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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • Let’s also throw in being a creep.

    He provided a song for the 2001 animated film Osmosis Jones. This is an animated, family-friendly buddy-cop movie about a white blood cell and a cold pill teaming up to take down a virus. In the song, “Cool, Daddy Cool,” he explicitly states his attraction to underage girls and his fondness for statutory rape.

    Young ladies, young ladies, I like 'em underage see

    Some say that’s statutory (But I say it’s mandatory)


  • I also bounced off of the Reloaded version (and SW in general). Unfortunately, I can’t really speak to the alternatives from personal experience.

    However, I’ve been gearing up to try Call of Cthulhu, and found out it has a Western setting! Down Darker Trails. I had never heard about it, but what I could find was really positive. If and when I run a weird west game, that would probably be my first choice, and certainly a top contender.




  • Exactly what just happened to me with Tabletop Simulator. Every single fucking Magic card that I or anyone I played with was saved.

    Even better, I couldn’t delete the files to get rid of the low storage warning. Changing the directory TTS uses didn’t work. Deleting the folder didn’t work, no matter how much I tried, because clearly MS knows better and I must have done it by mistake. I had to log in and use their web interface just to fucking say “yes, delete it, yes, I fucking mean it.”

    Not that I’m upset about it or anything.









  • Mostly because the rest of 5e is built around an assumption of relative balance.

    Adventures in modern D&D tend to consist of a series of more-or-less balanced encounters, usually combat, that will tax but usually not kill the player characters. If you tune it to be too easy, that makes for a boring session, or one where the DM runs out of content because the set piece encounter didn’t last as long as it should have. If it’s too difficult, you might have PCs die in a way that doesn’t match expectations. If most of the time combat encounters are supposed to be balanced, and a player has invested in their character’s backstory, and there’s clearly an arc they’re supposed to follow to the end, it sucks to have them be eaten by feral dogs.

    “The DM can fix it” is always true, but a cop-out. If players avoid a set-piece encounter in 5e, it feels like they’re avoiding the whole dang adventure. And while XP doesn’t have to come from combat, that’s the bulk of it, and the most clearly supported by the rules.

    And other systems just don’t have the same problem. Narrative games, like Blades in the Dark, have characters face consequences but not die unless it would be narratively satisfying. Other games just aren’t built on the assumption of balanced encounters, so it doesn’t throw a wrench into things if players get an unfair advantage, or bypass an encounter altogether, or just plain run away. And something like PF2e, which is in the modern D&D model, does have a functional balancing system.

    A functional balancing system also doesn’t really have the problem of constant, perfect balance. D&D’s CR system will let you design encounters that are Easy, Medium, Hard, or Deadly, and PF2e’s Threat levels include Trivial, Low, Moderate, Severe, and Extreme. It’s just that one works better than the other.

    Obviously all of this is “fixable” by the DM, but still, that puts a lot of work on the DM just to make the game work as intended.