Any tips on that then? I really don't want to spend more than $15-20 tops (although I realize this is impossible hecause of shipping, so I guess as little as possible will have to do) and it has to function without the commander (which seems to defeat the purpose of the format but whatever) because no matter who I've played, it just gets removed to the point where the tax makes it unplayable (Kess, Muldrotha, Pantlaza, Prosper, Hakbal...several more).

Also maybe you can answer, what happens when you are technically not dead (>0 life) but can't take any useful actions? Friends seem upset when I say I'm ready to scoop, but I'm also not interested in sitting there for another hour not being able to play. I guess they want my life total to stay for damage triggers maybe? Or they think someone can come back from an empty hand and a recent board wipe?

Ah that sounds nice. Makes me wish anyone played Jumpstart. Cracking a couple of those in a similar way to your Pauper decks would've probably kept my energy up after a terrible round!

I've never understood the "these people hate Star Trek!" take I've seen around the new shows. It's clear that nobody working on these sets out to intentionally make a bad show. Some of the Easter eggs and references are deep cuts, so it seemed obvious to me that the people working on these are big fans.

I'm going to be honest, Klingons in the TNG era always felt too goofy to me. They weren't a proud warrior culture so much as borderline clownish space vikings who spent more time getting drunk than actually conquering anything. A redesign and change in how their culture(s) present on screen was welcome for me, and I think Discovery did a great job. I even liked the way they recontextualized the Klingon language, to make it sound more alien and more threataning than the staccato, oft-mispronounced mess that we got in the TNG era.

That said, I also think there was a missed opportunity with them. For a long time, I've had a head canon of the different looks of Klingons throughout all of the eras could be chalked up to these all being distinct peoples from within the Klingon Empire. It stands to reason that over a long enough time scale, an empier spanning multiple stars would start to consider people not originally from their homeworld "Klingon," even if they might be genetically different. I always thought it would be cool if the TOS smooth forehead Klingons were actually just one species that were culturally Klingon, where the Worf-type were another, and the General Chang type was yet another. It would provide a way to smooth over the aeshetic differences with an in-universe explanation that doesn't require any retconning except for a handful of episodes from ENT that die-hards didn't like anyway.

But oh, well. One can dream.

I mean it's not a comeback, it's just advice. I started using Linux in 2004, when trying to Google an answer basically never worked, and once I was told that the included manuals contained all the instructions for everything, I started having a much better time. It was humbling since I considered myself very proficient with Windows troubleshooting, but I had to recognize that I still needed to read the instructions now that I was in unfamiliar territory.

Anyway, since you're not interested in that, have a nice day, and I hope your future experiences work out better for you.

If it's a terminal command you need help with, type "man [command]" in the terminal and it will give you the literal manual page for the command. For example, to get the manual for tmux, type "man tmux"

If it's something else, check the Arch Wiki. Yes, even if you aren't running Arch. It's some of the most comprehensive Linux documentation all on one site and most of it can be generalized to any distro.

But to be honest, your attitude here makes me think you will never have a good time on Linux. It does require a certain curiosity and willingness to learn -- maybe even some patience while you get the experience to intuit solutions as you likely already do on Windows without thinking about it.

The manuals really do contain exact information on how to engage with pretty much everything, but if someone suggesting that you use the resources designed to help you makes them "an ass," then I suspect you will simply fail to become familiar with the environment. I'm not trying to be a dick, I'm just telling you that when you're new, you need a different mindset than what you're showing with this comment.

Ben Milton's take on traps is, I think, the best way to handle them.

Don't use traps as a hidden thing. Make the trap itself obvious to the players, and describe it's positioning. The trick should be for the players to figure out how to either avoid or safely disarm the trap.

One example he uses is a pit trap with a narrow board serving as a bridge over the top of it. The smell of volatiles indicates that there may be some kind of fuel at the bottom of it. The board is on a rotating mechanism, and if anyone tries to stand on or otherwise move the board, it ignites the fuel below with flint inside the mechanism, like a lighter. Since the pit is too large to jump across, players will need to find another way across.

In my own game, I recently pointed out a section of floor filled with skeletons whose legs were partially sunken into the tiles up to the knee. Since the sections of the floor were too long to jump across, they tested what was wrong by throwing objects onto the tiles and seeing what happened. Once it was clear that only objects that had been stationary for a few seconds sank in, they sprinted through the hallway and made it to the other side fine (one character lost a boot). They had fun, nobody felt it was unfair, and I would call that a win.

Unfortunately for them, the floor on the other side of this trap was greased, so they went sliding down a chute to the fourth floor of the dungeon, and had to look for a way back up, which came in the form of a previously inactive elevator that was a shortcut back to the first floor.

Sen's Fortress in Dark Souls 1 is a good example of how traps like these can be utilized. They're all obvious and easy to avoid, and serve more as positioning puzzles than as gotcha mechanics.

I play a lot on my Steam Deck these days, but the main battlestation is just a regular old upper midrange workhorse. R5 5600x, RX 6700xt, 32GB of DDR4 3600 and a few terabytes of NVME storage.

I'm still just using vanilla Arch because I haven't found anything better for an enthusiast desktop.

I think the only part where I kind of cut against the grain is that I'm running Gnome. It does what I want with minimal tweaking and it handles my FreeSync monitor without any headaches. It also just looks pretty, and I'm not about to pretend I don't like eye candy on the desktop.

EDIT: Forgot to shill for the case I'm using: A P-ATX. I really wanted a small form factor computer, but I also think ATX motherboards are a better deal than ITX, so this seemed like a good option. When I bought it, the only other thing that came close (from Thermaltake) was out of stock, so I ended up with this and I'm actually really liking it, despite it being a pain in the ass to assemble.

The Forest?

War crimes and human leather.

Drink a bunch of cold water when you smoke, and try to keep yourself busy.

I also try to avoid eating too much while stoned since it becomes a hassle to manage taking insulin for everything, and those two things work well for me.

I backed it. I've gottena lot of utility out of Ben's other games, so this one seemed like a no brainer for the tables alone, much less the rest of the game underneath it.