A movie called Sir Henry at Rawlinson's End, extremely surreal British Arthouse. Like an opium dream from the brain of a fox hunting aristo, part comedy part stream of consciousness spoken word poetry. The gags, puns, and quips are truely monumental. It's a gem, though not PC, you've been warned: https://youtu.be/N6W5RB50fXk?si=eYUlKqkTyyMvHz-Z
As a bit more background the Ancient Dragons were Blue, Black, Red, Green, and White, so we had to work around a mix of damages. Nice bonus with the Pit Fiend, Dragons aren't immune to the Frightened Condition and creatures within 20 feet of the Fiend roll for Frightened at start of turn, and all attacks are magical so it punches through resistances.
First Druid Shapeshifted to Ogremoch soaking damage and myself as the second Druid Shapeshifted to Pit Fiend multi-striking with poison helped to finish the fight, our Cleric was putting out some serious dps with Smites though he went down and had to be revived twice, a sorcerer with Invulnerability potion successfully splitting off two of the Dragons with Agro and doing some strong AOE until the Pit Fiend came in to finish them off. I was the Pit Fiend Druid, Dream Circle, focusing healing after summoning a Draconic Spirit to soak damage early on until the Shapeshift towards the end. Wizard in the backline focusing Lightning damage with hasten, but the Blue Dragon being immune he switched it up towards the end.
I just did a two-shot where we went five level 20 characters vs 5 Ancient Dragons. Beyond all expectations the players actually won without a Permadeath. That said, the GM didn't use the Dragons' spell abilities much, that might have turned the tide.
Worth noting that it was the fact we had two Druids with Shapechange that turned the tide of battle.
I actually hope that some dev work goes into providing "premium features" for paying subscribers. Things like profile cosmetics, awards, "superlikes", gif embeds, maybe sub only communities/threads. I view all of these as perfectly acceptable premium features that folks pay for on platforms like Discord that don't deter free users. If it helps make instances sustainable and keeps high quality admin & moderation in place, I would argue it would be a big community benefit.
Another possibility is instance - as - affiliate where the admin sets up affiliate accounts with services like VPN, Amazon, a web host, etc. To enable users to buy things they would already and give a kickback to the instance.
A lot of the devs left Kbin due to the on-man-leadership problem and started their own fork Mbin which has been progressing more quickly. A lot of instances have moved to Mbin, including kbin.run which I am on. Either way, it is performing very well overall and does enable interaction with both Lemmy and Mastodon instances. I check Lemmy instances directly periodically and don't see any advantage to returning when Mbin lets me interact with more content.
@spaduf I love Baudrillard. It is a bit odd that he has a student or TA rrad his lecture for him, but once you realize his French accent is so deep as to be near unintelligible to an American you can appreciate it. The thoughts are exceptional: https://youtu.be/q3kgjjTE0dk?si=XM_lMs6KdhLf6_-n
@Blaze hmmm, why yes it is. I don't know why that community does not come up for me no matter what I search on kbin.run I'm all for joining an existing community as long as I can interact with it.
I'm pretty sure kbin.run federates with lemmy.ml. odd
@retrieval4558 thanks! Please lend a hand getting is started and post a couple of your favorite pieces of SciFi content. We have a book list and art list starting which is a good place to start.