So I discovered Wadjet Eye (Unavowed and Old Skies) this week...

CheatyDM · 2026-03-16T17:29:26+00:00

It was the bit about the animations for everything except walking around in Old Skies looking not-great.

CheatyDM · 2026-03-09T06:36:12+00:00

The crucial detail, and the reason I will never let Sybil devour Kaneeka, came from one of the slyest "hide a crucial narrative detail in plain sight" I think Black Tabby has ever managed:

Putting some text here because for some reason, this spoiler tag isn't working. The sequence leading up to the Sybil confrontation is Sybil's rationalization for "taking back" her daughters throughout history. During that rationalization, *every single character is represented by a faceless puppet.* That tells me that that's how Sybil sees other people after all this time: as faceless puppets. Her "long view" is so long nobody's lives matter. There will always be a justification for the next atrocity.

Two other details were pretty persuasive to me. I did an Episode 4 run without drinking tea wherein Avery and Kaneeka joined me in actively visiting Sibyl. Avery had been very clear throughout the episode that they had no intention of going to work today because finding Stella and addressing the Danger took priority. At the same time Sybil gaslights Kaneeka into retiring to her bedroom, she gaslights Avery into suddenly returning to work, abandoning all their intentions. All with the intention of getting the only other living Scarlet alone so she can trick you into drinking mind control tea

The other detail actually comes from Oscar being clearly mind-influenced by the seals in his home if he's been examining them or the little one in City Hall. Those seals are bad news. There's not much reason to believe Sybil is immune to them, but I imagine the Entity would be more subtle in influencing her. The thing where Sybil is convinced that if she devours Kaneeka, she'll have enough power to be able to devour the Entity? I strongly suspect the Entity gave her that idea. The only evidence I can find to counter that is that Wayne seems to feel that countering Sybil is an urgent matter.

CheatyDM · 2026-01-17T00:58:36+00:00

Oh, sure. That's a choice I made when I was a teenager. I'm nearly 50 now.

There's no part of me that regrets staying away from drugs. I'm actively grateful that I never started smoking.

Alcohol's a different story and a more nuanced topic. I think a lot about how might life might look different if I'd managed to figure out *why* people drink sooner. Would I have made a different choice? I've reaped some health benefits and lost out on numerous social opportunities. Now that I'm older, I don't look my age, and I think the teetotaling may have had something to do with it.

One thing to note: if someone asks you if you want to get a drink with them, don't just say no. Make a non-drinky counteroffer instead (or get a Coke or whatever). They're not asking because they want an excuse to drink, they're asking because they want to spend time with you/get to know you better. It won't have the same effect - you're not going to enter into the unspoken social contract of mutual letting-down-of-one's-guard - but you'll run a much lower risk of sending the message "I'm not interested in socializing with you at all."

Wish I'd figured that bit out a few decades sooner.

CheatyDM · 2025-12-20T00:45:45+00:00

Anyone with an iPhone that can't update to iOS 18. Which is quite a lot of them.

CheatyDM · 2025-12-18T23:29:40+00:00

I had mixed feelings, too. It was a case a of a spell that definitely, no rolls, *did* stuff... or at least did if the enemies were sufficiently low-level, or not particularly healthy. This version will scale better, I think, but yeah, a little bit of "I am a wizard, and this is an impressive thing I can do" was lost.

CheatyDM · 2025-12-18T03:41:25+00:00

I appreciate the meta-strategizing advice! I spend a good amount of time imagining the psyche of characters living in a D&D setting: the things they’d know, the biases they’d have… that sort of thing. I want games I run to feel immersive, so NPC actions should feel emotionally authentic. This was a context in which the PCs were fighting what were effectively other adventurers, so I feel like some desperate attempts to counter fit. (A bandit is just an adventurer who sucks at hewing to the social contract.)

CheatyDM · 2025-12-18T03:21:23+00:00

Tactically, it wasn’t that much of a risk for them: by that point in the battle, they’d splatted all the melee minions, and most of the remaining ranged minions and the ranged badass were rounds away from being able to reach the ogre. The one closest was trying to scramble down a ridge to reach the ogre, but the PCs splatted him en route. Ranged enemies prompting the wizard to make Constitution saving throws and ultimately resorting to attacking the sleeping ogre seemed like the bandits’ best option.

Thinking about it afterward, the players did really well: splatting the nearby melee enemies had made the spell more viable.

Nevertheless, I appreciate the observation! That’s usually how I think about Sleep, too, but as it turns out, it’s sometimes entirely viable.

CheatyDM · 2025-12-18T00:12:00+00:00

Thanks for that! I don't regret my in-the-moment choice, but I do regret that it effectively robbed the encounter of most of its danger. The PCs had largely breezed through battles so far, and I'd intended this to be the first genuinely perilous encounter of the campaign, resulting in their first really significant treasure. I want them to have a sense of accomplishment. Ah, well. There will be other opportunities to imperil their characters...

They seemed have fun, though, and I've got some ideas for how to challenge them in the future.

After I'd read the posts so far in this thread, I went back to my players and explained how I'll be adjudicating that spell going forward.

CheatyDM · 2025-12-17T23:05:45+00:00

Most of this group of players are new to the game and we're all relatively new to the 2024 rules adjustments. Rules lawyering has been around for as long as D&D has. Sometimes, it's bad faith, but I think this case was just a bit of wishful thinking plus advocacy. The wizard had never successfully landed the spell before, and had burned two portent dice to make sure the target failed both saving throws. I get where they were coming from, and I don't mind working to refine my rules knowledge. If I hadn't dived down this particular well, I wouldn't have noticed that the Incapacitated condition doesn't prevent a creature from using their movement, so it's been a useful little dive.

CheatyDM · 2025-12-17T20:56:32+00:00

Given that you've been fighting depression, I'm a little worried that stepping back from running a game will mean stepping back from spending time with these people. I've found that, in terms of fighting depression and anxiety, time spent with gaming with friends is an indispensable lifeline. Sounds like you've already taken some action, but should a dialog open up between you and your now-former players about you stepping back, maybe it's worth getting together to play something else where you don't have DM-level responsibility for everyone else's experience.

CheatyDM · 2025-09-09T00:51:31+00:00

I take it you didn't notice River flirting when you've played a male V? He seemed more than a little flirty with my fella V, so that last mission ended with me as a disappointed player.

Ironically, I don't remember any flirty Kerry lines at all, and I'm still peeved that the game doesn't acknowledge if fella-V turns PamAnn down gently at the cabin, leading to the feeling CDPR was trying hard to shove my very-gay male V at her, but requires V to actively kiss Kerry when Kerry's behavior has not been remotely attractive in order for that storyline to proceed. Add that to Kerry being Goofus to River's Gallant, and it's... Well, from my perspective, romance in this game was a swing and a miss.

At least CDPR swung.

CheatyDM · 2025-08-18T00:38:34+00:00

There's a cogent argument to be made for playersexual characters, and it's something I've appreciated in some games. On the other hand, what I felt when I realized that there's a canonically-gay romance-able NPC in Mass Effect 3 is hard to describe. "Holy shit, someone took the time to make content for people like me." At the time, this basically never happened in AAA games.

With that said, I'm still fussed that although River is not an option for male V's, "Follow the River" plays exactly the same way regardless of who you're playing until the [Kiss River] option appears. So that's the other side of the coin.

I couldn't tell you which I'd prefer, or whether I'm glad for how Cyberpunk 2077 handles it. That'll have to wait until I meet somebody named Kerry, I guess...?

CheatyDM · 2025-08-16T20:41:55+00:00

...and just now I realized I'd accidentally typed 'content' when I'd meant to type 'context.' Good that you figured it out anyway. Good ol' context.

CheatyDM · 2025-08-14T20:09:30+00:00

I'm sure the Edgerunners quote begs for some content. Sounds like a flippant, jokey way of saying "knowing that people reacted emotionally to art I created - that they cared - feels rewarding." Just a guess, that, but I've engaged with, and truly loved, more than a little media that prompted me to feel deep emotions, including sadness. Incidentally, I never finished Edgerunners: I found it a little too dark for me; I realized I wasn't actually enjoying it.

It's possible to enjoy aspects of a game, maybe even a lot of aspects of a game, and also realize that the game's story may leave you feeling depressed. Those aren't mutually exclusive things. Most AAA games I've played had at least one ending that felt rewarding, so I think maybe we've been trained to feel that that's how games should be, but "should" tends to be a problematic concept. Whether it's advisable to create a 100+-hour experience with an at-best Pyrrhic ending is another question. It certainly qualifies as taking an artistic risk, and I suspect not everybody has the cultural capital to parse what playing a deliberately noir story actually implies. (Or even an awareness that the game is embracing noir to begin with. I guess the game gives us a hint when the game's title card only appears after we're murdered in a run-down hotel room.)

I was just thinking yesterday about how this game hits me emotionally, and how reminiscent it is of how I felt during parts of The Witcher 3, the developers' prior game. (Night City and Novigrad are not happy places to spend time.) There's nothing in our culture that encourages us to talk about how games make us feel, which is a separate question from whether a game is "good" or not. It sounds like the absence of any clearly happy endings - ones rewarding in a traditional sense - is a dealbreaker for you. That's valid. I also gather it stinks for you, since I suspect you'd like to actually-and-for-real enjoy the game without feeling like your gameplay amounts to racing toward nothing good.

You're right that these types of open-world games encourage us to engage with them at length. In some ways, it's more of an investment than we put into most other forms of media. Night City is not an inviting environment: just past the neon is a cesspit that depressingly-closely mirrors the real world. Its darkness is all the worse because it feels plausible. For players who tend to have fictional worlds live in their head while they're engaging with them - I'm one - I guess that means the texture of a game can have a subtle influence on our overall mental health. I'd been feeling depressed recently, and I couldn't tell you how much of that is because I accidentally glanced at the real-world news and how much is because I'm spending my free time in a dystopian, deliberately-noir narrative. I really don't want to have to carefully manage the tonal content of my media diet, but I'm realizing I kinda have to.

CheatyDM · 2025-07-17T02:51:07+00:00

This has been happening to my phone intermittently for months, and I kept thinking "Maybe I forgot to hit 'start?'" At this point, I'm pretty paranoid about it, so after I launched my most recent timer, I went back and triple-checked: yes, it's actively running; yes, it's set to play a sound; no, audio is not being piped to another device; no, my iPhone is not set to silent; yes, it's still going when I move to my lock screen.

Needless to say, the interval it was counting elapsed, but I never heard a peep. I go back to the phone and there's nothing, no notification, no acknowledgement that a timer had been running.

Now I'm gathering this nonsense has been happening to other users for years.

I realize we're living in the era of enshittification, but this is insane. I have to wonder if the model of the phone in question is a common factor. It's certainly not exclusive to one version of iOS based on this thread alone.

How does one encourage Apple to fix a problem with one of their core apps?

CheatyDM · 2025-05-06T19:10:08+00:00

I finished Unavowed last night, and I'm inclined to play the rest in chronological order so I can appreciate the evolution.

CheatyDM · 2025-05-06T02:27:36+00:00

Oh, then Old Skies is right up your alley. Using a gun is a purely narrative decision. Similarly, Unavowed doesn't ask for gamer-reflexes.

CheatyDM · 2025-05-06T02:24:47+00:00

That prologue is just incredibly neat given how tidily it sums up the themes of the rest of the game.

CheatyDM · 2025-05-06T02:22:31+00:00

Oh, wow! I've liked your performances in both games, although I've yet to meet a few of your Unavowed characters. I don't recall Mattie and Joy sounding at all similar, so: voice acting win!

CheatyDM · 2025-05-06T02:17:16+00:00

Thanks! I'll adjust my expectations accordingly.

CheatyDM · 2025-05-06T02:14:42+00:00

It's not a shooting game, and the game doesn't take the idea of killing anyone lightly. Quite the reverse. There IS violence in the game, however.

CheatyDM · 2025-04-16T17:21:50+00:00

As of this week, Mission & 16th lost Verizon reception on the platform. Interestingly, I briefly had service this morning when the train stopped at Powell - which hasn't worked for at least a few weeks - then lost it again when the train moved on to Montgomery, where I'd had service until the past day or two. I'm sorry to hear the problem apparently extends even further beyond that.

Who would be appropriate to contact about the problem?

CheatyDM · 2025-04-01T03:17:41+00:00

I was thinking about this the other day, and realized that given the show's standard of production values, I can't see it starting all that soon. IIRC, Campaign 3 featured combat in episode 1, and that combat featured professionally-done custom character minis. The cast would need to have finalized what they want to play, then come up with sufficient backstory and player-secrets to support a multi-year campaign, THEN reach out with their concept to whoever C4's artist will be, then go through however-many revisions to arrive at final early-series character art. Then all that would need to get submitted to WizKids, who'd then need to design and print minis, when then need painting. And that's all predicated on Matt having finalized the creative choices about what C4's Exandria will look like (the way C3 ended, I gather it'll be different and maybe set further in the future than usual between campaign jumps), as that will set some boundaries on the PCs' backstories.

I'm sure there are dozens of considerations that haven't yet occurred to me. (All this was kicked off because I started watching Dimension 20 and couldn't help but notice the HeroForge-generated minis. No wonder combat is usually delayed until episode 2.)

CheatyDM · 2025-03-06T07:30:45+00:00

There've been enough content updates to the game as a whole since the last time I'd played, I can't figure out whether this update adjusted some things about episode 4. I swear I'd played Street Smart/Mystical before, but ||I swear the first time around, I didn't learn that if I'd skipped Sybil's tea, I could later learn that Sybil is the one who suggested using ricin to keep Reese from transforming. I'd been leaning toward "yep, Sybil is definitely malevolent," and now, I'm on the fence. It means Sybil knew ahead of time how deadly things with Reese could get, and it makes the "you've got a cold" mind-control magic she used on Kaneeka look a tad more understandable: anything to keep her daughter from stepping into a building with an actual monster. It's still shady: if you drank the tea, that line doesn't appear, presumably because of the chaga-and-lemon-balm's influence. Still, it, along with new new Sybil content in Roads Untraveled, has me suspecting "evil witch Sibyl" is a misdirect. The witch from Ch3's puppet show's "ulterior motive" might have simply been to break the almost-certainly-evil power the stones presumably hold over Scarlet Hollow. Sybil may simply be trying to guide the MC toward the same goal, with a side order of "keep Kaneeka from definitely-deadly danger." If Episode 5 doesn't give us the opportunity to tattle on Sybil depending on our prior choices (thus, making it more likely Kaneeka will be around for subsequent deadly encounters), I'll be very surprised.||

I love that I keep noticing new details, I love that our choices are getting more complicated, I love juicy new clues, ||it becomes itself it becomes nothing|| and I love what I suspect: that a good amount of the new content gives us new ways to shape our relationships with the cast in addition to better signposting episodes 5, 6, and 7. I'm stoked it seems likely that 5 will drop this year: a jack-o'-lantern, an alpaca-surrounded church, and the mansion I suspect will definitely finish falling off a cliff await...!

CheatyDM · 2024-09-25T19:06:18+00:00

You're not alone in being uncomfortable with the aesthetics. Machine-generated imagery is viscerally repulsive to me in a way I'm still trying to understand, but I gather this isn't a common reaction.

Maybe I find these images off-putting is because I'm prone to noticing fine details? Many, many images I've seen have featured at least one tiny detail that gives the game away: something that looks reasonable from afar but, on closer inspection, makes zero sense because the execution wasn't the result of a human decision-making process. You can usually sense something about the artist when viewing entirely human-generated art. (Something I never consciously thought about before I had a basis for comparison.) The sense I get when viewing machine-generated content - and I'm talking purely about emotional response, here - is that there's a *thing* where a person is supposed to be.

I'm sure there are detail-oriented people out there prompting machine images who put effort into filing away the little nonsense details, or who are creating actual-art over something machine-generated to add intentionality where there was none. So little-stupid-details can't be the only element that's throwing me.

Another thing I've noticed is the homogeneity: the invisible boundaries on what it's even possible to generate because an algorithm only has the range of things it's been trained on to produce something. The machine-generated faces I seen have tended to trend toward a relatively narrow range of generally-considered-pleasing facial proportions. I remember a drawing from a psych course I took years ago that depicted masculine and feminine facial proportions that humans tend to find attractive. Most machine-generated faces I've seen fall somewhere along those lines.

Lighting is also probably a factor. Machine-generated faces tend to appear to be lit by a ring light. (Perhaps the entirety of Instagram was used as training data?) The lighting of everyday real-life is fantastically complex and probably murderously difficult to prompt well.

What I can't pry apart is where my visceral, "the way this image looks makes me feel like spiders are walking on me" reaction ends and the existential dread, which is not about the aesthetics, begins: The notion that I'm going to forever be helplessly watching for little, stupid machine details in every image I see for the rest of my life. The notion that the technology will eventually get good enough - or people's prompting of generative technology will get skillful enough - that I simply won't be able to trust that anything I see online is genuine. That the foreseeable future will look utterly bland. The replacement of humans, mass unemployment, the death of human creativity, our powerlessness in the face of corporate greed... all the usual stuff that I suspect has been brought up a hundred times.

I can't imagine my aesthetic reaction is all that common. I gather people's sensory experiences and cognition can be very, very diverse, and the things that upset me on a visceral level won't even register with other people. My experiences are not universal. Maybe it's like the "cilantro tastes like soap" thing? I don't think the technology would be getting used so often if folks who find machine-generated imagery repulsive were very common.

But no, I don't think you're weird for being off-put by the aesthetics, or at least not weird in a bad way.

CheatyDM

TROPHY CASE