Goes further than that, imo. Toxic masculinity can also be subtle. It doesn’t need to be a chest-beating guy. Besides trying to hold a death-grip on your emotions, sinking yourself into whatever society holds to be manly, I can’t really think of an example rn, I’ve just woken up.

Squad, Rimworld, WH40K: Rogue Trader, Another Crab’s Treasure, and Valheim and Baldur’s Gate 3 with friends.

Yeah, lot of em moved on to make Weird West, as Wolf-Eye Studios.

It’s a good game if an out-there im-sim is what you want.

How tech savvy are we talking? I can troubleshoot the usual stuff on my pc, by googling. But I’m not a sysadmin and have 0 knowledge about how to set up or maintain a server.

My group has been looking at TTRPGs for a while now. We used Owlbear Rodeo for one campaign, and started our current one on Roll20 without premium, but… It’s so unintuitive. An honest to goodness UI/UX nightmare. I can see the logic behind some of the choices but it’s so uncomfortable to use. We want something with a bit more functionality (character sheets and dice rolling at least, dynamic fog of war being a personal bonus as a DM).

How tech savvy are we talking? I can troubleshoot the usual stuff on my pc, by googling. But I’m not a sysadmin and have 0 knowledge about how to set up or maintain a server.

My group has been looking at TTRPGs for a while now. We used Owlbear Rodeo for one campaign, and started our current one on Roll20 without premium, but… It’s so unintuitive. An honest to goodness UI/UX nightmare. I can see the logic behind some of the choices but it’s so uncomfortable to use. We want something with a bit more functionality (character sheets and dice rolling at least, dynamic fog of war being a personal bonus as a DM).

I work in the industry, and yeah. Before, marketing was based on utility. “Buy this because it can do this and this and that”, basically marketing how effective or what it can actually do for you. Around the 50s (in the US) marketing changed to be based around lifestyle. “Buy this so you can be this”. Now nearly all ads appeal to emotion instead of reason, and it is very effective.

Researching about what a product offers is so much harder than just buying on a whim because the ads and the product are colorful.

You can see this change in old (really old) newspapers. Ad spreads were chock full of text about features. Now 3/4ths of the ads are an image of a happy woman if marketed for gals, or a stoic muscly man if marketed for guys.

Gives me the ick.

Horror, last year I read Between two fires, cant remember the author. Felt like I was reading dark souls, but with more of a religious horror vibe. It was okay. Gave me ideas for my dnd campaigns.

EpicLoot might also be good, if OP’s kids are keen to grind components.

Not FPS, but Valheim is plenty fun. Also, zomboid, but that ones a bit more violent

Replaying Dragon’s Dogma in prep for the new game. I had forgotten how much grind the game requires, honestly. I’ve been Mage 1-11, MArcher 6, Ranger 6, Sorc 30-40 or so, and my magic score is still low as hell. I’m purposefully delaying meeting the duke because I really want to give MArcher a try in the post-game, and it feels like I’ve already played for a long time but sheesh, levelling up is slow. I had never focused on building for stats, honestly. I know now though that most of your damage comes from your gear, so I might quit levelling Sorc when I reach 450 magic instead of the 600.

Hope it’s a little faster in the second entry.

Apart from that, trying the Nordic Souls modpack for Skyrim, and Helldivers 2.

Just finished Dune Messiah. It was good, but I liked the first one more. Feel like it could’ve been shorter, while at the same time I feel like I would’ve appreciated more info on how the jihad affected people outside Arrakeen.

I’ll probably start on either Colour of Magic or Gardens of the Moon next.

IMO the problem at this point is leadership. They’ve realized people will buy their shit if they sell a cheap, surface-deep fantasy with interesting visuals and let folks do a very limited number of different things in a single playthrough. Because of that, there’s no nuance to their worlds. They want to make a sandbox game with no reactivity.

Unless leadership resigns I won’t expect anything else than the equivalent of a gas station meal.

Sounds cool ngl, I’ll spin the idea to my table and split the cost. Thanks!

Oh, that’s nice. Does homebrewing require coding? I have some experience with markup and javascript but not enough to know I won’t muck it up.

Hey! Couple q’s regarding Foundry. I’m the DM of our group, and have a ton (and I mean a ton) of homebrew for the campaign we’re running atm. The homebrew spans changes to core mechanics (no damage rolls for example) to completely revamped classes, races, and backgrounds. How easy is it to homebrew on foundry? I’ve been eyeing it for a while because roll20 is so user unfriendly I was thinking of going back to Owlbear and manage everything through google sheets, or upgrading to paid VTTs.

Wasn’t here back when it happened, but from what I know, it was straight up white supremacy shit. It got defed to death.

I don’t know I’d qualify Rimworld as complicated, honestly. It has more moving parts than The Sims, sure, but it is nowhere near how complicated EU4 seems (I haven’t played it, it scares me, but CK is another good example).

I’m very new to DnD (started as a DM a couple weeks ago), heard of gurps because of fallout message boards, no idea what THAC0 is.

Oh, I had no idea it was open source. I’ll take a look, at the very least. Thanks for the rec!

BG3 and Halo: Infinite with friends, Doom: Eternal, Crusader Kings III and Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous solo.