So one night we’re playing a modern era game and the BBEG and her husband are “holding court” at a very expensive night club. So all the PCs get dressed fancy, rent a limo, and bribe the bouncer heftily to let us in. A quick persuasion check and we’re in and snooping around. The GM wads up about a whole notebook. “I had plans for you to come in through the skylight, sneak through the kitchen, break in through the fire exit, even find a secret door to the basement. I never thought you’d just go in through the front door.”

So sometimes it’s the GM that fails to plan the simple solution.

People who come from happy living homes in fantasy settings have no motivation to risk their lives and that happy home for an adventure.

The things that make the happy loving home work as a background are characters that either want to duck an arranged marriage or are so far down the inheritance chain they are going to be life long mooches if they stay.

Nobody pays attention to that part. They just see the very prominent $50k! and think that’s what they’re gonna get. Even if they do catch the “up to” they are going to hope. 50k is still life changing money to someone that makes 5x what a McDs worker makes.

Do not depend on WiFi to hide your location.

Google’s (not sure about other’s) location services keeps track of WiFi access points and the coordinates of devices that connect to them, and with the way Google sucks up all data, probably even just passing in range of. So WiFi can tattle on your location as well.

A job I had a few years back closed one office in PA and sent their WiFi APs to us in AZ as they were way better than what we had. For about a week this played havoc with everyone in the office’s location when using Google maps. A few of us that played Ingress (precursor game to Pokémon go) could start the game and get an action against the point in PA before our GPS would override the WiFi location.

Watch the movie “death becomes her” for great ways to fuck with characters that can’t die.

If it is, it’s based heavily off of the ttrpg mage: the ascension. The symbols and the technocratic union organization are from that game, the technocrats being one of the main villain groups. Though I don’t remember them ever going full “kill all humans” at any point.

What’s the target use case for this? It seems too small to be useful as a laptop replacement, and isn’t really mobile without cellular radios. About the only purpose I can see is replacing pagers that are still used in medical facilities.

Number 1) find the fuse that controls the modem and pull it. Without this your car can only report when the service techs hook it up to their diagnostics, and what is reported there versus what reports on the regular from the modem is a huge difference. You lose a lot of convenience this way, but that’s to be expected. CarPlay and auto give you a lot of that convenience back, but now you’re giving a lot of that same data to Apple and Google, even if all you think you’re doing is projecting maps from your phone to your infotainment. Do you trust them? You can use Bluetooth audio in most cars without using CarPlay or auto, that should be safe. Stick to maps on your phone if you don’t want Google or Apple getting your driving data.

It’s easier for me because my table is a bunch of 9-12 year olds. Most of the time I’m just prodding them to do something, anything, then I get rewarded with the monk randomly punching someone in the bar because “we hadn’t had any combat yet.” I made some nemesis NPCs but I can never predict what these kids want to do so I wing it the whole time.

I found that few people have the imagination to play both sides of their characters. They always try to be human mode or fairy mode, but that’s not how it works and it’s really hard to always think of your characters as being and doing both simultaneously. It’s a great game for the imaginative, but probably hell for a lot of other players. It does lend itself to LARP really well though. We did a huge live action game for a few summers with like 40 people and 3 GMs, it was tons of fun.

If you want an actual dumb car that’s reliable, I don’t think anything beats a TJ series Jeep wrangler. Not good gas mileage, but the I6 engine in them is fantastic and it’s still relatively easy to get parts for them despite being 20 years old. You can add an after market head unit for CarPlay out android auto.

If you really do go new, you can disable the cellular radio. It’ll cost you a lot of convenience features, and you won’t get updates. But no cell radio, no ability for it to give your data to the mothership.

Also the ability to snapshot an image, goof around with changes, and if you don’t like them restore the snapshot makes it much easier to experiment than trying to unwind all the changes you make.

I have and use a resimed that does the phone home option. Once my doctor got what he needed I put it in airplane mode.

Distributor used the stats while I was reporting to call me and tell me I need new filters or other parts. I lol’d and bought them online for way cheaper. They stopped trying even before the doctor got all the data he needed.

Also, AFAICT it’s only data out, so I’m not worried about some exploit being delivered to the machine.

Final thought: I work in med tech. We have better security than credit agencies because we get fined more if we screw up. Personal data leaks are so common no one even cares anymore, but leaking someone’s medical info will shut a company down. You are likely safe, but ultimately never as safe as a “dumb” machine would be except they just don’t exist anymore.

Actual final thought: you will be amazed at how much better you feel every morning after actually sleeping instead of the dirty pseudo sleep you’re currently getting.

You probably don’t need anything. Laptops using disk have been in use in bumpier environments for decades prior to SSDs.

But let’s say you do. Bolt some eye hooks to the top of your case and suspend it with paracord. It’ll turn vibration into sway and your disks will happily keep on turning.

Rifts was my first TTRPG and it opened up the whole RPG world to me. Absolutely loved the blend of magic and sci-fi.

Combat system was clunky as hell though.