I only watched dubbed anime, if there's no dubbed version I get a friend to read the subtitles out loud over the character voices.

[-] ProfessorOwl_PhD@hexbear.net 4 points 2 days ago

My understanding of 5e's adventures is them being almost exclusively rehashes of 2e and 3.x adventures, so it really won't be that different.

[-] ProfessorOwl_PhD@hexbear.net 14 points 2 days ago

who apparently plays D&D with "30 or 40 people regularly"

This man has never once played a ttrpg in his life.

[-] ProfessorOwl_PhD@hexbear.net 3 points 2 days ago

who thought that getting a cheesy splatter film director was a great decision?

Honestly on paper that sounds pretty good, Borderlands should really work as a bit of a campy gorefest. Just... not Eli Roth.

[-] ProfessorOwl_PhD@hexbear.net 4 points 2 days ago

Yeah, the foreskin has a mucous membrane similar to the inside of your eyelid that keeps the glans moist and prevents infections.

[-] ProfessorOwl_PhD@hexbear.net 8 points 3 days ago

Talking owl that follows travellers through the woods giving unhelpful advice.

[-] ProfessorOwl_PhD@hexbear.net 1 points 3 days ago

There's a handful of abilities that can turn a specific build up to 11, but it's as much a way to replace an ability you don't like with something you will use as anything else. I don't think I have any in my level 300+ builds - the one I use most is the ability that autosolves the next lock you encounter to speed up spy missions even more, and that comes from the helminth itself instead of a frame.

[-] ProfessorOwl_PhD@hexbear.net 4 points 3 days ago

The Lore's always been kinda murky, but I understand the original frames were made by infecting people with the helminth strain of the technocyte virus (e.g excal umbra, some of the primes), which are what the tenno connected with, but then they were used as blueprints to mass produce frames without the person. The ones you build in your foundry are copies, so you're just returning a lump of infestation to the original mass for it to reabsorb and learn from.

There haven't been many major updates since the new war, so you're not actually all that far behind. Lots of hot fixes, QoL, and updates to bring the content islands closer together. Nothing earth shattering, but some improvements.

Seeing as you're coming back, might as well start with the veilbreaker content that follows on from the new war - archon hunts are the new sorties and Kahl's missions are mini new war sections with various challenges, both weeklies. Zariman kinda sucks as a hub, but the missions are trying something new. Albrecht's lab is similar, but better executed, and has an extreme difficulty weekly if you're into that kind of challenge. Duviri offers a new version of open world without dailies, but the cool stuff from steel path does require a daily rep grind from the Zariman.

[-] ProfessorOwl_PhD@hexbear.net 24 points 3 days ago

This is completely standard, Paizo have always given the rules for free and made you pay for the stories and lore.
It's not even a starter set, it's the playtest, so you already need to be familiar with Pathfinder 2e in order to use the rules. Definitely not a place for a group to test the waters, they're looking for serious dweebs to obsess over the maths and mechanics so they can refine it - the playtest adventure(s) are just playgrounds for them to do that it.

[-] ProfessorOwl_PhD@hexbear.net 8 points 4 days ago

Just try and prove me wrong

Dungeons & Dragons

D&D isn't even a good TTRPG for it's niche, nevermind actually good.

[-] ProfessorOwl_PhD@hexbear.net 5 points 6 days ago

Use Kelvin then, 314°K is a way bigger number

[-] ProfessorOwl_PhD@hexbear.net 25 points 6 days ago

Trolls, bots, NPC's, ai, it's all the exact same attack - "this isn't a real person so I don't have to deal with their argument." It's a thought terminating cliche so they don't have to deal with the cognitive dissonance.

68

He's too old for it to be a reference but like... That's his actual name. Jan Six. I don't know how to process this.

87

Dr. Rachael Louise “Raygun” Gunn is a lecturer at Macquarie University, Australia, who has extensively studied and participated in the Sydney breaking (more commonly known as break dancing) scene. Her work has primarily focused on studying social dynamics in the breaking scene from feminist and queer perspectives: https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=LLebtn8AAAAJ&hl=en&oi=sra. Gunn has also demonstrated outstanding ability in the breaking scene, having won numerous competitions across Oceania and garnering wide respect from other Australian breakers.
Gunn has also been widely reported as having a background in Jazz, Tap dancing, and Ballroom dancing.

I put it to you that Rachael Gunn is intimately familiar with breaking, to a much higher degree than most breakers, having both personal and academic experience with the scene. Her academic work breaking down elements of the scene indicate a detailed understanding of the moves, speech, social and cultural contexts, modes of dress, relationship with gender, and numerous other individual aspects. She also has a detailed understanding of her relationship to the scene, having written a paper titled The ethics of living a double life: rethinking ownership, authenticity, and identity in hip hop culture, and spoken in interviews of being white and middle class in a scene that grew from socially impressed minorities.

So how could someone with the demonstrated knowledge and ability of Raygun not score a single point at all, having reached the Olympics as the highest scoring competitive b-girl in Oceania? Indeed, Martin Gillian, head breaking judge at the Olympics, praised her performance, and she's received extensive support from the breaking community in defence of her routine, so a score of zero seems impossibly unlikely.

The inclusion of breaking at the Olympic games was a controversial topic ahead of its debut, primarily due to concerns over the corporatization and dilution of breaking culture inclusion would bring, and was widely criticised by the breaking community. One person who studied the divide in opinions was Dr Rachael L Gunn, who in 2023 published The Australian breaking scene and the Olympic Games: The possibilities and politics of sportification, which criticised the IOC and WDSF’s implementation and homogenisation of the scene. From the conclusion of the paper:

[...] the concerns are centred on the impact upon culture, and a potential loss of agency and self-determination. Isolated from neighbouring countries, and consisting of distinct, localized scenes guided by individual agents, top-down decision-making led by the WDSF already impacts the social organization, identities and hierarchies of respect within the Australian breaking scene.

While sport and the Olympics are framed as ‘great equalizers’, the exclusivity of Australia’s sporting institutions along gendered, class and racialized lines means that breaking’s sportification may in fact impact the accessibility of breaking. While the ABA aims to ensure that Australian breakers retain self-determination and agency through this Olympic process, there are many obstacles that come with the introduction of concepts like governance, transparency and accountability. Making global what is essentially a localized practice invariably requires standardization, homogeneity, professionalism and risks further moving breaking away from its African American and Latin cultural traditions and histories.

I put it to you that Raygun's olympic performance was in fact carefully calculated to show off breaking without meeting a single olympic criteria, as a protest against the inclusion of the sport, choosing to show breaking off as an artistic medium rather than athletic one. Using movements that were specifically contextual to Australia's presence in an international space, her performance was a criticism of the IOCs attempt to represent breaking as a gymnastic sport rather than artistic expression, and directly intended to sabotage the inclusion of breaking - and expected resulting gentrification of the scene - in the Olympics.
Currently it has been confirmed that the 2028 Olympic Games will not feature breaking, and there are currently no plans to include it in the 2032 Games.
Raygun wins.

163

Please commit to your words and actions. Commit to the fucking turn you were going to make right in front of me, before stamping on the brakes at the last second. Commit to a fight after challenging me on not risking my life around your shitty driving.

Do I "want to fucking go"? You have no idea how much I want to fucking go. I have to cycle around idiots like you all day, if you step out of your armoured wankmobile i am going to sink my teeth into your flesh and not let go. I will bite your flabby fucking tits off. I will beat you with my fists and helmet and entire fucking bike until a kind samaritan pulls over to drag me away from your limp body.

Anyway, if I ever mysteriously stop posting you should be able to dox me by googling "cyclist eats driver UK".

19

They're the same species, just different colours

9

I originally found this single among my dad's collection as a 12 year old, just learning how to use his record player and having no idea what the switch labelled 33-45 was for. I still think the slow version is better - 0.75 speed on the player will get you close enough.
Anyway a couple of years ago I found out DJ Fresh had done the same thing on purpose around the same time, and somehow I never knew.

17
submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by ProfessorOwl_PhD@hexbear.net to c/ttrpg@hexbear.net

Previous Thread

It's taken a few weeks to start moving peices (that is, the party finally stopped picking fights with librarians long enough to measure time in hours rather than rounds), but since their second night of resting after the murders they have been the targets of Nightmare spells, twisting their dreams. Unfortunately that's just been a soft chorus of clucking as they keep succeeding on the will saves, but it did prompt a round of worried discussion between the characters about whether chickens have souls.

After a new round of preparations they ventured back into the Gauntlight and started picking fights with librarians again. Also they tried to contradict a ghost administrator and got ghost slapped into purgatory for a moment, but eventually they got back en-route towards the first chicken ghost encounter: the smashed remnants of Krrrterra, who was obliterated with a landslide. Impressively, their first instinct was to go for diplomacy, apologising for killing it, and asking what they could do to help it move on to the afterlife. With a speak with animals spell and a critical success on a diplomacy check, I couldn't just have the chicken fly into a panic and cause a fight, so engaged in dialogue.
There were four issues here though: One, while ghosts are normally animated by unfinished business and can only be permanently put to rest by making right the injustices that created them, these ghosts are mostly reanimated by the giant spooky lighthouse that shoots beams of ghosts, so the primary answer is to destroy the 20th level artifact (they are currently level 4). Two, even without the lighthouse, they're motivated by revenge against their killers, so the secondary answer is for the party to be killed by the chicken ghosts. Three, ghosts are often unaware or in denial about their own deaths, nevermind what is needed to put them to rest. And four, chickens are not particularly capable of higher level thought, so the only thing their questioning actually established is that it wanted to eat some worms.

So they hit it with positive energy damage until it dissipated. It wasn't a difficult fight, a single PL-1 enemy, because even as a ghost a chicken isn't much of a threat (on its own), but it did teach them some embarrassing lessons about weapons attacks and incorporeal creatures while minorly inconveniencing them, as planned. The ghost chickens have been established as a fun callback, and soon a running joke. Once they start coming back (and in greater numbers), we'll have some good horror cooking and can really start the emotional rollercoaster, but I have to be sparse with details until future updates, as the Goblin Sorcerer's player is reading and I don't want to spoil too much for him.


New Art
It's bad. You wanna see some cool ghost chicken tokens, go back to the first post. First up, we have Krrrrterra, who was hit with a landslide:

get it? because she was... squashed. It doesn't get better.

Hyppokoko, bludgeoned and drowned by a blast of tsunami:

the file name is wetghost.png. like seriously i got no idea

And finally, and most [CW: meat]ly, Brrrkit, who was incinerated by a beam of pure heat: I'm sorry.


Mechanics
Applying the ghost template to a basic bird statblock didn't get me close to an appropriate challenge for the party, so I altered a ghost commoner statblock in different ways for all chickens. Krrrterra had the weak template applied, the Kinetic Assault ghost ability added, and a handful of minor additions and changes:

8
61

Why can't it be something fun like swapping surnames and then creating a portmaneau or blended name for the kids.

46

oky ghost chickens and it's so fucking stupid.

So they found the Dooms of Tomorrow in B29 and after some experimentation determined that the Annihilation Beams were specifically triggered by creatures passing by rather than having a physical trigger that could be interacted with. Their first plan to disarm the hazards ended with the inventor's construct companion getting Annihilation Beam'd into lots of tiny little pieces, so they decided to buy some chickens and lob them in. They were hit with beams of pure tsunami, inferno, earthquake, monster, and undead. First two were pretty easy, I went with falling debris for the third, big godzilla hand for the fourth, and void energy for the last. Gonna be real with you, the description is "From Monster" and I just don't know how that works as a beam.

The thing is, quite apart from the ethical issue of throwing a defenseless animal into something called an annihilation beam, the whole campaign explicitly revolves around a spooky lighthouse that makes undead. I've been more subtley referencing it through various random encounters, but the first big event of the story is the lighthouse shooting a giant beam of light that creates undead where it lands. And there are a bunch of haunts and undead inside. Like there's basically a sign over the entrance saying "Undead made here". So now the chickens' ghosts need revenge on their murderers.

Honestly, no idea where I'm gonna go with this, but I've made tokens for an undead ghost chicken and a kaiju ghost chicken, so I'll give them some nightmares next time they go to sleep and see where that takes us.

22

The rogue went down at the end of a running chain of 4 encounters the party charged through, right as they decided they had bitten off more than they could chew and turned tail to run. Just walked off and left him with the remaining mini boss. If it weren't for the mini boss's tactics of getting other people to do things that require him to leave his throne, the PC would have been killed on the spot. As it was he regained consciousness about 10 minutes later, and slowly and carefully crept away with the aid of some great stealth rolls while the morlock tried to work out how to get a second casting of telekinetic manoeuvre.
And then the next morning he decided to be the bait in a plan to lure a drake out of its lair, got stuck trying to scrabble up an embankment out of the way, and was obliterated in a flurry of teeth and tail lashes. It was brutal, even with PF2e's generous dying rules he turned from alive to dead in only 4 seconds as the first strike knocked him unconscious and the next two burnt through his dying condition.

Luckily the player already had a backup ready so when the party turned tail and ran again I was able to maintain a natural flow of roleplay to reach a point where I could introduce the replacement, but it was sudden and shocking for all of us. For the players it was shocking because in a single turn the drake turned him from slightly damaged to chunky salsa, and for me because its not actually a difficult fight - I mean, a drake is still a dragon, so it is more dangerous than raw stats make it look, but if they'd put the tank front and centre instead he'd have easily withstood the initial barrage and they would have steamrolled it.

They're going to be so mad when they realise it's only as tough as the minotaur skeleton they took down instead in order to get some xp and level up before taking it on again.

7

feat. Jim Jones.

1
Stable Defusion (hexbear.net)

Art AI that generates hundreds of pieces of art from Stable Diffusion using the same parameters, then analyses the similarities to generate the training images it's drawing from.

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ProfessorOwl_PhD

joined 1 year ago