Posts made by Ortallus

Okay, not QUITE how I meant it, but I see how it came across that way. Ew Ortallus. Just.. ew.

@coin said in General Video Game Thread:

@ortallus said in General Video Game Thread:

@ganymede said in General Video Game Thread:

@ortallus said in General Video Game Thread:

The games made him out to be WAY more of a lech than he was in the books.

Maybe. It's more the players, though.

Probably true. I mean, he definitely wasn't hung up about sex, but he WAS very devoted to Yennefer, in his way. Their relationship was just... complicated.

Yennefer is de hottest name. >.>

I just came here to say that.

Right? If I have a daughter....

@faceless said in General Video Game Thread:

@coin said in General Video Game Thread:

Yennefer is de hottest name. >.>

No.

Yessssss

@ganymede said in General Video Game Thread:

@ortallus said in General Video Game Thread:

The games made him out to be WAY more of a lech than he was in the books.

Maybe. It's more the players, though.

Probably true. I mean, he definitely wasn't hung up about sex, but he WAS very devoted to Yennefer, in his way. Their relationship was just... complicated.

@ganymede said in General Video Game Thread:

@faceless said in General Video Game Thread:

Yeah, I've been told I could skip Witcher 1. I've even been told by a couple people I should just skip Witcher 2. Go straight to Wild Hunt/3.

If you remember the Overlord expansion for Mass Effect 2, that's what they do in The Witcher 3. You can literally make up the story in the previous 2 to fit how you want to be.

And, yes, it has actually ramifications in the game, depending on how you write Geralt's backstory.

Which is why you should play The Witcher 3. Nothing but that.

Spend the money. Play. You will not regret it.

(There's an awful lot of brothels in that part of the world.)

The games made him out to be WAY more of a lech than he was in the books.

@auspice said in Random links:

@ortallus said in Random links:

@arkandel said in Random links:

Good read.

https://aeon.co/essays/why-is-pop-culture-obsessed-with-battles-between-good-and-evil

"pop-culture"? Shit, that story is as old as stories are. Iliad comes immediately to mind.

I see your Iliad and raise you Gilgamesh.

It's just what we do. Good vs evil, Hero's Journey, etc etc.
Stories follow a pattern. Break that pattern and it just doesn't really work.

Man vs. Man, Man vs. Nature, Man vs. World, Man vs. Self.

The "evil" itself can be relative, but it's baked in somewhere.

Also, Grimm's fairy tales. I mean, c'mon.

But, in fairness, in classic Greek literature, there is often no defined good or evil. ESPECIALLY when dealing with the gods. Classic pop culture depicts Hades as a royal bastard often times (See Disney's abomination of a Hercules translation), but in the old stories, he was actually very compassionate, loving, in a creepy obsessive sort of way, and forgiving.

Edited to add this link. This.. horrifying, horrifying link:

Edited again to add this one. Sorry, could only find a Facebook link, not on YouTube I guess.

https://www.facebook.com/therisingwasabi/videos/947161722110650/

@surreality said in Table-top gadgets:

This is more writing-focused, but it is entertaining and may be similarly useful: http://www.springhole.net/writing_roleplaying_randomators/backstory-idea.htm

I think I linked it elsewhere recently, as it's what I use to come up with random filler for test templates for wiki and whatnot as well because once the wiki code brain is on, the 'I need random examples of what might be on a character sheet as filler that doesn't need to be a huge chunk of lorem ipsum text' part is so, so very turned off.

http://www.ashami.com/rpg/

@firepuff said in Extra Life:

@ortallus In the past, I've played for the November game day. I wasn't aware of one this weekend.

https://www.extra-life.org/# for anyone interested.

It might only be PUBG?

Edit: It is, I just checked. All the same, if you play PUBG:

https://www.extra-life.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=cms.page&id=1414&eventID=541

Not sure if this is the appropriate location for this, but it is about gaming, just not about MU* gaming.

This weekend is the Extra Life gaming marathon for charity. I'd forgotten about it this year, but this is about the most fun way to raise money for about the most worthy of causes that I can imagine.

You play video games. People give you money for the children's hospital of your choice.

What could be better?

I was thinking maybe anyone who is participating in this event could post their donation link, and/or Twitch link. The first year I did this was before Twitch was even a thing, and I just gave people hourly Facebook and email updates. Twitch can be such a wonderful medium for an event like this, though.

So yeah, if you're streaming specifically for the event this weekend, please post a link. I'll try to pick one at random and drop in to donate some cash. Maybe others will do the same.

@lithium said in General Video Game Thread:

So I learned in 7 days to die, at least in the random world I was playing in, that you can only go down to -57m before you hit the unbreakable bedrock... which... sucks for me cuz I found a place already -22m below sea level and was trying to dig down far enough the zed's couldn't sense my forge and such.

I still spend way to much time on Avorion though, I get to a certain point, over-extend and then end up starting over to try out new ship designs etc.

-57m is, indeed, always Bedrock.

The good news is, you can't dig deep enough' that zombies won't sense your forges. It creates a heat map in the x,y axis, and completely ignores z.

It is still rather unfortunate though, because it limits the depth of your underground base. You'd have to expand horizontal to go big, which you might want to if you get into gardening and such. Also, generally speaking, you want a good 5 squares or so past the edge of your base smoothed out on the surface. This has to do with the way zombies interact with unlevel terrain.

The "Silo" books, by Hugh Howie.

Involves a post apocalyptic scenario where people live in a massive subterranean bunker.

@quinn said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

Debt.

That totally makes sense. Go into debt paying for child care so you can go to work and pay for child care. =P Might as well stay home and collect welfare. <.<

@auspice said in General Video Game Thread:

This helps explain why I couldn't get into Witcher 1 at all. It's just been gathering proverbial dust.

Same. Only on my 3rd install though. =P I think I make it about 30 seconds longer each time!

@arkandel said in Table-top gadgets:

@ortallus That doesn't solve the issue of a centralized platform for campaign management though.

No, true enough. Like you said, GDocs, and meh. =/

@quinn said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

A month and a half? Where do you live? Cause dude, where I live it's $3900 a month for the two of them and it's only that cheap because the youngest just got out of the infant room. Still better than the $4500/month we were paying last year, though.

They are not fucking around when they say kids are expensive.

JFC, how do most people do it? That's almost as much as my girlfriend and I make put together. Good thing we don't have kids.

@arkandel said in Table-top gadgets:

After playing a couple of times it turns out D&D 5E's licensing is making things really annoying, unless I'm missing something.

What I wanted was an online campaign tool that gave my players access to a centralized location to simply build their character sheets, and that way I'd have access to them as well. We play table-top iRL but it'd be convenient to see what spells everyone has access to, what their specs are, etc.

D&D Beyond seemed like a good choice for it but the pricing model is really annoying - for example I already have a physical copy of the PHB but to gain access to that same content I'd need to purchase a separate digital copy of it as well. Players are given access by default to the basic rules (SRD) which... is really basic. A warlock complained they couldn't find the Patron they had picked right off of the PHB as an option for the character sheet, for example.

The same seems to apply to most other third party sites - only they simply don't have non-SRD content available to them at all.

I guess I can do similar things with Google Docs or a wiki but meh.

That's just asking for torrenting. Not that I would ever suggest or condone such actions. I'm talking about 'other people'. sagenod

@quinn said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

It never fails, doing taxes every year and having to figure out how much we're giving to daycare is just the worst. It's god damn criminal how much we pay. I might as well be sending them to college. Seriously.

Pffft, your 1000 in tax savings should TOTALLY cover that. Right?? (For a month and a half, anyway)

@insomnia said in General Video Game Thread:

@ortallus But it's Funcom, so don't bank TOO much on plans coming to fruition.

Also fair, and really, I shouldn't promote anything of theirs after they pissed me the f'n off on TSW:Legends.

Game itself wasn't terrible, but I signed up for a month of the patron thing, figured it would simply expire after the month, as I very carefully paid attention when signing up, seeing if it said it would be a recurring subscription. Nope! You're automagically enrolled in a rolling sub, without being asked or even informed. At least, at the time that's how it was. I hope I raised a big enough stink they fixed it, because the assholes put my account in overdraft, and then when I went to pay a bill, I went even further into overdraft. Cost me 70 bucks that they refused to pay.

I told them if they could show me anywhere in the patron registration process that you agreed or were notified that it was a rolling sub, I'd drop it, and they said, "We'll get back to you on that." They never did. They also refused to give me a refund on the sub fee, at first, but after about a week of raising hell, they finally agreed to the refund, which allowed me to get the two overdraft fees dropped when I spent several days playing phone tag with the bank, explaining how Funcom had screwed me (and finding online links of others making similar complaints).

Suffice to say, one of the absolute worst customer services experiences in my life, and they'll never get another penny out of me personally.

@sg said in General Video Game Thread:

A friend of mine bought me Conan Exiles and I've been playing it quite a bit the past couple of weeks.

It's like a more frustrating Minecraft, but with schlongs flapping in the breeze while you rapidly die of dehydration and starvation. People keep saying the combat is good, but it's mostly cheesing with arrows and rockem sockem robots.

Somehow I'm having a lot of fun with it. Definitely one you have to play with friends on a private server, though. I would lose my mind on a PvP server where some griefer can just show up and knock down your castle.

Yeah, you also want to modify resource gathering and possibly thrall 'taming'.

Conan Exiles is essentially a reskinned ARK, but some of the plans they have for it in the future are pretty interesting. Check out their roadmap videos on YouTube. There will be these giant "herds" of NPCs that will essentially be armies. They'll attack keeps and do all sorts of other stuff.

But yeah, the combat to me was definitely not the draw.

@arkandel said in Random links:

Good read.

https://aeon.co/essays/why-is-pop-culture-obsessed-with-battles-between-good-and-evil

"pop-culture"? Shit, that story is as old as stories are. Iliad comes immediately to mind.

@insomnia said in General Video Game Thread:

Buy it now, it's the cheapest you will be able to get it for a long while, plus with the monthly bundle you get well over $100 games each month, as well as access to the Trove which is a bunch more games you can download too.

Also, if you sign up for humble monthly right now and use my affiliate link, I get a bonus, if that sort of thing floats your boat.

ETA: I haven't gotten to play it much lately, mind you, as my father is slightly obsessed with it right now. >.>

Perfect time to get another copy!