Or don't, and just pick what sounds fun!

I've been sitting pretty with both uBlock Origin and uMatrix stopping both the ads and the delay from YouTube. Not sure what exactly is doing which, but it's been working for me

Switch to calzones, they're better.

The only thing stopping them is their own incompetency. Truly a thin wall, but as their older generations start dying off we'll see that wall broken down.

Which, as history shows, is a tenuous proposition at best.

Should give you an idea of the quality of the coffee at Starbucks, I guess. One step above diner coffee here in the States, but that's not really saying much.

Oh nO! noT SocIAliSm!

Would it be pronounced "sh-it" or "z-it"?

Quick, tell him that on Twitter! Maybe he'll actually do it and we'll finally be rid of his godawful grandstanding.

Try garbanzo bean water, or aquafaba, using unsalted canned garbanzo beans. The protein chains in the water function very similarly to egg whites.

Hardly ever. The leaves store water, and it thrives in arid conditions. I'd water it about as often as a snake plant.

They did. It's called the Vita and it's still amazing even after Sony dumped it. I have one a friend cracked for me, and any game I could possibly want to play runs at a crisp 50 fps with no fluctuation. If only they had marketed it better.

I'm pretty sure this has something to do with using the Moon as a jumping-off point to the rest of the solar system. Assuming we can get a functioning colony on the Moon, it will be significantly easier and cheaper to get to Mars and potentially other planets as well. This might just be something I heard from a friend of a friend though, so don't quote me on it.

My suggestion for balancing encounters? Don't. As long as the monsters and traps feel appropriate, full balancing is unnecessary. There's a couple reasons for this. One, your players will escape or beat situations in ways that you could never have imagined, and; two, if things get too hard and everyone's really struggling, you can scale back the encounter and even fudge dice rolls if it makes narrative sense to do so. Deus Ex Machina is not off the table either, for D&D at least. Remember, your players are heroes: something saving them right as all hope was lost is par for the course. The only time characters should die permanently imo is when it makes for a compelling story.

And I've already reported it as misinformation. Nice when a website lets you report stuff without having an account.

You could always use Outlook's calendar if you wanted to add to people's schedules via emails. It's a little "business-y" for my taste, but it is effective at reminding people there's a game happening. It also has Teams integration for a searchable chat option, a file storage system, video chat, etc. Discord is pretty bad if you want an archive-able chat.

Alternatively, you could also try Matrix, which is the open-source version of Discord and has a ton of integration options available. It does require that everyone download something, but any coordination effort is going to require some amount of buy-in from the players. Let us know what works!

Standard combat in D&D is based off of an old system where the tension comes from a survival-horror "will I die before I escape with the loots?" feeling, which means combat is supposed to be dangerous, punishing, and generally a bad idea. Most people today don't enjoy that style of gameplay and are more interested in the narrative side of play. This makes combat a chore because it drags the players out of making interesting choices narratively and doesn't replace it with anything. Combat doesn't have that cloak of survival surrounding it, making it feel hollow and tacked-on.

The biggest thing for me to counteract that is giving people the ability to "fail forward." Not an original idea by any means, but I get the feeling that most people play D&D with a, "I roll to hit, miss, whoops that's my turn" sort of vibe. Admittedly there's no mechanic in a regular D&D game to facilitate this, but I like borrowing from Blades in the Dark with their clock system. Instead of failing to hit, the player hits, but it initiates some kind of countdown timer for something else happening in the fight or elsewhere. This gives me the ability to build tension in the fight while also giving me reasonable control over the length of the fights as well.

I like your implementation of Luck Dice; it seems to balance out some of the feel-bads while giving players options. I don't know if it addresses the core problem of misses in combat, but at least players won't feel like they're not going anywhere with a string of bad rolls. It also neatly fits into the heroic fantasy aspect of characters being better than most people and nothing can truly keep them down. It might be interesting to give your big bads Luck Dice too to make them feel more scary instead of doing lair/legendary actions. Let us know how it goes when you run your game!

Out of curiosity, do people feel that Kickstarter projects should be on the list for news? I was avoiding it this week, but there are a LOT of board games and card games being Kickstarted right now.