Durckad

Fevre Dream is an amazing book. Wonderful twist on vampire horror. The Armageddon Rag is like, partially, a really cool book and a really neat snapshot in time of the post-Vietnam 70's in the USA with a side dish of psychedelic/acid rock. However, structurally, it's kind of a mess and the end just kind of happens? I do think it's worth reading but it is kinda flawed.

Fifty Shades of Fae, ackshually.

I only noticed ads at the start of videos on Prime which is not that bad, honestly, certainly not to the same extent as, say, Hulu or Paramount+. If they get more prevalent then, yeah, that's annoying, but right now? Meh. Certainly does mark the end of the golden age of streaming, if there ever really was such a thing.

If my almost 9-year old potato can run Cyberpunk (and it still looks pretty good, even with the settings turned down), I think almost any computer should be able to.

Fuuuuuuuuuuuck. That.

I don't know if I want to live in a world where BG3 is considered short. I spent over 100 hours on one playthrough! That's short?!

It's a great little game with a neat time traveling-based plot with some good characters, an interesting world, great music, and pretty damn good gameplay. Best of all, it's not some overly long, 200 hour bloated monstrosity of a game like so many RPG's nowadays (or games in general). I think it could be finished in like a good 20-25 hours. That said... I do think this is fair even if I don't agree. What was once innovative often becomes old hat as time passes, that doesn't make the original any less good. Chrono Trigger, IMO, holds up better than some of my other favorites from that era of gaming. Even FFVI, a game that probably has even MORE nostalgia bias for me, honestly.

I mean, it's certainly possible, but I have replayed all of them (except for, ironically, Mass Effect 2) and they all hold up fairly well, IMO But, does being newer make something automatically better?

Well hate to disappoint you, but yes, I do think BG2 is better. Much better than B3. It's much more groundbreaking, better pacing, less linear, absolutely tons of optional side content. It's a classic game for a reason, IMO. BG1 and BG3 are on similar levels for me, though I think, "objectively" BG3 is probably a better game, but BG1 has a lot of nostalgia for me. Both are pretty flawed in different ways, but still quite good or great games in their own right. I don't think DAO really holds up well for me at all. IMO YMMV. That said I do think it's character and narrative choices are almost on par with BG3's and its roster of side characters is incredibly strong as well. Also other games I would argue are "better" RPG's: Planescape: Torment Chrono Trigger Final Fantasy VI Deus Ex Mass Effect 2 BG3's strength, to me, comes down that it does a lot of already established things fairly well but doesn't really excel at any of them and doesn't really do anything new. It's a very good game, but greatest RPG? That's a pretty high bar to clear.

Disagree. Very strongly.

Hmmmm... 1986 - The Legend of Zelda 1987 - Castlevania II: Simon's Quest 1988 - Super Mario Brothers II 1989 - hmm, fuck, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Arcade Game is the only game I have really fond memories of here 1990 - Super Mario World 1991 - Final Fantasy IV 1992 - The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (Ultima Underworld) 1993 - Doom (Sim City 2000) 1994 - Final Fantasy VI (X-Com: UFO Defense) 1995 - Chrono Trigger (Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness) 1996 - Mario Kart 64 1997 - Goldeneye 007 (Fallout/Diablo) 1998 - Half-Life (StarCraft/Baldur's Gate/The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time/Thief: The Dark Project, jesus fuck 1998 was a great year for gaming, holy shit) 1999 - Planescape: Torment (Age of Empires II/Unreal Tournament/Super Smash Brothers/Alpha Centauri/Homeworld, another insanely good year) 2000 - Baldur's Gate II (Deus Ex/Diablo II, BGII and Deus Ex were very, very close, Diablo II was a distant 3rd but I played the absolute hell out of Diablo II back in the day) 2001 - Halo: Combat Evolved (Super Smash Brothers Melee) 2002 - Warcraft II: Reign of Chaos (Morrowind) 2003 - Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2004 - Half-Life 2 (World of Warcraft/Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines/Rome: Total War) 2005 - F.E.A.R. (Civilization IV) 2006 - Warhammer: Dawn of War (The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess/Guitar Hero II) 2007 - Mass Effect (Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare/Bioshock/Rock Band) 2008 - Fallout 3 (World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King, kind of a shit year for me, to be honest...) 2009 - Dragon Age: Origins 2010 - Mass Effect 2 (Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty/Bioshock II/Fallout: New Vegas) 2011 - Skyrim (Deus Ex: Human Revolution) 2012 - X-Com : Enemy Unknown (Dishonored/Mass Effect 3/Legend of Grimrock) 2013 - Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon (Bioshock: Infinite) 2014 - Shovel Knight (Wolfenstein: The New Order/Wasteland II) 2015 - Cities: Skylines (This War of Mine/Axiom Verge) 2016 - Stellaris (Civilization VI/Total War: Warhammer) 2017 - Prey (Hollow Knight) 2018 - Surviving Mars 2019 - Disco Elysium (The Outer Worlds) 2023 - Baldur's Gate III

Hey, no judging...

IIRC, the BG1 manual was pretty much a primer on how to play AD&D 2e. I know I learned quite a bit about playing AD&D before playing AD&D just by obsessively reading the manual. The Warcraft 2 manual was also a treasure trove of information: lore, story, and even some stuff useful to actually playing the games! Some other good manuals from the bygone days were for the NES Zelda games. I loved reading about the various monsters in the games. The copy of BG2 that I have came with a cloth map as well, which I still have to this day thankfully. The manual, alas, has been lost for a long, long time.

No ethical billionaires, but maybe... maybe edible? No, no... but maybe...

I think the skill problem is more a D&D problem honestly. Every edition has had some disparity in power between casters and martials and tried to solve it in different ways and none has really succeeded in doing so in a way that satisfies anybody. 1e/2e, wizards were horrible to play at low levels (no cantrips, 1-4 hp at level 1, and one spell, then rely on your crossbow with terrible to hit rating until you get to sleep and recover... maybe if the DM lets you), they leveled much slower than anyone else, but got to play with all of the big guns near the end. I'm not super familiar with high level 2e and 1e so I'm not sure how vast the gulf really was but also I think the idea of balance back then was just very different than it is now so the game was clearly aiming for a very different target than 3e and onwards. 3e was honestly the worst at this, because not only were wizards demigods at mid to high levels, but druids, sorcerers, and clerics too now. Any one of them could buff up and make a non-magic class obsolete. PF did a decent job at trying to fix this, but it did this by just adding more and more numbers and bonuses until you need a program to run your character at high levels. 4e, honestly, may have been the best at this, but it did this by essentially stripping out much of the uniqueness of casters (IMO of course). Again not super familiar with 4e, but out of everything I've heard, it is very, very well-balanced in this respect. And 5e, by rejecting much of 4e, just simply reintroduced many of the problems that cropped up during 3e. However, Concentration does seriously mitigate many of those issues. Also the fact that spells no longer auto-scale. Unfortunately, making feats much rarer than in 3e removed Very much agreed. From what I remember, this was a pretty common complaint of skills in 3e. Well, not so much skills, because they were still pretty useful, but that so many skills could be rendered obsolete with a simple spell. So yeah, the more things change... This is correct. Concentration in 3e and Concentration in 5e are only kinda, vaguely similar. 3e does not limit the number of spells you can have cast at a time, 5e does. 5e measures whether you can keep the spell active while taking damage or being interrupted while the spell is up. 3e measures your ability to successfully cast defensively or while taking damage or being distracted. I've honestly never heard of 5e Concentration being a home rule during 3e but I guess it's possible... Honestly, the Concentration skill in 3e is one of the weaknesses of the skill system. Every spellcaster takes Concentration. It's such an incredibly important skill for spellcasters that it's almost mandatory. It's a skill point dump. If a skill is mandatory, then just make it not dependent on being a skill, make it a class feature for spellcasters or something. There is no reason for it to be a skill. Congratulations! You've just invented 4e.

Well, this was true of kits as well. Many were notoriously unbalanced or were only balanced through odd roleplaying restrictions or requirements. If there's one thing 2e and 3e have in common, it's the pure crap shoot of quality in the optional rules content that was being released throughout the editions. The bigger problem with 3e was that there was just so much of it being released. Almost every book that wasn't a setting sourcebook was prioritized around releasing more and more rules content and, like you said, so much of it was clearly not that well balanced. Add in all the 3rd party content and a poor DM could be swimming in crap feats and prestige classes. Even Pathfinder 1e fell victim to this content treadmill, although IMO, it was even worse here as every new release seemed to up the scale of power compared to the previous releases. I don't think that's really correct at all. 3e and 3.5e were both criticized quite a bit at the time for being too miniatures focused and for basically requiring a battle mat (or grid) and miniatures to "play properly." Several examples of combat rules in the core books even utilize both grids and miniatures to explain their function in play. Multiple rules in 3e also require knowledge of specific placement and distance of your character against monsters or NPC's, namely flanking, Attacks of Opportunity, diagonal movement, and 5-foot steps. You could certainly play 3e without miniatures and a battle mat, but, 3.5 especially, practically assumed that you had access to and were using both during play. Whereas with earlier editions, miniatures were simply a part of the game that you could use or ignore if you didn't want to use them, 3e very much started the focus on utilizing miniatures being a key part of the game much to the chagrin of players and DM's who did not want to use them. 4e was even more blatant and if there is a version of the game that was truly miniatures focused, it was 4e, to the point that distances in the books were changed to squares rather than utilizing feet. 5e is, like you said, very simplified and streamlined down from 3e and 4e. Flanking is now an optional rule, 5-ft steps no longer exist as a thing, and attacks of opportunity are greatly, greatly simplified, and since everything is basically boiled down to advantage/disadvantage now, characters have far less reason to utilize terrain or specific placement on the battlefield to stack bonuses during combat, ala 3e. So while I would agree that 3e, 4e, and 5e all have emphasized a greater reliance on the utilization of miniatures during play, to say that 5e is just a "miniatures wargame with a sheen of roleplaying" is both insulting and requires a very skewed view of the progression of the game over the past 25 years. Even 4e, I would argue, is still a roleplaying game, even if it is probably the closest to being a straight miniatures based wargame with its emphasis on balanced combat and grid-based play. 3e itself was frequently referred to as being a "roll-playing" game back in the day for its over reliance on rules-as-written gameplay, miniatures-focused combat, and boiling role-playing down to simple skill checks. I didn't agree with it then and I certainly don't now. While I can understand and sympathize with the desire to name 3.5 a cash grab (because some of the push to put it out so early absolutely was) it did clean up and improve quite a bit of the rules at the time. I would happily play 3.5 today if given the chance (though I think I would prefer Core PF1 or PF2 instead) but I'm not so sure about original 3e. 3.5 was definitely a needed release at some point. The amount of absolute glut of material, either 3rd party or official, during the 3e era was absolutely insane. So many releases that consisted of nothing more than monster books or books full of feats and prestige classes. The market during that time was very thoroughly over-saturated even before 3.5 IMO. Some great stuff, some real dreck, but a lot of pure meh. Oh yeah, you definitely can but I'm not a big fan of the scanned .pdf copies of older books. The scan quality of some is not great sometimes and I don't find them enjoyable to read beyond being useful for casually referencing. I would much prefer having a physical copy, but of course, YMMV on that.

Oh yeah, 4e is definitely not bereft of good ideas. I'm quite fond of Minions (or at least the idea of them) and the Bloodied condition (and certain abilities on monsters and characters triggering off of it). Yep, I forgot to mention that, but that was certainly an issue with 4e as well. Honestly makes me wonder how 4e would have done if WotC hadn't shot themselves continually in the foot leading up to and including the release. Would the massive change in rules have been enough to sink it by itself or was it just a conglomerate of ALL of the issues working together that led to it being received so dismally? The changes are honestly NOT that important unless you're a lore fiend or fan of a certain campaign setting or you're just a big nerd with too much time on their hands (ie me). Even then you can enjoy, say, Forgotten Realms without knowing the messy history details behind the releases of 2e, 3e, and 4e. The biggest issue there is that there's no big campaign setting book for 5e so you'd likely need to rely on older releases for information. The 3e Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting Book is a fantastic sourcebook... if you can get your hands on it as it's, as you can imagine, been out of print for some time now. The 2e Campaign Setting books are just as good (generally) but even harder to track down.

Each edition of D&D has brought lore and rule changes along with it. Mostly it's an excuse to sell more books, or it least it was, I have no idea how well D&D books sell now, but they sold pretty good back in the day. But also it's an excuse to rationalise away any changes in the canon or rules. For example, the switch to 2e eliminated a few classes from the core roster (assassin and monk were the two primary ones that were removed, though I believe they returned later on) and the Time of Troubles radically shook up the status quo of Faerun with several deities getting killed, Bane, Myrkul, Bhaal being some of the primary deaths, though Mystra was killed as well and a mortal took her place, becoming the new Mystra. Several new deities rose to power in those places, namely Kelemvor, the aforementioned Mystra 2.0, Iyachtu Xvim, and Cyric. 3e brought back Bane at the expense of his son, Xvim, and I believe he also took back some of the portfolios he lost to Cyric, which is good, because Cyric absolutely fucking sucks. The Shade Empire returned and started causing some trouble in the North signaling a potential return of the Netherese Empire, or at least a wannabe Netherese Empire. I'm sure there's more but those are the big ones. I noped out of 4e so all I know about the changeover there was that there was the Spellplague, which I'm assuming was used to describe the rules changes in 4e and that almost no one likes the Spellplague or the changes to Faerun. 5e retconned away most of the changes during 4e but 5e hasn't released a big, Campaign Setting book so I have no idea where things stand now with the setting and I can't be arsed to hunt down details as I only kinda like Faerun as a setting. Plus I don't run my games in the setting. Kits became prestige classes and they function much differently but fill a slightly similar niche and yes, Thaco is a thing of the past, thank the gods. I'll be honest, I love some of the artwork for 3e, but yes, it's not the classic fantasy style of Elmore, Clyde Caldwell, or Keith Parkinson. I recall people on forums describing it as "dungeon punk" but whatever, I liked it, but it is a stylistic shift. I don't believe wildspace was ever canonically brought up in 3e as Spelljammer was very much a dead setting during that time, but Toril was removed from the Great Wheel during 3e and was given its own, separate cosmology. The Great Tree I think it was called? In prior editions, movement between the various campaign settings was possible but difficult, but in 3e it was still technically possible but much, more difficult and up to the DM as to whether it's allowed. 4e is almost directly responsible for the creation of Pathfinder, but it's not so simple as the rules changes forced Paizo to make Pathfinder, it's a bit more complicated than that. Mainly, WotC and Hasbro majorly fucked up, surprise, surprise. Not only did they launch 4e without an explicit GL or SRD, they tried to entice 3rd party publishers to jump aboard with vague promises that "yeah, everything will be good. We won't fuck with you guys. Promise." Paizo didn't want to tie their future to a game system that didn't have any legal documentation written up yet, plus, I'm assuming they weren't big fans of the direction WotC was taking the game or at least the snippets they had seen. There was also the fact that WotC had just recently pulled the licences of Dungeon and Dragon Mag from them, forcing them to start up their Adventure Paths and writing up the Golarion setting. I'm assuming that didn't help in their decision making process. I also recall, though not with 100% veracity, that there was a bit of a leak of the new, potential OGL documentation at the time and that it was much more restrictive that what had existed under 3e and that basically forced Paizo, and other 3rd party publishers, to jump off from 4e. Combine that with the massive changes, not only in the rules but in the lore and how the game played, and 4e was divisive to say the least and lacking much of the 3rd party support that 3e/3.5 had at the time. I'll be honest, I never played 4e. I remember the lead up to its release, I bought the core books, read through them and went "Nope." It does have its fans but they're certainly not very numerous and it's probably the least consequential of any edition of D&D, except for some few, specific rules and bits of lore that survived into 5e. Most of those lapses in logic and weird rules are directly inherited from 1e. 2e and 1e are not that different, the core of the game is still much the same between the two, albeit with some modifications (the removal of some classes and races from the core of the game, for example), but yes 2e had level limits on non-human characters, class restrictions (no dwarf wizards!), class prerequisites (you had to roll really well to play a paladin or ranger), multiclassing was limited to non-humans and to certain class combinations. It's honestly a deeply silly system and is just begging you to homebrew many of these restrictions away because they really only exist for gamist reasons (humans suck compared to other races so let's balance them by arbitrarily restricting access to certain classes! Simple!) and don't make any real sense. Compared to 1e, 2e is, eventually, a more "crunchy" (ie rules focused) game with the release of various sourcebooks like the "Complete" series of handbooks and "Skills and Powers" that introduced kits and other optional rules that greatly enhanced the customization of characters. I did once own a copy of The Complete Psionics Handbook and man, that was an interesting system. It didn't cohere at all with the existing 2e rules but it was full of so many weird and bonkers powers and I only understood about 20% of it so of course I allowed it in one my games. I am very, very sad that I no longer have that and several other 2e books that I collected at the time. 2e also introduced some of the best campaign settings of the game, namely Dark Sun, Planescape, Spelljammer, and a couple of others (Red Steel, Zakhara(?), Maztica, etc). 2e had too many goddamn settings, so many in fact that they just started cannibalizing and fragmenting their own player base but there was no doubt that there was some true creativity there. Honestly, if you ignore the rules, 2e was the best. It had some rich and flavorful campaign settings that were well-written and unique. Too bad many of them are languishing and have been largely untouched for years, if not decades. Yeah, this is pretty much spot-on. 5e is in almost every way, a reactionary repudiation of 4e, a return to the roots of D&D. It takes the core framework of 3e, some of the more popular rules from 4e, and the game philosophy ofc 1e/2e and smashes it into a mostly coherent whole. It's far less rules intensive than 3e or 4e and it has fewer options and customization for players to dig into for their characters. But on the other side of the coin, it's much simpler to pick up and play (and DM) than those two editions. On paper, 1e/2e are similarly easy to pick up and play as the core of those games offer almost 0 ability to customize your character, no skill points to allocate or feats to choose, just roll stats, pick a race, and pick a class, roll hp and go. The big hurdle is just wrapping your brain around how the systems work as 1e/2e are very much not intuitive (roll high for this, roll low for that, roll a d20 here, roll a d10 here, roll a percentile here, etc). That lack of options and customization has meant that 3e/3.5/PF still has a pretty large niche in the D&D community that 5e will probably never be able to win over due to its differing focus. Same for 1e/2e and even 4e, I assume, has its small group of fans and players still out there, happily ignoring 5e and whatever bear traps Hasbro/WotC is busy stamping their feet into. Hopefully this is coherent and helpful as I may have had a glass of wine while writing this. Any grammatical errors are certainly not due to my own inability to type.

Booted up Boltgun last night and played it for a little over an hour. It very definitely walks on the same path that Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal do; fast, frenetic, and ridiculously gory combat that constantly pushes you to keep fighting even if your health pool is just a little sliver as enemies drop small health pickups so you can kill AND heal. It's maybe not as good as Doom 2016/Eternal at doing that and occupies more of a mid ground between them and older Doom and Doom clone games. It's quite fun so far and the pixelated graphics look great.

Pretty solid finale overall and a pretty big step up from Season 1. I didn't hate Season 1, it was almost aggressively okay from start to finish, with a few standout moments here and there. But Season 2? Yeah, I quite enjoyed it. Although... I haven't really followed any online discussions but I can certainly imagine big Halo fans fucking haaaaaaating this. I enjoy the games but the wider "lore" and stories are beyond me caring, but even I can tell how much this diverges from established events. Not enough for me to care about the changes but just enough for me to go "Oh, that's different. Okay." I'm not sure an "accurate" adaptation is even possible, but this certainly goes it's own direction in many respects.

I was talking to some of my friends about this, but X-Men did have one thing that Batman did not, it was way more serialized and relied more on continuing and developing storylines over Batman's more episodic structure. As a kid who hadn't gotten into anime yet and wasn't into comics, X-Men was one of the first animated shows I saw that eschewed the episodic format and that was huge for me. Spider-Man (and a host of other shows like Exo-Squad and Gargoyles) did that as well, but X-Men came first and that was a big reason why it was THE show for me back then. Was Batman a better show? Yeah, probably, but for a dumb kid looking for something a bit "more adult" than TMNT, X-Men was the shit. Loved Spider-Man back in the day, I tried rewatching it about 10-15 years ago and... nope. Doesn't really hold up. Sometimes... things should just stay as distant memories in your childhood.

Yeah, it turned out a bit dry, but not so dry that it's inedible. Not sure I'd recommend it, but I've certainly made and had worse. That sounds delicious. Can't go wrong with mushrooms and garlic, honestly.

I dunno, Denis turned one half of Dune, which was mostly people talking and thinking in caves, into a 2 and a half hour movie that was very, very good and very not boring so I think there's enough meat on the Messiah's bone to make a full movie. Much like Dune Part Two, it probably won't be entirely faithful to the source material, but as Dune Part Two largely, IMO, benefited from the changes, I could certainly see movie of Messiah being quite engrossing.

It's St. Patrick's Day so that's a good excuse to make Shepherd's Pie. Turned out quite tasty as per usual. I also made Soda Bread for the first time ever. It is certainly one of the breads of all time. Comments on some of the recipes I followed mentioned adding dried fruit, sugar, or nuts to the recipe to make it a bit more... flavorful. Which I will likely do if I ever make it again. I tried the "authentic" method now I'm fine with screwing around with the recipe.