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description= Originally a pair of views on gaming, it s now musings by Redbeard on video games (mainly MMOs), board games, RPGs, and other geeky hobbies.;
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Text of the page (random words):
hose times i was too sick to squirm away but those shots hurt like hell and when i heard what the cure for rabies was 20 shots in the stomach or 5 in the arm that encouraged me to avoid all wild animals as much as possible assuming my ancestors could even afford a horse since the peasantry could rarely afford to do so themselves i m not so foolish as to think that my ancestors were merchants or nobles given that there were far fewer of those two groups than there were of the peasantry i ve seen enough census records of my ancestors to know that most of them fell under the broad job description of laborer which is not the sort of thing you put down for someone whose family came from a higher social status translated from latin it means from the wrath of the northmen save us o god posted by redbeard at 3 33 pm no comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels memes musings monday march 18 2024 meme monday thirsty rpg memes no i don t mean memes designed by the hydro homies subreddit either my poking around in baldur s gate 3 has made me wonder a bit about just how horny is everybody out there i mean i get it that you re young and whatnot but more than once i ve watched a cutscene in an mmo or rpg and thought just how much of this is wish fulfillment no it wasn t a fluke kira wait just a minute you could have said something you know thankfully i began playing bg3 after there was a hotfix to get some of the npcs to uh not get so horny for you so quickly to which i thought holy crap it was even faster earlier i m going to have to go in the direction of assuming that a lot of these romances and whatnot are primarily wish fulfillment and they just get hornier quicker and that i wasn t hanging out with an extremely slow moving and prudish crowd in my teenage college years still rpgs and mmos do now have their share of very thirsty npcs these days to match the horny pcs so in honor of all this thirstiness in the genres here s a selection of memes on the topic you know the paladin doesn t have to be the thirsty one from dndmemes yeah that escalated quickly from animalnouncomics well if you ever wondered where dragonkin really came from from demotivational i think well that certainly explains elminster s interest in things no not in bg3 specifically yet but due to reputation courtesy of ed greenwood s copious novels about the forgotten realms from imgflip and one bonus meme for the perpetually thirsty you see moss description was the perception of what rpgs were to the people who didn t play trying to convince some dms to actually not inject tons of sex into their campaigns is the challenge i ve experienced from cheezburger and the it crowd posted by redbeard at 6 00 am 4 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels meme monday memes friday march 15 2024 point of reference if there s one game that i play more than any other it s sid meier s civilization iv what you expected an mmo wow maybe oh no not by a long shot a rare cultural victory for me from back in may 2022 i don t save a lot of screencaps but since i almost always win a space race this was a notable exception i bought the game around 2009 or so which honestly works as a counterpoint to wow and i ended up re purchasing the game on steam a couple of years ago when it was down to 4 or so on one of those winter or summer sales my reasoning was that i d already gotten my money s worth out of the original game and i knew that in order to install it on this new pc i d have to go buy a portable dvd drive so it kind of made sense to save a few dollars and just buy the game off of steam instead having played the original civ back in the day and then civ iii for several years i knew what i was getting into still even i was surprised at how much i preferred civ iv to civ iii i don t think i ve even bothered to try to install civ iii on this pc and even though i dabble a bit in civ v and civ vi i always return to civ iv just how much uh whoops that little graphic is from my 2023 year in review from steam that s roughly half of the year i played civ iv because some of those sessions went kind of long it s the sort of game where i can play for a bit go away and do something else for a while and then return to the same session while it s been patiently waiting for me in the background unlike it s brethren and other civ sim games a match of vanilla civ iv can be cranked out in about 3 hours or less depending on how wars develop and my need to micromanage city building and development it s when you add systems such as found in civ iv warlords or civ iv beyond the sword do the civ iv matches really start extending in length i guess for immersion those later iterations of the game are better but i prefer vanilla civ iv for the overall simplicity and balance i ve gotten to the point where i can play for about 5 10 minutes and immediately decide whether it s worth it to continue a game or start over something i can t really do in the latter two for a bit longer and don t tell sid meier this but the ai in civ iv is kind of predictable and brainless so i can switch my own brain off for a bit while playing that is especially useful during lunch where i can hop on and play for an hour or so and try to forget anything stressful in the morning so if you ever wonder if i spend all my time in wow or other mmos i guess you ll understand that is simply not the case hell i don t even spend the majority of my video game playing in wow but rather in a turn based civ builder game from 2005 just a guess really no idea as to the exact year posted by redbeard at 6 00 am 1 comment email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels self sid meier s civilization wednesday march 13 2024 behind the curve my son informed me the other week that he d finished baldur s gate 3 considering that after that first week s worth of excessive playing my time in bg3 had shrunk to practically nothing for a month i guess i shouldn t be surprised i m not into rushing into new content when an mmo expansion hits but that initial week s worth playing bg3 gave me enough dopamine hits that i could understand the urge to keep playing when i realized i was eschewing work to play bg3 i had to dial it back for my own sanity and to keep my job but that kind of goes without saying my son didn t have those issues since he was able to fit in most of bg3 before his current semester of grad school started and more power to him for that i m not going to lie and say i was totally fine with all this i felt a pang of jealousy at how he cruised through the game while i m plodding along it s not as if i m savoring the game either at times it feels like when i was speed leveling that draenei shaman when tbc classic came out i m constantly plotting my next move and trying to figure out how to progress further through the story yes my mmo playing is at exactly the opposite inflection point from where i am playing a single player rpg you could say that i m playing baldur s gate 3 like other people play world of warcraft and you d not be wrong it s the equivalent of reading a really exciting novel the pages fly by and you want to get on to the next part just to see what happens i get that i really do but i think that i need to be reminded of that from time to time that people who blitz through content aren t doing it just to get it over with but genuinely like the content so much that they re constantly turning that next page to find out what happens i guess i get cynical about things when like in tbc classic everybody was supposed to follow a playbook to get themselves raid ready as soon as possible i thought it was only my guild that did that because a few people i met out in outland while leveling had completely different and better experiences with their guilds in terms of pacing and prepping for raids however on further reflection those better experiences had more to do with helping their own leveling shamans to get leveled and not abandoning them to their fate when the dark portal opened those guilds while more helpful to their shamanistic and blood knight brethren still had goals to achieve and raids to prep for they were just a tad nicer about it that s all there were quite a few guilds raiding karazhan gruul s lair and magtheridon while i was somewhere out in terokkar forest plodding away a blast from the past from june 18 2021 if i were in the sweaty raid i d have only a little over two weeks to get to l70 and through the attunement gauntlet our raid team was the one with the casual reputation that i despised and started raiding in the last week of july 2021 if i were in those guilds i d not have been abandoned true but i d have also been pushed into the regimen all of those other guilds were doing so why am i okay with it when i m playing a video game such as baldur s gate 3 as is typically the case i believe it has to do with agency typically the way to get me to do something is to let me figure it out on my own and i ll likely end up doing what needs to be done if i m forced into doing something by some external force then i m going to drag my feet and refuse think of it of how people approach taxes everybody in the us has to file their income tax by april 15th and a lot of people will procrastinate until the last possible moment to do their taxes i know people who do that on principle complaining about their tax rates and whatnot but i am one of those who simply don t like being told to do their taxes especially if i m given some sanctimonious bullshit like what i got as a kid when being told to eat my dinner because it s good for you from calvin and hobbes likewise at work if i m told i have to do something i m probably going to be one of the last people to actually get it finished i would not do well in a highly regimented environment such as the military hawkeye is my spirit animal from imgflip and m a s h from that perspective you can see why i clashed with progression raiding in an mmo format when i joined the progression raid team i did so willingly and pushed myself to get up to speed both gear wise and add on wise there weren t requirements for how exactly i went about getting my toon s ready for progression raiding just that i get myself ready and yes i willingly went to sixtyupgrades wowhead and icy veins to see where my gaps were it wasn t a directly communicated expectation but rather something i did on my own to become a member of the raid team it was only when tbc classic came along and raid guild leadership began making exact demands on the gear and process of getting raid ready did i rebel the concept of raiding went from only being concerned with the end result raid ready to trying to dictate how it should be done and those demands weren t limited to my guild almost all of the actively raiding guilds on myzrael us were guilty of making the same demands on their members starting in tbc classic and whether their demands were cloaked in a velvet glove or not the demands were pretty much the same iron fist do it or you re not on the raid team the lone exception that i was aware of was one guild who basically told its members to go do whatever for a month when tbc classic dropped and they circled back after that month to see where the guild stood before getting ready to raid okay that s just raiding still there s nothing that says you can t do whatever you want in an mmo in general at it s core that s correct the design of an mmo is to allow a player to do a variety of activities without saying you must conform you could make the argument that modern mmos have a ton of alternate activities designed with this player choice in mind this old chestnut highlights the player choice the modern mmo has versus good ol classic can t even recall who first made this meme the thing is mmos are not merely the sum of systems there s a social element to them as well and that is how the problems creep in in any social endeavor certain niceties are expected if you want to fit in just like proper social etiquette in real life there s an mmo version of social etiquette when interacting with people the wil wheaton saying don t be a dick is just the bare minimum for social interactions beyond that mmo interactions are a bit more complex if you want to do group content in an mmo especially in today s age you re expected to have done the correct things to maximize your output what that entails varies between guilds and groups but there s a measure of commonality driven by the knowledge that in the group finder mmo environment players are interchangeable if you don t have the right specs gear systems settings you can be painlessly replaced by someone else and in a pre group finder mmo be prepared to submit for inspection if you want in on some group content developers have attempted to circumvent such social restrictions with new ideas lfr raids being the most notable but that s a technical solution for what is inherently a people problem and when i play any group content in an mmo i feel the social pressure i never used to but once you ve crossed the rubicon and been on the progression side of things the veil of obscurity has been ripped away and you now see things from the lens of those who are judging whether you re good enough to join their raid team the best way to find good candidates for your organization is to create what i call positive encounters actions speak louder than words so you need to ensure that these potential new members have some actions by which they can judge you when you need a specific class get your best group runners together and advertise that you need said class in order to do an instance once you get them in your group don t mention recruitment just run that instance and do your job well if they do well tell them you hope to group again and then part ways if they aren t in an organization you may subtly mention that you are looking for their class do this enought times with enough people and word will get around that you re a solid outfit you can t buy better publicity than that and it creates more opportunities for you to use the soft sell the guild leader s companion by adam ferrel trzonkowski page 41 the irony is that i thought this way before i bought the guild leader s companion because i d be on guild runs in an instance and guild chat during the run would have a lot of commentary on any pugger s technique both good and bad and what their prospects were as a potential member of the raid team i never saw it myself until i formally joined the progression guild immediately before tbc classic and there were plenty of times i wished i had remained ignorant and just enjoyed a dungeon run or a raid i guess that s where the irony creeps in a single player game such as an rpg doesn t have that sort of social pressure there s nobody looking over your shoulder judging your gameplay dropping 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