I grew up in a village whose name roughly translates to “Bob’s place by the stream.”

God, Strange New Worlds is so good.

Its wild seeing Star Trek that isn’t embarrassed to be Star Trek.

I’m aware. That’s not what I meant by “This is not a joke.”

Also the hint is that OP said they meant it as a joke. But, yeah, everything you said too.

This is not a joke. This is genuinely what a significant number of flat earthers believe.

Some guy named Alton Brown recently started posting videos. He only had two up so far but he shows promise.

/s, or are you one of today’s lucky 10,000?

If you want to do tonkotsu the easy (eg, very much non-traditional way), here’s a hack for you; make a classic pork bone stock - being sure to give the bones a boil first to remove any scum, and adding some chicken wings to round out the flavour - in your slow cooker or whatever, then take the finished, strained broth and run it through a high powered blender.

The reason tonkotsu is cooked at a rolling boil is to emulsify the fat into the broth, creating the signature creamy texture. But chefs in Japan didn’t have high powered blenders back when they invented that method. Turns out you can emelsify fat very easily with one of those. If the texture and colour aren’t right you can add a little bit of pork lard to get the consistency you want.

Obviously for proper tonkotsu flavour there are some additional steps needed, like using konbu water to make the stock and having the right mix-ins, but just getting rid of the need to babysit the stock at a rolling boil makes the process significantly easier.

It’s actually a brilliant monetization model. If you want to use it as is, it’s free, even for large corporate clients.

If you want to get rid of the puppygirls though, that’s when you have to pay.

The worst part is that this failure will probably kill any chance of The Chinese Room getting to actually take a proper swing at this, from scratch, with time and a real budget. It really feels like if they were allowed to do that they would hit it out of the park. Bloodlines 2 is a much better game than the review scores suggest, mostly weighed down by the expectations people put in the Bloodlines name.

A really important thing that I find a lot of writers need to learn is that backstory is not character depth. You can write an incredibly deep and complex character without ever telling us anything about their past.

Depth comes from complexity. Complexity is found in contradiction. Real people don’t have some simple set of programming that defines them. This is why I despise the alignment system; it’s basically a textbook for creating uninteresting characters. In real life people often hold complex and contradictory (or seemingly contradictory) ideals. Or they profess one ideal but live out another.

Think about a character who lives by a philosophy of always putting themselves first. Think about all the times they do something for someone else, not even really understanding or accepting that they’re breaking their own rule. Think about why they would do that. That’s character depth. Maybe there’s something in their past that explains why they are that way, but we don’t ever need to know what it is. And in truth, most people can’t be summed up as one or two pivotal events. We’re the sum of every single moment in our lives, all put together in one complex mess of a human being.

They didn’t say it’s not defined, they said it’s not a valid name. Most languages don’t allow function names to start with a number, so 5 literally cannot be a function if that’s the case.

But that’s assuming this isn’t some really obscure language.

Depends what you want to do with those character sheets.

If you just want a text file that people can paste their character sheet into, this will work: https://foundryvtt.com/packages/taf/ If you want to actually build full custom character sheets, you probably want something more like this: https://foundryvtt.com/packages/universal-tabletop-system/ Or this: https://foundryvtt.com/packages/custom-system-builder/

There’s also a general purpose PbTA system that’s meant to be customised into different PbTA hacks: https://foundryvtt.com/packages/pbta/

I guess in the sense that you have to load some kind of system to play, there’s a requirement to use some sort of plugin, so maybe that’s a dealbreaker. But it’s generally not an issue. While premium content for Foundry exists, it’s mostly in the form of rulebooks and scenarios that have been ported into it by the people who make and sell those games. The actual systems are all free, with literally only one exception (Brambletrek, for some reason).

A really good way to thicken your ramen is to mix a raw egg with about a tablespoon of mayo. Put this in the bottom of the bowl before pouring in the noodles and broth. It’ll mix in and create a more creamy, silky broth.

So, it seems like the plugins don’t really affect you either way then? If you don’t want that added functionality, you’re good to just not use it, right?

Can you help us to understand why the plugins to add games is a problem for you?

Maybe I’m missing your meaning here, but it reads kind of like you’re expecting some kind of situation where a single VTT would somehow support every game system out of the box?

Do not cite the deep magics to me, I was there when they were written. I grew up on System Shock and Deus Ex, and that’s exactly why I found Dishonoured so hard to get into. Those other games gave the player a complete free choice in how to approach them, but Dishonoured doesn’t do that. It presents an apparently wide open field, but the moment you pick a particular path and set off down it, the game wags its finger and says “Oh no, not like that. That’s not how you’re supposed to play.”

There’s also a lot of stuff throughout the game about how the city gets more corrupted, more rats everywhere, that sort of thing. Some of this makes some stuff harder, some of it is just vibes. But all of it is the designers very noticeably wagging their finger under your nose for engaging with the mechanics they made and actively encouraged you to engage with.

I’d be happy with either option. If you’re going to punish the player for not doing perfect (eg, no kill) stealth, don’t tease them with a bunch of really exciting combat mechanics. If you’re going to include all the exciting combat mechanics, don’t punish people for using them.

I bailed on Dishonoured for one very specific reason; the morality system.

Dishonoured is, in my opinion a spectacular example of game design, and an equally spectacular example of how to break your game design by not understanding the way players interact with the tools you give them.

Dishonoured is a stealth game. It’s also a game with a superb combat system, and a really fun and exciting set of powers for the player to enjoy using. These things can, sort of co-exist, if somewhat uneasily. But then you add the morality system.

The morality system, in effect, punishes you for playing the game in a non-stealthy way. Or, more specifically, for playing with the wrong kind of stealth. The morality system wants you to ghost the whole game, slipping past every opponent without the slightest evidence you were ever there. But doing that means not engaging with most of the powers and any of the combat.

Having the option to follow a ghost playstyle is great. But when the game sets up a bunch of really fun mechanics, then punishes you for engaging with those mechanics in exactly the way they were designed to be engaged with, that just sucks.

Usually. Enter The Matrix was one of the rare exceptions. That game genuinely slapped. The gameplay was crazy fun; it took all the slow-mo coolness of Max Payne and added wall-running, super jumps and martial arts. The combat was lots of fun, and the story was all written by the Wachowski’s to tie in with the second and third movie, including actual scenes that they filmed as part of the process. They took it really seriously, to them it was an essential part of the story.

Obviously the whole Matrix 2 & 3 saga has some problems, it’s not the Wachowski’s best work (how could it have been, they had a plot for one movie that they were told to expand into two), but the game is still a really fun entry in their ouvre.

The line “Mario is a war criminal” is seared into my brain forever.