Mawd

I'll have a look later in the week but feel free to plow right ahead with your concept because I can easily shift into a different role.

Well it sounds like you already have a strong concept so feel free to go ahead there. I was thinking conversation bard with some buff aspects while taking a bit from either the assassin style tree or the more trap findey style.

I'm definitely thinking of rolling a rogue now. I haven't made a trixy character yet. Bard/rogue might be good to play on the deception angle.

Oh I can't make my mind up at all is the thing haha

I already have a low level pally in 5e but I'm still considering rolling a new Pally or a Rogue Or Bard.. heh

Reflex is an updated version of Quake multiplayer but it's a very faithful recreation of the CPMA mod for Quake than it is a straight remake of Quake.\ The main difference between the two is the mod and some movement changes. I think you can move in air differently to what Quake allows. edit: yeah I did miss that you were talking about SP Quake. Anyway I was going to add that this style of multiplayer is about controlling item timers on the map like Red Armour or Mega Health. Maps are usually designed in a way that you have to sacrifice one to secure the other and that even if you have RA the other players can still get Yellow A. and maybe a better gun before they look to fight you. Duels especially tend to be about picking up one of the three essential weapons (rail, rocket, lightning guns), either YA or RA and looking for a kill before resetting your stack once you have map control again. As for SPness I really only started with Quake 4 and it felt like it was already being influenced by other shooters like HL2.

Oh ok. Is that what we're doing now? All these changes happened when I was sleeping. Anyway I'm fine to do 5e. I think it's a nice system. But with character creation sessions, the times everyone's suggesting fall between 6am-9am on a weekday which is something I can't really do due to other commitments sorry. I would be happy to watch and talk with the others I find on their shared story stuff. Eastern time is 16 hours behind me and PDT is 13 hours behind just fyi. Or we could brainstorm ideas ITT and come back with summaries after character creation?

It's my favourite album of this year (aside from Blackstar, still this is the most listen-able) but I really have to be careful how much I listen to it. Been getting back into St. Vincent a lot too. I originally liked her album with David Byrne more and bounced off her latest solo album but going back it's been really good.

Just start the church of Fry. You'll be good as.

Nice idea. I'll add myself.

Neil Cicierega's mix of Ghost Busters has me craving more mashups I dunno if I can really care about new DG any more. Maybe if I get really out of it one night but even then. Y'know after following the DG mania since it started the only album I can reliably come back to is Fashion Week.

Sounds good. Having a P2T button again makes me a lot more comfortable with people in the back ground. Oh and just a thought. So you could run XP based on sessions played instead of monsters defeated? Maybe adjust all of that for the progress/types of challenges we face but right now monster slaying does feel like the bedrock of levelling which, isn't quite what Pathfinder is about. As a side not to that I'm not sure how the other characters are dealing with their xp but for the cleric and myself we've accrued around 110 xp out of 2000 in our progress to level 2 out of the two sessions we've played compared to Reynard's half a level. That might be by design but Idk. Another method is for the GM to award levels based on when they feel its right. This could be after a campaign arc or some super boss battle. You peeps might want the more mechanically rigorous experience of Pathfinder though. The other thing though is that early levels of Pathfinder can be quite limiting for some people both in terms of what players have the option to do and what the GM can throw at them. As I remember CR 0-1.5 enemies mostly boil down to small bats, some dogs, some humans, Kobolds, etc. So if that ever gets annoying you could always expedite the early character levels, say make them last around 2-4 sessions until some threshold that feels right for you/us and then it's back to slower experience gain.

I am totally in the same boat when it comes to jazz. I saw whiplash the other day and it reminded me to check out the few jazz songs I know again. : D

Yet the experience of playing a game is not the same as watching it. That's why film and games are considered different media. In the same way you call it "experiencing a different fun machine entirely" you have people speed running or challenge running the game for a specific experience that they want from it. These people are free to choose how they want to engage and consume media. For some the quintessential dark souls experience heavily involves pvp, no healing estus, or only using a strength based great sword or sword and board. These are all personal ways to experience the game which the creators ultimately make a available to the player as part of their choice and all adding options to make the game more accessible (that you don't ever have to choose) does is add the potential for more fans and revenue. Dark souls has never just been about action, it's an adventure, it has in its own way a story focus, heck the type of action completely changes depending on your play style or self imposed challenge. So at the end what refusing to make this game more accessible does is remove people's choice to evaluate how they want to interact with it. It's saying that people who can't play without constant distractions,have a bigger work/life commitment, more difficult circumstances as a caregiver than someone like Osmosich (thanks for offering your experience as a parent, it's always interesting to hear how other people choose to engage with media depending on their different constraints and options), or some kind of health issue like arthritis or something more severe, isn't allowed to play the game at all just because you or the creator have arbitrated that they're not allowed to despite that the game already consciously making different experiences possible and that options to make the game more accessible don't have to be imposed on others. One of the great things about Pillars of Eternity is that it gave the player like 30 options to tailor their rpg experience without some kind of rpg Lord hanging over their shoulder and telling them how they were actually supposed to interact with the game. You actually see players in the souls game sequence breaking whatever experience people are supposed to have with the game when players go to wikis or forums to gain information about the game that they haven't found in their personal experience. There's nothing in the game that tells the player that the external souls community is required to experience the game yet people choose to do so because they are free to make the judgement call themselves. So at the end of the day with all of the different opt in/ opt out ways to experience the game I'd say they're really not playing checkers or chess. They're playing a game with the name of Dark Souls on the cover with all of the trappings and options that Dark Souls games tend to have. Which is a completely different experience to watching a specific player play Dark Souls. I doubt you'd actually assume this from my post but I find the idea of always expecting the ambushes or traps and never being surprised utterly boring and maybe I'd even go so far to say that is absolutely not the kind of DR experience I want for myself. But I'm not someone who would ever disapprove of leaving/reading those messages because I understand how valuable those are to some people's experiences and the option is there for the taking. I just think that it wouldn't be skin off anyone else's nose for certain other options to also present for people to consider. Anyway I don't have more to say. I think I'd go in circles. Sorry for the derail everyone(else).

I think that the effort to make the game more player friendly is worth it. After playing the game the default way I might not want to make use of new quality of life mechanics but I know that for many implementing saves in the game, adding a pause function to the game, more checkpoints, or an "easy mode" (that the lead developer publicly floated as an idea) would enable so many people to just play the game. For instance there must be many busy people who really want to engage with the game but don't want to accept constraints like never pausing or even the invasion mechanics when say they are a caregiver. Or maybe there are people who have less mobility that want to enjoy the game and the simple addition of a pause function would be a massive help in letting them engage with the systems. I also think that maybe yeah some of those options might need to stream players into different match making contexts at (just) in terms of pvp modes simply for game balancing. But making the game more accessible while also staying true to the underlying spirit of a SoulsBourne adventure should be an offer of player choice.

I kind of went off the deep end and made a big delving nerdy post about SoulsBourne. Hopefully there's something interesting in the takeaway to this: I found the point that DS is a shitty teacher and not very respectful of time constraints (which it is in many cases) interesting because that overall is my experience with certain cult hit strategy games. This isn't meant to be a combative post or anything I just mean that in very much the same way I will never become one of those grand strategy Gurus who takes over continental Europe from nothing in about 8+ hours of play; and I'll certainly never even take over just the UK without going to an outside community to actually explain/walk me through the sometimes obtuse interactions of the particular game. Or to say that I'd never really improve my game in Starcraft 2 if it weren't for community education projects from people like Day9. Idk I just thought it was interesting that Rob in particular said he wasn't interested in playing this game/series (SoulsBourne) that don't respect time, or that they require a set investment of time before you get anywhere with them. But he's (in a good way) a geek for a lot of deep mechanically meaty games that do up front require a massive investment of time. It's totally understandable that having put in that investment into an area that already is super rewarding he doesn't feel the urge to have to do all that for Dark Souls -a genre that he's not invested in the first place (I'm assuming). But he also plays a genre of game that can make a newcomer feel like they have to go through the same process. I know this was Heather's example but going through an area over the course of an hour and then dying before the next progress save point also feel similar to a process found in the strategy genre where a player identifies a goal in mind for the game and then spends a large chunk of time engineering the game state to fit that goal only to have all progress ruined by some other variable they couldn't plan for. I know there's a lot of difference between unlocking a new area of a game and realising a self directed desire in an open format game. But these parallels feel interesting to me. If I were to school a new player on what to expect from Dark Souls games I would say that the game is nominally fair but will caveat its rules in order to still pose or ramp a challenge. I'd also say that at its best the game wants to ensure that everything in the environment from covenants to what items are found on or around corpses is meant to serve an underpinning story or lore reason for its presence. But that the game does fail or isn't completely honest in its attempts to meet those requirements. I think it's a brilliant flawed game with a community that does have a lot of assholes in it. But if you can accept the at times arbitrary ways you're expected to interact with it you can find a lot to love.

I don't think I remember the main beats of this discussion but I love how certain games cross train you for others. I think that say alien movement in Natural Selection (2) makes me better at evasive movement in other shooters or first person pvp games like Chivalry. Or how playing as a melee based creature in a multiplayer game made it far more natural to use cqc mechanics in other pvp games without panicking. NS2 and CS:GO are both made for older formulas but they too still have people forming 3 high poles where they all try to crouch/jump at once so one guy can get into a vent or a good flanking/sniping position. Also I'm cosigning Spenny's post about delicious Jank. Chivalry is an amazing game because of the dragging. It's also interesting that within the same game a large portion of the player base capital H Hates anyone attempting to use a feint attack (an attack that is cancelled during it's wind up animation that can trick an opponent into whiffing their own attack animation, leaving them open) despite it being a) part of the tutorial and part of the intended game design (I think). But wielding a 2 handed Warhammer and doing a 360 death spin is OK despite that it is only made possible by mastering the dragging mechanic. Dragging actually allows you to extend your animation swing as well as speed it up. Sometimes a player wielding say, a Zweihander will do this to ensure that the opponent is tricked into thinking the danger is over but really they're about to die to a swing that lasts seconds longer than they expect it to. A few other games have even included the mechanic for themselves. Warhammer: End Times: Vermintide (horrible name) did so and Dirty Bomb included it too. Although Dirty Bomb's devs decided to nerf dragging by hard capping a melee animation's swing speed at one point after an only melee character with a shield, invisibility, and a Katana was found to be too broken. P.s someone from a forum for gay teens once had his comments and thoughts from when he was a dumb teen used against him in a right wing attack article after he pissed off a website editor while trying to become a right wing political commentator. The story and fall out was as horrible and cringe worthy as you can imagine.

How does 12 Monkeys feel compared to the movie? I don't really mean "Is it better?" or anything. Does it seem similar in tone or did they go a different way? I finally saw Whiplash I'm not sure I really wanted to but I've had it for ages and the 'net went out for a few hours. I want to say it's a great movie but at the same time I don't. Something about it was satisfying though. Cathartic I guess. In another world I could or have been like that kid. I've certainly had people be like that teacher before. There was something satisfying seeing the whole process. Rather than just being a part of it and wondering why I'm left feeling confused and shattered. Hah. heavy I guess.

I'm not sure if this has been posted before but here's an NYT photo essay on the experience and context of the people who use Indonesian people smugglers to enter Australia's regional territory; often ending up in Papua New Guinea an impoverished nation with high rates of physical and sexual violence, or The Republic of Nauru a barren island once used for strip mining, now the indefinite storage of asylum seekers. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/17/magazine/the-impossible-refugee-boat-lift-to-christmas-island.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1

It's hard to give much advice on it when it's just a mindset thing. If you're pushing time just treat every run as mostly unimportant. It doesn't matter if you screw up and get overwhelmed. Later you might work out how to pull things back from the brink but for now it's not a thing to worry about. You can always just hit 'R' and restart for a clean run. If you want more practical advice, stand some feet away from the towers, use the dagger stream when they're midrange/far and the shotgun when they're close. Also towers in the early game tend to spawn opposite each other so always find the mid point and you shouldn't have too tough a time under 80 seconds. There are other tricks like always finding moments to kill towers while clearing enemies and making sure to kill spider skulls reasonably soon. You could try watching other people's runs too. They're still a bit stressful but I find them kinda cathartic. I was testing my new mouse out with this game yesterday and I'd forgotten how much fun it was.

Yeah? How's the meta coping now? I'd start playing and see for myself but my mouse is Borked right now : (

Sean is great. But so are you all. If it's just too many cooks in the kitchen then what about Idle Weekend, E-Sports Today Appearances? However it turns out Sean you brought some awesome happy quality to the shows you were involved in and I wish you all the best :>

Which ones have you started with? Some of them are Kinda Great and others just feel like a solid guilty pleasure. Ciaphas Cain and some of the Horus Heresy books are super. Gaunt's Ghosts books are pretty good once they hit their stride. I haven't looked at much of the fantasy stuff but there are gems there too. I just finished Storm of Iron the other day which is all about the Iron Warriors besieging a massive citadel. It was quite a bit of fun.