I’m okay with a DM ruling that it’s possible to cast it in such a way that someone is taken off guard, sure. Maybe a performance or deception vs hostile creature(s) insight rather than the typical stealth vs perception when determining surprise from sneaking, which is not RAW, but I think sounds reasonable. I’d definitely not consider it to be an automatic aspect of the spell at any table I ran.

And you absolutely could not avoid a fight and just walk away from the situation with plausible deniability because you “only insulted them”.

Ignoring the actual rules and mechanics is basically step one in almost every “isn’t this goofy” D&D anecdote.

Not only is it not “decent damage” (even the buff it got in 5.5 just brings it from “the worst” to “poor”), it’s also not a subtle thing you can just drop on someone unsuspectingly.

Spellcasting for an attack is an obvious aggressive action, which means an initiative roll comes first to see if you even manage to get it off before they clock you. It’s also not like everyone around just shrugs and lets you go about your business because all you did was hurl an insult. You attacked someone with an offensive spell, the response is exactly the same as if you threw a firebolt at them

The flavor of insulting someone to death is fun, I’ll grant that, but there’s nothing special about Vicious Mockery mechanically that makes it immune to initiative order or people noticing what you’re doing.

Everybody’s saying that the Scatman stutters but doesn’t ever stutter when he sings.

It’s a checkbox in the installer, easy to miss. Has defaulted to off for a very long time now, basically ever since SSDs have been commonplace.

The default depends on your storage. It has defaulted to not load on startup for me any time I’ve installed it to an SSD.

Jellyfin has some security issues that, depending on who you ask, are either critical vulnerabilities that make it completely unsafe to expose to the Internet or largely unconcerning for regular users.

I had exactly the same experience, at about the same time. Had been hearing good things about Plex so decided to try it out. Immediately noped out when it required me to create an account with them. Similar to you I looked around and found it to be a relatively new change.

Frankly baffling to me that anyone with the wherewithal to self-host was okay with it.

Generally speaking it’s considered bad practice for a GM to call for rolls that literally no one in the party can succeed at, but as with anything in tabletop roleplaying there is nuance.

There could be a narrative reason for the player to not know just how difficult something is and you don’t want to give it away by just telling the players they can’t succeed. If the most capable member of the party rolls a 20 and fails then the “reward” is the narrative of the attempt and learning what you’re up against.

Or maybe someone in the party could succeed but for whatever reason the child-prodigy wizard with a strength of 8 wants to try lifting the portcullis. It wouldn’t make any sense for them to actually do it.

…are you calling first person shooters “shmups”?

OP doesn’t seem to have responded, so no, but that’s not the fault of the question.

Because of the XY problem. The problem OP is stating may not actually be the source of the issues OP is experiencing.

Finding out what OP is trying to do will better inform a solution and may make the stated problem irrelevant.

Exactly this. I had a character go to a brothel in a campaign I ran. I just said okay, you go to the brothel and have whatever you consider a good time. No further detail or RP was requested or required.

Definitely did not expect Konsi doing a Street Fighter 6 Cammy cosplay.

When I initially set up my media server I went with Jellyfin over Plex mostly because the idea of having to create an account on an external service to use software I was hosting myself rubbed me the wrong way. Since then the more learn about Plex the more baffled I am that anyone chooses to use it at all.

Even more ridiculous since a 1.4x performance increase is already incredible news for anyone who makes regular of this.

If someone found a software optimization that improved, say, blender performance by 1.4x people would be shouting praises from the rooftops.

I wouldn’t buy a new Seagate drive, let alone a refurbished one. Every Seagate I’ve ever owned died in less than five years. Every WD I’ve owned lasted until long after their capacity was so far outpaced by newer drives as to be useless.

Anecdotal, yes, but it’s happened enough to me that I’ve been soured on them for life.

There are a few options there.

As someone else mentioned if you’re using IPv6 then it doesn’t matter, you’re already routing internally even if you’re using the public DNS name, no extra work required.

All the rest are for IPv4.

If you’re not behind CGNAT some routers/gateways are also smart enough with their routing to recognise when they need to route back to their own external IP and will loop back locally instead of making any hops out to the internet. Again, if this is the case for you then no additional work is required other than perhaps running a traceroute to confirm.

Another option is to add a local DNS entry for the name you’re using to resolve to a local IP address instead of your public address. The complexity (or even possibility) of this is going to vary considerably with your setup. If you’re running your own local DNS e.g. pihole or similar then it’s trivial. This is how mine is set up.

If all your clients are going to be on PCs (or devices you have more than the typical manufacturer allowed modicum of control over) then you can do something kind of like the previous, just with all your local hosts files.

If none of the above are options, then you’ll unfortunately have to fall back on using a local name/address, which means a slightly different client setup for devices you use exclusively in your home versus ones you might use elsewhere.

Traffic for a local Jellyfin server should definitely not be going over the internet. Also any reasonably modern client should be able to direct play most media without transcoding.

As for my own Jellyfin setup, one TV has an Nvidia shield plugged in and is using the standard Android TV client. The other is a Samsung smart TV onto which I have side-loaded the Jellyfin Tizen app.

In the moment at the table, arguably RoC, but that’s still not necessarily going to convey well to anyone who wasn’t there.

Also, assuming OP’s previous submission is the “player shenanigans” which prompted this then it’s my opinion that it wasn’t cool at the table, either.

A pretty large proportion of “player shenanigans” stories amount to “we ignored the rules and allowed something ridiculous to happen”. This is fine if that’s what your group wants to do, but can’t really be expected to be relatable to the community at large.

It’s similar to the stories about level 5 groups who miraculously defeat an ancient red dragon or whatever. It invariably only happens because of some utterly absurd homebrew/ruling, or the GM just played the dragon as an idiot.