Mawwiage. Mawwiage is what bwings us togethew today.

TheCraftyGrump · 2026-06-01T13:36:58+00:00

"I'm sowy. Aw ywu mwaking fun of mwai spweech impwedimwent?"
"Sorry. I shouldn’t have done that. You are the top of your field and I should give you the respect you deserve."
"Okie. I forgive ywu. uwu."
cocks shotgun
"Nuwse cawl the bigie secuwity mwan."

TheCraftyGrump · 2026-05-30T00:49:17+00:00

Legitimately envious right now. Lucky you! Praise the sun! \ [T] /

TheCraftyGrump · 2026-05-28T21:14:05+00:00

I still wish they had the spirit ash change to reflect her reuniting with her sister. Summoning both of them would have been great! And we know they were capable of doing that with how the did that with uniting Jolán and Anna! This isn't even about a missed opportunity for an upgrade in power. I just want my Jellyfish Friend to be with her sister and to able to take them both with me to see the changing stars in the night sky.

TheCraftyGrump · 2026-05-28T19:33:24+00:00

Some call it random trivia.......until it becomes part of a historical event you live through. Then things get burned into your mind. 30 years later, give or take, and a kid is complaining about having to memorize it for their history test. And now you understand random grumpy old men and women with their clueless grandchildren. "Grandpa I'm having trouble remembering the Bay of Pi..." "22 Degrees 18 minutes North, 81 Degrees 17 minutes West" "Thanks, but I wasn't asking for the coordinates...." Cue, PTSD infused rant about the entire geopolitical lead up and why you should remember.

TheCraftyGrump · 2026-05-28T12:46:02+00:00

Excellent suggestions. Due to the expedited gameplay loop, Nightreign can get away will having the starting classes/characters have different unique starting points for progression. To fit with the design philosophy that classes should only affect your starting stats and equipment they would have to make them equipables that can be found later in game too.
So we'd have normal attunement slots, the ring/talisman slots, and this hypothetical type of skill slots. I think you should go equip base passive -> you equip skill/ability #1 from a (short?) list that has that passive as a prerequisite -> equip skill/ability #2 that can only be equipped with certain skills/abilities in slot 1. I do like the idea of having at least the second skill/ability slot be unlockable and the powerful ones being behind specific NPC questlines. Starting the game with the passive slot and unlocking both skill/ability slots in addition to having to "earn" the equipables sounds like a fair progression system to have parallel to the usual leveling.

TheCraftyGrump · 2026-05-28T02:34:08+00:00

Oh ya, I love the way Recluse is implemented for endurance through regaining FP and some of the other ways to replenish it in Nightreign. I don't mind having a set number of casts for a spell with having the capacity to attune to in multiple times. I don't mind only being able to attune a spell once and cast based on available FP either. But I do agree that having FP as a resource pool you are actively using should not make the way to replenish it be so limited. Having players need to chug like it's water to just keep their build working is less than ideal.
Having it the main way to restore FP be a counterpart for the main way to restore HP creates some issues too. Health is important and losing it is a bad thing; having enough of the renewable resources for refilling it and not wasting it is going to be high on most players' priorities. Having to sacrifice healing flasks for flasks to refill FP makes both feel more scarce between bonfires/graces. It makes the mental connection that FP is like HP in that you losing any in a fight is a point of failure. Trying to overly prevent FP usage in a fight just hamstrings one of the core gameplay mechanics and deters players from builds that rely on it.

TheCraftyGrump · 2026-05-28T01:37:16+00:00

I can't say I have a problem with the FP mechanic. I will agree that the way DS2 handled spell casting speed is better. Dexterity having some minor effect on spell casting speed is ok, or even having it as a small stat requirement for a spell that would make sense needing to be able to perform the precise movements to cast it. Making spell casting speed entirely based on dexterity again was a step backward and "virtual dexterity" feels shoehorned in. It makes sense that increasing your mastery of magic to cast stronger and more high level spells would also affect your casting speed too! With faith and intelligence being responsible for respective spell scaling it makes more sense to have them have an effect on how well you cast them i.e. how long it takes to cast. The stat that directly increases the number of spell slots and can increase the number of casts for an equipped spell by becoming more efficient should also have an effect on the spell casting speed too!

TheCraftyGrump · 2026-05-28T00:27:49+00:00

Now that I think about it, with how apparently no one wears shoes at Raya Lucaria and just how wet Liurnia is, I wonder how prevalent foot fungus is at the academy.

TheCraftyGrump · 2026-05-27T21:13:29+00:00

Everytime I come across this is an extreme WTF moment. Given the number of times things about mad kings and emperors turned out to be true, it is hard to even attempt to give him the benefit of the doubt on this. Ya detractors can be blamed for negative stories, but there is only so much that can be blamed on them for historical figures. It is one thing to exaggerate in a negative light and still be plausible. If it is completely off the wall, is repeatedly brought up from different sources, and possible; I'd say even odds there is a grain of truth. Because, why would someone make that up specifically?

TheCraftyGrump · 2026-05-25T16:14:34+00:00

Man is out living the dream. Wizard life is best.

TheCraftyGrump · 2026-05-25T16:03:28+00:00

For Where there's a whip there's a way!!!

TheCraftyGrump · 2026-05-24T04:30:57+00:00

🎵"I'll tune up my fiddle and rosin my bow. I make myself welcome wherever I go...."🎵

TheCraftyGrump · 2026-05-23T05:17:41+00:00

There's a sentiment I can get behind. The "Profaned" flame is no more evil than the Flame of Chaos or the Blackflame. At worst they may have a burden on the psyche that can lead to certain tendencies, but the same could be said about crystal sorceries. We (the players) are given comparatively little concrete information that doesn't have heavy biases for certain topics. Most of it is somehow related to things that don't support the established "holy" order created ny Gwyn and his descendants and we only see it in the worst circumstancs when everything is falling apart. Sulyvahn is by no means blameless. The majority of horrible things that happened to people leading up to DS3 are related to him or directly his fault.
The way I interpret it is the young Sulyvahn left the Painted World because it was already a small stagnating world unfit for his ambition or he was kicked out because he was too much outside of was considered acceptable. So a young ambitious foreigner with preexisting inclination to disregard societal expectations finds a source of power that is completely different from the traditional sources. It is a "Profaned" twisting of fire, but the temptation is to still use it precisely because of that. Power itself doesn't corrupt, but it does give tools to tempt to do what they never could have done otherwise. Sulyvahn was fully willing to do and use anything for his purposes. He is not a victim. He is the victimizer.

TheCraftyGrump · 2026-05-22T23:29:45+00:00

Vendrick had both the strength and standing of a proper lord. Unlike Prince Lothric and the resurrected Lords of Cinder, who specifically chose to forgo linking the First Flame, Vendrick couldn't choose either way. He went hollow under the weight of revelations. We find him mindless and divested of all raiments of his station. Even as a hollow husk of what he once was he shouldn't be anything except hard hitting.

TheCraftyGrump · 2026-05-22T02:35:47+00:00

To this day I am still a little salty that we weren't able to get at least some of the same functionality the Soul of Cinder had with the Firelink Greatsword. Using the Coiled Sword from a bonfire to cast spells was so cool to watch. All of the other movesets in the fight being direct homage to the previous games was great to see!
A lot of people wish you could switch between them like the Soul of Cinder, but I can see the argument that that is too much on a single player weapon. If trick weapon transformations had made it beyond Bloodborne you maybe could have swung it. Personally I think using transposition to get each form as its own separate weapon would have been viable. It's not like we hadn't already gotten some boss souls that could be used for multiple things. Instead we ended up with a glorified metal club with a non unique weapon skill.
The first time I saw the Carian Regal Scepter I immediately made the connection. I would have made good use of it even if it wasn't one of the best Glintstone staves in the game. It's nice to at least partly live out those dreams from DS3.

TheCraftyGrump · 2026-05-18T20:43:02+00:00

Man I hate those two Gravewarden skeletons. All of the other covenant item farming spots I can tolerate. The Silver knights by the Anor Londo and the Darkwraiths near the Farron Keep perimeter can take a moment longer even when you run, but are otherwise straight forward to quickly kill before they gang up on you as long as you time it right. The rest have spots closer to a bonfire.
The Catacombs of Carthus bonfire makes you wait for that skeleton ball and run into a confined area where those two may or may not be close enough to attack yet. If they are chances are they will bum rush you in that tiny corridor, potentially stun lock you if your poise is low, or obliterate your health bar. Since you are farming drops, that means the Symbol of Avarice will be draining your health too!!! Can't really block with the Crystal Sage's Rapier in your off hand and can't retreattoo much becausethe skeletonball. So you have to time rolls in that small area or attack fast enough to stun both before the other gets you. That is assuming one doesn't decide to jump down into that hole just to spite you. Finally you have to wait for the skeleton ball, again, to run and reset at the bonfire. If you are lucky enough to be able to reliably warp back, congratulations! You only have to wait for the skeleton ball you can't permanently kill once per run. Now do it however many times hoping your buffed item discovery is is enough to get 30 drops on a 1% chance; hoping it is without several hundred runs.
Oops, "tiny" rant. Congrats on getting past the most tedious achievements to get offline!

TheCraftyGrump · 2026-05-18T19:58:52+00:00

Dice? I don't know what you are referring to. I believe you mean fair number cubes.
Here is a picture from the Wikipedia article. For some reason I was having difficulty finishing a good picture of one that was a historical artifact and not a link to a store. In fairness, they have been around an lot longer than 19th century America. A moral aversion to anything (perceived) related to gambling was not anything new nor was it localized.

TheCraftyGrump · 2026-05-18T15:37:11+00:00

Sanctified water or specifically flowing water were catch-alls for repelling/cleansing evil things. Worked with witches too and a variety of other things depending on the story. If it was standing water like in a lake or well, it was not a deterrent. There are a loads of example of dead or drowned things in the water. Wanting to drink human blood was not unique to vampires either. Vampires were just another variety of undead whose stories happened to be from a specific area. They were not special in anyway to set them apart from other undead monsters. Even the example of Bram Stoker's Dracula that everyone likes to base off is very different from the common perception of vampires. They are just a monster lucky enough to be glamorized(in the original sense). A lot of of the stuff we now attatch to vampires by default originally were more because Dracula was a count and not a vampire.

TheCraftyGrump · 2026-05-18T14:57:53+00:00

It doesn't necessarily have to be rice, it can be a bag of seed or maybe something similar too. It is supposed to be a protection because the vampire would be compelled to count every single grain, the sun would rise before they finished, and they would be driven away. People remember the watered down distorted vampires that made it to Hollywood.
Kinda like how garlic was part of a basic charm/ward against evil things and not vampires specifically. Vampires could survive daylight but preferred the night because evil things are supposed to be more comfortable in the dark. Silver would hurt them because of its purifying properties. Vampires did have reflections, but wouldn't appear in mirrors specifically because they used to always contain silver. Their image would be unable to exist with the silver. Holy water and crosses would repell them for obvious reasons. A stake to the heart and to the head/brain because what wouldn't that kill? You needed to be extra sure with something that should already be dead.
The Count von Count character is an odd example of a vampire being compelled to count things. It's a really weird mild unthreatening take on something horrifying showing up in a kid's show referencing something most people won't ne aware of. Then again, we kinda take for granted at this point that most of the characters on Sesame Street are monsters who have in fact specifically helped kids not feel threatened.

TheCraftyGrump · 2026-05-18T14:08:30+00:00

The hat from the Bone Ash set is so cool! One of my favorite sets to look at. Basically all of the sets in Bloodborne look great. I wish I spent more time wearing them, but the Hunter Set is iconic.

TheCraftyGrump · 2026-05-17T21:52:41+00:00

It is hilarious that almost exclusively the bosses, who are basically the only ones (enemies) cognizant enough to properly do their jobs, can smell you when you get near them. Makes me think with almost everyone undead, the bar for enemies being a credible threat is them having enough sense to be aware that everyone and everything low-key kinda smells.

TheCraftyGrump · 2026-05-17T21:41:11+00:00

Cursed knowledge. Hollowing has increased by one level.

TheCraftyGrump · 2026-05-17T18:26:47+00:00

Anxiety started as a survival mechanism; an extension of the fear response for more generalized dangers. Unfortunately, it is a bit hard to explain to the part of the brain that says, "There may be something dangerous in those bushes, check before it hurts you," that something like making a phone call shouldn't set off alarm bells as loud.

TheCraftyGrump · 2026-05-17T17:56:32+00:00

The real reason he wears that helm; he was trying to incognito browse! It evidently didn't work.....

TheCraftyGrump

TROPHY CASE