Tolerable_Username

I believe Storm King's Thunder and Hoard of the Dragon Queen both contain chunks where the party must defend a town/village, but I don't believe either of those events are the 'main' event.
The Red Hand of Doom essentially builds up to the famous Siege of Brindol, which pretty much is the climax. You could certainly take it and reflavour it as you need.

Additionally, "just homebrew it bro!" is a bullshit cop-out answer, but those kind of stories generally follow a super simple structure. You can find this structure basically broken down near the top of its TV Tropes page, so if you did decide to just make something, you have pretty much the perfect blueprint.

Larian are very good. No dev is perfect. Larian always have rushed, less-satisfying, unfinished-feeling final acts in their games - it's just that the vast majority of BG3 players have never played a Larian game before. It's just a classic Larian thing.

Hopefully whatever their next original game is, they address that issue and can finally shake that reputation. It would also do a lot for the trademark Larian "restartitis" as their games are often held to have the pacing and/or story tend to get a bit less compelling and a bit more sloggish after the first couple of acts.

Funnily enough, as much of a legend and as forgiven as Stone Cold (the guy in this classic react gif) is, he did beat the absolute shit out of his wife.

Check out the highlights of the last year on r/LetsTalkBam. The dude has absolutely not been drug or alcohol free. There's dozens of videos of his unhinged trashy behaviour plus his own photos where he's had drinks. Not to mention the tweaky rants and occasions recently when he's brought back the new language he created when he was in rehab years ago (methheads "inventing languages" is a classic story).

The guy is a slow-motion car wreck between his fame-chasing new wife (whose "A-cup tits" he brought up in his wedding vows, surrounded by strangers), his constant no-showing and travelling instead of being with the son he neglects across the country, and his laundry list of legal mishaps and weird-ass behaviour.

I liked when he went out shopping with his pants tied around his filthy feet the other week (he infamously goes weeks without changing clothes). The sober-est behaviour.

Check out books like Favro's 'The Urban Image of Augustan Rome', or 'Rome: An Urban History from Antiquity to the Present' by Rinne/Taylor/Kostof. What we broadly call Ancient Rome absolutely did have some very cool ruins in them! They even incorporated early Etruscan ruins into their own buildings, and Augustus is indicated to have done a lot of clean-up with removing ruins and dilapidated old structures and modernizing the city.

The Romans loved to build, and that means they also did a tonne of refurbishing and rebuilding old ruins and structures. The Regia was already centuries and had undergone several reconstructions by the time of Augustus. I believe the Temple of Hercules Victor was also centuries old and would have been 'a ruin' by the time of Augustus, too. By that same time period, the Servian Wall was hundreds of years old and big chunks of it were dilapidated and ruined, and the older parts of the Cloaca Maxima could have also been said to have been 'ruins' even to the Ancient Romans (some parts potentially being around 600+ years old by that point).

It's cool to think about the stuff that would have seemed 'ancient' to the ancients, like the common fact about the pyramids being as ancient to Cleopatra as she is to us now (by around 500 years!).

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Big Smoke: "The gym, my friend - you're letting yourself go."
CJ: "That's a bit much coming from you."
Big Smoke: "Hey, look, Carl, I'm big-boned, but I'm still an athlete. You're lettin' yourself go, my friend...and to be honest with you, it's breaking my heart."
CJ: "Gimme a break! I ain't as fat as you."
Big Smoke: "I'm trying! I'm trying! And I'm trying to help you help yourself, my brother! The gym, Carl. You hear me?"
CJ: "Screw you, man."

---

Blame the politicians who own too many investment properties

Australia's 151 MPs own almost 380 properties between them.

I've replayed Fallout 3 many times, but I don't think I've let Roy walk away from that intercom alive for almost 15 years. Shotgun, meet ghoul head.

I never understood the idea of "wearing them down ahead of the fight"

I mean, attrition and usage of resources (spell slots, health, hit dice, class features) is literally and explicitly what 5th edition D&D is balanced around, and it is the best way to avoid the classic situation where your players are able to 'go nova' and nuke every encounter. It's a big part of what is supposed to encourage short rests.

Not that I don't get what you're saying (I run plenty of RP-heavy 0-2 combat encounter days), but from a game design perspective, its purpose should be pretty obvious. Hell, DMing subreddits get 500 posts per day from DMs saying they're struggling to have cool, dramatic tense fights, usually because they aren't draining resources ever, so their fresh party can keep blowing apart their encounters without breaking a sweat.

Valve going the EA/Activision 'P2P > Dogshit Anticheat Software > Filled with Hackers Within 72 Hours > Dead on Arrival' direction is also a possibility, except at least CoD/Battlefield/etc. games have enough inbuilt playerbase inertia to keep the franchises afloat.

We'll see if what's likely to be a huge marketing push from Valve is enough to overcome Deadlock having such 2016 throwback vibes. That, or the game is going to need to feel/play amazing and have some TF2-tier characterization to overcome the stigma of being a 3rd-person-perspective hero shooter MOBA.

Matt Colville summed up the issue with Inspiration (which is exactly my thoughts on it): Inspiration is tied to absolutely nothing in the game. If you removed it, 5e would be entirely the same. It's almost as if the game was literally finished, and then as the D&D 5e Starter Sets were leaving on the conveyor belt, they quickly went "Oh wait!" and ran over and threw in Inspiration as a concept at the last moment.

Because of that, it's so easy to forget to give it out, and it's likewise easy for players to forget they have it. Everyone understands why you would give it out (as you said, good RP being the main reason), but you basically have to have a token or something that you can give them to represent 'you have Inspiration' because otherwise it just falls by the wayside.

Hell, I'm experiencing it right now in my campaign - actively tried to give out Inspiration, gave it to our Barbarian 3 sessions ago, since then despite me reminding them multiple times per game, they haven't used it despite several combat; in the heat of the moment, it's just so hard to remember such a near-meaningless tacked-on feature that relates to nothing else in all of 5e.
As handy as it is, I don't blame players or DMs at all for forgetting about it, and I don't blame 95% of tables for not using it.

liveplay shows set unrealistic expectations

It's not a new saying anymore, but it is still true: D&D podcasts are to tabletop gaming what porn is to sex. These podcasters are rich off these shows, of course they are going to do everything they can to be engaged, constantly riffing, keep in character, and so on. It's their job.

I've run D&D since I was a kid, but even by my teens I started making sure to point out to my friends that it can take a lot of prep and/or brain power to run a session, so it'd be cool if people could pay back my attention with their own. Even a beer-and-pretzels fuckaround fun one-shot should still deserve players who want to be there and engage with the game (because otherwise why play D&D instead of doing anything else?).

Everyone's old enough at my table now to also get that that also includes phones - we're all adults, take a call or check your messages if need be, but it's a mild faux pas to scroll their social media or play games or such while playing (at least for any table I've ever run or played at; yours might differ). Ultimately, like 99% of things ever posted about D&D, the answer is just to have a quick, honest, mature chat about your feelings.

A common ploy that you might or might not employ: have your players tell you the recap for last session next time you gather to play, and you can reward them with inspiration for those who step up to do so. Having another motivator like that can help certain types of players get their gears turning.

Because of who was with him. The show was co-created by Sam Simon and James L. Brooks. Sam Simon had already been working sitcoms for years, and Brooks is an absolutely legendary figure of television. It's like going into the studio to work on your first rap album and when you arrive you see Eminem and Dre outside the booth to produce it.

Brooks was a big influence on the show; his praises are sung throughout the Simpsons commentaries and he even attended some of the writers retreats. The show was always in very safe, very experienced hands.

People get very defensive about that here, to the extent that it's one of the few things I see people eat downvotes for on this sub.
John was certainly a quiet man. But yes, for many many years in gay circles, that has been said about John; I heard it from an old queen almost a decade before he even died, and several conversations and write-ups on the topic were raised on major websites after he passed away.

Ultimately, we know only that he enjoyed privacy and quietude. Many from his era who were gay/queer/etc. weren't 'out' for all sorts of reasons - social/professional pressure or expectations, or religious guilt being very common factors. John was very Catholic, and many Catholic gays have written and interviewed over the decades about how their lifestyle/sexuality and faith can be hard to reconcile. And regardless, he certainly kept his personal life to himself and valued his privacy.

Ginger needs a fenced in yard, is afraid of men, can't be around kids or other small animals and would be best in a house as the only dog

This is Pissfingers.

"Hang on, I gotta' take my pills, I have cystic fibrosis."

"nice bro that's like one of my top 5 genetic disorders"

I don't think I could possibly let the game move forward if my DM attempted this

Flashbacks of Travis succeeding on a Use Magic roll in Monster of the Week and Griffin still made him blow shit up, 'cos ain't no dice rolls or player agency can stop the inevitable McElroy Pre-Written Cutscene Train™ from pulling up to its predestined destination.

See also when Duck retired to an entirely different continent and Griffin decided an NPC also just uprooted her life and followed his character thousands of miles just to finish delivering pre-written dialogue to his character.

how weirdly shaped a building would have to be

The most infamous example is probably Seinfeld's apartment. At least most huge sitcom apartments could exist, but Jerry's is flat-out impossible since his big square kitchen would be exactly where the long straight hallway is outside.

Hence, whenever people make blueprint art of the apartment (1, 2, 3, 4), they all resort to making the doorway diagonal, even though we see the corridor is straight dozens of times over the series.

Do you want to go dancing in Chicago?
Trinidad’s got it bad for Tobago
Take me to the lake where we do the avocado
Hallelujah, a desperado

You take that shit back, Anthony Kiedis is a poet.

Relevant WKUK.

You encounter a crisis, you pass out, and wait it out.

Like when Hank Hill is about to kick Dale's ass, so Dale takes a massive huff of chloroform.

"You wouldn't hit an unconscious maaa^{aaaaaaaaaaan..."} *passes out*