majestic

I feel like chewing my screen right now. Looks good. But today's feeding time is well over and done with, so there's that.

I use Hulu all the time. Not. Because I can't.

Also, writable DVDs are a notoriously terrible medium to store data. It might just be a bungled burn. Maybe try a USB flash drive. That's also potentially higher up in the default boot list and you won't need to fiddle with your UEFI settings.

4E came up with abilities that fall into four different categories: At-Will, Encounter, Utility and Daily, and they do exactly that. You can either use them every round, once per encounter or once per long rest which isn't necessarily a day but never mind that. You can select new powers and replace old ones you don't like at level up. Utility powers can be limited to once per encounter or day depending on the power. It also made multiclassing weird. Multiclassing was a line of feats you took where you could essentially shuffle some powers around and possibly qualify for your multiclasses's progression paths later on but you'd need to multiclass within your role and to a class using the same primary stat for this to even work in any way. Work meaning to not gimp your character. Essentially you'd just take the MC feat not to roleplay something but to gain access to a certain class trait you'd like. In order to drive home how useless the first multiclass feat sometimes was, often they'd just allow you to pick an At-Will of your multiclass and make it a daily power for your character. An encounter power if you're lucky. MCing to Rogue allowed you to sneak attack once per encounter and gave thievery skill training. Later MCing feats allowed to swap an encounter, utility and daily power between classes. That is where it would get interesting, alas, is that really worth four feats? It also had the cookie cutter stat spreads. You had a couple of stat spreads to choose from in the PHB, but realistically only three of them made sense, and that are the ones where you can put 18 in your primary stat (with a +2 bonus for your race, choose accordingly or gimp yourself). Everything else is a bad choice. Every build path has a clear primary stat and depending on the complexity or your choices a clear secondary and perhaps a tertiary stat. Unless you roll for stats that leaves three viable choices under the rules: 18 13 13 10 10 8 18 14 11 10 10 8 18 12 12 10 10 10 The second one being the most common because you can have a 20 and an 16 in your primary and secondary stat. The first one looks deceivingly interesting but falls flat as you'll want to increase your primary stat by leveling up and racial bonuses come as even numbers. It's pointless to have two 13s there, that's dead weight. In order to fix the weird multiclassing later revisions introduced hybrid classing - a concept where you're two classes at once, but with one character level and special rules for all possible combinations. A veritable nightmare to work with. Mixing abilities is a pain the arse, the rules aren't at all clear especially when it comes to level increases and eventually you'll just wish you went single class instead. Plus the actual amount of viable hybrid builds is somewhat limited and further constrained by what's already in your party. I played a Warlord/Cleric combination specifically to combo buff and increase group mobility. It's not a good combination in general but it worked for the party. You can even top that off by taking the MC line of feats on a hybrid. Hm.

It's a pity they didn't do this earlier while 4E was still the current version. All the time playing 4E I had the feeling that the rules were meant to be adapted to computer games, that just never really happened. From the outside, having never played it, 5E looks like the incestous offspring of 3E and 4E.

He said he wouldn't watch Season 2 in the Season 1 ReView either. Or at least that he already cancelled CBS All Access and doesn't plan to resub. At the end of the day they're still a business though. So you bet they'll watch and ReView it. Fanservice... of a different kind.

Having to stay home has some advantages. Not that our company's cantina would be bad, but homemade's better. Savoy cabbage with potatoes and a sunny side up. Now onwards to flatulance.

Incubation or Silent Storm, perhaps?

I know someone who unironically says that Voyager is better than The Next Generation. We often quarreled about it (well, wrote ridiculously long forum posts about it that are now gone) and we usually ended at an impasse. The scary part is I can see where he's coming from. I think he's right when he says that Voyager's characters were more colorful and interesting, but I don't think it matters more than the overall quality of the episodes. Interesting episode told with less interesting characters trump Voyager's usually sub-standard (compared to other Trek at the time) episodes with more interesting characters. The worst part about it though is to see all the squandered potential. Enterprise was even worse in that regard. I should probably rewatch Voyager right now. It'll appear glorious compared to Discovery and Picard.

I concede your point. I fixed my post.

For me it was really the other way around. The Fade is an area that's fun the first time you do it and becomes progressively worse with each playthrough. Although comparatively by far the worst contender in that regard is Icewind Dale 2's Ice Temple. Everything about this sucks when you do it a second time. And it begins to suck arse and then some afterwards.

Nine of ten dentists approve of that meme.

Screw balance in single player games until it is raw, then kill it dead with fire, lightning, poison and then some more. That was the best part about Kingmaker. Finally being able to create cheese again and no fear that the developer is going to empty your pantry when they feel like it. If players want balance they can imagine it, make different choices or purposefully gimp their characters like in the olden days of playing single class clerics in Baldur's Gate or Icewind Dale.

Unlimited potential almost. Imagine selling TOS era Klingons, TNG era Klingons, the Blingons from Kelvin and the Klingorks from Discovery as seperate cosmetic DLCs. Of course you'd need to buy the Klingon DLC first. Or... seperate Vulcan and Romulan cosmetic DLCs. They even look the same, so you'd just need to design different clothes.

Like in Shadows of Amn I'd venture. There's both available to sub level 10 parties in BG2. It takes some doing but it's possible, using enough cheese.

Kreia voices a lot of opinions and challenges that seemingly stem from the NJO series as a whole, not just Vergere, like Mara Jade insisting that Anakin Solo builds their camp without the help of the force because having other skills is important for a Jedi too and overreliance on the force is a bad thing, the idea that the force might have a guiding influence also (IIRC) came up first in NJO, and of course you have Vergere who has a hand in cutting Jacen Solo off from the force. Unless I'm mistaken MCA said he read a lot of the Star Wars novels in preparation for writing for The Sith Lords. It kind of shows. But it also seems to work both ways. Vergere turning out to having been a Sith Lord attempting to convert Jacen (successfully so, actually, since he became Darth Caedus later) seems to have been inspired by Kreia being one - sort of. NJO also was noticably darker than most of the Star Wars EU. Much, much darker. Eventually the Yuuzhan Vong end up crashing refugee ships with millions of people on them into Coruscant's plantary shield to overload it. That novel came out shortly before 9/11. Talk about timing.

Luckily MrBTongue made a video on why DA2 is better than its reputation: It also has the most hilarious opening ever. "Dragon Age 2 is an interactive cave management simulator made by Bioware."

Whee, fun, there it is. We just got our papers exempting us from any current and future lockdown measures - for the purpose of showing up at work obviously.

If not he'll effectively be killing his voter base. In an, uhm, quite literal sense. My fingers itch because I want to post something very cynical, but, eh. There's a time and a place for that and it's not now.

No, you're right. Skarpen posted that already. It was just a little smaller.

I don't know, I like(d) THEDAS as a setting and the lore behind it but you're right of course, the presentation of Mass Effect 2 is a good deal better and the origins could have mattered more beyond a few interactions in the respective origin zone, although playing a Dwarven noble and helping Bhelen makes for a few fun conversations. Inquisitions delves a bit deeper into what happened in the Tevinter Imperium, what the Fade really is and what the Gods of Thedas represent. It's just hidden underneath a layer of checklisty pseudo-open-world exploration of the most meandering sort, and the worst offender is right after the introductory mission. The gameplay is okayish and on a technical side the game suffered heavily from EA forcing Bioware into using Frostbite. The game sure looks good but it is noticable that Bioware spent a lot of development time on making this thing work with large open areas. As such it feels more like a first game in a series with a newly developed engine where half the resources were spent on developing the tech. Kind of like PoE and Deadfire differed.

You're on a board full of pretentious pricks. Posters have changed over the years, the games came and went, but the debates stayed the same. Way, way back Sarevok was a better villain than Irenicus and Icewind Dale actually told a fantastic story and was a so much better game than Baldur's Gate. Even though it was mostly combat, dungeoncrawling, combat and some dungeoncrawling sprinkled with more combat on top - something that's also universally agreed on to be terrible in the Infinity Engine (nowadays also known as RtwP is always terrible). It's true that the game is too long for its own good, especially if you add Awakening's game time, and only has a rather shortish - I'd almost say excuse - plot. But that seems to be a staple for Dragon Age except the universally disliked one. The game lives from its lore and world building. Not that having an excuse plot is a bad thing per se, the original Diablo had a very short and pretty staple fantasy storyline but it was told so effectively and well that it didn't matter. Both Origins and Inquisition, though the latter more so than the former, suffer from pacing problems. I'm not sure that's because the plot is barebones. There's a Fade skip mod for Origin for a reason. Heh. Mass Effect 2 has essentially the same plot but that didn't bother most players. Although in that one it's mostly character development, not worldbuilding. That happened mostly in the first game.

Oh, fun. As of tomorrow we're in lockdown. I'm someone who rarely gets sick. In the past 10 years I was on sickleave for perhaps a handful of days. I always chalked that up to having a well working immune system, but now that I think of the upcoming lockdown rules and I realized I've essentially lived the lockdown rules for the past 20 years. Hah. I always knew there'd come a time when being a socially awkward recluse would put me in a position where I can belittle the common rabble.