If you want the full comfy chillax experience, add the mod that just lets you pause time whenever you want. Feel like fishing but don’t want to miss something? Take a pause and relax with a rod for a bit.

I also suffer from min/max gaming and this is the only way I could enjoy the game without being stressed.

Specialized LLMs trained for specific tasks can be immensely beneficial! I’m glad to see some of that happening instead of “Company XYZ is now needlessly adding AI to it’s products because buzzwords!”

I had the Secret of Monkey Island on a CDROM as a kid and the soundtrack of the original is burned deep into my brain.

Fun fact: you could put the game CD into a normal CD player, skip track 1 (The data track) and just vibe listening to the entire soundtrack while rollerblading.

Time for me to give it another listen, I hope it holds up!

Instead of trying to specifically carve out spaces for each one, try just figuring out the balance of the starting play area and immediate neighboring regions. Then have rough ideas of where some other continents in the world are, and as other spieces come up that are rare for the region you can say they are originally from continent X.

Until the players actually go visit these other places, you don’t need to have societies fully formed and figured out. Once players decide to visit, you should have at least one session of sea/air/whatever travel buffer to give you time to populate new lands (and can then adjust for any storyline/player interest.)

For example, in my campaign I told my players that the elven homeland was in the continent to the south. Three years later they are finally going to visit there, and it turns out I now know that the elders and majority of elves in the capital city live in a giant treetop metropolis while halflings and some other races are engaged in a 1920s style drug-fueled gang warfare on the ground level amidst a technological revolution (Drive-by violence is much more interesting with repeating crossbows and fireballs instead of tommy guns and bombs). The elves care very little about what the “dirty ground races” are up to because as a consequence of their longevity, they are very slow to change and adapt to a changing world.

Had I tried to figure out their society at the start of the campaign, it would have been nothing like that.

There’s no other system that quite captures the feeling of, “Shit, that was a lot of damage. Do I try to heal them before it rolls to 0 or just spam attack and hope to end combat before they go down?”

I agree, throwing enemies into stacks is much more amusing than everyone just standing around.

It doesn’t matter any more than any other individual data point. The concern is that when all the data points are collated, it gives a LOT more information about someone than many people realize.

Here’s another website referencing that article for visibility: https://metacurity.substack.com/p/best-infosec-related-long-reads-for-d92

Nice set, you had me at #1. Reminded me of Super Soul Bros - Motherlode: https://supersoulbros.bandcamp.com/

So much time spent playing Sid Meier’s Pirates! I think there was a remake that was faithful to the original with updated graphics, and it was great times. Capture ships, attack forts, trade goods.l… just a great game.