This may be slightly inaccurate but in the UK, life sentences basically never happen. A life sentence normally has a minimum term, in this case 45 years, before they can go up for parole. If they get parole, their freedom remains conditional for the rest of their life.
This is my favourite, it’s a little cheesy and fun, but it doesn’t have my biggest issue with the Reddit one which is for some reason acting like it’s a birthday party.
It’s a shame that knowing average monster hitpoints is generally metagaming and there is no ranger option or similar to show you this.
It would be cool to follow a fireball. If you know the enemy you’re fighting has about 32 hitpoints for example, such as the thug, and a band of them got hit by a fireball for 30 damage, sleep is a perfect spell. But getting this combo off in game always feels a little metagamey in a way that just makes it ineffective.
I’d say the Rage beyond Death feature of the zealot is pretty major to how they’re played. A level 14 barb may have 150 hitpoints or more, plus their resistances, but people play the zealot in high level games for this feature.
The idea of getting to fight to 0 hitpoints, then keep fighting until you die and then still not relenting until the fight ends is rad. Hell I’d say that their level 3 and level 6 features, while cool, were designed after their level 14 feature and designed to let you get as much out of that final feature as possible.
The Witcher novels are one of the few epic fantasy franchises I’ve read and man, I didn’t really like them.
Unsurprisingly, I came from the playing the Witcher 3, and I loved the first two books; the collections of short stories. The actual main plot felt that it never knew clearly where it was going, and it often suddenly meandered at times that killed the pacing, and man was it horny.
I don’t mind horny either. I really enjoyed reading Murakami’s The Wind Up Bird Chronicle, and the authors horniness is prevalent throughout the novel, but it actually works to complement the narrative. Even in the Song of Ice and Fire series where GRRM can get distractedly horny, it doesn’t read as off-puttingly as Sapkowski’s “edgy horny” style.
This is my favourite novel of all time. It’s interesting how the conversation is always about if it’s adaptable into film, where many famous novels are accepted as totally unable to be adapted.
Part of it comes from McCarthy’s very external style of writing. It’s basically impossible to covert the layers of subtext in Ulysses to screen, or the introspection of The Bell Jar.
Hell in university I adapted the first chapter into a screenplay to pass the time and I was super happy with the outcome. I’m paraphrasing here but when the Coen Brothers adapted No Country for Old Men they made a joke that the adaptation was as simple as Ethan turning the page and Joel writing the words. McCarthy’s work screams to be adapted.
On the flipside, Blood Meridian’s meandering, epic nature may be what makes it unable to be adapted, not it’s cruelty. Any and all adaptations for screen would need to reimagine swathes of the book, which is a disservice to it’s structure. Many novels have this difficulty in adaptation but for reasons I struggle to explain, it feels it would hurt this novel more than most. Even if it were to be adapted into a 10 or 20 episode high budget show, I’d doubt it would adapt naturally in it’s flow.
On a totally unrelated note, chapter 14 is such a great chapter. I often pick the book back up to read that chapter again. It’s got fantastic prose, a great monologue from the judge, and covers in my opinion the most critical point of choosing evil for the Glanton gang.
On the D&D side, the final big adventure is releasing for D&D now before they refresh the rules starting in autumn. That adventure is high level and the main antagonist is Vecna, with him effectively having lieutenants of many of the other popular villains.
This isn’t just a D&D tie in, it’s an ad for Vecna: Eve of Ruin.
Id assume that’s a liability thing? I’m not too sure as I believe it’s legal to be topless in NYC, although probably not Dublin, but it’s almost definitely not a crime to show 9/11 imagery.
I’m only talking from watching PF2e actual plays and playing a lot of 5e but I’d say PF2e combats would run 1.2x longer under the same conditions as a 5e game.
I’d say DM style is easily the biggest influence, I’ve played in games where a one hour combat is the significant boss battle of a campaign, but rules for 6 rounds, and I’ve played in games where a 6 hour battle may be normal, potentially with as few as 4 rounds passing (the latter one absolutely does kill me though, I think my character in that game has actually developed to avoid a fight because I dont want the faff). I’d say DM style can influence a combat length by 3x or more.
Similarly an understanding of general efficiency in combat from the players too can half a combat length pretty easily.
I wouldn’t worry about it extending the game length, any extra time is pretty negligible compared to steps you can take to stop the time of combat unraveling.
I was so amazed at how common they were. I spent a year in Australia and probably saw more kangaroos day by day than I see all wild animals combined day by day here in the UK (excluding birds).
Hell I grew up in North Wales and may have seen as many kangaroos day by day as I saw sheep here, and that’s saying something.
I do have an amount of pity for people with extreme religious views. I remember talking to an atheist friends extremely religious mother who was trying to come to to terms with the fact her daughter was going to go to hell one day.
Imagine walking through the park and seeing someone about to eat an ice cream that you know has a powerful psychoactive substance in that will kick in after few years that tricks the persons brain into believing they’re being tortured until their brain turns to mush.
I absolutely don’t agree with people spreading their religious doctrine, especially when unwelcome, but many of those people could be considered victims to that choice and don’t deserve to be antagonised.
Idk if anyone else follows the rule of thumb of “let the party pull the same trick 3 times before you make it backfire”.
In a story, it would fail on the third try, in a game, it would never fail. I find 4th time doesn’t leave many people dissatisfied but also doesn’t let every encounter be trivialised.
Bust out your fireball empowered cultists responsibly.
I wrote an essay on this exact thing back in college. Basically every backdrop, including every mountain range the action actually took place in was totally digitally created, furthermore many of the explosions were beefed up in post production. Some obvious stuff like the sandstorm were of course CGI too. Sometimes the ground would just be reshaped a little for the aesthetics of the final shot when it’s basically just changing desert to desert.
The thing is, practically every vehicle and person you saw was real, and most of the special effects like the explosions were real and looked incredible on the day, with things like shrapnel and the like being added in post.
Fury Road barely used CGI for the content people care about, the stuff that’s exciting to know was done for real on location. But beyond that, it was used liberally.
I’m happy with this approach and I’m curious to see how much the new film adheres to this choice.