sambeastie @ sambeastie @lemmy.world

I like games of all types and sometimes try to make them. IT Professional w

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2 yr. ago

Looks cool! Piques my interest in the same way as Nox Archaist -- getting to experience gaming from a time before me, but with some of the rough edges sanded down.

The SN30 is about as close as you can get to that, I think. I have two, and use them for everything. They're basically SNES controllers with analog sticks. No paddles or other macro buttons. Just ABXY, dpad, start, select, shoulders, triggers and sticks.

They do also make the Micro, but that might be too tiny even for a child. Dpad and face buttons only.

Perhaps an unpopular opinion, but I actually like D&D and much prefer it to every other family of games I've tried (WoD, GURPS, PbtA, etc). What i dont like is the current iteration of D&D, which is why my recommendations are:

Swords & Wizardry Complete: it's OD&D with some of the rough edges sanded off and all the optional material added. Tons of classes, lots of tools for procedural world building, and very easily hackable. It's simpler to teach to a new player, and its more flexible than 5e for experienced players. The tick-tock of the dungeon turn structure makes it easier to keep pace as a GM, and when in doubt, rolling x-in-6 always holds up. If you want a classic dungeon crawler, this is it.

Whitehack: Still D&D but more narrative. Skills are replaced with groups that can give advantages to tasks directly influenced by membership in that group. Magic is super flexible and everyone has access to some form of it, but the "magic user" class gets to just make up their own spells and pay some HP depending on effect size. Great rules for base building, good GM advice for making adventures that aren't dungeon or wilderness crawls (but are structured like those things). The core mechanic minimizes table math so even your players who struggle with addition can play fast. Less deadly than actual old D&D but keeping the same vibe. It's my favorite for those who prefer narrative to mechanics. In a lot of ways, it's D&D rewritten for the way a lot of people actuslly play 5e.

This, at least, is not entirely true. OD&D does not have any distinction at all between male and female characters in the original 3 pamphlets.

Pretty sure that stuff came in later, post-Greyhawk. It certainly showed up in fanzines of the late 70s, though...

Haha, I've been pulling your leg, the confused response was just too funny to ignore at first. I have a new comment that explains it.

You're good, and yes, it is older than 2e.

OK, time to come clean. I had assumed the other old people would have this at the ready, but when the confused responses came in, I just rolled with it and now I'm bored with the joke.

This is for BECMI. The question itself is real, though, I've heard of better Thief progressions, and I don't want to just top out at 14 like most people do since I never got to play with the Masters or Immortals sets and I want to try it at least once so I know how it plays.

Definitely not AD&D, I have those too and they're much heavier books -- these are more like magazines.

I should note that I have a blue one in here labeled expert rulebook. One of my players is bringing more that go with these.

I searched for the text on the box and mine is this one

https://www.amazon.com/Dungeons-Dragons-Basic-Rules-Set/dp/0880383380

Just the basic box set? We wanted to try playing to max level since none of us have ever actually done it.

D&D?

Not a zoomer, but I am on the youngest edge of millennial -- the first computer I remember using was running Windows 95, and our first home computer was a Pentium era HP. My love for the older stuff didn't start until I was much older.

My bet is on either thermals or power supply.

Not likely to be RAM, since issues there are more likely to either prevent the machine starting in the first place, or lock up if it fails while the machine is in operation.

Not likely to be CMOS battery since that generally wouldn't cause the machine to shut off, it just preserves firmware settings between power cycles.

In theory, there could be an intermitted short happening somewhere and the PSU's OCP is kicking in, but I've never come across something like that. Similarly, there could be a problem with an internal power cable connection doing the same, but it sounds like you've already checked that.

I would test with a different PSU if you can. Thermals should be easy to check for too with the many pieces of available software to keep track of such things.

I've never understood the "these people hate Star Trek!" take I've seen around the new shows. It's clear that nobody working on these sets out to intentionally make a bad show. Some of the Easter eggs and references are deep cuts, so it seemed obvious to me that the people working on these are big fans.

To give credit where it's due, RotS and many of the Disney-era Star Wars products have gone a long way to fitting the glamorous, shiny prequel aesthetic into the gritty, used, "lived in" aesthetic of the OT. I'm not the biggest fan of The Last Jedi, but I actually think the implicication of the shiny galaxy just being a property of the rich inner rim planets was a great move in unifying everything.

I'm going to be honest, Klingons in the TNG era always felt too goofy to me. They weren't a proud warrior culture so much as borderline clownish space vikings who spent more time getting drunk than actually conquering anything. A redesign and change in how their culture(s) present on screen was welcome for me, and I think Discovery did a great job. I even liked the way they recontextualized the Klingon language, to make it sound more alien and more threataning than the staccato, oft-mispronounced mess that we got in the TNG era.

That said, I also think there was a missed opportunity with them. For a long time, I've had a head canon of the different looks of Klingons throughout all of the eras could be chalked up to these all being distinct peoples from within the Klingon Empire. It stands to reason that over a long enough time scale, an empier spanning multiple stars would start to consider people not originally from their homeworld "Klingon," even if they might be genetically different. I always thought it would be cool if the TOS smooth forehead Klingons were actually just one species that were culturally Klingon, where the Worf-type were another, and the General Chang type was yet another. It would provide a way to smooth over the aeshetic differences with an in-universe explanation that doesn't require any retconning except for a handful of episodes from ENT that die-hards didn't like anyway.

But oh, well. One can dream.

Xfce might be the choice here, since most of benefits of Wayland won't really apply to this machine (from an end user perspective) and it is relatively lightweight.

Been hearing a lot about Hyprland, will probably check it out even if I don't end up using it on this build.

How does loading up a game through steam work with that? I'm a big fan of Sway (and i3) but I don't use them on gaming focused systems at all, so I'm curious.

Hoping the bug with Corsair Vengeance RGB Pro is fixed so it doesn't take up a huge amount of CPU resources to run effects. I had a really cool set of effects going that I just couldn't use because of this.

To be fair though, that isn't fully OpenRGB'S fault, I think the bug is actually in the effects plugin, not the main application.