Miles O'Brien

smacks forhead

I even went back up to double check it was goblin…

Clearly I cannot read today. I should go back to sleep…

Sorry but that “soulless” goblin is smiling contentedly in the last panel, I find it hard to believe that anything without a soul can feel happy.

… Maybe the bard is just that good?

You know, quantum resonance in the Heisenberg compensators. Sometimes the dice spit out an impossible number.

Don’t even get me started on the time we rolled a natural negative

I’m always a fan of “best possible outcome” for 20, and “worst possible outcome that doesn’t immediately kill anyone” for nat1.

If you’re 2ft tall and trying to destroy an iron wall and roll a 20, you successfully scrape some iron off the wall. It doesn’t just collapse spontaneously. If you roll a 0 1, your attack bounces off and your weapon breaks. Luckily it didn’t rebound and hit you.

It makes things more believable, however rule of cool is obviously above that. So if you can do a flip off a cliff onto the back of a dragon and convince it to attack the tarrasque for you before it eats you, and roll a 20 for all that, you better believe that dragon now considers you it’s deity, and will die in a ball of flames, acid, ice, etc, in your name while flying headfirst down the tarrasque’s throat. The tarrasque obviously dies from this, since it’s so epic.

I guess it really depends on the stakes.

I once ran a campaign of a game similar to D&D where one of the players had geared a character to be super charismatic and had an end goal of being able to persuade anyone to do anything.

She kept persuading the random side characters that helped them into joining, until they had a small army of Merry Men.

Yeah, the campaign took a back seat while they played Robin hood for awhile.

She started specifically targeting side npcs because I wanted to drop a character that was making my vocal chords hurt. They liked the npc because he was basically a child’s vision of a stereotypical pirate.

The prosecution used the presence of the first aid kit they carried

Insane bullshit.

I have a kit with me every day of my life, and I’ve had to refill it many times due to using it on others.

It would be pure coincidence that I happen to be carrying a first aid kit on any given day, and if I’m going to a peaceful protest I’m bringing my trauma kit because the entire fucking world knows how cops treat protesters.

The white brick at the bottom is for detecting large objects (cars) and is either controlling a traffic signal, or is being used to count traffic going through that spot.

An intersection near me uses them to switch the lights at an intersection where traffic almost never comes from, so a timed light is unnecessary, but important traffic still comes from that direction.

I wonder how difficult it would be to make a heating system directly powered by solar panels. It doesn’t have to be enough heat to make a person comfortable in a t-shirt, but just enough to allow normal battery operation.

I’m sure that depends on a lot of factors like shed insulation/wall facing direction, etc, and burying the battery bank would probably be more effective.

to find an expanded & bloated lithium ion battery pack

Intrusive thoughts: “go on, poke it with a knife. See what happens firsthand”

As usual, the opponent of recycling things is simply “it’s too expensive”

The ultimate failing of the future, as always, is current reliance on capitalism.

Why recycle when you make more money by blowing up the planet and ripping out the good stuff?

That’s fair.

The obvious choice is “don’t buy tvs that might do this” but if you’ve already got one, open up the case, find the wifi antenna, and pull the little connection out.

Calm down there, Satan.

should be impeached

Impeached and then executed for treason.

If that’s what you took away from my comments, have fun I guess.

I told him the game focuses on the group and if he’s not part of the group then he won’t be playing, and since that first game he has participated, with few issues popping up.

I probably could have been clearer before we even got to the table that if you aren’t playing with the group then you aren’t playing, rather than just expect them to stick with a group on their first game.

I told him multiple times that if he was going to try and do his own thing, he won’t be participating with the group, and the group is the entire focus of the game.

I suppose I could have made it more explicit that he could join the group or he could leave the game.

I should add that that was many games ago, and he has since begun participating, although he often tries to go his own way and threatens to leave the group constantly, but so far he hasn’t actually tried leaving the group unless it was agreed upon for strategy reasons. (they split up inside a crypt in the most horror movie fashion possible)

let people roll to see if something happens

Oh god so many DMs in the past have done this, and I just roll my eyes every time.

Like I’m okay if you want to roll your own dice behind the screen to see if we get attacked overnight, but that should be the only kind of “roll to see what happens” going on.

I really need to do some kind of team building exercise before a game, something that they’ll want to do, but requires teamwork, just to demonstrate the point that they need to work together.

When my first character did the whole “I’m gonna be all by myself because I’m a lone wolf” thing, the DM let me go off and the totally unexpected happened and my character got into a scuffle he wasn’t prepared for, but a group sure would have been.

I absolutely used to be that “my character is a quiet rogue-ish type that definitely wasn’t modeled after Aragorn when he was introduced at the Prancing Pony mixed with Robin hood” who always “had to be convinced” to join, and nobody ever called me out for it. I honestly wish they had because that’s annoying as fuck and you miss out on playing an actually fully developed character.

Nowadays I tend to be less tactful that you are, but essentially tell people the same thing, or literally beat their characters over the head with ambushes.