u/sindeloke

and will never happen during normal gameplay.

very funny to me to hear people say this, because my first playthrough was a bard, and I busked constantly as a completely normal part of gameplay (it's way more controllable and efficient than Minor Illusion for getting NPCs where you want them if you need to steal or fireball a group or whatever), and I learned about that achievement when it popped for me in Sorcerous Sundries.

Now the "long rest with only alcohol" one, that I had to do on purpose.

Fortify one-handed? If that's your build, why wouldn't you want to have that on all the time?

Your whole post is a really solid and insightful breakdown of the issue, but this in particular I think is a question of impact scaling. The fortify one-handed you can make in game is infinitely spammable, balanced around that accessibility, and therefore fundamentally way more annoying to apply than it could ever be worth.

However, it's very easy to imagine a potion that would be none of those things. They've existed in MMOs for decades. A Warcraft-style potion with some kind of imposed cooldown that locks it to one use per fight, but which buffs one-handed sufficiently to double damage for thirty seconds, would be both balanced and possibly worth navigating the menu to use (although being able to tie it to another action, the way MMO macros allow pots to be tied to other cooldowns, would also be a significant boost).

Honestly what I've seen of PoE (and what I've played of Lost Grimoire, an essential mod for me) feels closer to what I want from the game than Simonrim. But the one thing that always locks my Morrowboomer ass to Adamant is the addon for larceny consolidation and Hand-to-Hand. Do you have any plans to implement a similar optional functionality for Empyeran? (Or have plans for/know of a patch, though that seems like it would defeat a lot of the point since you'd still have to have both an almost completely overwritten Adamant and also thus Mysticism in the load order.)

god there's a really popular AU in my fandom right now. I was already frustrated with it for other reasons, but I had to bail out hard and permanently just recently when it turned out one of the characters had been hiding all of her accomplishments from her partner out of a fucked up, self-sacrificing insecurity, and her partner looked at this suicidal, stressed-out woman and instead of asking herself "why doesn't she feel like she's allowed to be loved or acknowledged and what can we do to fix that," instead just said "you hurt me really badly and fucked up really badly and how can I trust anything you say anymore." Which, okay, she has been established in this AU as a very selfish person, the entire long-term arc of the relationship is her hurting her partner, her partner doing something hurtful in return but not saying why, her being like "this is your fault" and her partner going "yes you're right" and swallowing her actual problems and nothing getting solved, and I thought them eventually figuring out and solving that dynamic was the point?

But then the author made a post defending her, saying wow you guys are being real mean in the comments, do you not see it from her side? Her partner's being such an asshole? And I realized oh. This is just never going to be a fair relationship, the author and I are quite simply not on the same wavelength of what that looks like.

I don't follow RWBY, but I have noticed there's a whole recurring phenomenon in femslash in general, where the author clearly wants to have a good, old-fashioned Grovel™ scene with one party throwing themselves on the mercy of the other, Darcy-style, because they really dig that particular trope. But they just... can't quite make the bad thing actually particularly bad and it just ends up with one character looking like a self-involved bully and the other being kind of a doormat.

I don't know if the problem is just that the bar for women is higher and if a female character actually came out of the gate with "your family sucks and I hate that I love you" she wouldn't be ~forgivable~ the way Darcy is, or if it's just way harder to get a female character to be selfish and mean in an interpersonal way and still have it be in-character (because the bar for women is higher and if she were that much of a bitch in canon no one would be writing fic about her), or if people realize they're doing this but they just want The Grovel™ that badly. But it's really annoying.

Malice Mod will always be there for us ;_;

Kill a different Dark Brotherhood target and see if they come after you for it. I'm fairly sure that the mod JS uses has that particular fallback.

My quiz isn't particularly afraid of retaliation, but that "safe harbors, Isabela" sure murdered real-world me hard enough for an instant reload.

Which is fascinating, because apparently the whole idea was to introduce a retro plot device to go with the retro setting.

How do you do that, in Wonder Woman of all franchises, without anyone in the room at any point saying "hey is there maybe a reason we don't tell that story anymore?"

There's a throwaway line in DISCO about how the synthbody tech was basically abandoned for being unreliable, with an incredibly low success/compatibility/whatever rate. Which is not a whole lot better, but an attempt was made.

Warhammer, at its best (and despite the tagline), is less grimdark and more of an over-the-top parody. I don't feel bad about throwing orphans in the orphan-crushing machine when I play a Warhammer game, because the mere existence of the orphan-crushing machine is a ludicrous joke about the mindless, stupidly evil inefficiency of capitalism or fascism or both, and the orphans are not people, they're the punchline to that joke. And even on top of that, many Warhammer games give you the opportunity to make an actual difference to the people around you, anyway (you can even save a whole sector from marauding elves and Imperium culture, in Rogue Trader). Playing a game like that isn't emotionally draining, it's absurd and fun.

That is very much not the vibe that I get from people talking about Beyond Reach.

Babs and Dinah are absolutely not going to touch each other.

Depending on when in canon and how you interpret them, however, there is an outside possibility that Babs will talk Dinah through getting herself off and they'll both pretend that doesn't count.

I feel like Rumi would avoid sharing a bed with the other two pre-canon because you never know when your shirt is going to ride up or your collar is going to hang open in the night.

Post-canon you're not getting polytrix just because they share a bed, because they crawl all over each other all the time anyway and it never tipped the scales. However you will probably get polytrix at some point while they're sharing a bed simply from the odds, because they're going to be doing that constantly.

I feel like show!Kara would indeed destroy a bed with an amazon but since the situation sort of mandates it is not a bed she owns, I also think she'd feel very bad about it afterward.

I know what you mean, but that's a funny example, since SR Exterior Cities is right there, and superior to Open Cities with its greater compatibility and synthesis patcher.

The one that does get me is the Aretino Residence one, that lets you kick Angrenor into shape and have him take care of Aventus and Sofie. I hate empty houses and love finding beds for orphans, but there's no alternative to it that doesn't rely on specifically the USSEP Angrenor AI package. You can, of course, open xEdit and bake the AI package into the mod and remove the dependency, but it's annoying. (There are also actually a lot of mods that think they require USSEP that don't; "you can fix it in xEdit but it's annoying" is a very common consequence of the early USSEP ubiquity.)

I don't remember how it came up, but she already read fanfic when we met, so it wasn't a big deal to tell her. She knows when I'm writing a lot and will occasionally give me joking plot prompts.

We're not usually into the same ships, though, and her "bad at feedback so I won't say anything" insecurity and my "if you don't say anything it means you're politely not telling me that I'm stupid for caring" insecurity don't really mix, so I don't usually offer it to her to read and she rarely asks.

Unfortunately clerics aren't proficient with morningstars.

(Of course they could have given it the trait "grants proficiency" but I guess they just felt it wouldn't be sufficiently thematic, somehow, or something.)

"Cleric of a good god" to me feels like... Durge murdered some Selunite cleric and is carrying their holy symbol as a trophy or for sinister Ritual Reasons or some shit, and then wakes up with no memory and sees this moon-charm in their pocket and figures "I must be a Selunite I guess?" and Selune elbows Kelemvor and Lathander in the ribs and goes "holy shit watch this this is gonna be so funny YES MY CHILD YOU ARE DEFINITELY MINE"

There was a time when you could not purchase a game that was not a physical copy in a box created and distributed by the manufacturer, and the expectation that a player would have a manual was so mundane and reliable as to be invisible. Used games existed but were very much understood to be a buy-at-your-own-risk affair, and manuals could sometimes be found at libraries or borrowed from whatever friend who turned you on to the game in the first place, because the vast majority of friendships people had were with other people within driving distance.

(and more importantly there's nothing especially useful or necessary in the Morrowind manual. UESP is more accurate as well as more accessible for any nuances of mechanics or builds.)

Truly an academic for the people.

I know there's an adult mod for at least one of them where he sends you dirty and/or romantic letters periodically throughout the game. Possibly both of them?

I don't know if it's any good, mind you.

Yeah, one of the things that makes Tolkien's elves work for me is that there's no real attempt to make them culturally alien from humans, but they are so completely metaphysically alien from humans. The majority of fantasy settings just give nonhumans bumpy foreheads and call it a day; if the setting later tries to say the difference between them is real, meaningful, and load-bearing, it doesn't work, because it's obviously not. But "the literal laws of physics just kinda work differently for them" is unique and fascinating and can bear up under the weight of a whole lot of worldbuilding.

Fortunately you don't have to hope; you can check any download for viruses by uploading it to a free scan site. I'm a big fan of VirusTotal, which has saved my phone from many apk trojans, but you can also check Kapersky or Metadefender or all three, if you're really paranoid (which you should be, frankly! there's a lot of malware out there!). Also good for peace of mind if you download a lot of SKSE dlls, although it won't be nearly as good at catching novel evil scripting as it will regular trojans in some 7zip file.

I think it's very much designed with the understanding that 80% of players will only play the game once.

Because intentional friction can be very powerful if you use it correctly, but it also wears out its welcome very fast; the tenth time you have to drag through snow is unpleasantly "not this shit again" in a way that the hundredth time you kill the same boss might not be.