I have started playing D&D basic with my family as a way to spend time together away from devices.

I found the original character sheets:
http://www.ultanya.com/2015/10/throwback-thursday-character-sheets.html

Anyone else have favorite character sheets for D&D?

My old TTRPG group hasn’t met in months now, and listening to actual play podcasts only scratches the itch.

Probably a long shot given the size of the site, but anyone interested in playing a TTRPG sometime soon?

I’m thinking something easy and low pressure, like Stewpot, or Fiasco or maybe a world builder like the Quiet Year/Microscope/Anomaly/The Ground Itself; I have the PDF for most of those.

But hey, if you have something you’ve been waiting forever to play: I’m here for it.

I have literally nothing to do tomorrow so drop a message if you’re interested! I’m in CST

For the purposes of the question, I want to ignore official remasters/rereleases since those are essentially separate, newer full releases. I'm interested in old, original games. Titles that you can "manually remaster" yourself with mods are fine, since you're still playing the "original" game to some extent.

Also, "regularly" in the title doesn't have to mean daily/weekly and can instead be "once every couple of years".

• What keeps you coming back to them?
• Is your love for the games strictly nostalgia-based, or could an unacquainted newcomer still find similar value in them?
• If there are any modern games that try to scratch the same itch, do they succeed or fail?
• Would you want an official remaster of the game (if one isn't already available)?

So there is this game called Valheim that recently released. You may or may not have recently read the article where they claim to have sold over a million copies around a week after release.

I bought it to give it the 2-hour smell test and it seems pretty darn good. However, this game seems best played with others and I doubt my friend group will end up playing this. Renting a server seems pretty cheap so I was wondering how interested you would be in a Tildes community server? I would be down for paying for a month and seeing where it goes from there.

It looks like min slots for a server would be 10 slots but I would imagine that's okay since we all wouldn't be in the same time zone. I can scale this up if the demand is there.

Thoughts?

Other Info:

What is Valheim, the Viking game blowing up on Steam?

Server is set up!

Game is password protected but if you click me, you will find what you need.

The title question is more of an umbrella one, and I want to state from the get go that I am asking these questions non-judgmentally. I want this to be a space where people can feel safe to respond honestly.

I’ll also qualify that I’m not asking these impartially, as part of my reason for making this thread stems from some identified frictions in my own life that I’ve been mulling over. I don’t want to prime anyone’s answers, however, so instead I’ll just lay out what I’m interested in hearing about:

• Do you feel that you need to hide your gaming from others?
• Are you honest with others about the amount of time you spend playing games, the types of games you play, or the importance you ascribe to them?
• Do you feel that people judge your gaming habits or status as a gamer negatively?
• Do you identify yourself as being a part of a broader gaming culture?

"Wrong" here can be intentional or unintentional. Maybe you completely missed that a character had a certain ability and got through the entire game without knowing there was so much more you could be doing! Instead, maybe you specifically challenged yourself to get through the game without using that ability, seeing if you were up to the challenge! Maybe you activated cheats to cruise through on easy mode, or maybe you accidentally activated a cheat and had no idea that the game wasn't supposed to be that easy (ask me about my FF7 playthrough).

"Wrong" can also be however you decide to interpret it: counter to the developer's intentions, exploiting the game engine, uncovering a loophole in the game's systems, pursuing your own goals instead of the game's goals, etc. It's not meant to be a moralistic judgment by any means (play any game however you want!) but more just an identifier that you went against the game's standard norms and expectations.

Tell us what you did "wrong", why you did it that way, and what the outcomes were. Did it make the game more fun or exciting? Did it ruin the game for you?

I recently played through 2013's Tomb Raider and it was a delight -- a wonderful reboot that modernized a series whose originals I loved but that are quite dated by today's standards.

In the game, Lara, the main character, is in peril constantly, and she is driven into worse and worse situations in an effort to save her crewmates and friend. The narrative of the game demands immediate action -- any dawdling risks all of the characters' lives.

Of course, we know that games' timelines aren't necessarily time-driven but character-driven, so it is trivial for Lara to stop at any point in the game and not advance the story. The killers who are prepared to murder your friends will patiently wait around as long as necessary. Furthermore, the game gives you plenty of reason to do so! There are collectibles to find and story and lore bits scattered about the levels that you have to go out of your way to encounter. Finding these gets you more XP and resources which unlock skills and weapons that make the game easier. The game lets you fast travel back and forth to different areas as needed, and I spent a good amount of time at the story's height of tension not resolving that tension by advancing to the climax but by ignoring it and scouring the island for all the things I missed instead.

I use Tomb Raider as an example here, but I'm sure you can think of plenty of other examples where the game directly incentivize actions that outright subvert its story. What I find interesting is that, on paper, I should care about this discrepancy, but in practice I really don't. In fact it's customary for me to do this in nearly every game I play, as I find that I like "checklisting" and cleaning things up rather than advancing the plot (of course -- do I actually like that, or do I merely like that I get rewards for doing so?).

I don't have a singular question to ask but instead have some jumping off points for discussion:

• Is this undermining of narrative tension an actual issue, or is it just part of the suspension of disbelief embedded into the medium of gaming?
• Have you felt that particular games were made worse due to this issue? If so, why? If not, why not?
• What games are counterexamples -- games whose narrative tension is not undercut by their gameplay? What makes them work? Does that aspect benefit the game, or would the game be roughly the same (or better) without it?
• If you consider this an issue, does the "responsibility" for it lie with the developer of the game for incentivizing gameplay counter to narrative, or does the "responsibility" lie with the player for ruining their enjoyment of the narrative by pursuing other goals?

Also, don't feel limited by these questions or my choice of game and feel free to address anything else relevant to this idea that you feel is important or relevant.

I was curious how many people on here enjoy listening to game soundtracks outside of the game. I personally love when a game has a great soundtrack as it really adds to the atmosphere and overall immersion in the game. I also like collecting physical copies of them as well.

If you do, which ones are your favorite? Personally I love Shin Megami Tensei, Final Fantasy, and Blazblue soundtracks the most.

Flash is gonna die for good in a few days (dec 31st) so I felt this is a good time to ask this question. (Although obviously, there have been large efforts to preserve these when the developers did not. And even then, HTML5 means browser games will continue to exist, even though mobile games have mostly replaced browser games anyway.)

Mine personally were (taking away some of the more well-known ones):

Gravitee 2

Basically a game of celestial golfball. Had a level editor, which was quite fun.

Bonk.io (although this one has a sequel that's not in flash)

Pretty popular for a flash game made in 2016. Basically a game where balls need to "bonk" eachother out of the playing field.

Effing meteors (Definitely one of the games that I probably remember being better than it is.)

Basically a game where you clump up small meteors into bigger meteors to destroy stuff.

Ribbit

A game where a rabbit and frog are fused together and need to bounce like a pogo to the end.

Frost bite

A mountain climbing platforming game.

Sushi cat

A game where you need to eat sushis quickly. Also has cutscenes.

Flash cat

An aesthetic racing game? Not entirely sure.

Chisel

A game where you drill through the planet enough times to move to the next level (man, I had some weird gameplay preferences.)

Dillo hills

A game where you need to time your descents to pick up speed in the hills and fly.

Dino run

An 8 bit game where you as a dinosaur need to outrun extinction.

Raccoon racing

A power-up racing game I remember playing quite a bit. Definitely designed for children, even if that's not very surprising.

I'll start: the party knows my character is a veteran of the war between the elves and the humans, but they don't know that she was duped into helping develop a type of biological warfare and becoming an accessory to war crimes.

What are you hiding?

I’ve been playing Bayonetta on and off for a bit of time, and now that I’m near the end of it (just started Requiem), the genre kinda grew on me, which surprised me quite a bit.

I see loads of games being thrown in the same bag:

• Bayonetta
• Devil May Cry
• Darksiders
• Ninja Gaiden
• No More Heroes
• God of War
• several Warriors/Musou games
• etc. etc.

So I was wondering what makes any specific game in the general genre distinct and special, and wanted to discuss in this thread.

My experience with this genre is limited as the Switch is my first ever console, but I will share what little experience I have in a comment.

P.S. I hope this thread will be a bit more lively than my previous try with the Different types of 3D platformers thread.

I asked in another thread about the best games you played this year, which is a question that tends to surface highly polished and often highly familiar gaming experiences.

This thread isn't about "best" but about the most interesting -- games that did something different or odd or tried something new. They didn't have to necessarily succeed at that, and they can be very rough around the edges or even outright bad -- what matters is that they went out of their way to offer something very much their own.

Post in this thread if you've got a game you want to play, and you're looking for others to play with. Video games, tabletop games, friend codes, gamer tags, you name it. :)

EDIT: There is an Unofficial Discord server with a #games channel. It may be easier to organize on there, and the link's posted a handful of times in this thread, so I'm just gonna... stick it here, I guess? https://discord.gg/PcP8qHS

As anyone who's spent any amount of time on any gaming forum would know, Cyberpunk 2077 was easily the most hyped game in the past year, if not the past few. Expectations were impossibly large: fanatics expected the immersiveness of Red Dead Redemption 2, the map detail of GTA V, and the density of a Yakuza game.

Now that Cyberpunk 2077 has been available to the public for ~1 day, what are your impressions? Does it live up to the hype? Do the bugs detract too greatly from the experience? Is it revolutionary in some sense; or is it the inevitable cumulation of open world RPGs, excellent but ultimately derivative?

For perspective, would you consider it a personal contender for game of the year?

Maybe it's a random itch.io find; maybe it's a minor title from a long forgotten console; maybe it's a dev project your friend asked you to play test. Whatever it is, you think it's neat, and you never see it mentioned anywhere.

Tell us about the game -- what is it? Why is it noteworthy? Do you think it deserves more recognition than it's gotten? Why do you think it's as hidden away as it is?

Dear Tilderinoos I believe in doing fun things with strangers (that sounds dirtier than what was intended).

How are you boys/girls/All/none feeling about gaming or Game Nights as events together? Games like Among Us, Minecraft, CSGO?
Or Pen and Paper RPG's via Matrix/Discord/Telegram?

I am kinda drunk right now and in that lovey-dovey level of drunkedness so this may be just a random optimistic kind of post... but what do y'all think? Would it be fun? How can it be done?

Note that this question is touched upon here, but only for very large, expansive mods.

Also, I don't play a lot of games and have never installed a mod (and most mobile games don't allow it anyway and none on console) so this is mostly based on how much I like the concept of the mod and the footage I've seen of it, which is obviously to be taken with a grain of salt and is gonna be a lot different from a list from someone who actually plays the game with the mod. This list will also be biased towards well known mods and won't be expansive for the same reason.

KSP

Principia

Kerbal space program simplifies gravity by only doing calculations for one body generating gravity, meaning Lagrange points don't exist and orbits are generally simplified. This mod changes that, and not just for your ship, it does for the planets too.

RSS (Real Solar System) mod

Title. Basically it recreates the real solar system in Kerbal space program since KSP has it's own system with it's own planets. Usually followed by Realism Overhaul (a mod with includes real rockets because the KSP system is 10 times smaller for playability) and Realistic progression (a mod that makes all those rockets disponible in the game's tech tree and would probably be high on this list.)

Outer planets mod

Basically a mod that adds Saturn, Uranus and Neptune analogues to the game, and some of their associated satellites, while still being relatively original. (note that they do add a pluto analogue but the stock game already has a pluto analogue. It's turned into an Enceladus analogue around the Saturn analogue.)

Honorable mentions:

10x Kerbol system, because it scales up all the celestial bodies in the game to a realistic size without needing to change the rest of the game.

Tilt' em!, for adding axial tilt into the game, something that is moderately important to orbital mechanics (if your planet is inclined relative to the rest of the solar system, your orbit might need to align with the solar system instead of the planet to reduce inclination in interplanetary space.

Shadow of War keeps crashing on me now, which has provided the inspiration for me to finally sit down and get this off my chesticles. I think bad things happen in my brain when I read the news too much or don't get enough exercise.

I remember when tormenting NPCs in games used to make me feel very sad. I was almost driven to tears by the villagers in Black & White being flattened under a carelessly dropped boulder, in fact. Over the years, though, I've found that my capacity for cruelty toward NPCs has grown considerably. I'll give a long example:

So, got any confessions of your own? Is this a potential indicator of psychopathy? How many musically talented Pushkrimps have you recruited?

What are the best controllers for console and PC that you've used that aren't just official console controllers? I'm a nerd when it comes to getting a million different input methods for games, and I'm always looking for new ones to play with.

Glad we'll never go back to the hellish days before Valve and various FOSS projects fixed the nightmare that controllers on PC used to be.