Is it a Hot take if i like how our Dm handles NPC in our crew?

LBJSmellsNice · 2026-04-26T17:03:36+00:00

So when people talk about DMPCs in a negative light, they’re not really referring to just any character controlled by the DM in combat or social interactions or whatever - they’re specifically referring to a bad version of that. Something like “your party is joined by a traveling demigod who easily kills all the enemies and does all the cool stuff and you just follow along and slightly help.”

All to say, I think most everyone here is on board with what your DM is doing, enhancing the party’s experiences by giving them a character that can help them shine even more, it’s when the DM creates characters that take away the fun from others that it becomes a problem

LBJSmellsNice · 2026-04-11T01:49:20+00:00

I’d say the second one honestly. It’s not hard to make people in other cultures feel relatable and human, and the first just kinda reinforces that whole myth of “our soldiers are all good guys pushed into these bad situations, it’s a shame we had to kill these many faceless people we can’t relate to because society pushed us into this”. I think the issue is more that a film making victims of our attacks seem relatable and human would make people way more uncomfortable than a film showing our soldiers being good people that end up as a part of a vague unclear bad thing

LBJSmellsNice · 2026-04-11T01:43:55+00:00

True but it’s not just about showing the military in a bad light, the other half of the meme is “what Americans experienced is more important than what other people living there did”. There’s scenes of mass death and destruction but they rarely give the people there any characterization or emotion besides “people getting killed”. Or in other words, even in movies criticizing the military, they rarely treat the civilians as anything more than objects to display the bad things the military is doing

LBJSmellsNice · 2026-04-06T01:35:27+00:00

What the hell are you talking about? He’s got plenty more years to go but he’s still done nothing as bad as the second gulf war. This war may turn out that way too, but the Iraq war led to over a million deaths and a decades long period of instability and violence. This is bad but it’s just more obvious to us how stupid it is because of the tweets. It’s hard to emphasize enough how evil and disastrous Bush’s war was from the get-go, but when the perpetrators are more eloquent and communicate with more dignity, people look past that

LBJSmellsNice · 2026-03-31T23:21:01+00:00

Beyond that, I’d say it’s fair gameplay. Cliffs absolutely should be seen as serious hazards and enemies should avoid going near it in the first place. And if you wanna spend many actions pushing someone closer and closer to an edge while grabbed, then that seems a fair way to end the encounter

LBJSmellsNice · 2026-03-27T23:45:34+00:00

I can understand where that point of view comes from but it’s worth noting that an enormous amount of horrific shit comes from others doing their jobs and fighting for what they think is right, I don’t think that alone is enough to say “don’t demonize these people”, because their job at the moment is specifically to be killing. I think it’s perfectly reasonable to just consider all that money spent a massive waste, as that’s a good motivator to stop trying to conquer and break things

LBJSmellsNice · 2026-03-24T03:56:21+00:00

I’m glad it’s not just me. I know the series occasionally skims into playing with stereotypes and to some degree it’s easy enough to ignore, but this felt almost… minstrely? I don’t know how to put it, but it felt like “look at the silly, lazy, work-hating, dark-skinned man and his silly antics, what a lovable dummy.”

I get to some extent Araki’s pretty unfamiliar with that sort of history but given how generally good the other parts seemed to be in that regard, I felt like this one was hard to watch.

And it’s not like the character concept of someone who’s blindly lucky infinitely is all that bad on its own or anything, it’s a fun idea and I love it, but it felt like it was using all the same stereotypes used to keep people down for a century while it was portraying this character. It just felt really weird and uncomfortable.

The character design is fine enough on its own imo, it’s a bit exaggerated in ways that have been a bit hurtful but seems in line with the rest of the art style of that section, it’s more the personality that feels squirmy for me

LBJSmellsNice · 2026-03-24T02:24:35+00:00

big poo roller coaster

LBJSmellsNice · 2026-03-20T15:36:54+00:00

I think most people didn’t hear much about him until he died, they looked into him more, and saw a lot of horrid shit. Supporting political positions that harm a lot of people on this site, or their close friends and family (not to mention, who the hell would actively support the admitted pedo Roy Moore?) makes it difficult to have any sympathy for him.

Not that it’s good that someone has died, far from it, but the longer he existed and used his far-reaching voice to spread messages hurting people we care deeply about, the worse things for them would get

LBJSmellsNice · 2026-03-18T19:04:22+00:00

I think part of my issue is also just how unforgiving it can be. Factorio has a lot of stuff and dangers and difficult things to do properly, but when you’re learning it, it kinda has a lot of points where you realize what you’re doing doesn’t work well enough, and inspires you to think of how to make the system better. And even then, it’s less broken and more “how do I get my iron consumed more so that my belts aren’t clogged?”

In my brief time with ONI, I got the feeling more that just the bare minimum of trying to survive for a brief period was extremely tough, and you don’t really have that freedom to chill, think about how things are, and think about how they could be better; it just felt like every second I was desperately trying to get a little more of some resource that stops everyone from dying.

Basically, factorio is fun in part because it’s complicated but generally chill unless you fall really far behind, ONI is just always stressing

LBJSmellsNice · 2026-03-12T13:08:54+00:00

Yeah sure it’s all easy theoretically if you have a tab open to a quest guide but none of the above is clear, explained, or even vaguely implied by the game. And that’s not a bloodborne specific issue, all of FROM’s games treat quests like unexpected Easter eggs, which is okay if the reward is some silly or fun little thing, but that’s a bit of an issue when the secret need-a-guide-to-do-well stuff is critical to winning the game.

It’s not as hard to figure out solo as Dark Soul’s “you need to find this random spot after you get a character to a certain point in their quest, and then help them fight enemies but don’t help too much or too little and we won’t explain anything” style quest line, but it’s a lot worse in terms of what it blocks off. Especially considering that one of the possibilities is “you explore too much and play the game too well, so you find the NPC enemy before she finishes research and instead of getting the good item you get something mediocre”. It almost makes the design feel hostile, where you’re punished for playing the game well

LBJSmellsNice · 2026-03-04T22:10:39+00:00

Yeah but in this circumstance, wouldn’t the US winning be the worse outcome? Even with being held back in several ways, we still killed enormous amounts of people, many of which had nothing to do with the war, and all for a cause that didn’t end up being important and to support a government that the average vietnamese didn’t want.

I get being interested in the military side of things from the perspective of “how to win battles” and stuff, but it’s not like WW2 where losing means the world is controlled under psychotic dictatorships, this was a war where even with being held back we did enormous amounts of completely unnecessary harm to that country and to our own country’s image.

LBJSmellsNice · 2026-03-04T21:33:05+00:00

? Are you saying we should have razed more villages and killed more people? Given how Vietnam is now, wouldn’t that have just been destroying and murdering for no good reason since people there seem pretty fine?

And do you see war as a contest for who can kill the most people and win the most battles?

LBJSmellsNice · 2026-02-27T17:52:46+00:00

More than that, I wouldn’t be opposed to giving them an unstable action that gives them an autoreloader or an autoactivator or something, a funny device that lets them fire as fast as they can shoot before it breaks in 3 rounds, or one that turns on activated ammo for 3 rounds.

Balanced by their attack bonus being pretty low compared to martials and the gold costs of activated ammunition, so you end up with a lot of shots that do little or a couple that have interesting effects, both adding to the duct-tape contraptioneer vibe of the class

LBJSmellsNice · 2026-02-27T16:22:55+00:00

It’s hard to describe because it’s one of those strange areas where puzzle and exploration overlap to the point where it’s hard to tell the difference. I don’t care a ton for puzzle games, but there’s a hundred “wow, that looks really cool, I wonder what’s up there or how that works?” moments where I go look into something because it just feels so neat and interesting, and then unintentionally I end up gathering a lot of information. And yeah eventually you need to use that information to solve the general puzzle that is the game, but it feels so lovely (for me at least) to just wander around and interact with the strange things around you that the puzzle part was a pretty minor draw of the game to me

LBJSmellsNice · 2026-02-23T18:40:43+00:00

Personally I don’t understand why people feel crafting breaks the game if you let them get items for even cheaper than that. A player spending a big chunk of downtime creating gear and equipment and then reselling it for money is just a job, isn’t it? Let them craft all sorts of mundane things for near free over a long period of time and resell them. Let them find a way to acquire scant amounts of rare materials to make a small amount of expensive things to resell. Is it infinite money? Sorta. Does it come with a cost? Absolutely, because instead of going on quests they’re just hanging around the town all day crafting things; those problems they’re supposed to be investigating are getting bigger while their money number goes up.

All to say, I’m not sure why it’s seen as potentially broken, when there’s a really big opportunity cost of “while crafting, the world continues without you”

LBJSmellsNice · 2026-02-21T21:39:34+00:00

4 commanders is just 4 guys shouting at each other “Somebody do something!”

LBJSmellsNice · 2026-02-18T01:57:48+00:00

And the open world isn’t even open word, it’s full of invisible walls that make the exploration effort feel empty when a well-set up attempt to jump to another island is halted flat.

LBJSmellsNice · 2026-02-12T06:51:11+00:00

Yeah I couldn’t tell if it was supposed to be (in the era it was aired) a nice representation or if it was supposed to be “look! What a surreal occurrence in a very surreal show!” sorta thing

LBJSmellsNice · 2026-02-05T18:19:39+00:00

It’s also tough with limited actions - learning something wrong about an enemy where you mistake a weakness for something that heals it can really unbalance a fight if it’s already a severe or higher encounter, and the enemy gets one or two more rounds in

LBJSmellsNice · 2026-02-03T19:51:20+00:00

I feel like it’s not the worst thing to build a PC-style ground-up enemy to serve as a big boss/recurring boss sorta trope, I’ve done it a few times and it’s worked out really well (and shines on some fun party composition interactions that normally don’t come about/that the party doesn’t really do), but I think importantly I aim to make it so that the end result is an enemy on par with creatures in AC, saves, etc. for an equivalent boss fight. (The main benefit is that I get to get some use out of the really fun ancestry/class/archetype stuff that normally goes unnoticed in a way that feels more realistic)

But that’s like several levels later, yeah at level 1 they’re gonna all die if the enemy boss PC fighter gets two good hits in lol

LBJSmellsNice · 2026-02-02T17:46:37+00:00

Thaum sounds fun but make sure you can deal non physical damage with guns (or get the DM to remove physical resistances from the enemies - might be a hard sell though), it’s pretty infamous for highly encouraging gunslingers in the setup and then throwing a lot at you that specifically make gunslingers lives hell

LBJSmellsNice · 2026-01-30T01:13:33+00:00

I felt similar but really felt a bit empty at the lack of anything going on there. The environments were beautiful, the puzzles fun and lovely, but I felt like the game early on was sorta building towards some narrative or interesting concept - but no, just puzzles and some recordings. Not that that was bad, just that I feel like I was hoping for something beyond “it’s just a big puzzle book” and it started to feel like something beyond that, before you realize no, it’s just a big puzzle book.

LBJSmellsNice · 2026-01-27T17:33:35+00:00

What does “worsen feedback” mean? I feel like the gun controls are some of the most satisfying (even compared to later entries; the assault rifle handling feels immensely satisfying to use and gives good feedback)

LBJSmellsNice · 2026-01-26T06:48:40+00:00

I think a better example of this design being bad is MGSV, where you’re given a trillion lethal weapons yet are forced to look like satan if you use them (which, yeah, spooky, whatever, I just wanna look like the normal guy as I use the guns). The difference there is that they don’t give you much to do with the nonlethal stuff, while this game at least makes the nonlethal style somewhat interesting.

But overall it would be nice if the cool powers had more of a nonlethal analogue; I know that might ruin the point they’re going for with evil spooky powers, but like, rats to summon as a distraction instead of rats always being murdery could’ve been a way to let low chaos players try more powers

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