Khrux

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.

One thing I did notice a while back, was seeing the 2022ish interface for YouTube and Google search and feeling how dated it was, still absolutely usable mind you, just clearly with a design ethos from an older era.

Most the time, I feel that changes Google make are absolutely arbitrary, rounding a button and then squaring it again, but I need to give them credit that there is something more, something about staying at the forefront of GUIs. It’s still all bullshit of course, the old one looks older but is identically useful.

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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.

If you get around to Microscope and enjoy it, it recommend both The Quiet Year and For the Queen.

When I played Microscope, I found that the game was a little too unconstrained and it was very hard to keep things from becoming totally silly, then in the close up scenes, everyone would basically want to default to playing a super rules-light generic TTRPG, and two or three of those scenes would dominate the session. I feel that it may get better with frequent play, but that’s not really what it’s designed for. Ben Robbins, the creator is a very talented game designer and is also famous for the West Marches style of D&D play, and has made numerous GMless TTRPGs since, and I’ve only ever heard great things about them.

The Quiet Year is a game with a more constrained setting, that basically uses a map you fill in as you please and a bunch of prompts tied to playing cards to play out the 4 seasons of a small settlement moving from it’s founding to a final point where either the settlement is implied to die out, or is a fantastic springboard for a traditional TTRPG to take over. There are plenty of hacks online that move the tone from a post apocalypse feeling survival focused game to basically anything that charts a settlement for a year, including one by the creators called The deep forest which I understand to be a decolonising focused and a bit more cottagecore / cottagecore. I preferred this to Microscope mostly because of the fact that it’s prompts constrain the tone from becoming all out silly.

Finally For the Queen has been one of the best games I’ve ever discovered. I’ve played the first edition but there is a second created by the same creator, Alex Roberts, produced by Critical Role’s Darrington Press. If you’re Critical Role averse for some reason, the first edition was not tied to them at all. This game is by far the easiest to teach new players, and is the first game I’d bring to play with absolute TTRPG newbies. In my opinion it generates the best story, although rather than being solely worldbuilding, it places a primary interest on your characters and relationships to a queen figure. I find that despite this, the world’s that comes out of it are far more evocative and exciting to develop than other GMless TTRPGs, and a large part of that is the hard to hack reality that it’s just got good prompts. Despite that it’s got the most hacks of the original of anything here, as the original game is so streamlined and well playtested, which really shows while playing it.

I had a similar experience in my 5e game, no real combat but basically the intrigued that drove the game got tenfold more complex and was revealed to involve each member of the party in a varying but believable way.

Seperatly, I also played Alice is Missing the month before and it lived up to the hype I wanted, but it’s very up.my street. What I seek in an RPG is being able to move between being immersed enough to feel what my character feels when I want it, but when I don’t, be able to act as my own drama maker for later. AiM absolutely delivered that for me. It also didn’t need magic or tech to deliver any agency which is a big plus to me.

Funnily enough The Witcher 3 is one of the games I always think of for the trope of not following the plot. Often I think of the ludonarrative dissonance specifically between Gestalt’s paternal drive to find and protect Ciri Vs Gwent.

For large scale, AAA open world games, I mostly think of Breath of the Wild, which transparently sets itself up as being about taking as long as you need to get strong enough to save the world and Red Dead Redemption 2, which doesn’t care about the stakes of the world.

I sometimes can’t wrap my head around the fact that Witcher 3, BotW and RDR2 were each two years apart. I don’t feel any open world game has occupied the cultural space those games did since.

This is definitely a selfish opinion but people who block adverts or torrent being a small percentage of users can be a good thing.

If they lose even 5% of their userbase to Firefox over this decision, they’ll find a way to make grand modifications to Google search and YouTube in a manner that stops you blocking ads from alternative browsers, and while I’m happy swapping to an alternative search engine, it’ll definitely becometedious to sidestep Google’s gaze.

But if it’s 0.1% of people who swap due to this, and Google already don’t care about the small percentage they lose to Firefox then I would rather sit under the radar and not be cracked down on.

To be fair, modern AI voices sound pretty real. Making it artificial would have been a tell in it’s own right.

Long before ZA/UM closed, I was certain that we’d never see a new game of that quality again from the same studio.

I’m not confident any of these new teams will pull it off, but I’d rather have four attempts than one.

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.

Microsoft will definitely have the power to bulldoze all other things named copilot, like Facebook did to meta. I’m still not over AI being a lame word now. I miss the time when it felt sci-fi and not like a corporate buzzword.

The most common cheat is probably gaining money or experience, but there have always been pretty extensive mod menus for GTA Online with tools from invincibility to making your vehicles rainbow, to randomly causing other players to explode or setting hundreds of muggers on them.

In 2015ish, I used to cheat, other than getting rich, all I was interested in doing was making an indestructible chrome bus with smoke trails that I’d drive around picking up players in, to teleport us all to North Yankton and back like a tour guide.

There’s a book called Tabletop Role-playing Therapy: A Guide for the Clinician Game Master by Dr Megan A. Connel that’s a really standout resource about this, she appeared on the official D&D podcast a year or so ago talking about it.

I’d say that this is more a resource for therapists to use TTRPGs than it is for DMs to act as therapists for their players. There’s a fine line between accommodating your players’ preferences and needs and providing unwanted therapy; if you want to actually put any therapy techniques into your game, ask your players approval first.

I’m less worried about the idea that people are charged groceries based on income and more worried based on need.

Will the person who buys cigarettes twice a day pay more than the person who pays once a fortnight because it’s clear that they require it more? Will the shopper of the family of 6 pay extra because they don’t have the time or energy to drive to the next place that offers groceries without this system?

Introducing this based on income seems like a sugarcoating of something far more insidious.

I don’t want to throw the word enshitiffication around, especially when I’m not sure if I can spell it, but the platforms that people jump ship to when that happens are probably especially vulnerable to people jumping ship again.

I can’t imagine Mozilla effectively marketing Firefox as anything but the bullshit free browser, and when they lose that, people will just move to the next actual bullshit free option.

This is also probably off topic because I can’t load the YouTube video.

I was talking about the second Dune film a little while back and saying how much I enjoy a well realised world that doesn’t try to convey itself by comparing itself to ours. I get the same feeling watching Dune and Lord of the Rings as I do when I watch a film from a culture I’m not familiar with; a sense of needing to adjust to their way of storytelling.

Pairing this with what you mention which is basically extra subtle show don’t tell, and you end up with something I absolutely adore, which is a story in a fully realised culture I know nothing about, that understands that the bare minimum amount of that culture I need to understand to fully enjoy the story can be the best amount to have.

I was going to say how rare this is but thinking about it, it actually isn’t. Tolkien’s cosmology is fully realised and vast yet I learnt basically no fluff about the world that wasn’t necessary to the story. Sometimes I just had to make peace with the fact that I didn’t understand the cultural context, I could only measure it’s importance in the attitude of the characters.

That’s the shit I love.

I’d presume they have a few cashiers from the Philippines but at least one person managing the store.

Feign death every time. Most OP spell in the game.

Temporal Shunt already narratively does this I believe, although only for a round.