Yep and CR10 when you’re level 7 and decided to fuck around is also a proverbial dildo

Just from DMing perspective I feel this when my players decide to fight a NPC they weren’t supposed to fight at a level I don’t have a block for lol. “Well your options are cr3 and cr10 and you’re level 7 so…10 it is and imma just shave some stuff off while hoping for the best” lol. Shout-out to every time my party says they’re looking for shady people to circumvent the legal way to do something then balk when the pricetag isn’t a handshake and an IOU their reputation proceeds them will never be collected.

Honestly just miss everyone working together. I only did about 1.5 seasons each of Picard and Discovery, but I just couldn’t take all the “the enemy is each other”. If I wanted that I’d watch the expanse? Ftr I will watch them in entirety and fully judge at that point, rn I haven’t so can’t say they offer nothing. SNW seems to get it though which I appreciate and hope continues. There are so few optimistic sci-fi shows I really want trek to stick to that niche.

I always skip this one. Feels like someone went to a group home once to visit a relative and did not take in the entire situation going on just “these people are so kooky!”. Think the most realistic part of the episode is their space CNA just leaving Bashir alone with them with little to no instruction lol. I’ve only done one NA job so far, but yeah that was my training lol.

Had some players that were doing a see who can sleep with NPCs tally check. I had some NPCs do it right back. I gave them both insight checks to realize they were now the game instead of playing the game and both failed. This feels like that lol.

It’s funny I did a rewatch recently and I realized he’s kind of obsessed about her the way Julian is about him and she kind of treats him the same way. Julian wants to play darts, nah he wants to go hang with Keiko, nah Keiko wants to get back to having a a career, he should go hang with Julian! Now Miles is making the face Julian made when he ditched Julian lmao

I generally start with a pre-written adventure and then just run it sandbox living world style. If I do anything it’s a ton of researching random DND lore and working that in.

Echoing move to SNW. It has a higher budget than older Trek and follows the current trend of “mini-series” storytelling. Older Trek follows older TV rules (wanted 26 eps to a season so a lot of filler to make it so). DS9 would be my other rec with a heavy caveat that if you’re not feeling an ep skip it and look it up on memory alpha later, particularly for the first season. As it goes on it gets more into the long form storytelling you’d expect with today’s shows, but first few seasons can be a bit rough and there can be a long time between plots being revisited (but when they are they make it count). TNG, Voyager and TOS are mainly monster/problem of the week (Voyager kind of weakly straddles longform and episodic leaning heavily towards episodic). Out of them I’d recommend TNG outside of the first two seasons (first season is TOS scifi tales encore, second season I actually like a lot and has some good eps, but general like is a minority opinion and cast gets retooled in third season anyway).

If you don’t mind kids shows also recommend Prodigy (kinda like a Trek ATLA imo).

I usually ask for elaboration as a social puzzle for what my party picked up about bonds/traits/flaws (tbf they don’t hit on random barkeeps). If they correctly target something they don’t have to roll. If they lead with “let’s ditch the twerp and take a spin around the sheets” to the NPC who tearfully asked them to help her protect her little brother that’s going to be a roll to maintain relations lol. Or my party’s fav for trying to join factions: “so you’ve seen me backstab my good friends, I’m in fact well and widely known for backstabbing, but I would never do that to you, I’m 100% devoted to the cause and also here’s my extensive list of things I want for allowing you to license my name in your faction with a clause I reserve the right to refuse any duties I don’t feel help me personally even though you’re a noble order of paladins dedicated to helping the unfortunate for no reward” lmao (actual negotiation).

So from the article the Lae’zel ending only happenings if you

Super spoiler don’t think there’s a spoiler text accepted across all instances yet

Accept becoming a mind flayer and some events thereafter and then follow through with Vlaak’ith telling you to kill yourself. This “rare no one’s taken” glitch ending seems to be if you listen to Vlaak’ith, but don’t turn mind flayer you can still take the kill yourself ending if you check the mind flayer box …despite not being mind flayer. Which could only happen through a glitch. So it’s just a you could take this path if you’d checked X box but you didn’t so can’t “ending”. I’m not sure what this article is trying to say honestly as it’s literally just “if you make X choice you could get Y ending, but if you glitch the game to believe you made X choice you could get Y ending” article.

If you read the article, this isn’t a rarest ending like the headline says. There is an ending playing as Lae’zel most players don’t take because it’s a bad ending that obviously ends the story. The ending being talked about is a hacked ending that was maybe an idea at one point to get to the above ending via an alternative path, but wasn’t ultimately implemented. I wouldn’t even call this an ending frankly. It’s more “there’s some game files that can lead to each other if X or Y is marked, but actually can’t because Z being marked cuts that path off”. More of a glitch than anything.

Iirc everything’s loaded as one map so you don’t have long loading times going from lot to lot. So if your sim goes on a date downtown you don’t have to then load downtown to continue playing and then reload the sim house when they go home.

Idk about hit, but decent success maybe? Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers wouldn’t be bad with a re-release that fixes the controls (gameplay is mainly a series of mini-games which the timing is off for making attempting completing them a rage inducing task) and the travel map areas redone to have actual purpose instead of “here’s a zany spot with cyclical weather where you can throw stuff around to play with our gravity code”. The story was pretty good/interesting imo as a Final Fantasy version of Cowboy Bebop.

From playing d&d with a few definitely… Never had another group try to convince me it’s simple math to work out the dynamics of a fireball and how far it would really go in a tunnel system because they wanted to get enemies around a corner too lmfao.

US, 30s, yep. When I needed a new car decided to get one cause I was driving an hour to work and thought it would help me with driver’s trance (cue sad laugh track…). Ended up having to order a new car cause I couldn’t find one I wanted that was manual within a reasonable driving distance that wasn’t complete junk. Didn’t really help my problem, but I do love driving it lol.

Kind of weird because automatics make me uncomfortable to drive now, they accelerate so easy I feel like I have less control (though I’m sure this is just a skill issue on my part).

This is a good article I think for DMs who have only done one system! I can only talk about 5e here, but:

Backgrounds as Skills

Iirc in the DMG you are encouraged to take backgrounds into account though not really given a tangible way to figure this. In modules too there are backgrounds tailored to the adventure, but again you’re not really given direction in how to figure this. Personally I just lower DCs, make information more accessible, etc to people whose backgrounds it would apply to. For example I often get the my girlfriend was killed by X and I’ve been genociding them in revenge background from new players so if the enemy they’re facing is X I’ll give them more insight into the enemies’ tactics, culture, etc than other players as their character has a background of vested interest in fighting this foe.

Super Easy Monsters

All I can say is the 4e directions on how to run monsters never should have been ditched. I don’t mind the long statblocks that much (though it is annoying because many of the spell selections tend to be nonsensical fluff, what is that lich going to do with prestidigitation…). I haven’t even played 4e, but I do like to convert older dragon and so on magazine adventures to 5e for one-offs and every time it’s a 4e adventure it’s so much easier knowing there will be a how to run the combat section. When I do 5e straight up I usually rework the encounters myself to make a bunch of video game-esque combat cycles (first the monster will use bless on allies and then x and then y, etc). So I feel like it’s not even the long statblocks that are the main issue here, but that it’s hard to divine from them in 5e what the go-to combat round actions envisioned here are.

Escalation Die

This is an interesting concept, but honestly I’d just rather lower AC and HP to be more in-line for the experience you’re trying to give. My players talk way more about one shotting enemies in round 1 than they do about finally being able to get that hit to one-shot in Round 4 so I’d rather lower AC if it’s an intentional fight to make them all feel like heroic badasses. Just from a numbers point as well the monsters would also be getting more “heroic” and you have the problem of their ability to one-shot your players (at lower levels) increasing. I think lowering AC/HP and sticking to average damage (no rolls, attacks just do X) for monsters probably works better here, especially at low levels.

Icons

So 5e does kind of have this. Modules have backgrounds with built-in connections and there’s an optional rule called Plot Points (p. 269 DMG) that’s similar to this, just not focused around important NPCs. I actually like a rule from another game described to me by someone (I think it’s Blades in the Dark or another heist game) where you get a point and can spend it to overcome a complication as long as you explain how your character prepared for it ahead of time. This doesn’t require the PC to play off any NPC connections which I find to be harder for players who are there more to roll dice than tell a story and new players.

Range Bands

I think PbtA uses a similar system (haven’t played it, just been told by my players) and it works really well for TotM. Personally I just limit it to melee and ranged. Keeps it simple and if we’re doing a big boss battle I pull out the map. I don’t really do combats on wide open plains so I don’t find far to be useful, but that’s just me!

Thanks for sharing!

I kind of assume if they have plans for him it’s a young Kirk spinoff. If they wanted him to stick around I feel like they wouldn’t have closed down the relationship with La’an so forcibly if that makes sense.

If there’s going to be more voyager characters I really hope Neelix gets a cameo for an episode. I’d love to see him back in the kitchen with Jankom taste testing lol