Oh don’t worry. There are a lot of tables in this system.

Part of me agrees, but another part of me says…there are far too many rules in this about sex…including illicit forms thereof…for me to want to play this with anyone I know IRL.

And also no part of me wants to spend the multiple hours this would probably take to roll up a character. I Googled looking for digital character generators, and they supposedly used to exist, but the official FATAL website no longer exists.

I dunno about “higher level” maths, but there is one bit where you’re asked to solve a simple year 8–level algebra equation (which is still a much higher level than any other RPG I’ve ever played asks you to do). It’s also in one of the more explicitly NSFW parts of the system.

Specifically, you have to solve for y: (BT – 80)² = –4y + 120, where BT is a number arrived at in an earlier step, using (C_M / C_V/A ) × 100. I will not be defining what C_M and C_V/A are in this forum in order to keep the comments SFW.

Haha yeah, when I was young I played a fair amount of Age games, but never playing them in their normal intended fashion. A lot of using the cheats, playing the campaigns on easy mode, and some custom scenarios that largely don’t use actual economy management that’s at the core of the game.

Only got into the more competitive side of the game after the DE release in 2019.

I think my most intense one was probably from the very first campaign I ever played (after a couple of sessions experience in a kinda ad-hoc fashion). D&D 4th edition.

We were a rather big group of (I think) 6 players plus DM. The main campaign was fairly standard. DM set us up with some prophecy stuff and we set about fulfilling it.

Everything was going pretty normally, until I got the weird sense that there was something else going on. Outside of session I spoke to the DM to have my character try and investigate. It turned out that weird sense was correct. Another player was setting up their own schemes between sessions. So I started setting up my own schemes, and roping other players into them.

It’s the kind of thing that looking back on it now, most would probably consider a major red flag. There was no Session 0 or any out-of-character discussion about doing these kinds of things. It could have been incredibly toxic. But we loved it. It added a whole extra layer to everything we were doing during the sessions, as well as giving us the ability to converse with the DM and each other to play more of the game asynchronously between sessions.

In the penultimate session, we defeat the BBEG on another plane, and then arrive back in our world. Another week of last-minute scheming, before the actual final session was a massive PvP battle where the player openly turned against the rest of the party. One of the other players unexpectedly (to me at least) turned and joined them, as well as some NPCs on both sides. “Intense” is the perfect word to describe that session and the build up to it. That physical, heart-pumping feeling the same as when you’re hyping yourself up for your first time trying a dangerous sport or something similar.

We ended up pushing back and winning the encounter for the good guys, but didn’t actually kill or capture the betraying PC. They fled, and their player took over as DM for our next campaign.

Kinda reminds me of that messed up restoration of a painting of Jesus.

Thtat’s the one! (And my #2 is AoE4. AoM is #3, and AoE3 is #5. All these considering only Steam play time.)

Sure, and I am in no way suggesting that it was a bad game in its day (especially now that I know at least one of the issues I had with it was a bug introduced long after the fact). But I am suggesting that it doesn’t hold up nearly as well as some people like to insist it does. It’s the “Seinfeld is unfunny” trope, except that that relies on the idea that people today don’t find Seinfeld very funny; the difference is that I regularly see people saying that yes, Half Life is still an excellent game if you play it today.

And for what it’s worth, the game I have put the most hours into on Steam (and by 2x the 2nd place game—which is a more recent entry in the same franchise) was released just 10 months after the original Half Life. Granted, I’m playing on a 2019 remaster with upgraded graphics and some new QoL features, but it’s the same basic game, and had a vibrant community still playing on the 1999 version all the way up until the '19 remaster. It’s a game that I think really does hold up very well today, albeit in an entirely different genre.

I’m not a big shooter player. I had played a fair bit of Battlefield 2 multiplayer, the CoD4 campaign multiple times, as well as games like Star Wars Battlefront 2 (the first game with that title…) and Mass Effect (I think at the time I had played only 1 and 2).

I actually thought I had played the Source version of it, but my Steam history says otherwise. I was playing the OG version, in 2014.

Neither of the above. The question mark indicates a rising tone (common in informal speech), as a way to reduce intensity and specifically not be a dick about it. It’s a polite and friendly way of letting you know you made a fairly easy-to-understand mistake (it’s basically a mondegreen), and what the correct phrase is.

I know this is a controversial take, but I really intensely do not like Half Life.

I have issues with it from a narrative perspective. I have no idea who it is I’m fighting or why. It feels like an incredibly forced “oh, we need an excuse to throw some baddies at the player” premise.

But the main problem I had was mechanical. It’s just not a fun game to play. The gunplay was fine, but then it forces itself to throw a bunch of puzzle and platforming mechanics at you, and just…why? It’s so, so terrible at them. Running up to the edge and jumping will more often than not really in you falling because of a misalignment in perceived location and where the game’s engine says you are. Boxes, which you have to move around to solve the puzzling, fly around at a million miles per minute, making the fine control needed to successfully solve the puzzles very, very difficult. And ladders…don’t even get me started about ladders.

I couldn’t bring myself to finish the first Half Life, let alone start on the sequel.

I genuinely think the alignment problem is a really interesting philosophical question worthy of study.

It’s just not a very practically useful one when real-world AI is so very, very far from any meaningful AGI.

!nottheonion@whatever.instance

Yes, of course there do.

Some smaller companies are run by people still in touch with humanity.

Some bigger companies might see the writing on the wall and pre-empt the vote as a tactic to gain public goodwill.

chock it up

Chalk it up?

Honestly it seems to just be the artist’s style.

Sounds like she’s just having a hissy fit.

Telling a mod of the community you’re in to “blow me”? Brave move.

Pls just remaster Battle for Middle-Earth II and put it on sale on modern platforms with modern multiplayer. That’s literally all I want.

or super complicated Latin that contradicts itself and absorbed things from everywhere at random.

English borrowed a shit tonne from Latin & Romance languages, but it is at its core a Germanic language.

To make a joke that still sticks with the facts, maybe something like “wannabe Latin”, or “that shitty Romeaboo language”.

The Last Agni Kai > Aang v Ozai, CMV.