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You either die a Babylon 5 or live long enough to become a Battlestar Galactica (2004).

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Chillin’ on the Bridge

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past tense of william shakespeare? william shookspeare

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more substantive thing about Glass Onion and then i think this is all my thoughts: i really liked something i feel was clearly shown in the flashbacks but not outright stated, which was that andi knew damn well miles bron was a dumb huckster.

that's what she wanted him for. she needed that ability to throw himself into his latest shill with total commitment, because of his need to believe in his own hype. the 'reality distortion' of his hard sell.

she knew that to get what she wanted out of life, she needed to harness that confidence of a mediocre white man we all talk about.

that it would open doors that would stay unmoved in the face of all her brilliance, and polish, and perfected rich bitch voice.

there's a lot of these guys out there, and she picked a dumb one because she planned for him to be the front man to her mastermind. (apologies to paul mccartney lol i don't mean to impugn your intelligence.) a smarter man would have had his own plans, would be harder to use as a mouthpiece for her better ones. she would have needed to find an actual partner and not a tool, and she didn't trust like that.

duke wasn't actually wrong to say they were all playing the same shitty game and andi lost. i mean, he was morally wrong but he wasn't incorrect.

like blanc says, she thought that because she was better than bron, because she was the genius and he was the cheap con artist, he wasn't dangerous. and in the end that was where it all fell apart.

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being so staunchly anti generative ai while everyone around you is "i used chatgpt" and "i asked grok" and google search is useless and every company is implementing ai and every single celeb is taking ai money and partnering with ai is like... it's so jarring. why can't you see the harm like i can? why are you so lazy? why are we making society this stupid? can we please stop? it's killing people does that not matter to you?

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Went to the zoo and the cemetery for my birthday today and even though it is my birthday, I have a gift for you.

This man's real name was Firmus Dick.

Firmus.

Dick.

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Thoughts about Daggerheart

So, I found out about Daggerheart this week and I have thoughts.

First, a quick note: I have very limited TTRPG experience - a couple of DnD campaigns over a course of about a year and a half, and a few months in a Pathfinder campaign. I have years of experience with narrative role-playing; everything but actual LARPing, basically.

Daggerheart is a new tabletop roleplaying system born out of Critical Role. Matt Mercer is one of the designers and, as far as I can tell, the public face of it.

I'm interested enough in DnD that I subscribe to Pointy Hat's channel and I watched his Daggerheart video this week. After Pointy Hat's video, I went on a binge of Daggerheart videos that I had to forcibly pull myself out of. A friend of mine (my Pathfinder DM) and I kept exchanging excited, erm, DMs about it.

Here's how I'd describe what I gathered about it: Daggerheart is the diametric opposite of Pathfinder. Pathfinder was made by DnD nerds who wanted the mechanics to be more granular, while Daggerheart was made by DnD nerds who wanted the roleplaying experience to be more fluid.

Here's the thing about me: I'm a roleplaying nerd, but when it comes to DnD, I actually love it for the numbers. My combat turns in DnD take anywhere between 10 to 20 seconds: I say what action I'm taking, I roll my dice, I'm done. I do not RP out my characters actions. This has always made me a little frustrated and bored to be in campaigns with people who always RP out their character's actions and take 5 minutes on a turn.

You would think, given the above, that Daggerheart's narrative "spotlight" system that has no initiative rolls and is meant to lead to cinematic experiences wouldn't be to my taste. But I actually think the opposite: if I were playing in a system that was made for the people who RP their combat, I'd probably have a much better time being part of that table and also RP my combat more.

Another thing about Daggerheart that intrigued me is its duality dice system - players roll two D12s instead of a D20, with the combined number being the determiner of success or failure, while the higher-rolling die gives special currency to either the player or the DM. This system, if I understand it correctly, allows combat encounters to automatically scale to the number of combat participants: The fewer players there are whose rolls can give Fear (the DM currency) to the DM, the fewer actions the DM can take.

Players still get to have the "nat 20" experience, by the way, only in this system the critical success is obtained when you get a double (of any number) on your duality dice.

Another mechanic that I thought sounded great was that weapon damage scales with you as you level, which allows things like an early-campaign boss dropping a cool weapon without it being game-breaking, or a character starting off with an heirloom weapon that they won't have to eventually replace just to do adequate damage.

The bottom line is that I heard a whole lot that I liked, and nothing that turned me off. I would absolutely love to try a Daggerheart campaign. As with all campaigns, the success or failure would be much more about the DM and the group than the mechanics, but the mechanics do sound incredibly fun.

And now, links to resources and videos!

Pointy Hat's video that got me started (warning, he ran it based off a beta release and talks about issues he faced that were fixed by the official release, which he notes in the video) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkav4h5O4is

Ginny Di's video on character creation with the official release https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdMo0f3kxKk

Insight Check's video going through the motions of a combat encounter https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOlwgZpf_wg

Official link so you don't have to google it: https://www.daggerheart.com/

And finally, the digital editions link, because it includes a Quickstart Adventure guide, a free PDF that includes scaled down rules, some pre-built characters and an outline of a session. A test drive, basically: https://app.demiplane.com/nexus/daggerheart/sources.

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‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves A stately pleasure-dome decreed. And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

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thinking about creatures.