Recent content by Umbran

Sure. But there are lots of things that are disruptive to ongoing enjoyment of playing a character - character death being the most obvious. Playing a game with other people will almost certainly involve some amount of compromise. You can't always get what you want, as the man said...

In short: Easy-to-run modules are rather simpler than the modern norm. Gone are the days when you have a dungeon of rooms each populated, but with minimal interactions, so that a map and key to stat blocks and trap descriptions are sufficient. In the last published D&D adventure I ran, I had...

No-prize: Starkiller base is not a giant space laser. It is a giant, Force-driven hyperspace weapon. The "visible" phenomenon is essentially a Force-vision driven into the minds of every sentient being in the (very large) area.

That depends on how you get the light to focus.

Oh, there's elements of it. But, to be self-insert, the character still has to be recognizable as the author.

Most of my action declarations are because that's what the character would do. Like, that's playing a role, right? But then, most of my action declarations are not things that would cause issues for other players at the table, so there's no problem. When I realize that "what the character...

Not quite. They didn't kill people and take their land. They killed some people, and then claimed dominance over the land. The typical mode has been conquering, not genocide. Which makes the food production angle sketchy logic, as you are increasing the ruled population when you take the...

Train derailed due to dinosaur.

Or have some restrictions on when you choose to award it? Or is the group not doing things you reward experience for?

My most recent session was on the positive side of okay. We were starting a new campaign of the Hollow West, using Fate Accelerated rules. It is a shortish, weeknight session, with an opening scene that included more NPCs than PCs, so a lot of time was spent setting the scene, but then the...

The first step in figuring out how something novel is done is to see proof it can be done :) Youtube very much wants to scare us. Scaring us gets clicks. Scaring us also engages fear responses that do a number on our ability to assess risks, which wasn't all that great to start with.

Sure. There's over 6000 species of frogs and toads in the world. That's one. That qualifies as a "very special frog", like I allowed for.

Mod note: @LordEntrails and @môrgondír You two are done in this thread.

If I understand what you mean by that comment, no. Not magic in all but name. Just tech and understanding we haven't gotten to yet. I don't claim that knowing about aliens will magically solve all our problems - just that we'd learn a lot.

Yes, but unless it just happens to be a very special frog, it probably isn't crawling up there to cure your cancer, either. :p But actually, the way science spins off knowledge, information on those aliens is likely to help in human medicine - they imply new materials, new physics to be used in...