Specifically things like instanced 5 man dungeons (like Ragefire Chasm or the Deadmines in WoW) which are explicitly designed to challenge a full party of a certain level range. Notably, not endgame content. I'm sure the answer changes based on different factors (e.g. how good are the rewards? What are the drop rates like? Are similar rewards available elsewhere? How long is the dungeon? Am I late picking the kids up from soccer practice?), but I'm curious what folks' thoughts are. I'm personally sour on the idea, but I understand that my attitude is "the less MMO an MMORPG can be, the happier I am", so MMO designers should probably disregard my opinion.

Supplementary Context: usually about once a year, I get the bug to hop into an MMO. However, I am not a good MMO player. I tend to flit around my gaming library like an ADHD pixie on cocaine, and there's no telling how long my interest will sustain itself. Therefore, any "meta" choice I make is purely by accident, and I don't spare even a moment of thought on "efficiency". In fact, I've often thought of my dalliances in MMOs as digital tourism. By and large, I'm there to craft, read quest dialogs, and poke around in the weird corners of the map for a couple weeks before logging off for another few years. Anytime I've ever done group content (which is, admittedly, not often), I'm desperately trying to keep up while someone nukes everything in the dungeon as they sprint towards the end. I wind up feeling like my lackadaisical approach is probably fucking up someone else's farming loop. Now, I don't think either the sweatlords or I are playing the game "wrong" so to speak, but our priorities are in conflict. Maybe I'm letting people-pleasing anxiety get the best of me, but I feel like the person that cares enough to grind a dungeon reward as fast as possible should get right of way over my happy ass who will intentionally sandbag my way through a dungeon if the vibes are right. Therefore, I tend not to engage with such content, if it's not possible to solo.

This has all come to a head because my current preoccupation is Star Wars The Old Republic. Given this game's much greater emphasis on story and dialog than a typical MMO, I actually feel like there's RP content that I want to see in the dungeons, irrespective of any item reward. To the game's credit, many of these can be done solo by selecting the "story" difficulty option before loading in, but not all of them. I just don't want to be the asshole holding up the party cause I want to watch the 3 minute into cutscene (or whatever) while everyone else is hammering their skip buttons trying to get to the boss.

Not necessarily asking for advice, as the solution seems obvious to me (it's "talk to your fellow players", like it always is), but I thought this might foster some discussion, especially from old heads who might have lived the raid life back in the day, but now have different priorities.

It's the most wonderful time of year, folks, the new Rich Evans torture simulator is here!

Took this snapshot incredibly hastily, mostly to tease a friend who had to leave earlier in the set, but I think it the colors turned out pretty neat for a point n' shoot pic.

Also, this was maybe my fourth or fifth Coheed show, but this was definitely the best they've sounded. Not bad for a band coming up on their third decade of performing. Strong recommend if they are touring your city.

From the video description:

The era of fiddling with emulators to get Playground of Destruction working on a PC will soon be over. As Mercenaries Recompiled approaches its last stages of testing and polish, the author KraftMacAndChee has deemed the project ready to be released publicly on 9/26 (this Saturday.) The project makes it possible for Playground of Destruction to be played natively on a Windows PC or on Linux via Proton, without the need for the middleman of emulation. It also comes equipped with a mod menu, several graphical enhancements, fixes for various bugs that can be found in the original game, and many more features. Kraft will soon be dipping his toes into mod support for the project, so that large modding endeavors like PoD+ can be fully supported and experienced in their full glory. We will be holding an event in the menace.pro discord on 9/26 at 4:00 PM Eastern time to show off the recomp and celebrate the release. A public build drop will follow afterwards, announced by Kraft. Special thank you to all of the playtesters that aided with the polish and fixing up of bugs, and also to those that contributed anything else to the recomp. This timely and efficient release could not have been pulled off without you.

Not a member of the team, but someone who sunk a lot of hours into this game on the OG Xbox, despite somewhat frequent technical difficulties. I try not to wallow in nostalgia too often, but this feels like an acceptable exception, as a lil' treat. There is also a link to the creator's Discord in the description, if that's a platform you use and you're curious to get some more information.

Continuing my tradition of listening to Scott Manley talk about stuff I don't understand...

BLUF: Title, basically.

Extra Context: A couple years back, I picked up the 4th edition of Twilight: 2000. For those don't know, this is a post-apocalyptic RPG which was first released during the absolute peak of Reagan-era Cold War saber rattling. Unlike other, more fanciful or escapist takes on life "after the end", Twilight skewed much more simulationist, with Tom Clancy levels of hard-on for NATO and Soviet personnel and equipment statistics. Think This War of Mine meets ARMA 3, moreso than Fallout or Wasteland.

I start with this preamble to communicate how different in tone this system is from the games of 5e DnD I've played and run in the past. While the latest version of the Twilight rules is, to my understanding, significantly less packed with grognard crunch than previous iterations, I still find myself overwhelmed with all of the various mechanics and slight rule variations. As an example I hope is illustrative, to fire a weapon classified as a machine gun, your character uses their "heavy weapons" skill, but they follow the "ranged combat" rules, because heavy weapons typically refers to explosive type weapons. You also have to remember whether the MG you're using is classified as Light, Medium, or Heavy, as there are different requirements/penalties based on your character's stance. In and of itself, not too bad, and it pretty much tracks with the considerations I would put in place if I were designing this system, but it becomes a bit much with the everything else of the system. Case in point: the entry for hand grenades states: "grenades use the same rules as heavy weapons, with these exceptions:" and then goes on to list 6 bullet points, which makes me think that it hardly uses the same rules as heavy weapons at all lol.

To be clear, I don't necessarily want to jettison this level of crunch, as I think it's integral to the tone the system is designed around, but fuck me if it isn't a lot to keep track of, especially since I'll have to shepherd potential players through it efficiently if I have any hope of actually playing a game.

With that being said, any advice from the field? Experience with Twilight would be a bonus (any edition), but if anyone has general tips for tackling new systems, I'm all ears.

Was doing some yardwork when I felt a presence watching over me. Thankfully, before I began treating myself for suspected heat stroke, I noticed this fella up in the treeline doing just that. I'm not sure if this is typical behavior for groundhogs, though their common name would indicate not, but I suspect he may have been trying to avoid my dog. At any rate, for an oversized rodent, I thought he was pretty cute! I checked back an hour or so later and he had scampered off elsewhere (I suspect into a tunnel under my garage that I've been putting off dealing with).

Admittedly, wound up with more of a "plague" troll type scheme, but, overall, I'm very happy with how this turned out. Last item in the to-do list is some light corrective work around her hair and feet and then I'm calling it. I wanted to make a creature with some ick factor, and I think this works!

A friend of mine helps out at a local artist co-op, and he invited me to come through to see the Deadly Prey exhibition. Deadly Prey Gallery. I wish I had snagged more photos of the artwork, but hopefully what I grabbed was interesting enough. Accuracy to the films being advertised did not appear to be a priority in many cases, such as the Dune poster featuring a Lynch worm, a Villeneuve worm, a Beetlejuice worm, and a tongue worm from Tremors. I'd crosspost this to some of the movies communities, but I don't know how :(

Other posters:

A searing portrait of young men fighting for their lives in Vietnam in 1965, when America was ramping up involvement in Southeast Asia.

I love these sorts of themed film surveys. As children yearn for the mines, so too do I yearn to put movies into categorized lists. Full disclosure, I've only watched the entirety of 1 movie on this list (Deathstalker 2025), but I do watch a lot of RedLetterMedia, so I feel like I've gotten the gist of all of them lol.

Anyone got any affinity for the genre or particular recommendations for barbarian-type movies? Cause, I gotta be honest, I watched that Barbarian movie from several years back based on nothing but the title, and, let me tell ya, I felt VERY misled... (/s of course... Mostly.)

The second of a two mini pack containing two generic Orc Adventurers. The first was painted some time ago, but I finally got around to painting his partner yesterday. Didn't touch the spell effects, as I want to do some more research into the best approach for that, as this is will be my first time painting translucent plastic.

Overall, he could stand to be much neater, but every time I went in to clean something up, I wound up slopping paint somewhere I didn't want it. So, I decided to just hit it with a couple washes to hide my mistakes and call it a day. I might go back in tonight to reapply highlights in a few areas, but I'm mostly just pleased to have reduced my pile of shame by one figure.