For gaming I see your point, it looks like everything as to be a money grab nowaday which greatly reduce the quality of a lot of games.

For ttrpg I don't feel like it though. Sure Wizard of the Coast/Hasbro has gone to shit but I left the D&D train a long time ago already. And the amount of other very good and accessible system is amazing. IMO The only thing "bad" that this new popularity bring is players with wrong expectations. Some expect every games and every DM to be of the same quality as Critical Roll or other well known podcast, some exept to find "video games" mechanic like in baldur's gate, some are trying to force the meme stuff inside the game, ect.

Not accurate at all. You need a lot more paragraph, even better if you cut them every 2 sentences, and emoji at the end and beginning of every sentences.

Yes

If there is one thing I can proudly brag about is that I'm part of the Elite that have that running for several years. With few hiccups of missing sessions, and sometimes extra games on the same week as the "main" game.

For those stuck looking for groups, just start it yourself, you'll be surprised how many people around would like to try and will probably like, but don't want to start the thing themselves.

You already had good answers but I would like to add my two cents:

The "starter set" is the cheaper option (less than 20$). It has a small prewritten adventure, a set a prewritten characters of level 1 with backstory, and the basic rules you need for this adventure.

Good point for it: cheap, the bare minimum you need to dive directly in it, already contain an adventure so it's easier for you as a new GM.

Bad point: it only contain a small subset of the rules, and will become "useless" if you decide to go further and buy the full books. Also, if your wife or kid do not like the pregen characters, you will not have the full rules related to character creation.

Then you have the core rule set already linked.

Good point: everything you need for a very long time, you will have all the rules to run anything you want. Other books are "only" going to add more options (spell, items, characters building options, ect).

Bad point: the price (120$), more information so it may be harder to digest everything and "get into it". It does not contain pre written adventure. You will have to find one separate or make one yourself, there are some free options available.

On top of that you don't need anything else exept pen and paper. Dice are of course greatly recommended, but you can start with some free phone app.

Yes, to better understand this you have to understand the "flow" of the program. Meaning the order at which the instructions are executed and not written.

Here you have the flow of the program starting from n =3 until the recursion reach draw(0), note that none of the for loop have been executed yet. At this point it reach the first "return" instruction and go finish the call to draw(0).

Then the flow go back to where it previously was: inside the draw(1) call just after the line calling draw(0). And it start executing the next lines of the draw(1): the for loop.

Then it reach the second "return" and proceed again until the whole program is over.

Never ever ever ever give money to someone that promise to give it after to charity. There are countless stories with proof of people who never kept the promises. Even if they did give it, they get tax benefit instead of you. It's worth also (even more) for shop or other places that propose to round up the total and give to charity.

You want to give to charity? Just give to charity, why a middle man ?

Yes, as I wrote when the method draw(n=1) finish the for loop that print one "#", this call of the method draw return. Then the process start again from the after the line draw(n-1) of the method draw(n=2), which execute the for loop to print "##" and return. Then again you come back to after the line draw(n-1) of inside the method draw(n=3), ect.

You should keep in mind that everytime a draw(n-1) is called, the current method is "paused" until this call return.

You are looking at a recursive method, as you can see with the line draw(n-1) inside the draw(n) method. You can search for "recursive function" on internet for a better understanding.

Basically, the method draw is called a first time n = a user input, but then this method call itself with n-1 until it reach 0. So you can think as if function draw(6) will call draw(5) and wait for it to return before continuing, draw(5) call draw(4), ect until draw(0) that return immediately.

So then the order of execution will be draw(1) that print " #\n" and return, then draw(2) will proceed to print "##\n" and return, then draw(3), ect until draw(n).

30min is considered short ? Damn, I have 15min to commute and when looking for a new place I did put a limit at 20min from my work place. Most of my colleagues have shorter commute time than me.

No suprise more than 2h wasted per day would make someone depressed.

Just buy blocks of basic hard soap. Better for your skin and your plumbing. I don't know if it's cheaper compared to your 10L bottle, but it's definitely cheaper compared to normal liquid soap bottles.

I watched it purely for nostalgia reason because of the games. There was few interesting scenes (combat scenes), but overall not worth it.

They took a big dump on all the existing lore, and on the already well defined character of Master Chief.

Forward Unto Dawn was so much better as a Halo adaptation.

People in the comment seems to not understand that it doesn't mean average on the "scale of beauty/attractiveness". But averaged features. Like if you merge all nose shapes of a million person you get this nose, ect.

It was tested already several years ago that people tend to like faces made by merging a lot of faces together and "averaging" them. Most of the time rating them more attractive than the individual faces used.

I don't find the source anymore... I'll check better later.

I wasn't even the first, someone else posted it also while I was typing my answer.

I didn't even re play it that much. I think in the end I probably have more playtime on Oblivion. But much better/stronger memories from Morrowind. It was maybe because I had less video game experience to compare it with, but this one clearly left a big mark on me. I still have incredible goosebumps when "the road most travelled" or "nerevar rising" sounds start playing from my playlists.

The gameplay maybe clunky compared to today, especially to combine weapon and magic. But everything else was so amazing for the time, and some part are still much better than recent games.

I even had a talk with someone at an "ai in game dev" conference who took as an exemple the way the diary/quest log of Morrowind was working.

Without a doubt Morrowind for me.

Halo and Diablo also, in different genre.

Yeah I had to make an android app for that because one person in the group was taking ages to proceed each rolls ...

I would say that the game as a whole is fine but it's carried by the franchise. The system is not for me, but no doubt a lot of people like it. I cannot even explain why I don't like it specifically, it just didn't work for me.

Work related project was a library for curves representation (polynomial, bezier, and a lot of other types) in C++. I liked working on it for several reasons. First one is that I could finally start something from scratch after years of working on legacy code. No dependency on strange old library from the team, only mainstream libraries.

But mostly it was because I learned a lot on this project. I had to mix template programming, heavy use of polymorphism, python bindings of the c++ and serialization together. I had experience in all of this stuff already, but mixing everything together bring a lot of new troubles and you have to understand how it works more in deep to be able to solve them.

I'm not making "famous" open source package with thousands of download and used everywhere, but seeing this package still in use in several other projects (and not only in my initial team) even after I left the initial team feels good. One day someone from my new company recommended to use "my" library as dependency to solve one of our problem, without knowing that I was the author, saying that it was a good well written lib. That's a nice ego boost!

Lancer ! I did one short scenario (6 sessions IIRC) and the system and combat were a blast ! The story a little bit less, it was a homemade one for the GM. But apparently the published ones are quite good.

Oh I would like to try the star wars D6. I played quite a lot of the ffg star wars because at some point it was the favorite for most of the people in my play group, but I never found it very nice. I love star wars lore, but not this system.

Probably not, this is Quebec. I'm in a french lab and everything is written in English. You don't really have choice as you are collaborating internationally. Even if the lab is based/funded in France, not all of the people inside will be french. They plan to have scientific advisors that are not french according to the link.