> When Geordi's "1990's TV studio" holodeck program produces an episode of Star Trek, Data deduces The Enterprise is fictional. This creates a weird simulation loop that finally becomes sentient and leaves when Picard teaches it to love.
@doppelgreener Look, I'm not a big fan of Harry/Ginny (most because JK did pretty much zero development on that front) but I don't think Harry should have ended up with Hermione.
now we need the rebel shipper who objects to Harry + Draco on the basis it should've been Harry + Lucius and that the 'marry' ship name should be exclusively for that ship
@doppelgreener There was actually a butter dish in Book 2 that Ginny slipped her elbow in while being all schoolgirl crushing on him and why on earth do I remember that detail?
@Yuuki Ooooh, I actually went back to check on it -- you're right. JKR said she married Ron+Hermione as wish fulfilment (I thought it was Harry+Ginny that was wish fulfilment) and not because of credibility. She didn't say that any of it was wrong, or non-credible. Imagine -- they could've actually experienced character development in the intervening 10-20 years.
TNG Seasons 1 and 2 were needed to filter out what worked, what didn't, the writer pool to stop having mass turnover, and for Roddenberry to stop interfering.
About a page late to the conversation. I've been watching TNG again, in early S3.
It might be just my conceptions of what's romantic and what's not but I think it would be even more romantic if instead of getting married with each other the main trio would meet in the same pub or park or bistro or whatever for the next forty years to chill out and chat, maybe throw a few inside jokes or something like that.
@Yuuki Ron had better character development, at least. Harry's development is mostly learning more about the wizarding world and slowly going from stranger to native.
@SPavel Kind of true, but most HP combat spells seem to be designed mainly for one-on-one duels while Sauron's thing is more like "too many to count-on-one"
Why not add in a ludicrously powerful but morally bankrupt dude who only has two emotions, and one of those emotions is reserved for a dead, married woman, and the other one is contempt?
We need to get the "Star Trek season 8" guy to write up some scripts, like "Snape travels to the underworld to rescue Lily Potter. Ron and Ginny try to pawn their wands for butterbeer money."
@Yuuki Harry suffers from having to be a protagonist who can be the reader's proxy into the world. He'll never have as great character development as everyone else, because the more character development he gets, the more distant he becomes from the reader.
@doppelgreener Although, to be fair, I find that sometimes very annoying. Because the characters' reactions to Link's presumed conversation basically dictate what he said anyways. And sometimes it is counter to what I wanted to do.
Not annoying enough to not love LoZ to death and BotW is an absolute masterpiece, but there you have it. Nothing is perfect.
@doppelgreener Me too! And you know what was even funnier: I had a hard time finding one! Partially because I don't have the physical books on me right now (so I needed a previous answer with a source with a page number), but the other main blockage was that most of the answers I came across just depended on the basic rules lol
@NautArch The search function is the best and worst part of it right now. It is good enough to be really convenient except when it fails utterly to find something simple.
@Yuuki Naruto's incompetence is reasonably realistic - he's ostracized by pretty much everybody so he's never learned jack, and even afterwards he is kind of stupid.
Fortunately for him, competent people constantly take pity on him.
You know what a super nice feature of dndbeyond would be? If you clicked a link that you didn't have access to, it would give you a page number to find it in the book. Would I want to be the one to implement this? Not a chance.
Iruka gives him a pass for stealing a village treasure and actually gets him into the academy, Kakashi decides to train him after he's the only one that breaks his rules, I don't remember why Jiraya does but it's probably something equally stupid
His only real accomplishment is talking to the Fox
"Okay here's your problem, you're bending your index finger during the third gesture when you need to keep it straight. Try that again and see if the issue resolves. If it doesn't, pray to your power source to reboot the jutsu, and see if that helps."
@NautArch You can ask @BESW and @trogdor about how it was for them during their D&D 4e games. From what I recall, they found it irreplaceable. Trogdor used it for build options, BESW for being able to easily search the entire body of published monsters for DMing purposes as well as items to provide to players. Not even having all the books can match that.
Madara was first immortal and then came back from the dead twice, Obito came back from the dead, so did Itachi, so did Sasuke at some point I'm pretty sure (I think he was supposed to be dead while inside the barrel?)
@doppelgreener I can see definitely how that would be true. Multi-source search, even with the few sources we have right now, is incredible. With a library the size of 4e....
@doppelgreener I never played 4e. I started with and played a couple years of Pathfinder and went right into 5e as soon as it came out. It was a bit of a shock the lack of online resources coming from Pathfinder at first.
But in a spin-off/filler, turns out she's from an alien species that travels through dimensions/realities to harvest energy from them through the trees.
Or the various things that seem like they'd be important but are just one-offs that aren't mentioned again. Like the jar that could seal anything inside of it.
@Yuuki photo is burning hands. But next to photo is Call Lightning. I think it's safe to say the producer did their best to find a character like the one shown.
@NautArch ← feel free to re-close this if you are concerned by it. I'm just one person, and I reserve my diamond hammer for when I'm very sure something needs hammering, and leave everything else for the community to hash out - some things five other people can work out better than just me.
@doppelgreener I feel the same way with the Gold hammering now. Until I'm more comfortable, is it okay if I do what I did in terms of posting here and asking?
The theory is, if you have a gold badge, you have seen enough different questions in that subject you definitely know when something is a dupe of something else.
@NautArch Obviously, the strengths of your PCs lie in areas you don't want to deal with, therefore you made your PCs stronger so that they could get those things out of the way faster
@SPavel not really. I mean, I have some different tactics for those situations, but overall my tactics are generally driven by the encounters themselves.
but the next DM is picking up the same world for his campaign (decades in the future) and I'd like my character to have some more meaning in that world.
Will Smith's is slicker but I feel like the original cinematic cut suffers from the ending narration and the revised ending.
"I Am Legend" not because he becomes the horror story monster analogue to the vampire zombies but because he sacrificed his life so that the mother and kid could escape with the cure.
I know they initially tried for the original ending but focus groups didn't make sense of it or whatever.
@SPavel If you're not aware, @TNG_S8 did get turned into a book, which has the plotlines a bit more fleshed out. It's somewhere in my house. Good if you like that kind of humor, not worth it at all if you don't.
@NautArch I also sometimes feel that way. Sometimes I'll drop a link; other times I'll drop the hammer but also leave a comment saying "here's what I'm thinking and what swayed me to 60-40 in favor of closure, but if reopeners be reopenin' I won't be reclosin'." As much to invite people to use their votes and disagree with me freely as to explain, frankly.
@NautArch My ethos--rather, my written note to self--is to try to find a place each session to (a) play directly into a character's strongest feature and (b) play directly away from a character's strongest feature. I.e. sometimes you put a wall between the barbarian and the bad guy, sometimes you lock 'em in a room together =)
@nitsua60 Each session may be too frequent, but it definitely sucks to sit out for a whole session because you're literally stonewalled, and it sucks for everyone else when the barbarian goes full threshing mode and they are all playing dainty intrigue guys who are lousy with a blade unless it comes to slicing steaks.
@nitsua60 I assume that the first the playing into the barbarian's ability to smash through walls, while the second is playing against the barbarian's confusion about social etiquette?
@SPavel yeah, I definitely don't get to check each box for every PC every session, but I do literally make check-marks and try to keep my eyes/ears open.
I have never encountered a barbarian who was particularly confused about social etiquette, at least not until after the fact (why is everyone looking at me like that, all I did was scalp him a little)
The difficulty, of course, is that players love to make characters with very different abilities, so it's hard to make sure everyone can contribute
PCs also love to imagine themselves succeeding all the time, and their enemies failing all the time, so they rarely prepare a secondary way to contribute
If you want to diversify things (as the GM), I suggest worrying less about mechanical design of challenges, and instead trying to change up the nature of the challenge. Maybe use movies & TV for inspiration for "high-tension scenario that isn't combat".
I don't worry (at all) about mechanical design when trying to check these boxes; rather I think about what the NPCs do in an encounter when it's time to try and check a box on my "party worksheet." I don't care if playing to character C's [strength|weakness] is particularly good or bad for an opponent--I've got lots of other ways of balancing that scale =)
@SPavel Hm? I've encountered many characters of all trades who were very confused about social etiquette (for some reason my players enjoy upsetting people with a higher social status than them :P )
@SPavel This is one reason I've gravitated toward systems which are either so narrowly defined that competency modes are always mechanically applicable, or which encourage character-driven narrative to the point that you pretty much can't have a character who's mechanically limited to only one or two competency modes.
A good example of a really obvious way to do that is Atomic Robo, where your character is defined by three broad competency modes (Action, Science, Robot) each of which is further defined by a phrase that describes your particular approach or specialty in that mode (Fighting the Good Fight, One of the Foremost Engineers in the World, Virtually Indestructible). That forces you to have a pretty broad set of "How I can be relephant to the situation" tools.
Whether you're at a fancy dinner party or trying to disarm a rocket while being shot at, it's equally important that you're a famous engineer who uses being an indestructible robot to fight for good: that's what you are and why you do things so it's useful in any situation you find yourself.
