T w e n t y S i d e d
And he’s probably going to drag you down with him.
Shamus Says:
The world is looking more and more lavish in comparison to those first early strips.
Shawn Says:
The world is looking more and more like it exists compared to those first early strips. ;)
The Death of Half-Life
Valve still hasn't admitted it, but the Half-Life franchise is dead. So what made these games so popular anyway?
Video Compression Gone Wrong
How does image compression work, and why does it create those ugly spots all over some videos and not others?
The Best of 2013
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2013.
Raytracing
Raytracing is coming. Slowly. Eventually. What is it and what will it mean for game development?
Crash Dot Com
Back in 1999, I rode the dot-com bubble. Got rich. Worked hard. Went crazy. Turned poor. It was fun.
Welcome to the battle of Minas Tirith, second take.
I like how the evil soldiers and zombies are just hanging around this random town for no reason. They’re not looting or establishing a perimeter or digging for an artifact, they’re just waiting for the cutscene to end so they can ambush the heroes.
I’d rather say they temporally forgot they existed at all, kept loitering and stinking up the joint, and then they suddenly got a memo.
Ramgar’s spear looks like a panel border and it confused me. I think because I’m reading on my phone and it’s really zoomed in?
It does kinda look like that. A long, thin bit of white space through the middle of the image.
It feels like Marcus is about to get LARPed . . .
At that point, the players should go “oh, we forgot, we’re actually still outside the village”.
You mean, they got all the exposition from a farmer who just managed to wander out of the village, sword in gut? Interesting interpretation of events. I don’t think anyone would buy that. Except maybe Casey.
I mean, the dude managed to say all that as his dying words, it’s totally believable that, at worse, if he couldn’t move, he just shouted so loud that they heard him outside the village. Totally.
Great. Now I want to see this scene acted out.
The Three Little Pigs rule of D&D construction: The typical DM can picture buildings made of thatch, wood, or stone, but unless your DM is a history nerd or watched a documentary once, they’ll never have wattle and daub houses in their game.
Is that an actual rule called that way?
More trope than rule, and wattle and daub is really primitive so not likely to be seen in civilized lands (unless you’re playing Stone/Bronze Age D&D). I mean, frontier towns might just use one of the many easy and cheap ‘wattle daub’ construction methods, but then lush full forests are a fantasy trope thing and that really makes the inclusion of a “non-wood centric” construction style out of place.
I think what he’s alluding to is a distinct lack of ‘pierrotage’ and ‘lathe and plaster’ showing up in most euro-trope fantasy. Also Joe is missing that ‘thatch’ is a roofing material… a ‘thatch’ house is probably wattle daub… or woven reed or sod which is just as primitive.
*metal scream* Thatched roof cottages!!! ~
Of course, the true DM tip here is “always ask a character with high wisdom or high intelligence ‘are you sure’ before they do something decidedly unwise and stupid, so it is at least deliberate when they inevitably say ‘of course I am'”
Then again, Marcus’ new boobarella is probably low on both and jacked in charisma.