Posts made by Packrat

@Auspice I am in the UK here so indoor/outdoor cats are very much the norm with keeping them inside all of the time largely considered to be cruel, along with being lucky enough to live in quiet suburbia so there is maybe one car every ten minutes down my road.

So most of the time they are free to head out and do cat stuff in my garden or those of my immediate neighbors (they are girls and so do not roam very far). Both houses alongside mine are owned by people who like cats and feed them treats for that matter, I know the braver of my two spent portions of last summer approaching barbecues then demanding and receiving a tribute of sausages.

New government guidance is not to allow cats outside because they can contract the virus.

So now I am faced with a terrible choice, do I release murderous felines with a lust for the blood of the innocent and the possibility of spreading a deadly plague to the neighborhood?

Or do I cope with floofy kitties who SHOUT ALL OF THE TIME THAT THEY WANT TO GO OUTSIDE and will gladly dismantle my house and/or claw my face whilst I try to sleep if I do not open the windows to let them outside into the sun so that they can lounge on top of the shed?

Super belatedly, I think you only need Life 3 to turn a tree into its mass of hornets? Which is pretty terrifying if you are anywhere near a good sized tree, summoning thirty million very confused hornets in a confined space is a pretty good nuclear option.

@Apollonius Belatedly, my attempt to make a new Fading Suns game got to the point of being given full access to the code from previous games, renting a server for a year and building most of the grid along with writing tens of thousands of words of theme files. I even made some neat map graphics and similar.

But I also suffer from chronic severe depression and the person who volunteered to help with some of their (awesome) code had other priorities. So it never got anywhere, mostly for the first reason. I can certainly help out with projects but not head them given I am 100% guaranteed to burn out if I try that.

Depression: Your work performance review has been scheduled for this afternoon. STRESS! Turn into a ball of nerves and fail to sleep properly as you have vague unformed nightmares about losing your job and failing.

Reality: Boss pushes back meeting by ten minutes due to feeling it hardly neccessary, tells me how happy he is with how everything is going, asks what he can do to support if I need it, claims he had no real ideas what to put in the mandatory to fill in improvement section. So is there any external training that he can pay for me to go on? Also keep up the good work and enjoy the fifteen thousand dollar bonus.

Depression: Still leaves me feeling meh and anxious and terrified of job security? Dammit.

As somebody who suffers from chronic major depression I find packaged ready meals pretty great. Waitrose (the 'posh' supermarket here in the UK) sells really nice ones and you can get three for like seven pounds (nine dollars?) So that is most of a week worth of dinners for the cost of one ordered in delivery meal.

If I am feeling ultra lazy than I microwave them but you can also just shove them into the oven for a half hour and they taste better, also they freeze so you can order them in bulk and pile them into the freezer. It is a zero effort way to get genuinely decent food that would otherwise be a huge pain to cook, I mean when am I ever going to actually make chicken and mushroom risotto for myself?

I am rather a luddite when it comes to PBs and tend not to use them, but one thing I tend to do if trying to find one for a character who is supposed to be super athletic/strong/whatever is to not look at actors or actresses.

Instead I look for pictures of Olympic athletes, as an added bonus you can then find people who are ethnically diverse pretty easily, plus they are going to be as close as you can get if you want to have your character look like they really do have those maxed out physical attributes.

@Auspice I can really sympathise there, not that I write for a living, but I started writing recreationaly and actually got an audience. I was running one of those 'write along as people vote' choose your own adventure type stories on a forum and it got to the point where anything up to a hundred and fifty people were voting each time along with probably a thousand readers. It was fun! Not to mention gratifying, I think I was up to fifty or sixty thousand words deep and people were recommending the thing I was writing to each other. Great!

Then I hit a complete mental brick wall, burnt out and stopped with basically no warning. I can only imagine how bad that would be if that was also one's livelihood not just a hobby.

My mum just got a puppy, she is disgustingly adorable and loves everyone she meets:

@Tinuviel I do not remember any sexy shirtless werewolves in Star Wars.

@surreality I can sympathise, Hera, the Mug Smasher I posted a picture of recently, turned out to be infested with fleas. I got her treated for them then the next morning she snuggle cuddled me adorably.

When I turned on the lights and looked at my Egyptian cotton white sheets. Oooh god, they were littered with dead and dying fleas, hundreds of them. It was disgusting.

Then she stretched, purrbbbtted and ran ahead of me into the bathroom before flopping over like this and she was mostly forgiven:

So I decided to hang a white sheet over my front room door in order to dry. This apparently made Artemis decided she needed to lurk atop said door. Now she jumps onto the heads of those who dare enter:

Also I am going to need to run another white load.

If you want something completely different, I have been trying out Age of Decadence. It is old, it looks awful and it is brutal as hell.

But the game is incredibly deep and can be played in what seems to be at least a half dozen completely different ways. There is a 'big plot' that the character is only one part of and you interact with it in utterly different ways depending upon your skills, background and actions.

The setting is a weird post magitech apocalypse quasi-Rome but frankly I am not 100% sure if there is any magic or if it is all technology. You have legionaries with bronze spears but my singular run through so far I also encountered a what I am pretty sure was a nuclear bomb, a drawn out quest line over a suit of (maybe magical?) powered armour and what I am pretty sure was a god entombed in the bottom of a pyramid full of weird machines that my Lore 0 character did not understand at all. Protected by Roman-Robots.

Behold the Mug Smasher

She is utterly unrepentant about her mug smashing.

It is very much a 'system thing' but one of the few parts of the original Fading Suns system that worked really well was that, absent special combat maneuvers, you could generally only use a given 'weapon' once a combat round.

But you could act more than once a combat round and still have good odds of succeeding if you were highly skilled.

So a character who was not monofocused on one combat skill could, for example, swing a sword in one hand and shoot a pistol in the other. Or kick somebody, etc. Not to mention even if the grappling rules were weird and broken without house rules? Armour and energy shields were good enough that grappling somebody was often kind of necessary and practical. A super focused sword person was legitimately vulnerable to two people in good armour grabbing them before one started to apply a dagger.

Of course some of those combat maneuvers had all of the balance and saneness that one might expect of the people who made 1st edition World of Darkness then fled the constraints of editors. A skill that lets you, as a single action, throw a number of enemies equal to your Fight skill as a normal throw action? (probably 7+ if you have this maneuver). Obviously completely balanced in a system where it normally takes a serious expert to not be immediately defeated by two capable foes.

Right, much as I might complain about it being kind of... Bland, I still remember running a that tournament on Arx where I managed to get through multiple rounds of elimination jousting followed by a like, 14 person grand melee.

In one evening, without it lasting until 3am or something.

The sewer combat itself was not too bad really even with combat skills of 2-3, Blood Boost turns you into an instant badass on the cheap. The big issue was playing a Ventrue who could not get any sustenance from rat blood. I got through a LOT of blood packs to power those fire ax swings.

Another factor seems to be a strong tendency to make all types of equipment 'equivalent' and merely a case of what flavour of fighting you are going to solely specialise in. Of course this is due to the marked tendency for player characters to oddly have their powered battle armour on in the bar when ninjas attack and similar.

It does make it tricky though for people to be good at different things though. People optimize, if they want to use a sword? They max out their swording skill but ignore all others. If they are an archer? They max out archery and never take a single point in anything else, especially on games where there is a massive investment in equipment meaning that having multiple types is prohibitive and the idea of somebody dropping their eight million dollar sword into a pit or being attacked with it not to hand is unlikely.

If somebody is say making... a knight? Then in my view they should have good reasons to have some skill in unarmed combat, the ability to use a bow or crossbow (even if not super well) and also the ability to use a dagger. Not just maxed out Swording or Lancing or whatever. Those should be skills that are legitimately useful in different circumstances. Maybe sometimes you are being harassed by horse archers or you are going hunting, maybe other times you are somewhere social and wearing a sword is rude, maybe another time you have been knocked off your horse and are wrestling with a foe whilst trying to shove a knife into the eyeslit of their armour.

Also players seem to assume that the 'heavier' or bigger weapons have more advantage than they actually do. Maybe not so much now, but I absolutely remember people commenting on Arx about how X was at a huge disadvantage because they were wearing leather vs Y in full armour, even though the leather was higher quality and thus probably had better mitigation. The person who can beat a two handed sword wielding knight whilst wearing leather pants and a corset with a knife in hand? People need to seriously reprogram their assumptions not to view them as just having won a seriously one sided confrontation.

Talking about vampires, I actually picked up the 14 year old original Vampire the Masquered Bloodlines recently and installed the 'fan patch' that fixes stuff and improves the graphics.

It is actually really damn good? A few sections get iffy especially if playing as a social character (looking at you, sewers full of monsters and only rats for blood) but I am now super hyped for the new one coming out next year even if it has been delayed.

@bored It does not help that quite a lot of games have implemented FS3 without the people running it actually reading the documentation at all. I have been on more than one where various stances/weapons/whatever have actually been doing the opposite of their stated intention with staff utterly oblivious until I pointed it out to them.

Things like shields making it easier to hit you, that kind of stuff.