soli

I’m surprised at how hard seeing Max again hit me. I don’t have much interest in playing a new LiS game, but I still got unreasonably emotional dredging up memories of the first game.

It used to be the way we played ADnD

Far from everyone, the game was born out of war gaming so maps and minatures have always been big in the community. I personally see theater of the mind more often these days than when I started.

As a non-American who didn’t grow up with imperial, I still prefer it for fantasy. Metric sounds too modern and scientific. Also I feel like I have more room to fudge distances because it already sounds imprecise.

Would be a fun bit to make the players use metric in a magitech world though.

From the way you’ve described your mental health problems, I’ve had similar friends who have found stable, loving relationships. So there’s hope, though I know that can be the most infuriating thing to hear.

My favourite bit on drow related lore is from 2E. Non-drow followers of Eilistraee would do black face and travel the world as part of an effort to show drow could be peaceful. There is something hilarious to me about how well intentioned the author seems to be but completely oblivious to what it looks like.

Yeah, but there were a lot of boulders already being carried 🙃

I had this ex who was deep into D&D and really keen on similar movies to The Princess Bride from the same era, but hadn’t seen it. I suggested it for a movie night while we were sharing movies that were a big part of our childhood and got “it looks stupid, I’m not watching that”. Unironically might have been the straw that broke the back of that relationship, I ended things not long after.

Yeah this one of those movies that is like designed to be memory holed. I remember it being the subject of a bad movie night with friends, but all I remember is Jeremy Irons hamming it the fuck up. Literally nothing else about the movie.

I thought after playing Star Trek: Resurgence, which I adored, that I’d follow up with The Expanse: A Telltale Series. I’m a fan of both series and The Expanse seems just as well suited to the format, I’ve enjoyed the other Telltale games I’ve played and I really like Camina Drummer. Recipe for a slam dunk.

Off the bat, The Expanse has a lot of advantages over Resurgence. It’s far better on a technical level - it never crashed, I didn’t have any visual bugs, I didn’t have any performance problems and there were no input issues. All things Resurgence was rife with.

But here’s where the problems start. The Expanse, in a technical sense, is better graphically. It doesn’t look better though. It’s just creatively kind of dull. This is going to be a running theme with the game - it suffers any time an artistic choice had to be made.

There’s only a brief moment in the first episode - of five - where we escape the uninspired industrial corridors. You might point out those industrial corridors are part of the show’s aesthetic, but they don’t convey the same details about how these machines work and how the people live in them. They miss details like how the decks are laid out in relation to the direction of thrust, and are weirdly wide rather than that utilitarian claustrophobia. The show also had no problem finding spectacular space vistas that are largely absent here.

But visuals are not why we are here. It’s the story, right? But for the first time in any Expanse media - from the books, novellas, show, etc - I was incredibly bored. None of these characters are remotely interesting. The Camina I know is intense, driven and decisive. This Camina is unsure, anxious and just all around unimpressive. The politics are gone - not that the faction don’t get a lot of lip service, but everything said is incredibly surface level and dull.

The game is blatantly obvious in how it forces outcomes regardless of choice. I was particularly frustrated when I shot a mutinous crew member multiple times, saw him floating limp in space, only for him to teleport mere moments later and have a gun pointed at another crew member again. I had these whiplash moments pretty often, where it felt like there needed to be an intermediary set up scene but instead we just awkwardly jump to something.

More important than decisions in story outcomes is stuff you find while exploring. People live or die based on these. Except you have no idea whether clicking something or walking somewhere is going to trigger a cutscene that’ll push you past a threshold where you can’t return to find something. Locations of items rely on moon logic - you don’t find meds in any of the med bays you go through, you them on a random crate floating in space. The result is an anxiety over whether you’ll miss something, and butchered pacing as you aimlessly walk around trying to find these things that could be anywhere.

The voice acting is sadly sub par. I really liked Camina’s actress in the show, but she sounds like she is phoning it in here. The others aren’t any better. The belter accents were particularly awkward.

It feels weird to talk about game play in this genre, but with dialogue choices this weak I couldn’t help but notice how much worse The Expanse’s were. There is a lot of tedious filler walking, jarring video game-y avoiding patrolling “drones” with comical red laser beam search lights and holding a button until a thing is collected. Resurgence had plenty of issues in this regard but, to it’s credit, it mostly just cut to the next scene (at least in the first half).

The one puzzle I remember was moon logic. You need to work out a password, which is connecting a series of shapes, and are encouraged to look around the environment for shapes that might have been important to the previous inhabitants. Is it any of the pseudo-religious iconography? Anything of sentimental importance? No, it’s the path of the silly connect the power lines chore you did earlier.

Ugh, I could go on. This is already way longer than anyone should read. The TL;DR is The Expanse gets a 3/10 for me, compared to Resurgence at a 9/10. It should have been an easy passing grade given my investment in the series and it’s suitability for this format but it’s just so creatively bankrupt.

I’m unironically disappointed. I’d take any new direction at the moment, I’ve already been pushed past the point where it wouldn’t make a meaningful difference to me if it got worse. Even a change with a low chance of getting better is worth it over a guarantee of remaining shit.

This is very much a build that can take down major threats single-handedly, and is designed to function as such.

I think you’re going to be shocked when you take it out of the white room lmao

I’m not sure why you think this is any good or would require anyone to rebalance an encounter at level 16. The charmed condition is just:

• A charmed creature can’t attack the charmer or target the charmer with harmful abilities or magical effects.
• The charmer has advantage on any ability check to interact socially with the creature.

Like okay, a single humanoid in an encounter has to attack a different party member for two turns worth of actions?

Hypnotic Gaze is such an awkward way of achieving this as well. You’ve invested two levels in a class with little synergy with your main for an incapacitate that only works with 5 feet of you. Your DC for this is going to be terrible as it’s INT based not CHA based. You’d be better off just taking Hypnotic Pattern as a spell.

Yeah, great for lobbies like that. Can’t think of a more effective, quick to type thing you could dump in chat.

I’ve deployed it in real life too and watched a bunch of awkward 20-somethings go from nothing but occasional stressed sniping at each other to making “ooo ooo aaa aaa” noises while throwing themselves back into the job at hand. Truly a sight to behold.

Most of my use has been in games though, where I’ve accidentally become team parent to far too many groups and had to get a bunch of maladjusted shut ins back in the right mind set before a tournament or whatever.

Sort of off topic, but “apes together strong” has been hilariously useful to me over the years. The number of gamer brained “lone wolves” I’ve had to get onboard and working together is bizarrely high. Apes together strong always hits. Instant enthusiasm and team cohesion as they make fucking monkey noises together and start to roll with any set backs they have instead of squabbling amongst each other.

Already came out months ago, it was terrible.

There was this kid in my high school IT class who got suspended because he kept drawing Spiderman porn in MS Paint. This reminds me of his “art”, though instead of phallic shaped towers he just would draw actual penises.