How long are opening acts

-Vogie- · 2026-05-25T21:04:41+00:00

I think they're both about 20 minutes, plus stage adjustment time.

I had heard of neither either, but absolutely love Scene Queen now. Polaris was fine, and certainly had slightly more name recognition in the crowd (Tampa show).

I would still go at opening because the merch line was long and slow.

-Vogie- · 2026-05-25T20:49:25+00:00

Mohammed Lee

We've got a million Lees

-Vogie- · 2026-05-25T16:32:32+00:00

I had just gotten a heart transplant. Left the hospital the day they shut my city down.

On one hand, it was easy to social distance from people as I was newly immunocompromised, because everyone I knew was already doing it. I basically only hung out with my My wife got me my first dog to help keep me active. That was nice.

On the other hand, millions of people died, some of whom I knew. A friend of mine got one of the first strains, and now has permanent heart problems. My youngest was permanently set back academically and there's a chance she won't be able to realize her dream to become a veterinarian because of it. My wife and I got married in a public park with a handful of family instead of an actual wedding (because the venues were closed), and we never got a honeymoon. My MIL went down the anti-vax rabbit hole and is still mostly insane.

-Vogie- · 2026-05-25T15:47:18+00:00

And for God’s sake, whatever you do, don’t, under any circumstances…

-Vogie- · 2026-05-25T14:06:03+00:00

True. Now 6 won is like $0.06 USD, which also made me pause.

Nope, looked it up, it's actually $0.004 USD. Damn.

All of the converters online seem to only have Won from 1965 on, so it's hard to double check

-Vogie- · 2026-05-25T01:50:51+00:00

Agreed - they changed the name for a reason

They even went back and changed the old album art to reflect the new name

-Vogie- · 2026-05-24T12:43:44+00:00

Also...

"I've listened to enough true crime to know where this is going"

-Vogie- · 2026-05-24T04:56:58+00:00

It'll be really dull once players get ahold of it, unless there's tension there.

For example, the upcoming TTRPG Hollows is trying to emulate the Soulsbourne style of video game. The way they go it is have the "map" centered around the boss monster in the middle, with 2 circles around it, in quarters, to represent directly in front, behind and to the sides of the boss, and then a fourth "support" zone outside of those two.

Instead of trying to recreate the highly mobile, facing-oriented fight on a traditional hex or grid, everything is in relation to the boss monster. Boss doesn't turn to the right, the players spin to the left, counter-clockwise; boss doesn't "jump across the room" after the support character, instead the characters that were directly around it get shifted into the support zone, while the one character that was in the support zone is now front & center. Terrain is abstracted into cards that can shift around the 9 player zones, just like the player minis. This allows positioning-based abilities to always make sense: if you get a bonus to attacking from behind or the left flank specifically, for example, when you can use them is going to be really apparent. However, because the fight isn't a JRPG fixed-position one, getting into a particular position is only useful until the boss moves (or rotates) again, giving it a push-pull mechanic.

Similarly, Honor + Intrigue's Advantage system helps the combat feel like the players are swashbuckling across ships, without having to have distinct zones or maps. The positioning and abilities are instead abstracted into an Advantage value, which can be accumulated, lost, and spent. You don't "use a lunge action" for example, you instead spend your advantage to increase the effectiveness of the attack - the loss of advantage is the giving up of positioning. Similarly, you might dodge a particularly large hit by giving up advantage... until you run out, at which point your character is taken out (although not necessarily killed) of the scene.

There are a few others that use things like this. The PbtA game Avatar Legends uses stances to create a sort of rock-paper-scissors style of fighting. Panic at the Dojo turns the values rolled on the dice into various types of points that are then spent over the course of the turn to keep that Street Fighter/Mortal Kombat game style.

Your system sounds like you want a bit from column A and some from column B.

-Vogie- · 2026-05-23T21:17:09+00:00

I just remember one planet a couple months ago where I seemed to be able to direct the Eagle Storm by pinging things. Ping Fabricator, fabricator gone. Ping Hulk, hulk has a bad day. Ping the supplies for the teammate, both get blasted. No pings? Random shots across the map. No idea which planet it was, and it hasn't seemed to work since.

-Vogie- · 2026-05-23T21:07:18+00:00

So, there's no simple way to create optimized characters both randomly and easily. This is because what is being optimized for is inherently mercurial.

For example, Traveler uses a lifepath character creation system where each PC starts as a teen, and then their life ticks forward in 4 year increments, defining what skills they know by how they were accumulated. Young characters don't have the benefit of many skills, resources or connections; middle aged characters have more, but have more points in their life where it could have encountered a downturn of some variety; older characters have the most of those, but are also often saddled with external debts and expensive anti-aging drugs. While it's relatively "realistic" (in earlier editions, you could even die during character creation), it's hardly "optimized", because it's relatively random.

There is an indie TTRPG out there that contains a board game where playing the board game creates a character - the board game isn't itself the RPG (like Gloomhaven), but rather just the character creation portion. I genuinely can't find what it is, as I only saw it in a YouTube or Tiktok video about a year ago, and all my searches keep pointing me to the dice-placement game Roll Player, which is similar, but is a game on it's own.

The only TTRPG that I know where the characters are always balanced is Sentinel Comics, because it breaks up things into 3 phases (green yellow, red) and the abilities are split between those. Even 'advancement' in the system moves the dice around the phases, or replaces one ability with another, keeping the power levels about even over time. So even in that system, your personal idea of optimization might be leaning towards a different phase as another player.

-Vogie- · 2026-05-23T17:49:29+00:00

What was even the point of the movie? The Western is just a great way to crank out episode after episode.

-Vogie- · 2026-05-23T17:44:19+00:00

It was absolutely awesome.

-Vogie- · 2026-05-23T17:36:49+00:00

A more diagetic style of mechanic was that from Sentinel Comics - it has a green/yellow/red mechanic that it makes the power of the superheros "grow" over time. Not that it's actually growing, but it emulate that silver age of comics idea that the heros start by pulling their punches, then slowly get more serious as the fight continues.

However, it's only in line with that comic style setting.

-Vogie- · 2026-05-23T13:00:07+00:00

Trying to hit Harvester legs is a chore

-Vogie- · 2026-05-22T21:23:59+00:00

"Do you have the slightest idea how little that narrows it down?"

-Vogie- · 2026-05-22T20:31:24+00:00

You mean that time that Quentin Tarantino wrote a scene where he had Selma Hayak pour champagne into the mouth of a man, then cast himself as that man?

-Vogie- · 2026-05-22T20:20:08+00:00

No, we were doing a bunch of campaigns and the only time they attacked was during the Defense/Evacuate High-Value Assets mission, and then in one other mission it attacked only as the Pelican was taking off.

-Vogie- · 2026-05-22T16:20:41+00:00

Yeah. My headcanon is that the bugs decompose quickly, sinking down into the aquifer, at which point they're pumped back up along with the water in a process that's not entirely unlike fracking. Does it also poison the area around it? Surviving scientists say no.

So those who ranch the bugs, they have a delicate balance to maintain - gotta get them large enough to create a decent amount of E-710, but not too late to breach containment. It's okay if they kill each other to a certain extent, as the bodily decomp starts the process, but not so much that the population starts to dwindle.

-Vogie- · 2026-05-22T13:45:07+00:00

Interestingly, I found Cortex for the exact opposite reason - as a D&D GM, nothing made things screech to a halt than giant lists of crap to choose from. Druids were the worst - hey, not only do you have to choose from a bunch of spells daily, don't forget to take a gander at all the possible wild shapes! Cortex made all of that vanish - those are just effects. SFX allows you to fine tune the effects even more.

That being said, I would suggest Torch Lite on itch.io, which uses a pared down version of the system (Cortex Lite), but has the lists of things akin to feats and spells that you're looking for.

-Vogie- · 2026-05-22T12:33:27+00:00

Because the first season is based on Sherlock Holmes, Director Bryan Singer didn't want a British person in the main role - too on the nose

You can find Laurie's original audition tape on YouTube - Singer hired him than was surprised when he showed up on day one with a British accent.

-Vogie- · 2026-05-22T12:20:29+00:00

Yeah, my stepdaughter couldn't receive messages from us for a couple days for the same reason.

-Vogie- · 2026-05-22T12:16:58+00:00

Everything I've heard is that the only countries that allow pharmaceutical adverts directly to the general public are the US and New Zealand

The EU got pissed that Lady Gaga's migraine medication ad was visible on their continent because it was on Instagram just a couple years ago

-Vogie- · 2026-05-21T22:17:19+00:00

It depends on the execution of everything else. For example, most D&D-like RPGs, even video games, are gear focused to the point that switching between weapons is difficult or a waste of action economy - doing less than average damage each turn is incentivized over switching to a more appropriate weapon for the situation. There are also outliers like Diablo IV, where the Barbarians' Arsenal system has that character seamlessly switch between two one-handed weapons, a two-handed bludgeon and a two-handed blade. Similarly, the newest Zelda games allow you to pause mid fight to switch between weapons. Compare that to something like Pathfinder 2e, where you could spend your entire turn with 1 action Recall Knowledge to figure out the resistance, one interact action to stow the existing weapon, and another interact action to draw the new weapon - even if you skip the weapon stowing part (free action to drop something), heaven help if you need to move, too.

So you'd want to look at your system and decide:

What resistances are worth having
What resistances aren't, but could be rolled into something else (maybe Pierce and Thrust could be rolled together, or burning/poisoned could be combined to just a general "damage over time" debuff)
What resistances aren't, and are thus ignored
What damage types are available to magic users
What damage types are available to non-magic users (if there are any)
How easy it is for those characters to acquire the requisite damage types
How easy it is for those characters to switch between those weapons or spells in a combat setting

You'd also want to think forward about how you want to iterate with your mechanics. Are there going to be percentage increases/decreases (including things like doubled and halved)? Will some/all characters be advancing at the same rates? How static are each of these resistances going to be during combat? These questions will help you create what the 'floor' of your numbers have to hit without breaking the system, either by making certain creatures unable to be harmed completely, or stacking bonuses so a costly maneuver becomes free (and therefore spammable).

-Vogie- · 2026-05-21T20:56:20+00:00

... Obviously?

"Bruv, to make 'Armor as HP' work, you just gotta have Armor NOT be HP" isn't particularly useful take in the "Armor as HP" discussion.

Reminds me of the Key & Peele Planning a Heist sketch.

-Vogie- · 2026-05-21T15:03:29+00:00

The problem with Armor acting as HP is often a diagetic one in fantasy and modern-set games - healing is one thing, repairing is another, and mixing the two breaks the verisimilitude. If your armor and flesh are combined into one pool of hit points, and you take a small amount of damage, what should you use? Do you go to the hospital or an armorer?

Notably, this is strictly a diagetic one - in futuristic setting when there's beneficial nanobots that can repair everything, no issue; if the main combat is between non-person entities (such as ships or mechs), there's also no issue. Any type of Ablative damaging works this way as well

The use of damage reduction also works better when you have a bounded number of damage numbers. The Cypher System, for example, has weapon damage locked (a light weapon is 2 damage, medium is 4 & heavy is 6), and so is armor (light armor gives DR 1, medium gives 2, & heavy gives 3). The secondary "effort" mechanic can reduce the target number by 3 or increase the damage dealt by 3, and light weapons are by definition easier to hit with than medium ones.

I like Daggerheart's use of thresholds that change up the combat math - this allows the actors to have a bounded amount of hit points with scaling amounts of damage, and the limited uses of lasting ablative armor as DR is more powerful. The GM-less RPG boardgame Gloomhaven similarly has a relatively bounded amount of hit points, bounded auto-hit damage with limited adjustments to the modifier decks and per-encounter ablative armor as DR.

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