A Bit of Rambling

 Feh. Tired this morning. Must stay awake...

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I started Assassin's Creed Valhalla over the weekend. It certainly has a different feel to me from the rest of the series. Several hours in I only have a handful of different weapon types with several still unseen and 2-3 armor options. I'm not sure what I think about that overall, but I do feel the game would benefit from some ability to at least loosely target weapons/armor that suit your build within consulting outside sources. Combat feels a bit "floatier" than Odyssey. And I've hit a couple bugs that very oddly had workarounds that involved changing graphics settings. How graphical FPS setting is connected to passing beyond a particular spot in a cave is beyond me.

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In our Sunday D&D game, we came fairly close to a party wipe. In the previous session, when our stealth character was discovered we jumped out of his cloak-with-dimensional-resting-space and totally stomped what appeared to be a high-level assassin type and a few lower-level guards in less than two rounds. When he was next discovered, though, we got into a fight inside the manor by our sorta-target and his guards. The first person out of the cloak ended up eating a ton of damage and having only a few HP left. The rest was a bit of mess with a wall of fire and stuff.

We picked up mid-combat Sunday and things got messier with lots of critical hits rolled. At one point, I think three (of 5 PCs and 1 NPC) of the group were at 0 HP due largely to the high-damage weapons of the guards and a summoned demon. The druid's healing got us up enough to start making an escape (as the main baddie likewise was doing), but it appears this little assault is likely to result in a lot of property damage without any actual leads we were hoping to get. Hmm.

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In last night's game, we took down a stone giant thane, rescued a gnome from her pouch and found the Conch of Teleportation we were after. There's some "irony" there in that we knew we wanted/needed to the conch to access another giant stronghold but we have no idea it can actually transport anyone anywhere. So the group scrambled to escape before reinforcements arrived - especially the giant we ran into earlier who cast Time Stop (particularly scary for our wizard who recognized it as we're only 8th level).

We made it out a tunnel that was out of view before and started making our way out of the hills, but were caught by a mixed group before getting clear. A couple of us have been picked up and tossed around by a roc, there are a couple bears just getting to us, and the caster stone giant caught up. Alas, timing had us pause during the conflict, so we'll see how that goes.

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I've been reading more manga/manhwa of late than books, and it's vaguely amusing to watch the flow and shift of genres that seems to happen. I suppose there's some observational bias in that there are plenty I don't read so don't factor into the popular waves, but I've seen a lot of isekai stories in the last year or more - a "normal" (thus reader-relatable) character is transported to another world or time or into a game or something along those lines. Some of these truly gamify things to the point of having status screens with levels and stats. Some give the protagonists "cheat" powers and set them up as national heroes, some have them betrayed in order to fuel a revenge story. Sometimes a "villainous" character will try to avoid the ultimate fate they lived a previous time...

But in these stories, it isn't really the divine gift powers that really set the protagonists apart so much as their mindset. Because these characters come from the future or a different world, they tend to have an advantage because of what they know. Doctors reborn into more primitive worlds can apply their knowledge toward stifling disease, expert gamers who know their way around a fantasy world's rules can min-max systems, and people who have lived a future can take steps to change it. That's the real common thread in my eyes that often makes for an entertaining read.

Of course, such tales beg some thoughts that are a touch sobering personally. "Well, yeah, if I got another chance at life - mine or one in another world - sure, I could take my present knowledge and apply myself to become better. ... But why?" I don't know. Without some dired fate to avoid or demon lord to overcome, my current mental self might be more detriment than benefit. If I had a goal to latch onto, sure, I could do something. But without, there's no motivation to train/study/save extra-hard.