Claincy

Ah, dang. ... Is there somewhere that things are going well?

Not to mention Brexit. It's like the US, UK and AUS are in a competition to see who can screw things up the most. Just...dangit, this year is not going well. Edit: It's likely this edit won't really get read as the thread's moved on. But to clarify my main issue with the election has little to do with any party and everything to do with the hate being thrown around everywhere.

Yep I didn't visit any of the large booths, I don't particularly feel like waiting half an hour in line to play a brief demo of a big budget game I already pretty much know if I will want to get or not I spend most of my time at PAX in panels or in the Indie section. With that said, Zelda and Horizon both look very promising, though I don't have the requisite console for either at the moment.

Went to PAX Aus today, twas good My head was bad before I went though and PAX certainly wasn't gonna make it better. Add to that the mental drain of being around that many people and I was pretty wrecked by the time I got home. Still, I managed to get some work done and I feel a bit better now, so overall a win

I finished a prototype for a game I'm working on yesterday. It came out quite well so I'm thinking of expanding it into something bigger

...just...it'd be difficult to handle that worse. Even if someone is cutting themselves for attention (I know that's not what's going on here) they've definitely still got serious psychological issue/s and need help/love/support. I think shutting down emotionally is a pretty natural response to that :'( I don't really have any advice that hasn't already been said and I don't know if/what you believe in, but I'll be praying for both of you.

D&D had a slow start tonight, but it built up momentum as it went. My party has recently entered the Feywild through an expanded junction with the intention of closing it back to it's normal state. A little while into the session they were attacked by a small group of pixie-like creatures but before the attack some of the PCs overheard them discussing the price they could get for the party, given the price they got for selling the dwarves to the lycans. A little later the players run into the lycans, who are guarding something the players will need to take (though they don't actually know what the thing is, or what it does, or even that they need to take it, yet ). I specifically roleplayed the lycans as being highly aggressive and described them as large, muscular, rough and notably hairy. So with those clues in place I take no responsibility for the rather limited success the players found when trying to sneak in while invisible. Invisibility is great, just not against enemies with outstanding hearing and smell It wasn't till after one of the werewolves had already howled to alert the others to come help and others were chasing the PCs that they put 2 and 2 together and realised they might be in trouble. Especially as the two PCs who had been sneaking there had left while the others were asleep because they thought the others would argue, or would want to come, and they aren't very good at stealth. Anyway, the noise woke the other 2 PCs and they arrived in time to help. The PCs won the fight against the 4 werewolves but they could hear more werewolves approaching. I decided they were taking a bit too long in debating what to do so I got a wolf howl youtube video playing. That sped them up. After looting the bodies (of course) they decided to climb up some trees to hide. When 13 more werewolves emerged from the other side of the clearing they were all rather scared, they knew full well they didn't stand any real chance against that many. Fortunately for them the werewolves rolled notably low on their perception checks and soon fanned out to search the nearby woods and follow the PCs tracks, as the PCs took a short rest. With that done and most of the wolves out searching the forest one of the PCs flew some distance away and let off a shatter spell (very loud) causing all but one of the werewolves who remained to head in that direction. They then tried to climb down quietly, and failed. We went back into initiative and they really needed to kill the werewolf before it could go back into wolf form and howl to alert the others. They almost certainly weren't going to manage it in time until in a stroke of ingenuity the party paladin used their last spell slot to cast "Command" to order the werewolf to be silent for the round. With him dead they legged it in the opposite direction, leaving the brightly glowing crystal they needed to remove behind. That's where we ended for the session. They've got a head start, but it won't be long before the werewolves return to the clearing and start following their tracks Oh and at some point they'll need to go back there to get that object. All in all we should have an interesting start to the next session Edit:One of the particularly enjoyable parts for me was when the Paladin cast that command spell. I rolled the werewolf's wisdom save then made some sort of "hmm ok" comment and moved on to the next player's turn without saying if he passed or not. I kept them in suspense until the werewolf's turn when he went into wolf form and...remained silent. *Evil grin*

Ooh, that'd be interesting. Let us know how it goes My main on and off background project at the moment is developing a homebrew system and fantasy world for after my current campaigns finish. I've got the foundation built but it'll be a long time before I've filled in a lot of the details

Heh, sounds like it went pretty well then Yep! Some highly entertaining tales Heh, thanks Though while I like to think I'm a reasonably good GM I know I'm not a great one (yet, hopefully in a few years). I think I have a lot of knowledge about GMing and I tend to be pretty ambitious in what I attempt so I sound like I'm a better GM than I actually am

Well, here's the odd thing. Finding enough players was by far the easiest part. I knew enough people who liked mistborn or who just found my pitch for a multi-crew campaign interesting. I'd had negligible experience GMing before I started this campaign but I've gotten a heck of a lot better at it since then and a lot better at managing the multi-crewness. I have a folder system where I keep notes on all the (24 23 now) major houses involved in the campaign, I have a map of the alliances between the houses and a majority of the time the players do not interact with other PCs directly, but with other people from the same house or other houses entirely. There has been far more indirect (and more direct) interaction between the various PCs than the majority of them realise. The timelines can get a bit very messy to keep sorted but I've got better at that over time too. I've also had plenty of practice in keeping a poker face when the PCs are discussing whether X event or house is player driven I've definitely made plenty of mistakes in that campaign and there have been long gaps when I've been sick or otherwise unable to maintain it. Over the years I've also had significantly more people drop out of the campaign than most campaigns have in them in the first place :/ Still, I don't regret running it one bit.

That...does seem quite low. From a quick search in Aus the minimum wage for an adult is $17.70, sure that's AUD but that's still roughly $13.53 USD. Sure most manufactured products here cost an extra 20% or whatever here but I'm not sure how food prices compare and even then that's a significant difference.

I've shared a few of my roleplaying stories on the true stories thread but I don't remember exactly which. So I apologise in advance if I repeat something, but here's a few fun stories. My first proper roleplaying experience (I think?) was playing Prime Directive (star trek rpg). My dad was GMing and us kids were players. We were investigating a derelict Romulan ship and my sister was playing a vulcan and decided (quite reasonably) to start things off by trying to mentally detect other lifeforms. The roll was exceedingly bad and my dad described life forms moving around all over the ship, and some coming up the ladder next to us! So naturally we all pulled out our phasers and waited. Once we realised there wasn't anything coming up we decided to make sure there wasn't anything that was going to come up so we climbed down ourselves. At that point in time we were less aware of the tendency for things to get more dangerous when you went down. In any case, there were 2 or 3 romulans below that appeared to be completely crazy and were wielding some sort of blunt instruments, pipes or the like. I had decided to play a genius engineer/tech type character, which had sounded like a great idea at the time. Not so good when crazy romulans are charging you, so the first thing of any significance to happen in the game was me getting knocked out in 1 hit I may have learned a thing or two about caution, and squishy characters, from that experience. --- The one rp experience that may have been before that was with some family friends (around our age give or take a couple of years). We created GURPS characters with some intention of adventuring. All we actually ended up doing was determining the order in which we would eat party members if we were starving (one of the character's pet hamster was first on the menu) and having a free for all battle...sort of. It very quickly stopped being a battle as people lost interest, I think someone decided to hide in a tree while someone else set up a BBQ and started cooking sausages. I don't remember how that all ended, but I do remember the sausages getting burnt. --- In my most recent D&D (5e) session my players had just entered the feywild and found themselves in a forest of giant trees. The wood elf cleric immediately decided to climb a tree to get a good view, not an easy task given that the branches were proportional to the rest of the tree and relatively spread out, but they rolled a nat 20, so up they went They got about halfway up before the party's warlock cast fly on themself and zoomed up past them to take a look. Unwilling to just climb down again as the party moved on the cleric decided to follow from the tree branches, leaping from one to the next. I allowed it of course, and asked for an acrobatics check. They rolled very low (a 1 I think) and missed the first jump and started to plummet towards the ground. The party made some attempts to arrest their fall, all of which failed, and I had the cleric make a dex saving throw to land well, which they also failed. The fall didn't kill them but it did drop them to 0 and leave them bleeding out, a problem easily rectified with a little healing magic. Just after this they heard an extremely silly sounding voice (intentionally) shouting DOOOOOOOOM at them. A couple of perceptions checks later they saw a satyr sitting on the bottom branch of a nearby tree and smiling gleefully as it repeatedly pronounced their DOOOOOM. The dwarven fighter, being the level headed, rational person he is, threw a javelin at the satyr and knocked him out of the tree. That pretty much set the tone for the encounter (as intended) and aside from gaining a little bit of useful information everyone had a good laugh Doing the silly satyr's voice strained my vocal chords a bit and I certainly sounded ridiculous but it was 100% worth it. One of my players started yelling DOOOOOOM as we were walking back from getting dinner later on so I think it made the right impression. --- For the past 3 and a half years or so I've been GMing a Mistborn campaign with multiple crews from competing noble houses. (I do not recommend this kind of multi-crew campaign unless you have a lot of time on your hands and you're really dedicated. It can be awesome, but it's hard.) The players are aware of the other players, but don't know who their characters are or which houses they're from, which can lead to some hilarious interactions. Earlier in the campaign two of the player houses both essayed a number of minor strikes against eachother, before allying to work jointly on a major contract for the steel ministry. All without realising they were interacting with other players. XD Another fun moment early in the campaign was when one of the crews wanted to sabotage a rival houses' barge convoy using a simple, but creative strategy. Their keeper stored as much weight as they could and their mistborn picked him up and leaped over the canal with him and dropped him over the barge. The keeper then tapped as much weight as he could and slammed into the barge, causing it to flip. He then tapped gold to heal himself, stored weight again and the mistborn pulled him up from the bottom of the canal, ready to repeat the process for the next barge. Probably the biggest downside to this plan was that it left some rather compelling evidence that some significant powered shenanigans had gone down in the raid

Sure, I'll list a bunch of games that from my experience and/or knowledge are good, or at least interesting and worth looking into. This'll be (at least largely) games that came out sometime in the past 4-5 years, I'm sure you'll know a bunch of them but maybe not all. I'll start with the bigger brand games and then do a list of Indie/smaller devs. I'm not going to go into detail about each cos I don't have that much free time right now But I'm happy to go into detail about any specific ones you want me to. This is certainly not an extensive list, but hopefully there is something in there that you'll like. I'd also recommend watching the youtube series James Recommends by Extra Credits, there's some overlap with the list above but there are plenty that I didn't put on that list. Not all of the games are "good" but they are all at least interesting in some way You could also try the Games You Might Not Have Tried Extra Credits videos.

I know what you mean, a fairly large number of AAA games feel pretty shallow or formulaic. But with that said I think there were always a lot of bland/formulaic games, we just don't remember them much. I think there are considerably more interesting, deep and wildly diverse games coming out now than any time in the past. (Though there is certainly a lot of garbage coming out too of course ) I do wish there was more innovation and risk-taking amongst AAA studios (though I understand why there isn't) but there is a wealth of it amongst AA and Indie devs. Edit: I can recommend a pile of games from the past few years that are particularly good (or interesting) if you'd like?

Oh yeah, thanks There's enough terms around that I keep forgetting a lot of them.

Definitely looking forward to it, dishonored is one of my favourite games Dunno if I'll end up doing what I did with the first game again, ended up doing 3 play-throughs. One was aiming for low chaos but taking it as it came. One was high chaos and one was, well, something of a challenge run. From memory: Hardest difficulty, auto-aim/aim-assist off (controller), clean hands, ghost, mostly flesh and steel.

You mean: We tend t short'n everythin'

Oh yeah, I'd forgotten about that term, thanks I definitely agree The media's obsession with romantic & sexual relationships can be frustrating. Those relationships absolutely have a place there and they are an important part of society, but a slightly more realistic number of strong friendships would be nice. Personally it's pretty rare that I feel particularly lonely and when I do a little time hanging out with friends fixes it nicely

Huh, we played that in my primary school too (in Aus), cept it was called "Heads down, thumbs up!"

Aromantic and asexual aren't precise terms and some people disagree over the definition but in general (to my understanding anyway): An asexual person specifically doesn't feel a desire to have sex. An aromantic person doesn't feel a desire for romantic interactions. Both terms cover a spectrum and the term "grey-aromantic" or "grey-asexual" is sometimes used by people who identify as being somewhere along those spectrums. Choosing not to engage in sexual or romantic activities isn't the same as not feeling the desire for them but unsurprisingly enough many (but not all of course) people who are on the spectrum do choose not to. To my knowledge it's not uncommon for someone on 1 spectrum to be on the other but some people definitely are one and not the other. In any case, they are labels that you can choose to apply to yourself if you like. If it helps you to identify as one of them, good for you! If it doesn't, don't use it Hmm, that's a pretty good description Personally I identify as grey-asexual & grey-aromantic. I'm not totally without those feelings of attraction but what bit of it I do feel is more of an occasional annoyance/irritation. It's difficult for me to emotionally understand the importance and prevalence most people place on those kinds of relationships and for the most part I view those kind of interactions as awkward & uncomfortable. Like Twi's friend I do notice good looking people (women, I'm straight for whatever degree of feelings I have) but beyond that immediate/automatic aesthetic appreciation I'm not really interested. I also find most examples of romance/sexual interactions in fiction boring at best. It's a bit like disliking sports and going to a school where that's the main thing everyone seems to want to talk about. As @Kaymyth said: when you're a teenager your hormones go kinda nuts and how you feel then may be very different to how you feel later in life. This may or may not be an unpopular opinion but I think that A: a person's sexuality is heavily influenced by their life experiences to that point, and B: it is very possible to modify your sexuality through conscious choice over an extended period of time. I'm not saying that you can completely shift your sexuality or that it is equally possible for everyone but I definitely think it's possible to deliberately shift yourself along a spectrum (having done so myself). The brain grows and develops in the ways you feed it.

I really liked Enemy Unknown and from my time playing it xcom 2 pretty much takes everything that did well (and the things it didn't) and makes it better. I found it less buggy than EU (which isn't saying much), but I'd still go with a self-imposed iron-man rather than using the setting. That way if or when it does hit a nasty bug you won't lose all your progress. I haven't really touched the MP in Xcom 2 so I can't speak too much to that. In any case I definitely recommend it, I don't regret buying it at full price but whether it's worth that for you or not is something you'll have to decide for yourself

We need more of exactly this in the world There are plenty of things people choose to do that I disagree with, think are wrong and/or run counter to my beliefs. I won't support or encourage those actions but that doesn't change my belief that everyone should be treated with love and respect.

thanks Normally I feel like I have a pretty decent handle on it all, it's just when I'm feeling particularly bad that those thoughts start to really bother me.

Feeling better now A good work meeting and a good D&D session have left me feeling significantly more positive about things.

K. So, I partly think I should be posting in the good news thread and not here but this thread fits how I'm feeling. First the good: I've been offered additional work at my current workplace. (Which is interesting, professional, well payed casual work.) So really, this is a very good thing I'm now at a point where I need to turn down some of the work offered cos I can't handle more cos of my health issues, which is where the bad part comes in. I've got an appointment with another specialist on Tuesday so hopefully they'll be able to help. But frankly I have difficulty feeling any optimism about that. Over 3 years and nothing we've tried has worked :/ It's not always that bad, sometimes it's less debilitating and more just annoying. Past couple of months have been fairly bad though. Anyway, what bothers me more at the moment is that it's hard for me to really remember how it felt to not be sick/in pain and stupid as it may be that's kinda snuck into my identity. On top of that part of me is afraid of being well, partly because then I won't have an excuse for when I fail etc and partly cos I know that it's had a major impact on me as a person. Truth be told there were some negative aspects of my personality that changed for the better because of my sickness and part of me is a little afraid that if I were to get fully better some of that might sneak back in. I'd be on guard for it of course and I'd never let myself go too far that way, still, scares me a little. Anyway, just been a couple of those days, I'll probably feel better tomorrow