Total Pebble Knockdown

Life hacks are everywhere these days. But have you ever heard of gaming hacks? Well, Nathan ran across a video from 5 Minute Crafts claiming to give us “13 Gaming Hacks You Should Know” and has tasked Alex with rating them from “Must Have” to “Kill it with Fire”.

Sometimes we have adventure hooks that needed more time in the oven. On this episode, we look at an old Reddit post asking to flesh out some of these to see if we can bake them all over again.

A while back we discussed character tropes and touched briefly on the idea of the Mary Sue, a character that effortlessly and skillfully manages any situation while remaining flawless and beloved by all. This is often seen as a bad thing, but Nathan makes the case that we should stop being so hard on this archetype and maybe look at the possibilities of building characters like them.

The Xbox Showcase was surprisingly good and made some big announcements. What Nathan really wanted to discuss, though, was the amount of new IPs presented from established developers. So, let’s talk about those, including the one that made him VERY excited.

Space is very vast and so goes the games based in space that try to emulate that. However, Alex sees this as a big problem because space is also very boring. How do we address the massive scope of space as applied to video games?

There are some iconic monsters in D&D. But what if we took 2 of them and smashed them together? Well, we are going to imagine that very thing as we do the monster mash with fantasy creatures.

Cyan recently released their new VR game, Firmament, and it was met with less than stellar reviews compared to their previous efforts. It has now come out that they used AI-assistance to develop the game. How far did that assistance go? Did voice actors get credit for their work? What role should AI even play in art moving forward? Also, did you see this stupid expanded Abbey Road album cover!?

Alex has an idea, so buckle up. Let us discuss an adventure hook where your party is confronted… with themselves!!!

Someone on Reddit asked about the price of buying a bar in D&D and we thought it was a great opportunity to discuss economics. What is the disparity between the wealth of adventurers and the rest of the game world? What should your characters spend their incredible wealth on? And yes, we even look at what a bar in D&D should cost.

So… Five Nights at Freddy’s is getting a major motion picture. This is happening and you can’t stop it. The question remains: Who is this made for and will it make children cry?

Nathan and Alex saw the Tetris movie, which we quickly have to clarify is NOT a documentary but a docu-drama. Sorry Alex was misled on that point. What did we think about it?

RPGs have a cinematic quality that many people may not understand if they only saw the D&D movie with no former understanding of tabletop gaming. So, using the D&D movie as a template, can we explain how a game of D&D would go to achieve the same basic heist?

Unreal Engine 5.2 has now released and we are starting to wonder how blurry the line between reality and fiction is going to be. While impressive tech spurs the imagination, we’re taking a moment to ask how the outside observer could even tell the difference between a photograph and in-game engine footage. Will the advanced tools change how studios make games? Also, how are tools such as AI art and ChatGPT going to change gaming as they get implemented more to automate people out of the process?

Alex has experienced a dilemma in World of Warcraft: The new content arrives, but there is far more to do in the last content that was released. However, the game is now pushing him to start the new stuff before he’s even completed the current story missions. How could we fix this so people looking to follow the story and power gamers could both get what they want out of the experience?

What is in a name? Well, that’s the question we are asking today as we consider how your character’s name can affect the way the world perceives them. Perhaps you should be careful to not call your PC “Punchy McPunchface”? Who are we to judge?

They found the spoon! And it’s all thanks to Pokemon Go! No, you don’t get more context for that yet.

Redfall is the latest title from Arkane and really marks a troubling downturn in quality from a great studio. Nathan played, or at least attempted to play, the open-world vampire game and it was… unfortunate.

What if the players in your game were really bad at taking notes to the point that it could derail the entire mission? Should you tell them they made a mistake? Should you let them make the mistake? Should you just give up? Well, probably not the last one, but the other questions are worth exploring.

What would you do if you won a free lifetime of GamePass? Well, someone did and turned it down because of taxes. If you live outside the U.S. this might confuse you. Welcome to our world.

We recently talked about D&D 3E and, frankly, people had a lot to say about it. Among other things, several people wanted to explain how we were wrong about barbarians. So, I guess we’ll try to expand and clarify the history of this classic D&D class. Also, what is this stat block Gary Gygax made for Conan?

When we play games, do we actually have free will? Moreover, how much free will do we really want? We’ll discuss the nature of free will in regards to gaming without having an existential crisis, we think.

Ark is asking players to pay for the next-gen upgrade while taking the previous servers offline. This is totally a good and customer-friendly business model that will absolutely go over well with the fans. Do I have to explain that was sarcasm?

Monster Energy tried to file a trademark claim against Pokemon and Monster Hunter for using the word “Monster” because it could confuse their customers. No, I am not making that up.

Sometimes we return to the things we remember in a simpler time. For Nathan, that has currently become Fallout Shelter, the mobile tie-in game for Fallout 4 released back in 2015. And after playing it for a bit, he remembers why he stopped playing it in 2016.

Last week, Klaus Teuber, the legendary game designer who created Catan, passed away. So, we are talking a bit about Catan, specifically the differences between the board game and the dice game that came later. How did the mechanics change in the process and what had to get sacrificed to make the switch? Nathan finally gets to talk about this modern classic board game.

What are realistic expectations that new players should have going into TTRPGs? During our live show our crew started talking about the influence of livestreams and liveplays on roleplaying games. Is it unrealistic to expect an epic roleplay experience out of the gate? And is there really a problem with NOT doing an epic campaign?

So, you have a PC that can fly. This can cause some issues with creative problem solving if you can just fly over the terrain. What can you do to make flying characters included in your party without overshadowing the abilities of everyone else? Let’s soar over that topic as we go Delving Deeper.