since youve mostly gotten your answers on the basic questions, i will add some other information here for you as FYI. If you’re wondering, you can use regular old acrylic hobby paints for miniatures. It’s going to take some extra work and a lot of mixing to get it the right consistency and will be a learning curve there.

If you’re wondering if it’s worth the money to spend on mini paints, that’s going to be entirely up to your preference. Mini paints can be quite pricey vs regular old craft store paints. I would maybe suggest dabbling with regular paints and getting some thinner medium and see if mixing them works out well for you. If you find it too annoying/frustrating/not worth your time then get mini paints. Mini paints can basically be used right out of the bottle.

i’ve never played it; How does the system work? is it a traditional d20-like system or something else?

https://hardcodex.ru/2024/

Hardcodex has printable spell cards, and they updated for 2024 spells it looks like.

Yeah, looks like it got all jacked up when I posted it from my app. Gonna fix it

Yeah, we have a set day and time, and will only reconsider if 2+ people are missing

So my immediate thought given this context would be to make the new strain/miracle drug/whatever be something that combats the existing evil virus as a counteragent. So it would provide some amount of resistance/immunity to it, but i like the idea of a (probably unknown) drawback. Something like cordyceps maybe that slowly takes over and/or controls the person like you mentioned.

This could easily be told to the players through the NPC you mentioned who has control of the new strain/drug; he can slowly become more erratic/out of control, and his actions can start to get more suspect (along with any potential physical signs).

So basic idea for a campaign would be:

• Players run into NPC that has new miracle drug that provides resistance/immunity to super evil virus
• NPC is being hunted by the AI because of it
• Players try to protect and help NPC get to somewhere safe to begin process of creating/manufacturing/growing new drug at scale (current supply must be protected because it’s so low, so player’s can’t have any, but they know the NPC has tried it on himself)
• Over their time with the NPC, his motivation and actions begin to turn more sinister as the effects of the drug set in
• Player’s need to eventually make a choice as to if the current situation with the virus or the new threat from the miracle drug is the lesser evil.

What, exactly are you trying to replicate from the show? The miraculous super drug the powers-that-be despise? The plot premise of running from the authorities with a secret? The main character himself? All of it? Something else? Depending on what aspects you like, you can do different things for your game (fyi I know little about EP specifically, but translating plot into games can be universal).

well, to be fair, almost no one used counterspells back then because of the many failure points, clunkiness, and the high chance of it being a complete waste of your turn. Better to just cast your own fireball first.

Thats pretty similar to what 3e (and iirc older) counterspell did. You had to cast the same spell in reverse to counter a spell. So to counter spell a fireball, you had to have a fireball prepared and “counterspell cast” your fireball. That said, there was some action economy problems in 3e that made it not worth it (you had to use an action to ‘ready’ a counterspell on a specific target, when the target cast a spell, you had to roll to identify the spell, and if they cast a spell you didnt know or have prepared, you were out of luck)

Presumably, someone attempting to mug you would probably be a bandit (+3 to hit, +1 to damage), not another commoner

i second the comment that you need to consider why you want to do this. You generally need a pretty good reason to split your codebase into multiple languages.

As far as actually doing it, you have a ton of different options, some of which have been mentioned here. Some i can think of off the top of my head:

• create a library (dll or so file or the like)
• set up a web server and use communication protocols (either web socket or rest API or the like)
• use a 3rd party communication/messaging framework like MQ or kafka or something
• create your own method of communication. Something like reading and writing to a file on disk, or a database and acting on the information plopped in

basically every approach is going to require you to come up with some sort of API that the two work together through, though, an API in the generic sense is basically a shared contract two disconnected pieces of code use to communicate.

same. Ive played it for about ~10 hours on the steam deck so far, and i have my FPS counter turned on at all times; never seen it dip below 40, and i dont think ive touched any settings. On an original steam deck, not an OLED, though

for what its worth, the new (2024/2025) monster manual supposedly has spellcasting monsters with more “magical” actions built in. While they do still have a list of spells, they have more built in tailored “magic action” type things they would be using instead of spell casting in most scenarios, like having a “magic bolt” type attack for a mage or something. We don’t exactly know how extensive this is yet, since we’ve only seen previews so far, but it could make running spellcasting creatures a bit easier.

windows can still play castle of the winds? i play it all the time. In fact, i just booted it up again a moment ago to make sure it didnt break recently or something. I dont remember ever having any issues playing it, and ive played it off and on for decades. In fact, googling real quick, it looks like my abandonware even has a “easy installer” for it.

Monster tokens are probably one of my “unsung heroes” of gaming when it comes to travel; I know people (myself included) probably always go to with minis, but if i’m going to a convention, traveling for the holidays, etc. tossing a whole pile of tokens into a bag make for great addition. No particular brand, just whatever i’ve picked up over the years.

yeah, its hard to predict what will happen to it, especially after gabe steps down or dies, but depending on how much of the company is broadly owned by employees vs individuals, it can help to shield it from bad decisions. Unfortunately, we don’t know the exact numbers. If gabe + mike own 51+% then it could potentially lead to overriding employee will in a bad decision for money (either through their actions or through inheritance like you say). Or the employees could just collectively make a bad decision too.

AFAIK, most of valve’s stock is held by employees, not private investors. It’s usually a pretty hard sell of “make the company you work at shittier to make more money”, especially since most of the employees probably know gabe personally (valve has less than 400 employees) and likely approve of his leadership.

FWIW, at this point, that study would be horribly outdated. It was done in 2022, which means it probably took place in early 2022 or 2021. The models used for coding have come a long way since then, the study would essentially have to be redone on current models to see if that’s still the case.

The people’s perceptions have probably not changed, but if the code is actually insecure would need to be reassessed

i mean, thats part of what gives it away. all the current AI generated music has a flat, auto-tuney quality to it. There’s also a fairly limited number of voices it ends up using, so its pretty distinctive when you hear one.

the art and the music are both definitely AI