest people get more Fun Stuff than everyone else. Feels bad.
Edit: also it does weird things to the story pacing. Any time sensitivity gets weird if the players are going a five minute adventuring day
Random encounters aren’t the most interesting thing to do at the table for most people. Design choices that funnel the play time into them then seems like a poor idea.
If you’re playing the game just for the combat itself then it’s probably fine. But if you’re playing for any sort of story then fighting a random pack of spiders probably pays off less than fighting plot relevant stuff.
Disagree. If the party just uses Fly to get over the cliff instead of coming up with an interesting solution, that’s kind of boring. It also makes it harder for non-casters to shine.
Second, I don’t really like when the world scales with the party. The DM changing the world because the wizard blew all his slots stupidly feels bad. Why even have the choice of spending resources over a long period if everything is just going to scale with us?
Also it kind of sucks when you do get to the big boss and the wizard is tapped out because he’s been real loose with his slots
You touch on an important point. The D&D long rest resource resource management system can make sense when you’re doing a dungeon crawl and you’re actually into the whole “do we have enough supplies to go deeper or do we turn back thing?” But my understanding is that’s not how most people actually play. There was a poll going around a couple months ago that revealed most D&D groups do one fight per long rest.
If you’re just doing one fight per long rest, you’re doing per-encounter powers badly. That screws over the on-paper short-rest classes, and forces the story’s pacing to be slow to account for the “ok you sleep for another day” thing.
Yeah it sounds like your “random tables” still hook into the story there. That’s not the “random encounter” I was thinking of exactly. I was thinking more of the “You’re traveling through the woods when you encounter… four spiders and a dire badger!” Those tend to be kind of shallow.
Personally I prefer to come up with scenarios and not roll on a table at all. Like, instead of thinking about “the bandits came back successfully” and also “they came back injured” I can just pick one and bake it more.
But this is kind of drifting off the topic I was trying to describe. I was objecting to the “Well we need 4-8 medium encounters for the game’s assumptions to hold, so I guess you’re fighting some random bears now” thing. Doing encounters just to wear down the party’s resources is a weird design in my mind.
It’s funny how there are so many people that are like “ew 4th edition”, but there are also many threads where people propose fixes for 5e that reinvent 4th edition.
Barely making it through is more fun than casually strolling through
The way D&D is designed, you’ll very often stroll through the first couple encounters of the day. You have way more resources than you need to handle them, since a medium encounter is only designed to take like 1/6th out of you. The last fight or two in the adventuring day might be extra tense, but you have to do some filler first. I don’t like that. I’d rather have all the conflicts be meaningful.
Now, in 5e you could just run all deadly encounters, but this quickly creates several problems. Short-rest and no-rest classes don’t get to shine, for one thing. Secondly, if you’re doing a lot of long rests you can’t really have time sensitive plots.
You could instead run a different rules system that has the desired feel from the start instead of putting the round peg in the square hole. But as I said elsewhere in the thread, D&D is so mega popular it sucks all the air out of the room. It’s hard to find players for other games. Hard to find community discussion for other games. Plus, if you take someone who’s only ever played D&D and plop them into another kind of game, that’s often a difficult transition.
This is how most magic works in Unknown Armies, by the way. That game is fantastic and just drips with flavor and insight (2nd edition anyway. I haven’t read 3rd)
If your book mage wants to charge up, he has to go find some rare valuable books and add them to his collection. If the chaos mage wants a charge, she has to start taking some risks. You can do some crazy things with a major charge, but getting one is probably work. Or win Russian roulette if you’re a chaos mage.
In practice it can be difficult with a large group where everyone has their own obsession. It provides good down time options and plot hooks, though.
Someone else said similar in here, but as I said to them: that wouldn’t really solve the problem. Someone’s probably going to play a long-rest class, and the game will still have to be centered on that cadence.
Though a game of no long rest classes does sound pretty good. Fighter, rogue, warlock… different warlock? Pinning everything to short rests I think would work much better for how people actually want to play.
That aside, there’s a whole universe of other ways to balance games than per-rest. DND mostly just has the one and frankly I don’t enjoy it.
I’d love to play other systems. My weekly group finally agreed to try other things on the regular, and so far everyone has really enjoyed it. I think the core engine is called Year Zero? Honestly the guy running it maybe did a smart thing by giving the group a short Google doc with the rules summarized instead of the actual rule book. Getting players to read is embarrassing difficult.
Also, are you me? Because I have often half jokingly said that you could just change from 5e to another system and the average player wouldn’t notice because they’re so bad at the rules anyway.
Fate is my game crush. It’s a general purpose RPG. And i know some people cram DND into any setting but it usually doesn’t work great. Fate is actually designed to work for any setting.
It’s very open and honestly I think requires more engagement from the players. If you have a bunch of wallflowers who look at their phone and then just say “I attack” on their turn, fate isn’t going to go well.
But if you have good players it can be fantastic.
The core of the game is “Aspects”. They’re free form short phrases about your character. “Fresh Faced Wizard”, “Last Knight of the Silver Shield”, “Royal Accountant”, or whatever. Those inform what your character can do, and you can invoke them to get a bonus on rolls.
The dice system is also more to my taste. It’s a fixed dice pool, so you tend to roll average results more than outliers. 1d20 means every outcome on the die is equally likely. I kind of hate that.
It also has better rules for succeeding at a cost. DND just doesn’t have any rules for that. The DM can handwaive something but it’s not codified at all.
It encourages anymore writer’s room approach where players are encouraged to add to the story. More than just being zeroed in on their character. Some people hate this. I like it.
I could go on, but I’m on my phone and supposed to be working. Fate is really cool though.
The world of darkness / Chronicles of darkness games are also very good. I like cofd more but I think that’s uncommon. Very clean dice system. Honestly could do fantasy with it without much changes.
I like that stats and health are pretty tightly constrained. You know that on average a person has 7 health. So you can be pretty sure that if you have a hammer that does two damage, and your dice pool gives you on average two hits, you’ll probably take them out of the fight pretty quick. Compare with DND where that bandit might have 8 HP or 20 or 40. There’s not really a way to gauge what you’re dealing with. Some people like it. It feels bad to me. Like the worst kind of video game where the red goblins have twice the hp as the green ones just-because.
The rules for supernaturals are also pretty good. Mage just blows DND magic out of the water with the flexibility and depth.
There’s also blades in the dark and related powered by the apocalypse games. They’re popular. They have a pretty simple but effective dice pool system. I’m not a huge fan but they’re worth checking out.
I could go on but I really should go back to work. Been fussing with this between tasks all day, heh.
In my last DND game, where the wizard was extremely fast and loose with his spell slots, the DM gave him a free long rest in the middle of the final boss fight. It kind of sort of made sense for story reasons but not really. I was honestly kind of pissed. Like on the one hand the wizard was having fun. On the other like what’s the point if we’re going to do that. I’ve been here doing the tactical “this is how we can solve this problem with the fewest resources spent” and no one else is, and he gets this? Ugh.
Even Baldur’s gate 3 betrayed me like this. There’s a lengthy sequence that I did with like no resources spent. It was slow and cautious but I knew there was a big boss at the end of it. And then they put a fucking full-rest fountain right before the boss fight. I could’ve been fireballing everything instead of playing smart!
When it was my turn to DM, before the scene I just complained about, that wizard was practically begging for a long rest. No sir. You get multiple hard encounters and a race against enemies. Maybe don’t blow Hold Person on the fleeing civilian when the rogue has expertise and is ready to grapple next time.
I’m much happier now that we’re playing a different system.
17 million people have played Fallout 76 (fallout.bethesda.net)
Does "Rock music is evil / of the devil" have racist roots?
As a Christian most of the circles I’m around are pretty chill…no stone-cold fundamentalists. But I have been around people (and even had family members) who are 100% convinced that rock music is evil and will lead people to engage in witchcraft and draw pentagrams all over their home....
X-Men Games Will Be Sony Exclusives For More Than A Decade, Leak Reveals (kotaku.com)
And Tigger Too - Danby Draws Comics (i0.wp.com)
Source: And Tigger Too - Danby Draws Comics...
My world shall go unused (lemmy.world)
Sony Patent Aims To Change Game Difficulty In Real Time As You Play (insider-gaming.com)
What is the worst case of keeping up with the Joneses that you have seen?
If you were to give feedback to the Devs of "Life", what would you say?
why do people like cigarettes, alcohol, drugs, and sugar and gluten??
all of those things only harm the human experience and end up making people live less!! no drug!! why do people like these things if they only harm your body… i don’t understand… gluten is bad for your heart too
"Millennial lingo" by Shen Comic (file.coffee)
Source: Webtoon - RSS
I can cook at least (lemmy.world)
Lemmy, what are some of your "oh shit" work stories?
What are you currently working towards?
What kind of goal are you working towards? Legendary weapon or specific skin, please share! I’m kind of looking for new inspirations😅
Worst-Reviewed Call Of Duty Ever Has Already Outsold Zelda: TotK (kotaku.com)
Vulnerable Republicans nervous as 'tone deaf' Supreme Court takes up new abortion case (www.rawstory.com)
The U.S. Supreme Court's decision to take up a case on the abortion pill mifepristone has unnerved Republicans from swing districts.The court's decision last year to overturn Roe v. Wade limited GOP gains in last year's midterm elections and is expected to again play a major role in next year's elec...
Twitch will now allow "Artistic Nudity" following the viral topless meta (www.dexerto.com)
Twitch Updated their Sexual Content Policy:...
What is your system uptime?
;-)
Disney games boss acknowledges 'a lot of demand' for Knights of the Old Republic remake, giving me my first spark of hope for the project in ages (www.pcgamer.com)
Satanists expose the GOP doublespeak on "free speech" and bigoted rhetoric (www.salon.com)
Why did we even try landing here? (static3.srcdn.com)
I'd prefer to have the unlimited plan (startrek.website)