Season's beatings greetings to you all :p. Hope you all have a good time.
Merry Christmas. :)
So I managed a few nice bits of loot for the holiday. Some gaming headphones, a shiny 5TB--4.5 usable, and I've already managed to use up over 2TB--external HDD, and some PC games.
Nice! Pretty much everything under the Christmas tree was for my son, but we had a little road trip and saw cute otters, seals, and sea lions.
Happy new year as well :)
Whose idea was it to put two holidays so close together? :P
Happy new year!
Happy new year!
Happy new year, folks!
Happy holidays and a happy new year, both belated.
Been visiting extended family, everybody wants to see their granddaughters/nieces/cousins (i.e. my girls) around the holidays. Returned home a few days ago, now doing the rounds. I'll make sure to also post here later today or early tomorrow.
So while we're waiting, I think I've managed to get together something decent to explain Boros getting these gun-mage abilities. It would require delaying the acquisition for a bit, but basically it would be a (n incomplete) draft copy of some preliminary work done by Thrune's boys after their windfall of confiscated guns and powder, said copy ending up (in some manner) in the hands of a fugitive Torrent hellknight that the party helps.
Sounds decent to me, Boros.
Also, I posted to that effect elsewhere: Apologies for going missing for the past 2 weeks. I have no excuse, the floggings may commence.
More seriously, the last couple months were rather stressful for me, and the time of the year is draining both for work AND personal reasons.
While most is taken care of and all good(I'm not pushing silver linings back, not complaining about anything currently), I needed a break from things.
A timeout, just for me. Been taking those days to regenerate. I should absolutely have given advance notice - but it was less of a planned thing and more of a "flow" thing.
I do apologize - not for taking the time, but for how I handled it. Between that and the flogging I hope I get to keep my ankles.
Either way, today I'm checking back in to all games here that haven't disbanded or are in limbo, I will try to post gameplay to most of them tomorrow(including us), then finish the rest of them on friday IF NEEDED(some catching up to do in several.).
I only GM here, and I'll try and prioritize that henceforth. (As a player I can be botted if I hold things up - as a GM, not really possible.)
Almost a year ago, I promised the last chapter to a story I wrote online to its readers. Still uh, haven't finished that last chapter.
Almost a year ago, I promised the last chapter to a story I wrote online to its readers. Still uh, haven't finished that last chapter.
You are an unspeakably horrible person. You totally deserve to step on a LEGO for such a heinous crime.
In other news, I'm still around, but I've got a case of the crud (not the coof though, luckily) that's making thinking utter agony. So my game post won't be happening until next week at the earliest.
Sorry to hear that. Hope you feel better soon!
Rest up and get healthy!
Sorry to hear that! Hope you get better yeah.
As for me I've just been defaulting to other things; I'll make sure to find time to read and post before the end of the weekend :)
Congrats on 2,000 gameplay posts! That's pretty impressive.
And I'm first on the next thousand! Here's hoping it doesn't take us another (almost) 6 years to get to the 4k mark :D!
Congratulations us :D
Huzzah.
Nope, won't take that long, as said, I'll stick to a faster post speed now. Of course, I fell ill this week. Kids brought me the flu, but luckily no Covid. Still, headache, fever, the works. Of course right after kicking things off again :/
Speaking of preparations. This is something I've been meaning to prepare but keep forgetting about.
Nez would like to make a silver raven flag, and I think that might be a good signal to serve as the "passphrase". I would like to make use of my Flagbearer feat eventually. I already have the flag, but we would need to retroactively assume she spent some time during downtime adding to the flag.
Of course, with no ranks in sewing or anything like that, I fully expect Nez's flag to look like a child's scribble of a raven. :P
Or you could ask the kindly old lady that was in prison because she supposedly served poisoned cake to some dottari. She's spending her time knitting stuff for her grandkids. She definitely did not have knitting goods when she arrived. Someone must have provided them for her. Nobody knows. She's got 7 Sweaters and 6 pairs of socks done. Also, no one ever saw her sleep. Furthermore, a cat spontaneously manifested on her lap some night when nobody was looking.
Chances are she could help with your flag...or could have already done so, if you promise to eat proper and put some meat on those ribs.
Perfect!
Kith will prepare
1st level
Adhesive Spittle
Cure Light Wounds
False Face
1 open
2nd:
False Life x2
Jeez Luise...I had some trouble with the page for a few days last week. But then I kinda felt guilty for not having posted and not immediately posting on the weekend(when I usually have little time to do so) and post-poned it a full week because I felt bad about not posting in the first place. Talk about self-reinforcing negative feedback loops. Old patterns. Ones I do try to break. I'll have to check my notes but I'll definitely get a post in tonight.
Jeez Luise...I had some trouble with the page for a few days last week.
Found yourself logged out, and couldn't log back in? Because I had that issue as well, and remembered (from the last time it happened) that I had to completely clear my Paizo.com cookies.
Yeah. Wish they could just put up a notice on the login page when they screw things up, since it seems to be reoccurring.
That, but also, it somehow buffered the "maintainance" page for me. Even when I went back to my bookmark, for several days it would claim to be in maintainance. It seems to have been connected though, because using a different browser did show me the page, and flushing everything paizo on my main browser fixed the issue(and allowed me to log in).
How local does one have to be? Miranda is from this area though she's mostly a city gal :p
How local does one have to be? Miranda is from this area though she's mostly a city gal :p
I'm pretty sure that still constitutes "local," it'd be Boros who isn't from around here.
Aye, what Boros said. If you read the spoiler, you'll realize you are local enough for that :)
Of course you can't know that before, but then, I'll let you know if you are no longer considered local in the area :D
Ok... so I'm in a situation where, I look at the gameplay tab, and I see neither of my posts, then I refresh, see the post I made second after I assumed I must have lost the first one, then I go to edit it, and I see the first and second post but in the wrong order, and then I leave the edit and the first post is gone again.
... Uh... I'm just gonna give the forum a night to sort itself out.
Since the Survival check was passed by 2 of you, and because I realize I may have been more clear, I'll add to it here:
pokes with a stick
Do something.
I think this is an appropriate time to ask "Hi, you aren't waiting on us the players for anything at this point, right?"
He's probably being overrun by his horde of sprogs :D.
No, no, I was simply stupid.
I played my last organized online games, with clan and everything, more than 20 years ago.
Because I am broken. I can't control myself. I avoided MMORPGs like the plague because of what they would do to me.
Fast forward to this year, when suddenly my entire friend list(or those that let me know they are online) started playing lost arc.
I figured 'yeah, that's hype, they are testing it and will be back to the other games shortly'. Only nothing changed over weeks.
Against my better judgement, I allowed myself to be convinced to play.
Long story short, I'm at 300 hours less than a month after I started.
It may sound ridiculous, but I utterly fail to control myself with this kind of media. It's impacted several aspects of my life, including work and family(I did not neglect my kids, but I was slightly ill and isolated myself, too). Every free minute I had, and several not-free-minutes as well, went into that game.
On the bright side, there's little content left, much of which is timelocked and my main is in the slowish endgame-grind. So I actually managed to pull myself 'off' the game if only because there was nothing to do.
I seriously regret starting, but I can't quit. It's not even a joke. I am prone to addictive behaviour patterns for these dopamine hits this kind of game provides. Funny enough, I am quite resistance to controlled substances(I had some wild time during my university years). But certain types of games, I always had to avoid. To people not familiar with that, it must sound somewhat absurd, but I assure you, this stuff is my achilles heel. (Kind of like the guy losing all his money in the casino - over and over - but since this is "free" my mind justifies that it's not the same...even if logically I see the similarity, emotionally it feels much different)
I will make sure to update here on the weekend. (No guarantee when though, first I have to make sure to spend some quality time with the kids, too.)
Oh f&@+, you poor bastard. This is why I restrict my online gaming to casual play in ESO and GTA V, with occasional dips into The Division 2 (where I am, for my skill level and patience, at endgame). Because I know all too well that games of that sort will eat my brain if I let them, having learned that lesson entirely too well from my days no-lifing Ultima Online (back when that game mattered, obviously).
I don't think anyone here wants this game to be a mental burden on you GM. Whatever is best for you and your family is what's most important.
Oh, THIS game is no burden.
Lost ark is.
I did tell earlier this year that I should have more free time and all that - that may have been detrimental in my downfall :P
But it's still true. I am just p*ssing all that time into some online game. Alas, until the second part of Vern releases I'm mostly out of content and reduced to dailies/daily grind. And while I will spend 50 minutes farming 10 ripe bananas with bad drop rates, there's a very real limit to how much of those things I can do in sequence. So yeah, pulling away will be doable.
Such games are a beautiful but deadly quagmire. My sympathies. It's hard to deal with, since it's so darn fun when it is fun. And addictive...
Mordred, did the game eat your brain again? Are you that much in need of whatever those ripe bananas get you :D?
Well, since Mordred has been eaten by life or something--here's hoping he gets coughed back up soon--I guess I'll regale you all with a summary of my foray into Elder Scrolls Online.
Last time I played an MMORPG, it was Ultima Online (from Second Renaissance to just after the release of the Paladin/Necromancer expansion), so it's been a good long while since I dipped my toes in this sort of game. Played lots of Skyrim though (with the obligatory restarts due to mod issues :p), so I wasn't completely fresh to the series itself. First issue was the camera, and it almost put me off the game entirely. In Skyrim, first person is the default and it works really well. But in ESO, I found it almost entirely unusable, and it wasn't until switch to third person (and finding a good distance to look from) that I started enjoying myself.
First mod I installed (and the only one so far) was one to highlight all of the resource nodes and such, because f@~% me if I'm going to zoom all over the area (and some of those areas are f~%#ing huge) looking for a log in the grass to chop or a flash of color that indicates a plant I can harvest. It is (sometimes) kind of annoying to see all of those resource indicators crowding my map and the compass bar, but it's minor and something I quickly stopped actively noticing.
On the physical side, the game plays pretty well using a controller. I'm sure there's KB+M purists out there who probably felt a sudden urge to hurt someone when I said that, but it's true. Controls are simple, accurate enough for me to settle in for a session lasting hours, and (to the best of my knowledge) do everything I need done. Accessing the different quick slots for consumables is a bit cumbersome in a fight though. Really wish I could get the Steam controller working completely with ESO, having that flexible little bastard in my hands would be awesome.
It's a fun game. I'm a total noob, obviously, but getting to (finally) play the sneaky, sticky-fingered, assassination-happy khajiit rogue that I keep trying for in Skyrim is great. (He's not a villain though, honest. He just believes that anyone who isn't strong or cunning enough to retain their possessions--which includes the most valuable one of all, their life--doesn't deserve to have them, and it's his purpose in life to facilitate the transfer of those possessions into the hands of those better suited to look after them properly. And if he happens to get paid for doing so? Well, that's entirely fair, because his transfers are hard work and every laborer should be justly compensated for their efforts.)
F$#& tons of quests, almost to the point of being too many at times. It's all too easy to be doing one quest over here, and then get sucked into doing a different one on the far end of the continent when you meant to stick around in the previous area and work on the next quest in a set. And because of ESO level scaling, pretty much everything can be done solo which is very nice for me, since I'm not yet up to inflicting myself on a guild.
I'm kind of split on the level scaling system that ESO uses though. On the one hand, it's nice to know that I won't unwittingly (or foolishly) bumble into a fight that's ludicrously out of my level range and get stomped out like a fire immediately after. But on the other hand, there's a definite rush to finally clearing content that you couldn't touch before due to being a relative weakling. And I do miss that rush.
Biggest complaint about ESO though? The f@!*ing crown store. I understand that Bethesda wants to earn some money, and I don't have a problem with that at all. But when I plunk down almost $60 bucks for an expansion (the upcoming High Isle), I don't think it's too much to expect that my purchase comes with all of the content relevant to said expansion. So finding that I have to drop--depending on which version I want to get--either $15 or (almost) $40 to buy the in-game currency I need to then buy the expansion's associated intro DLC? Mother. F~*!er.
(And that purchase covers only the two DLC dungeons, a cosmetic pet, and a mount. It doesn't cover any of the other content associated with the upcoming expansion, such as the cosmetics, the new house and house items, and such like.)
And when you find that skill sets (in my case, assassin and thief) are locked behind similar DLC purchases? Ugh. Bethesda has made it readily apparent that they absolutely will be skinning you for every last bit of non-base content in the game, even after you buy the big expansions.
But still, I'm having more fun than not in the balance, and my sneaky cat-man will hopefully not be a complete scrub by the time High Isle's content opens up, so I can rampage through with everyone else.
I mostly played wow back in the days, but have dipped my toes in Knights of the old republic online a few times. Recognize that nickle and dime scheme :p But at least the leveling bits are free-to-free-ish. And some cool world building once in a while is nice.
Glad to hear you're having a fun and a bit healthier time with the game though :D
A brief addendum to my ESO experience.
F&%+ those motherf~%!ing guards in their motherf+&#ing asses with their cheap, b+%!##$& immunity to attacks, their b$@@$%#~ stealth cancels, and their b&#%@$%~ CC moves. How is a hard-working thief supposed to get rich if this f$~*ers keep stopping me when I'm out and about with even a hint of notoriety?!?
(Got caught doing something naughty, decided to run instead of bribe my way out. Got repeatedly nailed by abilities that rooted me, dragged me back towards the guards, and (finally) turned me into a f$$&ing statue for them to wail on. They took all my hard-stolen swag afterward too.)
Mmm, as a kid it was Runescape and then Guild Wars for me.
But recently me and a group of friends have been going around doing free trials of various old 'classic' mmos to see what they were like. It's been an interesting experience.
World of Warcraft back in the day--there was a group of five of us who started at the same time, it was a perfect group size!
There...was a content drop. Pass, new continent, new class, not much, but enough to suck me back into the void.
Send help. Or an exorcist.
More seriously, deep down I know that the passion will pass. And I'm afraid of losing this enjoyable passtime if I neglect things. So second attempt at trying to pull myself from the grasping tentacles.
(Last time I almost made it, I was actually reading up on stuff in notes/AP but didn't manage to post courtesy of one of the kids(no blame to her, entirely valid reason for pulling me away), then came back just in time for a raid...
It's already late and I admit I had no time right now to read, but I am interested in Boros story and will come back to it later :)
He, World of Warcraft was the first I avoided like the plague. People in the dorm were playing, but I knew i might as well have quit studying and my job if I so much as took a closer look at it.
ESO seemed interesting in theory, but honestly, the main reason for me to play Fallout or ES-titles was moddability. Which by default is a no-no for online/multiplayer.
Definitely not the kind of mods I use. *ahem* (among others)
Never been a big fan of level scaling in anything. I loved games where you could more or less sequence break by going somewhere absolutely deadly and sneaking some loot/equipment/stuff from there by being cautious.
So fun for a second playthrough. That, plus returning near the start areas later in the game for some quest stuff and absolutely mopping the floor with enemies that were lethal on your first visit.
So yeah, catching up and hopefully rescuing what remains of my games today, then looking into posting tomorrow.