Any gamers around here?

[Hydra009]

I'm watching a video about how to make D&D dungeon explorations more interesting.

The normal way of doing things is kinda boring, with maybe a search action or a skill check or two.  Everyone's very thorough because no one wants to be the guy who steps on a trap.  No rush, no ticking clock, no excitement.

Basically, the DM adds a ticking clock.  The dungeon becomes more perilous over time, wandering monsters, crumbling walls, maybe you have to race another group to the MacGuffin, etc.  Fail a roll?  That's wasted time.  It's all about managing risk vs reward.  How deep can you go before you have to turn back?

Often, you'll have to choose between exploring a room or passing it up - maybe that room has valuables or equipment or prisoners pleading to be released.  Maybe it's a trap and guards or a golem will pop out to ambush your party.

Just create an environment full of choices and watch your players try manage their greed against their safety.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

LOL. I played the first D&D game, the one with no real graphics, back in the 80s. I was waiting to go to Purdue and killing time. After some false starts I went to an office supply store and bought a quadrille desk pad. (Think graph paper but blotter size.

I then mapped every square on every level. Twenty levels IIRC. Killed everything. As I was sitting in a farm house in rural Indiana this was the best I could do.

[Hydra009]

Me playing a new RPG:

LEVEL UP!  Choose your new skill:

+2% damage to unit type Ogres
+1% chance of sizzling bistro
+10 damage while Sagittarius is in retrograde

*closes the game and checks the wiki and reddit*
*even more confused*

[Nobody]

Hey, that sizzling bistro sounds pretty good! 🍷

[Hydra009]

It might be if I knew what it did!

[Blackleaf]

I stayed up until 4:00AM last night, playing Jurassic World Evolution 3. Not on purpose. Just lost track of time, and didn't feel tired at all. It was just constant stream of, "Okay. One more thing. Oh, yeah. I need to do this too." I'm just playing through the campaign right now, getting used to how everything works. The new breeding system adds a lot to the game. Have to be careful, though, because they'll overpopulate super fast, if you let them. The Compies breed like rabbits, but at least they are easy to please. Since they're so small, including them in an enclosure with a larger species that won't make a snack out of them, they'll have more space than they'll need.

Sometimes, species won't get it on when they don't have enough space, but that is not always the case. Some would keep making more and more, requiring me to provide them with more space and resources, until I take away their nests or give them contraceptives (a toggle to disable an individual from breeding. My five raptors think they have enough, but my Yutyrranus will keep popping them out three at a time, until they're completely miserable.

The babies can also inherit traits from their parents. Not just colors and patterns (which is cool), but also behavior traits. Had one ceratopsid baby that was "intolerant," so it didn't like sharing space with other species and kept attacking my jeeps. That was not gonna fly, so that baby got sold off. lol

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Not a fan of run-and-gun, more into strategy games. I like to steal the other guy's relics in Age of Empires.

[Hydra009]

Expedition 33  swept the awards

GOOD.  Let that be a lesson to the big AAA developers/publishers that they must deliver a solid game WITHOUT price-gouging.  It's entirely possible to make tidy profit and delight gamers simultaneously - lots of indie studios do just that - and it's time to finally put that myth to bed.  No more horse armor.  No more "surprise mechanic" loot boxes.  No more "minimal viable product".  Delight gamers or shutter the studio.  Period.

[Hydra009]

It has *only* been 14 years since Skyrim released and 7 (!) years since the Elder Scrolls 6 teaser trailer was released.  And I don't know about you, but my mental health is doing just fine while waiting.

Absolutely NOT crazy.

[Hydra009]

I find it so fascinating when complete novices start a game for the first time.  There's a LOT of frustration because they don't know anything so they don't understand core mechanics or what to expect.  (Seasoned gamers often don't fully appreciate that they're starting with a huge leg up from prior experience)  And newbies are always tempted to quit in frustration, but a little insight into how you can improve your approach (I prefer to word it that way instead of "what you're doing wrong" even though they're the same thing since this sounds more positive).  As a newbie, you're supposed to experiment and see what works and what doesn't, then keep what works well and stop doing what doesn't.

The game is supposed to teach you as you go, so for example - an enemy starts flashing red and then explodes, killing you instantly.  From then on, you know that if an enemy starts flashing red, you need to run for your life.

But it's not just the player who needs improvement, often the games don't communicate things well.  This is especially true with puzzles.  And while puzzles are supposed require some amount of contemplation, they're not supposed to be complete mysteries.  I played Secret World with my brother and HATED it because of the damn puzzles.  One puzzle was "my favorite composer" and I had literally no clues to work with except a photo of some fireworks.  My brother told me the answer was Vivaldi and I wondered if the game was screwing with me or genuinely expected me to be psychic.

As a rule of thumb, in games like D&D, puzzles are supposed to have multiple clues and you should be able to solve the puzzle even without finding all the clues, since it's easy for adventurers to miss some detail or the other.

I was playing Endless Legend and at the time, there was a new mechanic called Security.  So my cities would have little security icons next to them, saying 20% or 40% or 60%.  I didn't think much about it.  Then I saw that I can research ways to boost security - with very eye-catching names like Traitor's Lottery.  Again, didn't think much of it.  Then the enemy began a vicious and prolonged espionage campaign that took me by surprise and assassinated one of my governors.  I took it much more seriously after that.  >:(

That's how it should work - you get blindsided but it doesn't crush your spirits, it steels your resolve.  Then you come up with a new strategy and do a much better job.

[the_antithesis]

So for xmas, my brother gave me one of these.



This is the R36S handheld console. It's a decent budget option. A bit more powerful than my Anbernic R280V, which runs a chipset that is from 2013. The R36S uses a Rockchip RK3326, which is more powerful than what's in the Intellivision Sprint I recently bought.

When I went to research this thing for firmware options and the like, I learned that the market is rife with clones, some that use the weaker chip in the Sprint or have half the RAM at 512MB. Turns out this is a "soy sauce v04." That name has an amusing story behind it. A chinese man as looking at these consoles on... some retail site and discovered that if he included a package of soy sauce in his cart, the console would have a significant discount. Main point is the say sauce models are decent with the right CPU and a full gigabyte of RAM, in one chip instead of two.

Flashing a new SD card with the OS has been a headache. It uses ArkOS, which has been though a bit of turmoil and finding exactly which version I should use has been a pain in the pooper. First attempt bricked the system. I had to pull the battery cable and reseat it to get it to work again with the original SD card (which it is recommended that you replace because they are prone to failure). I then tried ArkOS4Clone which says wit work with this variant I've got. It worked but the controls didn't work for some god-unknown reason. I learned enough about this to find out that there are .dtb files that contain the settings for the screen and also the controller. I just copied all of them off the original SD card and it worked. Hooray.

However, the original SD card is 128GB and I put the OS on a 32GB in hopes of using the second SD card slot. But I found out too late that the 128 Sandisk brand 128GB card are not liked by the finicky device. So, I ordered Samsung 128GB card because the compatibility list I found says it likes those. While I waited, I remembered I had a 256GB Samsung card and tried it and it, well, it worked. The device recognized it as an SD card in slot 2 and all that happy horseshit, but the unit bricked if the card was in slot 2. What I had to do is take the card out of slot 2, turn the device on and then put the card back in. This is not great.

After trying and failing to get either the 256GB or the new 128GB Samsung cards to work in slot 2 without needing to be removed to boot, I gave up and decided to go to the single card method. I got a decent working install going on a 128GB Sandisk card and then I decided to try the 256GB card again. Forgetting the order of things, this time I formatted the card, flashed the OS, ran the EXE on the BOOT partition to select the correct clone I'm running but decided to let the device go through the first boot process before copying over the .dtb files. AND. IT. FUCK. ING. WORKED.

Why the hell didn't it work the previous time I did this? The controls were definitely not working and I was getting pissed. Now it's working like it was supposed to all along and I'm even more pissed. I'd try the SD slot 2, but I don't want to push my luck.

So, this is a decent device but the proliferation of clones and the OS being weird makes it hard to know what you need to do to make this work.

[Hydra009]

Endless Day!  In the Endless series of games, there's a annual little event where some strange/wondrous/eerie stuff happens but only around this time (though I think that can be changed with mods or clock time shenanigans).  It's just a neat little surprise, a special mini-questline, and a special achievement if you delve into it.

I really wish more games did little cool little micro-DLCs like this, though it's probably a bit of a headache to program.