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ProfessorOwl_PhD [any]

@ ProfessorOwl_PhD @hexbear.net

Posts
20
Comments
510
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • If you're wondering how the UK is doing I got arrested Saturday evening for sending my MP a mean email

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  • I have mixed feelings about having gone to a grammar school - how at odds private education is with my values, but also how many of those values were formed from seeing the world from an angle I wouldn't have been able to at a public school - but for once I'm straight up thankful I went and learnt how to be charming as a mode of attack. Deferring to their knowledge while preempting their instructions, just things like saying "after you" a second before they could instruct me to follow them, undermined their authority and put them a little off balance without them being able to identify it as anything other than gracious politeness.Really importantly though, I wouldn't recommend any of what I did as a general approach to being arrested. I have a bunch of privileges I knew would influence their attitude towards me, like being white, identifiably male, and well spoken, and other privileges I knew I could lean on to help out, like having a strong support network in my friends and family, so combined with the frivolity of the crime I was doing all of it from a fairly safe position. If I was a minority or looked poorer there's a good chance it would have been seen as being cheeky and resulted in at least a caution, and if my parents didn't already know a bunch of solicitors I wouldnt have been able to project confidence in the way I did.

  • If you're wondering how the UK is doing I got arrested Saturday evening for sending my MP a mean email

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  • Right? They asked if I'd ever communicated with him before and I could truthfully say no, I haven't. Previous MPs, yes, other members of parliament, yes, various government enforcement agencies, yes, just not this specific man who has only been in office for 2 years.

  • If you're wondering how the UK is doing I got arrested Saturday evening for sending my MP a mean email

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  • As much as I'd like to call myself brave I was mostly insulated from the situation by a cozy blanket of autism and relief it wasn't about a real crime. Most of the people I know who have been arrested have been pretty shaken by the experience, but they put me in a quiet room without too much decoration, nobody around to bother me, and a nice thick book to keep me occupied. I've been chasing that my whole life, it's just not going to intimidate me at all.

  • If you're wondering how the UK is doing I got arrested Saturday evening for sending my MP a mean email

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  • I did nearly ask if sending that Tyler the creator tweet would be a problem, but I was already out at that point and my sister was giving me a look.

  • If you're wondering how the UK is doing I got arrested Saturday evening for sending my MP a mean email

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  • The specific legal wording makes it easier - it doesn't need to be the sole or primary purpose, just a purpose of the communication, so it's actually so broad that it could potentially be applied to basically any insult.

  • Despite running D&D, Pathfinder, and PF2e for almost 15 years, tonight I'll be running a fight against a dragon in a dungeon for the very first time.

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  • I didn't bother adding the child, in fact I didn't really change anything up until after he steals the sword - when they chased him to the smugglers cave I placed a bit more emphasis on backstory stuff like the sword being a physical connection to his family history and him trying to buy the sword back from the Menhemes in his pleading with them, and they decided they wanted to help him get the sword back legitimately rather than punish him - they convinced the mayor to let them hold onto the sword for safe keeping while helping Carmen stay sober and finding him more interesting work that made better use of his crafting skills than bashing out axes for the lumberers. They did stuff like mentioning around town that he made the equipment they used to defeat various terrors of the middle floors to rebuild his reputation in the town, and gave him additional emotional support after the Hellknight (nicely) asked him to kill himself. I rewrote his importance to the lighthouse, giving him additional motivation and reassurance, but even with him being a dick about everything at the start they found his backstory sympathetic enough to try and make him a better person.

  • i am really worried about what's going on in eu

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  • Battlefield 6. Anyone else actually considering buying it?

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  • Have you ever tried Warframe? The level/modding system gives a lot of room for low and high skill players to play together (it's a straight up power fantasy in the best way), and the "base" mission time is 5 minutes - either a mission takes around 5 minutes to complete or there's the option to leave or continue every 5ish minutes - so you should be able to easily leave without interrupting anything. It isn't forced co-op in the same way as Vermintide and DRG, so much of the content can be solo'd if you prefer, but it's really community minded so you're overwhelmingly more likely to get help than abuse if you're flagging for any reason.

  • If You Were in a Kung Fu Movie Setting What Would You Name Your Dojo?

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  • School of the Hundred Hands teaching the Hekatonchiere Style, which is where me and 49 friends all wail on you at once.

  • Battlefield 6. Anyone else actually considering buying it?

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  • I kinda stopped playing online games overall and its been pretty good for my mental health

    I already preferred the PvE modes in online games but switching to specifically cooperative games like Vermintide and Deep Rock Galactic worked for me. Even without any direct communication they have much more of a sense of community.

  • i am really worried about what's going on in eu

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  • It's a post in itself and I only got about half of it down before work, so I'll drop a link here after I finish it tonight.

  • i am really worried about what's going on in eu

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  • Oh yeah, I should post about my arrest

  • On that terrible "Burn the Israeli Flag" post (CW discussion of antisemitism)

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  • The St George's Cross and Saltire aren't anywhere near as synonymous with christianity as the Star of David is with judaism. Without the context of being on a flag they're indistinguishable from a + and x - the equivalent symbol would be a Crucifix, which we definitely do not have a burning version of.

  • Good Game To Play As Communists? HOI?

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  • Have you considered Red Faction? It's getting on in years, but it's explicitly about a united workers revolution.

  • Despite running D&D, Pathfinder, and PF2e for almost 15 years, tonight I'll be running a fight against a dragon in a dungeon for the very first time.

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  • That's fair, one of my party is a Hellknight so for him stopping an army from invading Otari in exchange for a single soul was a no-brainer even with the morality pet angle. Eventually him and the rest of party came to a compromise that they'd just ask him nicely to sacrifice his soul to unknown eternal torments at the hand of a devil, and not push it if he declined. He turned them down so they did it the hard way, but the Hellknight still spent a lot of the floor requesting they go back and ask again.

  • Despite running D&D, Pathfinder, and PF2e for almost 15 years, tonight I'll be running a fight against a dragon in a dungeon for the very first time.

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  • Thinking of updating Ravirex to a mirage dragon, hoping to mess a bit with an old gm that will play.

    Fuuuuck, I had a similar idea but the ones I looked at didn't really fit, Mirage would be the perfect replacement. Go for it.

    In general, I've not found it as lethal as many report, but my players started with no PF2e knowledge and one had no ttrpg experience at all, so I structured the floors around introducing them to new mechanics, techniques, tactics, abilities etc.Mr Beak and the shrine Corpselights on the ground floor are the biggest threats starting out - they can easily down a level 1 character on a crit and the Corpselights could potentially wipe the party in one with their beam attack. Killing a party member here did have the advantage of letting me run a long ass funeral for the dead character then bringing him back as a zombie in the deadtide event the next night though, so while the fights aren't necessarily fair they can help in establishing tone and characters personal motivations.Middle floors will largely depend on how reckless your players are for kill count, but they should be familiar with the mechanics and be able to handle everything if they're careful and not afraid to flee if everything goes south. Middle floors suffer the most from the single-PL+3-enemy-in-a-small-room problem, but we found each fight generally brought something unique to the table and kept things interesting.Last few floors are level dependent - if you're doing XP rather than milestone the party can easily get a level ahead of where they're intended to be by scraping each floor for loose experience like mine did, but it can just as easily leave them a level behind if they're regularly missing secret doors or ignoring sections of floors. If they're ahead of the curve the bottom floors have danger around every corner, keeping the party on their toes even in fights they're fully prepared for. If they're on milestone, fights like Ravirex will kill characters even with rolls as bad as mine. If they're behind Belcorra will TPK them as soon as they get there. There's less roleplay and engagement with Otari, but it has the most engaging and dynamic combat, and replaces the roleplay by moving the story down into the dungeon. Most of the actual story for the first 2 books is about Otari rather than the Gauntlight, but the third lets them actually engage with the BBEG and shutting down the Gauntlight, so it doesn't need the extra stuff from outside to keep the players interest.Generally you can run the whole thing straight from the book, but it's worth browsing AV Expanded for ideas - I only took some choice pieces of the festival and a little of the expanded roseguard lore directly from it, but it helped with fleshing the story out.Speaking of fleshing things out, it's worth finding your characterisations of the residents of Otari early, as they are you primary source of roleplay and if you establish them early it's pretty easy to get the party to start engaging them at every opportunity. Even though the story won't really deal with them in the last book, there's still plenty of reasons for them to seek out various services or advice from specific NPCs if they already know they exist.The only thing I completely rewrote was Carmen Rajani and the Cooperative Blade. I think as written he's a sympathetic character who yearns for purpose, and letting the party work to redeem him makes for a better story and bigger moral dilemma when Urevian requests his soul (have Urevian meet the party and make the offer almost as soon as they get to his floor, so every time they go into a fight they know they could just sacrifice him and skip the floor). As part of that redemption I also made him one of the keys to unlock the lower levels instead of the Cooperative Blade (Vol settled down and hung up her sword immediately after defeating belcorra, so I decided it was her family that carried her spirit rather than the sword), which my players found corny but still preferred to the original plot when I told them about it later. He's way better as a morality pet than irredeemable dickhead.

  • Despite running D&D, Pathfinder, and PF2e for almost 15 years, tonight I'll be running a fight against a dragon in a dungeon for the very first time.

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  • So the inventor turned it to paste. It started by trapping the weaker party members in a corner so it could breath attack them and then pick up easy crits on the basic strikes to recharge it, but the fucking inventor got all the crits instead and took off a full quarter of its health with each of their stupid 2(2d12+2d6)+1d12+1d10 damage. It went from over half health at the end of round 3 to dead in the middle of round 5.

    This always happens when I get to play a smart enemy, I roll like dog shit at a critical time and one of them pulls out a string of crits. They were all lined up and half melted and they just spread it's brains across the ceiling.

  • Despite running D&D, Pathfinder, and PF2e for almost 15 years, tonight I'll be running a fight against a dragon in a dungeon for the very first time.

    Jump

  • Despite running D&D, Pathfinder, and PF2e for almost 15 years, tonight I'll be running a fight against a dragon in a dungeon for the very first time.

    Jump

  • Its a really big dungeon.