I've been playing for a few years now and have been lucky enough to be part of the Patron D&D group as well. I figured I'd give some thoughts on D&D Beyond if people are looking at that for an easy way to manage everything D&D wise as I recently bought into the ecosystem...

The short version is that, if you already own the Player's Handbook and maybe some other books as well, then it may not be completely worth it. I say this because, while it is free to create your account and use things like the character creator, you have to also buy the associated books to "unlock" certain content. For example, if you're wanting to create a warlock, you can only choose the pact of the fiend without paying for the player's handbook which unlocks the other pact options. The same goes for books like Xanathar's Guide to Everything which will then unlock the other options there such as Hexblade.

The books on average are about $30 each, however the nice thing is that you can actually buy just parts of the books if you don't need everything. For example, I wanted a complete list of the demons so that my nifty new Summon Greater Demon spell could have some good options, so I was able to buy just the creatures from one of the campaign books for around $7-8 instead of the full $30 for a campaign that we won't ever play. Depending on how much you want to rely on digital toolsets instead of hard copy books and pen/paper character sheets, it still may or may not be worth it.

My favorite part of this is by far the character creation aspect. Once you choose your race and class (which gives you the book-text descriptions of everything including racial bonuses), the layout for choosing each new feature per level is great. If there is a static feature such as gaining extra attack, it will simply describe it exactly as the book does. If there is a choice to be made such as class feature or ability score increase, it will alert you and present the choice very clearly. For my in-person game, we started out at level 10, so it was very quick and easy to make the choices I needed to make and have it create the character sheet for me with everything calculated out.

After your character is created, you can really go about using it either in D&D Beyond which allows you to keep track of health, spell slots, limited use skills, etc. or you can simply export your character sheet into a PDF and print it off in the exact layout as a standard character sheet. I used the digital version to track my last game where my barbarian was basically being attacked by a whole town and the party (don't drink literal snake oil, trust me), and it was decent but required a lot of shifting around in the digital view to get to what I needed. However, being able to look at certain features and have the relevant description right there instead of writing it down onto a character sheet and then having to look that up in the physical book was pretty nice.

Those are my initial impressions with it, if anyone has any questions for me about Beyond or even how Patron D&D works, I'd be happy to answer.

So I had been curious for a while where Jones got his infamous mug from, and I finally found the seller's website! Appears to be from goodlywoods.com and I just purchased a mug from them that is absolutely amazing. Spent way too much on it, but i have a feeling I'll be using it for years.

I recently finished re-playing through all of Half Life 2 and both episodes (Jones read my September community comment about it, was excited to see him read it lol). The whole Mark Laidlaw story where he posted his vision of Episode 3 made me want to do it again since I hadn't really played through them since they were originally released. If you're in the same boat as me and haven't played them in many many years, I'd recommend it as they definitely still hold up imo. Such good level design and interesting encounters both story and combat wise.

I definitely liked the betting special, thought I'd give some initial impressions:

Liked: There were definitely some funny moments in this special (favorite was when Kyle said to More of a Sports Guy about what he was talking about "I can't care", great moment lol). Everyone was doing quite well with the responses I thought, and I loved the introductions to the degenerate quartet. I also liked the Gut Check challenge a lot, a ton of rapid fire bets where your first instinct is what you have to go with, and a lot of good variety there in the bets themselves.

Didn't like as much: I do miss having everyone in the same room together like the Nintento betting special so that there could be more funny interactions between everyone. Also, I didn't quite like the 3 second rule for the initial bets. While it introduces another layer of strategy and drama, I personally would have rather seen these bets have the chance to get properly thought out instead of how Blood had to rush through just about every time.

All that said, you can tell that a lot of thought and prep went into the betting special as always and I always appreciate all the effort that goes into them. Looking forward to the results!

I'm not sure if this would be the proper place to put something like this, but I just had a quick, simple idea about Fun Game Monday now that Kyle is playing Megaman Legends. I would love to see Kyle, after he completes this play-through, on stream to re-watch his presentation for the game on the first Hall of Greats and see if there is anything that he might have a different opinion on or if his original thoughts on the game haven't changed since he played it so long ago. I just think it would be an interesting discussion on how nostalgia and how it affects your memories of games you loved long ago but haven't touched since then. What do yall think?

Get ready for some metal

1.) Emperator - Valkyrion - Band I was in many years ago, figured this would be a good example of my musical tastes in itself since I helped make the song lol (i'm on drums)
2.) Wintersun - Sons of Winter and Stars - I love long, epic metal songs and Jari is probably my favorite song writer. I also love Kai on drums, such an impressive drummer
3.) In Flames - Dead Eternity - Not much of a fan of their newer stuff, this whole album is one of the best examples of great melodic death metal out there.
4.) Dragonforce - Ashes of the Dawn - Been a Dragonforce/power metal fan for a long time, this album just came out maybe a week ago and I'm digging it a lot
5.) Amon Amarth - Cry of the Blackbirds - One of my top favorite bands, hard for them to make a song I don't like.
6.) Blind Guardian - Mirror Mirror - More power metal, seen Blind Guardian twice live and their entire discography is so diverse and great. They do a lot of orchestra work in the newer albums and they write each part themselves.
7.) Kalmah - Like a Slave - more melodic death metal that's a bit harder than In Flames, love this band too

Dreaming big this year, at least I think it's big...

• RE2 Remake - any gameplay is welcome, but the big dream part is a shadow drop of the full game to be within a month of E3, and/or include RE3 full remake at the same time to be a collection. Optional big dream would be both static cameras for original feel, and first person option supporting full VR like RE7.
• Doom Single Player Content - I doubt a full sequel would happen so quickly, so I'm mainly hoping for some single player DLC content like an expansion to Doom 2016. Big dream would be a complete revamp on the multiplayer side of things since that has always felt like the most lacking part of the game (dedicated private servers is the big dream)
• Elder Scrolls 6 - Loved Skyrim, but I'm ready for a new engine that doesn't require you to limit your frame rate to prevent physics from breaking on PC.
• Personal big wish - Sequel to Lichdom Battlemage. I loved that game and want more, I loved the crafting of spells aspect and the general attitude/feel of the game, especially after they revamped the method of creating more powerful spells to be a bit easier.

I'm a big fighting game fan, so I was glad to see SF2 get its rightful spot. I do kind of wish that a specific version were chosen, though, just for clarity's sake. I would argue that the different versions of SF2 were fully-separate games in contrast to a nominee like World of Warcraft where the different releases of content were expansions requiring the base game to play. To my knowledge, you couldn't upgrade the arcade versions to the newer versions either and were completely separate cabinets as opposed to a game like SF4 and other modern arcade fighting games that allow you to upgrade to a newer version. I did a little research on this to confirm but please correct me if I'm wrong.

In my eyes, the SF2 nomination would be specifically for either World Warrior since it was the first and biggest jump from the original Street Fighter game, or for Super Turbo since it is considered the culmination of all the previous versions and, essentially, the best version of SF2.

Personally I'm not too worried about this having the affect you describe. Is the length of the ban harsh? I think so, yes. I would rather see it only banned for the next round or two.

The reason I don't think this will be an issue is because of the amount of potential nominees being extremely high, even keeping in mind that there are 9 nominees per round there is a staggering number of choices that could be put up to vote, and having one not receive any vote by someone other than the one that nominated the game is telling enough that there are much better choices out there. The fact that no Final Fantasy game has been brought up, no Doom, no Smash Bros, no a lot of things have been mentioned in the first 2 rounds means there's plenty of games that are worthy and plenty of time to get those that were banned another chance later on.

The "better choices that day" argument I also disagree with because I trust the allies to bring up games that they truly believe in with their vast collective knowledge of games and gaming culture. Maybe my sarcasm detector is malfunctioning, but I don't think that any nominee that we've seen so far has been a troll. A good case has been put up for each game nominated, even for the ones you could call surprise entries like Megaman Legends or Black Flag or Link's Awakening DX.

I guess what I'm trying to get across is this...the chances of a not-worthy game being nominated to begin with and therefore take the spot of one of the greats over a "better" game that was banned previously (and keep in mind, everyone's opinions will differ to a degree as to what game is "better") is extremely unlikely from what I've seen so far, so I both enjoy the added tension it brings and am not worried about another game getting an unfair placement in the HoG.