Sugar, caffeine, and ibuprofen mitigate the effects, and Bob Dylan songs make the whole thing speed up so it's over faster.

oh, hm.

@doppelgreener wife: "yes, that's a migraine. [looks worried] do you have that?" me: "no. Some guy in Australia." wife: "oh. Then why haven't you loaded the dishwasher?"

@Miniman "Stats of a sheep!" would be a good bowdlerized swear.

I just went out for pizza & a beer on a cold breezy night. Got very cold. Back of head felt very cold. Then I noticed it was legit a headache.

@nitsua60 haha!

@nitsua60 "Because some guy in Australia had a migraine a few nights ago! The butterfly effect is mysterious and powerful."

@doppelgreener Definitely sounds to me like it's within "migraine-like" parameters, and I'd hazard a guess it's not unrelated to the other headaches you've been getting over the last year or so.

If I repcap on sheep I may have to rage-quit RPGSE. Or at least opt out of the entire reputation system.

(@trogdor check back here in 24 hours--I may have stolen your avatar)

@nitsua60 lol

@nitsua60 I could offer some alternatives.

@nitsua60 As long as you don't fall into the terrible trap of repcapping twice over, downvoting once, and making no badger progress.

@BESW yeah, i'm gonna start checking out if i'm one of those people who's gluten intolerant or whatever the term is. my gut tells me that might be the case, and gut feelings like this are usually pretty trustworthy for me, but doubly so right now because my gut's the thing that's directly concerned with it. :D

@Miniman been there...

We'll have to see how shee ^^ looks once hats start coming around =)

@nitsua60 Yeah, pretty recently, I remember. Also, me too.

@BESW I'm going to go ahead and say it... what the hell is going on there?

@Miniman

Thanks man

this tweet makes more sense now.

@nitsua60 They're the TribuT Telephone Sheep in The Museum für Kommunikation.

especially the scare quotes.

@BESW (though I'll also say that I have a lingering love for that style of phone+handset. Lets you slam a fist down on one end to pop it up into the air for the catch-and-talk.)

@nitsua60 Heheh.

Apparently some people on Guam don't have wired handsets anymore. I don't get it.

@Skathix Always happy to throw in tidbits of experience! It's hard to understand as a DM, I did something pretty similar, and I really didn't get why my players didn't like it until it happened to me in turn.

We live in a place with irregular power outages which may last days or weeks. Your cell phone and wireless handsets need a backup.

If I ever work up the motivation to start blogging, I may write an article on "Classic DM mistakes that seem like a really cool idea but don't go over well with the players" - it sounds really specific but there's a lot of material there.

@BESW ugh don't remind me, my parents have wireless handsets, and on top of everything else, because they can walk around with them they never leave them on the chargers

so I have to hunt for them all the time to keep them charged

@Miniman You could easily get guest bloggers!

@Miniman [note to future self: bookmark Miniman's blog]

@BESW I'm not sure I'd want to get guest bloggers who are better writers than I am :P

@nitsua60 [note to future nitsua60: Thanks man!]

@Miniman just get me then, I tried writing a book once, and I got a quarter of a page in and realized I didn't know what the hell I was doing XD :P

@trogdor Anytime I read something I've written, I cringe and delete it - my standards for writers are pretty high, and my writing is absolutely awful.

I have that exact problem

@BESW oh dear, they ring. Constantly. How long until someone who worked there went on a "Silence of the Sheep" rampage?

@Miniman I read and have read so much that I have standards I don't think I could reach myself for writing

@nitsua60 I'm hoping they gave the employees earplugs.

@trogdor Me too! So a blog is unlikely, unless I take writing classes or something.

that all being said, there was only ever one thing I wanted to write, so it isn't a huge problem I feel like fixing

@Miniman Mistake #1: prepare. Mistake #2: don't prepare. Mistake #3: reading GM advice. [hmm... not looking so good...]

@trogdor, @Miniman I think this is why a lot of artists (writers, painters, etc) prefer to enjoy art that's nothing like what they do.

@nitsua60 Leading up to Mistake #4: Writing this blog.

@BESW makes sense

@BESW That does make sense. And it totally justifies my lack of producing...well, anything. "Oh, I'm just keeping my enjoyment options open."

I feel like the blog needs a white half/black half theme: the problem is that we're (tongue in cheek) pointing out that it's possible to make mistakes in any direction because it's also possible to be great in almost any direction. But we're hard on ourselves and focus on the failings....

Were I to do something similar (and I may; hoping to start up some kind of blog later this year), I'd probably frame it as learning from mistakes.

@BESW It goes without saying, but if you do, please tell everyone here!

Instead of "Don't do this," it's "I did X and although it turned out pretty awful I learned Y!"

@Miniman the world needs this

@BESW I committed to running a weekly-sessioned campaign; turned out okay, but I learned that I should only run in the campaign world three-of-four, giving myself time to catch up when necessary.

'cause, I dunno. A lot of the mistakes I made as an RPGer, I feel like I needed to make.

@BESW It is interesting to read twenty year-old letters to Dragon and see the same sorts of problems/advice that w see popping up here....

If I'd taken someone else's word that they were bad ideas, I wouldn't have gained my own insights from the experience.

(And forty year-old letters to Avalon Hill General)

[amused]

Yeah, some stoves everyone needs to get burned on personally.

But there's also a big issue in the RPG community where many folks are playing in nutshells without any opportunity to see other people touch stoves.

@BESW no kidding

So "mistake blogs" are, I think, very valuable. I'd just personally avoid the didactic approach and instead go more anecdotal.

@BESW and some people don't even realize that they're getting burned!

@nitsua60 what does the phrase "run in the campaign world three-of-four" mean?

@doppelgreener Three weeks out of every four, I assume, instead of weekly.

@doppelgreener 3 weeks out of 4, I assume.

@BESW yes pls. mistake blogs would be great.

As the saying goes:

> Learn from other peoples' mistakes; you don't have time to make them all yourself.

@nitsua60 And I guess "in the campaign world" indicates that you do something else on the 4th week rather than skipping the session entirely?

@doppelgreener Yeah, sorry--three of each four weeks in-campaign; do something else on the "off week"

@nitsua60 GREAT ORK GODS

hehehe

Great Ork Gods is fantastic for that

@doppelgreener Lately we've been playing Danger Patrol and Surgadores and binging Gravity Falls.

course, there is also roll for shoes and such things

@doppelgreener deadEarth. Just to make your players really appreciate the regular game.

@BESW yay! how's surgadores working out?

@doppelgreener It's doing okay, but I haven't figured out what's not quite working.

I think I need more test subjects

@Miniman what is this gutwrenching pain i feel at reading that

@BESW test it with me as well sometime, I might be able to put my finger on it. I already have some half-formed thoughts about things that may work well or not work well in it.

@Miniman It's also a great way to get rid of excess players!

@doppelgreener I almost went with...a different system that I feel shouldn't be named here, but then I decided said system shouldn't be named here.

Good call.

I feel like that was probably a good idea

@BESW Where "excess" is defined as "Any player who is unwilling to withstand a night of psychological torture in exchange for 3 nights of fun"?

@Miniman What better way to trim your group down to only the sorts of people who would inflict Old Man Henderson on you?

@BESW There's another one for the blog: Stories that sound awesome but were in fact fun for exactly one person out of everyone who experienced them.

Nobody had fun at the Old Man Henderson table. Not even Henderson's player, except in a grim revenge sort of way.

@BESW Hmmm, I might have read a non-original account - the author made it sound like they really got a kick out of it.

He was having "fun" making the Keeper's life hell, and he took smug delight in the clever ways he exploited the Keeper's character flaws to do so.

But it was more of a "If the ship is sinking, I'm going to burn it down first" kind of deal: deriving what sadistic pleasure he could out of a miserable situation.

Yeah, that sounds right.

Hmm.

I think my vampire-vs-druid session counts as "sounds fun, but wasn't."

@BESW Vampire-vs-druid session?

[sigh] Vampire paladin and druid with an anti-undead vendetta, in the same party.

@BESW Ah. Right.

They had an uneasy truce until the vampire drank blood from a dead animal in front of the druid, and she flipped out.

@BESW yeah, that sounds less than great....

The rest of the session was a one-on-one duel between two evenly-matched PCs, with everyone else ducking for cover as the forest burned.

Both players had their heels dug firmly into "My Guy" territory, so the best solution was to retire both PCs on the spot. The remaining party fled the burning forest and got two new PCs in the next town.

The idea of a druid and a vampire squaring off, with well-matched abilities that dynamically countered each other so the fight just kept moving and changing, sounds awesome.

But it was just the slow-motion special effects of two players refusing to look for reasons to keep the party together.

...that does make me curious what the outcome of the battle itself was

Mechanically? The druid would run out of resources while the vamp wouldn't, but the vampire had a strict sunrise limit on how long he could keep going.

Narratively, we just left them to finish their battle and I later had the party hear rumours about it continuing for days and nobody was sure if it finished or if they just moved the fight into uninhabited territories, and no one was going close enough to get any detail.

Further into the campaign the massive forest fires created pressure in elf-related political and military interactions.

@BESW personally -- I'd have had the party find them both too dead to be rezzed a few days/weeks later, just to bring some closure to the characters

They preferred having their PCs become legends.

@BESW ah.

BTW, @doppelgreener:

@Miniman was it That Five Lettered Game That Doth Starte Withe an Effe, or Thate Six Letered Game That Starteth Withe a Hhhhhh? (huff outward gently to pronounce the last bit)

@doppelgreener H.

Don't forget The Three-Word Game That Starts With R.

@BESW Wait, what even is that?

...yeeeah. Seriously, we talk about deadEarth because on the list of Truly Awful RPGs it's one of the few that's coherent enough to be understood, ignorantly bigoted instead of violently prejudiced, AND complete enough to consider actually playable.

Most of us can read it, understand it, and imagine playing it, without becoming physically ill.

@Miniman [sigh] "Enjoy" this list.

@BESW Well, that's why I wasn't specifying in the first place, but we've kinda broken that now.

@Miniman very gracious of you then.

@BESW deadEarth being a "previous" title holder against the current three is, I think, completely reasonable. Those three make deadEarth look like a mildly stomachable game with half-decent mechanics by comparison.

deadEarth is in the "also-ran" category.

haha

"you tried, but you're not quite that awful"

Ooh, there's a game with a copyright note which appears to say that all the characters and stories anyone plays with the game belong to the creator of the books on which the game was based. ...and so does the game itself, despite being written and published by a third party.

That's beautiful.

@BESW fail.

@BESW what game is this?

@doppelgreener Second from the bottom on that list I linked.

@BESW i'm impressed that that sounds like it is the least among its offenses

It actually seems to be a fairly boringly inept RPG. It's mostly coherent, lifts some good mechanics from other games, spends way too much time on combat rules for the kind of stories its licensed IP is trying to tell, and has major layout flaws.

The Really Weird Stuff is from the source material, and it's not necessarily fair to take an RPG to task for being true to its licensed IP.

@BESW oh no i was thinking like, instant death from kicking a stationary car or tripping over

Oh, yes. That's silly.

But then, given the literally inhuman gracefulness of the PCs, who's going to trip?

@doppelgreener what?

> The rules... include such wonderful faux pas as chainmail armour that provides complete protection from flamethrower damage, collision rules that would result in instant death from kicking a stationary car, falling rules that would have the average human killed every time he tripped...

wow

so basically they didn't care about any kind of semblance of realism, or apparently making mechanics that actually suited the setting

Often, this sort of thing means they didn't have the time/money for quality control or playtesting.

I suppose so

I don't understand why they would make a game under those circumstances though

Some folks don't understand how much work is necessary to make a really good game.

But more often, especially for poorly-made games with IP licenses, it's a matter of somebody hiring a third party to cash in on an IP.

Remember the SG-1 RPG? Somebody said "If we make an SG-1 RPG, people will buy it." And so, regardless of whether it's a good idea or not, it happened.

It's clear that the folks making the SG-1 RPG loved the show. But it's also clear they didn't really get a lot of time/money to do it "right."

Given, among other things, the whitespace/quote layout issues with Wraeththu, I suspect similar problems.

(A common way to pad out underdeveloped material is to use extra-wide margins and justify them by sprinkling in flavour text quotes from your source material.)

@BESW Some people don't know how to make a good game. If they had combat-heavy rules, they might've just gone "so, uh, D&D's pretty good, let's do some stuff that it does. Also Mage has a fun magic system, let's take that. Also these games have fall damage and stuff right? Let's model stuff like that, it's realistic, and we all know good RPGs have detaild rules for everything. Hey wait these numbers are weird in practice, oh well I'm sure it won't be that big a deal."

@trogdor so imo it's very likely just "the creators had no idea what they were doing and were effectively incompetent"

mhmm

I guess so

@nitsua60 I'm surprised there's a stat for speech rate, and I'm hoping it at least makes sense because of the novels' narrative details.

lol

(I'm really not optimistic it makes any sense to have a stat for though.)

@doppelgreener I can't even summarize the example they give of the authors' example usage without running afoul of BE NICER. I've tried, and there's no way around it. Suffice it to say: the authors manage to tie the evolution of a for-profit tryst to those stats.

@doppelgreener Well, you can't have people just talking, now can you?

hey there @nitsua60

@Shalvenay heya

@nitsua60 how're things going?

slow... working on a bibliography. (Should just go to bed and wrap it up in the morning.)

Gah...HNQ on Worldbuilding where the obvious answer is so obvious and so missing that I almost answered it.

@Miniman wow xP

@Miniman I actually had one of those "obvious answers" on a HNQ on WB

@Shalvenay I'd typed out half of it before I even thought about what I was doing.

Why don't monsters leave dungeons? Because the people who built the dungeons and put the monsters in there in the first place don't let them.

I mean, I'm Halaster, the insanely powerful and powerfully insane arch-wizard. I've created the largest and most fiendishly difficult mega-dungeon in the history of mega-dungeons. And what, I'm going to forget about it and let the monsters wander off?

@Miniman haha XD

@Miniman hahahaha

it's how I explained the traps and puzzles in mine -- just substitute vexgits for the wizard

as the wizard (actually, sorc) in there isn't too happy about the vexgits :P

@Shalvenay I had to look vexgits up. But damn, they are awesome.

@Miniman Hmmm, no. If the Batman vs Superman movie is any guide, having people talk can actually resolve conflicts, and conflicts are exciting, so if nobody manages to talk it through, there will be conflicts and the game will be exciting!

@doppelgreener That seems to be a theme in movies lately. Well, not just movies. And, not just lately.

I'll just leave this here.

haha

yes it's definitely a thing

If you've played Bravely Default, awkwardzombie's comics on it are disturbingly accurate.

i have not

but i enjoy awkward zombie a lot

Yep, it's one of my favourite webcomics. I just felt the need to call out the Bravely Default ones because they are so on the nose.

this one remains one of my favourites

awkwardzombie.com/index.php?page=0&comic=042913

also generally applicable to RPGs

morning

@Sejanus Hi!

@doppelgreener ah yes, I love this one because that is exactly how Hector worked XD

@doppelgreener @trogdor Even better when a Myrmidon did the full crit animation, split into 8 and attacked in a frenzy of blades, followed by..."NO DAMAGE".

@Miniman I think I never got that because I mercilessly destroyed all Myrmidons at the levels where that is probably possible

because at lower levels they tended to one shot people with those stupid crits

@Miniman nice. :D

but I got so many of those spear guys doing an animation of impaling someone with really high armor and no damage happening

it was always hilarious and I was glad to see that comic about it because it illustrates exactly how it worked and how silly it was

Typically Hector would counter attack and immediately kill them too

XD

because he was a boss like that

Yeah, Hector was scarily overpowered. I was really fussy about who I allowed to gain XP, since I only wanted to use certain characters long-term. For the first few missions of Hector Mode I was basically only using Hector, so he got even more ridiculous than usual.

lol

I tended to end up getting him to level 20 a bit early and having to sideline him

because god forbid I let him steal exp he isn't going to use

@trogdor Well, you see, I got really attached to the characters in Lyn's Tale. So when I got up to Eliwood's or Hector's Tale, and they took all my characters away from me and gave me crappy new ones, I only used Eliwood and Hector while I reacquired the characters I actually cared about.

ah

(Actually, the first time I played, I just quit at that point, but I was younger then.)

I played that version of Fire Emblem a lot, and I mostly ended up using different characters every time

@trogdor I experimented with the ones who weren't just different versions of the ones from Lyn's Legion. For example, the wyvern rider. Awww yis.

though I ALWAYS used Mathew, and Fiora

@Miniman yeah, Heath ended up being crazy awesome

@trogdor Ah, Fiora. Completing about 60% of the missions solo while everyone else just randomly fought enemies.

last time I played I used him, but it turned out it was a bit hard to class up two fliers in the same game XD

not impossible though

@Miniman one item and suddenly no weakness XD

well, two I guess, if you want her to have a lot of hp

@trogdor Yeah, balance flies out the window when you give Superman an amulet that makes him immune to the effects of kryptonite.

@Miniman Tomb of Horrors.

she was probably my favorite personality wise as well as mechanically

@Miniman exactly

it was broken as heck, but it was still really fun

@BESW Yeah, exactly. That one's even better in some ways, since it's not just for entertainment purposes, Acerack was actually getting something out of it.

I couldn't work out how to spell that, let's just call him Asscrack the Demilich.

And in non-RPG media, Tomb of the Cybermen. Which I have plans to RPGify.

@Miniman what was he doing? Harvesting souls of the dead? A cable TV broadcast deal?

@doppelgreener Yes, and probably.

@doppelgreener Specifically, winnowing adventurers down so that only the strongest ones (with the souls that were worth eating) actually made it to him.

@Miniman why did he spurn the weaker ones? was there a cost to eating those?

They weren't snacks worth interrupting his nap for.

ah

Actually, it's later revealed that he wasn't even there.

so he didn't want to be bothered for anything but the best, I can respect that

@Miniman oh fantastic!

He had better things to do, and set up the Tomb of Horrors to go ding! when a snackworthy hero got far enough in before dying.

The Acererak you faced at the heart of the tomb was a decoy.

was getting to the decoy the mark of getting far enough? (either getting to it or beating it)

(Yes. A lich, who is by definition capable of treating his body as fungible, used a body double so he wouldn't be bothered by missing 1d10 while he regenerated.)

I can't recall all the details.

@doppelgreener This is also the basic conceit of Tomb of the Cybermen.

Cybermen can only reproduce by converting living humanoids, and a group of them found themselves running low on numbers in an empty part of space without enough resources to leave.

@BESW oh, yes, i saw that. build a tomb of puzzles that's so challenging people can't resist the urge to beat the puzzles. only the best and brightest can, and the puzzles reopen the tomb and reactivate the cybermen. so you get those people for the next generation of cybermen.

So they built a giant puzzle trap, clearly labelled it "FOR AWESOME TOMB LOOT PLEASE RAID HERE," and went into hibernation until folks came by who could solve their puzzles and prove worthy of conversion.

Yes.

and then if they succeed, the five adventurers become Cyberman Red, Cyberman Yellow, Cyberman Blue, Cyberman White, and Cyberman Orange, and usher in a new paradigm of cybermen before quietly getting swept under the rug a few episodes later after the whole idea turns out to have been not such a good one.

[amused]

The little-known Crayola Cybermen.

FFFFFFFFF any time i get like 60 days into the fanatic badge I show up like 1 hour late and go back down to 0

@PremierBromanov I don't know whether I should be proud or ashamed of my 688 consecutive days.

lol

@Miniman I have that same feeling sometimes

not that exact number of days but still, and I probably have had the consecutive messed up a couple times for various reasons

even though I am on here every day by my time

I do feel like that badge is slightly unfair to people in some timezones (not mine but I can understand being frustrated with it in some places)

@trogdor I think it's pretty generous - I would swear there have been 24 hour periods where I didn't visit, but it hasn't flunked me.

Maybe someone else is using my account, that would explain why some of my answers are actually good XD

@Miniman well, we both live in places where the time it uses isn't TOO bad though

@trogdor It's favourable, if you think about it - it's easy for us to get 2 days in a row by SE time within the space of 5 minutes in the middle of the day.

yeah

that is at least a thing that can be used to some advantage

to be a little fair, no timezone by itself would be able to stop you from getting the badge, but being busy and unable to log on at the time the day switches over isn't gonna help, that is for sure

Random question: what's a good single non-YouTube website for watching videos of car racing on a mobile device?

Is there, like, a sports website which will do that for me or something?

I have no idea, I don't have a particular liking to watching that type of thing

or most sports

Neither do I, but I'm easing my dad from the laptop to the tablet and Amazon Freetime has website whitelisting for almost anything except YouTube.

Random realisation re:fate points that is probably not that original, and doesn't have an application (yet). But. One of the functions of fate points is to skip past either uninteresting or unforseen justification for the stuff we actually want to do. Examples: declaring a story detail (of course I know the constable/have rope with me/etc), invoking aspects.

On the latter: you could have spent an action setting up an aspect and a free invocation on it, but if you're in a hurry, just spend a fate point to do largely the same thing.

That's an interesting way to say it.

I've thought of it as, "if you don't want to fail, use a fate point instead of rolling."

Has the same effect of "Let's hurry up past this bit."

Yeah, I think so too :). It saves either character's time (you don't want to spend an action to set up further stuff, you want to do that stuff now and be done with it), or players' time (you don't want to do flashbacks or otherwise establish why you can do a thing, you just pay for it.

It's also a good way to bypass edge cases where your character isn't very good at something generally, but it makes sense they'd succeed in this particular situation.

One genre that's always been hard to implement in rpg which this may work well for is heists. I haven't actually read Leverage RPG, so it could be a solved problem, but still. Heists typically have a very complicated plan that at some point goes wrong, but it only seems that way because it was part of the plan as well...

And having the players actually plot out a heist just doesn't work out that great, usually.

Heist or war. Same thing.

I've got a few heist games but never played them--or even read them very carefully.

I've heard good things about Leverage's setup.

[goes digging through RPG files]

Fiasco is about the less-competent version of the trope you're talking about.

Fiasco plays fast and loose with storytelling structures in general, just bouncing between interesting scenes.

InSpectres is... not quite right, but has mechanics that graze up against this topic.

One Last Job is a more structured and teamworky version of Fiasco.

I know I was just looking at something heisty last night, but I can't remember what or why.

@Magician I'd take the original Mission:Impossible TV show, especially the first two or three seasons, as a quintessential template for the genre.

Haven't actually seen it. What about Leverage?

Leverage... kinda does the same thing? But in a more Fate-tastic "This is really about the characters, the heist is just what we're using to bounce 'em off each other" kind of way.

By contrast M:I is total competence porn.

@BESW Given who the showrunner was, it's not surprising.

Oh, absolutely. And I'm not saying it's bad or anything.

Just--the character-driven stuff kinda gets in the way of using Leverage as a prototypical example of "complicated plan hidden from the audience" heist narrative.

M:I is very formulaic, but they have a TON of fun within the formula.

It always starts with a quick briefing where we're told the objective and a little bit of context about why it's important and what sort of obstacles we might expect. Then it skips the planning stage almost entirely.

We come in at the end of the planning, and each character says something about how they're prepared for the mission, but with no context at all.

Then--jump straight into the mission, and every commercial break ends with a cliffhanger that might be actually part of the plan, or might require quick thinking for the characters to compensate.

And as we go along, those weird things the characters said they were prepared for each come into play and are crucial to the heist.

That does sound exactly like what I've had in mind, yeah.

Often it's hard to see how anything relates to the actual objective of the heist until the final act.

And usually a primary goal is to keep anyone from ever knowing a heist happened at all.

eg, if the objective is to assassinate someone, you manipulate someone else into doing it for you and thinking it was their idea all along.

Or to smuggle a defector out of their country, you have to fake her death.

Sometimes it was simple "replace X microfilm with Y microfilm" stuff, but often very complicated psychosocial stuff. Very 1960s "Americans quietly meddle in foreign affairs."

@BESW This reminds me of a show I think I might have mentioned here before - Hustle. It's a UK show about a group of conmen. You see part of the setup at the beginning, then see what appears to be a series of complications to the plan, and usually leaves you thinking they failed. Then they go celebrate at their local bar, and you get to see all the "behind-the-scenes" parts where what you think was the plan going wrong, they'd planned for all along.

@Adeptus Hustle is the UK Leverage, or vice versa, depending on who you ask.

Aha! That explains the similarity then. And there's a RPG for Leverage?

Yup.

...I thought I had Leverage, but I seem to only have the quickstart adventure.

I may have to remedy that.

I really liked Hustle. They had a couple of episodes that didn't entirely go to formula - one had them getting conned out of their loot (and then has the same reveal of how it was done). And the last few minutes of the final episode is a total fourth-wall-break

@Magician This review of "The Heir Apparent" gives a good sense of Mission: Impossible.

...now I want to watch M:I again.

There was a TV show before the movies? Neat!

Yup, and they're very different.

I mean, the first film is in many ways a good successor to it, but after that... M:I was never an action series on television.

It's the gold standard for gadgety spy/heist competence porn.

Now I'm keen to see the series.

I highly recommend the first three or four seasons. Two and three are best, and there's absolutely no continuity so you don't need to worry about viewing order or completion.

Seasons one and two have a lot of the best stories, seasons two and three are when they were really getting a handle on the show's dynamics. Season five and beyond... they stopped being international agents in the Cold War and started fighting the War On Drugs.

The shift from the 60s to the 70s hit that show hard.

Leonard Nimoy was a recurring main character for several seasons, that's worth seeing.

(Also, William Shatner guest starred as two separate villains in two separate seasons. That's worth seeing because Shatner.)

I think my favorite episodes are when they gaslight bad people into making stupid choices.