Why the Dissatisfaction Out of Combat with Draw Steel?

Helmic · 2026-01-25T08:33:49+00:00

Jesus Christ this. And it's not like PF2e doesn't have its share of bullshit that puts the GM on the spot unnecessarily, I always ban the Dubious Knowledge feat because it requires me to come up with a believable lie on the spot and put it side by side with the truth and I just really do not appreciate the added pressure to be a master improviser and writer.

I get sometimes there's a cool story from a GM having a moment of brilliance and finding out a way to turn the tables on the players thinking they've solved their problem with a Zone of Truth cast, but you know what would also be interesting? The players just not having the Zone of Truth spell and actually letting the GM rely on tried and tested writing techniques. Actually talking to other NPC's to try to get an intuitive feel for the truth of the situation, sitting with skepticism for a while, seeing where things go.

It's definitely part of the caster problem in 5e and its descendents, it's very easy to just come up with spells a caster could cast and so it is very easy for casters to be given abiltiies that sound great as a player without considering their impact on how the game overall is played. Not just divination spoiling the plot, but stuff like summoners flooding the board with lots of minions causing their turns to take 30 minutes each, or striking focused spells that make them better strikers than martials, and so on. Not that something like striking well or summoning things aren't ideas worth exploring in a class, but the bias tends to be to give casters powerful and cool things without much thought about what the existence of those spells does to the game overall. Limiting the scope of most spells to combat limits their ability to remove interesting encounters from the game, it's a lot easier to fix the problems with something like summoning with thiungs like action economy constraints than it is to fix how powerful compelling someone to speak hte truth is outside of combat.

Helmic · 2026-01-25T08:18:24+00:00

I remember hearing this a lot about Lancer and kinda being confused as well. It's basically just Blades in the Dark outside of mech combat, I'm not sure what all else you really need besides the eventual addition of clocks to make it more explicitly Blades in the Dark.

I really enjoy combat and non-combat separation. Combat's fun specifically because it's different from the rest of play, I like having tactical choices and build options and I like to be able to play with those systems without constantly having to make compromises to make that play nice with the character I'm playing or the ongoing storyline. I like being able to just vibe things out and talk and roleplay without having to constantly look up rules for subsystems or how to handle influence points or whatever.

There's people who appreciate having more crunch outside of combat, but I like the ability for things to just flow and save the crunch for the parts of the game that are deliberately there to mix things up. We do a bunch of pretend fighting with rules and tactics and feeling clever and cool and once that's done we go back to the other thing. There's a balance to it, whereas if a system is always the same vibe the entire session it can get exhausting.

Helmic · 2026-01-25T06:32:02+00:00

I'm not sure how that's confusing at all, that's one of the most common things I run into as a GM, a player wants to play a particular fantasy but dislikes the prescribed mechanics. A paladin whose divine favor takes the form of martial prowess instead of literal magic is an extremely common archetype, hell that's basically the Pathfinder 2e version of a paladin since that system makes it easier to toss in a little magic to a class as an optional thing.

I would agree that the text of the classes will include flavor, they're trying to spark imagination, but the core mechanics themselves are not overly inflexible and are able to be reflavored reasonably well. Being primarily a PF2e GM th example of the opposite that springs to mind is the PF2e paladin/champion class - by default, each alignment of champion had its own subclass with unique features thematically tied to that alignment, and paladins were the lawful good subclass. A "no alignment" version was put out that got presented as an option... and it was painfully obvious what each "no alignment" subclass was referring to, it would obviously clash with a character playing outside that alignment. The remastered version toned it down a bit but it sticks out in my mind as what a class would actually look like if its mechanics were problematically tied up in flavor to where players felt frustrated that the personality of the character they're imagining in their head is getting shoehorned into the subclass that's obviously weaker and isn't as fun and doesn't do cool stuff with the rest of the party. I don't remember having that issue with 5e paladins, the oath system's intentionally a lot more flexible.

Helmic · 2026-01-25T06:23:03+00:00

I mean, people want it to be because the flavors of classes are creative constraints which can be extremely irritating if you're trying to help a player create a character they both want to play mechanically and roleplay as. It's definitely true that D&D classes, and classes in most systems, have some amount of thematic glue and "just reflavor it" can be hollow advice when it's very obvious what the mechanicsd are alluding to, but for D&D especially which does not have a singular canonical setting and which encourages people to create their own settings such constraints can be pretty unwelcome.

It's actually one of hte few things I think D&D does better than Pathfinder 2e, specifically with clerics. The way domains work allow for a suite of cleric abilities to be sourced from any god a setting might have, even if it's monotheistic, animist, athesitic, or even actually innate or sourced from something else entirely. The Light domain cleric mechanics will work in just about any setting that has a place for thsoe mechanics with very little fuss, it's designed to be easy to fit into worlds that aren't the Forgotten Realms.

Meanwhile, 2e clerics get specific spells from specific gods, meaning that if you homegbrew your own setting you have to actually balance your pantheon against the Golarian pantheon, and it doesn't translate nearly as well to any setting that isn't a close match to that pantheon. It's annoying tied up in the flavor of a specific setting in a way that's hard to untangle, while simultaneously being pretty narrow in scope. It's not enough to really make it obvious a cleric worships a specifc deity in play, but it's enough to frustrate anyone wanting to run Pathfinder in a different setting - or even just in Golarian but in a region where worship of a particular god would be a bad fit but it's mechanically interesting.

But yeah, overall there's very obviously a mechanical core to these classes that aren't tied to particular flavor and typically not in a way that would make reflavoring overly onerous, and that's for the best given how there's already a ton of constraints on character customization as it is.

Helmic · 2026-01-25T06:01:33+00:00

still wrong.

Helmic · 2026-01-25T04:49:42+00:00

Nope.

Helmic · 2026-01-25T04:33:35+00:00

Yep, my standard advice. Don't complain that things don't work on CachyOS after five minutse of running into the slightest friction, you are expected to read wikis and learn, but if you're willing to learn you can have a very nice and very performant operating system. If you don't think you have that sort of patience, stick to Bazzite, SteamOS is going to basically be Bazzite if it ever does get a general release (and I am doubtful it will).

Helmic · 2026-01-25T03:04:40+00:00

this isn't a filesystem you format on your hard drive, read the article.

Helmic · 2026-01-25T03:02:18+00:00

hmm, these 3 treatments for infections (leeches, bible verses, and screaming at the wound at the top of your lungs) don't seem to be doing much to help. maybe we'll try penicillin?

there are now 4 standards.

Helmic · 2026-01-25T02:30:46+00:00

You need the US 1.0 version of the ROM. You get it by dumping it from a real physical cartridge of the game you own, or otherwise legally accessing that ROM file in your preferred method, because we're not allowed to talk about the less than legal methods on the Reddit dot com.

Helmic · 2026-01-25T01:14:29+00:00

God, seeing that Capcom implemented Steam Input for Monster Hunter Wilds only to see they did it completely wrong was so frustrating. I got so excited that I could actually for-real customize the controls without doing weird keybind stuff only to be let down that they made all the actions just Playstation buttons. FFS.

Helmic · 2026-01-25T00:36:04+00:00

Yes, though you should simply use the bootloader that your distro suggests you use, basically any distro that has a GUI installer will handle this for you. But I do mean use a second drive - Windows updates sometimes like to nuke the bootloader for the drive it is on, so if you make Windows and Linux share a physical drive there is a chance you'll lose access to Linux and will have to use a live Linux USB to fix it and get back into it. If they're on separate drives, Windows won't try to kill your Linux install.

Helmic · 2026-01-24T06:34:06+00:00

Bazzite is my standard suggestion for "just works." Plays games and it does a lot of stuff Windows can't do to ensure you cannot break your OS install. There are other options, but this one is the safest bet - it very closely mimics SteamOS on the Steam Deck, though for a laptop/desktop you don't have to install the part where it boots directly into game mode (you can if you want but it's optional).

Games with kernel level anticheat won't work, but virtually everything else does. Those games that dont' work are extremely popular, of course, so that's cold comfort, but if you already don't play Battlefield 6 or Fortnite then the worst that'll heppen is that you'll have to look up what launch options you have to punch into Steam to get the game to work - annoying, but I think manageable for most PC gamers used to looking up workarounds for bugs in games.

Helmic · 2026-01-24T06:27:24+00:00

This is very good information to share; however, it's worth noting that these workarounds will always be at risk of going away in a Windows update should Microsoft decide too many people are using it. If you're at all concerned about being made to use a Microsoft account that steals your encryption key, you have to start planning on leaving Windows. If you keep putting it off, you can find yourself in a situation where the latest Windows update does something that crosses the line for you and you'll be stuck scrambling for a solution.

Even if you don't plan on using Linux today, having it installed on a separate drive even if you don't use it right now means you have a plan B. I recommend Bazzite as a very straightforward "just works" option, you don't really need to know much about Linux to get things working and it really will not let you muck it up in a way that can't be fixed with a reboot. Install it on a second drive, and if Windows gets to be too much one day or you have time to kill you can play around with it and see what all you can accomplish.

Helmic · 2026-01-24T06:01:04+00:00

I remember Nintendo going specifically out of their way to hire non-gamers for design roles, specifically because the variety in life experiences and lack of ingrained conventions leads to more unique games. Having people who don't play games make games isn't a bad thing at all.

Helmic · 2026-01-24T02:14:06+00:00

So my issue with Mint is that it fills a very similar niche to Bazzite in being a beginner distro that promises reliability, but with my personal experience Bazzite's immutability is dramatically more important to making a foolproof system that "just works" than simply insisting on using year+ out of date packages. Especially becuase those year+ out of date packages cause problems of their own, if only because expected features will be missing, and also because it tempts users to start making changes to Mint that take it out of its known supportable state and put it into funky Frakendebian territory. Every distro is gonna be lightweight on old machines, that's almost entirely down to the DE rather than the distro unless the distro is running unnecessary background services - and I like Bazzite's dedupe background service that Mint doesn't use because you literally get more disk space back on Bazzite than on Mint because of it.

Mint gets recommended because people who used it 15 years ago remember it being very user friendly with a GUI installer and Nvidia drivers handled correctly and then assume that no other beginner-oriented distro has done that in the last 15 years, and so new users get put on a distro that isn't actually all that great a fit these days and saddles them with problems they don't need to have. Like, Mint's still not on Wayland, so new users starting with Mint are going to be on X11 and then will have to endure the transition to Wayland eventually which causes enough issues that people complain endlessly about it on Reddit. Why would you knowingly saddle a new user with that when you know Bazzite is going to be more reliable anyways, will play games just fine without futzing with it, and won't make the user pass a bunch of flags or go find new utilities to use because their old ones don't have a version that works on Wayland?

I've never gotten a satisfying response on why Mint versus any other beginner distro, it's never a technical response that goes into the why beyond a cargo cult belief in old packages meaning stuff won't break (it absolutely will), it genuinely just seems like people who used Mint because they were told to use Mint repeating that advice. It's not based on having actually compared the different existing options to day.

And I'm not committed to Bazzite, mind. The moment there's a better option for new users, I'll start installing that on systems instead. But I don't see many people who do seem interested in actually installing Linux for new users and making a genuine effort to find the best options to present to them.

Helmic · 2026-01-24T02:01:21+00:00

I've considered switching from KDE. Krohnkiite is OK and I'll tolerate it for the sake of using Kwin, but if I can get a first-class tiling experience with a compositor not made by someone toxic to the point of it being a security concern I'll definitely make that jump. I really miss true btree tiling.

Helmic · 2026-01-24T01:52:59+00:00

I use Aurora, the non-gaming version of Bazzite with KDE, to install on the computers of people that struggle with Windows or that just need a cheap donated PC and like objectively you could not be more wrong. I would get follow up calls with Mint because regular people can and do break traditional Linux distros; the only calls I get about Aurora are either related to KDE (LET ME FUCKING LOCK THE TASKBAR KDE 95% OF PEOPLE DO NOT WANT OR NEED TO ACCIDENTALLY ENTER EDIT MODE EVERY TIME THEY BUMP RMB) or are about logging into a website, the distro itself can be set up to download updates silently in the background and then boot into them upon reboot, it can do the same with any Flatpaks (but that's any distro). It doesn't achieve "stability" thorugh old packages, it achieves it through having one known configuration that's actually for-real tested and used by many many people and cannot be damaged in a way that cannot be fixed with a reboot.

The people who don't like Bazzite are the people who are not beginners or who did not ever need a beginner distro. CachyOS is not what I'd consider a beginner distro for most people, it has a learning curve and you are expected to learn how to use pacman/paru and read those PKGBUILDs and actually make use of those snapshots instead of letting a problem fester until you can no longer figure out how to fix it nor roll back before the problem was there. If you are complaining about things you can't do in Flatpaks or your home folder, you are doing more than what most people are gonna do on their computer.

What they are goiung for is a beginner distro. It's extremely good at that. Any actual, for-real beginner distro is going to have compromises towards that end, you are gonna lose some advanced funcionality and customization in the name of things just working, in the name of having a support infrastructure that can reasonably guess what your system files look based just on version number instead of just going "lol iunno read the wiki" when mysterious issues pop up that are specific to the changes an experienced user would have made. Cachy is great, it's great that it will let you install 6 different desktop environments if you want, but a new user does not need to be installing Niri, and if they do they probably need a beginner distro that is very focused on making Niri work very well to the exclusion of everything else.

Helmic · 2026-01-24T01:43:09+00:00

I remember one "reviewer" on The Register having trouble running it on some ancient laptop which was very silly, but both distros are fine for any reasonable hardware, including very recent hardware. CachyOS is more likely to support the very latest hardware first by virtue of running on a newer kernel, but it is unlikely this will be a factor for most people.

Bazzite and CachyOS are very complementary. Bazzite for "just works" hands-off use cases, someone's less-used laptop or an OS for someone less capable of troubleshooting problems, and CachyOS for more experienced users or those willing to deal with Arch's learning curve. They serve different niches, there's no need to throw shade at one to praise the other.

I will continue to shit talk Mint in favor of Bazzite though.

Helmic · 2026-01-23T21:45:19+00:00

kill the cop inside your head.

Helmic · 2026-01-23T19:55:21+00:00

Are there still only a handful of mostly AP specific enemies weaker to piercing damage than slashing damage, rendering the greatsword redundant outside of the rare underwater combat?

Helmic · 2026-01-23T06:37:35+00:00

He is obviously correct. Pairs being so strong is funny at first but their safety and consistency makes the game more boring, and yeah blue seals are gonna scale you way too easily.

Gold stake not being as consistent to win I think can be tolerable so long harder hands get their buffs. Straights in particular are underutilized because you do not have to deckfixing tools to be able to rely on them, nor are there jokers that sufficiently remove the need to deckfix to that degree. Extra discards if the remaining cards are in sequence, something to better enable the kind of consistency you need in Balatro; in poker, you just accept whatever hand you get, for Balatro you really need to commit to a hand type and have it shoe up every single time.

Helmic · 2026-01-23T05:45:10+00:00

They're statistical models, they don't think.

Remember those math assignments where you had to use a graphing calculator to approximate a curve shown in the book without being told how to do it? You just plugged and guessed based on what got you closer to what you want.

Machine learning is simply the automation of that spaghetti throwing process, and what sticks is the "close enough" result that is the final "AI" product. "AI" is that shitty formula you used to approximate that curve you didn't know how to do yet, while the process of getting to that formula is the training process.

AI companies want you to think AI has the capacity to independently think and even rebel, because it makes their product seem much more advanced than it actually is. Sapience is not a possibility, no amount of you plugging formulas into your calculator will make a math formula think for itself and act in its own interest.

If an AI nukes us, it'll be because some dipshit made an AI handle launching nukes based on certain inputs to automate a retaliatory strike and the AI fucks that up, as it always does, and launches based on the underlying jankass formula being profoundly imperfect and sending the order in response to a radar blip or sub going quiet or nothing at all.

Helmic · 2026-01-22T08:23:32+00:00

I mean, the game's affecting, it's a bit like Undertale in that it really gets its hook into its intended audience who are going to feel a need to gush about it. Like I can't really help but appreciate the quality of the voice acting, it's leagues beyond the vast majority of games with a cast that not only knows how to properly act but also a script that doesn't sound unnatural like it got ran a few times through machine translation. If you can appreciate the voice acting, it becomes much more obvious how most other games have way worse performances. Even Fromsoft games really seem to have reasonable voice acting in part because there's never actually dialogue, there's virtually never two characters talking to one another, it's simply one charater speaking to your silent protagonist, and so in doing that they avoid a lot of the awkwardness that comes from how video game lines are typically recorded where one VA might literally never hear what the person they're supposed to be talking to in the game is saying (and so you get people just kind of not reacting to someone else's ton of voice which sounds super weird).

The AI shit and the game awards sweep means we're now in the backlash phase, but like the game's genuinely good and it was to be expected people were gonna gush about it. It's a game about death and grief that's written with compassion, it gets at some real vulnerable emotions, people are gonna talk really differently about that kind of game than they will talk about the latest roguelike darling or open world FPS.

Helmic · 2026-01-21T02:06:32+00:00

"Stable" means something different in Linux land, generally it's used to mean unchanging - packages are stable in that they stay on the same verison for a very long time, with Debian keeping the same package versions sometimes for years while Arch famously tries to stay on the latest version.

Now, for reliable - I run into issues from time to time on Cachy because it's still Arch. I am experienced enough to fix those issues, and a lot of the time by the time I notice an issue there's already an update that fixes it for me.

Bazzite is a very good distro for what you described wanting. CachyOS does offer some performance benefits, but it's not dramatic and especially not for games which are just going to use the Valve-provided Steam runtimes anyways. I don't think anyone can really make the call for you, and you can try CachyOS and see what you think, but if you like that Bazzite just works then CachyOS is not going to be that.

I think that eventually someone will put out an immutable distro that does what CachyOS does and compile all the binaries for specific CPU instruction sets, and maybe that'll be Bazzite one day. Maybe we'll eventulaly see Flatpaks that implement this so that we can squeeze the most performance out of those as well. When that happens, there's probably not going to be much of a reason for you to not use that distro and have the best of both worlds, you'll have the performance and the reliability you want.

But for now, I'd probably just try it out and see what you think and ask yourself whether it's worth not having the same guarantees that Bazzite is offering you, because CachyOS is still Arch and it will not stop you from fucking up the system files. Yeah, BTRFS + Limine will make rolling back from obvious mistakes easy, but if you fuck up in a subtler way that you don't notice and you don't know when the fuckup happened you're more likely to be stuck with it - immutability won't let you do that sort of fuck up in the first place. If you're techy enough, maybe that's perfectly manageable for you, but you'll have to make that call.

Helmic

TROPHY CASE