• 0 Posts
  • 35 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 20th, 2023

help-circle

  • 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.


  • The flip side to this article is that most of the criticisms, while really valid, talk about the intended play style for life sim games to be to live through the key points of their character’s lives with immersion.

    For literally 20 years, I’ve barely seen it used for this purpose, instead people make themselves, their friends, their dream house, they cheat in money and turn off aging etc. Actually stopping to roleplay your character making friends is the activity most people do when their bored of the regular things they do.

    Still, InZoi seeming to not simulate the lives of any of the other NPC’s is a big loss. Even if you’re not interacting with that part of the game, knowing it’s there is great. The Sims 4 (or 3, I forget) strove to reach the dream version of this: You buy a cheap property in a fully open world and ‘functioning’ town and you could walk from your front door to the town center, and the neighbour you see may also drive to town and you’ll see them there. Then as you play, you go from working in the gym to owning it, and can now modify it like your property because it runs on the same rules, the same goes for everything else. The Sims didn’t manage this but their later games clearly launched with this as their design’s guiding light.

    I’m mostly interested in the game as a character creator and house builder, but that’s because I don’t expect any game to do a good job of what the article writer wishes for, The Sims included.



  • 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.


  • I wouldn’t be surprised if basically every person with over 1k hours in a game isn’t seeking some sort of escapism, not counting the anomalies like people leaving servers running etc.

    I suppose every minute in a game is escapism of some sort, but escapism from dysphoria or something else significant, I think would be common.








  • 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.


  • Yeah the fact it’s called a small moon is slightly deceptive to us because our moon is absolutely huge as far as moons go. The natives of the SW universe would be used to much much smaller moons.

    For reference, our moon is 3475km across and the death star is 150km across, so it’s diameter is 23 smaller. It’s also weighed at about 900million tonnes or 9*10^14kg.

    If I’m right (which I’m likely not). g=(GM)/r² or g=(6.667*10-11*9*1013)/75².

    That’s a gravity of 1.086x10^-5m/s² or if I round with pure disrespect for physics, 100,000 times weaker than earth’s gravity. Essentially it’s totally negligible compared to their artificial gravity. Hell, I don’t even think a marble on the floor would overcome it’s own grip and roll towards the center of the space station.

    My maths is almost certainly wrong somewhere here, I failed it badly.


  • 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’ve read quite a few anecdotes and quotes about Gygax’s misogyny before but I agree with you, I don’t think there is nearly enough information I these gods to extrapolate that it’ embodies all powerful masculine forces as good and all feminine as evil, especially as the article mentions how this perpetuates pre-existing coomo themes in story and myth. Everything we know about Gygax would say he’d lift from myths with sexist themes without adjusting that, rather than add them with intention.

    Do do think there is myriad evidence that Gygax believed femininity to be inherently inferior, but that’s different from evil. It’s still stupid and worth highlighting but by excessively demonising him to the point of nearly making things up, it’s just fuel for people to dismiss the valid points.


  • Khrux@ttrpg.networktoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlWhat generation are you?
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    edit-2
    10 months ago

    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.