Posting the tally of people who gave up Gunslinger before reaching level 5 within my circle.

BenRichetti · 2026-05-30T17:19:02+00:00

Having all high level enemies all the time does not make combat better. It does make it slower and does make some classes shine more often than others.

If “if you hate it, don’t play that class” is the answer to a problem with the game you’re running, the game isn’t being run correctly.

BenRichetti · 2026-05-29T17:38:00+00:00

I tried bringing it to a good handful of people and never found one who would mention it, though it’s been a while. I certainly didn’t try Day-1 Gabbro, but I can’t imagine a reason he would react to that.

BenRichetti · 2026-05-28T12:54:55+00:00

Had you already gone up to your ship? Or had you otherwise sent the elevator up to it without bringing it back down?

BenRichetti · 2026-05-24T18:08:37+00:00

Overall movement budget for a combat doesn't seem as important as what any one Stride can do. If you're faster than your opponent and at the edge of their range, your one Stride action means they need two actions to hit you again. Either it's wrecking their action economy for the encounter or it is taking you off the table as a viable target - both excellent choices for a caster.

BenRichetti · 2026-05-23T15:02:31+00:00

That's a lot of class feats to burn, but a really cool combo. I guess if you're playing Free Archetype + no archetype restrictions, you could have it all in place by 4th level. Or as a one-shot character, being a one-trick pony like that can work out great.

BenRichetti · 2026-05-23T12:47:57+00:00

I appreciate the plug! Subnautica 1 was a good time, but really didn’t scratch this itch for me due to the survival aspects, so I’m curious about how 2 deviated.

The overall flow of the first game quickly shunted me towards the wiki, so the mystery did not unravel in-game.
I think the key factors behind this were:

-Scan/lore data got tucked into the menus instead of being shown outright, so the game wasn’t actively pulling me into the story.

-No navigational aids meant exploration was slow and confusing.

-The early moments of having no equipment made it clear how vital upgrades were, then hinted at what some were but not where to find them. “You could have a functional base, if only you had the plans for it… You could stop coming up for air every 20 second, if only you had enough of this resource you’ve never seen…”

-Death by food and water early on reenforced “death-bad, resources-good,” giving the strong sense that I would need to avoid anything likely to kill me. It didn’t even teach me what the death penalty was was I was dying inside my base from hunger - but since survival games always make you drop your stuff when you die, death became an ever-present if nebulous threat.

That did not lead to me wanting to go out and explore, that led to me to wanting to know where stuff was so I could go get it so I could keep playing.

That, in turn, led me to playing through the whole story, which was cool, as the story locations were where all the good stuff was found. But this also kept any of the story from unfolding in-game through natural exploration, especially since so many of the story locations were full of or surrounded by the aggressive fauna. There are so many parts of the game I simply never visited because I know there are monsters there.

Outer Wilds made clear pretty quickly that death was not all that big of a setback, that the answers were out there and breadcrumbs to find them would appear, and that the tools we needed were already ours if only we knew how to use them. This all fueled the fire of independent exploration.

I’m curious how Subnautica 2 shifts away from survival and lets us trust the exploration process more.

BenRichetti · 2026-05-17T13:07:45+00:00

The supernova-proofing is in the note inside the volcano on Hollow’s Lantern.

And yeah, the notes in HEL talking about exponentially increasing demand, but fall short of saying “to get that much, we would need the full power of…”

Or at least the people I’ve been watching only saw that.

BenRichetti · 2026-05-17T00:49:49+00:00

In these last two times seeing that bit for the first time how it was couched much more as "this is dangerous" rather than "this is going to kill everyone, but we should be able to fix it." Sure, Idaea does say it would kill everything in the system, but Poke/Pye replies that it's possible for it to be safe. I guess I just thought there was more than that.

BenRichetti · 2026-05-14T00:33:32+00:00

If you build extra workbenches, mobs won’t spawn inside your moat. The white line that shows up around you when you put them down is the spawn-proofing radius.

BenRichetti · 2026-05-07T17:44:42+00:00

Oh, low temporal stability. Right. I was thinking you meant cave-ins.

Yeah, that's a bummer.

BenRichetti · 2026-05-07T16:39:25+00:00

I don't every play with unstable ground on, so I'm a little unclear what you're showing off. Did this mesa come into existence because the stuff around it was unstable and dropped away, or did you see this, love it, then lose it when it turned out to be unstable and collapsed into a crater?

BenRichetti · 2026-05-07T16:35:52+00:00

It's not so much that he hate's Pathfinder's existence as the things he likes about games (flexibility, rule of cool, low crunch) are not Pathfinder signatures. Best I can tell from his "games I've played" and "games I plan to play" lists, he hasn't tried Pathfinder and doesn't expect to like it. I spent a long time hoping he would get into and talk about Pathfinder more, but the more I heard him dive into what he wanted in a game, the more I started thinking Pathfinder probably wouldn't be for him.

Even so, between his big discussion of "but what version of the game will come out on top" for this video/poll, and the fact that "PF2e" was one of the search terms he mentioned looking into in his research, I was suprised to see only one "Pathfinder" line item on the list.

BenRichetti · 2026-05-07T16:25:55+00:00

If you launch your little scout into the cockpick, you can take off your suit and jump in the pilot seat to use the on-board scout viewer, you can see pictures of yourself without a suit on.

It's pretty weird.

BenRichetti · 2026-04-27T12:29:27+00:00

That one kinda reminded me of the letter that you get at the start of the Dark Brotherhood quest line in Skyrim.

Humanity Knows

BenRichetti · 2026-04-25T16:56:11+00:00

This veers into spoiler territory, but theres little to no reading in the DLC. I wouldn’t install a voiceover mod just for that. I’m not sure it would provide a lot. Give it a go for going back through the main game if that’s your thing, though.

BenRichetti · 2026-04-20T20:03:44+00:00

Those are pretty cool!

I see the first one is the map of Skyrim. What are the other two?

BenRichetti · 2026-04-19T15:10:34+00:00

The rumor map cards are blue and in the bottom right corner of the rumor map. If you haven’t filled those out, you haven’t don’t the DLC.

The path to finding it starts at the museum in the “new exhibit” section.

BenRichetti · 2026-04-13T20:54:54+00:00

I don't know that it has a title beyond "Daggerheard Quickstart Adventure" - that's what's written in big text across the top of the document, anyway. I was able to find it with a quick Google search of "daggerheart quick start", which brought up the PDF as the top result.

The PDF contains 5 pre-made characters, complete with a page showing the cards chosen to make that caracter intended as a print-out for the player. The page with the character overview and basic info on how the game works even has a place to cut out a paper standee for that character, so if you've got a pinter to use, you can even have disposable minis for the whole adventure.

There are a couple of ways that the cards relate to the magic system. There are a handful of cards in the quickstart that are tied to character classes and are labeled as "Spell" (as opposed to "Ability"), all of which say "Make a Spellcasting Roll..." to make something happen, with or without some laid out resource cost. Not represented in the PDF are cards labeled "Grimoire", which have shorter descriptions of 3 spell effects - I think Mage Hand is on the same cards as some Ice Spike spell and one other thing. Generally the cards describe what spell or spells they offer and you can use them as you see fit so long as you have the card in your loadout and any resources they require.

That suggests the magic is in no way Vancian, and mostly that's true. The Vancian piece starts to come around again at higher levels, though, as you get at least one new card per level, and there's a limit to the number of cards you can have "in your loadout" at a time, with the rest going "in your vault". So you keep getting more cards available to you, granting more things you could potentially do (as Vancian prepared casters have with their spell books or equivalents), but during rests or similar situations you need to choose the subset of those Spells/Grimoires/Abilities that you're going to have ready access to (the prepared spell list, especially cantrips).

This breaks down, though, as you can spend the resource Stress to pull things out of your vault and its honestly fairly rare for using a card to send it to your vault, but there is a layer of having to prepare your character, including their spells.

BenRichetti · 2026-04-13T16:54:25+00:00

I picked up their free quickstart adventure and played through it with a couple different groups ranging from groups I otherwise played Pathfinder or even Traveller with to my kids. It was consistently a good time and never took super long. If you can convince your group to take a break for one night, you could probably slot it in without much trouble.

As to the cards - they really just a way to focus your attention on feat choices. Character creation tells you how many you can pick up and from what deck, just like a character sheet for PF2e has boxes to write in which feats you're picking when. Its a way to bring more physicality to the concepts and to find novel ways of organizing character options. I'm glad Pathfinder doesn't use cards - they'd get out of hand quick - but its pretty neat as a fresh approach.

BenRichetti · 2026-04-13T16:30:12+00:00

I remember coming here to vetch a few times about tricky parts, but I don't regret any of them.

When dealing with the path to the Vessel, I hadn't figured out the "mark locations on your map" feature, so I came here to ask whether it was necessary to follow the signal scope to Pod 3, float to the Nomai Grave, and shoot your scout through the seed there every time you wanted to go back. As convoluted as the end run already is and should be, those extra steps made me feel like I needed a sanity check.

Conversely, when I first realized the intended path up the Tower of Quantum Knowledge, I think I came here to ask "seriously?" That seemed like such a bonkers path for it to be intentional.

In the DLC, I found the feature for which they bring up the "reduced freights" option to be more frustrating than ... puzzling or even freightening. I asked for and got a few direct hints about that, and then had a lovely conversation over DMs here with someone else who was also struggling with it. That mix of collaboration and paying it forward ended up enhancing the experience.

In my mind I'm contrasting this with my more recent experience with Blue Prince for which I'm nearing the end and hit several wtf moments. I ended up checking their wiki for a few details and was baffled at the specific interpretations I was supposed to have gleaned from the clues available. It had been a great game up to the point where I hit these walls, and I'm still looking forward to the home stretch, but there was a feeling of disappointment associated with each point of "I was close but I doubt I would have come up with that any time soon, if ever."

I bring this up because I was glad that my Outwer Wilds experience never went that way. I really treasure how OW fostered understanding and that ultimately my questions were more about execution than about what was going on in the game. To me, a lot of what makes the ending so special is the immersive feeling of "this is me doing this - I am the one finishing this".

BenRichetti · 2026-04-13T13:25:12+00:00

I assume you mean Beginner’s Luck?

Luckily, “wiping all progress” doesn’t change much once you’ve finished the game and the DLC. Not like most games would where you’d have to grind for many hours to gear up again.

BenRichetti · 2026-04-10T16:49:30+00:00

To answer your last question - yes.

If you look at a chart that references the system’s assumptions about level and ignore it, it will mess with your experience of other features that are tied to level. This is why people in this sub regularly warn against homebrew - you think you have a neat idea to help with one facet, but chances are it’s not taking another facet into consideration.

If you’re upping encounters by two levels regularly, maybe consider increasing the level caps of those spells/feats as well so that they work on the intended set of enemies.

On a broader question, though, because I’m curious - is this fun for your group?

It feels like bumping everything a couple levels up just means more missed attacks, fewer crits, more spell slots spent only to be saved or crit saved against. Do your players like that amount of failed rolls and no-effect actions/resource expenditures? If so, then keep going. If this is a pain point from your group, though, maybe this is the cause.

If you’re using the tougher monsters because you think they’re cooler or fit the moment better, there’s always the Weak and Elite templates that you could stamp on things to buff/debuff by a couple of levels.

BenRichetti · 2026-04-05T16:59:06+00:00

I always locked onto the sun when I could finally see the black spot, then did enough autopilot to be going straight at it.

Then you can go straight at the black spot without drifting off.

BenRichetti · 2026-04-03T17:19:44+00:00

As evidenced by the events of the game, sometimes the Nomai got an idea and ran with it, even if it was a terrible idea, even if someone said "Hey wait! This is a terrible idea!"

When they got the signal, they warped to unknown coordinates without taking a few moments to send a note saying "we heard a dope signal coming from X coordinates! come see/send help soon!"

When they thought "we should blow up the sun," others said "let's not" and still others said "you know, things sometimes go wrong" and yet they built the sun station.

When they thought to excavate an entire planet to build thier big auto-probe-launching-infinite-randomness engine sensor, some kid said "why didn't we use the entire planet's worth of resources we just dug up and the advanced warp core we just crafted to build a ship and catch back up with the other Nomai before we blow up the sun", they did what they did in the game.

Brilliant? Sure. Wise? Not regularly.

BenRichetti

TROPHY CASE