Khrux

I had a similar experience in my 5e game, no real combat but basically the intrigued that drove the game got tenfold more complex and was revealed to involve each member of the party in a varying but believable way.

Seperatly, I also played Alice is Missing the month before and it lived up to the hype I wanted, but it’s very up.my street. What I seek in an RPG is being able to move between being immersed enough to feel what my character feels when I want it, but when I don’t, be able to act as my own drama maker for later. AiM absolutely delivered that for me. It also didn’t need magic or tech to deliver any agency which is a big plus to me.

This is Call of Duty 22.

I used to play call of duty way back in the day and fell off around the time Black Ops 2 came out, mostly because I felt like there are too many games and I didn’t need another black ops.

There’s now more Black Ops games than I’ve bought games this year.

To be fair, modern AI voices sound pretty real. Making it artificial would have been a tell in it’s own right.

Also the toxicity that is implied to exist by this post is pretty rare really. Even back when I was using Reddit, toxicity generally sank to the bottom of comment sections, and even more so here. When I got into D&D close to the beginning of 5e, some online voices on YouTube for example carried this toxicity but nowadays, most voices are far newer and friendly.

In general, most people are more interested in what happens at their table instead of all tables, and the rules are just guidelines to aid that.

A good way to tell the difference between a bee and a wasp is hair. Bees are fluffy like a cute little dog. Wasps are hairless and cruel like my father, who I become more like every time I look in the mirror.

This gave me flashbacks to being on Reddit with the cult of Keanu Reeves. I respect the man but if he’s shown too much love puts him in a situation where anything he does will be scrutinised.

The world has been giving them nothing but praise for like 5-6 years now, I think that’s all.

I’m less worried about the idea that people are charged groceries based on income and more worried based on need.

Will the person who buys cigarettes twice a day pay more than the person who pays once a fortnight because it’s clear that they require it more? Will the shopper of the family of 6 pay extra because they don’t have the time or energy to drive to the next place that offers groceries without this system?

Introducing this based on income seems like a sugarcoating of something far more insidious.

I moved to Bristol, UK around 3 years ago and joined here around 1 year ago. I’ve never been able to tell if the world has just become more pro anarchism / communism or if both Lemmy and Bristol are so strongly intertwined with those mindsets. I’m always amazed by the intense parallels between here and Bristol that I’d never seen between the internet and a physical place before.

I don’t want to throw the word enshitiffication around, especially when I’m not sure if I can spell it, but the platforms that people jump ship to when that happens are probably especially vulnerable to people jumping ship again.

I can’t imagine Mozilla effectively marketing Firefox as anything but the bullshit free browser, and when they lose that, people will just move to the next actual bullshit free option.

This film won’t happen. Skibidi toilet had 15 mins of fame for generation alpha and only had legs from older generations not understanding it because it’s toilet humour and absurd.

The kids already don’t care about it. If the Minecraft movie went through development hell for 10 years, this movie is not getting made when they realise the kids already don’t give a shit.

Yeah the fact it’s called a small moon is slightly deceptive to us because our moon is absolutely huge as far as moons go. The natives of the SW universe would be used to much much smaller moons.

For reference, our moon is 3475km across and the death star is 150km across, so it’s diameter is 23 smaller. It’s also weighed at about 900million tonnes or 9*10^14kg.

If I’m right (which I’m likely not). g=(GM)/r² or g=(6.667*10^-11*9*1013)/75².

That’s a gravity of 1.086x10^-5m/s² or if I round with pure disrespect for physics, 100,000 times weaker than earth’s gravity. Essentially it’s totally negligible compared to their artificial gravity. Hell, I don’t even think a marble on the floor would overcome it’s own grip and roll towards the center of the space station.

My maths is almost certainly wrong somewhere here, I failed it badly.

This is also probably off topic because I can’t load the YouTube video.

I was talking about the second Dune film a little while back and saying how much I enjoy a well realised world that doesn’t try to convey itself by comparing itself to ours. I get the same feeling watching Dune and Lord of the Rings as I do when I watch a film from a culture I’m not familiar with; a sense of needing to adjust to their way of storytelling.

Pairing this with what you mention which is basically extra subtle show don’t tell, and you end up with something I absolutely adore, which is a story in a fully realised culture I know nothing about, that understands that the bare minimum amount of that culture I need to understand to fully enjoy the story can be the best amount to have.

I was going to say how rare this is but thinking about it, it actually isn’t. Tolkien’s cosmology is fully realised and vast yet I learnt basically no fluff about the world that wasn’t necessary to the story. Sometimes I just had to make peace with the fact that I didn’t understand the cultural context, I could only measure it’s importance in the attitude of the characters.

That’s the shit I love.

I was going to say that although Reddit had a reasonably coherent hive mind, Lemmy is far more similar to eachother in our points of view.

But maybe that’s made more extreme because I’ve blocked so many voices that I don’t agree with, just because I’m not looking to spend my free time debating anymore.

I don’t even think the back legs look too weird. One of the things I’ve found when trying to spot AI is that often actual images look weird like this just because of the angle / compression etc.

Ah I use Sync for Lemmy as my main client which sometimes just does this to long vertical images.

It’s normally a long image thing. Because this is multiple full resolution images stitched together vertically, the hosting site compresses it’s dimensions, even if it’s not that large of a file.

If you’re like me and this image is too compressed to read, here’s the tumblr link.

This may only be an opinion I have but often I feel that narrative in RPGs is actually two slightly more distinct styles; I’ll call them immersive and performative, but I presume somebody else has already named them.

I think 10 candles is one of the few systems that sets it’s sights on immersive narrative play. This is, imo, the hardest thing to pull off in any TTRPG and I envy eny player who can reach this style easily. 10 candles may make you actually afraid and feel hopeless in a way few other games can.

Madness in my opinion is a performative narrative mechanic. As a player you don’t feel compelled to act mad in their own fear, but are responding to a mechanic to continue to set the tone. Gumshoe in general and F.A.T.E too for that matter are top of the class for narrative TTRPGs, but they target the performative side.

I first came across this when I was playing D&D and could recognise that all my players preferred roleplaying to anything else, but when we tried F.A.T.E, it didn’t gel with two of them. We’d been falling into a common pattern which was three of us would basically perform to create the immersive experience for the remaining two, in the process all getting what we all wanted. This only worked because the 5e narrative mechanics are basically three skills that are only called for at the DM’s discretion, which was then being called for less for the immersed players in favour of actually just weighing their arguements. Then in F.A.T.E and gumshoe, the additional guidance for roleplay actually locks players into performative pkay.

There isn’t too much in 10 candles that actually disrupts the immersive style of roleplay. Anything that is properly introduced as “who your character is” rather than “what your character is doing” can support this style of play, and is particularly strong for prompts introduced in the character creation stage. These prompts should also be few and far between, so they never limit natural choices and bring the character out of immersion. I just don’t know if madness can do that.

That’s all my opinion, I’m not a game designer beyond GMing my own systems, and I may be totally wrong.

All of this said, I do think my biggest issue with ten candles is that when the game is down to one candle, the tone change from “the tragic tale of the hopeless acts of humanity in an inevitably ending world” to “everyone gets killed off one by one”, is solved by making the ticking clock madness.

The actual game sort of treats the ticking clock as your resolve to keep going, but that would make the final failure the moment your resolve fails and you simply give in. In reality, people often don’t want to go down without a fight, so everyone’s resolve flairs up at the end, just to be defeated anyway.

Madness is a more accurate mechanic for ticking towards everything going wrong, because it’s expected to end dramatically. The extinguishing of candles feels more like a fuse in this situation, and when it all cumulates at the end of the game, that’s the foreshadowed tonal shift being met.

Again my opinions are absolutely that of an amateur and god knows why I wrote so much about this.