Search results

I think the basic shift that happened, starting with the final arc of Campaign 2, was the shift from themes being driven by the players to themes being driven by the DM. Until that point, Mercer’s stories had focused on fairly simple plot points, and his attention was given to his amazingly...

Ohhhhh, now I have to check and see if the newest season is available on one of my subscriptions. Oldman is predictably great, and even though the plots do get a little loose on occasion, the performances are so strong and the tone so compelling that I find the whole package riveting. Fantastic...

Finished Anathem. It's a singular novel that takes huge swings, I found kinda boring to read, and yet interesting to think about. About 3/4 of the way through this seriously epic novel a new character is introduced who is literally named Jules Verne, after the author, which really helped me...

Still mostly working on terrain but got around to this D&Lairship. It ties nicely into our campaign - it started with the party being hired to help protect a driftstone mine, and many levels later they have saved enough, and the artificer is skilled enough, to use some of the driftstone, along...

Another big difference between 1e and 5e, that might be a feature or flaw depending on taste, is that in 1e power-ups came from magic items to a much greater extent than in 5e, both in terms of how many items you got and in terms of their relative power.

I don't find multi-classing makes that much of a difference in character power. Certainly it's true in 5e, as in almost any other RPG I've ever played, that players who know what they are doing can build more effective characters. But I think 5e is fairly exceptional in how well it does balance...

We all started with max HP at level 1, which was a common convention in 1e, and our characters also had better ability scores that you get from standard array as we used one of the options from the 1e DMG. Rolling for HP at level 1 was not typical back in the day - that’s more of an 0e thing...

I’m sure folks once said the same thing about printed books. eReaders have saved me a fortune, a ton of space, dramatically lowered my carbon footprint, and adjusted with my aging eyes and wrists. When I travel, I have my whole library, and if I need a new book while laying on my patio, I buy...

Buns gotta be toasted.

I'm not planning on multi-classing my current character, but she's a monk and it's a long-running campaign with intent to reach level 20. I really wanna play a level 20 monk with the 2024 rules (technically, I've already done it, but only for a one-shot, not as a full journey). I think my...

American cheese isn't my favourite, but it works on cheeseburgers and I have had many good burgers that used it. My preferance is a medium aged cheddar, but, you know, almost any cheese has its charms. Even velveeta can be tasty in a properly cooked grilled cheese sandwich, as long as the bread...

I want to push back on the supposedly lethality of old school games. I've played since early 1e, and we had characters who lasted for years. In fact, even if a main character did occasionally die, raise dead-type spells were quite obtainable. And it wasn't just my group; campaigns running for...

This conversation has me really wrestling with how to discuss overtly political art given the forum rules. It has been argued that all art is political, but generally you can discuss, say, Andor without getting into the specifics of of the fairly obvious but coded commentary on today's political...

Yes. Look, we're treading close to politics now, and I've already been accused of rooting for the genocide of Japan (???), so I have to be careful what I write, but the rhetoric used in the film, and the general plot of the film rehabilitating the reputation of the Japanese military, as if they...

That’s quite an interpretation of what I wrote about the film using rhetoric that echoes that of the Japanese Far Right. If that’s how you read me, then there’s not much point in continuing.

To be fair, if I was lucky enough to still be playing with all my buddies from back in the day, and still having a good time, I wouldn’t feel much incentive to swap editions. I swapped because I largely fell out of the game and then came back for 5e because my kid wanted to play. And now I run...

Who says I don't critically examine other cultures, including my own? I can assure you that I do. But that's got nothing to do with this film, which specifically uses some language that echoes WW2 denialism from the Japanese Far Right, and a plot that serves to rehabilitate the Japanese...

Liking new things takes effort, and the latest research shows that the cognitive reward (literally, the dopamine rush) we get from new learning declines with age. So liking new things takes even more effort as we age. Then I think it basically becomes a cost/benefit analysis to most people. For...