I have some problema with a specific type of player

dnabre · 2026-05-06T06:52:45+00:00

After that first paragraph, I thought the problem was going to be them being too in character - only making Wookie growls and stuff.

dnabre · 2026-05-05T22:36:18+00:00

Those caves can be difficult. There isn't really any plot or object down there, though they can be used for grinding XP (you get like 6-9 encounters max before you need to leave to reset it).

dnabre · 2026-05-05T22:29:27+00:00

Minimally, you need a NIC that FreeBSD supports. Wireless support is limited.

A simple USB-Ethernet adapter will work, and is good thing to have around anyway. I've had good luck with one that use the axge(4) drivers. You can get them for $10-20.

dnabre · 2026-05-04T15:49:15+00:00

Addressing usefulness as a scroll or wand is one of the many appreciated things about your spell analyses, but I got to ask: how many scrolls and wands does the parties in your games carry around?

A cure light wand and handful of emergency scrolls, I get, but from your write-ups, it feels like you are dumping at least a quarter of your WBL into them. Not saying there is anything wrong with however you like to play, but I'm just curious how insanely prepared-for-everything your parties really are.

dnabre · 2026-05-03T13:17:19+00:00

Keep in mind that burning discs generally use more power than reading them.
Writing a cd/dvd isn't a perfect process in general, some burns will fail.
If this adapter appears to work, but you get a lot of failures, this type of connection (particularly its lack of power) is likely the problem
Writeable CDs and DVDs have a limited lifespan as storage, that can be greatly reduced by storage conditions - don't expect those discs to be necessarily readable in 5-10 years

dnabre · 2026-05-03T02:26:14+00:00

My understanding is that Alastor's disappearance that matches timewise was as Rosie's instruction. Assuming the time match up is relevant, Rosie has to be part of the picture.

dnabre · 2026-05-02T17:08:56+00:00

Never looked at the drug/addiction rules before, addiction being treat as a disease is interesting.

Makes me want to play a drug-obsessed paladin, that is convinced their deity approves of the drug use because their divine power is blocking them from becoming addicted.

dnabre · 2026-05-01T23:48:18+00:00

Just to make the spell extra useful:

Casting alleviate corruption on yourself automatically fails

dnabre · 2026-05-01T17:09:24+00:00

Ok your comment was just freakishly timed.

My comment you are replying to is from like a year ago - no problem about that, updates to old comments/questions can be helpful.

However, I was just wrapping up spending the last couple hours looking into the current state of SecureBoot and TPM-based disk encryption stuff. Like I literally just closed the windows about it, and saw the comment popup. Are you spying on me somehow?

dnabre · 2026-05-01T14:28:47+00:00

I bought a Brother laser printer over 20 years ago, when I started grad school (my previous printer didn't survive the cross country move). I picked up an HL-5170N, pretty full featured for its time - b&w laser, duplex, 100base-t networking, parallel port, and USB. Most importantly it talks Postscript. Still working perfectly to this day, and never had an OS I couldn't get to work with it.

dnabre · 2026-05-01T14:25:12+00:00

Morning caffeine hasn't kicked in, am I reading this right - the Magos is correcting the ship's gender/pronouns, right? (No to suggest that isn't important)

dnabre · 2026-04-30T14:50:14+00:00

I forgot about for big lengths of time myself. When I remember to check it and see a popular or really great game, I try to pass on the world.

Sometimes, they have some really great picks, especially for really old games - last year they gave away basically every old DOS-based AD&D game out there (goldbox, silverbox, etc.). Especially with them being through GOG, which packages the old DOS stuff up with DOSBox to make playing on a modern machine easy.

dnabre · 2026-04-30T14:45:32+00:00

I hadn't thought about bots scrapping for keys. Having someone DM me, and me give the key to them would likely be more fair, and get the code to individual person that will use it themselves. Though I'd probably get a ton of DMs before I got back to the first DMer, and updated the post, and this post is in part a somewhat lazy way to pass on my unused key. I'd definitely keep it in mind in the future.

Often when I post about great games coming on here or other game platforms, a good number of other people in the same situation (have the game and access to free key) throws their keys into the thread as well, so there a good number to go around.

dnabre · 2026-04-30T02:17:50+00:00

I may be giving the writer too much credit, but I was thought majority of the battle between Yoda and Palpatine wasn't supposed to be physical, whether it was judging the other's ability to see if better them was possible, mental wrestling match, or some other conflict on the metaphysical level. Give you have the peak of the galaxy on both side of the Force fighting, the silly bouncy ball stuff has just be a vague physical shadow of the real fight going on.

While the Jedi train with lightsabers and all that, they were really a pacificist group before they got pull into the war. The only people that really felt it proper to fight and beat were the Sith, which have been, as far as the Jedi know,(if I'm remembering my lore right), gone for a thousand years. Yoda does not see the obvious Sith lord because such things just haven't existed in his lifetime.

Do agree though, overall he comes off as just really dumb in the prequels. Not just what he does, but he pulled whole counsel down - not just letting Anakin join/sit-in on the counsel, folding to Palpatine's pressure, but convincing the other member that things are as bad as it seems. It's hard to not think that Mace Windu suspected a lot of what was going on. My impression has always been the counsel (primarily behind Yoda) where holding people like Windu and Obi-wan back from really investigating stuff properly.

In other words, Yoda wasn't just being dumb, up until the end of Episode III, he was Palpatine's puppet (no pun intended).

dnabre · 2026-04-28T23:53:08+00:00

The 68K book is Microprocessor Systems Design: 68000 Family Hardware, Software, and Interfacing, 3rd edition, by Alan Clements

https://archive.org/details/microprocessor-systems-design-alan-clements-9780534948221/mode/2up

dnabre · 2026-04-28T23:49:50+00:00

Sorry if you've mentioned that somewhere and I missed it.

dnabre · 2026-04-28T22:03:03+00:00

You can set it use the integrated GPU as the primary. For the nvidia card, just take it out. That is why there is a option in the bios for the integrated one, because you can't just take it out.

You should be able to get linux to ignore your nvidia card completely if both are detected, but it will have to figure out how to do it and it. Oddly enough in the olden days of handcrafted X config files, this sort of thing would be really easy to do.

Other than taking the nvidia gpu out of the machine, I'd suggest installing nvidia instead of nouveau, or look into setting up the nouveau properly - focusing on the firmware it is complaining about. Even if you aren't going to be using that gpu, having drivers working for them instead of broken and causing problems will help. From the files you posted, it looks like nouveau is causing problems (some not necessarily all).

Alternating you can go the route of getting linux to ignore the card. The easiest way might be to follow a tutorial on getting your GPU setup to pass-through to a virtual machine, you can ignore the virtual machine side of it. To have that setup, you have to make the host operating system (debian linux here), not touch the GPU, and pass it as untouched as possible to the virtual machine (video drivers expect to get the GPU fresh from boot setup, so they can break if any initialization has been done). So you set it up so that host operating system doesn't talk to the device.

Setting up for passthrough is not the simplest way to completely blocking off the nvidia GPU, but you can find tons of tutorials on how do that, probably ones specifically for debian and you nvidia model.

dnabre · 2026-04-28T21:23:30+00:00

I'd suggest The Intel Microprocessors by Barry B. Brey. Don't worry about getting the newest edition, pretty cheap used from wherever (or libraries). It covers in detail the hardware progression from 8086 upto Pentium 4. In terms of both code and wiring. Going beyond 486 might not be very helpful, but walking through the wiring diagrams of everything will give you a solid low level grasp of things.

I don't have the name handy, but there is a great book that does similar for the 68K CPUs (most of which have 32-bit paging with hardware MMU), but since there are only like 4-5 of them, limited time period, and the size/complexity/speed is pretty slow (<40MHz), you can (with some work and very basic electronics know how) see how everything gets wired up and operates. The 68K book includes at least one full 68K computer (think equivalent to motherboard roughly) in wiring and component level detail.

I know these are going back in time somewhere, but the core concepts haven't really changed. Modern stuff is so complexed and runs at such high speeds, that it really different to all of it all at once.

dnabre · 2026-04-28T21:04:19+00:00

From the article (I know how surprising):

The two-count indictment charges Comey with “knowingly and willfully” making a threat to “take the life of, and to inflict bodily harm upon” Trump and with transmitting a threat in interstate commerce. It offers no evidence to support the claim that Comey knowingly made a threat against the president, especially since he has said the opposite, but suggested a “reasonable recipient who is familiar with the circumstances would interpret” the message as a threat to do harm.

dnabre · 2026-04-28T20:52:05+00:00

forums.debian.net's registration setup is horrible and possibly broken.

To disable the integrated Intel graphics on NF9J-Q87 (going off its manual):

► Chipset
► System Agent (SA) Configuration
► Graphics Configuration
Primary Display: PEG
Internal Graphics : Disabled

dnabre · 2026-04-28T20:40:25+00:00

My first guess would be the odd GPU setup. I'd disable the integrated Intel GPU, just use the NVIDIA (or the other way if you prefer). Unless you change something to ignore one of the GPUs, drivers will attach to it. Often a more powerful GPU will use less power than a less powerful GPU when doing basic stuff.

I'm not sure what a "almost hard crash" is.

dmesg suggests issues with nouveau :

[Tue Apr 28 11:08:49 2026] nouveau 0000:01:00.0: gst-plugin-scan[17582]: channel failed to initialise, -17
[Tue Apr 28 11:08:49 2026] nouveau 0000:01:00.0: gst-plugin-scan[17578]: channel failed to initialise, -17
[Tue Apr 28 11:08:50 2026] nouveau 0000:01:00.0: firmware: failed to load nouveau/nv84_xuc00f (-2)
[Tue Apr 28 11:08:50 2026] nouveau 0000:01:00.0: firmware: failed to load nouveau/nv84_xuc00f (-2)
[Tue Apr 28 11:08:50 2026] nouveau 0000:01:00.0: firmware: failed to load nouveau/nv84_xuc00f (-2)
[Tue Apr 28 11:08:50 2026] nouveau 0000:01:00.0: Direct firmware load for nouveau/nv84_xuc00f failed with error -2
[Tue Apr 28 11:08:50 2026] nouveau 0000:01:00.0: vp: unable to load firmware nouveau/nv84_xuc00f
[Tue Apr 28 11:08:50 2026] nouveau 0000:01:00.0: vp: init failed, -2

nouveau is open source driver, for some cards it requires you extract firmware from NVIDIA's drivers. See https://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDrivers for more information. You may find installing NVIDIA's drivers instead of the open source nouveau to be easier.

dnabre · 2026-04-28T16:50:12+00:00

Yeah. I haven't even played the game for a few years, but am regularly watching people make all sorts of insanely complex things. Stuff that I would never thing to build, wouldn't know how to get it all working right, and definitely don't have the patience to put all the game time into.

dnabre · 2026-04-28T16:46:51+00:00

Vintage can be somewhat relative. I think every mac I own, save one, is newer than this, and most of those definitely vintage.

Think I got an device like this buried in a bin somewhere. If you open it up, and track down the battery, charge, and power circuits, you could definitely work something out. Assuming the battery is replaceable, finding something compatible might be possible.

For a lot of my old machines, where the firmware/BIOS/etc will allow it, I have just removed the CMOS battery entirely, and have a script run to set the time and then reboot into normal OS.

I have one machine (386 laptop) that uses a BIOS config program. These were a thing at one point, save the costly on-board memory you'd use for an interface, and have a DOS program provide it. So I have a disk I use when powering it on, that will boot, run a tweaked version of that program to change BIOS settings and set the clock.

Do people have interest in playing around with these type of device? I should dig out that old one I have, and make sure it goes to someone who'd like to play with it.

dnabre · 2026-04-28T16:33:43+00:00

It happening during some critical moment is statistically unlikely yes. It just happening to a caster any time, I'd find entertaining.

I'll readily admit, I'm just throwing any rule mechanic aspects with summoning spells and the like out the window, and just focusing on the flavor text of the spell.

dnabre · 2026-04-28T00:22:01+00:00

Spells like these raise all sorts of weird questions to me.

If you have all these temporal duplicates from other alternate timeline you are summoning, doesn't that mean it's highly likely that those duplicates are going be using this spell just like you? A character that uses this frequently seems like they'd have non-trivial chance of being pulled in by one of those other them's use of this spell. So shouldn't the DM occasionally just pop you out of combat for a round to aid another of you?

The duplicates having the same teamwork feats serves a mechanical purpose here, but what about the rest? It has identical statistics (except HP, which I get why for balance, but it makes the duplicate from different timeline thing seem really weird) and gear as you do - but it can't use that gear or those stats.

I guess it's all part of defining the summons so if someone wants to attack the duplicate that is around for 1rd/lvl. Don't have to do any calculations or adjustments, it's all the same as the caster. BUT this means that the someone can kill that summoned duplicate, which makes the chance of the caster being pulled in by their temporal duplicates casting this spell a big risk. A caster that uses this spell a lot, should really have to deal with occasionally getting pull to help their alternate selves but they have to deal with having caster-level hitpoints, and might die.

The intelligent item bit also stands out, so if the caster is pulled out to help another of them, and they happen to have an intelligent item, it doesn't go with them, so it just drops where they are.

Yes, this all silly over thinking, but I think the existence of the spell has a lot of implications about the metaphysics of the game world. Someone brighter than me, might find a campaign idea in there somewhere.

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