I have never seen a cat look so much like one of those worm-on-a-string toys

I grew up next to a Norwegian neighbour who called our cat “Kattepus”, and I have apparently picked up and kept the habit of referring to my own cat that way. He’s also called Baggy, because being a black cat everyone wanted me to name him Bagheera

I could potentially see something along the lines of giving each civ a “canon” path that sets its abilities and having the aesthetic stuff match your chosen civ the whole way through working. So if you pick the USA to start with then you get American visuals / music / names etc the whole way through, but you automatically get the English bonuses in the appropriate era for that

It’s definitely not. Whatever the flaws in the end result, Firaxis do experiment substantially with their formula. Doing that is actually what caused the complaints this article is about

The idea is that it’s split into three ages and you change your aesthetics and bonuses between each one. So you might go Romans > Spanish > Mexicans in the three eras, for example. The intention is honestly a decent one, I think: make it so that games aren’t functionally over and therefore boring by the halfway point. It’s usually clear who has won long before they actually do win, and the fact that basically nobody ever played the late game meant that late game civs and mechanics were a bit of a waste of time. I don’t have VII though, so I can’t say anything about how it feels in practice

I think the story you’re referring to is that NYT itself owns a house in what used to be a Palestinian neighbourhood in West Jerusalem. It’s possible that there’s something about one of the owners, but I do not know about that

The house in question is in Qatamon, which was on the Israeli-controlled side of the 1949 Green Line. It was majority-Palestinian, but most of the residents fled during the war. Israel allowed Jews who had fled from the other side of the Green Line to settle it. In 1984, the NYT bought the house for the use of its Jerusalem bureau chief. It got some attention a while back when the NYT journalist living there read the writings of a Palestinian woman who had grown up there, realised she was talking about the same house (or more specifically, the house that his house was built as an upper floor extension of), and invited her to visit

I sincerely hope that someone has managed to use Command: autodefenestrate in an English-speaking game at some point. It’d have to be in some context where jumping out of the window wouldn’t hurt the subject, but if you’re in a room with a window out on to a canal or something then I’m pretty sure that could be a solid way to get rid of them for a bit

Then you still don’t know which door is the correct one, you’ve just learned which guard tells the truth and you’ve used up your one question. The trick is to ask which door the other guard would tell you is the correct one and then go through the other door. If you’ve asked the lying guard, they’ll lie about what the honest one would say and point you towards the wrong door. If you asked the honest one, they’ll truthfully tell you what the lying guard would say and also point you towards the wrong door

He is, although I’m gonna look funny at any GM that doesn’t homebrew that out. There’s even a Jeremy Crawford post from 2015 saying that he’d only consider fall damage to be for falls farther than however high you jumped, but they didn’t change it in the 2024 update. Harengons actually don’t even need magic to run into this issue, they can just jump high enough to injure themselves as of level 9

It’s me, I’m people

And how often are you going to be climbing in combat

Not often at all, that’s why I don’t think it’s the reason they picked centaur

The fact that you can have a Tank with Mounted Combatant riding you is very useful to a normal wizard build.

It’s definitely a valid approach, but it’s worth remembering that player centaurs are only medium-sized so the rider actually loses the advantage against medium-sized enemies that Mounted Combatant would otherwise give them. It’s not useless by any means, especially if the centaur takes Protection (although that would require grabbing a fighting style one way or another too), but I’d be surprised if it was all that much better than just having the rider on a regular horse and the wizard not in melee. The wizard does still have to actually pass the dex saves, after all, and this one is not going to be doing that very often

The thing about centaurs requiring their own mounts to keep up is pretty damn funny

5E (which this looks like) doesn’t tend to do negatives for species. Centaurs actually do have one of the rare ones, but it’s only that climbing is more difficult for you, so it’s very rare. I think the reasoning is just that the features centaurs do get are basically completely useless to a normal wizard build - a charge ability to get you into melee where wizards don’t want to be, natural weapons for all the punching wizards don’t do, and a bunch of skills tied to an ability score that wizards don’t need

Oh hey I sort of unintentionally did the monk one! He was raised in a villain’s cult that was was taken down by a party of adventurers. Since he was raised in it he fully believed in the cult’s teachings until the shock of that day, and since then he had been trying to make up for it. I didn’t use the religious aspect, but he had the aesthetic and the repentance, and also the party’s druid had taken him on as an apprentice beer brewer so he even had that European monastic tradition down too

The mimicry feature takes a bit of creativity, but remember you can use it on non-word noises! I’ve borrowed a dragon’s roar to create panic, replayed a conversation I heard earlier word-for-word to earn someone’s trust, and replayed the bard’s music to give them a backing band for a performance. However the two extra proficiencies are probably the more useful thing; not a flashy feature, but definitely a useful one

My boy Alaric does it too! Truly an evolutionary masterclass to able to just nap anytime anyplace

AC Competizione is on UE4’s graphics and in-house physics, so I imagine they’re doing something similar here

What an incredible colour her eyes are!

The one with the overlaid diagrams is delightful

A collarbone that isn’t attached to any other bones and a very flexible spine. However, while this makes them extremely good at it, the actual motions involved are, as demonstrated, manageable for a human. We’re just a lot worse at it

I do indeed love my gremlin boy who yells at me and tries to steal every mug of mint tea I make