I've also been avoiding all the Baldur's Gate 3 stuff, but will immediately buy it and disappear for a while once it is ready to go.
I don't know how much you know about this, but Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 edition branched off down two paths. One of them is the TSR-WotC-Hasbro IP that is currently 5th edition D&D. The other is a continuation of the 3.5 edition rules and completely separate lore and now a newer but VERY SIMILAR game product called Pathfinder.
There are two fantastic Pathfinder CRPGs, Kingmaker and Wrath of the Righteous and they are well worth playing if you like that sort of game. They are both staggering on the scale of how much of the game they implement, up to and including "epic level" play.
Baldur's Gate 3 is something else entirely. There are 175 hours of cutscenes. There are apparently more than 15,000 possible endgame states. The game implements the ability to speak to animals and to dead people, so if you run across a corpse, you can talk to it if you want to. You have physics mechanics, so you can knock things off ledges, jump around on the maps and set things on fire, which can then spread to other flammable objects, while the smoke from that fire impacts the area around it.
During the pandemic, my close friends and I played Baldur's gate 1 and 2 and Neverwinter Nights in multiplayer, and BG3 supports that as well. The support worked so well that we had one person playing on an iPad, another on a Chromebook and two players on PCs, all in the same game. We're going to run this game as a full multiplayer game (once player 4 gets a decent PC, which I'll send to her if I have to). I am absolutely jazzed about doing that. We mostly play tabletop games over Skype right now but I'm really looking forward to getting back to something with easier visualization.
I fully expect BG3 to be the only RPG I need for YEARS.
For what it's worth, Hasbro is trying to promote a subscription service for an AUTHORIZED 3D engine for the tabletop game as well. I think that's a terrible idea because it'll be the end of imagination in the game for a lot of players, but I don't mind inhabiting a game for a while.
That's terrible. The mold and fungus was the issue I remember from hurricanes, like Hugo, and the 1-2 punch of Irma and Maria.
At least there is advance notice to evacuate yourself but not with the toronado. I assume most of you guys all have generators?
I know a few northern and upper midwesterners that migrate to a southwest or southeast 2nd home for a few winter months to avoid the bad weather.
For the most part, if you've lived in the midwest for a while and you're outside a city, you'll be able to see and feel the atmosphere change and to be wary of tornados, even if you can't quite articulate the change. It just "feels like something is coming." City folk aren't in as much danger, but tornados still touch down in big cities, too. They cut a path of destruction that might be hundreds of meters wide, but that's just a fact of life for us. My office was 100% in the path of a tornado about 10 years ago. The tornado in that case lifted off the ground less than 200m from where our building is and still did pretty substantial but also relatively localized damage.
Ice storms are a different deal and they're different from blizzards or just being cold. Minnesota and North Dakota have far more brutal weather in terms of cold and snow amounts, and if you like far enough north, your car will actually have a heather in the engine compartment to get it warm enough to turn over when it's cold, and if you have any kind of money, you probably also your own plow as well. Ice storms are a set of conditions that start with relatively warm weather and then brutal cold and probably snowfall. We had one where I live around April 4th of 1998 or 99 that left entire cities without power for a couple weeks because so many power poles snapped from the rapid temperature change. They're a nasty sort of event.
I'm aware that hurricanes are massive combinations of nasty weather because of flooding and strong-but-not-tornado-class winds, but most people who live where they happen either drive elsewhere or know how to board up to stay safe. The problem is mostly a matter of scale, since hurricanes are so damned big. Buildings usually remain standing. The biggest question becomes a matter of adequate drainage and waterproofing, power availability and what services are getting cut off from roads washing out.
The west coast also has Earthquakes but every Californian I know kind of shrugs and says "Yeah we don't put glass stuff on ledges" and "We don't even feel them if we're in the car!" but who knows when that big one will turn Vegas into oceanfront real estate will happen? I've felt a few in my life, but they were all little ones. No one even really talks about anything below a 6 on the Richter scale. That's crazy to me.
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
