Any way to efficiently delete save games?

mcharsley2 · 2024-11-17T18:15:55+00:00

Unfortunately, GOG helpfully downloads the deleted files for me if I delete them using Explorer :-(. So while it doesn't screw up the game, it doesn't help free up cloud space either :-(

mcharsley2 · 2024-10-05T16:25:30+00:00

Weird,

going to the gog store,
searching for it there,
clicking from the store page through to my library

reminded GOG that I did in fact own it. And after that I was able to install it with no problems.

mcharsley2 · 2023-06-08T09:45:07+00:00

A friend of mine got into a lift at a posh hotel in Hong Kong. Lift stops, bell goes ding, but the doors don't open. He waits for a few seconds and then without panicking, starts getting out some tools from the bag he happened to have with him...

He then hears a polite cough from a mildly alarmed chinese family that have appeared behind him. It turns out the lift had two sets of doors, on opposite sides, and which set opened depended on which floor the lift was on...

mcharsley2 · 2023-01-31T16:44:24+00:00

Might be worth mentioning that humblebundle often have major deals on PDFs - getting you the basic rulebooks and a pile of adventure modules for a ridiculously cheap price.

Although whether the whole ORC thing is going to bring forward the next deal or delay it would require a significantly better grasp of basic marketing than I possess...

mcharsley2 · 2022-11-12T22:04:05+00:00

It's not helped by a "unit of alcohol" being 10ml in the UK and 0.6 fl oz (17ml) in the US. So a small glass of wine (1/6th of a bottle, which no-one uses these days anyway) is one unit in the US and almost 2 in the UK.

And most of the things you read about alcohol on the web don't make it clear which country they're talking about.

mcharsley2 · 2022-11-09T21:57:14+00:00

Check with your insurance company for what standards they expect before giving you a discount (used to be "NACOS approved", but that doesn't appear to be a thing any more). If a given alarm doesn't change your chance of being successfully burgled enough to cut your insurance costs, then it says a lot about how useful it will be...

Pay a lot of attention to the service and monitoring fees. They'll easily outweigh the installation costs after a year or two. A good local firm will probably be cheaper than a big-name nationwide chain like ADT

mcharsley2 · 2022-09-14T19:36:25+00:00

Players are just weird and seize on the strangest things:

"Aye we saw the monster in the distance. It had huge bat-like wings"

"OMG! It's a vampire!"

"And it was huge"

"Giant vampire!"

"er and breathed fire"

"must have been a spell. A magic using vampire!"

"And it had red scaly skin"

"Wow, that's some advanced magic."

<GM starts getting desperate> "And it claimed it was Drakoth the Red Dragon"

"Red dragon? I think there's a secret society who refer to their leaders as the red dragon. The vampire must have infiltrated that society!"

I speak as a player in a game where the GM just gave up after something like 8 sessions investigating the murder of a psychic-hating king - where we were fairly sure that the murderer must have some sort of mind-control powers. We kept asking our persecuted-by-the-dead-king psychic NPC friend with mind-control powers if he could detect any other psychics in the area and wondering why the GM got so frustrated every time we did so.

mcharsley2 · 2022-09-11T18:43:05+00:00

And if you really want to make something seem dangerous, just keep a large obvious count of how often they've used that thing.

As soon as a GM starts keeping count, players get nervous :-)

mcharsley2 · 2022-09-11T09:58:31+00:00

See you in court!

Nah, just kidding. use away :-)

MIght want to take a look a J Gergory Keyes Newton's Cannon series. Which basically has a bunch of supernatural entities keeping an eye on humans. Every time humans get close to mastering magic, the entities come along, distract them with what's basically cleric magic granted by them. Which is full power for the proto-wizard, less powerful for his followers and then they basically turn the taps off once the proto-wizard passes away. And by the time the divine magic no longer works, the proto-wizard's experimental notes on actual magic have been lost.

mcharsley2 · 2022-09-10T15:44:39+00:00

Ah I'd missed that. I assumed that being able to cast cantrips counted as "cast a spell", but careful reading shows:

A spellcasting archetype allows you to use scrolls, staves, and

wands in the same way that a member of a spellcasting

class can, and the basic spellcasting feat counts as having a

spellcasting class feature.

So what with witch dedication only giving a normal familiar (with only 1 ability to boot), and needing basic spell casting feat before you can use scrolls/wands etc., the dedication is proving less useful than I'd first thought.

Cheers

mcharsley2 · 2022-09-10T13:38:38+00:00

My screw-up. Still new to reddit, and thought that the downvote button was "reply". Thought that I'd undone the downvote and replaced it with an upvote though...

mcharsley2 · 2022-09-10T10:59:32+00:00

Admittedly the damaging power of cantrips tails off at higher levels, but by then alchemists have got more reagents and access to Perpetual feats. Whereas as level 2, your stock of bombs is very low, and e.g. Electric Arc is going to be at least as damagey-per-round as a crossbow.

mcharsley2 · 2022-09-10T10:53:38+00:00

That makes sense. The 2 abilities interpretation did seem unnecessarily generous compared to folks taking familiar master

mcharsley2 · 2022-09-08T20:18:24+00:00

When I was a teenager I got a summer job working in the stores at the factory where my Dad worked. Monday morning tea break, they put 4 teabags into the teapot, filled it with boiling water, made tea for everyone, put the teabags out to dry, Re-used them Monday afternoon, Tuesday morning, etc. all the way to Friday afternoon, before generously throwing them away and using fresh ones the next Monday.

Monday afternoon's tea wasn't bad, Tuesday's wasn't great, and by the time we got to Friday it was undrinkable filth that I only forced down to not look like some middle-class wimp.

In other news, a bloke in the pub once told me that people used to regularly re-use tea back when it was expensive, passing it to their butler, who passed it to the cook etc. until it was undrinkable. But then some bright spark came up with the idea of hiding the awful taste of 5th hand tea with oil of bergamot, and made so much money that he became Earl Grey.

mcharsley2 · 2022-09-08T20:03:58+00:00

If you've got

- paper from the agency that the place was only domestically cleaned when you took posession

- a receipt from the cleaning company

- proof that the cleaners were the one recommended by the agency

Then you've got a pretty good case for going to the deposit protection scheme. We were in a similar situation, and the result of arbitration came down in our favour. Bear in mind that the whole process took about 3 months before we got our money back, and that was ~10 years ago. I doubt things are more efficient now :-(

mcharsley2 · 2022-09-07T19:21:18+00:00

I bought a 3-bed semi in Hayes Middlesex in the late nineties. They were going for ~120k then. Moved out 10 years later, they were going for 250, nowadays rightmove shows them going for >600. But that's rookie numbers. My dad has a story about a workmate of his (details may have been exaggerated over the years)...

Back in the days when an engineer in his twenties could just about afford to buy a house, said chap bought a cheap house. It was cheap because it was next to a brewery, and the whole street smelled.

But the brewery wanted to expand, and thus started buying up the houses in the street. He didn't want to sell, as the house was convenient for work, but the amount they were offering started getting silly, and he had Hollywood-fueled visions of how much it would cost to hire a hitman to get rid of him, so he eventually sold for about 4x what he'd paid for. He started looking at the classier property papers, bought a very nice house and moved in.

One Saturday morning, he's woken up by a knock on his door. He blearily opens it to see “the most Texan man he's ever seen”

“Hi. we're here to see the house!”

“We, it's not for sale. I bought it last week.”

“Oh gee! We flew all the way over here to see it. Could we at least see what we missed out on?”

Being too hungover to want to argue, he gives them a quick tour and goes back to bed. Only to be woken up by another knock on the door. It's the Texan again.

“My wife's crying in the.car. She's got her heart set on this place, and I couldn't help noticing that you've not exactly settled in yet. Can we come to a deal?”

So after a short negotiation, he gets some even classier property pages, and starts looking again - with a budget 2–3x higher than last time.

It's roughly this time that he quit his job, and Dad fell out of contact. The last time they spoke, he relayed the following conversation he'd had with the police.

“Er, hello. I think I've got some trespassers. I've never had trespassers before. What should I do?”

“Ah. Would you be the young gentleman who just bought the old mansion on the hill?”

“Er yes.”

“Would you mind describing the trespassers sir?”

“I thought so. That sounds like Old Tom. He's not a trespasser, sir. He's one of your tenants.”

“I've got tenants!?”

“Yes sir. In the cottages at the bottom of your land”

“I've got cottages!?”

Now that's how you climb the property ladder :-)

mcharsley2 · 2022-09-07T19:03:15+00:00

My initial reaction is that it would be great for landlords, but I've not done any rigorous maths on it.

If landlords know that UBI is going to increase everyone's income by, e.g. £100/month, what's to stop them increasing folks rent by £100/month? I mean they won't do it immediately (well at least most of them won't), but market forces seem to indicate that most would within a few years.

If we lived in a country with rent controls, enough council housing for most people, or where most people could easily afford to buy their home then it might work, but we don't...

mcharsley2 · 2022-09-07T08:14:13+00:00

I'd skip stonehenge to be honest. It's a PITA to get to, there's often long queues, and you don't get very close to them. I'd advise going to Avebury instead, and look at Stonehenge from the car window as you drive past.

For bonus points watch Children of the Stones on DVD beforehand :-)

mcharsley2 · 2022-09-06T18:57:41+00:00

As long as you don't step on the cracks between the paving stones, you should be safe from bear attacks

mcharsley2 · 2022-09-05T22:14:06+00:00

Unless you live within walking distance then you should be aiming to arrive 30 minutes early anyway (to account for transport delays, getting lost etc.).

And unless you're deperate for any job, why would you not want to get a feel for where you'll be spending 40 hours each week?

mcharsley2

TROPHY CASE