Pretty terrible movie, all things considered, but it does have a very satisfying ending.

I think it’s fine if they act like highschoolers in a show for highschoolers. It just means that’s not a show that’s for me.

I think you’re selling DS9’s progressiveness short. The federation is portrayed as less progressive, but the message of the show itself is far more progressive than the norm; if anything, it makes the federation standins for moderate/centrist/liberals and calls them out for not being left enough.

Could you elaborate? How do their healing systems work? What makes them good?

Do you have a system you like where healing is a good idea? I’m a 3.5 native so I’m kind of used to the philosophy of “the best healing is killing them before you take damage.” But I’m interested in systems design in general and if there’s a particularly good example of doing it better I’d love to learn about it.

Really? I actually think it’s one of the strengths of 5e. In 3.5 you just have negative hitpoints down to -10, and that doesn’t scale with level or anything so it’s barely relevant after the first few levels. And it’s nice to not be just DRT when you get downed in combat.

You slightly moved the goalposts there. The assertion is not “Everything is making a political statement” it’s “Everything is political.” Your ikea glass reflects your social class, the international relations between where you are and where it was made. It may have been made by an oppressed person in some third world shithole (or even sweden!) It may even be a political statement, like a designer somewhere made it curvy because he thinks people are more likely to buy something with a “feminine” silhouette.

“Selectively simulationist” is a great way to put it. I think everyone falls victim to that from time to time and I’m definitely stealing your turn of phrase.

Specialization is good, because when everybody in the party is good at one narrow field we all get to take turns doing cool things. If you make a character that’s good at everything, nobody else gets to do anything.

Wow, they really don’t let you have fun in 5e do they?

There are some formats where inventory management becomes interesting again. We tried doing a Hexcrawl earlier this year and there was a lot of interesting gameplay to be had in the risk/reward management of how many supplies they wanted to carry vs how much they wanted to invest in pack animals, limiting their ability to carry loot back, carrying this vs that, guessing how much they’ll use before they can resupply or where future resupplies might be, gambling on whether to press forward and risk running out or turn back, that kind of thing. It’s just the more currently popular adventure structures right now (eg linear or branching narratives) where inventory tracking is superfluous.

You can always just have a penalty to will saves.

I used to only have one (seemingly) female friend, and then that friend transitioned, and I started to worry what it said about me that I only had male friends. Fortunately, a year or two later most of my other friends transitioned in the other direction and balance was restored.

Do you? You’re just casting a spell like magic missile or anything else. Perhaps the credulous fools that wrote it thought it consumed souls, but you don’t care about their ignorant opinions.

Atheist lich that wants to live forever because he doesn’t believe in an afterlife and isn’t bothered by eating souls because he doesn’t believe they exist.

DMing you

Well, no, not really. If I forget a password I’ve only lost access to the one site, and it’s recoverable. Just an partial failure. Not going to lose everything unless I literally die in which case I don’t care about anything anymore. And no one is going to breach my brain short of tying me to a chair, and that’s not really my threat model.

Not recommended. People can and do crib the kinds of things you’re likely to have around you. It can narrow the field of guesses more than you’d think.

I guess what I mean is, it’s a single point of failure. Usually an extremely strong one, granted.

Basically what diceware does. It’s just that humans are really bad at picking random words (“banana” is over represented, for instance) that’s what diceware helps with.