…blue raspberry gatorade…

…astroturfing; good catch…

^{(i was trying to parse when bra-stigma had been a thing after the twentieth century)}

…it’s an okay movie: perfectly servicable Standard Hollywood Treatment^TM; competently written, directed, performed, and edited; genre trope in-jokes liberally sprinkled throughout…

…i believe most positive reactions stem from defying expectations that it be a bad movie, rather than actually being good…

…human empathy is not a team sport…

…satellite galaxies != galaxy clusters; andromedia is 2.5 million light-years distant and the cluster in this study is about ten times that size, 23 million light-years across…

…that’s correct: i assumed 0.01c and didn’t adjust for time dilation, which can drastically affect the calculations depending upon how far we push relativistic super-science, although the required energies are commensurately absurd…

…so what you’re saying is that we should start calling drow shiela and bruce?..

…for those distances we’re talking hundreds of millions of years at relativistic velocities, even billions…

“You unleash a string of insults laced with subtle enchantments at a creature you can see within range.”

…its only component is verbal, and while it’s not subtle casting it’s fair to characterise as subtle casting; i’d argue for first-round surprise in the context of open dialog and in fact that’s how we’ve played it at my tables…

feet.

…it’s a tarantino thing…

…yeah, i think that’s an essential cultural distinction between tabletop and videogame backgrounds; i started seeing the transition in campaign styles in parallel with the advent of structured narratives around the mid-eighties leading into the nineties…

…by contrast, our groups routinely swap DM roles across multiple tables which all share the same more-or-less persistent world, although individual character and DM experiences can vary within the boundaries of narrative coherence…that sustained investment is the fundamental point of of our tabletop campaigns; it distinguishes freeform from prescribed gameplay and is why we chose open-ended campaigns over closed-form boardgames…

…are you familiar with the old RPGA living campaigns?..ignoring the structured campaign setting, that style of pickup game used to be how most folks played…

…if player characters aren’t at liberty to move between campaigns, then ultimately no, they don’t have agency: they’re just ephemeral labor playing-out the DM’s narrative with nothing to show for it afterward…

…mind, i’m not damning that arrangement - some folks enjoy the transient experience - but i have no interest in investing my own creative energy toward anything that i don’t keep…

^{(i already deal with that sixty-five hours every week and remuneration barely suffices to stay my contempt)}

…hot tub time machine; absurdly better film than its pitch had any right to be…

…fair enough; i don’t invest my time in campaigns where players don’t retain agency over their own characters…

…west marches vs. one-shot campaigns, plenty of tables for both styles…

…nah, i have plenty of characters from other campaigns available when the opportunity arises…

…i’m not big on contrived replacements; i may rejoin organically at some point in the indeterminate future but if i’m out i’m out…

…nah man, i’m here for casual conversation; nothing at all shameful about honest ignorance, only willful ignorance…

…because it’s a plainly ignorant statement akin to “i don’t like french music”: do you just dislike music malt whisky?..that’s a fair statement, but one which would apply to all malt whiskies regardless of nation of origin, as there’s no unifying style distinguishing scotch in particular…

…conversely, if you don’t mind other malt whiskies but dislike something specific about scotch, that’s indicative of narrow experience coloring your expectation of a vast ecology of styles and expressions which have little in common other than being based on barley, water, distillation, and age…

…“i don’t like scotch” is a common statement from folks who’ve only sampled peated malts; your listerine comment sounds like medicinal peat notes, which are a divisive style…

…i generally prefer windows open to the world but i’ll concede that it’s niiiiice, though: i never sleep better than nestled underneath a blasting window-box on a hot summer night…

…‘scotch’ encompasses such a vast diversity of spirits that i presume anyone who blanket-dislikes it either 1) doesn’t like malt whisky in general, fair enough, or 2) mis-apprehends a specific style as endemic to scotch whisky as a whole…

…the latter folks typically dislike peated malts, often after sampling bottom-shelf blends…