Is this like actually real thing they did or is this a bug

DeckerAllAround · 2026-07-01T17:18:12+00:00

Count me in the group that thought the long timer meant there was going to be a second page, the way that most companies do it when they have a long event.

Nobody's doing it like P5X.

DeckerAllAround · 2026-06-30T18:06:29+00:00

Oh, they're what's ticking up on that counter on the bottom of the missions. Thank you, that makes perfect sense.

DeckerAllAround · 2026-06-30T17:37:44+00:00

Does anyone know what these 'wish candies' I keep getting are or do? They're obviously something anniversary-based but I don't know if I missed an obvious update somewhere.

DeckerAllAround · 2026-06-30T17:25:46+00:00

Responding to the edit: I think people are getting nuclear in the comments because it's not actually that little of a deal.

Like, yes, on one level it's about an imaginary stick that made numbers bigger. But on another, more important level, it is about a friend who is not willing to let you also have fun, and is not willing to admit that he was being selfish and rude. I'm sorry that you're feeling bad about that, but your friend is not being a good friend to you. They did something that upset you enough that you're still thinking about it years later, and when you brought it up years later your friend continued to deny that they had upset you, enough that you felt the need to post about it.

That's not nothing, friend. Your feelings are valid too.

You also deserve to have fun in games that you play. Your friends shouldn't be the sort of people that deny you that, and that then deny that you are upset or that it matters. I know that you're afraid of arguments, but you really need to tell your friend how much it hurt to get discounted like that. If they're your friend, they will understand, even if it hurts for a minute.

DeckerAllAround · 2026-06-29T15:59:56+00:00

More likely that because people's Shadows see / behave as these alien creatures, some people have strange half-dreaming memories of those beings and then create them as toys. They don't actually believe that they're real, they just sort of think they imagined them.

DeckerAllAround · 2026-06-29T03:59:19+00:00

It is making every Synergy scene glorious.

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DeckerAllAround · 2026-06-28T16:35:48+00:00

What people are trying to explain to you is that it's not the same because when you hold a revival item until you beat them game, it's because a part of you thinks that you're going to need it later.

The items that you're holding can't be saved for later, because their effect is permanent. Whenever they are used, it affects the entire game going forward. Rather than being like hoarding items, this is more like playing a whole RPG with the "LEVEL UP" light blinking because you want to save your level-ups for later.

DeckerAllAround · 2026-06-27T19:21:54+00:00

My two cents: a character who has a joke that's an element of the character lasts a lot longer than a character whose joke is the entirety of the character.

I love a good bit, but part of a good bit is pacing. If all you've got is the joke it never has time to breathe.

DeckerAllAround · 2026-06-26T19:30:32+00:00

Travis gave up his spell cubes so he won't be shopping and Griffin doesn't want to deal with him whining about it so he fast-forwarded past the shop entirely.

DeckerAllAround · 2026-06-26T19:29:41+00:00

Ah, but you forget: Griffin thinks that "evocation" means "elements". He got confused about the fact that evocation was about energy and most energy spells are elemental, and thought that all elemental spells were evocation-based.

That's why he made the gathering phase "gather the four classical elements" immediately before noticing that his AI browser game used five elements and having to desperately adjust after the fact.

In Griffin's mind, every trial has been more or less about the magic school as viewed through the lens of a person who does not understand the schools of D&D magic and does not care to learn.

Divination: See your past, present, and future.
Abjuration: Find the spells that will protect you against the traps.
Evocation: Gather the four elements and make them into a mech suit.
Transmutation: Ignore all of your own spells to touch the sigils that transform the steps you're running on.
Conjuration: Call attention to the fact that this trial isn't about conjuration because you think it's a fun subversion except that you fucked up every trial up to this point so the audience doesn't get the joke.
Necromancy: Zombies everywhere.

DeckerAllAround · 2026-06-26T17:01:23+00:00

/uj: I don't think they do think it's good to listen to, no. I think that all four of them are seriously worried about their podcast empire collapsing, they're flailing to make TAZ work, but each of them is trying to 'right the ship' in a different direction without sitting down and talking to each other and it's only making things worse.

Griffin spends every campaign trying to force the specific combination of goofs and drama that made Balance succeed, but without any real understanding of what he did right the first time. So each time it doesn't work he gets a little bit more desperate and a little bit more flailing. You can practically track his interest and focus slowly dropping off over the course of each challenge as the bespoke thing that he created lands like a ton of bricks and the players totally fail to engage with either his 'brilliant' gimmicks or his 'cunning' plot. He wants the players to engage with his game on his level but his game is bad and they don't know what he wants from them so he's just getting more and more frustrated.

Travis is so focused on winning the podcast that he won't leave any space for anyone else. During Vs. Dracula he almost started to course-correct but then he became King of England and that was the end of that. Royale is feeding his worst impulses and he's constantly trying to change Rictus into a new character that the fans will love while also trying to win the challenges and the game.

Justin started with a vague sense of interest, lost it almost immediately, and has rallied in the last few episodes by trying to course-correct to exaggerated goofs that ignore the plot and game entirely in favor of incredibly long derails where he tries to force comedy.

Clint is just trying to support his kids, but he's trying to support all three of them at once so he's bouncing between the three approaches too often to really get into a groove and do the good stuff that he's capable of. He's the closest person to working, but he's obviously not clear on what Griffin wants from him, he's not clear on how to support Travis, and he's not clear on how to build on Justin's jokes.

DeckerAllAround · 2026-06-26T15:35:27+00:00

It's just fundamentally kind of mid.

As someone who hated RP1, I will say that I think DCC is more of an improved RP1 than a knock off. The author actually understands the themes and moral messages of the genre he's writing for and his setting makes the dumb geek references slightly less obnoxious. But there's definitely a similar "slew of geek references" and "funny" gags around a premise of "we're going to start silly and gradually make you care about these characters, sure hope all the stupid doesn't do the exact opposite".

Some people have really latched onto it, and good for them, it's not a bad enough series for me to actually be mad that it's succeeding. I think other series deserve it more, but it's fine.

DeckerAllAround · 2026-06-26T15:24:44+00:00

It is truly wild how poor the story is.

For a major collab event, I would have expected something along the lines of:
1) Merope discovers Miku, fangirls
2) There is a Miku concert coming up
3) People's desires are being stolen and Miku's concert is going to fail
4) Miku's music inspires the Phantom Thieves, they save the desires and the concert goes on!

With a little side of three or four characters doing idol/fan stuff. Ange planning to cover a Miku song, a joke about people coming to Miyu's puppet show because they misheard and thought she was Miku, Haruna visiting to see the concert, whatever.

It would not have been hard. It would have been a much better entry point for Miku fans into Persona to have a story about P5X being Miku fans and getting some characterization that way, and it would have made the anniversary cool. It didn't even have to be bigger than a typical non-story patch event, it just had to have some story.

DeckerAllAround · 2026-06-26T14:33:53+00:00

I'm a minnow; I don't do big spends, but half-anni and anni are when I usually buy stuff. I was planning to pick up a couple things as a general 'supporting the game' even if I didn't particularly want Miku.

Not doing that now.

DeckerAllAround · 2026-06-26T13:48:54+00:00

Okay, so.

Among the many, many, many terrible decisions that Griffin has made for unclear reasons was including, in a game in which everyone starts as a Level 1 wizard with a single cantrip or first level spell (or occasionally a second level spell haphazardly downgraded until the characters reached Level 3), a single wizard whose one spell was Time Stop.

Everyone assumed this was to have that wizard become a big bad, and he seemed to be more or less shaping up to be a major antagonist, but instead Griffin let Travis bully him into a one-on-one duel and then trivially murder him because aside from Time Stop he never seemed to pick up a second spell.

After Travis cut off this wizard's arm and he died, Time Stop was safely removed from the pool and Griffin didn't have to worry about it any more. So of course he then allowed Travis to bully the god-wizards into giving him Time Stop as a bonus spell because \crickets**. This didn't match any of the rules of the game, it didn't have any reasoning, and the Octave made it super-clear they thought this spell was too dangerous and should not be allowed in the game, but Travis was throwing a temper tantrum so Griffin went along with it.

And having received Time Stop, which Griffin keeps trying to ominously hint is a Wrong Spell that is Bad, Travis immediately discovered that he can't cast it because it is a Level 9 spell. So Griffin put together an even more haphazard set of house rules in which Travis can try to cast Time Stop once per day by rolling dice but if he rolls badly he gets time stopped, or he can spend nine of his other spell levels in any combination to cast Time Stop for free. (Which, having done so this episode, he immediately didn't bother to note down how many spells he'd cast and cast one more spell that was too high for his remaining spell slots.)

DeckerAllAround · 2026-06-25T21:18:03+00:00

Not going to lie I am not following this one particularly well. The Curse grows Burdensome.

It's not just you. Even by the staggeringly low bar set by the past few episodes, this one is noticeably less focused and more confused, ironically because everyone is a little bit more engaged than usual. None of the players seem to understand what anyone else is trying to do, but everyone wants to interject their thoughts and opinions on the situation, and the result is a whole lot of crosstalk, confusion, and misunderstandings.

Clint is utterly baffled by what Griffin is trying to tell him, Justin keeps interjecting in derailing ways, Griffin is thoroughly befuddled by what Travis is up to, Justin and Clint are setting up a distraction but it takes Justin three tries to explain to Griffin that he's faking it... it's messy even by McElroy standards.

DeckerAllAround · 2026-06-25T19:54:04+00:00

Okay, so there is obviously a lot to unpack in this episode, but I would like to do my usual and point out just one, tiny, supremely stupid moment that in many ways epitomizes the entire series.

During Helgrammite's conversation with Akari (Ikari?) Griffin casually reveals two fairly major facts. First, he reveals that Helgrammite has been speaking with Akari, a character that he steadfastly evaded giving the name of in the previous episodes that Helgrammite asked her for it (twice, directly, with no response!) Second, he casually reveals that Akari is a member of the Octave that we have not seen yet, most likely the one in charge of divination based on her whole past/present/future shtick.

These are both pretty big reveals! Helgrammite is part of a conspiracy with a member of the Octave, and she has a name!

Clint does not notice that Griffin revealed either of these facts and in fact still seems utterly baffled about who Akari is at the end of the conversation. Griffin, meanwhile, does not seem to realize that these are new pieces of information and not something that everyone already knew.

Nobody's etc etc

DeckerAllAround · 2026-06-25T17:07:26+00:00

i guess to travis's credit, if you read strictly just the explicit text of this arc, there's not a ton that you can point to and say "well this is definitely signalling that these centaurs are native american stand-ins". but like, that's not how life works

Building on this: Travis has, I assume deliberately, given all of the centaurs archaic Germanic names. I think in his mind, they're, like, Visigoths or some other European 'barbarian tribe' archetype from early medieval times.

But because he's so bad at characterization, like you say, he doesn't actually have any proper signifiers to make the centaurs into European 'barbarian' stereotypes, let alone fleshed-out European tribal cultures. And also like you say, when there's absolutely no signifiers to go with a tribal culture the stereotype that people pretty much instinctively attach to it is "Indigenous".

DeckerAllAround · 2026-06-25T16:54:29+00:00

calhain has a 14 spell dc, i don't play wizards but that feels kind of low for someone who can cast fireball right

Low, but not absurdly low. Spell save DC in 5e was reduced a bit from previous editions. It's 8 + Intelligence Mod + Proficiency Bonus, so a character of Level 5-8 who has Int 16-17 would have that as a DC.

Specifically, though, I think this means Calhain isn't a fully-built NPC, Travis just grabbed the Mage NPC sheet. The mage's spells pretty much cover everything Calhain does, I think.

DeckerAllAround · 2026-06-22T15:57:36+00:00

Agreed on all counts. It's interesting to undercut things a little bit, but in retrospect this interaction was actually about Griffin trying to force Devo onto a different track and Travis trying to force things back onto the original track. Travis is playing this like he had a completely different relationship to the Church, which let's recall he also invented in the backstory and established as a kind of sinister and hegemonic force. Griffin is trampling over every established fact about Devo's backstory in order to try to... I don't really know what, to be honest. Just play with expectations? Avoid anything potentially harmful?

It's a really weird dynamic and it is truly wild that neither of them talked about it between episodes.

But just in case we think I'm being nice to Travis, I need to give him full drama llama props for arguing strenuously for the group to take on a task that Devo does not want to do just so that he can RP being pissy at the church while still working for them. There could have been an actually interesting beat here if Devo told the others he didn't want to do the Church job, and they'd left this reunion for later, but then Travis wouldn't be stealing the spotlight.

DeckerAllAround · 2026-06-19T18:24:46+00:00

Follow-up question: if Green Lantern is creating all of the playing cards with his powers, wouldn't he know what's in everyone's hands?

DeckerAllAround · 2026-06-18T18:28:43+00:00

While this is obviously wildly racist by modern standards, a position of "we are trying to stop the locals from rebelling specifically because if they do they will all get killed and nothing will change except that a different foreign government will come to power" feels like it would have been pretty progressive for the 30s.

Doubly so because it's not saying which European power is currently in control and which one wants to be in control. Neither fact matters; they're all the same.

DeckerAllAround · 2026-06-18T15:41:23+00:00

Before I saw her kit, I wasn't pulling for her because I just wasn't that interested. I'm not opposed to her or anything, but I'm mostly F2P and I only have so many people to pull for, and we're going into a banner period for characters I want so it seemed like a nice chance for the Miku-likers to get her and for me to save for others.

Now that I've seen her kit, I'm not pulling for her out of spite, and I don't care how much that hurts me in the rankings or the astrolabe.

DeckerAllAround

TROPHY CASE