I also want to point out: if the main impediment is the ability to play games comfortably with a controller on TV, my wife and I are currently playing Cyberpunl 2077, modded, on a TV, in a different room of the house, using a playstation 5 controller.
both Steam Link and Apollo/Moonlight (I found Apollo’s setup of virtual displays out of the box to bw superior) work very well.
Identify - (a pearl worth 100+ GP) Spend 100GP to fine out what this 10GP sword does.
But, for some reason, many then choose denouvo instead…
See, i thrive off that a bit… i always stress over having the right map for everything i want to do, but i have come to realize that my players can be just as engaged when they use their imaginations. That, and i use the rule of three: Have three places preared, have three lore things prepared, and three encounters prepared.
We are a mixed online/in person group, using Foundry, so it took a bit to get the vibe right.
I also am doing an partial home brew Faerun, where Faerun gives me the overall structure, which takes a bit off my plate.
That and… ahem… borrowing… from all the fantasy novels and bringing them in as homebrew.
Gave my paladin a Sword of Truth, but the whole “you can only kill people you think are evil” is a curse mechanic of the sword. Also, he gets itchy whenever anyone around him lies.
The players found a magic bell that has charges which can be used for multiple 1st level healing words, or one mass healing word once per day, with 1d4 charges recovered per long rest.
I am lifting a concept of Holds-based magic straight from the Ericcson Esslemont GURPS rules (in my 5e Faerun, Mystra is Basically K’rul, and the weave is basically the warrens, but there is a deeper, more potent, far more chaotic form of magic that is dangerous).
My wife wanted to be a druid/harry potter character, so i found a home brew ruleset for her on potion making that expands her ability to brew potions and stuff, with the main limiting resource being time.
One of my players wanted to be Kalashtar, so i have a thing where her granparents fled with other Kalashtar to Faerun, and the Quori basically hunting her family down (yay for big bads!).
I also have another person who wanted to be from critical role’s Tal’Dorei, so why not have a multiverse sized campaign where something his character does causes one of the villains and him to be pulled through to a new realm? Boom. Theres the story. BBEEG#1 was trying to do something. Player from Tal’Dorei is a powerful wizard thats expirimenting with crazy magic. Both do a thing, pull each other through to a new place for both of them. Quori want to be able to conquer places physically? Boom - whatever the player and BBEG#1 did weakened the barriers between universes. The Qouri discovered this and now they want to conquer every material realm on the multiverse. Kalashtar character doesn’t realizes shes the lineage of the long-thought- dwad taratai. Qouri inspired recently found ways to navigate the multiverse, and murdered most of her family. Boom BBeg #2: qouri invasion.
For sandboxing, i am trying to run with three possible BBEGs, and reacting to their choices.
I made a little solo game outside that i used to determine the BBEGs’ actions to some extent and to take some of the pressure off of me having to actually make decisions.
Plus… playing it out, super fun, i can change it if i want to, AND i can throw in flavored encounters to slightly steer the players focus…
I also try not to get attached to NPCs.
I LOVE creating them - whenever i play video game RPGs i spend way too much time in character creation, and then end up restsrting five pr six times before gettig my “playthrough” character…
So i have well over 150 NPCs in Obsidian. All mostly detailed out and such.
And that doesn’t include the ones msde up on the spot because my players want to go ask a random guard where the cheapest booze is.
But i will be carrying them from campaig to campaign, so its not wasted work :)
Woah, woah, woah…
Its called “sandboxing” now.
How long did you have to spend to become immune to Iocane powder?
Unsure, but they are about to 100% forget they now have this quest until level 20 and are fighting a necromancer and his army of the dead and then suddenly need to keep turning surprisingly well made mirrors until light opens every door.
Dawnbreaker was a cool sword though.
Just want to point out… their “equal” and “correct” map is missing New Zealand…
I see you never learned the dark art of Mail Merge!
Isn’t access to the internet a fundamental right in the EU? Wouldn’t blocking access be a violation of that?
So… General Strike to stop the coup?
The film companies, including Killing Link Distribution and movant Voltage Holdings, disagreed with the lower court decisions. They appealed to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, requesting a reversal.
Welp. Sounds like part of hollywood never heard of the Streisand Effect.
On the other side of this, you have company’s that are in tangential fields looking to grab up a piece of that pie. Electricians, low voltage companies, fucking furniture companies (oh, we totally do audiovisual, that’s similar enough), the C-suite is trying to force their way into this new golden goose and expecting their staff to be able to handle this without training, time, or real hands on experience. And, no, a 2 day workshop from a manufacturer isn’t really “training”, at least not the only training needed…
I tried to get a job at LCBO, but apparently “taste tester” isn’t an actual job there, but they were incredibly apologetic that it didn’t exist, and said they would call me if anything changed.
I can sing all the lyrics to Dicke Titten. Does that count?
And that the Wikipedia article discussing it is in fact wrong as well…
Sorry, there isn’t a lot of contemporaneous discussion referencing microtransactions on an arcade game that came out in the mid-90s… Back then, we paid up and complained about it to your friends or the person who had their coin on the table.
Basically, the gist is during game play, at specific breaks, you could have the opportunity to buy things like characters, combat abilities, infinit resources, etc.
Here you can even watch someone play the game. Miracle of the internet age, you can just open up a browser, type in “double dragon 3 arcade gameplay” and watch someone play the game and live the experience of being 10 years old in the 90s vicariously through someone else.
Or you could even download the PC port, or play it in emulation on your device of choice so you can truly see if those nasty first-hand accounts are telling the truth and you don’t have to question whether those people posting were knowledgeable, astroturfing, etc.
I thought it was going to be hard to find, since this was an arcade game from my childhood… But here’s one article from Neogaf.
If you Google “Double dragon 3 arcade insert coins”, there are reddit articles, forums talking about this, and even the Wikipedia article talks about this being one of the first commercial games to have in-game micro transactions.
"The U.S. version also features item shops where players could use additional credits to purchase in-game items such as weapons, a
dditional moves and new playable characters in one of the earliest forms of microtransactions in a video game, although this system would end up being removed in the later-released Japanese version…"
Also, not defending Bethesda’s practice, but Horse armor also wasn’t their first microtransaction for oblivion…
They also had themes and stuff on the Xbox store, and literally told people that these types of things were going to be released.
To be fair - I didn’t buy oblivion, a friend of mine had it for Xbox, and I went and sailed the kazaa seas and downloaded the base game + all the DLCs without having to pay micro$oft’s ransom. Only pointing out that we knew well before horse armor that gamers will open their wallets for this.
Double dragon 3. You had to put coins into the arcade machine to literally buy items from an in-game store…
Also, second life came out before Oblivion.
You can be a PC couch gamer! Apollo/Moonlight or Steam Link work pretty damn well. If I can play cyberpunk two rooms away from my PC…
it isn’t without its issues, and my ISP’s router keeps messing with things, but hey, my wife went from “watch him play over his shoulder on a 24” screen" to “play in the living room on a couch and controller with him”