Sounds like a fantastic weekend!

I would personally recommend keeping to a system that everyone is familiar with for a one-shot when the point is to play the one-shot rather than to try out a system. Learning new rules always leads to some friction, and that can easily slow a one-shot down enough to make it no longer a one-shot. You can absolutely say beforehand that you’ll be playing relatively loose with the rules, letting more things than usual just happen without rolls or just letting the players narrate the end of a combat that they’ve clearly won

actually having a Paladin as a simple class compared to PF

Isn’t PF2’s champion essentially just a paladin? I haven’t played one so I can’t say for sure, but on the surface it looks like the same idea. That said, if D&D simplifies character creation and everyone’s on board that’s totally reasonable

If you have any potentially funny ideas, be it bits, custom spells, “combat scenarios” or puzzles please share!

I’m just gonna spout out whatever comes to mind with no particular quality control here:

• Start the adventure by having it be one of those “haunted” hotels that offers you a free night if you stay in the haunted room. Naturally, this one actually is extremely haunted

• If you’re using D&D 5E, guardian portraits from Curse of Strahd are horrible extremely funny to use as a GM (and could probably be adapted to other systems easily enough)

• Make the first encounter be all of the furniture in their rooms. It’s all animated, and they need to scramble for their equipment because they were in bed

• A social challenge in which the ballroom is full of dancing ghosts while some kind of horrid thing plays the organ. The challenge is to dance your way across the hall to get to the organ and break it, letting the ghosts rest. Make it apparent that they’re not meant to fight their way through by having an NPC beg them to let the spirits rest without dsestroying them or something. Failure to properly blend in results in being forcefully swept into a waltz (grapples/restraints with saves against a steady hp drain)

• I’m not 100% sure how to execute this one, but an Escherian room like the one from Labyrinth could be a fun puzzle

Little guy’s brain is gonna be floating in the astral plane after that

She sounds lovely!

He’s a good boy, I’m just too lazy to go fetch his toys a lot of the time!

What an expressive face he has!

Ahaha, we play rough sometimes. But it’s always play. He’s actually really good at noticing if he has bitten or scratched too hard, there’s a real shift in his demeanour and he suddenly gets all gentle and affectionate. But otherwise it’s game on

My attempt to rephrase it based on how I understood it after listening to that section of the podcast (which I cannot recommend, he’s absolutely just spouting marketing shit):

You know, all of the AI-generated content increasingly looks similar, the faces generated are all beautiful in the same way, and so I’m empathetic towards what videogame fans are thinking about DLSS5

I HAVE PERCEIVED YOUR CAT

HE’S CUTE

This is correct, although it should be noted that the power generation side of this is just a kind of cool incidental thing. The main purpose of the coating is to protect the solar cells

It makes him into a little speech bubble

Oh hey, I’ve got one of those too!

For those who are, like me, confused about how the cat could belong to a man who died an entire human lifetime ago: the museum houses descendants of Hemingway’s childhood cat (and a bunch of other cats too). The website has a page about them that includes pictures of a few https://www.hemingwayhome.com/our-cats

As the article says, Mexico said it didn’t want American troops in the country. There is no indication that that happened. The US contribution here, as far as we know just now, is information

Even then, though, Mexico may well decide that even if it doesn’t want US troops, bringing them in to cooperate might be preferable to fighting the US over it when the US is being so belligerent

This title format is gonna be great in six releases’ time

Presumably when he wakes up again, so it might be a while

You don’t have to like Cuba’s government to have some sympathy for the people. Countries regularly send food aid to North Korea when its people are starving

I am delighted to report that the image description on Commons is “My cat loves styrofoam peanuts”

(specifically that’s the description of the original upload, not the cropped one on the article, but still)

Also it’s geo-tagged to a specific house in Canada. I hope that was a choice made consciously

To be honest it seems like they’re so paranoid about The Woke™ that it would be almost useless. It would just be a recommendation for every single game that has a plot and wasn’t made by dickheads

Is 30 fps not playable?

That’s fair, it is slow and often clunky. I am personally totally fine with the pace of it, but I get why it wouldn’t be for everyone.

To me, the ship navigation stuff was there to make the setting feel bigger and lend weight to the plot rather than the puzzles. I personally enjoyed stopping off at unexpected things I found along the way, or figuring out how to get to some of the less-accessible worlds (the marketplace at the very top left of the map stands out to me here). I’m okay with it not being a tightly-focussed puzzles-only sort of thing

Edit: possibly relevant, apparently the game had some pretty bad bugs with the navigations on launch. I played it after those got patched, so my experience may have been different to yours