Khrux

Mushroom circles grow in circles because they drain the nutrients from the ground, and eventually you have a nutrient barren center that grows with the ring of mushrooms around it.

I wonder if this is something similar, although I’ve not heard of mold using up a resource before.

This is a really good point but I feel there is a double edged sword here. Loads of old school bigoted nerds love star trek because for whatever reason they actually don’t pick up on the compassionate, far left messaging.

It was also different when 50 years ago, a black woman as bridge officer was scandal to right wing sensationalist media.

The overt and sometimes performative progressive details that are present now push the boundaries in a similar manner to the old boring change, while being much more noticeable to the rest of the audience.

I don’t mind it being deep, just don’t fill it with your actions and deeds. A big part of fun for TTRPGs is ‘play away from the table’, which for the players is typically making art, backstory or builds for current or future characters. Most long backstories I read don’t invalidate a level 1 character but mostly explore values, just as my real life story could be as deep as I choose to write it and I’d not even have the skills to be level 1.

My suggestion is:

• Get people together for a session 0. Only pitch the campaign and tone then, if not construct it collaboratively too.

• Hand out pieces of paper or card face down, have each player take 1, and ensure there is one between each player. These cards say Love, ally, rival, or enemy.

• Explain that players should make an NPC for their backstory that matches this word, and should make a shared NPC with the person next to them based on the card between them.

• Now let them take another card of their choice. They can either make another NPC with this, or use it to make the relationship to one of their shared NPCs asymmetrical.

• They can design their NPCs and backstory now or before session 1, up to them.

Finally, explore what the players can choose to do to contribute between sessions to the game. If they don’t do anything, that’s fine, but they should have a way to meaningful contribute to something. Typically I encourage world building and cultural lore, such as unique foods and why that has a thematic resonance.

This is hard to structure, I had a player who was a former forever DM, who played a knowledgeable librarian in a former monster hunter guild. I asked her to make some monster statblocks, as she’d know them inside and out in character.

My advice to players:

Make your backstory show that your character has done no huge deeds yet, and most importantly, have everything that matters in it revolve around NPCs. Not just is this the best drama, but NPCs can move, join factions, be redeemed, betray you, die and everything else.

• That cost halfling village you design that perfectly exemplifies your character, but will never be seen in this urban campaign halfway across the continent? Make the most important part of it the mayor’s daughter who happens to be your childhood friend.

• The strange necklace that made you stronger but more angry when you wore it? The final time you saw it was when your brother stormed out of your co-owned business after a bitter argument.

• The lord who helped you smuggle your liquor into the city? That’s the same lord that wrongfully imprisoned the player character next to you.

One of my favourite scenes from a campaign came when a player, after spending a session getting the chance to meet with a resistance leader, turned to the others and said “this is my ex-wife”. That whole dynamic was interesting too, as both had come from a warrior culture and initially parted due to neither being the “strong warrior”, now both trying to fight against that same faction a decade later.

My all time favourite NPC was a talented tailor in an urban campaign, who owed one player character a favour and was generally fond of them all. Nothing like the party having a go to guy for fancy or silly outfit amendments.

It’s interesting how Discord absolutely nukes its own trust by pretending to be more than it is. I loathe discord, to the point I’d use a competitor (not teams) just to evade it. I’m sick of finding a hobby group using it as a Frankenstein forum / chat / info hub when it’s only built for chat.

Discord is fine for this use, but I’m getting used to the distrusting it so often that it blends into reasonable use.

Purple: Magic??

Green: Life/death??

Red: Life/fire??

Blue: Magic/cold??

Honestly the only colour I don’t feel uncertain about is orange, that’s always bad.

Also on the topic of health potions, a great piece of advice I once heard was that if your players are in a foreign land, remove health potions. Give them health biscuits and watch them reconcile with God.

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.

I do think a huge world with an engaging and dense design can still be made worse with size. In some games like Skyrim, Breath of the Wild or GTA 5, you could probably drop me anywhere and I’d know where I was, half due to good and differing region design and half because the map isn’t that big.

Back in 2015 I’d dream of a GTA 5 expansion that adds San Francisco and Las Vegas to the map, turning the north and east of the map in to a 500 yard straight of water, but in reality, two more large cities and their surroundings suburbs and wilderness would have never kept it’s memorability like the first region.

I used to play call of duty way back in the day and fell off around the time Black Ops 2 came out, mostly because I felt like there are too many games and I didn’t need another black ops.

There’s now more Black Ops games than I’ve bought games this year.

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.

I’m a 50/50 toss up between two reasonably different genres.

The first is coming of age films, particularly queer ones. My go to film to call my favourite is Call me By Your Name, I also love Stand By Me, Aftersun and have a huge soft spot for Kiki’s delivery service.

The other ‘genre’ is dramas / thrillers that get pretty fixated on madness, particularly from the protagonist. There will be Blood is my go to second film to say, and I love Apocalypse Now, Perfect Blue, The Witch and The lighthouse.

I’m not as much fan of when the genres overlap however, although that may be because of how small the sample size is. There are quite a few films that have a young protagonist who is finding themselves, who may end up idolising another to the point that the film falls into being a thriller. We had Saltburn last year, which people often compare to The Talented Mr Ripley, and I do enjoy these films but I never get that milestone feeling that I’ve just experienced a piece of media that has profoundly impacted me. The only thing that exists in this shared space is one of my favourite novels; The Picture of Dorian Gray.

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

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

I’m born in 98’ so I’m right down the middle but generally classed as the last of the millennials.

I feel a lot closer to zoomers, but where I’m from, I think the people who have fast-tracked adulthood with kids and mortgages are textbook millennials where as layabouts like myself share a lot more spaces with young adult zoomers.

I’m already needing to remind myself that some of the deepest internet brainrot like skibidi toilet is not a new phrase but a meme of the hour started by generation alpha and then carried by confused millennials.

Subnautica is the perfect mesh of several things that work fantastically. It is a good survival game but with it’s upgrade and discovery based exploration limitations, it’s closer to a metroidvania than it is to Minecraft. The thing it does so well is sneak this past you, it’s a mystery driven metroidvania where the downtime is a resource gathering, based building game.

The closest game I can think of of that tried the same mystery metroidvania approach is The Forest, but this feels like one of the many many games from the post Minecraft and DayZ boom that has a certain scrappiness to it that somehow Subnautica absolutely sidesteps, and it’s all from just being a really well made game. The vibrant and often tranquil art style that lends itself to awe inspiring locations, and the level design and overall plot support eachother so well.

That said, I’m not in love with the amount of resources. A 4*8 gridded inventory puts me off a game from a worry of it to getting too grindy, and subnautica is a “I need to build another storeroom” kind of game. With a full survival game like Minecraft, which is endless and about exploration and progress alone, I know my storage will be unweildy and I can forgive it, but I’d have appreciated Subnautica finding a way to require less mindless resource hunting / busywork unless itnwas optional base cosmetics or the like.

My big three are Outer Wilds which at this point barely needs mentioning, Disco Elysium which seems to be getting more famous by the day, and Hollow Knight.

Outer wilds is an exploration game, and if the other comments haven’t been clear, that’s all I’m saying.

Disco Elysium is an unbelievably dense police procedural set in a unique setting, it can also be fantastic to explore without hearing much beforehand but unlike outer wilds, you don’t really need to beat yourself up for looking up the occasional piece of lore.

Hollow Knight is a souls-like metroidvania, so it’s ticking the Sekiro / Dark Souls box well.

I got about 90% through the game with only a rough understanding of the lore before ending up watching video essays about it and I was absolutely blown away. I don’t think the lore is overly difficult to find, and isn’t that complicated, but like FromSoft’s games, it’s not always delivered in a way that you naturally pick it up.

I play a lot of games with the “media literacy” part of my brain firmly switched off, because often games handhold you through the storytelling. With Disco Elysium, you know from the getgo that it’s a pay attention kind of game, but Hollow Knight, it sort of feels like a storyless flash game, and sometimes key lore is delivered in a beautiful set piece or creature design, so I only realised I should have been paying attention when it was too late to catch up.

I got no less enjoyment from it by catching up on the lore later though, these three games are absolutely my top three.

My final bonus suggestion is to bash out all the supergiant games in order, Bastion, Transistor, Pyre and Hades all hit the marks for me to sometimes just stop in awe and let myself get chills, although less tban the three above. I also think Pyre is one of the most overlooked games of all time.

Hey that’s exactly what my rent / wage split was in the UK last year. The only reason anything got better is that minimum wage went up while my rent hasn’t yet.

I honestly don’t think Lemmy will function well without a way for identical communities across different instances could subscribe to eachother, allowing a single feed of information. This would stop the instances splitting the userbase.

Early Reddit had a subreddit for everything, but most were dormant. However as soon as you posted on it, enough people had it on their front page that you’d get a response. I think Lemmy feels very similar to how Reddit did 10 years ago, except many of the dead communities are totally dead.

Studded leather, 20 Dex and Int, then something like haste is definitely possible.

No.

This isn’t my standard instance but I do take a look at it sometimes. I’m definitely very far left leaning, I don’t have a label that clearly fits me but I’m probably close enough to anarcho-communism or syndicalism. I live in the UK so it’s pretty common for my views to fall further left of the USA.

I’m not particularly good at actually adhering to my own views, infact I don’t think I’ve ever done e anything substantial to bringing my ideals into reality. My dream would be for small federated housing / workers co-ops and unions to get a good handle in my area, and then have the stability to grow.

The crucial reason I’m not a tankie is that I actively oppose top down leadership structures, and I’m actually more against authoritarianism than I am against the right, but I feel that in my country, conservatism and authoritarianism are deeply linked, and a bottom up power structure would do more to actively oppose facism and power consolidation than a far left authoritarian regime.

In short, No. My principles may make me a commie, but I’m an anarchist first.

I just always give too much context to my stories, and quickly realise that I’m giving context for context for context and cant remember my point.

My closest friend is very similar here though, and we can have great long conversations that are 20 layers deep of tangents and forgetting our original points. We also sometimes yell ‘pin’ at eachother as a shorthand for ‘lets put a pin in this’ which basically means that at some point we’re trying to remember what we wanted to say at that point because it was fun.