Kalbear

Okay, no, it isn't the daughter.

On Moldaver, here's my fanwank:

You would almost certainly see them, and more importantly you'd hear them the same way you hear planes; they'd be pretty loud even before the bomb.

Well, not if vault tec was planting them.

Right - but why would she let him have custody on that day?

Also finished the show last night. What a fantastic ending. The blackout hallway fight was cool as hell. A bit confused on this part though - knowing what we do about Howard's wife and what she went through to get a vault slot, and knowing what we do about who dropped the bombs first - how would she ever let her daughter not be at her side the day of the drops? Why was she with Howard at that point?

No, it is almost 100% perfectly canon with an absurd amount of references to the games that are perfect. Sometimes I suspect too good, and certain things that are in the show don't work as well for being live like they do in the game. But they 100% roll with it.

What? No! At 5th level the bonuses are actually pretty reasonable for everyone - 3rd level spells' power match up pretty well to both the proficiency bonus and the extra attack. That's my central thesis - that the power that most martials get at 5th level is actually reasonably balanced with the power that 5th level casters get. The main imbalance is that casters have basically all the tools to deal with multiple foes and martials don't, but the martials get significantly more damage to single targets. Where it goes off the rails for the most part is level 7. And my solution is exactly as I said - balance martials to give them similar power levels as casters at that point. Either make martials have significantly more versatility for the things they can do via skill checks or ability checks at that level to match things like Greater Invisibility or Divination, or give them more ability to do multitarget damage like ice storm, or give them more abilities to do more interesting things like polymorph or some of the summon abilities. The absolutely stupidest easy thing to do is take a few 4th level spells and make the martials have effectively copies of those spells that they can do better than a wizard, per class/subclass. That would make it so that each martial can do things that are at that powerlevel, and can do them better, but a wizard can be significantly more versatile and do almost anything - just not quite as good. There are lots of other ways to do it too, mind you - but that's the sort of thing I'm talking about. My solution, simply, is to make everyone as good as wizards are. And then balance the rest of the game around that. I'm not forgetting that; it's part of the general system. And it's not a basic understanding of math; it's a fundamental example of the relative power increase. I get that it is scaling with the things you're facing and that's important to note because after 5th level is where the scaling starts really suffering for martials, but the scaling math doesn't change. At levels higher than 5th you don't need to worry about a lot more extra attacks from anyone other than pure fighters, but you do start needing to worry about hold monster, polymorph, ice storm, wall of fire, etc while balancing fights.

Yeah, that's why I said basically. There may be a few other Easter eggs too.

So far basically none of the characters are from the games.

I guess? To me your quibble was that there were too many actual new countries and places, and things were recovering. That's been true everywhere in Fallout. There are going to be a whole lot of wild places for a very long time - especially since the radiation doesn't die down in a whole lot of spots - but civilization is coming back and thriving, and it's not all brutal raiders killing everyone and eating each other for funsies. I think this is mostly how you're interpreting the word and the world, and I'm likely not going to convince you otherwise to change how you're using the definition or thinking that you're right. I'll just say that the show is deeply close to the games, and the notion that you have to nuke everything so people can go back to playing Fallout 'the way it was intended' is really not remotely accurate by the way the games have been done.

BG3 is apparently the very first game to sweep all 5 of the major game awards since they were created. A bunch of games got close but most of them actually didn't make it with the BAFTAs, largely because BAFTAs are often too late the following year. That's pretty cool. In other news, a wrestler cosplayed as Karlach in one of her matches: https://www.ign.com/articles/ring-of-honor-wrestler-athena-baldurs-gate-3-karlach-cosplay

Yeah, this is very much not really the games. That's how you usually start the games but even they start meeting small villages and doing the equivalent of killing 10 rats. All of the fallouts have had significant development of factions and behaviors, and all of them have been about how humanity both adapts and splinters to these things. It is definitely not mad max. It's far more high-tech and advanced than that. Fallout has a few major themes I would say: The retrofuture style, especially evoking the capitalist/communist split Often very tongue-in-cheek humor A combination of both people barely getting by with spit and bailing wire and very high-tech components both from a bygone age and advancements Completely off-the-rails ethical behaviors But things like pockets of society? No - there are societies, big ones, big factions and behaviors and people getting back together. It is a lot of competing societies in most of the games and quests that matter.

First two eps were pretty awesome, especially decent given my viewing audience hadn't played the game. The Aw shucks vibe of the vault dwellers and the action beats have played pretty well, along with the over the top hilarious gore.

It's already been renewed for season 2.

It's an increase from +2 to +3. That's a 50% increase in what it was before. Given the fundamental math that's a pretty big deal in terms of overall success rates. This is especially true when you expertise instead of just proficiency. Another way to put it - for most characters the proficiency bonus is equivalent to getting a +2 stat increase. It's equivalent to getting a +1 weapon. And it is doing that for every single thing that they can competently do.

The difference in power between levels 4 and 5 is pretty insane. It's also pretty insane from 3 to 4, but 4-5 is even moreso. Specifically: - Virtually every martial character gets a second attack as part of their attack action. - Everyone increases their proficiency bonus from +2 to +3, meaning everyone gets better at hitting things and casting spells and doing anything - All major spellcasters get access to 3rd level spells, which are significantly above the powerlevel of 2nd level spells This means that your martial characters are usually doubling the amount of damage they're doing on a turn. Your spellcasters have both more abilities to do more things and those things hit significantly harder. And everyone is better at everything by 50%. The 3-4 bump is mostly about the ASI or feat, especially the feat. Getting crossbow master and being able to go from shooting once to shooting twice in a turn is pretty crazy. Sharpshooter/GWM have similar powerful beats. Even if you go away from some of the more broken feats you get things like +2 to your main stat, which adds chances to hit and chances to damage increases. But the feats are usually where it becomes nuts.

It's not that bad. Earthdawn had a good example of this. Every talent (your special, magical skills) could be advanced by a level, and the cost for each of these was in karma points which increased via fibonacci sequence values (1,2,3,5,8,13,21,etc). At certain thresholds the talent got specific perks or special abilities, but otherwise it just increased the kind of dice you rolled to determine success. (so level 1 = d6, level 2 = d8, level 3= d10). In addition you got certain abilities unlocked after some period of time as well for your general class. It sounds like a lot but it was all really self-contained and there weren't a ton of talents per class, so it wasn't crazy. It also meant that most everything scaled pretty similarly, solving some balance issues. I think this is a real good idea and something I was talking about with my group. While it's true that some levels aren't that significant for some classes that's a flaw and sucks; it should be a feeling of getting some really cool things all the time. I mentioned champions getting to jump further as an example of how crap some of those level breaks are, but the real problems are that (again) magic users always feel like they're getting something amazing basically every 2 levels and often feel amazing every level because they get more slots. I suspect you need things to feel more like what you're getting in those 3-4-5 levels, not less. But having more granulated progression would also be nice. The idea of having milestone progression has a flaw - it gives the characters no real idea of how well they're doing. You can give them slices of XP every week and that helps, but it still means you go from not knowing how fireballs work to being able to cast them effortlessly in one big jump. I also think that having a lot of the drudgery of this stuff be available on apps and online makes this a lot easier in terms of what you might want to do and keeping track of it.

Pfft so unrealistic, everyone knows women can't surf

In more relevant news, AI is being used to pick targets for Israel in Gaza - and it has a 10% failure rate: https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/03/middleeast/israel-gaza-artificial-intelligence-bombing-intl/index.html I guess that 10% is acceptable as long as you're not particularly punished for it.

Iger's keeping her around because by their metrics she's doing a pretty good job. People seem to forget that she's also responsible for things like Andor and Rogue One and the Mandalorian, and a lot of their licensing deals. But can we maybe, just once, not turn a topic about Marvel into bashing Kathleen Kennedy? Maybe?

The Ultima manuals and game box was absurdly cool. It had things like a cloth map, and a crazy detailed manual, and all sorts of things. Later on RPGs put in a ton of actual text from the game that you needed to use a specific key system to read from - along with a bunch of random things to throw people off - because storing that much information on disk was actually taking up too much space, plus it was something of a piracy fix.

I mean, kinda? I'm saying less about having spell slots and everyone having spells or even the same kind of mechanics, and more looking at it as: is this ability in general as power as the standard spells you can get at that slot and with the amount of things that you can use? And again you need to balance it with how many times it comes up, how powerful it is in and out of combat, flavor parts, etc - but that should be how you balance it. As an example, comparing champion level 7 (more jumping!) with 4th level spells shows an obvious imbalance, even if you can jump every single turn. If you want wizards to be the master of versatility but having to plan for and make tough choices, and want other classes to have more niche abilities that are less flexible that's fine too - but you need to balance that with increasing that power level too. Ultimately I think D&D suffers greatly from not having a clear idea of what each class is really good at and what they're not good at, and then balancing around that behavior; it is clearly missing intentionality. Which is weird, because WotC owns it and they're absolutely stellar at that sort of thing with MtG.

Don Hankey is Russian? https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/04/02/don-hankey-trump-bond-175-million-california-auto-loans/

Per reports the rematch drew 12.3 million viewers on ESPN - which is the highest it's been for any basketball game on ESPN since 2012, for men or women: https://www.npr.org/2024/04/03/1242484445/caitlin-clark-angel-reese-lsu-iowa-viewership-record-espn?utm_medium=JSONFeed&utm_campaign=news&utm_source=press.coop