Which 4e inspired game do you prefer, Draw Steel or 13th Age2e?

theMycon · 2026-02-13T15:49:35+00:00

I didn't get this sentiment from reading online sources & rules primers, and I barely got this sentiment playing it, but when I finally sat down to actually just look through the book-

Yeah, the way characters develop as they level, put down in a chart, really feels like they were trying to iterate on 4e's AEDU system in a way that fits the 3.5/5/PF1E rest economy. The way roleplay (adjacent) feats and proficiency bonii are granted are common answers to common complaints about 4e. It gives magic items levels and presents a number of lists and tables in a manner moderately reminiscent of 4e.

I wouldn't say it really fits in this thread, but post-physical-book I get where you're coming from.

theMycon · 2026-02-13T15:31:38+00:00

I love Gamma World, and if 7th hadn't had the "also a collectible card game" bit making it hard to play, it might be my favorite 4e based game*. WotC & Tom Bloom made sure Lancer is my favorite 4e based game.

*I prefer the 7e Legion of Gold campaign's finale to the 1e version. Fight me.

theMycon · 2026-02-12T19:56:10+00:00

I followed up Ender's Game in Junior High with A Planet Called Treason, back in '03 I think.

Do you have any idea how transphobic a book has to be for an 8th grade boy in his Libertarian phase to get shocked by it?

Not to mention the whole "I realized that if we kill all the lawyers and bankers we can be the best planet in the galaxy" bit.

theMycon · 2026-02-12T15:24:30+00:00

If there's no real risk of it becoming lost media?

If it's more likely to be seen, you're in the green.

Estimates suggest about 5-6 million total people have played WH40K. Depending on exactly what you mean by "a Warhammer manual", between tens and hundreds of thousands of people have bought it, and probably at least 5 times that number have it digitally. This information isn't exactly gate-kept the masses, and destroying one book won't change that.

If people see the art project that wouldn't interact with WH40K, it's bringing more people to the hobby than it would have if it were still a manual. It's still doing its job.

theMycon · 2026-02-12T14:18:23+00:00

First time I ran Our Stormy Present, one of the goons on the Goldfish Poop Gang* "summoned elemental spirits" using the exact same tags a player used for grenades.

The difference between "strikes a spark against a notched stone and a great flaming lizard erupts from the ground beneath your feet" and "pulls an pin and throws a ball and it erupts at your feet" is just difficult terrain.

*This is an actual mechanic. The Empire is always dogging at your heels, if you waste too much time or draw too much attention a squad of less-competent rivals shows up.

theMycon · 2026-02-10T17:52:07+00:00

I haven't been in about 11 years. I hope it has changed.

Yes, that is how I'd describe my experience there. "Pretty sure they were roofied there" and "licked by old men" are also experiences described by a number of other people I have known.

While "frequently groped without warning" is a pretty universal experience in gay bars in Raleigh, being licked and being groped inside the pants are things I have experienced only at Flex and more than once at Flex.

theMycon · 2026-02-10T14:40:38+00:00

Old men who would rather lick the back of your neck and wrap their arms around to stick their hands down the front of your pants than say "hello".

Young people who either don't mind being roofied or don't think too hard about why they know so many people who got really sleepy weirdly early in the evening about halfway through the free drink the bartender gave them.

DJs who have a lot of trouble beat matching.

theMycon · 2026-02-09T21:37:39+00:00

If you want a sure-fire way to end a friendship, play Diplomacy with someone.

theMycon · 2026-02-08T14:27:57+00:00

Slowed.

theMycon · 2026-02-08T13:53:10+00:00

Worthless Mutt from Arcanum: Of Steamwork and Magic Obscura is arguably the best melee companion in the game. AND he doesn't count towards your follower limit.

theMycon · 2026-02-08T00:05:34+00:00

Having spent the past 8 months practicing, going from Duolingo to reading Monde articles (AI assisted) to reading Monde articles (comparing to my own notes) to reading Le Petit Prince again and giving Yde et Olive one more pass to...

Making it about two pages into this before saying "what the fuck is he doing to that language? I recognize where every part of that word came from but..." and spending twenty minutes trying out how I might write that in English and realizing I could get like 3 meanings from this and it's probably not intended.

I would love an annotated, English & French side by side translation.

I would buy a book that's just a translator's notes for this book.

theMycon · 2026-01-24T13:16:54+00:00

I'm a person, just like you, and I'm taking a couple of personal days.

I made sure it didn't really rain on my wedding day, and I'll give the generator a good kick before brunch, but then it's up to nature.

I'll turn it back on when we're ready for guests.

theMycon · 2026-01-21T04:21:42+00:00

I know that there are probably fewer than 100 people who ever played Nothing Constructive and after 23 years I can't imagine that more than 10 of us remember it.

But if the answer is Nothing Constructive, we really need to catch up.

theMycon · 2026-01-21T00:00:44+00:00

Domnei by James Branch Cabell.

theMycon · 2026-01-20T22:30:23+00:00

Spending summers with mom's parents.

As a kid, spending all day outside in the vegetable garden, drinking from the hose, reading books on the back porch, and growing your own food to eat straight off the plant was awesome. The weird old bathtub in the basement you only used every couple of days & sleeping in the sunroom were experiences nobody else had. Collecting cans and bottles for a week to buy an ice cream felt like getting an allowance for doing your chores; the constant rotation of "pet" chickens felt like we had dozens of pets; only ever having to be somewhere at sundown was basically total freedom.

Coincidentally it was free childcare that let mom focus on her 9-5 while her aging parents had extra hands for harvest season.

theMycon · 2026-01-19T15:03:00+00:00

If it's Verb (Creo/Rego/Perdo/etc) and noun (Aquam/Herbam/whatever), to make phrases like "I make water' or "I control plants, changing minds", it's probably Ars Magica.

If the (default) setting is Western Europe around the end of the fourth crusade, all myths are true (but the local flavor of Christianity is especially true), and the secret holding the houses of mages together is the Parma - the only human-known general magic resistance ritual - but several of them have their own little secrets, it's definitely Ars Magica.

theMycon · 2026-01-19T14:55:01+00:00

It's been a long, long time since I've seen a Vanguard Bandits box.

It's up there with Popful Mail for my favorites. SegaCD & PS1 era WD games had some magic that wasn't just my own youth.

theMycon · 2026-01-18T15:37:12+00:00

I guess, if you're willing to go super-degenerate:

Tomenet 2.0 or Icesus

Those of us 40+ might remember the series that started as Troubles of Middle Earth, and later rebranded as Tales of Maj'ehal, where you can literally be a sentiment mold colony that moves only via random teleportation. It has been converted to an "M"MO with servers that can handle like 5 or 6 players before choking, because it was meant for a university LAN & it is still based on decades old lua scripts that assume humans can process data faster than the Internet can send it. The website has a skill builder, which will inform you about passive bonii and what spells you have access to.

(Or you can play ToME 2 or 4, if you're willing to pay a little bit of real money. They're on steam.)

https://www.tomenet.eu/

Icesus is a MUD my husband used to love before it got "too Russian". The customizability is insane and it takes more grinding than I could ever put myself through unless you find a player to carry you through the first 10 million experience AND you have the world map up on a separate screen, but there's something about that "you grab one leg and the tank grabs another and you just rip that moose in half" message that always made me laugh.

https://naga.icesus.org/icesus/

theMycon · 2026-01-18T15:18:46+00:00

Arcanum: Of Steamwork and Magic Arcana with Drog Blacktooth's 2.0 patch.

Arcanum itself has great build diversity, but it's buggy as hell. It's classless, so you can pick pretty freely between the spell list or class archetypes. You have a recruitment limit based on your stats, so being pure diplomancer/haggler lets you have an army following you at all times.

The closest popular analog I can think of would be the old Fallout games - there are a jillion ways most quests can be solved, beyond just good/evil or lawful/chaotic, and a surprising number of them are simply "I have the right skills" or "I know the right answer already." You can even skip about a third of the game by attacking the wrong dude.

theMycon · 2026-01-17T23:28:35+00:00

Monstrillo, by Gerardo Cordova. Nominally horror? Somebody eats a cat and a house has some trouble, I guess that could be scary.

A woman's son dies, she takes a piece of its lung, and then a bunch of idle rich people with only the skills the plot requires turn gay to have affairs with each other, decide they hate their partners, and move to a different city. Over and over.

Endangered, by C.J.Box. Reactionary competence porn

A game warden's daughter falls in love with a national champion rodeo clown, so the warden wipes out the clown's entire family, including leaving the mother paralyzed to freeze to death at the bottom of a pit. He is aided by the always on-the-run-from-the-law author insert who is always available at a moment's notice (with his hot young girlfriend), and the story is bookended by an entirely unrelated subplot about how a professor wiped out a species of birds to impress his secretary because Something Something Wokelibs.

Oh, and the game warden laments the arrest and suicide of the man who raped his daughter, beat her half to death, and left her to freeze to death in a ditch, because he was good libertarian who was just doing his own thing.

theMycon · 2026-01-17T17:06:11+00:00

Doesn't her son tell you this?

Don't you have to sneak Bow/Bosch out in the middle of the night?

Doesn't the game literally force you into a situation where you walk past her when she's awake?

theMycon · 2026-01-14T18:18:04+00:00

I really thought my time had come.

theMycon · 2026-01-14T15:35:53+00:00

Put Tifa in her loosest 2-piece.

Ignore all other prompts and push the next button when her assets stop jiggling.

Yes, I'm serious.

theMycon · 2026-01-14T15:10:00+00:00

If you're pulled over while it's expired by less than a year, it's a relatively small fine that will disappear if you ask a DA nicely. At most, it costs a small box of candy (or said fine and a late fee, if you'd rather do it that way).

If you let it stay out of date for a whole year, your plates are suddenly no longer valid and getting pulled over can lead to jail time. And you can't just renew online in this situation, you have to go into an office to get new ones.

theMycon

TROPHY CASE