@Admiral - To be fair, I had different levels of difficulty getting out into the world from the starting zone depending on which character I started a game with. Some of them aren't a great solo character to make your way through the wilds with, which was the part that sometimes felt punishing.
@Admiral — Octopath Traveler is one of the best-written classic-style JRPGs I've seen in ages, one of the most visually striking, and also one of the least forgiving (especially given the frequency of random encounters on average). It's been a while since I played a game that only let you save at actual specific save-points!
@Roz True story. He was a work friend invited by another player, and was obnoxious the whole session, culminating in deciding that his PC had decided that nothing that was happening was real (it was a portal fantasy 'normal world characters end up in fantasy world' - I WAS FOURTEEN OKAY?? scenario) so he'd naturally start raping the women he met.
That said: portal fantasy is a wonderful genre and I will fight anyone who says otherwise. My current 5e game is not a portal fantasy, but I have played in and run several of them, and I always think it's fun inasmuch as the characters have every IC excuse for being as unfamiliar with your newly-concocted world as the players themselves are.
On the topic at hand, though? Honestly, there are times where an X-Card would've been nice even in my old tabletop group where everyone involved had known each other for years.
At one point, the person GM'ing concocted a world shift (i.e., we were in this world and it started to change, a'la magic coming back and forgotten legends being rediscovered) around our (player) phobias. Which could have been very interesting, mind you, if it had just danced along the edges, using it to make for a little bit of psychological discomfort!
But it ended up pushing those phobias a little too hard but no one said anything—not wanting to be the one who ruined the game—until one player finally hit a wall and said bluntly either we needed a new campaign or she needed a new tabletop group. Having an X-Card to raise when we started to cross that boundary from 'a thematic element that introduces unease' to 'yeah I am actively no longer enjoying this' might've let the campaign redirect before it veered too far into that territory.
(To his credit, when he then realized players were getting not just that 'edge of unease' he was aiming for but actively squick/yuck/discomfort, the GM promptly went, "Alright, this obviously didn't work as I'd hoped, I'm really sorry, let's flip to one of the other GMs for a bit and I'll come up with a new campaign for my rotation in the meantime." And his eventual replacement one was one of my favorite setups we ever played in that group—maybe of all my tabletop experiences.)
@Tempest said in General Video Game Thread:
Is this the first pokemon game (rpg/mainstream series, not including the off-shoot games) with 3d models or have I just not been paying attention? The art style of the pokemon is super cute.
The games have used 3D models since Gen 6, when they made the jump to 3DS. Which is also where trainer customization (i.e., chargen, clothing you can buy and wear, etc.) was introduced.
But in Gen 6 (X/Y, Alpha Sapphire/Omega Ruby), the character on the overworld map was a cartoonish little chibi version of your trainer and you only saw the normal-proportion 3D one in battles and cut-scenes. Gen 7 (Sun/Moon and Ultra Sun/Ultra Moon) changed it up so the overworld stuff is the same scale; your trainer is not a squashed little cartoon when wandering the world any longer.
ETA: And yes, I'm excited. Honestly, this looks like a good year for the Switch; I'm getting the first Switch installments of two of my favorite portable game series, since we're getting both Sword/Shield in November and Fire Emblem: Three Houses next month.
A whole bunch of Pokémon Sword and Shield / Gen 8 reveals today! A couple of new Gen 8 Pokémon revealed! The legendaries for the Galar region revealed! Dynamax (giant) Pokémon! Multiplayer cooperative battles, where you can meet up with your friends and battle together instead of as opponents!
flails around madly
Gameplay reveal trailer, as well as the general game information page with new information and a longer version of the above gameplay trailer.
flails around more
(Look, there's a special place in my heart for games falling into the "RPG I can carry in my bag and play in short bursts throughout the day, but could also play for hours on a plane" category; the Pokémon games have long dominated that particular spot, though admittedly the Fire Emblem games also often wander into that bucket.)
@saosmash said in Dead Celebrities 2019:
@Sparks OH NO.
I mean, it's not really a surprise; he wasn't in great shape. He lost both his legs a couple of years ago after a major aortic aneurysm, his health had reached the point he had really only been doing voice acting in video games (and playing Avon in the Big Finish audio dramas for Blake's 7), and even that had tapered off.
But he was Kerr Avon! He was a recurring actor playing one-off characters in classic Doctor Who! He was the voice of Grand Moff Tarkin in some of the Star Wars games, and of Overseer Tremel in SWTOR!
So I'm sad anyway.
Paul Darrow, 78 — the actor who played Kerr Avon on the classic (and extremely low-budget) British science fiction show "Blake's 7".
@Auspice — Armitron Sport, ~$25. Time/date, two timezones, countdown timer, stopwatch.
Also, you gave primary requirements, but what are the nice-to-haves? For instance, is a stopwatch useful to you, or is a countdown timer more relevant to your use cases?
@Darinelle said in MU Things I Love:
Watching players make terrible, terrible choices that are going to send everything into a complete tailspin, even though they should rationally know better (and in many cases do).
If everyone is perfect all the time, the story is far less interesting, but hey - we live in interesting times.
Refer to my previous comment in this thread. 
Seriously, though, when the obstacles players face are of their own creation, it can add a lot to the story; having to figure out how to vanquish an ancient evil may have some pressure to it, but there's a personal level added if you're the ones who accidentally let the ancient evil out in the first place. As a GM, watching players make those choices (usually) fills me with glee!
As a player watching them make those choices, mind you, my character may sometimes want to take people and smack them on the back of their head to see if that can re-engage their brain/common sense, a'la the percussive maintenance trope exemplified by Han (or Rey) smacking bits of the Millennium Falcon to make it work.
@Auspice said in Um...What?:
@Sparks said in Um...What?:
@Auspice — Alien Ship/Ground OTP.
sorry I subscribe to the Alien Ship/Virus OTP
Look, we can either have a (literal) ship war, or we can just accept them as an OT3 and all get along.
Yes, Hollywood will be greedy. Yes, capitalism encourages self-interest. Yes, there is bigotry of many forms in many places around the world still. Yes, we can and should still try to press people to do better.
"The world sucks" does not imply "and therefore we should accept this, and not bother to try to hold people to a higher standard".
Especially since I feel like "sorry, we can't acknowledge you exist in the world at all, much less as protagonists, because some people might be offended by your existence and money is more important than recognizing that you are people" is not, y'know, really a super great message to convey to LGBT folks in general, much less the younger ones.
@Kanye-Qwest said in Fandom and entitlement:
@Sparks Ugh, and in Endgame, you never even see Carol ASK about Marie, or mention her, or see her face as one of the missing. I get it, she had a fun weekend kicking around with her pal Fury, but I don't really think that he's the reason she rushed back to Earth after the snap.
To be fair, Endgame was written and filmed before Captain Marvel, which is why Carol's out-of-uniform look is so different in Endgame; they hadn't even settled on her aesthetic yet. When Endgame was written, they may not have yet known how that relationship would shake out and so didn't want to risk contradicting something.
I'll let them slide on that one just for reasons of production practicality.
@insomniac7809 said in Fandom and entitlement:
But when Lupin and Tonks got together, it was acknowledged that they were in a relationship, even though the relationship doesn't really matter for the plot. Say it and move on.
That Grindlewald and Dumbledore are together is buried in subtext, even though their history is a major plot point in the narrative.
This.
Straight relationships are acknowledged in the text of major stories, whether or not they're relevant to the plot. We've seen people get away with more on TV in recent years, but in movies? Anything else gets buried in the subtext.
In Captain Marvel, are Carol Danvers and Maria Rambeau in love? Like 70 or 80% of the fanbase say yes (and Brie Larsen sure as heck implies it constantly in interviews). Is that ever openly stated in the film? No. The subtext is, admittedly, extremely loud, but it remains subtext.
(And, I will note, unlike many straight relationships which get acknowledged in text, Carol's relationship with Maria and Monica actually is relevant to the plotline. The film just never openly defines what that plot-relevant relationship is, leaving themselves wiggle room.)
When people talk about wanting to see a movie commit to showing a visible gay relationship, I think what they mean is not "the story has to be rewritten to focus on this" but rather, "It would've been nice if, while changing absolutely nothing else in the film, at some point Carol or Maria had even one line that referred to the other as their girlfriend or partner to surface that relationship from subtext into text."
@BetterNow said in Good or New Movies Review:
My boy looking amazing instead of like a guy in a rubber chicken suit. Seeing my childhood monsters as they were meant to be in my child's mind was the purest kind of joy. Mothra was beautiful. Ghidorah moved gorgeously. Big G was splendid.
I was going to go see it this weekend with my dad, but schedules didn't work out. I'm planning to go with him on Wednesday.
My dad loves kaiju movies. When I was little, whenever he could find one showing somewhere, he would take me and/or my brother to watch them. Whenever they were on TV, he would watch them with us. He had vintage movie posters for several Godzilla movies that he had managed to collect while mom lived in Japan before they were married, and he had hung them all in the hall outside my brother and my bedrooms; they're still there. We watched them enough that my brother and I both learned at a young age to sing the Mothra summoning song (the original Malay one, not the Japanese one they used in later movies).
Ever since this movie trailer came out, I've been wanting to take my dad to go see it, and I am very much looking forward to it.
(wanders off, humming "Mosura ya Mosura, dongan kasakuyan indo muu...")
@Ghost - yikes! That's like years back when my dad's former office-mate—the lawyer he had literally shared an office with at the prosecutor's office, a man who had been over for dinner with our family more than once—committed the premeditated murder of a rival lawyer, with an elaborate attempt to cover it up, and got caught. (Though I guess at least he didn't decapitate the other guy?)
But I know the "this is someone I know, someone who has been in my life, and who is now a news story" feeling where you suddenly find yourself re-examining past interactions.
It's worth noting that if you go to ChromeOS's settings and enable Linux support, you'll also be able to use any Linux clients on it by starting up the Linux layer and then installing that client, and running it. Mudlet, for instance.
Caveat: The Linux support on ChromeOS at this point is very good once things are running—it's largely seamless—but unfortunately also sometimes very, very slow to start up. And it is more than a little irritating that you can only launch GUI Linux apps from the Linux command line.
I'm generally great at digging up old threads, but I'm having trouble thinking of how to even start searching for that one.
This one? (I used 'trigger' as the search term.)
It's so stupid but I am near to tears; as it is I have trouble communicating and when I ask for clarification someone implying that I'm stupid or being sarcastic about it isn't helpful and makes me feel like shit.
No, being mocked for any miscommunication—misunderstanding, mishearing, misreading, misspeaking, etc.—never does. Sympathies. 
