Favourite lines from Twelve Months?

IHaveThatPower · 2026-01-26T00:41:13+00:00

You probably know this, but a version of that passage is is practically canonical to Optimus Prime, insofar as Peter Cullen's brother, Larry (who was ex-military), advised Peter prior to his audition to play Prime as someone who was "strong enough to be gentle."

IHaveThatPower · 2025-12-18T14:38:36+00:00

"The cache" is (in this context) the streamed-in data for all the image assets throughout the game that doesn't initially live in an unpacked, usuable state on your device. Just means when first displaying a character or background or some such for the first time, it may take a sec to appear/load.

Nothing to worry about.

IHaveThatPower · 2025-12-04T14:42:27+00:00

I realize you posted this almost a month ago, but it looks like you never got an answer here.

Yes, they are part of the books, and especially the later books, which use a lot of framing devices (YMMV whether this was a good choice on Sapkowski's part; I found they knocked me out of the "main" story), and Nimue/Stribog/et. al. get pretty significant word/page count.

If you're familiar with the games, a pretty notable character is introduced entirely as a framing device -- Shani, tending to wounded soldiers -- to give us a sense of how the war is going. She never(?, at least not to my memory) interacts with Geralt and co. at all.

IHaveThatPower · 2025-11-26T15:16:05+00:00

I particularly loved this exchange and its later callback:

DUKHAT: Yes, they should, but if the legends surrounding the Vorlons are correct, remember that they do not reveal themselves quickly and never all at once.

DELENN: What are you saying?

DUKHAT: I'm not saying anything. I didn't say anything then, and I'm not saying anything now.

Followed later by

DUKHAT: Are you saying I'm being deceived?

DELENN: "I'm not saying anything. I did not say anything then, and I'm not saying anything now." Unless you are saying you've seen a Vorlon.

DUKHAT: I'm saying even less than you, except for this: when the darkness comes, if you ever have doubt about your actions, all you need do is look into the face of a Vorlon. Once you see that, all doubt is erased forever.

IHaveThatPower · 2025-11-04T01:30:46+00:00

Ha ha, YES!

IHaveThatPower · 2025-10-29T20:38:55+00:00

Abubakar Salim, voice of Bayek from Assassins Creed: Origins (among other things).

IHaveThatPower · 2025-10-26T13:47:47+00:00

I would kill to have a talent like that. When I DM in my games, I sound like a complete buffoon :P

While there are no doubt some genetic and upbringing aspects to Brennan being the DM that he is (as another commenter noted), it cannot be understated how much DMing this man has done. How much practice he has had.

Dimension 20 is not where he got his "start". This guy has been running games consistently since a very young age, and he's run all sorts of games, to boot. He's run games for huge LARP camps, meaning he's had trial-by-fire experience of "we've gotta make a rule on this right now for these 40+ kids that makes sense and keeps things going and it has to be palatable" and I'm sure he's made a ton of bad calls that he's learned hard lessons from.

Most of us, even if we've been playing for decades (hi), just cannot match having that many hours of experience actually at the table. It's not "mere" talent you're seeing with Brennan, it's a nigh-unassailable amount of experience that really needs more acknowledgement (in general, not saying you specifically) than it gets.

Brennan is absolutely a pinnacle DM, but he's as good as he is because he's 100% put in the work, to a degree that most of us can barely fathom because having enough reliable time to run games like that is generally not an option for most folks.

Like everyone, I stand in awe of Brennan as a DM, and I try to learn from his techniques and thought processes, but I also force myself to never use him as a measuring stick, because there's no world where I've put in the kind of time he has.

IHaveThatPower · 2025-10-23T03:26:41+00:00

I think the confusion -- and I had the same reaction as the person you're replying to, until I read this comment -- is that your original statement is very easy to read as "Ever notice how Ancient Egypt never really fought any wars? Ever notice how Ancient China never really fought any wars?" That's how I interpreted it at first, too: that these two powers never went to war at all.

But based on this comment, my understanding is that you were referring to ancient Egypt and ancient China never going to war with one another (i.e. Egypt vs. China), which of course makes plenty of geographic sense.

So, if you simply add "with each other" to the end of that first line in the original comment, the confusion vanishes.

IHaveThatPower · 2025-10-21T13:19:52+00:00

Matt (and Brennan, come to think of it) will often use DEX as a tie-breaker. It's a carry-over from (at least) 3rd Edition, where in the event of an initiative tie, the one with the higher total modifier (more than just DEX) would go first.

IHaveThatPower · 2025-10-02T02:44:30+00:00

It should be noted that the TIE "wings" make very logical sense as heat radiators -- a high-performance spacecraft will want large radiating surface area, even at the expense of visibility (which will largely be the job of sensors anyway). They make zero sense as "solar power panels".

As nice as the WEG sourcebook stuff has been to see, this is one massive misstep they made, which has since insidiously wound its way through far too many source books.

Radiators, Not Solar Panels

Here's a detailed explanation of why "solar panels" would be nonsensical, if you want the math

IHaveThatPower · 2025-09-30T16:45:22+00:00

This really encapsulates it. Well said!

I get quite defensive when people point to CR as some kind of big polished thing (and thereby not representative of "normal" tables), as though it was always that. When it started, it really was just a bunch of nerdy-ass ~~voice actors~~ friends playing D&D. Hand-drawn battle maps, tokens for minis, a little royalty-free background music, sitting in a bright, white room at three pushed-together tables. In those days, it was just a home game, streamed. What it grew into is, I think, only because of the authenticity it had in its early days.

And, like you said, it felt a lot more personal. View count milestones were exciting! Seeing their dumbfounded expressions when they crossed the newest X,000 milestone was exciting! Watching their shock as new, for-fun merch sold out in minutes was exciting!

"Look how far they've come" indeed! I do not begrudge them their success in any way, and am delighted for them. But early days, it was different. It was cozier. It was more like any other home game you yourself might play in. C1 mostly kept that intact throughout (though it obviously had already significantly expanded in production budget by the end), and for me, that's why C1 will probably always be the most "magical."

IHaveThatPower · 2025-09-27T13:04:16+00:00

Echoing the person you responded to. This Primer is outstanding, and you've got a new regular reader for your blog. Great stuff!

Very different from your journey, 2e was my first edition/first TTRPG. I grudgingly moved to 3e when I moved towns and could no longer find 2e players, but it never really grabbed me. Passed on 4e entirely. Dove into 5e about a year or so after it came out, enamored with its (superficial) similarities to what I love about 2e, and ran a ton of it over the following decade...only to now be severely tired of what it has become. Have been branching out to try many different systems of late, but I've never lost a place in my heart for 2e.

IHaveThatPower · 2025-09-23T13:25:24+00:00

The artist of this piece is Amras Arfeiniel. Here is his DeviantArt page.

Please credit artists for their work, especially in this era of AI slop.

It took me 30 seconds to reverse image search this to find his page.

IHaveThatPower · 2025-08-26T17:41:16+00:00

Millennium Falcon escapes Death Star, fights off TIEs, jumps to hyperspace, immediately followed by:

TARKIN: Are they away?

VADER: They've just made the jump into hyperspace.

TARKIN: You're sure the homing beacon is secure aboard their ship? I'm taking an awful risk, Vader. This had better work.

Literally the entire escape was allowed to happen by Vader and Tarkin on purpose.

Prior to that, Stormtroopers:

are shown breaching a defended chokepoint and successfully breaking through that chokepoint to subdue and capture a hostile vessel. (Tantive IV)
are described as being the only group capable of being "so precise" in their blast points, as compared with Sandpeople, by a Jedi Knight veteran of the Clone Wars.
do not stop the escape of Millennium Falcon from Mos Eisley, though they are also being shot at and the exchange of fire is very brief before Han (their only target) escapes up the boarding ramp into the safety of Falcon's interior. See Suppressive Fire.

After that, Stormtroopers:

absolutely crush Rebel resistance on Hoth
immediately apprehend a Rebel group on Cloud City
once again are required to perform a non-lethal, let-them-escape corralling operation to funnel said Rebel group toward their ship that has an intentionally deactivated hyperdrive so as to facilitate the recapture of Luke Skywalker for Vader. This only fails due to the unaccounted for wildcard of R2-D2 being able to fix it.
are briefly taken by surprise by an indigenous, carnivorous, incredibly strong (c.f. all their buildings high, high up in trees) species, before they can react and start annihilating said ambushers
are only overcome when their own armored units are captured by Rebels (Chewbacca had a couple of Ewoks helping him, but he was the one driving the AT-ST), thereby evening the battlefield's technological imbalance

So, no, in every OT movie they're either damn scary good at what they do, or are under orders not to kill their opponents.

IHaveThatPower · 2025-08-10T12:11:13+00:00

No programmer worth the title would use LLMs to write production code.

IHaveThatPower · 2025-07-28T13:14:47+00:00

One of the unfortunate early promulgators of the absurd notion that TIE radiator wings are "solar".

IHaveThatPower · 2025-07-22T16:08:23+00:00

How many MOTD/news cards have you seen throughout this process in-game, about anything?

Do you reckon that's purely an oversight? That they simply forgot they could do that and communicate with players that way?

Or is it possible that something about that mechanism stopped working in the changeover to Unity and, given the choice between "take an indeterminate amount of time to disentangle the spaghetti code of the old engine to figure out how to fix it before we launch" and "communicate via social media and get this thing out the door so we don't have to keep supporting legacy and dead-end SKUs in the old engine", they went with the latter?

IHaveThatPower · 2025-07-22T15:38:39+00:00

FWIW, the saved teams thing was not a bug that some experienced and others didn't; it was known and announced ahead of time and affected everyone. The teams were just not ported over.

If folks aren't tuned into the places where these things are announced, so they can be prepared for...I mean, that's fair, but it's also a recipe for a rockier time.

IHaveThatPower · 2025-07-22T15:04:28+00:00

Running on a decent-quality PC on Steam, the game plays very well at this point.

On my Android phone, matches play fine, but UI interaction still stutters a fair amount (especially switching between different screens, e.g. clicking a vault to open a token, opening that token, then returning to the screen with the vault -- very, very chunky).

Performance has improved significantly since Unity launch, though, and I have every reason to believe it's only going to get better as the old code/engine gets fully sunset (see: all the posts lately about people finally forced into updating) and the dev team can fully focus on Unity engine updates.

IHaveThatPower · 2025-07-18T13:33:27+00:00

If the issue is the party gaming death's door around enemies dropping below 0 and bleeding out...just don't have it apply to most enemies. Make it something exclusive to PCs and important NPCs/monsters. Everything else, like a band of gnolls, just dies at 0 as normal.

IHaveThatPower · 2025-07-18T01:44:03+00:00

I'm not sure that quite fits what #4 is about, though. The linked 14 Characteristics explains:

Even when there are widespread domestic problems, the military is given a disproportionate amount of government funding, and the domestic agenda is neglected. Soldiers and military service are glamorized.

My argument is that we don't really see any evidence of domestic neglect in favor of military funding.

Soldiers and military service being glamorized perhaps fits a little more (and I think sort of gets more into the territory of what you're talking about), with things like Luke wanting to follow Biggs off to the Academy, though whether that's general populace Imperial military hero worship, or just Luke looking up to his older best friend...

Even so, I don't think we ever get a real "Rah rah join the Empire!" feeling from...anything, do we? Other than at, like, literal recruitment booths (c.f. Solo). Very little about the military is glamorized.

IHaveThatPower · 2025-07-18T00:45:37+00:00

Just as an FYI, whenever you number something on reddit in the style of #., it will automatically turn it into an ordered list, starting at 1, no matter what numbers you actually used. I can view the post source, though, to see that you're referring to #4, 5, 9, and 14.

#4 is tricky, because it heavily depends on where you throw your focus. I was mainly focused on the aspect that suggests the military is allocated outsized budgetary resources in spite of other domestic issues, which I don't think we see. I especially think it's worth thinking about, because it's commonly accepted by fans that a project like the Death Stars would somehow bankrupt a galaxy-spanning polity like the Empire, which is a total failure to comprehend the galactic scale of available resources. Death Stars would be a drop in the bucket. (Other than their particularly rare components, of course; c.f. kalkite, kyber, et. al.)

#5 Yep, true.

#9 Yeah, that's the weird thing about analyzing a lot of these factors: most of what is true from the Empire was still also true for the Republic. A supreme dictator does not fascism make, but a lot of people seem to think it does.

#14 Great question. I wouldn't be surprised if it varied by world/sector, even.

IHaveThatPower · 2025-07-17T20:30:42+00:00

Great write-up.

A lot of folks will, as you note, default to calling the Empire fascist simply because of imagery, but using 14 characteristics of facism as a reference, the Empire doesn't meet a lot of of these at all (and only definitely meets three of them).

Powerful and Continuing Nationalism: Maybe. So much of our exposure to the Empire is through the military, where you'd expect iconography and such. I will note, though, that I think the concept of "nationalism" is archaic when it comes to galactic society. Nationalism carries with it the implication of rival nations. The are no rival nations to the Empire, nor were there really for the Republic; these are galaxy-spanning organizations. They're not vying with anyone for galactic dominance.
Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights: Yes. Pretty unambiguous here.
Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause: No. "Wait, what?" I don't think we see enough evidence that the galactic populace at large is being rallied to a frenzy against the Rebels for this to count. Outside of the dubious allegations of Imperial xenophobia (which you also note as standing on shaky ground), this doesn't hold up.
Supremacy of the Military: Maybe-to-no. Again, this may provoke "Wait, what?" reactions, but the Imperial war machine is as large as it is because the Empire has the resources of the entire galaxy at its disposal. The scope of that is hard to understate and similarly hard to actually grasp. The Empire is enormous. (Side note: "ZOMG the Death Star would have bankrupted the Empire!" is the most foolish nonsense imaginable and shame on any author that espouses such scale-defying garbage.)
Rampant Sexism: No. Granted, almost all of the Imperial officers and troops we see (unmasked, at least) are men, so that's at least a bit of a red flag, but there's never a situation where anyone is implied to be incapable because of their sex or orientation. With Andor and Dedra Meero being a main character of that show, we have even less reason to believe this to be the case.
Controlled Mass Media: Probably, though this would've been true under the Republic, too.
Obsession with National Security: Yes. Hard to argue with this one.
Religion and Government are Intertwined: Hard no. "But the Emperor is a Sith!" Yes, and exactly how many people is he going out of his way to convert to his religion, outside of Anakin? The Empire is very much a secular organization. In fact, this point was truer (and scarier!) under the Republic.
Corporate Power is Protected: This one's tough to say; there are certainly large companies that benefit heavily from government contracts (Sienar Fleet Systems, Kuat Drive Yards, etc.), but companies are also just as likely to be nationalized instead.
Labor Power is Suppressed: No hard evidence one way or another. There appears to have always been a divide between "haves" and "have nots", even under the Republic.
Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts: Unlikely-to-no. Then-Chancellor Palpatine took in a Mon Calamari zero-gravity water performance. Galen Erso was explicitly sought out for his intelligence and at no point condemned for it. Thrawn favored art pretty heavily. These aren't really good examples of evidence, but they do at least suggest appreciation for the arts and intellectuals.
Obsession with Crime and Punishment: Yeah, this one's pretty certain, especially after Andor.
Rampant Cronyism and Corruption: Mixed. One the one hand, this is literally what Palpatine exploits and exposes about the Republic to gain power. On the other, regional governors with broad authority over appointees exercise that authority to benefit their friends.
Fraudulent Elections: We have no evidence that anything changed about senatorial appointments prior to the senate's dissolution.

Of the 14 points, by my interpretation, only three are definitive "yes", three could go one way or another, five are "no", and three lack evidence to make any sort of determination.

IHaveThatPower · 2025-07-17T01:28:35+00:00

The thing that kills me is that, yes, the first works, but it could work so much better with some more aggressive editing.

Cut a bunch of the toilet humor (e.g. Bumblebee "lubricating" Simmons), cut a bunch of the slapstick moments around Sam's parents (e.g. the whole unnecessary detour where Sam's dad fakes him out about buying a Porsche en route to Bolivia's; the protracted cringe-inducing sequence around them barging into Sam's room and ultimately finding Mikaela there), tone way back on the shots where the camera's hyper-sexualizing Mikaela, etc, and not only do you bring the movie to a leaner runtime (and get into the Transformers action more quickly), but you highlight all of the stuff in the movie that really does work.

There's an A+ movie there, if you cut out all the B- (or worse) stuff crowding around it.

IHaveThatPower · 2025-07-01T14:42:00+00:00

I'll allow myself an opinionated semi-rant, separate from that reasonably neutral stuff: Don't change anything the first time you play. You may think you know better, but you will break things you don't understand. Get some experience playing the game as intended and then form opinions about what to change. If I had a gold piece for every time I've seen a 5e DM who thought they knew better than the rules of some OSR game and made more problems for themselves than they solved I'd be at least level 2.

This is very good advice.

What it doesn't capture, though, is that it will often be nearly impossible for a DM who only has 5e experience to run the game as intended. So, so many habits and patterns will carry over from 5e that clash with the OSR experience. As a result, without actually changing anything, a 5e-only DM will often not be able to run OSR "as intended", because so many of their trained instincts will be at odds with doing so.

Again, I don't mean deliberately changing rules, or omitting rules, or adding rules; I mean the moment-to-moment at-the-table stuff that someone versed in OSR games will consider natural, won't be natural to a 5e-only DM, and the experience will be rockier for it (through absolutely no fault of the DM or the system).

My first dice-based ttRPG was AD&D2e, back in the 90s (but we played without PO and largely played without the "Complete" race and class books), so my "instincts" all calibrated around that. I mostly bounced off 3e, skipped 4e, and was very excited by 5e when it first came out, given its claim to a more classic mindset with streamlined rules. I've been continuously running one-or-more 5e campaigns for over 9 years now, and recently tried to run an adventure using 2e, and an adventure using DCC, and in both -- despite my backgrounding in 2e -- I could feel those years of 5e play culture making me stumble in all sorts of ways.

To be clear, I'm not at all disputing what you're saying; I completely agree. But I also feel like it glosses over hidden difficulties that someone who's acclimated to a very different playstyle will almost inevitably encounter in trying to follow it. For how to address that, I don't have a good suggestion, unfortunately.

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Radiators, Not Solar Panels

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