I really liked Prism. And I don’t know, Radical Red just played different from how I like my single player pokemon experience.

I think there are triple battles now. Those might be 10 years old

coprophagia- the consumption of feces.

I did the gaybro liches before. It was a PF1 game where 3 of the party members wanted to be goblins. We had an Alchemist (burny), a Barbarian (Bitey) and a gunslinger (shooty). The last player wanted to a be human witch. The player was kind of dumb, but the character got gang pressed into trying to wrangle these goblins in spite of being an immoral shitheel herself. The first adventure (which is the only one they did before the game petered out for other reasons) was they were sent to rescue the local children from an Ogre who was kidnapping them from a village. They discovered that he was very erudite and literate (think Cave guy from Freakzoid) and he was trying to teach the children how to read. The villagers were very angry objectors to the written word. The next adventure (which I had notes for somewhere) was going to pit them against a dragon who had been kidnapping princesses. The players would discover he was a giant nerd, and was treating them well; he just needed them for his army build for wargames against other dragons.

Okay, so fine you get the tone; the liches were two wizards who were like, no homo gym bros in life, who made each other their phylacteries. My plan was to have the players find a diary and they would learn the joke; that was only one of them was gay. The diary would have no surviving identifying marks, so they wouldn’t know which one

is santa an elf?

So I think you’re right in a lot of ways. But I think your understating a few things.

First, OGL. OGL was great for 3.x edition. It spawned a cottage industry of 3rd party content creators, which by the end of the life cycle, had created content that which was smoother and more refined in the engine than anything WotC ever produced. This allowed 3.x to dig in and become immensely established. The problem is is that it cuts both ways; in 4e era, WotC’s biggest competitor was actually Paizo.

I liked 4e, I think its better than 5e. But WotC became way harsher on piracy and 3rd party content in that era. The way powers were structured and templates, it became impossible to keep up with everything without their builder spoon feeding it to you. They were really pushing their “adventure tools.” These were buggy, half of them never came to fruition, and they didn’t run on mac (even though they were browser based). They only stopped pushing them after they bought a third party site (D&D beyond, which I actually ban from my games). I’m just saying that 3.5 was an accessibility dream, and 4e was actually behind lock and key.

Meanwhile Paizo had the immensely easier job of selling 3.5 weirdos back 3.5, and WotC couldn’t stop them because of the OGL. For a while, I thought Paizo was actually doing worse damage to the industry; I was afraid no one would want to innovate if people were just going to play 3.x until the end of time. I guess I was right, because 5e is basically 3.5 will all the interesting parts cut off. And thats why WotC was trying to kill the OGL last year, in the weird way they did. They want the control, but they want the 3rd party support too.

The other thing you understated was just how many grognards there were for 3.x. I literally had a 5e baby pitch to me a cyberpunk 2077 game that he would run in starfinder, but 3.x guys refused to try out 4e. Their complaints were as many as they were meaningless. Orcs aren’t core? All classes get spells? I can see the WoW recharge timers! A lot of enfranchised gamers simply did not want to play a new game, and then PF came along, and they did not have to. I saw it happen in my game group, but this also was borne out in paizo’s ascendancy in this era.

I want to say one thing to your point @Colalextrast@lemmynsfw.com, that 4e had too much bloat; 3.x had a ton of bloat as well. At least every power in 4e was like, functional. 3.x had dozens of base classes and hundreds of prestige classes that were traps. Hundreds of feats that were not good. I think 1200 officially published spells (at least you could swap those out). The only reason 3.x combat wasn’t a crawl was because it was rocket tag; high level spellcasters usually end the fight in one move.

I play 3.5 for a few years. One of my groups swore by it. It was… textured. When you call it a steaming pile of shit, I see your point and honestly agree with you. But I will say it was… completely what it was. It wasn’t well designed, but it was immensely interesting. 5e is all of 3.x, but with the interesting parts sanded down. In my estimation, that makes 5e the lesser game.

Hypnotic Pattern. Damage is for chumps. Mass save or suck for me

It gets worse than that, and its weird no one has brought this up. This is going to be difficult to explain, because I have never actually played AD&D, only read it. There is a fighter feature called percentile strength, there the fighter has a percentage next to his strength score. This is only ever for strengths of 18, and the best was an 100, notated at 18/00. So Why mentioned this kind (face it) stupid and archaic rule?

"in the Strength Table I, the range 18/01-50 is noted as “Maximum strength possible for a female human or male gnome character.”

Oh boy Jill. I was crushed to learn about her transphobia. And also her cringe book.

I stuck with Babish through his expensive weird era because I still felt like I was learning something about cooking, even if i couldnt make his three day Troy pizza casserole or whatever. I still felt like I was becoming a better cook. Recently he switched up his editing style to less voice over, hands only content and more click baity listacles, and more videos where hes messing around in the kitchen. I liked watching the hands only stuff because I could see what he doing, and there wasnt any emphasis on his face, so there less emphasis on his personality, and therefore I felt a little less intimidated as far as trying it myself. The voice overs were also really concise. The end result was also really light weight, and felt like a recipe that didn’t have all the SEO “my grandma taught me how to make this cake before she died” garbage.

Alvin is still making videos in the classic “Babish” style on the Babish channel, and I still watch the vids Andrew puts out in that style, but if i can see his face, I wont even click on the video.

I would be generous and interpret that as Leah remembering Bail Organa’s wife (who it must remembered, she thought was her mother until like, an hour before that conversation), or else constructing memories of an ideal woman.

At least, until Obi Wan, but whatever

Your point still stands. She only found out she was adopted like an hour prior.

Leah makes out with Luke.

“Somehow, I’ve always known.”

I honestly cannot believe you forgot about the Skywalker twins.

“I’ve always known.”

Somehow.

I would argue that Jedi deserves everything the prequels get

Sometimes I wish Hollywood still made lower budget movies, because this felt like it needed a lesser production value. Jason Momoa knew what kind of movie it was.

Dark Knight. Heath Ledger’s Career defining performance can’t save this tortuously paced, boring, dreary, washed out slog of a war on terror metaphor. I hate Christopher Nolan, all of his movies are like this.

The star wars prequels get a lot of hate, but honestly, all of the cracks were beginning to show in Return of the Jedi. 4 and 5 are indisputably good movies, and part of the cinematic canon. Jedi has a lot of small things wrong with it… and also Leah is Luke’s sister randomly. This is a Lucasism, and as the people who were capable of standing up to Lucas fell away, and were replaced by people who grew up in star wars. Everything that makes the OT good is present in the prequels, and everything that makes the Prequels… contentious is present in Jedi. For the record, I like the prequels but I think they are flawed in really interesting ways.

Jedi is even in quality with all the prequels and sequels that came after, but has a better rep than it deserves because it stands next to the first (best) two.

I don’t know. I had to do a 3 month boot camp run through a local community college, and that included 36 hours of clinicals on an ambulance. There were daily tests, training on all the equipment, and batteries of tests finals that we had to pass. My favorite was we had to have a 80 in the course to qualify for the finals, but anything less than a 70 on any of the tests would disqualify you from taking registry, even if you had an 100 percent aside from that. That was for EMT Basic, the lowest levels of licensure. It’s a two year degree to become a paramedic (and I think thats like 200 hours of clincals, or something). And once I was in, there were 12 hours of CEs required for licensure (the company offered trainings), and I did have a written and practical test to take with the ambulance before they let me code, with a probationary period (mine was a few months, they really didn’t like me, looking back because I’m Jewish.)

I won’t go to bat for the industry very often. I was making minimum wage, I was working 60 hour weeks. The culture has a problem with boot licking and racism, work life balance, and catty bullshit. I never left like management had my back, and people gossip. And that’s before you get to the insane nature of the work, and the constant death and crisis around you. I worked nights; nothing was open, and there was never any time to eat, so we opted for handheld, easily available garbage from convenience stores. And of course, I never saw my family.

But even though registry can’t prepare you for the road, I would never have claimed I wasn’t properly trained.

Shadowrun 4e. A hacker who was way into drag racing. I got really into statting his race car, and even made driving equal to hacking. He was in deep in the underworld, trying to buy his childhood friend out of her indentured servitude at a brothel.

Mad Max style wasteland campaign: A Shepard boy, skilled at archery, wandering the wasteland with a talking dog (who was named Blood, but wasn’t evil). I saw this kid as being on the more idealistic and good side, and I picked a concept connected to society in contrast to what the other PCs picked (A reformed Mohawker, a powerful mutated woman wielding a stop sign, and a “priest of KISS” following the concert routes his roadie parents took before the bombs dropped, mistaking them for religious pilgrimage)… sorry that one had a lot of gas.

Superheroes: A jewish journalist who learns he is the inheritor of the Golem of Prague, and with it, a tradition of Talmudic magic. The other party members were a Bisexual paramedic/ vigilante by night (me and her player agreed that we were roommates lol) and the last one was a black teenager who killed a cop after he had paralyzed his brother. The campaign started and we were “the cop killers” and were protecting a small minority community but I keep thinking that had so much gas in the tank and room to grow and I might spin that off into its own campaign.

I’m just so sick of heroic high fantasy

I don’t believe in the supernatural.

The house I live in is my fathers childhood home. His mother was, frankly, schizophrenic, in an era where most people equated mental health with Rose Kennedy. She went untreated. She beat him as a child, and drove her entire family away. She died 15 years ago, and we are still cleaning out her accumulated garbage. She called for him on her deathbed; my father still didn’t go.

My mother also died in this house, suddenly. But she loved us, and we love her.

So I don’t believe in the supernatural, but I have been friends with two self proclaimed witches, who both said this place has an “off” energy. and sometimes, at night, you might sense movement out of the corner of your eye. It can be unnerving.