If you want a crunchy system that can do modern fantasy, I would just use GURPS. The core rules cover everything you absolutely need, and then as you encounter elements where you want more detail, you can drop in supplements as necessary: Horror, Undead, Blood Types (vampires), Magic or Thaumatology, Martial Arts, etc.

(Magic expands on the magic system presented in the core book, Thaumatology presents alternative magic systems.)

Maybe. It’s because “weapon attack” is the verbiage they settled on for hitting somebody with something that isn’t a spell (spells make “spell attacks”). They could call them “weapon or unarmed attacks” but that seems unnecessarily verbose when 95% of them are going to be made with a weapon. You might think that for hand-to-hand combat you could simply refer to “melee attacks,” but “melee” is a specifier that can be applied to spell attacks too, so it’s out.

So the current situation is this: a rule can simply refer to all “attacks,” or it can refer to “melee” or “ranged” attacks, or it can refer to “weapon” or “spell” attacks, or it can use both specifiers (as in “ranged weapon attack”).

So if you want to fix it, you need a word to replace “weapon” that could include unarmed combat but excludes all spells. “Physical” might be good, but has some edge case problems: if I have a psychic “blade” that attacks your mind, it makes “physical attacks” despite being a non-physical object. If I have a spell that physically throws a boulder at you, it’s pretty easy for me to remember that I should make a spell attack roll, but if you have a feature that defends against “physical attacks” you might think it should apply against the boulder when it doesn’t. “Martial attack” might be getting at the right thing, but it sounds strange, and for new players who might be new to RPGs “martial” and “melee” are both uncommon words that kind of sound similar, and that might cause confusion. (Also “martial melee attack” sounds more natural than “melee martial attack,” but then it has the opposite word order from “melee spell attack” and that’s weird.)

There may be a perfect word out there, but in the end they decided “weapon” was the least confusing, despite requiring the caveat that attacking unarmed is a “weapon attack.” And so everywhere that the rules say “attack with a weapon” instead, it is to specifically exclude unarmed attacks, although I admit that it’s not always obvious why they want to do that.

The ones that say “when you hit a creature with an attack using a weapon”? Your DM is following the intended rules. In 5e, your empty hand can make “melee weapon attacks,” but that attack is not an “attack with a melee weapon” or an “attack using a weapon.” Unless that changed in the recent update, I haven’t read the 5.5 books.

Let’s see… when I was 4 I got a Sega Genesis for my birthday. It came with Sonic the Hedgehog 2, and Granddad took me shopping to pick out two other games for it. I picked Sonic the Hedgehog and Ms. Pac-Man, and both were bangers. The Genesis port of Ms. Pac-Man had a bunch of alternate modes with different mazes.

I became a big fan of the Sonic the Hedgehog games. I got Sonic 3 for my next(?) birthday, and Sonic and Knuckles the Christmas after that(?). I was convinced that Lock-On Technology was going to be the future of video games!

Also my recollection is that Sonic 2 wasn’t actually packed in with the system, Granddad had to fill out like a rebate form to claim it from the retailer and it came in the mail. It had a NOT FOR RESALE sticker on it which I now understand meant “only for use in the promotion, don’t put this on the shelf” but as a kid I was very confused about what peril would befall me if I sold it to someone else.

Surely this is just a marketing stunt they pulled in the hopes of temporarily pumping share prices or something? Despite their claims that it can be optimized before release, I think there is basically no way they get it running at playable frame rates without a second dedicated graphics card on current gen hardware. They’re going to release it with terrible performance, promise to improve it, a few people who have dual 5090 setups will try it but almost everyone will ignore it, and the promised optimizations will either never materialize or they’ll be much less impactful than promised.

“The reason for that is because, as I have explained very carefully, DLSS 5 fuses controllability of the of geometry and textures and everything about the game with generative AI,” Huang continued.

He seems to be thinking of it as basically a post-processing effect, but it’s certainly the least performant one ever devised. Even if it’s true that the art teams can tweak it to get exactly the effect they want, I find it hard to believe they’d ever be able to get it running on the hardware they’re targeting, so it will just be an expensive novelty for games that want to promise the most bells and whistles.

Edit: Wait I just saw this,

“It’s not post-processing, it’s not post-processing at the frame level, it’s generative control at the geometry level,” he said.

What is he on about? Surely it’s not really mucking around with stuff earlier in the rendering pipeline? That would make it completely different from all previous versions of DLSS, why would they call it DLSS 5? I don’t think he understands how it works at all.

“Tubular” is from surfer lingo right? It makes a lot of sense when you realize they’re comparing whatever cool thing you’re talking about to a wave like this: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/1mXQaSA3-rE

I don’t need $1M. I’ll take just the $1000, if the other box has a million in it they can put it towards the next experiment.

Where do they even get 30 people who can cast 3rd-level spells? That’s like an entire region’s supply of 5th-level characters. Are they in Eberron and using mass-produced wands of counterspell? Maybe they’re the entire high-threat response team of a major empire or planar metropolis.

I’m trying to game out how many of my characters it would take to rescue the player if that’s really 30 5th+ level antimages, and with that many counterspells on the field I think the answer is that they could probably shut down every spellcaster I’ve ever played, at least for long enough to take out the primary target. The only D&D character I’ve played who really has a hope of accomplishing anything is a very high level 4th edition fighter, and even at near-epic levels things still look dicey because I bet those guys are all packing a bunch of other spells like hold person and only one of them has to hit to really mess up his day. Maybe if he teamed up with the high level half-celestial paladin of freedom from 3.5…

Actually I just remembered you have to see your target to counterspell them, so actually some people like the 3.x Sublime Chord would be in the clear as long as they cast improved invisibility while out of sight, but I’m betting the anti-mages are prepared for that too, somehow. It might even things up though!

I have surpassed mere procrastination, and now I simply never do anything.

One option:

• Every time an item is unloaded, save the in-game date and time as part of its data.
• Every time an item is loaded that has historical data, check that timestamp.
• Use the time difference between now and then to calculate whether fires have burned out, whether the temperature should have returned to the ambient temperature, etc. You could also assume some kinds of contaminants wear away after a certain time: water dries up, biological substances degrade, etc. If item degradation is ever implemented, potentially you could roll for damage to items that have been unloaded for very long periods of time, although you’d want to know if they were supposed to be exposed to weathering, etc. and you might not have good data on this. Or if food spoilage is ever changed so that items being carried or stored in barrels should still spoil, you can check for rot this way too.

This is how Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead checks if food has rotted or fires have burned out while you were away from an area. There’s a possible edge case here where an unloaded unit acquires an item that should still be dangerous, but then is saved by it taking long enough for them to return that the item becomes safe, but that’s probably okay—it’s hard to imagine how you’d set it up, and even if it happened the player probably wouldn’t notice.

No, this is the first time it has been available to the public. It was acquired by Riot Games several years into development, they decided to scrap most of the original work and start over in a new game engine, work on the new engine severely delayed reimplementation of previously completed features, which kept pushing the release timeline back, and eventually Riot canned the project.

Last year the original founder purchased the rights to the game from Riot, they went back to the original engine, and they got a working early access build out in like six months.

And you’re a prescriptivist!

They aren’t suggesting he not die, they’re suggesting that the part of the game before he died should have been much longer.

This is a minefield when playing Jackbox games with strangers!

They are really making it hard not to say “Silksong was the best game of 2025, and it was $20, and the DLC is going to be FREE” every time almost any other game announces its pricing, aren’t they?

I don’t think that’s really the same. The repackaging of Wii U games was because the Switch’s install base was several times larger than the Wii U’s, so they could sell them to people who had never played them before. The “Switch 2 Edition” updates are a way to try to extract some extra money from people who already played the games, but they’re not going to fulfill the same strategic goals as, say, Mario Kart 8 DX, partly because they aren’t going to sell as much, and partly because most of the people who buy them will already own the game and therefore only pay the upgrade price. I think from a strategic standpoint they’re basically filler.

I’m sure they’ll make one eventually. They don’t have anything else in exactly the same niche, and ACNH was incredibly popular. This seems like the kind of update you put out to make sure people keep the brand in mind while your next title is still too far out to announce.

Serious question: what problems does the default keyboard have that Florisboard is trying to solve? I’ve never looked at the Android keyboard and thought “I wish this worked differently,” except maybe when I switch languages by accident.

I am surprised by all the ADHD responses. I have ADHD and being able to see all the tabs I’m not using makes me anxious. I have to close them. If I really need them, I move them to a separate window and pretend it’s not there.

I don’t understand how this scene, which is only sexual by implication, is not allowed, but Fear and Hunger, in which you can drag a little girl through a dungeon full of monsters that sexually assault you, through orgy scenes, etc., is fine. Like I’m not saying that F&H should be removed, but I am saying that based on what is currently on Steam, it does not seem like this would be over the line.