Magic is just so tedious and predictable
Nepenthe @ Nepenthe @kbin.social Posts 1Comments 505Joined 2 yr. ago
Nepenthe @ Nepenthe @kbin.social
Posts
1
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505
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2 yr. ago
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.
I used to have one that did that. He was aching to get on the counter and the first time he actually succeeded, I was terrified he was about to burn himself.
Nope. He just wanted to watch me cook. Sat very politely the whole time. It became a thing. Never even asked me for any of it. He just wanted to spend time with me. I miss him.
I've actually never had anyone in a monster truck tell me I should buy a monster truck. So...by unfortunate definition...
Pic broke for me, so I'm not sure if joke I'm missing out on or photo of horse, which was the best monopoly piece. But that's, uh.......not a spring.
You know? I've never had the good fortune to be familiar with the series and it's on my wishlist now for later. It IS more modern than my usual tastes, but heaven forbid I play something new and find out I like it. Seems like there's spoilers in the third for the second one, though..
That said, my favorite part of this photo is they actually tried to do the math. If time = distance ÷ speed, the earth has a circumference of 24,901 miles, and the fastest snail's top speed is 0.03mph, they would encircle the earth in 830,033 hours. So I suspect this snail cheated and hitched a ride at some point, likely near the end when it got tired, but did most of it on foot
AI-generated maps and NPCs might be ok. Ditto fights, though there would have to be playtesters whose job it is to make sure the result is something winnable and acceptably fair.
The main issue there would be that there IS no continual certainty of that. You'd have to either be able to rerolled entire encounters — which would be jarring — or force the AI to DM what happens when you lose an impossible battle — far more rewarding, provided it doesn't keep doing it. But it may keep doing it. This would be impossible to ever test adequately. Every game on the market may be a hard mode Bethesda game.
I personally really don't think I'd enjoy something with a randomly generated cast/main story for the same reason I wouldn't be interested in owning one singular book whose writing changes every time you read it. I don't play to kill time; I play for the stories and I get attached like hell to the good ones. I replay them ad nauseam because I miss the characters.
I think it would be an intensely entertaining idea either as a New Game+ or for those games to have a wildcard setting that you could turn on and off. That way, there's no lack of devs who get to tell the tale they wanted and players can mix it up when they're bored. Otherwise, you've downgraded the job of the entire company to filling the AI in on background lore and nothing else.
Other aspects:
• for those that do get attached and wanna re-experience it, you'd need a way to save the information behind the game you just played. That file might be fairly gigantic?
• Would also lead to a weird market for other peoples' saves. The way modders already make quests, but for an entire plot.
• NPCs and party members that all look like randomized sims.
Even Jesus said imagining adultery is the same as committing it. They can still think, ergo they are worthy of punishment
And then never discuss the weather or any emotion other than happy.
But then, I don't suppose the other feelings are even a necessity when you're drinking as much and as many types of alcohol as Duolingo seems to think Turkey — a highly-regulated, 98% muslim country — goes through on the daily.
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.
His solid black mass of mustache makes him look like he has an obscenely happy bird beak
How do you just make the bed with no pillows
I was up at an Airbnb in Boston years ago and I still very much remember one entire third of the bed I was given being covered in different throw pillows. It was bad enough to actually be funny, and more intrusive irl than the photo I had to take would have you believe. Where the photo cuts off is the edge of the mattress.
I had to move them every night in order to go to sleep, and put them back every morning when I made the bed. I counted. There were sixteen of them. Everyone else's beds were the same way.
Yes, I do :(
Lol, I knew someone was going to call me on that.
I'd prefer if it weren't, though
I didn't wanna say, but I've been to Dallas. You have too many lanes to be coming into mine.
Your local area is trees now. Two and a half hours of trees. And a hideous tower thing painted to look like a marlboro cigarette, that people use as a landmark.
Not that I disagree the other commenter kind of...went off the deep end at the end, there. But if your suggestion is not that we take everyone in most of the middle states and shove 'em all together into what would probably come to 3-4 mid-sized American cities — so I guess a medium European one, an event that will absolutely never happen anyway — then your remaining solution to the city density/commute thing must be..to.....increase the density?
Is that what you guys are asking? The only problem with America is that there aren't enough Americans? Especially in Wisconsin?
Boston seemed like that too, when I was there, and I'm still wondering why anyone who lives there bothered to have a car. On the outskirts, yeah, but if you've got business in the heart of Boston specifically, it seems from experience you should just walk.
Thank you for giving me my new default. This party mix of measuring systems sounds way more infuriating to tell people than "about five and a half CDs."
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.