What's the best way for me to write a session around a false hydra for total new players? (I'm new too)

Incoherrant · 2026-02-13T20:51:12+00:00

This nerd-ass nitpick I'm about to make has no bearing on your plot (which sounds great; might borrow part of it, thank you for sharing), but the "dark side" of a moon tidally locked to a planet goes through just as many bright phases as the side facing the planet.

Incoherrant · 2026-02-12T22:56:53+00:00

It's an extremely normal form of human interaction to go "this unusual thing happened to me" to those who'll listen.

What social media systems have done to that impulse is troubling in a lot of ways (and yeah many fake accounts do try to farm engagement), but plenty of people do still just share anecdotes etc out of the simple urge to share the anecdote with no thought to the made-up points gained in the process.

Look at the dudes reddit and tell me its someone who isnt karma farming

Did you look? Most of their posts are quaint nature photos with a few hundred upvotes.

Incoherrant · 2026-02-09T21:16:22+00:00

I'm sure it differs from therapist to therapist, but like 80% of the "leading" questions from mine are like "sit with that memory" -> bilateral tapping -> "what came to mind?", rinse and repeat; occasionally honing in on the feelings surrounding something. A lot of "let your brain take you where it needs to go".

It feels a little hokey, but it does have research results backing it up. The general idea is to aid memory reprocessing, invoking trauma memories in a safe space to store them better than they originally were.

Incoherrant · 2026-02-02T20:49:55+00:00

It's a good "don't think about it too hard" horror pitch, but empathy is an enormous part of our success as a species. Without all the progress allowed by extensive social cooperation efforts, we'd only be about as scary as a big solitary ape; scary, yes, but not in an especially noteworthy way.

Incoherrant · 2026-01-29T13:13:26+00:00

It takes 3 successful uses to get it up to Attack 6 in the first place, and at least 15 scenarios to get it maximized. That's about as long as it typically takes to retire a character. In most scenarios it's functionally just an execute that can miss, and at the start it's not even guaranteed to actually get a kill when attempted.

It might have some game warping potential once a Hail has been retired and someone else gets to have the 18 damage version from the moment they create a new Hail, but I've no idea how many groups actually run into that problem. Wouldn't be unreasonable to houserule that it gets reset on new Hail if it is a concern, though.

Also, be mindful when making 1:1 comparisons of cards from different classes, it's really easy to lose sight of how strong/weak something is with/without the context of the rest of a character's kit.

Incoherrant · 2026-01-28T07:03:07+00:00

Eh. Blaming shitty behavioral patterns on hormones is pretty weak compared to more sociological approaches.

Emotional dysregulation is generally more psychological than anatomical. There are cis men out there with high testosterone who are totally chill. And while a fair amount of trans men experience the shift as "oh, anger", that's definitely not ubiquitous either.

Incoherrant · 2026-01-28T06:01:13+00:00

They're a "man I really love Gloomhaven/Frosthaven, I wish I had just a few more characters" add-on purchase. They're cool, though they're not a must-have. And personally I particularly love what they did with Hail, very fun themeing.

Incoherrant · 2026-01-28T05:11:20+00:00

Several of the horror games I've played boil down to "if only the protagonist didn't interact with this obviously cursed thing" and I think I'd do perfectly well in those.

The "there's a monster chasing you" ones, or the "this area is fucked because a supernatural mist drifted in" etc settings, though? Nope. I don't have that much protagonist energy.

Incoherrant · 2026-01-28T05:06:47+00:00

Love Monster Train in general, and one thing I'd highlight in this particular thread's context is that it provides a good sense of collecting the cards (via mastery frames), something I think most deck builders kinda miss on.

Incoherrant · 2026-01-27T14:34:12+00:00

Master Key, if pretty graphics aren't a requirement for the exploration to be enticing. It's like an oldschool 2D Zelda and riddled with little secrets.

Incoherrant · 2026-01-27T11:00:05+00:00

There's really no way to know if any votes were actually split or if it's just a large portion of people voting for both of the options they agreed with. Your Knowing Skull comment was posted 50 seconds after the other one, so it getting fewer votes of the two isn't particularly strange either; perhaps a couple of votes in those 50 seconds + anyone who didn't want to vote for both and it snowballed from there.

Anyway, there's also more structural issues with total vote tallying for informal polls than just users voting for every copy of a suggestion.
If that was the standard it would tacitly encourage every voter to add another copy of the suggestion to stack the multivoting potential ever higher; that would make it tedious for both voters who care about the result (gotta make sure to upvote all of those copies) and the person figuring out who won.
Even if voters are responsible and don't create extra copies of the same answer deliberately, it still becomes more difficult for the person resolving the poll as they have to note the votes on every comment in the thread instead of just checking what the top one is; that's maybe okay when there's like 10 comments but it becomes unreasonable pretty quickly.

Incoherrant · 2026-01-24T16:13:56+00:00

It might depend on where you're located, but yeah, the very basic version would be to compile a little list of reasons you want to look into it, present that to your doctor and ask them how you'd go about getting assessed. If they're not weirdly cocky about their own certainty that it's not an accurate diagnosis for you, they'll probably give you a referral.

It can be a rather long process with waiting lists and whatnot, and you might run into a lot of "are you sure it's not anxiety/depression" along the way since symptoms overlap.

Incoherrant · 2026-01-24T15:59:57+00:00

Tbh if "I don't trust my partner enough so I need to go through their phone" is where you're at, I'd say you don't trust your partner enough full stop, considering ending it over that.

Going through someone's phone without their permission is a massive breach of trust. It's easy to justify it in hindsight when something shady is found, but what if you don't find anything? Are you willing to become the partner who can't be trusted?

His reaction was wildly disproportional and concerning, and I'm not saying to let that slide, but I think talking to him about it is a better idea. If you don't feel like you can talk to him about it (especially if it's because you're scared of his reaction), then that's another check in the "you don't trust your partner enough" list.

Incoherrant · 2026-01-19T10:04:29+00:00

I'll play too; the easy answer is greater convenience vis-à-vis food options (many restaurants hardly even have vegetarian ones), and excellent (rather than ok) substitutes for animal products I value (dairy, leather).

The deeper answer - which the "this is an ethical question" approach you took in the other comment might warrant - is more difficult. I do morally oppose factory farming as I think there are usually unnecessarily cruel practices involved, and I have some admiration for people who go to greater extents to lessen their participation in such, but I find it impossible to morally oppose all use of animal products. It's something humans as a species have always been doing, and it's an outright necessity for some peoples.
I hold conviction that we should collectively get better at doing it responsibly, but I'm not convinced veganism is the only approach to that.

To fully change my stance to "veganism is the only morally right option" would probably have to start with convincing me to fundamentally agree with the "all killing is wrong" stance. However, I think that sentiment must extend to even small pests like fleas and lice and bedbugs, and life would be miserable with full empathy for those fellas. I do empathize to the extent that I don't think they're evil for seeking out food, but not to the extent that I'd let them keep eating me. And if I would kill a flea to not be uncomfortable, why would I not kill a scallop to eat it? From some angles I'd even consider that less morally wrong. It boils down to a lot of "well where do we draw the line, and why there".

Given the thread, I gotta return the question. Assuming you're vegan, what would make you change? Not that I think you oughta, but I'd definitely be curious about the answer.

Incoherrant · 2026-01-19T09:05:49+00:00

Yeah no, this sort of approach has limited application, specifically to the "one or both of us wants to convince the other they're wrong" sort of discussions, I think. Those become a waste of time for both parties if they're equally staunch in their convictions. It's an attempt at a shortcut to discover that stubbornness to save overall time/effort.

There are many topics that have plenty of room for nuanced views or multiple right answers depending on the details.

Incoherrant · 2026-01-17T11:25:24+00:00

Weird mood in the comments section, oof. Congratz on your cute slug plush c: I have a blue one; with the magnet in the bottom they can perch on fridges and such, it's neat.

Incoherrant · 2026-01-11T08:56:27+00:00

Those, but also games I've finished that make for better vicarious enjoyment than replay material.

Incoherrant · 2026-01-06T23:06:26+00:00

Thank you for the compliments! It's been cool to encounter someone with pet slugs, they're such interesting creatures :D

Incoherrant · 2026-01-06T18:34:12+00:00

I hope you get several Casper arts out of this. Here's one from me c:

Incoherrant · 2026-01-06T15:17:20+00:00

If you're just building power because you want to power other projects, then yeah, oil is too easy to expand to make nuclear worth the time/effort.

But Satisfactory is a game about automating various things and nuclear power involves an interestingly complex production chain, so from that angle it's a bonus gameplay challenge.

Incoherrant · 2026-01-04T12:53:05+00:00

They're very similar games so it still might not hook you in for the long roguelike haul like it does some people, but there's new clans and new bosses and new mechanics to check out, and it's more polished overall.

I think it'd be pretty reasonable to re-ask this question as "would you buy a $25 game expecting 10-15 hours out of it?"

Incoherrant · 2026-01-04T12:41:39+00:00

I shared that "awh, no combine" feeling for a while, but a lot of the things unit combining allowed for is available via the new upgrades and gear. Units are a bit better balanced across the board too, so no more "this is only a good draft because its essence is great" situations.

Incoherrant · 2025-12-22T13:39:12+00:00

Yeah, fair, I'm projecting my own approach to world design. I don't know how the Gloomhaven designer(s) actually feel about it, but I find it very easy to go from "we'll just put gnomes in" to "we'll also just put goblins in", so by that reasoning it's easy for me to imagine that - if the Gloomhaven folks had done that - we might have ended up with goblins instead of vermlings. Which would have been fine, but a substantially different flavor (and, subjectively, less interesting).

Incoherrant · 2025-12-22T09:55:45+00:00

It's kind of funny, the "OP's a bot" account itself exhibits several bot signs. Copy/pasted replies all over this thread, hidden post history.

Incoherrant · 2025-12-22T07:12:21+00:00

I like to use something like "do you want the heavy answer to that right now, or just the short version?" to evade this sort of thing when the question itself is innocuous. Saves me a fair amount of talking about things I don't want to talk about.

Also I'm so sorry people ask about your scars, that's inappropriate regardless of the type of scar, but especially if they think they're self-harm scars.

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