I will never understand people who think this movie isn’t funny - endlessly quotable:

“That’s a lot of nuts!” “You should be able to beat him now!” “Beware his song about big butts, he beats you up while he plays it!”

I could go on. In a just world he would have gotten to make more films, and not just thumb parody movies.

I’d recommend Killing Mr. Kringle.

It’s a very silly one shot, and it takes 0 prep. It’s a super-streamlined Forged in the Dark game where you’re mischievous little scamps instead of scoundrels.

I was hoping this was going to end with a call to help so I could then recommend Bunny Drop. Because the internet has poisoned my brain, so why not share the damage?

I think it’s just all a bit antithetical to how I run my games. I’ve really only used random encounters one time, and that was when I wanted to make a “classic dungeon crawl” and created an encounter chart to roll on when the PCs backtracked. That way, it would feel like the dungeon denizens were looking for them more the longer they were in the dungeon.

If they’re picking a path to get to an objective, then I want to reflect the flavor of that choice. If they’ve decided to cross a swamp, then I might have them run into another boat being attacked by a strange tentacle monster. Or, if they’ve decided to trek through the forest, a group of fey who are sick of the mortals encroaching on their land. Preferably, this ties back into the central story: the other boat in the swamp is carrying a rival adventuring party after the same treasure as them. The fey have been enlisted by the big bad who stole the treasure in the first place.

And if they miss either of these, they’ll run into them inside the dungeon eventually. These encounters are just a chance to foreshadow those things and don’t feel ‘wasted’ to me.

My only problem with the quantum ogre is that if you’re determined to have your players face a certain encounter, why even bother with the illusion of choice? Why have the left door and the right door? Why not just have a straight hallway?

Players already tend towards analysis paralysis for any choice you present, so if you’re going to give them a decision, then you can at least have that decision have an impact or clear consequences. No one wants to do a bunch of prep for content the players will never touch, but part of the magic of TTRPGs is having a world that feels alive and that you can influence.

One of my favorite GMing terms I learned about recently is “showing the barrel of the gun.” If you don’t want to come up with two encounters - one that the players will never see and one that they will - then a much more manageable alternative is to have one option that reveals the imminent threat to the players and one that does not. And if they then bypass your planned encounter? Well, great, you showed them the threat, and they got around it.

Nice Marines is my personal highlight. A bunch of unstoppable killing machines who have to try really hard not to kill anyone… even on accident!

BIRD CRIMES is another gem, along with Death Was the Only Road out of Town, and Giant Goddamn Robots.

It should honestly be fine, it’s a pretty standalone entry in the Gundam UC timeline. Though the idea of seeing Hathaway without having watched Gundam 0079, or Char’s Counterattack is interesting.

Hopefully it will make you want to go back and enjoy the other Universal Century shows. They’re all available on Crunchyroll, and Char’s Counterattack is on Netflix.

It is wild/infuriating how difficult it is to avoid Reddit in search results. It feels like we’ve really let the value of the internet just accrue in one place.

I haven’t seen him before! I’ll take this as a recommendation.

Polygon has highlighted a few standouts: here

For some reason, I can’t find anything from ttrpg.network when searching from lemmy.world. Still haven’t really wrapped my head around the federation stuff, but it’s annoying not being able to subscribe to these.