With regard to vehicle combat, I find it very strange that the very first NPC we meet has a man-portable surface-to-air missile launcher, but there don’t seem to be any anti-vehicular weapons that players can use.
Or at least I think there aren’t; I’m not nearly as far as you are, but I looked ahead in the research tab and didn’t see any.
The videogamey parts are really funny to me. I laughed my ass off when I saw Thufir Hawat standing around in the heat outside the Leto residence in Arrakeen because I guess players have to talk to him at some point, and the interior of the residence doesn’t exist in the game, so he has to stand around under an awning in the parking lot like a valet or something.
I am about 4-ish resource tiers in out of 7-ish or so, and I don’t feel like it is especially grindy by the standards of survival crafting games. There is obviously some grinding for resources, but there is also a good amount of exploring and doing quests, during which you can pick up a lot of the things you need. Getting through the iron tier was a little bit long because you don’t have access to a large vehicle inventory yet at that point, but I also took that time to reveal a bunch of the map, clear out bandit camps, etc. so it didn’t become too monotonous. There are a good variety of secondary resources that will keep you visiting different kinds of locations (wrecked ships, old mining operations, etc.) so that even if you just want to farm resources, you won’t just be spending all your time running between ore nodes.
If your friends would be playing together, they could also do things more efficiently by sharing bases so that they don’t each have to build their own infrastructure, and eventually you get access to a mining buggy that is faster to operate with two players (a solo player has to switch between the driver and mining laser seats).
The kids are alright.
Does OOP always play characters with the same backstory beats? I’m always making up new insecurities/obsessions/neuroses for my characters because I feel like I can’t use the same backstory twice. (They have to have something going on, though, because well-adjusted people don’t make a career out of going into trap-filled holes in the ground and fighting to the death for the inhabitants’ pocket change.)
This is the one where we bully our little brother into going back to the world where he can’t walk, right? :P
Canceled Pride? Well, I canceled my sub!
YEARS OF DOING and yet THERE ARE STILL even more TASKS TO BE DONE
This is my #1 demotivator. It doesn’t matter how many tasks I do, it will never be enough.
Unfortunately the DMG says that if a character somehow acquires the same feature more than once, only one counts.
I feel like I first saw this pic before AI image generation was any good, so it might just be good old fashioned Photoshop.
Took this one just now. It’s hard to get Xena to look at the camera!
OP already accounted for social situations where you would expect to meet people, though, and his parents seem to think that he should be approaching people in other situations—like in a store, or on the street. I’d be very cautious about that.
Not quite the same but I used to work at a local, family owned supermarket chain that is now out of business. I started at one of the busiest locations, but after I moved apartments I transferred to another location that was out in the 'burbs. At the first location I worked at, all our equipment was well maintained, stock was reasonable, stuff seemed normal.
At the suburban location, our equipment was all falling apart. The roof leaked. The other stores sent us their overstock and charged it to our departments. I was in the deli, and one day the contracted maintenance guy was there and I asked if he could take a look at one of the meat slicers. He said sorry, corporate told him not to do any work at this location that they hadn’t pre-approved.
My first hypothesis was that this location didn’t make any money, and that’s why they didn’t want to spend to fix it. One day I decided to ask the store manager about it—he was pretty chill and we talked sometimes, so I figured he wouldn’t mind. I said “Does this store actually make any money?” and he said “Well, let me put it this way: the numbers I report to corporate show that every department here, except floral, makes a profit every month. And then the numbers they put out in the quarterly reports show that we’ve never made a profit since we opened.”
“Where does the money go?” I asked.
“That’s above my pay grade,” he said.
I’m convinced someone was embezzling funds. A couple years after I left, the whole chain closed one day with no notice to the employees.
The problem with “body type” is that it is actually a gender selector too, but they don’t tell you that. If you’re body type 1 NPCs refer to you as she/her, and if you’re body type 2 NPCs refer to you as he/him. They needed to add a separate pronoun option, but didn’t, so right now the body type option is just the gender option but pretending not to be.
IME framegen hasn’t meaningfully reduced the open-world hitching. It gets the framerate nice and smooth while standing still, fighting a bandit or whatever… until you walk a bit and the game becomes CPU-limited while streaming in new cells, at which point you noticeably hitch.
The performance in interior cells (including cities) is very good even on Ultra settings.
I suspect that this is one of the compromises they made by keeping the old engine running under the hood, because as DF notes this also happened in the original.
I mean, it depends on the edition. In AD&D the damage of fireball increases faster than your HP: you deal 1d6 damage per level and you gain 1d4 HP per level (and you don’t get an automatic max roll at first level), so on average a fifth level caster has 12.5 max hp and deals 17.5 damage on a failed save.
Nowadays with higher hit dice and higher average Constitution scores and potentially larger Constitution-based hp bonuses, it’s more survivable for sure. It also doesn’t expand to fill its nominal volume if cast indoors, so it’s a lot easier to find space to cast it in dungeons without frying yourself.
Edit: This is ignoring the fact that not all mages are equally likely to survive to fifth level; rolling higher HP makes you way more likely to survive to the next level, so I suspect if we surveyed players of fifth level mages the actual average HP would be somewhat higher, with the low rollers having been filtered out by dart traps, lucky kobolds, etc.
It’s been a long time, but it’s supposed to be coming out this year.
Inspire allies to perform better or push their limits, bolster them against mental damage and heal mental damage they’ve sustained, raise the morale of a group (especially if that group shares my religion). Bonuses to public speaking, negotiation, religious knowledge, etc.
If I belong to a more fire-and-brimstone type religion, perhaps I can intimidate sinners, make my allies more effective against heretics, etc.
Yes, I think we should abolish the police and dismantle the army. That’s, like, the whole point. They’re responsible for most of the violence!
Oh cool, I guess I just didn’t see it!