The movie has gained a redeeming quality over the years. That quality is that it’s not the live-action series.

Power Word: Heel (turns the target evil)

Firebald (flames burn off the hair of all targets within the AOE but do no further damage)

Healing Wood (repairs damage to doors and furniture)

Eldritch Dolt (a magical idiot shows up and tries to tackle the target)

Misty Stop (allows you to teleport yourself to where you currently are)

Rage Armor (increases your AC but makes you too angry to cast spells)

Banding (see MtG rules, section 702.22)

Wash (look, the barbarian needs it and he’s not gonna do it himself)

Ever since the BE200 debacle I don’t know if I can trust Intel to deliver. Sure, the stuff that’s already out there works but who knows if any of their future stuff will?

AI usually got better when people realized it wasn’t going to do all it was hyped up for but was useful for a certain set of tasks.

Then it turned from world-changing hotness to super boring tech your washing machine uses to fine-tune its washing program.

Why not submit a million vibecoded PRs against various Microsoft repos? At some point they might get it.

Yes, I’ve literally seen baked goods advertised like that. One bakery in my town is proud of its bigger-than-average pretzels and puts the weight right there on the ad posters.

The idea was to have some kind of urgency but only once the players were far enough to understand the basics of what was going on. To that end, the date was supposed to be vague so that the GM was free to say “you figured out that the ritual will happen right after summer ends – which is in less than a week”.

Then he forgot that the timeframe was vague when I wrote the letter and told me to pick a date.

Unfortunately, this cut out a side plot where our party would’ve hired another party to hunt down some artifact. That artifact retroactively got downgraded to a red herring for time reasons.

On the other hand, we got an absolutely precious scene where the one party member who wasn’t magic-affine and didn’t want to be involved with any supernatural stuff had to ride an unnaturally fast six-legged half-demon horse in order to catch up with the bad guys.

Also, it cut down on all the “three wizards and a vintner have breakfast and discuss the state of the investigation” episodes. We had a lot of those.

I once fast-forwarded a complex plot through a GM-sanctioned bit of fluff.

The party had been invited by their uncle who turned out to be recently murdered when they arrived. Of course they investigated. At one point I had my character wrote a letter to the rest of the family to inform them of what was going on. I actually produced the letter as a handout. Since I had no idea about the date I asked the GM and he told me to pick anything in summer.

The GM s happy with the handout and it was deemed canonical.

A few sessions later he noticed that I had picked something ahead the end of the summer and the bad guys’ plot was about to kick off at a specific date right after summer ends. So suddenly the adventure went from “careful slow-burn investigation” to “mad rush to the location of the finale”.

Oops.

Eiffel 65 would like to meet you.

My vent core feels retroactively unblasted by this revelation. You really can’t expect anything good from any of the major studios anymore these days.

Nuclear power has some nice properties (and a whole bunch of terrible ones), is technologically interesting, and has been the premier low-CO₂ energy source for a while. That gets it some brownie points although I agree that it shouldn’t be sacrosanct.

I personally am mainly interested in using breeder reactors to breed high-level waste that needs to be kept safe for 100,000 years into even higher-level waste that only needs to be kept safe for 200 years. That’s expensive and dangerous but it doesn’t require unknown future technology in other to achieve safe storage for an order of magnitude longer than recorded history.

There’s a whole bunch of very good questions you can ask about that approach (such as how to handle the proliferation risk) but the idea of turning nuclear waste disposal into a feasibly solvable problem just appeals to me.

Of course I expect an extreme amount of oversight and no tolerance for fucking up. That may be crazy expensive but we’re talking about large-scale breeder deployment. It’s justified.

Wasn’t there a Dark Age after Bronze? The one where everyone was scowling the whole time and the stories were so tryhard edgy you could use a typical Youngblood issue as a letter opener?

(Basically the “pouches” era the sibling comments talk about. Rob Liefeld’s contributions to fashion will never be forgotten.)

Mind you, Highlander II would’ve made more sense as a non-Highlander movie that just revolves around space aliens dealing with Earth having a planetary shield now. As a sequel to Highlander its premise was really weird.

Given the color fringes on the flag I’d say it’s safe to assume those are JPEG artifacts.

Welcome back; you’re always a welcome sight. And know that we’re 100% behind you whenever you need a break. Looking after yourself is important.

LLMs use even more resources to be even more wrong even faster. That’s the difference.

Some basic discussion of what the adventure or campaign is going to be about is of course necessary. A full-social adventure with a party of dedicated murder hobos won’t work. But if the characters fit mostly within the requirements of the adventure then everything else can be adjusted.

Let’s say the GM wants to do an adventure where the characters will investigate a murder of a member of the city council, which will lead into uncovering and fighting a cult that is infiltrating the city’s upper echelons. The players are only told that the adventure will involve investigation, combat, and high society interaction.

The players come up with a detective, a brawny priest, and a politician who likes dueling. So they’ve got the investigative and social skills, the priest and politician do reasonably well in combat, the priest can even provide some healing, but there’s no ranged firepower and nobody can break into anything. The GM can tailor the adventure to match that; there’s no need for anyone to redesign their character so that the party can engage flying enemies or obtain evidence from a locked room.

Likewise, if the party were to consist of three wizards from the local college, the adventure could still work. One of the players is suggested to hold a teaching position at the college to provide social clout, one should ideally have some experience with investigation or political scheming, everyone is recommended to keep Mage Armor prepared, and the cult now favors ranged combat. The plot might move a bit slower because of less plentiful healing opportunities and frequent rests.

All of this assumes a GM who primarily wants to work with the players to tell a story. If the GM wants to do an unforgiving grind where the players will need to use every advantage (in and out of game) to survive, this won’t fly. Bring an optimized roster or perish. (Of course, most unforgiving GMs I know won’t allow magical healing so that character injuries actually mean something.) I probably wouldn’t join that game but some people roll like that.

On the whole, I don’t find it that goofy when characters die in combat. At least not goofier than when parties always just happen to consist of people whose skills perfectly complement each other, especially ones that form by happenstance.

I find that a lot of D&D players seem to have a fairly mechanistic view of the game, more so than with other games. This is probably a result of D&D, as an offshoot of a tabletop strategy game, being designed in such a manner. Now, your approach is already a lot softer (and I agree that some preplanning is recommended) but the “every party needs a tank, a caster, a healer, a skill monkey, and one of the needs to be the face” I responded to is fairly common in the D&D world.

I don’t agree with that level of party planning. I find it awfully reductionist and belying a mechanistic view on how the game works. I also never found it necessary. Every single element in that list is optional if the players and GM can deal with it. Heck, I’ve never even been in a game with a semi-dedicated healer. For something with clear, limited in-world roles (like your starship example), you do need to allocate them but games like that are rare.

Of course, like I mentioned that D&D’s design informs the way it’s talked about, my experiences are colored by the systems I’ve played, particularly The Dark Eye. TDE affords players much less power than D&D. Spellcasters are much weaker due to slow resource regeneration – they use a mana point system and a high-powered spell will take multiple long rests to recover from. Sure, you can combat heal or throw a fireball but only when necessary. Also, there are way more skills so even with all party members pitching in you won’t have expertise or even competency in everything.

As a result, the idea of having a party that can take on any challenge (and/or deal with several high-stakes battles in a short time frame) is unrealistic. This actually frees up a lot of conceptual space since there’s no one party that can do every kind of adventure. So with some coordination you can make anything work, even a party with no combat or magical skills who Shawn Spencer their way through quests.

What absolutely needs to be worked out are things that could set the party against itself or keep a player from interacting with the others. But that’s more of a player behavior thing; e.g. you can play a perfectly selfish, evil character who still puts the party’s interests ahead of their own – if they’re played to consider having reliable friends worth more than short term gain. So yeah, I also expect a certain amount of character tailoring, just on the roleplay level rather than mechanically.

That is a lot more optimization than I’m used to. In my group people just come up with characters they want to play and the GM works with that.

Mind you, we do discuss what kind of game we’re playing so we don’t end up with four pure noncombatants doing a dungeon crawl. But ending up with four wizards? Yeah, that might happen or even be encouraged.

I really don’t wanna have to discuss who has to change their character concept because we need a healer or our party composition won’t be optimal.

Almost makes me regret getting it. I got it for free with my GPU and never installed it but still feel it might not be worth the investment.