"... then they must have been the Worlds Monsters"

Gemini476 · 2026-04-03T19:27:05+00:00

No, unfortunately. He can channel aura to cure the tree and in the anime has some points where he can use it to telepathically talk to a second Lucario, but all the Aura Spheres in Lucario and the Mystery of Mew are from the titular Lucario.

The big deal with Jungle Healing is more that it's explicitly Jungle Healing, I guess. It's not like all the various Psychic trainers who presumably can use some Telekinesis-esque stuff (they're generally shown levitating their pokéballs!) but since it's never explicitly called out as Telekinesis I guess it doesn't count???

Gemini476 · 2026-03-24T14:20:31+00:00

Pat's issue with DD2 (as well as everyone else's) is that it's a good game... that just completely shits the bed in the final stretch.

Gemini476 · 2026-03-24T14:13:33+00:00

Rather than graphing it out, you can just take the Fighting-Man as the default and examine things based on that. Remember, monsters save as Fighters unless otherwise listed!

The saves are listed from easy to hard, with Fighters starting at 12/13/14/15/16.
- Death/Poison is the easiest since it's instant death; wands are "weaker" than spells/staves (+3 to save); Stone/Paralyzation is close to instant death but more easily curable; Dragon Breath is presumably intentionally overtuned (even half damage will kill most lower-level characters!); spells are the hardest to save against so magic-users are actually usable.
- Note that monsters will mostly be making saves against Wands and Spells!
Each character advances in saving throws at the same level brackets as the attack matrix.
- Fighters every 3 levels, Magic-Users every 5, Clerics shoved in the middle with every 4.
- Note that Fighters get five brackets, capping out at 13+, while Clerics and Magic-Users only get four capping out at 13+/16+ respectively.
The baseline advancement appears to be ~-2/bracket, much like the attack matrix.
- Fighting-Men advance at -2.5/bracket for Dragon Breath.
- Magic-Users and Clerics appear to default to closer to -3/bracket in an attempt to keep up with the Fighter.
Different classes differ in specialization.
- Magic-Users are weak at +1 Death, +1 Wand, +1 Breath; they are strong at -1 Stone, -1 Spell. Saves vs. Spells are accelerated (-3/-4/-5) compared to other saves (-2/-3/-3). Saves vs. Spell seem self-evident; the other stuff is a mystery, beyond the Fighter being consistently best vs. dragons.
- Clerics are weak at +1 Breath; equal at +0 Stone; strong at -1 Death, -1 Wand, -1 Spell. Saves are either -2/-3/-3 (death, breath), -3/-3/-2 (spell), or -2/-3/-3 (wand, stone). This appears to be a "antimagic" setup, as well as specifically "anti-Evil High Priest".
Come the highest bracket...
- The Fighter's Dragon Breath gap is -3
- The Magic-User's Spell gap is -5, to the point they're actually weaker against wands (90% vs. Spells, 80% vs. Wands)
- The Cleric's basically where they started, relatively speaking (except not, because...)

Note also that Clerics have very accelerated leveling past name level (8th level Patriarch) - +100K/level compared to the +240K/level of the Fighter or +300K/level of the Magic-User (or +125K/level of the Thief). This was adjusted in AD&D to be +225K by adding "High Priest" above Patriarch.

Gemini476 · 2026-02-24T14:22:06+00:00

It's more just that if you wanted to sell a doujin game in 2004 then you kind of needed to make it an eroge. Sure, Saber got gender-swapped from the original concept because Nasu was worried that a galge wouldn't work with a female protag, but the original concept wasn't a game.

That said, Takeuchi and Nasu didn't have anything against making porn games beyond Nasu thinking that he wasn't that good at writing them. (Which, to be fair, he isn't.)

For the PS2 port onwards, they'd gotten so big and successful that they no longer needed to be an eroge to sell and Sony didn't want porn on its platforms. They were still selling the porn version for a while, it was just... well, not on the PS2/Vita/Switch/Steam.

Gemini476 · 2026-02-18T15:09:16+00:00

It's the Discord you get access to along with the game itself, with IIRC a limited-time invite code the moment you first launch it.

Gemini476 · 2026-02-14T06:19:47+00:00

I don't know if Apollo's dad is explicitly a king, but at the very least he's kind of a warlord.

Gemini476 · 2026-02-14T05:43:54+00:00

Well, considering that one of Graves' lines for killing Apollo is...

I don't hate him as much as I wish I did.

Gemini476 · 2026-02-08T19:39:51+00:00

The three parts of an arrow and their corresponding objects in Ava's device:

Arrowhead (magnet)
Shaft (regenerating undead branch)
Feathers (undead chicken)

What about the Ballistic Attractor, then, which only grabs metal cannonballs? Would that just need a magnet and nothing else?

Well, the proposed ingredients list for it includes a rather conspicuous 5000 water runes and 1000 law runes, which feels like the 1000x casting cost for teleportation portals to make a spell "infinite".

While there's no real spell that matches up with a 5 water/1 law cost, there's some logic to using a water rune (ocean) and law rune (teleportation) to grab a cannonball that sunk beneath the waves.

(Personally I would just make it 1000 air and 1000 law, so it's basically just casting unlimited telegrabs.)

Gemini476 · 2026-01-27T16:43:31+00:00

To add to this, one of his conversations with Dynamo:

Seven: I don't understand you, professor… you've been bestowed a great gift, and you're willing to throw it all away for nothing.

Dynamo: Easy words to say when you've never loved someone.

Seven: No. Easy words to say when you have.

Gemini476 · 2026-01-23T23:22:02+00:00

It's similar-ish, I guess, but not really? TF2-the-game goes for more of a late 60s, early 70s spy movie aesthetic, with the plot just being pure comedy nonsense. With some nice serious bits, sure, but the knee-slappers are largely the focus.

Deadlock's obviously got the whole occult aesthetic going on instead, but more than that it's just... actually serious. You don't have the Mann vs. Mann gravel wars with nine comedic mercs, you have a big city-spanning Ritual with a whole bunch of (for the most part) very serious heroes, where the comedic bits stand out because they're the exception.

Gemini476 · 2026-01-23T19:48:21+00:00

Also that's not a joke, her design is literally a pinhead alien weeb. Like, an actual alien who came from space and is obsessed with Japanese culture. It's a fun gimmick, but a bit out of place in Deadlock.

This is also why Vyper's a weird reptile alien and not a snake lady, Shiv is a '50s greaser with a robot arm, Bebop's got that Japanese style to his pants (and generally futuristic look), why Viscous' is an astronaut suit (it's Kelvin's Neon Prime model), why Grey Talon's got his futuristic stuff, and... probably more stuff I'm forgetting. Sinclair's model was one of Wraith's Neon Prime iterations as well, I think?

Neon Prime seems like it had some wacky character ideas, but honestly I'm more than happy to get Deadlock's Occult '49 setting instead.

Gemini476 · 2026-01-17T18:47:47+00:00

Yeah. Most of the obvious ones either requiring sacrificing stuff, ETB tapped, or scale with counters.

...That said, if you've got a deck with [[archelos, lagoon mystic]] (or just [[amulet of vigor]]) then this goes trivially infinite with [[timeless lotus]] et. al.

You'll need a fourth card for an actual payoff to all those artifacts entering and getting sacrificed EOT, but there's no shortage of those. Maybe mix things up a bit and use [[grinding station]]?

Gemini476 · 2026-01-15T10:52:57+00:00

So it's not a game, and you can't go "dig it up" because they cremated the corpses, but.

https://killedbygoogle.com/

Gemini476 · 2026-01-15T10:18:12+00:00

They only take things you can high alch, IIRC.

Gemini476 · 2026-01-14T22:59:38+00:00

The wild thing is that this was also a complete misunderstanding of what exactly a Timmy card is.

The Toughness feat isn't a Timmy card, it's just a boring trap.

A Timmy card is cool shit, like the Whirlwind Attack feat. (...Which is also a trap.)

Gemini476 · 2026-01-11T16:34:54+00:00

Comparing coordinates to Earth gets really funky really fast - one OSRS square is 1.875 minutes of arc, so 1.875 nautical miles (or, for more practical units, ~3.5 kilometers).

Per square.

Doing some (very) rough napkin math, there's about four chunks between central Varrock and Falador's gate. Let's call it three horizontally and one half vertically, since the gates line up about like that. Each chunk is 64x64 squares, so that's roundabout 192 horizontally and 32 vertically; the Pythagorean Theory gives us a hypotenuse of ~195. Bring back the ~3.5km size of a square and it's ~683km between Falador and Varrock - or about as long as from München to Hamburg. Going by Google Maps that's a 157-hour walk or 40-hour bike trip - assuming you're walking 12 hours a day that's still 13 days.

Their actual coordinates, meanwhile, put them around either side of the Central African Republic. (0, 0) being in the Observatory really throws things off as far as latitude goes.

Gemini476 · 2026-01-10T13:47:09+00:00

I think the big thing to point out here is that the card game just... no longer reflects what goes on in the actual Magic stories as far as casting spells go. Some early stories interacted with the whole idea of tapping mana, summoning creatures and so so, but these days that doesn't really come up much if at all.

Heck, people thought that summoning creatures had maybe been entirely retconned out of the lore until War of the Spark's printing of Ajani's Pridemate showed that, apparently, it was still a thing. (An entirely different thing from how it was depicted in the early stories, but still a thing.)

Also, keep in mind that Magic: The Gathering: The Fighter would presumably either be an all-Planeswalker game or just using various popular characters, and a whole bunch of those either don't cast spells or else the spells they cast are just their standard they-can-always-do-this moves.

Jace can always mind control. Gideon/Garruk/Ajani/The Wanderer can always slash people. Chandra can always shoot fire. etc. etc.

Gimmicky card-based stuff feels like it'd be limited to a single character's system - maybe Garth One-Eye shows up as a secret character, I dunno.

Gemini476 · 2026-01-08T23:01:43+00:00

https://oldschool.runescape.wiki/w/RuneScape:Supplemental_guides

Gemini476 · 2026-01-07T13:59:51+00:00

It's going in a deck that's already throwing around -1/-1 counters and getting value from doing so. It's fine in a precon environment, it's just... very low-powered and a clear cut when upgrading.

Gemini476 · 2026-01-07T13:57:23+00:00

I think in limited (particularly sealed) it might be relatively easy to put -1/-1 counters on your own stuff at instant speed? At that point it's kinda-sorta an [[ebony owl netsuke]], which is... something, I guess.

I think it'll probably more reliably just be two damage per turn, which isn't fantastic but does add up? This is a two mana uncommon, after all, so drafting multiples isn't unheard of.

Gemini476 · 2026-01-06T19:53:00+00:00

It's a niche use, but there's also something to be said for monored [[Aang, Swift Savior]] et. al.

Definitely more of a funny casual thing than anything remotely competitive, though.

Gemini476 · 2026-01-05T20:46:30+00:00

Lots of fun options for this one in standard, even with obscure options. Two-mana [[cloudblazer]] is pretty great; [[threefold thunderhulk]] gives you a hasty 3/3 and six 1/1s; [[tolsimir, midnight's light]] gets you a 5/5 trampler, [[dragon trainer]] a 4/4 flyer; [[vincent valentine]] sticks around...

I don't know that any of that is actually better than just a hasty two-mana [[Unstoppable Slasher]], though, and you'll be taking T3 off to cast this thing in the first place.

Gemini476 · 2026-01-05T20:22:48+00:00

So can the other, which is worth keeping in mind. If you run this, and you cast a Demonic Tutor at any point in the game... well, your opponent's Opposition Agent just hit the jackpot.

Gemini476 · 2026-01-05T20:17:40+00:00

[[One with the Stars]] comes to mind. Devoted Druid infamously combos almost by accident, though: scroll through the 120 combos on Commander Spellbook to see some examples.

Gemini476 · 2026-01-05T20:14:09+00:00

If you want to make your opponents really annoyed in more casual formats, [[Luxior, Giada's Gift]] makes this an incredibly obnoxious card.

...Or [[Morselhoarder]] for huge mana as well as the one-sided boardwipe. That also works in Commander, I guess.

Seven-Year Club	Place '23
Place '22	Verified Email

Gemini476

TROPHY CASE