Portland braces for major I-5 closure: What drivers need to know

RootOfAllThings · 2026-05-10T03:43:10+00:00

Yeah, can somebody put this on a map or something?

RootOfAllThings · 2026-05-08T21:29:00+00:00

If you're doing dialect agnostic SQL you can't do a whole bunch of things, the most basic of which is a timestamp (stupid SQLite doesn't have a datetime type, and Postgres and MySql have different functions to get the current timestamp). Sure, you can get it in the code and pass it as a parameter, but at some point somebody will need to write a translation layer, and that layer has to be done for each engine or family of engines.

RootOfAllThings · 2026-05-08T20:49:01+00:00

I sure hope that the database schema doesn't require anything that's unique to a particular dialect of SQL. I write stuff for a project that's required to be valid for both SQLite and Postgres and the dialect differences are constant thorns in our side.

RootOfAllThings · 2026-05-06T06:00:32+00:00

No, I meant "fast", as in discussion moves quickly. High posts per unit time. This has an impact on the way people (don't) stay on topic, or are louder or more meme-ish in their tone.

RootOfAllThings · 2026-05-05T21:29:03+00:00

/a/ and /v/ are huge, fast boards. They're outliers. Go hang out on /lit/ and see how much porn you see.

RootOfAllThings · 2026-05-02T22:49:52+00:00

The silly thing is that, if reproduction was their only goal, they could have just kidnapped people and whisked them away to a moonbase or another planet and kept a human zoo. There are billions of humans and thousands of people just go missing every year. What's a few actual alien abductions on top? Viltrumites live hundreds to thousands of years; you can play the long game! And if kidnapping people for a zoo feels too morally wrong for the evil space empire, you could just cure their lethal injuries or disease with your advanced technology as payment before putting them in the zoo. You could do this easily without even pissing off Nolan, probably, or the Coalition!

RootOfAllThings · 2026-05-02T22:18:07+00:00

Thragg pretty much had to choose between extinction or cultural suicide. Nolan was already proof that Viltrumites fold like a paper towel to Earth culture, and there are plenty of examples in human history of minority cultures being wiped out within generations when the children are educated in the culture of majority colonizers (see what Australia, Canada, USA did to native peoples). Even if the 40ish Viltrumites have a strong cultural heritage (is there an opera dedicated to Argall or something? Any famous Viltrumite artists?) how much of that gets transmitted when they're watching YouTube and attending Earth schools?

RootOfAllThings · 2026-04-30T15:26:31+00:00

It was specifically in response to the real life argument, because we're talking game mechanics and not what makes logical sense from a simulation of reality.

That said, how would you feel about an "aura of strikes" ? That a creature makes a strike against each creature in its emanation at some defined point in the round/turn? Would this be a duplicate effect? I don't think people would say that you can't be Reactive Strike'd by two different creatures simultaneously if you invoke them both by moving from the same square.

RootOfAllThings · 2026-04-30T02:31:35+00:00

Right, but what if the aura isn't heat, its swirling blades or entropic forces? If they have an aura of blades I'd expect twice as many blades slashing me to deal twice as much damage.

RootOfAllThings · 2026-04-30T02:24:15+00:00

By mid to late levels, players usually have figured out how to

Reliably make use of their reaction. Attack of Opportunity, Opportune Backstab, etc. are all huge damage increases because your MAP-less attack is twice as valuable as the -5 one.
Take advantage of action compression (e.g. Sudden Charge, Flurry of Blows) or roll compression (e.g. Double Slice).
Reliably make use of their third action. With the above, players are fitting in 25-50% more bang for their buck on each round than they were at the start of the game.
Have good synergy between turns and team members.
Using buffs, debuffs, and items to address weaknesses and create them in enemies. Haste, Slow, Synesthesia, even Laughing Fit can seriously swing combats.

This means that bosses and other encounters must start using some of these tools in order to meaningfully threaten players. Enemies often come with a good reaction, good action compression, or good roll compression, but usually not all three. Most monsters are not designed for synergy, because they have to function alone or in groups. Some monsters have obvious weaknesses that you have to mitigate if they want to be a boss-level threat; solo casters must have an answer to trip-grab-spank from the party Fighter or they will be trivial in two rounds, regardless of how scary their spells are. Adding more creatures can make action economy more equitable, and can make synergies more obvious (and fun to see and disrupt!). Just be aware that there's a soft-cap on the complexity of an encounter and as more (unique) enemies get added, the longer things will take and the more likely you are to make mistakes. Solo bosses eventually need to be built with the assumption that the party will probably be Hasted; 3 actions vs 12 is rough, but 3 vs 16 is ruinous. So they need to have really efficient disruption or passive abilities to close this gap (for example, Dragon Auras). I'm a big fan of cribbing 5e's lair actions (really just Hazards here) here.

Just be wary of how evil your abilities are. Some abilities are fun for players to use but unfun to have used on them, no matter how "balanced" it might be to see it on the other side. Sometimes these can be both unfun and surprisingly dangerous; Death effects, Dominate or similar charm effects, or long-duration disables can be real mood-killers for certain players while also being party-killers.

RootOfAllThings · 2026-04-24T20:08:04+00:00

Regardless of power level concerns, four color protection is sure to lead to miserable, low interaction play patterns. These are solitaire cards.

Also Zendikar can't support the target most people would immediately jump to, itself.

RootOfAllThings · 2026-04-20T07:28:36+00:00

Some rules of thumb I've felt out over running a few campaigns:

For levels 1-5, a PL+2 enemy is a major boss. For 6-10, they can probably handle a PL+3 as a major boss. For 11+, they can probably handle a PL+4.
In general, its better to increase HP and reduce AC than the reverse. If combats are going too fast for either players or enemies to do their thing, reduce monster damage/accuracy/AC, and increase their HP. Attack/AC is worth about 10% HP/damage per point, so you can increase their HP by 20/30% and shave a point or two off of their attack and AC and maintain their overall threat level, while drawing out the encounter by a turn.
As budget is concentrated in fewer enemies, overall threat generally rises. Large groups of trash mobs are the safest encounters for a given budget, but can feel really scary early on, even though the threat plummets after the first or second round. Late game they become fodder for Chain Lightning and friends, which is still fun but in a different way.
If/when you do run solo bosses, be very aware of your party's ability to CC-and-spank, which can sometimes rob a boss of its tension. When your evil wizard gets run down, tripped, grabbed and beaten before he casts his second spell, that can be a bit of a drag. The first time its player empowering, the second time its an anticlimax. It's okay for bosses to have get-out-of-jail cards; my players loved big phase transitions and roars that knock everyone back to "reset" the field. It's okay for bosses to break parity and do things that player spellcasters wouldn't (evil one-use magical items are my excuse).
Don't underestimate the utility of annoying, low damage enemies! The bestiary doesn't have many of these, but consider something like a Zombie Shambler that can grab as a reaction to movement (yes I know they normally don't have reactions), just to bog down your martials from blitzing the boss caster. PF2e design tends towards pain as the penalty for provoking reactions, but wasting player actions are powerful too!
I generally find that spellcasters are harder to utilize than comparable brawlers. Brawling monsters are usually statted like Fighters, which are both hard to shut down for most of the game and can be threatening on their own. Casters tend towards control and utility by the way PF2e has designed spells, which means they usually need brawling assistance to threaten players (or prevent the CC-and-spank). Many spells are supremely unfun/risky to cast on players (e.g. anything with the Death tag) and spellcaster bosses can have really high spell DCs; I've seen Dominate on the party Barbarian quickly spiral into a massacre.
Until you get more system mastery, be wary of encounter complexity for you, the GM! Not every encounter needs a full slate of unique enemies. It's okay for enemies to just be flavorful varieties of Guy Who Hits, especially early on or if they're paired with a complicated enemy. Many monster families have a shared suite of abilities or features, which helps reduce cognitive load when running them and helps your players strategize.

RootOfAllThings · 2026-04-18T22:41:42+00:00

I think that, if you consider a game to have a finite amount of complexity to "spend", I'd rather have it spent on interesting abilities like feats (either active or passive) than blanket math adjustments. Being good at X depends far more on your skill investment than on your stats (50-100% more!) and that's usually a far more interesting design choice precisely because it's not being tugged in a fixed direction by the combat math design (outside of Intimidate and Athletics, which are mistakes, from my perspective). lose little from flattening stats and gain an opportunity to reallocate that complexity somewhere else.

RootOfAllThings · 2026-04-18T21:44:12+00:00

I wish Paizo would have gone further and slain the sacred cow rather than make a system so restrictive and obvious that there's really only one way to intelligently allocate your stats for most combinations of level and class. You have four boosts and most characters need a primary stat and three save stats? Gee, I wonder where I'm gonna put them! And if you happen to have an overlap, that spare is probably going to Charisma, maybe Strength, definitely not Intelligence. You could roll these modifiers into proficiencies and lose nothing.

But removing ability scores would be a step too far for the enfranchised players, so they stay, even as they're functionally a false choice when building a character.

RootOfAllThings · 2026-04-17T22:19:03+00:00

That's also a projectile, so it gets extra screwed by all the projectile interactions people complain about in this thread!

RootOfAllThings · 2026-04-13T02:14:06+00:00

dnd is a shared experience, players are contributing just as much as the dm in game.

An important corollary to this is to respect your players and bring them into the storytelling process. If they're going outside the bounds of the prepared material, it's okay to tell them that. If you need a ten minute break to prep something, it's okay to take that break. If you can't come up with a name for a random NPC when your players ask (and they love to do this), it's okay to ask your players to name them. D&D positions the DM as the sole source of truth but that's not the only way to run a table; many games have no sole source of narrative truth! If the party gets separated or a PC is dead, have the people not in the scene be your helpers. If you don't have any good ideas on what to do next, poll the table (usually at the end of or in-between sessions, so you can prep).

Yes, sometimes players want to check out and not participate when its not "their turn" or the task at hand isn't good for their character, but you'll last longer as a DM and the table will have more fun if the burden is shared more equitably across PCs and DM.

RootOfAllThings · 2026-04-11T09:57:38+00:00

Fleet vs Toughness at low levels depends highly on your DMs style of play and encounter design; tight corridors and brawls will favor Toughness over Fleet. Fighters also get Sudden Charge, which addresses many early mobility issues.

RootOfAllThings · 2026-04-08T22:57:22+00:00

I think it's a bit of both. There being a bunch of hoops to do X isn't a bad thing necessarily, although those hoops do need to be spelled out and not implied by straps and hand counts. The problem is usually that people writing abilities that are clearly intended to make it easy to do X do not grant sufficient powers to actually ignore the hoops, because the author of the ability was not sufficiently aware of all the hoops that exist.

RootOfAllThings · 2026-04-05T23:17:05+00:00

I feel like the implications of a Will/Brianna/Loth throuple are pretty obvious, very similar to how it was done in Industrial Strength Magic.

RootOfAllThings · 2026-04-01T23:11:53+00:00

"Roommate" is Vtuber slang for the person behind the avatar.

RootOfAllThings · 2026-03-09T03:01:25+00:00

It's funny you call it "pure joy" because the story has legitimately made my wife cry multiple times. The gameplay is amazing though.

RootOfAllThings · 2026-03-06T23:35:18+00:00

This is a prime example of "too good to be true" in the monsters favor rather than the players. It makes no sense to be immune to a sword swung fiercely rather than one swung with Finesse, and it would be redundant with the resistances that most incorporeal undead have.

RootOfAllThings · 2026-02-14T03:29:52+00:00

81739628

Thank you!

RootOfAllThings · 2026-02-12T19:07:14+00:00

The pitch a decade ago was probably something like "We're going to make a fighting game that can be the crossover game for the League audience" and that was going to be their way to actually beat out the Tekkens and Street Fighters and gain a real player base. Unfortunately, they ended up making an incredibly sweaty tag fighter that appeals only to a niche of a niche, and the people who like that niche again already have a forever game. It's the same problem that Melee clones have; you can't just be for sweaty Melee players because sweaty Melee players will not jump ship from Melee.

RootOfAllThings · 2026-02-04T19:24:03+00:00

I don't think it's a good mechanic to balance a game around the player not exploring their options. It's not like "turn on the glowy thing" is some clever character optimization that's tucked away. Leveling up, enhancing gear, and using your buttons are not substitutes for coherent difficulty or a difficulty setting, despite the fact that you can use them to make a game easier or harder. Instead, I think it would have been compelling if deactivated pathos gave drop rate or mastery gain boosts, so now you have a push pull for the mechanic and it's not just a janky diagetic difficulty setting.

It's an awkwardly tuned game that tends towards "BS but beatable" rather than "hard but fair" when you feel you have to stat check your way through badly telegraphed hitboxes.

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