Warning: all of those games contain stuff that can fuck you up if you’re not expecting them, so check trigger warnings as required. That said, I’d also add OMORI and Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass to the list - IMO they are much better than OFF as both games and stories while playing with similar themes.
Counterpoint: All the origin characters have bespoke side stories and dialogue, and one of them is a chaotic neutral rogue who is also a bisexual vampire twink.
(Given Sven’s advice here I’m probably just going to go with a drow or tiefling warlock, but Astarion is absolutely on the table for the second playthrough.)
By being the brains behind the Republican party, he has done more to endanger the entire world via climate change than almost any other living person. That’s leaving aside the destruction of democracy in America and all the many, many, many individual ruined lives. He is quite literally multiple orders of magnitude more evil than the worst serial killer in history, and when he dies I will hold a massive party in which the house toilet is decorated to resemble his grave.
The problem here will be that Elon’s new X logo is really just an existing Unicode character: 𝕏. It’s appeared in maths papers for decades. This isn’t like the golden arches - there’s nothing novel there to trademark.
I’d say start with Wrath and don’t bother with Kingmaker. Wrath is just much more interesting both as a game and as a concept, and there’s no shortage of replayability there - the amount of variability between paths is crazy. That said, whichever game you start with, I’d strongly recommend you download a mod to trivialise the management minigame (kingdom management for Kingmaker, crusade management for Wrath). They’re a) not fun, b) difficult (and unlike the rest of the game have no difficulty settings), c) have nothing to do with the core RPG gameplay, and d) can brick your campaign if you screw them up.
Also, you know about Baldur’s Gate 3, right? It’s coming out in two weeks after a very long and successful early access period and it very much looks like all the crazy reactivity of Wrath on a full AA budget.
People like you are why AdNauseam exists, FYI. If you make the non-adblock experience intolerable and then ban adblockers, people have a nasty tendency to fight back rather than knuckling under. I say that as someone who’ll whitelist ads - or donate to - sites I use regularly that aren’t run by shitheads throwing video ads in my face and selling my data to the highest bidder.
I mean, let’s not forget the whole sex predator thing. Their image is going to be faeces smeared on a bathroom wall until Guillemot goes.
Gay people in Malaysia are imprisoned for up to 20 years. This is not a law that deserves respect, and anyone who believes otherwise is a monster.
A tip isn’t a story in itself, it’s a suggestion of where to start looking for one. “Hey, I’m off the record here, but some shady shit is going down at my job and you might want to fire off a Freedom of Information request for x, y and z or talk to a and b” is a pretty good tip.
Quite a boring answer from me:
There will be some slight gaps in backwards compatibility/emulator compatibility for some games, but I suspect the biggest remaining gap will be PC games not capable of running on the Steam deck.
Have you tried Shelter 2? It’s not quite the same thing, but you play a lynx with five adorable cubs trying to survive in a wilderness setting. (Warning: your playthrough will likely involve some or all of your adorable cubs dying.)
If anyone in the comments doesn’t know about Civvie11 on Youtube, he’s the best source of long-form boomer shooter reviews and well-edited playthroughs on the platform. MtPain11 (a.k.a. Dean of Doom) is also amazing for Doom WADs specifically, that whole community got revitalised with the release of DOOM 2016 and just keeps going from strength to strength.
It would make me mad too, which is why I already had it in the second line. 😋
If you want to discuss something specific, IMO the only thing out there that beats a forum megathread is a very large community/subreddit dedicated to the topic. Now that Reddit is dying and Lemmy is still growing, that means if you want a place to discuss something like a specific tabletop RPG system then a large forum’s your best bet. Thankfully there are still a few of the ancient giants left around…
Yep, that’d do it! 😄 Thanks for the Cradle rec, I don’t like giving Amazon money but it does sound good - you might have just tempted me into it…
Ah, look at everyone recommending action roguelikes. The Berlin Interpretation is dead, long live the Berlin Interpretation! I’ll happily n’th Caves of Qud and Cogmind as amazing turn-based traditional roguelikes, and I’ll add to that pile the following lesser-known gems:
Some other notable traditional roguelikes which I think are less good than any of the six above but still worth playing, are:
I like pineapple on pizza, but I think there’s only one specific sort of pizza where it’s actually good. You need a good barbeque sauce base, jalapenos, and some sort of meat (I prefer chicken and bacon). The usual ham, pineapple and tomato sauce version can get in the sea.
Besides Practical Guide to Evil (already mentioned), Beware Of Chicken has very similar comfy slice-of-life progression vibes to the more chill parts of Wandering Inn but with none of the RPG trappings. It’s your stereotypical xianxia setting with a hilariously overpowered isekai protagonist, but it works because the overpowered protagonist rejects cultivation and runs off to the middle of nowhere to farm rice away from all the crazy people, and then the story actually sticks to that premise rather than using it to quickly establish a setting before immediately dragging him into the wider world. The focus is very much on the bonds between him and his found family, and when there’s danger it’s typically either a larger problem or because he’s not around to solve it.
By the way,
the Wandering Inn has some very intense periods but it never stays intense forever - no comment on whether everyone always survives the very intense periods, but the overall story will always have a healthy portion of comfy slice-of-life stuff.
A Practical Guide to Evil is amazing and one of the few webfics out there on par with The Wandering Inn, but I would’t really call it a progression fantasy - viewed in LitRPG terms, it’s a very rules-light system. If you’re Named, you hew to either Above (good) or Below (bad), you have three words representing things you can do exceptionally well, and you become both bound and empowered by stories. This idea gets used to its absolute fullest, and the viewpoint character becomes a master of the craft - on the surface something might look like a truce negotiation between armies, while actually being a pitched battle between the Named on each side for control of the narrative. It’s also got great representation. There’s a roughly equal gender balance, most characters are non-white, and queer characters are disproportionately well-represented including a very prominent (and wonderful) ace character.
In terms of background and history, the evil empire of Praes has traditionally been run according to the good old principles of demon-summoning and flying fortresses and sentient tiger armies, since when you’re empowered by stories these ideas can work… at least in the short term, since in the stories Evil always loses in the end. The Black Knight and his band of Calamities took that personally - “half the world turned into a prop for the glory of the other half”. He and Empress Maleficient took over and started running things more rationally, doing things like looking at orcs as people with the capacity to be terrifying shock troops rather than as random cannon fodder to be thrown away in their hordes, and specifically avoiding all the stories that lead to eventual defeat. They were able to take over the stereotypical Good Fantasy Kingdom of Callow, Praes’ traditional arch-nemesis. The protagonist grew up in Callow after the takeover, in one of the many orphanages set up by the Black Knight - orphaned children being a classic source of heroes - and her ambition is to join the Legions of Terror and effect change from within. In the first chapter of the story, apparently by happenstance she comes under the Black Knight’s tutelage, and things go from there.
Also, it would be remiss of me not to mention that it’s now finished(!) and the author is working on another story, Pale Lights. It’s early days yet, but so far it’s shaping up even better.
This is absolutely a real and important effect, but we should bear in mind that this poll isn’t the thing proving it so it’s kind of a bad headline. In particular, the headline suggests that this is a new and tentative finding rather than something that’s been known for ages, and that it’s possible to disprove the effect by knocking down this survey. Intergroup contact theory actually goes back to the 50s and AFAICT is incredibly well-established.
To prove the effect exists with a survey like this, you would need to carefully disentangle the people who “don’t know any trans people” because they don’t know any trans people from the people who “don’t know any trans people” because all the trans people in their life are terrified of coming out to them. Conversely, you would need to carefully disentangle the people who “know a trans person” because they know someone who’s out to the world from the people who “know a trans person” because they know someone who’s out to only a very few people who they already had good reason to believe would be supportive. There are ways of doing this for people who are better at statistics and experiment design than me, and as I understand it there are studies which do it carefully and do prove the effect, but this isn’t one of them and doesn’t try to be. (And why should it try to be, when the effect’s existence has already been established and studied separately, and when the raw data on a large current sample is useful without reinventing the wheel?)