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Joined 2 months ago
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Cake day: February 26th, 2025

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  • If you remove the Luxemburg, Andorra, and a couple of smaller countries, VAT rates are relatively consistent. Indeed, if you live within 20km from the border, it’s worth buying some stuff across the border, and for some trips to plan a fuel stop on the right side of the border.

    But if you need to drive 100 km, you won’t recover the cost of the road if you don’t do some specific purchases.

    Note also, that at least in theory, you’re not free to travel with unlimited cigarettes and alcohol (where tax rates difference can be crazy) so again, if you pass by Luxemburg or Andorra, you can’t legally speaking buy 100 packs of cigarettes, (but would still save 30 to 50 € on a 10 packs carton)





  • While the D&D Fight monsters ad nauseam is more an exception rather than the norm in RPG, it still has a couple of asset.

    Monsters are easy bad guys, there is not much moral consideration in fighting giant spyder or “children eating satanic Goblins” while if you fight against other humans who live in the forest that the Duke want to cut-downt to get wood for his navy it make everything more nuanced and complex. It’s great in regular RPG where you can get tons of interesting moral dilemna out of it, but if you’re into dungeon crawling monsters are removing all of that, and allow you to focus on the manage ressources to fight monsters apect of D&D.

    if you’re in zero to hero fantasy, you need opponent within that scale. so start with Goblins, then orcs, and finally dragon, and had a whole list in the way

    A you mentionned, it’s pretty specific to D&D and in many RPG you don’t use much monster, or come with something unspeakable and too powerful for the PC to fight against


  • Bonus post,

    Scene from a horror movie : A young blonde girl look at herself in the mirror, her reflection through the cracked mirror, shows a monstrous and creepy old witch with occult tattoos, wearing the same clothe and having the same posture, the whole scene occurs in a wooden house, giving it a fantastic ambiance

    Using Bing image generators,

    and that one would have been even better if only I didn’t got the extra face in it



  • Is the US situation that bad regarding game diversity ?

    I am in a very active club, and less than half of the games are D&D and clones (including pathfinder and OSR in D&D and clones), before that I was part of an active online community, and again while D&D was big it wasn’t more than half of the game ran.

    And if you look at new games starting, due to D&D tendency to be relatively long campaign, it’s even hard to find a seat at a D&D game because relatively few games starts compared to other games. (And then there is a couple of indie-game one-shots GM, meaning that there is always a slot open for a less known and often weirder game)


  • Male fashion sucks, but tank tops aren’t seen like acceptable for men (out of the gym)

    That said, students are old enough to understand how to dress, so IMO the professor should have say nothpng

    But soon enough you’ll discover that if you dare to wear a short at work your manager will ask whether you’re in Hollyday or even sends you home to dress properly



  • World of Darkness, a pretty popular family of games with Vampire the Mascarade as a figurehead, it reach peak popularity during the late 90’s/early 00’s, then almost vanished during the 2010’s. But with the recent release of the 20 year aniiversary verion and the fifth edition it’s raising again.

    It’s modern Urban fantasy, the setting is almost the real world, and the PC are monsters e.g. Vampire, Mage or Werewolf fighting each other to control the city. While the public part of the setting is known by everyone you play Chicago/New-Orlean/Paris/Rome by night (and can just look gooogle open street map to get a map) , the game has a lot of semi-secret lore, about the creation of the Vampire/Werewolf/the Magic world, and the secret of powerful and ancient being with each sourcebook adding extra lore.

    A difficulty with that setting, is that there is always a player who is fan of the setting and going to argue that you’ll never see this happening because [insert reference to obscure sourcebook] and that other player who actually went once to the city where you play so while WOD player don’t have rule lawyer, they have lore lawyer which are a bit akin.

    While I talk about rules, the system is IMO the good balance between rule light (It’s still a traditional skill-based/dice-pool system with it’s root in the 90’s) and crunchy, the 2006 revision is my default system for modern games (I know-it, it runs fines and fit my need)




  • y’d sometimes be faffing around doing “funny” stuff, but I mostly was sticking to the “use your resources wisely or perish” mode of DND.

    This is why, a letter of intent is important when recruiting for a new group. Explaining before session zero what’s your GM style and all the other important points. Beer and bretzel games are a legit way to play, but not suited for everyone, the same applies to tactical mini or to intense Role-playing. The earlier the players the better