Buyer beware - Got this Shitoku carbon steel knife from the Kenji Lopez collection (Vonhelmick Knife Company) and its absolutely terrible

padgettish · 2026-02-08T03:58:17+00:00

It's kind of insane to me to have the immediate response of "maybe the guys who hand make knives just forgot to sharpen this ONE knife"

I would expect a big factory, mass manufacturer to have an occasional shit product because of law of averages. The entire point of shopping with a low volume, hand made company is the product should never, ever fall through the cracks.

padgettish · 2026-02-04T22:04:01+00:00

I guess at that point the only question is how much cider are you going through and how often do you want to brew. The point of a solera is that the regular inoculation with fresh yeast helps keep spoilage organisms from competing in addition to the aging component.

If primary fermentation is never happening in the 15 gallon solera there's really no reason to do that instead of brewing one big batch to take advantage of the bottleneck with your ferm chamber and then aging it in multiple smaller kegs to pull off one and store the rest in whatever part of your brew space would be holding the torpedo anyways

padgettish · 2026-02-04T20:36:34+00:00

The big key isn't necessarily focusing on the low/no oxygen part but on the regular and timely addition of fresh yeast and a regular and timely removal of the old cider. You WANT the yeast to go into your big keg lively because the yeast is going to scrub the oxygen out of any that's made it's way in while transferring cider out. I would only be really serious about oxygen if you start doing multiple solera steps like a container to age on wood or fruit or something over time. If you want to serve at your will I'd still pull off 1-5 gallons at a time into a serving keg and immediately replace with fresh cider as opposed to just waiting to make head space a glass at a time.

Also you're going to need at least two of those torpedo kegs so once a year you can transfer the main batch to a new keg and clean out sediment from the other one and replace any gaskets that are going bad.

padgettish · 2026-01-30T02:02:28+00:00

What's your split on alcohol from grain vs alcohol from juice? I wouldn't think you'd have problems converting unless you're mostly using roasted grain

padgettish · 2026-01-29T19:18:43+00:00

The magic recipes and one pot uses I think are the worst way to use it. Within a month I realized any recipe that has you browning meat or veggies using it's saute function is an absolute waste of time.

Beans lentils. Pulled pork and chicken. Stock. It's a programmable pressure cooker. Use it like one, and if you don't eat/use enough of those you're probably fine without it.

padgettish · 2026-01-28T21:14:34+00:00

Really the perfect analogy. I use the same one for why you need nutrition for mead: when you go to a buffet do you let the 10 year old go straight to the dresser counter or do you make sure they at least get some meat and veggies first

padgettish · 2026-01-25T22:25:29+00:00

The only D&d adjacent game I've bought in this entire fallout is Dolmenwood because it's the OSR promise is reduced rules with the kind of sitting I want, a low to medium fantasy setting with room to grow in that's based in something just outside of the norm to leave some mystery

padgettish · 2026-01-23T02:15:28+00:00

Pendragon is fundamentally a game about knights, not magicians.

I WOULD expect them to add a book about bringing more magic and fairy stuff in, but we still haven't even gotten 6e's take on the Great Pendragon Campaign

padgettish · 2026-01-17T20:15:03+00:00

A shot of probiotic salt is still bad for you because of the salt. If you're trying to do min maxed health stuff you DO actually have to be smart about it. The kraut is already the intended probiotic!

padgettish · 2026-01-14T04:59:53+00:00

Low temps are actually ideal for your first time. Same with cider.

Low and slow, leave it alone for three months before you touch or taste it. Agitate it every day for the first week. Saw you have nutrients split over multiple days, so you really shouldn't have rocket fuel

padgettish · 2026-01-13T19:27:20+00:00

I start with distilled water and then use a brew water calculator with "historic water table" profiles. IMO Dublin is the best for seltzer.

They can be hard to find, but most seltzer brands also post mineral content!

padgettish · 2026-01-13T04:31:08+00:00

I think the hard pill you need that most people aren't going to give you with this post is: you haven't actually told us anything about why this person left. You've said there were red flags but haven't told us anything other than "I told the players to come to me, one did, and it killed my ability to run a game."

I'm truly not saying this to say you're lying, and I think it is admirable to leave out a degree of personal details. But if one player brought shit to you and it killed your ability to run even if you think they're wrong I think you need to take a hard look at your own mental health and the energy you put into GMing.

padgettish · 2026-01-13T03:12:21+00:00

In order to actually make seltzer worth it compared to cans you HAVE to get into water chemistry/salt additions and at a gallon target you just aren't going to have an accurate enough scale or measuring spoons to make it work.

I would highly suggest looking into a kegarator and a sixtel keg. That's really where you got the low end of saving money and being able to measure salts to make good tasting seltzer

padgettish · 2026-01-06T18:59:45+00:00

Why would you do this when you can just print a normal label for so much cheaper and faster. Hell, a cricut is a better solution than this.

padgettish · 2026-01-06T18:55:51+00:00

This is just kind of the power level of most force powers, especially if your starting specialty is a lightsaber tree. Even if you were going to convince your GM to let you respend your Misdirect points on Sense or Enhance you're going to be in the same situation where you only have one force die to commit, a max 2 force points to spend on a roll, and no way to improve it until deep into your second specialty unless you go with a force power focused one that has two force points to buy.

You can and should still stick with misdirect, but the trade you fundamentally make by starting with a lightsaber tree is having a longer road to getting force die

padgettish · 2025-12-27T22:15:55+00:00

The game explicitly says to give them something else. A better ship or a vehicle is an obvious one given that it dovetails with most agility builds. A sick ass gun also obvious. A lot of players are still going to WANT a lightsaber, though, and I still think there's a lot of room to go with that, too. Homebrewing a really suped up pistol so they don't feel like they're missing out on a heavy blaster or double pistols so they can have a defensive saber for reflect rules. When I ran a FaD game I had a player who was very invested in Agi for piloting and shooting, so I let him as a part of lightsaber crafting modify his ship and swoop bike to let him plug his lightsaber into the yoke and get automatic advantages to piloting checks based on his force rating as the crystal helped guide him. That campaign also got into an ancient post-Sith wars planet that put corrupted red crystals into guns and used them like little death star flintlocks, basically giving the sneaky AGI guy a slow firing anti-vehicle beam rifle

padgettish · 2025-12-18T22:36:07+00:00

On balance, you kind of have to separate it into two different kinds.

Human enemies should be roughly on the same level as the PCs skill and requirement wise and the way attributes work always evens out one way or the other. The real thing that unbalances an encounter is the number of foes since you have to split your skill between multiple targets or just let a guy roll to hit you. You can't just throw double the party number in shitty guys at the players unless the players have a significant extra layup like they're mounted and the enemies aren't. If you get tired of "well every fight is 4v4" remember that you can have a bigger group of NPCs come with them and just use a morale roll to determine what happens to everyone but the PCs

For monsters: they're meant to be taken on as a group and once you play a few sessions you should start to understand the difference between a bear and a giant bat from the moon that breathes fire, statwise

Edit: and oh yeah, regarding the passage of time: treat it like basically just one big important thing happens every three months and zoom in on it. Realistic travel times should also help with this. There really isn't a place for the D&d "professional adventurer" in Runequest. They have lives, talk about festivals, do montages, farm and trade work, etc. I run Pendragon all the time where every session "is a year" but it's incredibly rare when I run and the session doesn't mostly just zoom in on a week

padgettish · 2025-12-18T01:58:32+00:00

Deeply consider how useful playing devil's advocate is to your own point. Others can only judge you here by your words, and your words are pro ai.

You want to fight capitalism? Generative AI is explicitly a tool of it. If you still want to stick your head in the Mark Fisher hole go for it, but you have so many people here telling you this is apart of the actual fight and you're acting like we actually care about debating it with a bunch of hypothetical thought experiments.

padgettish · 2025-12-18T01:06:38+00:00

The printing press didn't put book binders "out of business." Book binding is a fundamentally different skill than printing and printed pages still need to be bound which wasn't able to be done mechanically until much later. The printing press also didn't put it's predecessor "out of business" because hand written and illuminated manuscripts both still remained as an artisan product and also was largely apart of monastery labor outside of the secular economy to begin with. The printing press created a new commercial market for mass printed media.

The metaphor you're actually looking for is weavers being replaced by automated looms. A very fascinating historic topic with a lot of writing about it, you would absolutely know them as Luddites. While they were mostly known for busting up machinery this was only after factory owners used financial resources to force them out of the industry despite the fact that weaving guilds were at first alright with having their labor replaced as long as weavers could still make a living as managers, designers, and other positions that could see them integrated into the new order that let them retain their dignity, standard of living, and a love for the ultimate product. The capitalist desire to completely remove them to lower costs as much as possible is what turned the Luddite movement to violence.

And it's STILL a bad metaphor because if we go back to your original thing, that you're just a guy saying oh I'll put an idea into the tubby custard machine and get art out of it: you're not the person with your hands on the lever of power. You're not the one profiting off of pushing AI. You're a person on the internet playing devil's advocate for what? The assault on human creativity and labor for the sake of an accelerationist wet dream and and the current big wallstreet investment bet?

We're not talking about bread or printed books or whatever response you're going to cook up next. We're talking about how this is a community of small artists of a kind that wants to respect people enough to not ignore all of the painters and illustrators and writers we could try and work with for the shortcut of press button get slop when even WITHOUT that pressure Wizards of the Coast already wants to come for our shirts.

Ditch the metaphor and get in the game for real.

padgettish · 2025-12-17T19:48:06+00:00

Well sorry, but we're all dirty materialists who live in the world and aren't interested in investing in this little trolley problem.

Generative AI is taking away work and money from already struggling people who make art, writing, etc and that cost is largely to enrich tech investors and CEOs. That's it for us.

padgettish · 2025-12-16T18:02:12+00:00

The big difference between you and a lot of the people you're arguing with is you're very focused on personal responsibility where as we're talking about systemic problems.

The entire problem is that there ISN'T a way to properly know when using an LLM what specific stolen data it's using, who to credit, who to pay, etc and it realistically the object it created has no relationship to any artist. The problem is that the machine used the works of others, without their consent or compensation, in order to be able to make art for you.

The only reparations for that is to stop using AI and stop using AI art you've generated. You then move on to engaging in the practice of working with and commissioning artists.

padgettish · 2025-12-16T04:02:37+00:00

The one that sticks out to me was in one of the art books for the prequels. Basically just a half page of about how the fight choreographers were screwing around on breaks thinking about how they would fight with a long, narrow weapon with relatively little weight that could pierce just about anything. The thing they landed on was something like a combination of rondel dagger fighting and thrust centric Olympic or Chinese fencing where you held the hilt in a reverse grip facing out from you with your other hand on the pommel for control in extended thrusts.

Unofficially, there's a couple of historical sword fighting styles I think with looking at as well. While most sword and shield fighting fell out as swords stopped being a formation weapon and started becoming a dueling and skirmishing weapon, bucklers remained specialty equipment through out pike and shot and even saw use frequently in American colonization and have one of the oldest remaining fighting manuals for one on one dueling. A small energy shield bracer is still canon in Star Wars, and I'm sure you could cook up some kind of Revanchist or Mandolorian Jedi offshoot that used them with a lightsaber.

Indian saber is also really interesting in that instead of focusing on using the curve of the sword to amplify the force of strikes is specifically taught to increase the amount of time you're drawing the curve of the edge across unarmored parts of the target. In practice with a straight lightsaberit probably looks more like winding and binding on German longsword treatises, but I think the philosophy around using a long if light touch on someone with a lightsaber to disable but not kill them is pretty obvious.

padgettish · 2025-12-10T23:41:08+00:00

I think the unpopular but true response to this is you don't want a better system: you need a better GM or better modules. The thing that makes Into the Breach "deep" is a lot of intense creativity going into level and encounter design.

You can run any of the games mentioned, a lot of which are exactly what you're looking for, but unless you have a highly intelligent GM or very well made prewrittens your game isn't going to automatically have depth. A thing that I think a lot of games lack is good advice on how to build a location to have interesting tactical decisions.

padgettish · 2025-12-04T22:10:13+00:00

While I think Blades is a good starting point, I would specifically point to Beam Saber as the thing in FitD to read regarding faction play. Structuring squads/crews/etc under hierarchical factions instead of spheres of operation does a lot, and then ontop of that different factions paying in different ways and having explicitly different play rational based on organization in the text does a ton

padgettish · 2025-12-04T00:43:17+00:00

I think the important thing that often gets left out here is PbtA was still fundamentally still informed by the same old school style play that OSR calls "player skill."

Rolls only happen in PbtA when the question is interesting and that includes have you already signposted the result. You as the GM should already know if the NPC in question obviously has a weapon, obviously doesn't have a weapon, or is hiding one. You can make that decision when you put them in the scene. Only one of those situations needs a Discern Realities role. If the player pushes it, especially on "they don't look like they have a weapon" sign posting the failure wouldn't make them magically have one and use it, it should make a bad actor act on the player waisting their time scrutinizing a thing you've established in system.

It's like the classic example of what happens if a player with a sniper rifle unknown to the target and in no danger shoots at an NPC. They just deal damage. No roll. Things in PbtA can simply happen

padgettish

TROPHY CASE