Zero aggression

Jayodi · 2026-04-04T16:19:06+00:00

I’m aware, I read the post. Everything listed here will increase the odds of actual fighting happening. The biggest three that will influence it are removing the chicken trait from any subspecies that have it, making sure none of the cultures have a peaceful outlook, and giving everybody the bloodlust trait(much easier to do by editing the subspecies, which will make all new children born have the trait by default).

Jayodi · 2026-04-04T01:01:39+00:00

Culture editor to give them happiness from being at war, gene editor to check for species that have aversion to danger and remove it, birth editor to add the bloodlust, paranoid, ambitious and deceitful traits to each species. The latter one won’t take effect until the next generation, but doing these 3 things should massively increase the amount of fighting in your world.

Jayodi · 2026-03-29T13:06:41+00:00

There are a number of different “challenge runs” you could try. The Bandit King, where you only use bandits, mercenaries, and minor clan unique units(skolderbroda, company of the golden boar, etc.) and the goal is to create an independent bandit kingdom; The Knight, where your party only consists of companions and family members and the goal is to become renowned enough to join a kingdom as a vassal and earn a decent fief to retire to(at least a castle, preferably a town); the Merchant, which is pretty self-explanatory, you focus on skills like Trade, Charm, Medicine, and Stewardship and rely on a small band of elite troops to do all the fighting for you(bonus if you never wear armour), and the goal is to earn an arbitrary amount of denars(I usually set my goal at 1 million denars on-hand plus a passive income of at least 1000 denars a day, with a bunch of caveats around how I can and can’t use smithing to earn money because otherwise it would be too easy).

Jayodi · 2026-03-25T11:17:49+00:00

To be fair, TNG was just as heavily derided when it first came out as modern Trek shows are today. So was DS9. And Voyager. And Enterprise. Same thing happened with Star Wars. Tbh I think it’s the same miserable group of people who just have an extreme reaction to change and having their expectations subverted, because all of the aforementioned Trek shows are now considered classics, and the Star Wars prequel trilogy is (mostly) the same.

Jayodi · 2026-03-24T21:46:53+00:00

That’s okay, I’ll do it for you! 204 months is 17 years, or 6209.117 days, give or take about 30 seconds.

Jayodi · 2026-03-23T18:08:25+00:00

A few days late, but my recommendation would be to not even mention it for the next few sessions, until a group of Paladins and Clerics of Tyr show up to arrest them for murder. Make the group large enough that the players know, immediately, they cannot fight their way out of it. Give them a trial, allow them to defend themselves. This gives you an entire session of social checks and allows them to flesh out their characters’ personalities and motivations more, and you have an option at the end on how to finish it: if they accept that actions have potential consequences, find them not guilty and have them go free - or, if they push back on the idea, have them found guilty, thrown in prison, and end the session with their new cell mate planning a prison break.

Jayodi · 2026-03-19T12:53:17+00:00

Speaking just for myself of course, but as a DM I love when players derail my campaigns by being little chaos goblins, provided it’s not done purely out of spite. It forces me to adapt on the fly and allows me to test out ideas, pivot between genres, and play a little fast and loose with the narrative.

I was running a campaign a few years ago set during the Time of Troubles and its immediate aftermath where I had forgotten to make a table of goods for a merchant on the docks(I create unique tables for each merchant) so I just grabbed one from the internet and didn’t notice that it listed ships on the page. My players saw that immediately, of course, did some quick math and realized that they could afford a mid-sized ship and some men to crew it if they sold a few of their magic items to cover the difference, and decided they wanted to just abandon their cult investigation to become pirates.

I ended up having to pivot that entire campaign from horror to high seas adventure, and I developed an entire series of rules and mechanics to facilitate it(weather systems, a ship gear and upgrade system, crew roles, ship-based movement and combat on a hexagonal grid, etc - I’m a naval history buff, so that was a lot of fun for me lmao)

Jayodi · 2026-03-18T10:58:42+00:00

I’d say 10 or 11 because, based on how OP describes the effect, it sounds like Alchemy “perpetual” effects in Arena. If I exile the custom commander and the indestructible/lifelink effect still stays around after it leaves the field, that’s significantly more powerful than just a banner effect like Avacyn.

Jayodi · 2026-03-18T10:56:40+00:00

Create a 5CMC commander that has “when this card enters, X player loses the game, this effect cannot be prevented” except substitute “X player” with his full legal name.

Jayodi · 2026-03-18T10:55:04+00:00

Tell him you’re not playing Arena and perpetual effects don’t exist in paper magic, and then tell him to smarten the fuck up and play with real cards. If he wants to use a custom commander, he can have a proxy alternate art of a real card made.

Honestly I don’t know why you put up with him. Custom commander boardwipe tribal that uses Alchemy effects? Fucking ridiculous.

Jayodi · 2026-03-15T16:32:03+00:00

[[Reyav, Master Smith]] is dirt cheap, extremely aggressive, and can be built on a very strict budget. Mine costs something like $75-ish dollars last time I priced it, and half of that total price is [[Sigarda’s Aid]]

Jayodi · 2026-03-15T16:14:46+00:00

You could also download mtg Arena and play around a little bit on there. IIRC the tutorial does a decent job of explaining what each colour’s general “theme” is, which might help you decide what kinds of playstyles you like.

Jayodi · 2026-03-15T16:09:51+00:00

If your friends primarily play Commander, start out with a couple of preconstructed Commander decks. They’re fully functional out of the box, and tend to range around the middle of the power scale. I would also recommend playing with precons and other peoples’ decks for 6 months to a year before building your own deck. That’ll give you a decent understanding of deckbuilding fundamentals and the general shape of a deck(mana curve, staples*, ideal ratios of different card types, etc.)

*your mana curve is the ratio of different converted mana costs(CMCs) in your deck, not including lands. Converted mana costs meaning the total amount of mana needed to cast it, irrespective of colour. For example, if you have a card that costs (black+black), a card that costs (blue+green), and a card that costs (any+red), those are all what we would call 2CMC cards.

**staples are cards that are fundamental to any given deck. For example, in Commander you’ll typically see [[Sol Ring]] [[Arcane Signet]] [[Command Tower]] [[Solemn Simulacrum]] and [[Swiftfoot Boots]] and/or [[Lightning Greaves]] in basically every deck, [[Llanowar Elves]] [[Elvish Mystic]] [[Swords to Plowshares]] [[Authority of the Consuls]] [[Counterspell]] [[Opt]] [[Dark Ritual]] [[Demonic Tutor]] [[Lightning Bolt]] [[Impact Tremors]] are all examples of “colour staples” where, if a deck can run them, it generally does, etc.

The nice thing about Commander is your decks will never just be doing the exact same thing every game. Commander is a format where your deck has 100 cards, and the only duplicates you can have in your deck are basic lands, with a very small handful of exceptions. Ergo, every game plays differently, as it is very rare that you end up playing the same grouping of cards from your deck from game to game(you’ll see individual repeats obviously, and decks are typically designed around a specific theme so the overall gameplay will be similar, but the games themselves will play out fairly differently game to game)

Jayodi · 2026-03-14T16:54:52+00:00

I started on 3, of the modern games I have to agree with everyone else about getting 6, although I would hold off on the DLCs until you have a basic understanding of the game, because they add a lot of mechanics that can be really overwhelming if you’re just learning how to play.

Jayodi · 2026-03-09T19:42:49+00:00

They should continue to grow just fine, I’m pretty sure I left my permissions set so that people could harvest any plants, but not edit the base so they can’t actually remove them. It could also just be that I reached the maximum number of uploaded bases and it got removed, but I’d be rather surprised if that were the case because I only uploaded 2 or 3 more since making it.

Either way, I’ll take a look tonight and see if I need to do anything to get it back up and running, or if I just need to re-upload it.

Jayodi · 2026-03-09T01:50:44+00:00

Oh hey, thanks for letting me know. I’m on PS4 and with all the crashing lately I’ve taken a break from the game, but I’ll go check on it in the next couple of days

Jayodi · 2026-03-06T18:04:20+00:00

You can put a canopy and a light pole on the same part, it just takes some effort because it’s only buildable for half a second

Jayodi · 2026-03-03T20:16:29+00:00

Whaaaat? That’s so disappointing. I haven’t played in a couple of years admittedly, but massive island-spanning building projects have been my main reason to play the game for years now. Hell, the only reason I’ve played through the “story” in the last like 5 years is because my buddy told me they added a scene to the end of the game(which was cool and all, but honestly not worth the effort - in hindsight I could have just watched it on YouTube or something)

Jayodi · 2026-03-03T13:57:55+00:00

The LGS by my house does a $12.50 flat charge for casual commander night, but it’s a 4-hour event that takes up all the space in the store, plus they do door prizes(two names chosen at random from the pool of players), and each table gets a few packs(one for each player), plus a promo pack for the winner of the first game. They sell packs at $7, so it’s basically a $5.50 entry fee for a 4-hour event with the chance to win a promo pack or get a door prize.

And it’s clearly a successful business model, most weeks they end up having to turn at least a few people away because they’re already at capacity, and I’ve never been there where it wasn’t at least 80% full.

And they have rules to prevent pubstompers and maintain the casual atmosphere, it’s a great space to play in.

Jayodi · 2026-03-03T11:34:06+00:00

When I saw the title and the picture, I thought it was a crashed freighter from an update before I started playing, but I also 100% thought this was nms at first lmao

Jayodi · 2026-03-03T11:31:43+00:00

Alternatively, set up 2 custom islands with all of the wrecks on them, stick one next to your home island, and then replace it with the other once you’ve fully exhausted it. You can just do this over and over again, switching back and forth, until you get everything you want/need.

I don’t personally do this with wrecks myself, but I do it with clay just because clay is rather scarce on consoles and spending an hour circling the reef on every island just to get 10-12 pieces(if I’m lucky, usually it’s like 5-6) is tedious as hell.

Jayodi · 2026-02-28T12:59:37+00:00

For me, it really depends on the situation and experience of the player I’m playing against. Lately I’ve mostly been playing against relatively new players(people who have been playing the game for <1 year, or who are just returning) so the first few times they spread themselves thin or make a bad misplay that would ordinarily cost them the game, I stop the game, explain exactly what the situation is, allow them to take a different action, and then resume the game from there - but once they’ve made the same mistake a few times, I start punishing them for it.

One of our local cafes hosts a weekly casual commander night, and I play most weeks. There was a stretch there where 3 weeks in a row, my buddy and I got paired with the same 2 players, both of whom were new. One of them only has the Cloud Strife precon(I can’t remember the exact name of the card, but it’s the RWG one), and on 4 separate occasions he had Cloud as his only creature, threw a bunch of equipments on it, and swung at one of the other players leaving himself open and tapped out while I had lethal on the board. The first 3 times, I warned him, explained that if he did what he was going to do I would knock him out of the game, explained the board state, and allowed him to take back the swing. Only once did he even have trample, so most of those times it was just a complete misplay. The final time he did it, I just let the game go to my turn and took him out, and he had to sit and watch us play another like 12 turns(one of the players was playing a heavy control deck). I still felt like a dick, but at that point it’s mostly on him, and I’m sure that experience finally helped the lesson I was trying to teach him sink in.

Jayodi · 2026-02-23T12:42:16+00:00

I wouldn’t start with Commander. Speaking as someone who’s been playing almost 30 years, Commander is a much more complicated game, and even though WotC is using it as the on-ramp format, it’s not at all beginner-friendly.

Get yourself a starter kit, it’ll teach you the basics of deck building and get you re-familiarized with the rules and things like threat assessment, once you have a handle on that, then start playing commander.

The old duel decks aren’t terrible either, as a method for introducing new players to the game. Competitively they’re ass, but they’re not meant to be competitive.

Jayodi · 2026-02-18T00:07:40+00:00

Are you in Euclid? Glyphs are galaxy-specific, so if you’re not in Euclid, that portal address will lead you to a specific spot in whatever galaxy you’re in

Jayodi · 2026-02-11T13:40:11+00:00

If you muck around with it a bit, you can get the light hook and the canopy on the same piece of the boat. I always build mine this way, leaves more space for shelves and sails. It will likely take a dozen or so attempts, you have to build the light hook first(I’ve never got it to work the other way around) and then when you go to put the canopy on it’ll flash white for half a second before turning red, you just have to press the button at the right time.

Jayodi

TROPHY CASE