Nepenthe

You know what? It’s d&d. They are now.

How would carefully examining your surroundings be anything but the opposite of reckless, though. Annoying, perhaps, but that’s a different problem this would only encourage.

It doesn’t, but I’ve wished it did. Probably as a toggled option, since I know it would aggravate others.

It would require a couple more Act 2 safe zones scattered about for the player to keep track of, but it makes more sense than the ability to just chill for a while in what can be some incredibly unsafe territory. Sneaking off to bang in the underdark? Sure. Fine. I’m certain that won’t cause any undue noise.

There are only 1-2 battles I’m aware of that can or absolutely will happen, and neither are randomized encounters in the same vein. Areas it notes are dangerous, it won’t allow you to rest at all.

Can happen just the same with Astarion. He’s perfectly fine being in a relationship with you if you never turn him down, but
[SPOILER paragraph because the tag won’t work]:

whether he means a damn thing he says is completely dependent on one single camp scene. If you rest enough with a sufficiently progressed relationship, he’ll confess that he meant to use you as a shield and accidentally fell in love. If you progress to Act 3 without the confession, you get a cruel speech about how easy it was, and he doesn’t know why you’re so shocked (“It’s what I DO.”)

…end spoiler. Someone needs to explain the hieroglyphics of that tag to me.

It’s a pitfall of theirs, and as intrusive as it would have been to keep the exhaustion meter they originally had, removing the mechanic entirely is too destructive. It makes hoarding camp supplies laughably easy and results in too much missed content.

Maybe a notification marker of some sort reminding the player would be enough. Maybe it wouldn’t, because “Boy am I tired” is just something my party members say sometimes and it was easy enough to ignore without any clear punishment for doing so.

But they really need to reinstate something.

The post can, yeah. The predictability with which all posts or comments containing the word “Google” will have several responses underneath evangelizing Firefox almost certainly will not, after it exceeds a point it very clearly routinely exceeds.

Not because you guys are wrong, (you’re not), but because you’re annoying, which is almost as bad. There is something in psychology called reactance theory, and it’s the reason why, when you’re just about to do the dishes and then someone else tells you to do them, it’s suddenly the last thing on earth you want to do.

It is a choice so small it isn’t worth arguing over, but it’s no longer your choice born out of your own free will, and now you feel cheated and resentful and you are not doing it, both out of spite and more truthfully to regain your sense of choice.

This is the same reason everyone hates vegans so much. They’re not wrong. They’re annoying. Firefox has vegan PR.

I held off listening to Hamilton for three years for no other reason than nobody else I met would shut the goddamn fuck up about Hamilton. Same with the TV version of Good Omens, whatever stupid cartoon jester thing has been in a third of the memes lately, and a hundred other things.

I am very likely to switch over to Firefox myself in the ever-nearing future. That ice is breaking. But it will not be because a bunch of strangers whined at me over my own choices for over a decade. It will be because the cons of whatever Google, Windows, etc. have done finally outweigh the pros of not having to exert effort to maintain my experience.

It bears consideration that in the meantime, Firefox users have a tendency not to even read the several duplicate comments before they start jacking off into them, not uncommonly in a way that’s loudly judgemental towards their own target audience.

The resultant spam cements a mental association between Firefox, the brand and the feeling of being annoyed and insulted. Don’t be those vegans. If I had to think, be like the art community treats Adobe. Fuck Adobe, but I’m not just gonna overload someone with aggressive pompousity who’s only using the industry default.

The thing is — not trying to sound snarky about this — do you honestly believe there is someone on the fediverse that hasn’t heard of Firefox before.

So what…happened after? I mean, that had to be a huge letdown, you can’t just end the campaign with the villain dying offscreen by himself and then we all go home.

With named poison gases one would find irl, there really isn’t a lot available that would meet the requirements. 99.9% are too volatile either to open flame or the presence of oxygen, have a very strong smell and/or obvious color that one probably couldn’t explain away by blaming it on the tinted glass of a nearby lamp.

Or they cause immediate symptoms that the party would be far too damaged by to doubt what’s happening (blindness, lung damage requiring immediate medical attention, etc.), or the symptoms don’t show up for 3+ days or require months of exposure. At which point, I consider any lich really wouldn’t bother doing that on purpose because who’s it going to slow down? It would be more of an accidental environmental feature like radon that would leave the surviving players lingeringly convalescent just to piss them off.

For something so non-reactive it poses no danger to the big bad, with immediate symptoms that are still deadly while being understated enough that an adventurer might brush them off…it would more or less have to be mostly or entirely inert, I feel like. Nitrogen, argon, and krypton are all heavier than air, inflammable, unnoticeable, and all easily made through an identical process at differing temperatures, with krypton additionally exhibiting a strong anesthetic effect.

A study of nitrogen gas as a replacement in fire extinguishers doused varying types of fires in 11-71 seconds. So your torch would go out, yes, which would be really cool. With this one, at least, it also seems to have a habit of reigniting when you leave. Fun!

However, my main concern with this would be that because all you’re doing then is displacing the air with something your body doesn’t even notice. There will be progressive symptoms as one approaches the source: fatigue, a feeling either of panic or drunken euphoria, dimmed vision, dizziness/incoordination, nausea and vomiting, confusion and hallucinations that may make them roll at a disadvantage to address any of these things.

And then you fall over and die. These things kick in very fast irl and kill even faster. As in, unconscious in half a minute and brain-dead in ten minutes or less. This would obviously be unfair to the party. Your light would go and then you go.

The two thresholds are very close for my liking, making the question in my eyes how fast they would notice anything is wrong before they had to grab a new character sheet. You’d have to fudge reality a bit if you wanted to make this even a little bit not bullshit.

And in a setting where the lich has intentionally depleted an area entirely of oxygen? We already have places like that. Pluto’s Gate in Turkey emits a steady stream of CO2 that pools on the floor of the cave in such strong concentrations that anything passing the threshold at the wrong time of day is dead unless it can hold its breath. You didn’t get a warning beyond what the locals would tell you and probably all the corpses. In roman times, they sold birds for the tourists to toss in. You’re going to have to make something up.

Edit: hold on… THE Nepenthe? Who likes yarn and cats? What a nice surprise running into you here

I KNEW IT WAS YOU. I was just debating saying something in the discord! Both a pleasant and hilarious surprise

I’m thinking for what they want, something inert would be a good deal, yeah. Just nitrogen can be made in quantity pretty easily, would displace the air enough to put out a fire, and cause disorientation, possibly nausea. Main problem is, we would be talking brain death in a little over a minute and that may not be enough time if the party is dnd stupid. A TPK in the span of a couple breaths, because without the CO2 you wouldn’t understand what’s going on until someone noticed the torches, and they may be too out of it by the time that they do.

Kinda wanna go through a list, now, to see if there’s anything heavier than air that’s entirely or quickly becomes odorless, has more pronounced symptoms than “confusion,” and wouldn’t kill quite so fast, but I’m not entirely convinced because of…how necessary breathing is. The rotten egg smell of hydrogen sulfide dissipates very quickly into nothing, but one breath is enough to kill you and that isn’t hyperbole.

All that would, of course, be assuming we’re playing by irl rules despite the whole place being built by a zombie wizard.

No way would it be enough to dim a fire, because CO floats. You’re either out of range entirely because the ceiling is too high, or you’re screwed enough to have already noticed.

The deadly part is carbon monoxide is flammable. If the party is in any sort of situation requiring torches or any one of them takes any action that creates an unlucky spark, you will never stop finding the body.

Which makes it a questionably intelligent plan for a lich.

Made me think of Eddie Izzard’s evil giraffe clip

You really need higher cognition for that, although I will grant that even cats on the higher end do understand that they are not supposed to be doing the thing they’re about to do and will simply wait for you to look away or do it really really fast. They’re just not capable of any greater evil that isn’t running across the dinner table.

So now the question becomes how dedicated to evil does one have to be, in order to be evil? Does a life committed only to scratches and bodyslamming others out of the way of free food count, since it’s a life committed only to selfish pursuits?

…I’m pretty sure I had an evil cat once.

Intimeowdation

I’d go for being the lich that is worshipped. Especially if it’s whatever crush I have doing the worshipping

deleted by creator

Yeahhh. Even if they reverted everything, brought back the apps, and released a scheduled weekly video of Spez crying as different mods whip him with a belt, I am not interested.

Reddit can do whatever. I found an adequate replacement due to the protests, and I took it in direct response to Spez’s clockwork PR disasters, so the protests did not fail for me.

Interesting read that should have gone without saying to anyone trying to manage a company, what trust thermoclines are and how to avoid them.

Judging the worth of the protests depends on what your individual goal was. If it was convincing reddit admins not to cut and run with a giant pile of free money, now you know better. Nothing in the company’s history made me think they were the type, which is itself a warning sign.

If it was reddit going down in flames, that’s always a slow burn and seems nigh unavoidable for any company as the years stretch on and management grows complacent, but they visibly did damage themselves because you’re reading this.

And it was enough damage that several hundreds of thousands don’t really mind making their home at a competitor instead. It’s only going to get worse, not because they don’t already have millions of users who didn’t leave, but because they have a solid reputation for never listening to those millions.

The protest was a death sentence because their proven problem solving method is to ignore the problems as they mount.