u/RealLars_vS

I just finished another rewatch and I can’t think of what the worst episode is. Curious to see what the rest of you thinks?

Last night, I came up with a concept that combines players choices with character skills and dice rolls to result in certain tiers of rewards. I'm curious to see what people think of it.

Disclaimer: I'm unsure if I'm explaining this correctly. It's all mostly in my head and proves difficult to put on paper. Please let me know if anything is unclear :)

Edit: this isn’t meant to be shown to players. Keep them in the dark on this. It’s merely a guideline for the DM to reward players and keep them moving forward.

Skill check |Unaltered situation |Low risk/cost |Medium risk/cost |High risk/cost
No roll |Tier 0: Starting point, players know little to nothing |Tier 1: The players learn something significant can be learnt |Tier 2: The players learn a clue to something significant |Tier 3: The players learn something significant
Low roll |Tier 1: The players learn something significant can be learnt |Tier 2: The players learn a clue to something significant |Tier 3: The players learn something significant |**Tier 4:**The players learn something important
Medium roll |Tier 2: The players learn a clue to something significant |Tier 3: The players learn something significant |**Tier 4:**The players learn something important |Tier 5: The players learn something highly important
High roll |Tier 3: The players learn something significant |Tier 4: The players learn something important |Tier 5: The players learn something highly important |Tier 6: The players learn all they can The idea is that, instead of preparing specifically what players find/learn/receive, where they find it, how they find it, etc., you only prepare these 6 Tiers of rewards. Tier 0 is the lowest, Tier 6 the highest.

Let's say players want to learn something about the plans of the local commander. They can go to their headquarters in the city center and stand outside: that's Tier 0. They haven't rolled anything yet, they haven't attempted anything dangerous, but they do already see something. For example, they see guards are posted outside. They see the walls are pretty high and difficult to climb over. They see a watch tower with 2 guards looking over the compound grounds. All that information is 'free', not locked behind a skill check. We'll call this the 'unaltered situation': nothing risky has been attempted yet.

Next, a player might attempt to gain more information by looking around: roll a Perception check. This is a little bit of risk: if the guards spot the player peeking around, they might start asking questions. On a low roll. they get a Tier 1 reward: they learn something significant can be learnt (there is another entrance/the guards rotate at noon). On a high roll, they actually learn something significant (the Evil Alchemist has entered the compound).

Instead of attempting a Perception check from a safe distance, they might try something more daring: break into the compound. Here, the Tier 1 reward from their first check could help: it allows them to move further into the table above.

Breaking in is a high risk/cost, and your players deserve more rewards for doing it. When they break in, without making any checks or rolls, they're already automatically at Tier 3: the best result they could get from just observing from a safe distance. But now they can make a check, which will result in much better rewards.

Any time players 'unlock' a certain Tier they also know how to move to the next Tier. So when they get a Tier 2 on their Perception check, they know what they need to do to move further in the Medium risk/cost column, since they already unlocked the base Tier for that column.

Risk and cost are interchangeable. Breaking into the compound is high risk but little cost, but casting a high-level spell with an expensive material component, paying a lot of gold to bribe a guard, or spending three days researching a certain topic are all high costs. You as a DM don't have to determine how the party pays these prices, as long as you acknowledge they have spent resources and deserve a reward for that.

This is, of course, only a concept, not a rigid mechanical system you should stick to. If it makes sense for players to start at a later column, or that certain rewards can't be gained at this particular time, it's better to deviate from the system.

Let me know what you guys think!

De D&D-vraag die ik nergens anders op Reddit kan stellen! Hoe vertalen jullie de engelse namen voor monsters, spreuken en termen in het spel?

Sommigen van deze hebben een vertaling, maar dat is dan dezelfde vertaling als van andere woorden. Voorbeeld: Ghost, Wraith, Specter en Phantom vertalen allemaal naar Spook.

Ik snap dat de meeste groepen gewoon de Engelse benaming aanhouden, maar ik vind dat bij het spelen in het Nederlands ook Nederlandse benamingen horen. Het haalt mij minder uit het spel als alles in dezelfde taal is. Maar het woord ‘Uilenbeer’ rolt gewoon niet zo lekker van de tong :p

Dus bij deze de vraag: hoe vertalen jullie de namen en termen uit een spel dat in het Engels geschreven is???

I have to teach a bunch of kids the traffic rules for boats (r/brandnewsentence). I want to do it in a better way than flash cards or a book they need to flip through.

The rules are categorizable, and they almost always require a visual aid like a drawing, diagram, picture of a traffic sign, etc. Memory came to mind, but that’s a bit too cliche, we already had memory several times for stuff like this.

Curious to see what games this community can point me at!

Just finished my 3rd(?) rewatch. The show had bad episodes (shuttle pod 1), great episodes (cogenitor, among others), but what really disappointed me was the last episode.

ENT was the first ST show I watched, so at the
time I didn’t really understand who Riker and Troi were. I figured during this rewatch I’d understand better. But I feel like the creators missed some great opportunities.

Good things:

1. The episode is supposed to emphasize how important Archer and the NX-01 crew were in the creation of the federation. It does that by the dialog between Riker and Troi.
2. Jeffrey Combs came back :D
3. Trip dying and knowing he did it for the greater good was good, but [read on]

Bad things:

1. This should have been a 2-parter at least. Perhaps it was only 1 episode due to budget cuts.
2. The last episode being about helping Shran instead of one final challenge before the signing of the treaty of the Coalition of Planets is a low-ball. The 2 episodes before would have made for a much better finale.
3. Trip dying for only 2 people sucks. He died for Shran, not for Archer.

Compared to the finales of TNG, DS9 and VOY (oof, especially VOY), this was such a disappointment. Then again, I suppose the sudden ending of funding forced the writers to make difficult choices.

Might be a controversial question to ask here, but I want to quit IF. At least for a while. Reasons: I want to see the difference again with ‘normal’ eating, I want to be free of the limitation for a while, I’m not even that good at it as of late (skipping breakfast is easy but not snacking/enjoying drinks with friends after 8 is getting difficult).

So I’m looking for people who have experienced quitting IF. Ironically, this is both the best and worst sub to ask this question. I’m not looking for people to change my mind, I want to do this and might come back to IF later. But I do want to know your experience if you have quit IF at some point.

Players are about to go on a chase, following a sailing ship across a sea. They don't know where the ship will go, and the ship is only out there to avoid the players and their request to the captain. How can I make that fun and engaging?

Finding and following tracks isn't really a thing with ships...

Question is in the title. This is a bit of a sensitive subject, I'm doing my best to phrase it as politically correct as possible. It being a sensitive subject is precisely why I'm writing this post. If I did it wrong, I'm really sorry and I hope people realise there was absolutely no ill intention.

Context: my party is about to enter a land that has been fighting a war for 150 years. This obviously requires many people at the front lines, which is at the west while the rest of the land is fairly safe from attacks.

The problem: Women are almost infinitely more important in the process of making new people (1 woman takes 9 months, while a man doesn't have that limitation). I reeeeally don't want to 'reduce' women to 'baby machines' in this part of the campaign. However, realistically, the men would be recruited for the war, while the women stay behind to ensure there will be new men to recruit for the war.

The underlying problem here is that logic brings me to what I just described, while this being a fantasy setting pretty much also allows me to do whatever I want. I feel like when I include the negative stuff from real life in there, it's a choice.

I'm looking for inspiration to find a solution. Any input is appreciated.

Markarian's Chain, including what is presumably sensor noise

I just got into post-processing my images, but I see a bunch of lines and big spots, obviously coming from my sensor. I did use darks, flats and biases during the process in SiriL, but it still shows up (see image).

One of the theories I have is that I used the wrong calibration frames: for the wide lens instead of the tele-lens. They're marked with '0' and '1', but how do I know which is which?

I finished the game 3 days ago. The last quest, where you see a bunch of machines completely smashing down a bunch of Specters is just awesome to see, and it got me thinking.

Horizon: Zero Dawn was a great game. It was one of a kind that offered unique gameplay, which isn’t common for AAA-games nowadays.

Horizon: Forbidden West was a great iteration on that already great game. The cauldrons have more depth, the machines added are radically new and interesting, and the story is amazing. Many of the icks and bugs (no more ‘inventory full’, Focus Pulse shows grappling points, falling issues were resolved, etc.) were ironed out. But it was also *just* another installment of what we already had in the first game.

For the third game, I really hope the world we play in changes in such a way that we do more *with* machines, instead of against it. Spoiler for the end of game 2: >! Nemesis is supposed to be a powerful [ally edit: enemy], since the Zeniths chose to flee from it instead of solving the problem. The answer will probably be to fight Nemesis with machines, but I’m praying that we’ll see this in the entire game, not just in a few levels at the end. !<

In any case, such a pivot wouldn’t require much in terms of game development. Overriding machines is already a thing. Hunting them can obviously still happen. But I would love seeing Aloy find a way to control Hephaestus and making the game about fighting the enemy with machines.

Tl;dr: How do I make searching for information in a library fun?

Imagine this.

Your players learned the last name of the BBEG. Their mother was a publicly known criminal who was executed a few centuries ago. Since this is no secret, information can be found about her.

They go to a library to see what information they can find about them. They ask the librarian about information, they give it to them.

There was hardly any interesting roleplay. There were no checks, and if there were: I don't want to hide important information behind a check. There wasn't any time pressing (yet), so they technically could have stayed for weeks to dig through all of the library.

I also didn't want to prepare an entire library of book titles to let them actually 'search' for books that could possibly hold useful information.

How do I make this fun???