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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1160 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for May 15, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Video game thread.

I played through Aethus this week. Its a top down survival / mining / exploring / puzzle game. The ambiance of the environments was great. I eventually turned down the difficulty settings for everything cuz it felt a bit like a slog on standard difficulty. The Scottish accents were ok sometimes, but every time I heard "no" pronounced something like "no-er" I winced. The story itself was very anti-corporate. Which I knew going in from the reviews, but it was still a little heavy handed with it all. At this point an anti-corporate screed in a video game just feels as generic as you can get.

Still playing Starship Troopers: Extermination on occassion with the 1stmi (a light military sim group). They are fun to play with. I recently competed what they call a "harbinger run" which involves leading a 16 person group from the field (rather than staying with the squad at base). Its a fun balancing mix of shooting the bugs around you but also needing to maintain situational awareness of the entire battlefield.

Dropped the factorio playthrough. Didn't have enough takers, and I messed something up in map settings that would have required cheating to fix, or flushing approximately 10-15 hours of early game play down the drain to start again. Both options didn't make me feel good so I stopped.

Storytelling Exalted 2e for a bunch of friends for a few sessions now. (Not exactly a video game, but TTRPGs don't appear to be a common enough topic to warrant a subthread).

I can recommend jumping into a new setting as a DM. Even with pretty much no experience, it's been pretty fun so far, although I bungled a few things about the way a pre-written adventure should be ran, and will probably bungle more. The first thing one of my players did was to stuff a demon inside of a random peasant mook who was guarding him on behalf of the treacherous rich evil guy.

Setting and writing/wise, I feel that 1e Exalted is alot better. 2e does have more polished mechanics, however, which makes DMing a bit easier. Though it still has it's quirks.

I’ve been holding on to a desire to run an Ars Magica campaign, but I’ve avoided it on account of my own lack of experience. How did you get started DMing at all?? There’s just so much to do even before the players get involved.

My current plan is to shelve that dream and try OSR instead. Less mechanical baggage, less asked of the players. On the other hand, they’re more experienced with Pathfinder and 5e, so maybe there’s a different sort of baggage.

I just took a premade adventure and kind of raw dogged it. Perhaps you're approaching this with a mindset of being prepared for anything?

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