val

There isn’t anything to “deal” with. If you want your players to only give predetermined solutions to problems, you really need to play a different game.

Plenty of people do, it sucks. Nothing like having a bonus large enough to still pass even on a one but because someone likes more critical failures you fuck up at doing something that should be comically mundane to your supposed expert 5% of the time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Götz_von_Berlichingen

In my experience, having a person who turns the game into a joke makes it less funny than if it was just played straight. The game is naturally funny and absurd in ways that are best highlighted when the narrative is taken somewhat seriously.

I once joined a random pick up game online. Had a session zero, vibe seem alright.

On the day we actually go to play it turns out the DM invited a bunch more people and the group was going to be 8 people. Two of these people show up late, don’t even have character sheets ready. Game was advertised as queer friendly, one of them I think makes their character a transphobic joke but the guy was so awkward it was hard to make out what he was doing. Vibe is now fucked. One person quits the group on the spot.

I spend like three hours of the least inspired, boring D&D of my life. There is no hint that’s it’s wrapping up anytime soon. All we’ve done is spin our wheels trying to grab on to the quest hook, being strung along to talk to the next random generic NPC to inch us closer to actually starting the adventure and had a single combat encounter with one creature where I’m not sure anyone even took any damage.

I have to stress, I think the DM was a nice guy even if he kind of sucked at it. I liked the original group of people.

But I break when he guides us to start shopping. We haven’t even started the adventure and it’s about to turn into a shopping episode. I panic, I have to leave this fucking moment because I can’t take it anymore. I’m desperate for an excuse to leave that wont hurt the DM’s self-esteem and ruin the game for anyone who was having fun. The best thing I can come up with?

I disconnect mid sentence and act as if the internet dropped out like a bad sit-com phone gag. This wasn’t even well acted, my brain died when I went to disconnect and I just trailed off awkwardly. It’s still so painfully embarrassing to remember. Yet I maintain it was worth it.

The dungeon layouts from malls and subways is just stupid. Just placing rooms is not a meaningful portion of the work in designing a dungeon. If you want to steal one, there are so, so many already designed for TTRPGs already and available freely.

Reading horse shit like this turns me into such a boomer. Even when players are misbehaving these days you’re supposed to coddle them and never question their right to a power fantasy, where absolutely nothing bad ever happens to them, they’re never challenged and they’re never tricked. It’s pathetic, and why the balance of DMs to players is worse than ever.

Over the years I’ve seen a lot of articles about former Bioware devs leaving to form their own studios but nothing has ever really come of it. Whatever magic they had in the 00’s just seems to be lost.

Baldur’s Gate 3. I loved it as a cRPG fan who grew up on them. It’s ambitious, innovative and I’m really happy it’s brought the genre to a whole new audience. I hope we see something of a genre revival. But if you’ve been online at all you’ve seen all the praise I could give it already anyway, so lets talk about the bad.

It’s shockingly buggy and it’s weird that it’s always just a footnote in the discourse. I’m not sure I’ve ever finished a game this broken before. I was constantly encountering issues that would cause me to reload a save. There are plenty of posts about the bugs - pretty much every single quest in the game will have dozens of threads about various issues - but when it comes down to reviews people are really forgiving of it in a way I haven’t really seen before.

It’s also made some fundamentally terrible design decisions that wont be fixed by patches. Long resting to progress the story triggers is particularly awful. It absolute kills the pacing, despite the narrative suggesting a heavy time pressure (that isn’t actually there), and encourages you to just nova everything. I found myself just spamming long rests after every narrative beat until the cutscenes stopped triggering just to make sure which was very tedious.

Meh, this probably would have been a terrible remake anyway.

Given every single system in Starfield is already explored and built on, I think they should have just given up on the jump system and gone with a gate system like Freelancer or the X series. You get to fly to every point without menus while still being time efficient. The reason they didn’t go with this is presumably because of the supposed “exploring the unknown” angle, but you never explore anywhere new in Starfield anyway.

It’s a basic ass answer but Sisko. Star Trek has tried moral compromise a lot by now, but Sisko remains the only one where it really hit for me. Later Trek, where it’s more common, just doesn’t have the same level of professionalism or idealism for it to feel meaningful.

Shh, we’re not supposed to tell anyone about it lest that guy gets any worse ideas.

It’s true though.

Nah, this isn’t comparable to stealing something while the PCs are sleeping or sacking a stronghold offscreen. The OP’s example clearly has the player there so they had agency to do something here, but failed to save it. It’s never your stronghold until you’ve successfully defended it.

I struggled with The Outer Worlds’ really ham fisted centrism. While it’s been awhile, I remember the best result on every major planet was to find compromise between the two factions. It’s done so clumsily that it makes none of the factions feel authentic in any way.

It can be easy to dismiss it due to the 90s TV budget and effects

It’s a plus for me. Something about the sets and effects being more ‘attainable’ makes them more interesting to me.

It was literally the reference point I used in my post for the last time I’ve seen any real backlash, in the first sentence.

I don’t think I’ve seen any public backlash hitting the developer or publisher for the content of a mod being “offensive to public order and morals” since the hot coffee stuff, and that was only because it was content already in the game. This is almost certainly a lie and the real reason is they’re worried mods will compete with things they’re selling.

Watching the new season made me wonder if I Futurama was ever actually good. Are my fond memories of the old episodes just nostalgia?

The joke that really illustrates how creatively bankrupt the new season was for me is the non-binary robot. It’s a joke I’d already heard before, complete with the same stand up framing. It was just someone seeing something funny online and just sticking it in their TV show completely wholesale. It got a laugh out of me just because I was surprised to see something so blatant.

Every time it’d do a “topical” episode, it was just them going to beat a dead horse whose bones were already bleaching. Late to the party on Amazon, Crypto, and NFTs, showing up with only the shallowest, most well trodden observations.

Still haven’t gotten around to playing Elden Ring so I don’t know if there are better alternatives.