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Impermanent echoes, sketches, and scratches for various Idiomdrottning components and libraries can be found here.
I hate this (from Silhouette Core Rules):
Designation of Product Identity:
Nothing in this book except for material in Chapter 8 features Open Gaming Content.
A product identity designation in fine print separated from the license page by 247 pages. Ouch.
In the countmail shell script from the bsdgames package replacing from | wc -l with notmuch count tag:inbox makes it work with notmuch â„ïž
I guess using !g instead of !gu wouldâve made a lot of sense. I didnât think of that.
I just added this into my custom-bangs.js for Just Bangs:
{
"t": "gu",
"u": "https://www.google.com/search?q={{{s}}}&udm=14"
}
It replaces DDGâs site index of The Guardian, which I never use.
Not that I expect to use this new bang a lot either, since I donât use Google Search very often.
Now this one, on the hand:
{
"t": "l",
"u": "https://ln.ht/?query={{{s}}}"
}
I shouldâve put that in a long time ago. Thatâs gonna be great.
Iâm putting on my prediction hat here and might have to eat that hat later (figuratively speaking. Eat plants!) but Iâm making the guess that the new weapon mastery system in D&D 5.2 will end up making the game more samey, less varied as every rogue wants vex and nick etc. There will be more of a âthis is the best weapon and chosing other weapons are build trapsâ 3e mentality. Or like the infamous deadhorse, âHunt Prey / Hunted Shot / Strikeâ which has been talked to death in the PF2e world. (Or for that matter, Twin Strike in D&D 4e.)
I wanna be wrong about thisâ I hope Iâm wrong about it so I can get down with the sickness and the new edition. I havenât tried it yet either so it really is just a guess. Itâs just that every time I see a 5.2 video and they mention this stuff Iâm like âbonds and ideals died for thisâŠ?!â
Several of our Rules Cyclopedia characters have died in character creation by rolling 1 for hitpoints with a -1 con. Moget! Dying in a life path, push-your-luck system like Traveller is another story but thatâs not whatâs happening here. I instituted a house rule that if that happened, you can optionally get 1 hp but no-one took me up on that since that character would still be low con. I got a liâl sad since Iâm low con in real life. âMore of a con artistâ as Dina Hashem would say.
Here are my currently open questions for #WindWraith as of August 16.
Iâm not just looking for official answers, anyone can chime in with homebrew answers and rulings like if you solved a similar problem when running Yoon-Suin or Veins of the Earth or your own conconctions.
1. How do cleric get spell if the deities are dead?
2. What is the range of a standard d4 cannon? Weirdo super cannons vary from 250âČ to 400âČ.
3. Thereâs a -3 shark armor. We use descending AC. Does that mean 9 - 3 = 6, or does it mean -3 total?
4. It says you get XP for value of resources when traded or treasure when spent. So question 4a: how can I best figure out those values, and 4b: do I also add treasure from OSE/RC or do I stick to the more limited treasure from Wind Wraith itself?
(Already received an answer to: which classes are OK: Use the new aquatic elf instead of wood elves, the other classes are fine. Thereâs a new wind mage but normal magic-users exist also. Goblins are common in the setting, use the Halfling class for them (and use that class for Halflings also which are just as common). Our group has an entomologist character which is awesome, so many choices even at low levels, a really flexible and powerful class.)
And then the fifth question I can kinda guess the answer to: there are rules for what happens when you end the session in a dungeon but there arenât any dungeons. Conclusion: Iâm allowed to add in some dungeons to this thing! đłïž
Spent lots of time prepping #WindWraith today. Fun. I made one sea with 26 islands and started detailing one of them. Iâm realizing Iâm gonna need a separate bestiary section in the bujo for the generated monsters. This notebook has a lined section and a squared section, which is great. Iâm really enjoying the hexes-on-squares hack I came up with a while back. That makes it easy to sail in the cardinal directions while still using hex-based island placement, but the main point is to get to use this notebookâhad I a hex note book I woulda used that instead.
One thing I miss is clearer guidande for treasure amounts, treasure placement (is it as per OSE? I assume less b/c scarcity, but then how much?), and prices (for things like ships). In #GhostsOfSaltmarsh and #GoldenVoyages itâs clear to see when players can get a particular ship classâwhen they can afford it. Here, not so much.
Oh, how Iâm Ă€lting hexes and squares
âRönâ is a good Swedish word. Itâs used to mean âscienceâs best current guesses, current understanding, with full awareness that that might change completely if we learn moreâ. Iâm not too fond of even weak Sapir-Whorf but maybe that one word is pretty good and maybe Iâm pretty glad I got to grow up with it as core vocab.
We started playing a #WindWraith campaign! It requires some prep work as a DM but there is an intro adventure to get started right away even as the book arrived just hours before game night. Weâre wrestling with some meta issues like âhow many retainers should we have?â RC suggests up to five retainers for a party that has a char 14 character, which I think is good for this starting island âfunnelâ. We only have two players!?! My group has dwindled horribly. So it sounds good to me that they have some hired help.
RC also suggests the DM run these retainers and thatâs what they do on Knights on the Dinner Table but thatâs not how we did it in the old Lab Lord / LotFP group I was a player in before I started my own group. The players ran the retainers there, which is what I prefer.
Iâm loving the system. Weâre using the Suldokarâs Wake method for THAC0 which is lightning fast: roll THAC0 or higher, ior AC or under, to hit, i.e. âroll extremesâ is good, and middling rolls are misses.
Re: @siiky 2024-08-13 11:21 +0100
Sam Harris: Democracy + Capitalism + Political freedom are the drivers for wealth and creativity.
Itâs sad that people still believe that although I get why they might. Capitalism created illusory wealth by stealing from the future and exploiting the workers. Now that future is here and weâre getting cooked.
The studio spent an estimated $86 million on prints and advertisements for the film.
The movie cost $17 million to make. And $86 million to sell. Our economic system so busted.
/r/LightPhone is all like âNo devs, do not open it up! But put WhatsApp on thereâ. People just donât intuitively get the fundamental FOSS tenets and why anyone would care.
Cyberpunk corporate dystopia came true. Same goes for climate change and labor exploitation.
Moget, Google:
will_there_be_a_foss_rcs_messaging_app_im_not at Reddit
Ihabunek pointed out this pull request:
(And like my own music collection, the gain is all over the place on some of those episodes, making me reach for the volume dial for almost every song.)
The radio app I use canât find all their channels, like one great one thatâs missing is Sheet Music, but it can play them anyway if I snarf the URL from the web pageâs source.
The only remaining problem I have is to find episode links for Field Recordingsâit seems easy enough for the other channels, so I donât know whatâs up.
Iâm new to NTSâIâd never heard about it until lettuce mentioned it in their gemlog four months ago but itâs already one of my fave things online. I almost canât believe it exists. It works with any radio app including mpd out of the box, and for when Iâm on the go and away from my modem I can listen to some fave episodes pirated with this gem:
Lettuce gemlog: Streaming ambient music
GitHub - everdrone/nts: NTS Radio downloader and metadata parser
I hope it always keeps working for ever.
Memory Lane has been one of my fave ways to find new-to-me music but I almost like it even more when it finds stuff straight outta my own collection, like this yé-yé hour:
HUNG, DRAWN & QUARTERED w/ Curley - French Special 8th April 2021 | Listen on NTS
Or when it was playing Townes Van Zandt the other night.
Hereâs an issue we were talking about on Libera Chat today:
Add suppport for pipâs new `pyproject.toml` ? · Issue #1873 · jordansissel/fpm · GitHub
As a quick and dirty heroin fix I copied over a setup.py from an older version (bless you, git, for honoring the ancestorsâ bones) in order to build.
This is the dark side of Python, how hard it is to install stuff from it. A far cry from the old days of chmod +x foo.pl
Iâm such a sucker for this hippie shit:
NTS Guide To: The Unbroken Circle 10th April 2023 | Listen on NTS
This compilation made me really happy.â„ïž
The fourth doesnât have a web page as far as I know. Itâs Megan McKay.
Gavin on Solar Opposites cracking the reins for the twentieth time, thatâs wrong, people with horses please donât do that! It hurts them. Normally a cartoon does this once and it bugs me but this guyâs been doing it forty thousand times. And it drove me crazy. Iâm crazy now. Just for watching a cartoon.
I ws chasing down the noise issue with my guitar setup and I finally found it so hereâs a note to self (although I must write this down in my paper notebook as well because Iâm more likely to look there).
1. On the SmplTrek, donât have both Monitor and Ext Src on. One is enough, the latter is best.
2. Set the gain on the rec source screen to low! Any higher sucks and is super noisy with single coil. I add gain or level with a send effect, that sounds much better, and with the input knob, I can even crank the guitarâs volume knob or the fish driveâs volume knob up. The poison turned out to be the gain setting on the rec source screen.
After trying all the other places it couldâve been (guitar volume knob, tone knob, fish drive one of five settings, and in the SmplTrek it could be one of seven places, turned out that the issue was only one of those fourteen places. Thatâs a relief, usually with a single coil guitar every single volume knob is a minefield with few sweet spots (thatâs normally the tradeoff with single coil) but here there was only one that was bad. With that set to low I have lots of room to play around with the other settings.
This record is gonna suck and will probably never be released. Itâs gonna go straight to /dev/null. But I do wanna try to finish it. As a learning exercise.
Right! Thatâs one reason why I feel the âoh it sucks, oh it sucksâ argument is so dangerous because to the extent that these might end up being actually useful tools, itâd suck if theyâre owned and controlled by and rented out by huge corporations. Itâs a means-of-productionâconcentration the likes of which the world has never seen.
Additionally, as youâre using this tool to crank out more gov forms per hour, are you still needing to work 40h/w or no? If yes, then thatâs great! I worry that thatâs not gonna be true for everyone since because of the way our labor market is set up thereâs no inherent mechanism that turns increased tool efficiency into more spare time and thatâs also something Iâd like to see more govâts addressing seriously.
I improv like crazy but Iâm coloring inside the lines of the gloracle. For example the prep might say âThere are 1d6 orcs here but they have 2HD instead of 1â and in the actual play I might be like âOK [roll roll, rolls a 4] her red scarf is ragged and torn, and she seems to be freezing, sheâs blowing on her hands to warm them up. Her battleaxe, with the markings of the Hyllweth orc tribe, hangs from a loop in her belt. It seems like sheâs standing a bit apart from her three comrades. Theyâre all guys. One of them have boots from the flamesea wizards uniform but the rest of his outfit is that of a warrior. Another one of the guys turns to look at you. What do you do?â or whatever.
I like improvising. I like improvising a liâl too much so I came up with the blorb to tie me to the mast so I donât get as carried away as I used to (âFour beholders bite you!! Take 40000 damage everyday! All our times have come! Like Romeo and Juliet!â).
And of course I forgot to use the coupon code I had đ€Šđ»ââïž
I ended up ordering His Majesty the Worm now that itâs back in stock but I feel I-donât-know about it since after my hype died down a lot because of my nitpicks, my hype for the Rules Cyclopedia + Wind Wraith combo went way up.
His Majesty the Worm, zeroeth (before first) impressions
I accidentally mentioned on IRC how in my teens the first thing I did when I first started Emacs was remapping C-h (with the help of some tutorial) and of course that started five rants on âpeople shouldnât use tech if they donât want to learn it the way it isâ until by the sweet merciful grace of GuÄnyÄ«n someone mentioned LSP so the two-minute hate found a new target đđ»ââïž
A bonus session #trippeludden! Session four-point-five!
Last sesh the dorks had schlepped a mage to a cruel tower but then parted ways and bolted once they learned that he didnât wanna give them any more share of the loot (âI already gave you two thousand gold coins for disabling that blasted lantern!â). And I wasnât sure what his fate would be in there so I recruited Simon (who isnât in the campaign normally) to portray him in there! Fun fun fun!â„ïž
I also got a chance to use the spell points (âMPâ like in video game RPGsâyes, I know that the slot system is also from a video game, Wizardry) from the 2014 DMG p288. It was great! I remember raging at it back in the day because it just adds a layer of complexity on top of what would be a simple system. But what I realized was that it doesnât really start to be complicated until level 11, until then itâs easier than the slots system (especially for people coming from a video game background). I wish I had realized that a long time ago because we couldâve had lots of spell points fun!
I prefer Haggis over Bacon (talking about the card games here! Eat plants!) by a huge margin but thatâs mostly because of how with Baconâs bombs the game becomes all about the quads. The 3579 is so good because itâs orthogonal to what would otherwise be a good hand. Whereas in Bacon it feels pretty arbitrary/âunfair/âflavorless that some combos (that look otherwise normal) are bomby. You basically need the player aid to help you separate combos from specials. Many of yâall might remember that my fave climbing game is The Great Dalmuti and growing up on that, Iâm not used to any bombs at all, I love how that makes all cards good basically since thereâs strength in numbers, although maybe the bombs are part of the secret to how well Haggis works at two.
The joker bombs especially give the same âsecretary problemâ feel that Mindbug is built uponâactually Haggis feels very similar to Mindbug in that regard!
I just checked and the âLiminal Spirits Oracleâ cards are way bigger than Dixit cards and look out of place. The Morgan-Greer cards are same height but narrower; they can work.
I keep Stella in the Odyssey box right here in the apt, and the Stella box (containing just the score tally sheet) in storage, but Iâm tempted to switch their lids actually, so that itâs the Stella variant that can grace my shelf. I mean, if it fits of course, Iâd have to test that first. The Odyssey insert is way better since it fits all the components for both games easily along with plenty of cards, so Iâd just switch the lid is the idea.
I bumped my Stella rating to a 10 on BGG; it and Zendo are the only 3P games Iâve rated ten on there, and it and Parade are the only card games Iâve rated ten there. The other games are 2P games: Ghosts, Focus, Go and two of its variants Snorkels and Meridians.
I noted that that rating is with our house rules, but since we do use our houserules, I canât not give it a ten.
Itâs insane that this completely dumb and bad and underdeved boardgame, this sorta pale shadow of Codenames and Dixit, this âcaptcha clicking in card formâ, is something that makes me so viscerally happy and joyful to experience.
âđđ»ââïžâ was finally home after being away for summer! I love her so much!â„ïžâ„ïžâ„ïžâ„ïžâ„ïžâ„ïž
We met up and played Haggis; we played a traditional long game of 350 points, not really utilizing the âbetâ rules, and using the new reckoning of one point per captured card instead of some cards 0, some 1, some 2, some 3 and some 5. The game was really fun; I had a huge lead and then she had a clean sweep almost catching up but I ended up winning. I also managed to use both laser bombs and rainbow bombs! This was our first time with the new reckoning so let me review that real quick! Thatâs right, fam, you get game reviews tangled up in the sesh reps in this đ!
Pros
1. The new reckoning plays much better, faster, breezier for pretty much the same results
2. The new reckoning is much easier to remember, teach, and explain
3. The new reckoning is much friendlier for ordinary playing cards compared to using the specially printed cards that had the point values
Iâm definitively gonna keep using the new reckoning and it makes Haggis shoot up as one of my fave 2p card games. I was kvetching that I donât like that it doesnât use the aces (one reason I have such a sweet spot for Color Gin is that it uses the entire French deck fully; suits matter, ranks matter, sets matter, sequences matter and all 52 cards are in use, whereas Haggis hits the first three of those four [and is way more interactive than Color Gin]. It uses a very unusual deck composition 2â10 in four suits, or five suites for 3p. But âđđ»ââïžâ was into it! She said it was easier, thereâs already enough to juggle, you donât need to worry about card rankings etc, this was great. She made a great case for Haggisâ deck design!
We used one of my fave decks from when I used to collect Bicycle decks. This deck is well worn by now.
But now on to the cons with the new reckoning!
She agreed that one point per card is better!
This is a strength of Seanâs game dev chops; he ruthlessly realizes when a rule doesnât really change the outcome of a game. Thereâs probably less than one game out of forty where the fiddly card point differences changed who won a game, probably less than one out of five where it changed who even won one round. So the new reckoning is way way better but it curiously shows traces of the gamesâ evolution since if it had been one point per card from the start the âcapturingâ wouldnâtâve evolved in this way or been phrased that way!
Then after I had said au revoir to her and returned home, who did I find waiting outside my door? My beloved D&D dorks! And D&D was really really fun today! We could play outside! It was the opposite of last time (where it was stomp-and-stare until we found a âTrilemmaâ adventure location); this time the random encounters were fun! I was using the rule that stuff on the NE Strielund table that weâve already seen a couple of times, instead I roll something off of Dungeonesqueâs tables (in the blue book).
So we got some flavorful and weird Strielund stuff followed by first a chimera! It was a scared and frozen chimera that didnât wanna fight but âMââs character TĂłfa hates the world so he started throwing javs! With disastrous results, everyone in the party spent their guardian acorns and barely escaped.
So that later in the afternoon same day they were more vulnerable and they ran into two nobles (high lords from Sisteborg [âLastfortâ]) and their five retainers. The nobles demanded 90% of the partyâs possessions. @Haloâs character Visan (heâs playing a Wildfire druid⊠that has taken every single chef feat in the book! + herbalism!) offered to cook up a meal, the nobles said âWell, thatâs a start! Youâre right that weâre quite hungry. We can divide the rest of your stuff after dinner.â (they had been treading in the snow) but Visan slipped them a sick dose of psilocybin âshrooms! Which was great because I then got to describe how they turned into wolves! (I did a detailed & gory description inspired by The Dreamers by Stephen King which I read the other day.) All seven of themâthe whole ânobles and retainersâ was just a disguise; rather than lycantrophized nobles they were really bandit werewolves who had stolen those outfits! They had the poisoned condition which made it easier to hide from them (which the party remembered) and defend from them (which they forgot). So everyone got infected by lycantropy which was moot in TĂłfaâs case because he died! But that was a good thing because âMâ seemed way more stoked for his new char! Heâs been not entirely positive to the #trippeludden campaign and even less for the campaigns Iâve been thinking of running (#trippeludden is kind of a stopgap or filler campaign as Iâm working on the next. Our #boatmode campaign isnât destroyed, itâs properly bookmarked & stashed in case I wanna return to it, which I donât anytime soon even though I can understand why the players would want to!) so weâre all hoping that his new character will turn things around!
What Iâve been doing with the Trippeludden setting is that they were pretty restricted in terms of character options at first but as they run into weird creatures, those creatures have been unlocked as character options. So at first they could only be humans but now they can be gnomes, Martoi remnants (using reskinned âShadar-Kaiâ stats for them), orcs (of the Aggal blight variety), half-demon (that is to say half-orc, half-demon, using âTieflingâ stats for them), and Seree automations (using reskinned âWarforgedâ stats for them). Players donât decrypt: Gurl jrer nyfb ernyyl ernyyl pybfr gb zrrgvat n bar-bss neznqvyyb perngher, juvpu, vs gurl qb, gurl pna cynl xva bs jvgu Gnfunâf havdhr yvarntr ehyrf. Gurl whfg qvqaâg tb vagb gung ebbz!.
Also we were using initiative cards! A little fiddly and slower compared to our normal home made deterministic initiative system but pretty fun and dynamic and easy on the brains for me as DM. I really had looked forward to using those cards ever since I got the Essentials Kit many years ago (they were still on their performated sheet, I separated them for the first time for last sessions but that session didnât have any fights). I made a couple of mistakes with the cards but âMâ help me sort that out. We could also use the cards to partially help keep track of which werewolves had been hidden from and which had not been.
Now, normally on a weeknight we donât play boardgames after, the way we might on a weekend (maybe as fillers before the game). But since we had a char death, we had time to play Stella! Itâs such a dumb game but I love it!!! It just makes me feel really really happy when I play it! And the best part is, âMâ loves it too! Things have been a liâl tense since his pet char died in #boatmode so itâs good that heâs been grooving on Stella. He thinks itâs way better than Dixit; although all three of us are in pretty much lockstep sync agreement about the pros and cons of Dixit and Stella. Halo asked if we could play good old Dixit too sometimes and we said yes. I think the 3P variant does work well for Dixit.
I finally managed to explain how the original scoring system works and they agreed how dumb and bad and fiddly and time-consuming and book-keeping it was. Our houserules are isomorphic but just work faster. âNormally even the âin the darkâ player would get two points for every match and one extra for every super spark, but they would then retroactively lose one of those points if they fall, and everyoneâs points would be tracked using these stars, and then between each round those scores would be transfered to a score sheet that comes with the game, I donât have it anymore, and then after the game the scores are summedâ. Itâs just so dumb!! Instead we use the bunnies and the score track from Odyssey and people get their scores immediately: one if youâre in the dark (which makes sense since the in-the-dark token only shows one star), two if youâre not, and one extra if you spark, and if the in-the-dark player doesnât fall, which so far hasnât happen to us, theyâd get bonus points equal to as many they marked (a.k.a. their position on the lantern track). So unlike upstream Stella you never have to âbacktrackâ and thereâs no âscore transferâ or âscore summingâ book-keeping steps.
Now, I believe that one reason they went with that cockamamie Rube Goldberg scoring procedure was to make the game feel more different from Dixit! And one other reason is that they just borked it in the dev process (I mean, the two-star/one-star sides on the lantern tokens are an echo of how scoring perhaps worked differently at an earlier stage in the process).
Now I mentioned the other day that I think I need new glasses already but it works OK when I pick up the cards. Stella is âkindâ in that way since it uses fewer cards per game. (Although Stella games are shorter than Dixit, we had time to play it twice in 40 minutes tonight.) And getting to look at these cards is such a delight and such a reason why I love these two games!
Iâve been frank in how much I canât stand some of Dixitâs expansions (âJourneyâ, âMirrorsâ, there are some other ones I also really donât like. Journeyâs images would be cool for a picture book but theyâre frustrating for Dixit because unlike Dixit, theyâre often just âone thingâ, each card is one story or one pun, whereas Dixitâs original three sets (âDixitâ, âQuestâ, and âOdysseyââJourney was called Dixit 3 at one point even though itâs the fourth set) I can come up with a dozen things for each card. But come to think of it, maybe Journeyâs cards would work well with the Stella ruleset actually! The Stella word card system affords us to look at every card in a new light! Although nothing can fix that Asterix-style card in âMirrorsâ! The Tintin rocket in Odyssey is bad enough!) but please let me then counterweigh that by saying how much I love the card sets of Odyssey, Stella and Revelations! BGG has all card images for all set I really do feel like Iâve picked my three fave ones (in that order: my old fave Odyssey now surpassed by Stella and by my new fave Revelations)!
After a long streak of expansions I donât like, the Stella cards actually are great! I know that the new rules and components were one big reason why I wanted to get the Stella box but those components can be replaced by scrap paper; as long as you have Dixit cards you can play with the Stella rules, just draw a five by three grid with six lines on a note paper or something. But I really really love this card set! Warm and soft and rich in imagery. Bringing back a lot of what I loved from Dixit which a lot of the other sets have lost. (âDixitâ and âQuestâ Iâd place as my fourth and fifth favorite; as I said the other day, Halo has them so Iâm not gonna get them since we can play with them with his set when we get nostalgic for them. Instead, Iâd be more likely to mix in divination cards from my Morgan-Greer or Lauraâs Liminal Spirits Oracle deck.)
My Dixit houserules and practices
Den högerextreme politikern Rasmus Paludan Ätalas för hets mot folkgrupp och förolÀmpning.
Fucking Àntligen! Gud det var uppochnervÀnda vÀrlden nÀr hela det socialdemokratiska etablissemangent (ihop med en instÀmmande opposition) höll honom om ryggen och hyllade honom som om han vore nÄn sorts fyrbÄk för den demokrati och öppenhet han gör allt för att förstöra.
Never mind. đ
Even though Iâve had an account on Kobold Pressâ webshop for ages they now require Cloudflareâs impassible captcha just to log in.
Your takes on Tales of the Valiant?
This is also why I might be a better tabletop game dev than a table top game designer. I can pick out the underlying probabilities and make a more sanded down, less fiddly, less cumbersome interface to those probabilities, and as those probabilities are more starkly presented they might be a more tunable knob for playtesters to pay attention to.
Two games of Radlands before D&D today and me and Halo won one each. He won the first one even though I had a massive card advantage engine and both Magnus Karv and Zeto Kahn active. So for the second game I copied his setup: Scud Launcher, Catapult and Juggernaut! And I won by a huge margin even though he had an active Muse! Catapult is just a really strong camp especially after a Juggernaut has wreaked havoc!
Then session four of #trippeludden for a session that was half awful / half awesome. First half was full of dudsâweather too extreme to travel, rumors that didnât pan out. Second half they actually made it to one of the Trilemma locations and that was fun fun fun! â„ïž They tried to destroy a lantern by a huge heap of robots!
Main beef the Project Xanadu guys had with the web was that they wanted paywalled iframes instead of blockquotes. I donât think I wouldâve been ever able to become happy in that grey and joyless world. Iâm grateful we went another way.
Iâm trying the one-notebook-per-campaign approach seriously this time, and that includes going back and tweaking and iterating the approach a bit since at first I donât succeed. If it ultimately fails then a new spin on my old index card system is more appealing to me than the disc-binding approach (maybe Iâll add a bunch of rubber bands or paper clips). Seems like itâd have most of the advantages of the disc-binding method.
For both the Worlds Without Number and the second edition Stars Without Number Kickstarters I went for the dtrpg hardcover pod coupons instead of the sewn offset printing. A bad decision. So all yâall who did go for the real books but have been second-guessing that decision, donât worry. I think you made the right call.
Biggest lesson so far is to get a notebook with squares, dots or hexes. Iâve already made tons of mistakes trying to draw the map on lined paper. I knew I had a bunch of great notebooks but I couldnât find them so the day the campaign started I ran to an office store and got one that ended up being only lined. All of my empty RPG notebooks are probably in the same place, Iâm just not sure where.
Not that it matters right now because Iâm already too costsunken into this particular notebook for #Trippeludden, and months ago I already got one specifically for Wind Wraith, I know where that one is. But I should find them, just in case other campaigns are on the horizon. (Strange Stars? Homebrew setting?)
Iâm putting a region map in the campaign bujo to help me organize things spatially, not just temporally, with a location index. That might seem like overkill for a filler minicampaign like this (Iâm thinking weâll go fewer than 25 sessions) but itâs important that I get systems right so I can apply them to a bigger campaign later.
Re: @siiky 2024-08-04 20:46 +0100
The first interviewee says that itâs possible to replace a maize monoculture (that produces 6T of maize yearly), into a maize, plus fruit trees, and other edible vegetables, producing 10T of maize yearly, plus the fruit and the other edible vegetables.
I believe it. One of the reasons itâs not being done is because it requires more labor, which is expensive since monoculture automation is running off of undercosted energy. (While simultaneously politicians are promoting iffy things like coal mining or car manufacture in the name of âjobsâ.)
Ebooks werenât enough?! You have to clone them now!?
Oh, wow, are typing indicators still a thing? I havenât used them in many years. I agree that they do more harm than good.
Wikipedia on how avalanche rescue dogs learned:
The dogs never received any special training from the monks. Instead, younger dogs would learn how to perform search and rescue operations from older dogs.
Dogs Learn by Modeling the Behavior of Other Dogs | Psychology Today
The name generator in Ghosts of Saltmarsh is so great and has served us for such a long time (d20 adjectives + d20 nouns for nicknamey names like âGloomy Curâ) but for a new setting I wanted a new vibe.
I tried the name generator in Dungeonesque but it has given out too many STDs or racial slurs, I donât trust it anymore.
We were playing indoors so I had some story cubes at hand to tide me over mid session but I donât wanna add too much to my kit, so Scrabble tiles is also out. Iâm experimenting with just the mnemonic major system, rolling a bunch of d10s. I was practicing alone (since itâs a difficult system to use) and I first tried four dice, but that wasnât so good (slow, and generated samey names); two dice worked better. Two consonants + imagination for the rest. If I use d20s, looking at the last digits (so that 14 and 4 are both ârâ), I could also use the first digit (1 or 0) for something, maybe something setting specific like like one of three different suffixes (like for town names, 0 0: no suffix, 1 1: -by, 1 0: -re/-te/-pe, 0 1: -ing) or character traits like gender. I dunno. That part, I havenât implemented yet. Maybe this entire track is a dead end.
Bad arguments for a good cause will end up hurting that cause.
Me and âMâ played a game of Button Men as a filler before D&D. I won, but it was pure luck because we were playing Core characters from the Fight City set and every move I made, my opponent could also predict. I just lucked out in how an early d20 reroll landed untouchably high and then I could coast on it to the end.
Then D&D, session three of Trippeludden! There is some amount of on-the-fly rolling (âtier twoâ in blorb parlance) as they visit small hamlets and villages on the map that get a random name, random inn⊠Iâm working off of the tables in Dungeonesque which in this case ended up pretty flavorful with a gang of mercenaries who joined the party as they went ghost busting Martoi on the heath. With disastrous resultsâthey made a big payoff rooting out a trio of bog strangles, but then once they found their target, a Martoi wraith escorted by five knights on horseback, they were routed. Four of the eight mercenaries died and they only took one of the knights with them before the party fled.
The flipside to working off of tier two and tier three is having to write everything down in a way I can remember and find again. Iâve been trying BuJo style (and this campaign is also a test run for that method) and Iâm already getting pretty overwhelmed. Iâve used index cards in the past, also with mediocre results but maybe theyâre still better than this? The BuJo style worked for Starforged but there I was taking my time and being able to write everything down slowly and carefully and update the index. Maybe whatâs needed here is to take better notes after each session? âReverse prepâ; go through notes, do tasks for next session, index everything all while this session is fresh in my mind.
During dinner Turncoats which keeps being fresh. âEvery game is differentâ, I keep singing that refrain about this game but it keeps being true. I got my first win in a long time, too. I was lucky and could pretty much stick to negotiating, almost.
Then Stella! So fun! I had to pick up some of the cards and look more closely at them. A completely uneven game where âMâ was in the high thirties, Halo in the mid twenties, and I had less than 15. The game felt like it was over too quickly, I can see how one would wanna play it twice! itâs just four rounds. Itâs such a dumb game devoid of any skill or merit. Like, it doesnât âbuild characterâ the way other games do (like Dixit or even something like chess). Iâm realizing as Iâm writing this that itâs just basically âcaptcha the gameâ. âClick on the squares that contain birthdays.â But the flip side is that itâs âlooking at art, the gameâ. It makes art pieces ludemic.
Then we got to play one of Jamesâ card games, Showboat. I loved it even though I was getting absolutely clobbered. It was more that I loved playing with the Heckadeck than the game itself, maybe, because even though the game is very fun (itâs got everything I love: simultaneous selection, planning, tableau building, a solitaire feel while being super interactive, uses multiple aspects of the cards, balancing different factorsâit has a bit of a Flipull feel, an old NES/GB game that I adore), itâs maybe not the most balanced? Iâm not sure yet. But what kept happening is that the person who retired second-to-last got the most point and who retired first got middle and who retired last (or rather, couldnât retire since the game ends when the second-to-last player retires) got least. No matter what else was happening in the round. Although I guess that one can think âOK, sure, then thatâs the gameâtry to set up so that you donât have to retire first. And then the actual score is extra margins that can start mattering once everyone gets good at that first partâ. The turn order isnât set since itâs sim-sel so maybe the game does have legs.
We were using ace through seven and then arrows and talismans instead of using kings and queens, since I thought itâd be easier to mentally divorce the arrows and talismans (which we collectively started calling âsupercardsâ or âsupriesâ) from the number sequence, and I thought that was right. Itâs easier to know that you can play a number after a âsuprieâ than after a king or queen.
Not that the traditional style of the Island deck isnât awesome, it is! But the Heckadeckâs flavor is to me even more awesome in how there can be a traditional-looking two of diamonds right next to a weird arrow or talisman and a half-way-between-weird-and-traditional three of clouds. The unranked oddball nature of the arrows and talismans is something that just pleases me somehow!?
While I was in card play heaven I got the vibe that the other players were getting bored to tears. I love trad-style card games like Parade, Ninety-Nine, Color Gin, Haggis, and they donât as much. Yeah, yeah, Sail, but those cards do have powers, sort of.
âMâ ended up winning Showboat and then left, and me and Halo played two games of Radlands which he won easily (which, goodâwe hadnât played in a few weaks and we ended on me having a winning str). We were both tired and making mistakes, and he could wrangle that chaos better I guess! Then one game of Star Wars where I exiled out my buying power early on leaving me with only heavy hitters, but it wasnât enough for the home stretch so he won. I was four guns short or I wouldâve wonâI needed to win that turn because he had a fistfull of lead. I had a Barge but Dengar was in the deck or that woulda done it. My Falcon had whiffed the turn before, too, so that was all she wrote!
Designing Traditional Card Decks â Crab Fragment Labs
Another pro of Stella is that you can more easily mix in non-Dixit cards from Tarot (borderless decks like Morgan-Greer work especially well), Mysterium, When I Dream etc or even Codenames cards or Magic cards. You still want a random spread but there are no hands of cards so card backs and sizes donât matter as much.
Halo realized all of this after one play since heâs a genius:
Lost Cities strategy ... a slightly different view | Lost Cities
Boardgames with Halo! First we played Lost Cities, I lost the full set-of-three (after winning the demonstration game, which didnât count), then we were both a liâl startled after one of my newly hanged paintings fell to the floor and the frameâs glass shattered.
(Iâm salty since I spent so much time hanging up paintings and after one fell I got paranoid that the other âcommand stripsâ would similarly give out so a whole day of work was undone. Also I need to take that frame to a frame shop to get the glass repaired.)
I ended up winning three games of Mindbug, two Hive, and one Star Wars. The Star Wars game ended up way longer than any of the times Iâve played it before as we both bunkered up with plenty of capital ships! We were dealing with some other health issues so the games werenât the most important thing. Just fun times hanging out!
It was a mistake trying to get back into Dixit now that I can barely see the cards. Normal playing cards, even text work better because theyâre so semantic but I have a hard time making out the details on these cards. I did a jigsaw the other day and I ended up having to do it more by feel and shape than by the print. My eyesight issues (and headaches) went away when I got new glasses around one year ago but now both those issues have returned with a vengeance. I canât afford new glasses already (because I spent so much on games and comics).
In her review, she talks about these solutions:
Table of Solutions | Project Drawdown
Daybreak: A climate scientistâs first impressions and review:
Though the game is clearly well-researched, I felt as though the impacts of the climate crisis were somewhat understated. The heart of my gripe is that all of the possible bad things presented in Daybreak are, in reality, happening simultaneously and in a deeply connected fashion.
I am so opepp for D&D 5.2, the weapon mastery stuff seems fiddly and so does the new origin feats. There are more conditions also. It all just seems more difficult on top of how Iâm being overwhelmed by all the changes.
My friends have correctly reminded me that when Tashaâs Cauldron came out, I was clamoring for an updated PHB instead that folded in all this new stuff because it was frustrating that TCE was such a âpatchâ so I guess Iâm being hoisted on my own proverbial.
Magic was intended to be hugely varied with lots of different avenues for play, which changed over time. It was not meant to be simply creatures forever.
There has been conflict between this view and reality for a long time â cards that destroyed mana, or forced discard, were hated but I wanted them to be part of the environment â I wanted cards people loved and hated rather than cards people thought were âall rightâ.
This doesnât necessarily play well with a constructed tournament environment. You can however, often get the great variation I like with draft or cube environments.
Jag sĂ„g en stor reklamtavla för Försvarsmakten hĂ€romdan dĂ€r det stod âVi slĂ„ss till sista henâ följt av nĂ„n liten textblurb som bedyrade detta on en bild av soldater med regnbĂ„gsflaggor och trots att jag Ă€r mot krig och i vanliga brukas lyckas vara ganska cynisk till deras reklam blev jag först vĂ€ldigt rörd men sen tĂ€nkte jag âfint, kan ni dĂ„ grundlagsskydda detta? Pluralismen hotas ju Ă€ven inifrĂ„n. Vi har riksdagsledamöter som vill kvĂ€va den. Vi har en militĂ€rallians med ett land dĂ€r den ledande kandidaten till presidentposten vill utplĂ„na den. Det Ă€r fint att ni vill skydda regnbĂ„gsflaggan men det kĂ€nns just nu som att den snarare Ă€r en kappa utsatt för vĂ€ldigt ombytliga vindar. If you like it then you shouldâve put a ring on itâ. SĂ„ tĂ€nkte jag.
Sen efter ett par dar mindes jag dessutom hur ex vis IDF anvÀnder sig av regnbÄgsflaggan för att motivera sina brutala dÄd (trots att gayÀktenskap Àr olagliga dÀr vilket 56% av befolkningen tycker Àr rÀtt). Ibland Àr det svÄrt att se att stöveln Àr pÄ den egna foten.
D&D first session after a two week break, and itâs session two of our Trippeludden campaign! Halo found an item that there was only one percent chance of him being able to wield it (a Circlet of Deel) but the dice were with him! We did roll that lucky â01â! After they reached an inn in the New Quarter of Sisteborg (âLastfortâ), and they leveled up their chars, we played Stella! I finally got to play it!â„ïž
It was fun and easy. I donât feel like comparing it to Dixitâitâs great that they have the same card backs. Dixit is a sensitive, creative, expressive game whereas Stella is just easy laidback mindless fun!
Also earlier today I bought too many gamesâMind Bug, Fiasco the card game, and Heckadeck. Thatâs on top of within the last week getting Deathmatch Island, Stella, Dixit Revelations (which hasnât even arrived yet) and Star Wars!
I kinda wanna throw all games away except for the Heckadeck so itâs dumb (and being a climate-clod) that I added some more to the collection.
We got to try Mindbug as a filler before D&D. I won but then we checked a rule and I retroactively lost insteadâapparently you canât mindbug the âPlay from discardâ ability the way I did for the win. Iâve wanted this game for years but now Iâm not sure about it. The theme, goofy SF, is more fun than Radlandâs grim âshooting and burning human beingsâ theme, but what I really want is to put a Forgetful Fish deck together.
Synd att SVT visar den korta versionen av Alien 3, jag har alltid velat se 144-minutersâversionen, âAssembly Cutâ. Jag vet nu inte vilken som Ă€r den bĂ€sta av dom tvĂ„ versionerna men det Ă€r ju just dĂ€rför jag vill se den andra. Den hĂ€r hade jag pĂ„ VHS pĂ„ nittiotalet.
When the people are being beaten by a stick, they would be way happier if they could be the ones wielding the stick and Boss Smiley were the one taking the lumps.
Weâve been talking about the Swedish chef lately and whether or not itâs accurate and Iâve been in the âthe unaccuracy is overstated, itâs not that far offâ camp but something just reminded me that whatâs really an accurate (but comically exaggerated) depiction is in Metalocalypse. English with all those extra âsâ that we Swedes donât really have an intuition for where theyâre supposeds to go so we guesses a little. Funnily enough it was less than a hundred years ago that kind of verb agreement (âI sing, she singsâ) disappeared from modern Swedish, but thatâs still far back enough that we all grew up without it.
Ja den var bra och sen sÄg jag Venuseffekten. Nu vet jag minst tre lebbromantikfilmer som slutar med en Robyn-lÄt.
The two Dungeon Club comic book volumes (I donât know whether of not there are more planned) were really good.
They have two life lessons, one that the main purpose of D&D is to be a good way to take your first steps into exploring queer relationships and identities in a way you can later implement in real life (Iâm sure thatâs not gonna backfire in todayâs fashy climateâor maybe thatâs what they want, since âThe controversy over the game led to a major boost in sales, from $2.3 million in 1979 to $8.7 million by the end of 1980â) and the other that itâs great to use illusionism, to cheat so your playerâs characters survive, to make up stuff unblorbily.
So one good life lesson and one bad đ€·đ»ââïž
The art and characters are great. Fun liâl books that I woulda loved as a younger teen.
En âtydligare talâ-instĂ€llning har dom ocksĂ„. Bra för jag har tillrĂ€ckligt svĂ„rt att förstĂ„ franska som det Ă€r!
Hade glömt att det Ă€r Pride pĂ„ SVT Play! Enda gĂ„ngen om Ă„ret som den appen Ă€r bra. Ser fram mot att kolla pĂ„ alla homofilmer för det Ă€r ju den bĂ€sta filmgenren. Och tvĂ„ nya saker verkar ha kommit till appen sen förra Ă„ret: uppspelningshastighet och att det gĂ„r att slĂ„ av texten. Jag lĂ€ste nyligen om âDansa pĂ„ min gravâ och det finns en fransk filmatisering av den, ĂtĂ© 85 som jag ska försöka se.
Oklart om jag orkar se klart den för jag Àr lite för stirrig för att kolla pÄ filmer just nu egentligen.
Hereâs another Scribe Rip post that has a liâl more info:
My Ultimate Learning Tool: A Mysterious Wooden Box?
I donât wanna go overboard since I am old and I donât like learning things. But I need to learn all the conditions and other rules in the new D&D version.
But thatâs what so different about the B-series view of time!
Itâs not the butterfly time travel of Ray Bradbury, itâs the kind of time traveler where the time travelers were always there. That trope is less often seen these days but when a pair of time travelers meet themselves and you see the same conversation from two perspectives, usually first from the perspective of the âyoungerâ characters but the you see it again when the âolderâ version of them explains it. The sort of time travel thatâs so necessary that if they didnât time travel thereâd be a paradox.
Itâs not just butterflies and important conversations or bullets, although thatâs of course the most fun, itâs every single liâl atom or electron in the atmosphere.
But in the game since itâs derived from Microscope itâs like first we the audience find out that thereâs a dead prez and then we see how the time travellers are trying to stop it and then later how those same time travellers stopped their own selves from stopping it. Every scene is âimmutableâ but since weâre creating and telling the scenes âout of orderâ as weâre time travelling around, itâs still fun. Itâs like if normal Microscope was history tourism, this version would have more active participation. Sorta like Forrest Gump with a time machine đđ»ââïž
Speaking of those liâl keyring cardboard flashcards, Iâm looking for info on how to best use them effectively. For example if Iâm using spaced repetition it seems difficult to sort them if Iâm studying on a bus or something. If Iâm at a table, then sureâI can unclasp the ring and physically rearrange the cards according to the spaced repetition schedule, and I can shuffle the to get them in a different order (or is that bad? Should they stay in the same order?).
Maybe if I have a way to mark the cards I can study on-the-go and then sort them out when Iâm in a calmer place.
One idea would be to use light pencil marks:
If I get card right, I add a faint line, if I fail the card, I faintly strike out all the lines (or just donât add a line if it doesnât have any lines). When I get to a calm place I unclip the cards, sort the cards by amount of lines, erase the ones where the lines are stricken, and use the line count and a calendar planner to pick out cards for the next study session, shuffle them and reclip. The ring needs only one divider card: between the cards that are due next study session and those who arenât.
Thatâs the best Iâve come up with so far. It still feels a liâl too fiddly, having to look at all the cards again just to look for the tally marks.
I knew about Leitnerâs system, but I was using scraps of paper (later apps). A friend of mine gave me one of those keychains, and I later found them at Muji, but I never figured out how to use them effectively. Twenty years later I saw some students in a Japanese comic using them but the comic didnât show how they were using them, leaving me still wondering.
Hereâs a post on Scribe Rip that has images from Leitnerâs original book:
Learning a lot of data efficiently: the Leitner system
Maybe unclipping them and just doing it at a table (just like card solitaire) is the best after all. Weâre so spoiled by handheld everything these days that it does feel weird to do anything at a table. I was into jigsaws for a brief while when I first moved to this place. Maybe that was a good idea. There only so many hours in a day and looking at the keyring paper scraps while traveling seemed like a comforting and cozy idea, but maybe itâs better to use that for silent reflection or reading.
With Wanderer, instead of using the motif table, Iâm thinking of using story cubes or tarot cards or oracle cards or even Codenames or Dixit cards. Or scrap paper or even those liâl Japanese cardboard flashcard keyrings. Or writing the motifs in the margin of all the pages (writing some of them several times) and flipping to a random page.
Iâm hoping the rest of the gameâthe themes, the adventures, the episodes, the inspiration structure, the questionsâwill really fly without the grid-based lookup.
Re: @siiky 2024-07-24 10:55 +0100
This is the gorilla book? I remember liking it a lot.
Iâve been thinking of a time travel game based on Microscope where the universe works according to the b-series or the block universe model, i.e. thereâs no branching and the future is immutable; like in Yn WrgĂ©r naq va Gjryir Zbaxrlf (movie names in rot13 to prevent spoilers). So player characters can go back in time and do things there and have an impact on things there⊠as long as the future remains the same. It reconciles the subjective experience of free will with the antecendent/precedent tenseless B-series âblock universeâ of Einstein and others. Itâs still interesting just like Microscope is because we the players, the audience, donât know exactly how things went down since weâre experiencing the moments out of order. + we can get to be in a cool time travel setting. In this universe there can still be things in the present and future that are the way they are because of time travel actionsâlike the well known paradox of a time traveler going to the future, finding a book heâs written, returning to an earlier time and copying down that text and publishing it. That could happen in this game!
Once more into the Star Wars fray with Simon, winning one each for an overall record of 3â1. The one time they didnât get a Vader I managed to win. I had hidden operations going out of a Yavin IV for longer than usual letting me grind away base after base no matter how many capital ships they had.
Then we found a secret rule that we had missed: apparently the Rebels start with the force on their side!
Itâs a blatant stylistic choice on the part of Steven Zaillian, who wanted the limited series to feel foreboding and suspenseful, as opposed to the sunny and colorful aura that its idyllic setting can sometimes invoke.
But thatâs how the book feels. Like a humid mediterranean summer. Itâs daylight horror.
Why do I have to live in the grim darkness of the far future where there is neither plein nor soleil?
New Netflix Thriller Sets Unwanted Viewership Record Despite 86% Rotten Tomatoes Score