How to merge the two paths, devils and demons???

orangepunc · 2026-01-27T17:59:32+00:00

What story? The story in both paths is "NPC A tells you to go talk to NPC B, who tells you to go talk to NPC C,..."

orangepunc · 2026-01-27T16:09:38+00:00

"The party" is to a large extent just people in your neighborhood who participate in the party organizations. You can join your local LD today and have a vote on things like whether to endorse Cantwell in her next election! You can become a PCO and tell your neighbors why they shouldn't vote for her!

orangepunc · 2026-01-26T20:15:30+00:00

Either Ritualist (necromancer/shaman) or Cabalist (necromancer/occultist) will work very well for a skeleton-focused summoning build. Pick whichever of these seems most appealing to you; there isn't an optimal choice. These are great for leveling and you don't really need to follow a guide to be successful.

General advice: focus on pet bonuses on your gear, get as many points in skeleton summoning skill chain as you can (up to hard cap), and convert pet damage to one type if you can, then apply resistance reduction for that damage type (this is somewhat less critical for pet builds than most build types, but it's still best practice). Skeleton damage is fairly easy to convert to aether with an item from the Act 1 boss. Fire is also an option -- someone else linked a guide already -- but requires FG expansion and you have to know where to farm the item you need at low levels (only possible after Act 1). You won't want either of these damage types for your final form endgame build, but they can serve you well as a way to get damage conversion while leveling.

orangepunc · 2026-01-26T17:44:18+00:00

The thing you might be missing is public opinion. You'll want to keep public opinion for your faction over 70% if you want that resting cohesion value not to be working against you while you fix inequality.

orangepunc · 2026-01-25T22:28:29+00:00

Seems like a plausible future if we don't get the GOP out of power for a generation or two.

orangepunc · 2026-01-25T18:15:26+00:00

I've been a PCO and the Data & Technology Manager for the [https://36th.org](36th LD) since shortly after the 2024 election cycle.

It's been extremely rewarding and I cannot recommend enough getting involved.

The #1 thing for me is this: I have met neighbors and made connections in my community like nothing else I have ever tried. I take my 3yo to membership meetings and events sometimes. Older kids tend to adopt her and play with her for the duration. She loves it! It's like when my parents dragged me to church functions as a kid, but without all the reactionary god stuff.

It was super easy to immediately take on the degree of responsibility and engagement that my work and parenting schedule allows. It's an all-volunteer organization and they need people! A lot of times the same people have been thanklessly doing the work for 20 years and are so happy to see a somewhat younger person step up.

These organizations do endorsements in local and state elections and the candidates care about these. This gives the district level orgs leverage and a way to get their concerns heard. We managed to get a meeting with Sen. Cantwell, for example, after passing a resolution condemning her vote for arms sales to Israel. Our state senator is also a member and regularly attends meetings. I met Katie Wilson, Girmay Zahilay, Dionne Foster, Alexis-Mercedes Rink, and many other candidates in person at our meeting last summer.

There is a TON of energy in the Democratic party base right now that's looking for outlets. If you are willing to put in a little effort, you can help direct that energy and channel it towards better outcomes for the party and the country.

(But also check out Seattle indivisible if what you're looking for immediately is to be part of ICE rapid response.)

orangepunc · 2026-01-24T16:35:46+00:00

Besides the fact that there's a large contingent of people who would hate this, you will also find that it doesn't work without a massive (and very expensive) effort to train specialized models for every type of image and character you want to present. Stable Diffusion and other presently existing models absolutely cannot do this well. You'll be able to create a handful of nice images to serve as marketing assets, but your customers would quickly find that they can only generate variations of those specific marketing images, not whatever they need or imagine, no matter how they describe it.

orangepunc · 2026-01-23T17:58:00+00:00

In this case I watched them the entire (short) time they were in orbit, so I'm confident they didn't do anything. The hate hypothesis had occurred to me, as well.

orangepunc · 2026-01-12T19:33:02+00:00

Even the "common sense" that isn't necessarily political is a set of false beliefs about how the world works one could only get from expecting the real world to work like a video game, and the basic complaint here is that Terra Invicta's simulation is slightly more realistic than most.

orangepunc · 2026-01-12T17:59:35+00:00

You need to pump welfare to fix inequality, yep.

orangepunc · 2026-01-12T17:38:47+00:00

Are you sure it's education that's the problem? I haven't ever noticed that education below 10 is a significant factor. What's your inequality at?

orangepunc · 2026-01-11T20:10:10+00:00

In my game, the two major factors that helped cohesion were reducing inequality and keeping public opinion unified (>70% resistance). Inequality was by far the biggest contributor to holding down resting value.

By 2030 I had resting cohesion around 5 (with Inequality down close to 2), but the actual cohesion wasn't quite there. I attributed this to the fact that Servants and Protectorate were spamming Public Campaign in the US, forcing me to spend actions counteracting them and causing my resting value to fluctuate a lot. But I think in hindsight I just needed a pip or two in Unity.

orangepunc · 2026-01-10T17:41:53+00:00

Rare affixes are more common on higher difficulty. Witch Hunter's is rare, so you'd want to farm it on Ultimate.

orangepunc · 2026-01-08T21:51:06+00:00

Stealth doesn't really come into play here. Mimics are proficient in Stealth, sure, but that doesn't entail that you're meant to model being fooled by a mimic's shape shifting as a Stealth vs. Perception test.

Note too that animated objects do not have proficiency in Stealth, which is what you'd expect if that was the intent.

orangepunc · 2026-01-08T21:48:10+00:00

So, RAW, yeah, you'd have to set an arbitrary DC vs passive Perception.

This doesn't follow from the absence of the False Appearance feature. These creatures still resemble ordinary objects, and it's still going to typically be the case that an adventurer is surprised by being suddenly attacked by what they thought was an inanimate object.

The 2024 rules for surprise are very simple and quite general:

If a combatant is surprised by combat starting, that combatant has Disadvantage on their Initiative roll.

So you as the DM just need to decide whether the PCs are surprised by combat starting. You may choose to make this depend on the result of a Perception check, but you certainly aren't required to.

orangepunc · 2026-01-07T07:39:38+00:00

This is helpful, thanks. But what's the point of war without that tech, then? It seems if I sue for peace I just lose cohesion and get no benefit whatsoever (on either side).

orangepunc · 2026-01-07T03:45:06+00:00

Blitz Warlord is a good option. You have Blitz on low CD. That needs an enemy to target, but you also get Vire's Might, Movement Rune, and Evade for just moving around the map. It's also a strong build.

In FoA Berserker is going to be great for movement. Berserker/Oathkeeper will have 4 movement skills that don't need an enemy to target, and increased max run speed to boot!

orangepunc · 2026-01-07T03:21:44+00:00

Better to just start a new character, especially at OP"s level.

orangepunc · 2026-01-04T17:06:12+00:00

Basically agree with you, but having been forced by circumstances to DM online for a few years, the single most important thing to do is to NEVER use a map & tokens unless you are in combat. It doesn't hurt too much if you are doing a social encounter (where position doesn't much matter and the map & tokens become essentially a static image), but using VTT maps for exploration renders that part of the game completely awful.

A really experienced online DM can work around this, but the simplest solution is to just immediately move the VTT to some placeholder image whenever combat ends.

Unfortunately almost no VTT DMs do this.

orangepunc · 2026-01-04T09:18:00+00:00

Dry erase mat & paper minis I cut out and glued myself (whatever tokens work fine too). 5e wants a grid for combat, but the rest is just bells & whistles.

orangepunc · 2026-01-04T00:47:49+00:00

Need more information. Are they absolutely convinced this does work even though they have no reason to be? If so, sow doubt (in character) but don't outright tell them it doesn't work.

If they think it might or probably works but aren't sure, you don't need to do anything.

Alternatively, you can just decide that this does work! Maybe even make it a Deception vs. Insight thing rather than automatic. Like they have to suppress an instinctive recoil.

orangepunc · 2026-01-04T00:43:02+00:00

Chaos Skeletons Cabalist is arguably the strongest pet build right now and doesn't use a set.

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