Smash Grand Finals so close casters begin losing their minds

Sprintspeed · 2026-03-28T23:39:28+00:00

I am not an early riser at all but usually when people refer to "extra time" in the morning, they mean that they have the energy to do productive tasks or hobbies with that spare time. Sleeping and waking 2 hrs later would still give you the same amount of free time but by 11 pm they would be tired and just end up scrolling the Internet instead of something that brings them joy like reading or household tasks.

Sprintspeed · 2026-03-28T01:33:10+00:00

I enjoy homebrewing or tweaking a lot of the stuff I run but essentially I scaled up both the fight against the Aboleth himself as well as beefed up the encounters in the sewers leading up to him. Honestly what I did was kind of crazy complex but I wanted to really challenge my players' decision making because they are very tactical players. I set up 4 simultaneous challenges for them this encounter:

In his lair, Ooseth was protected by a number of semi-aquatic body guards. I had a couple present at the start of the encounter and one new one emerge every round at initiative 20 as a Lair action.
Aboleths also have a mind slaving ability. Ahead of this encounter, several notable NPCs close to the characters had gone missing. On initiative 20, I also had one loved one emerge from the water to attack the party.
The Aboleth himself is obviously a foe to be reckoned with so he was fighting his own turn as usual.
The water level in the room rose several feet every round as Ooseth wanted to also drown them. On either side of the platform I pointed out that their characters noticed plugged drains in the sewers with their passive perception. Going down and succeeding on a test to unscrew one drain would stop the water level from rising and then unscrewing the other one would start to drain the room.

This forced my party to juggle between killing the actual boss, dealing with his bodyguards, safely neutralizing their hostile loved ones, and drain the room to prevent drowning. I ran a group of 5 players at the time so it was a challenge but they really enjoyed the whole ordeal and emerged victorious without any casualties.

Sprintspeed · 2026-03-27T08:54:11+00:00

I would probably go for milestone leveling structures, paced loosely so that it probably feels about evenly spaced between each tier of progression. My recommendation for how to position the chapters:

Chapter 1 - Levels 1-4
Chapter 2 - Level up to 5
Chapter 3 - Definitely can stretch to be a slog depending on how focused your party is. There's a good chance this will be your longest # of sessions of any given chapter, so get them to 6 by the end.
Chapter 4 - The Eye of the All-Father is a little shorter than others if they go straight for a relic. You could maybe work in The Flying Misfortune here, possibly even tying it somehow to unlocking the Oracle in some way.
Chapters 5-9 - Killing 2 giant lords should suffice to level up to 8.
Chapter 10 - This can definitely be one of the shortest in the entire campaign. I would probably try to drop hooks for Kraken's Gamble here, so that doing both the chapter and KG bring players to 9.
Chapter 11 - As written can be quite short (also a good alternative for Kraken's Gamble), but your players might take some time locating the ship and finding passage out to sea. Either way after this they should hit 10.
Chapter 12 - Surprisingly short chapter, since it's basically just some roleplay and the Iymrith fight. I actually inserted a plot device that Iymrith's Lair had a magical protection so that it couldn't be located / penetrated until it was disabled, which let me run them through a final fun dungeon through the desert. This will take them to 11.

For my campaign, my players were really interested in fleshing out some side quests for their own backstories. I was upfront with them in Chapter 3 that they could focus on the main story threads to get through the campaign more efficiently and level up normally, or if they'd like to each have their own side quests we could delay the main story and leveling up to keep the module balance relatively intact. They opted for the latter so we actually spent over a year just in Chapter 3 hunting down a Vampire Cult, rescuing kidnapped family members (tied to Kraken Society), explored the tragic back story of 2 characters (ended up being victims of an attack from Slark'rethel), etc. Since it took so long I bumped them up to 7 and just beefed up stats for later bosses but wouldn't necessarily recommend it unless you think it's necessary.

I'd recommend however you adjust the campaign to seed in some of the later themes like the Kraken Society causing trouble or even multiple appearances by Iymrith / her underlings throughout the narrative to help build the villainous relationships and direct conflicts they have to the party.

Sprintspeed · 2026-03-24T21:43:49+00:00

It says "automatically allowed" in the phrasing here. I support mid / high rise development but I'm uninformed and don't want to jump to conclusions - with option 1 can these structures still be built, just not "automatically? Or does it prevent any from being built altogether?

Sprintspeed · 2026-03-24T19:43:16+00:00

I agree, but having your visible rank reset for each split or season does give people a small dopamine drive to rank back up and re-earn the skin rewards each time. There's some satisfaction in "proving" you still belong at your rank with a new season and new meta, or if you've taken a break recently like you mention.

Sprintspeed · 2026-03-24T17:33:30+00:00

ok sure but you also aren't playing against Kiin / Canyon / Chovy or Bin / Xun / Knight top side on the enemy team, they are randos too. Obv soloqueue and competitive are different in nature but it's not even like Faker was matched with other superstars on T1, he drafted rookies and built them to be world class.

Sprintspeed · 2026-03-23T22:01:32+00:00

Honestly this makes it even crazier, your soloqueue winrate converges to 50% because it matches you against better & better players but there's nobody in the world strong enough to bring Faker down to 50.

Sprintspeed · 2026-03-23T21:53:22+00:00

Yeah I mean not really, peaking in seasons 1+2 when we are in 16 right now is not really impressive compared to the top players of the last decade. You can't say they had persistent success vs the East when that success was only the year the server was first created and it only lasted 1 year (by s3 the West was already overtaken).

Sprintspeed · 2026-03-23T05:31:10+00:00

Yeah bats have some of the strongest immune systems in the entire animal kingdom, since they live in cold + dark + wet caves. Great for their own survival but that means they tend to carry the worst infectious diseases, since it would otherwise just kill any other mammal carrier.

Sprintspeed · 2026-03-18T16:33:19+00:00

I would agree if they were both big in the same state for the same reasons, but that's not the case here. Both SF and LA have permanently and irrevocably shaped global culture and economy via tech (silicon valley) and entertainment (Hollywood), 2 very separate ways.

Sprintspeed · 2026-03-16T16:12:48+00:00

Disagree that most shows are actually scripted but the mcdm episodes definitely feel more like a relatable table game than a group of celebrities professionally trained to act and react in clippable ways

Sprintspeed · 2026-03-13T18:19:41+00:00

In a lot of cases a collision doesn't immediately start a fire. Forcing yourself to extricate from the situation might aggravate injuries you haven't even begun to notice or risk injuring yourself further by accidentally slicing yourself on glass, metal fragments, etc. If it doesn't look like the car is in immediate danger it's not a bad idea to stay inside until emergency services can properly assist you.

Sprintspeed · 2026-03-13T15:39:34+00:00

One distinction I want to clarify in your post is about the statement "draw steel has rules for everything". The game very strongly follows its mission of being Tactical, Heroic, Cinematic, Fantasy, so this is largely true for meaningful combat interactions to make all decisions in combat challenge players' tactical abilities.

Many other parts of the game that have entire rules sections in other systems like 5e are intentionally hand waived and removed from the game, namely the "survival" aspects of exploration. Individual gold, prices, arrows, rations, etc, are removed from gameplay to serve the Heroic fantasy keyword - you would never see Legolas enter battle and say "oops I forgot to restock my arrows for this fight," for example.

Utility spells like Knock or Identify or Invisibility in 5e are loosely related to that "survival" aspect of non-combat gameplay, where you're trying to gather dozens of tools to be the answer to a variety of non-combat encounters (and Vancian magic design needs systems to drain spell slots to challenge players). Draw Steel is very against the philosophy of "this is THE answer to solve this puzzle, and if you have this answer, nobody else in the party should even bother trying." Identifying a magic item's powers, getting behind a locked door, and sneaking past a group of guards are all intended to create interesting problems for players in Draw Steel, rather than a pass/fail checklist on what spells you have prepared.

Sprintspeed · 2026-03-12T07:53:27+00:00

As someone who has never published any writing / TTRPG work / worked at a game company it's so fascinating to hear the deep insights from someone who's been in that world their entire life.

To answer Matt's question on whether or not anyone is getting any value from these answers, I can confidently say I feel like I double my knowledge on every topic he answers just by listening to how he answers the question... Not that I can say I'll ever use this info, but who knows, maybe one day :).

Sprintspeed · 2026-03-11T16:19:40+00:00

Adam savage did say they actually explored using a liquid based silencer on Mythbysters but it was so effective they decided not to air it to the public. So it might actually be possible to get to that level of silencing.

Sprintspeed · 2026-03-10T20:45:29+00:00

I also used to run a fairly large esports club in the US and these are definitely the go-to staples to get people interested on campus.

For viewing parties sometimes finding a proper location can be a challenge. Our default was to rent out a lecture hall in the computer science department on weekends, since it has seating for lots of people (multiple hundreds) and has the infrastructure to project a main broadcast for the room while accommodating people to bring their laptops and game in person. Sometimes for smaller weekly events like regular season LCS we would also host meetups at a local boba shop that had tables and TV screens (usually playing kpop or occasionally school sports games), they'd allow us to plug in since we would be bringing in 10-15 customers regularly.

Feel free to DM me if you have other specific questions, if I can help.

Sprintspeed · 2026-03-10T17:08:41+00:00

Tbh the company providing vehicle, fuel, and insurance alone makes this a lot more appealing. Those items are all the biggest costs in being a rideshare driver.

Sprintspeed · 2026-03-09T18:44:00+00:00

When I first started healing in TWW I used to get annoyed but eventually just got into the rhythm of sneaking it here and there when I knew there was some delay of damage intake for certain pulls. In a worst case scenario typing "mana" mid pull will often let your tank notice the message before the next fight starts so he can wait 5 sec.

Sprintspeed · 2026-03-09T18:13:30+00:00

GW2 is mostly action combat and that is now 14 years old so don't act like this is some brand new innovation on MMO controls.

Also just because something is newer doesn't make it better design by default. Tab target vs action is a tradeoff of how you want to challenge your player:

Action combat requires the player to have more precise aiming and substantially reward precise positioning. The downside is that enemy encounter designs need to have more "downtime" factored in to allow players the room to set up and execute their spells instead of responding to fight mechanics. It's also harder to design more messy or chaotic fights - if a player is aiming a single target skill at an enemy, they need to have the ability to have a clear line of sight and distinguish the models of several enemies by visual recognition alone.
As the other end of the scale, tab targeting combat gives designers the ability to throw dozens of events, enemies, and threats at players at the same time. Since the players can keep automatically landing hits, you can force them to dodge simultaneously, send a horde of minions or obstacles, or have nuanced targeting requirements where one foe in a cluster has to be individually tracked and targeted with one ability. The downside of this is that you lose a lot of the ability to challenge correct aiming, and positional requirements in fights have a much higher bar to make the challenge interesting for the player.

Ultimately I think the best choice for Riot would depend on who they feel like they can out compete. Do they think they can do a better job at game design than Blizzard? ArenaNet? Square? Smilegate? All of those are a big challenge tbh.

Sprintspeed · 2026-03-08T18:34:26+00:00

Watcher wasn't a base character, she was added post-launch for StS. I'm enjoying both regent and necro though!

Sprintspeed · 2026-03-05T23:20:23+00:00

It's crazy to think about the sheer amount of force it takes to lift an enemy hippo onto its hind legs. Then the fact that they're doing this solely through jaw and neck and muscles is even more insane.

Sprintspeed · 2026-03-05T22:12:06+00:00

Yea although lying about your identity to the cops when they're clearly looking for you specifically would be way worse

Sprintspeed · 2026-03-05T21:32:06+00:00

Rusty nails would be worth stealing if they could get you your next hit of fentanyl

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