I like settings where the players can play parties from all kinds of factions. I’ve seen 'em roll up members of the same cult their last party faught against etc. This isn’t a complete answer but just one more li’l contribution to the thought palette around this.

What I did was use tokens for inspiration and saying “you can have as many as you want and then cash in all of them to get advantage”. That worked well.

I think this is spot on and I overall dislike the game. One thing that I am a li’l bit interested in is the hitpoints system which seems like a good mix of Fate stressboxes with D&D damage.

The amount of incoming damage can go to certain thresholds and that has different consequences (both symbol-layer mechanical and diegetic). I think that’s neat and I’m glad to see that experiment carried further.

How much gold is in that hoard?

Wow, I had missed that. That’s not good. I mean, CR gets criticized for their “shopping episodes” (even though my own group is even more extreme in that regard) so maybe that’s to address that? Diaspora, for example, just has a “recourses” roll instead of detailed accounting of space credits, and it seems to work well in the context of that game.

How far does that bandit run?

I don’t think that’s a fair characterization; range bands is trued and tested tech. Cartesian spatialization is overkill for most game groups.

@Aielman15@lemmy.world @Shyfer@ttrpg.network

It’s awesome!

Now that the concept has caught on so widely, I’ve often wished @pluralistic@mamot.fr had gone with a less scatological term. But maybe that is part of the reason it caught on 🤷🏻‍♀️

@technology@lemmy.world

That’s rich when the Google Play store is full of malware while F-Droid is full of gems.

@technology

Wouldn’t be the first Diablo TTRPG.

@rpg@ttrpg.network

Aber das gilt nur für stabile Paare und Polyküle. 🤷🏻‍♀️

Yes, I got that, that wasn’t the weird part. The weird part is why the matcher is searching char-by-char backwards in the first place as opposed to skipping match-by-match.

I’ll use “\b\w+”, that seems to work well. \W\w+ was not good since it caught the spaces.

(Thanks for your patient repeated replies, BTW, I don’t mean to come across as ungrateful.)

@0v0 @emacs

But what’s so weird is that replace-regexp forwards with \w+ replaces all words, while replace-regexp backwards with \w+ replaces the characters individually.

@0v0 @emacs

So it’s literally looking at the regexp backwards and forwards at the same time 😵‍💫

@0v0

I use Emacs for two reasons. Sunk cost, of course, but also the text input-methods for other natural languages. That’s like the main killer feature why I don’t even look at other editors. Anytime I try to type some dïäcrïtïcs into acme or whatever it’s a nightmare of compose sequences or deadkeys.

Also paredit is pretty sick.

@nyl @emacs

Sounds super fun! However, the disparity is mostly out of combat*, and this doesn't fix that.

That said, in our 5e #boatmode game the cleric is vastly outclassing the fighter even inside of combat with like a 2½ times higher DPR. (Well, we have two clerics, two fighters, and an assassin, but I meant best cleric & best fighter.)

@macmacfire @dndmemes

If they can do it within the wording of the spell "In an open container" or "fall as rain" then yes. For example if the foe is stuck inside a container, then it's gonna be welcome to Drown Town.

We don't use rule of cool at all generally but diegetic positioning is delicious.

One of the things I do is that I’m also so centered on the map. I love it when light is indicated on the map (currently in The Halls of Arden Vul and it isn’t 💔).

The single biggest influence on how I describe a room is when I was little and me and grandma would go down into the cellar under her workplace where she kept a case of soda by the door and we never ventured very far in there but the light didn’t reach the other sides of the room is how big and dark it was.

Ideally, and I am always trying to get closer to this ideal, I wanna:

• be succint, it’s better to get into a dialog with the players sooner rather than later
• describe the light
• the room’s dimensions, to the extent that their light can reach (width by depth, so I’ll say “30 by 20 room”, the players know that it’s wide)
• exits—using words like right, left, close, far, opposite rather than north or west. “On the furthest part on the right wall there’s a door, and there are three doors along the opposite wall”. We play in Swedish which also has different words for the long edge vs short edge of a room which helps (“långsidan” vs “kortsidan”).
• whether there’s furniture & stuff, without revealing any hidden treasures
• whether something living and moving is in here and what that looks like!

That last point I used to go back & forth on whether it should be last or first. Often times they’ve negotiated with it to even enter through the door, or they’ve listened through the door or something, but other than that I like giving a brief rundown on the hard landscape in there before getting into the squishy and shambling parts of it. Not every drawer of every chest, just—it’s a brightly illuminated pentagonal room, 50 feet across, with a big hole in the ceiling and this thing is crawling around in here along the walls, looks like a blue slithery serpent but it has six opposite pairs of legs and claws running down the length of it’s body and it says something in an unenlightened language.

Anyway, main point I wanted to make is that if I have my own experience of what I need to get a cross for a room, that also makes boxed texts less useful. I’ll look at the boxed text because oftentimes important info is only in there, but I’ve also looked at the map and my awareness of the party’s light. Stuart gives the advice that:

Never assume sight. Assume dark. A simple way to do this is to imagine the darkness as alive. Instead of being a simple black absence regard it as a kind of active liquid. It does not meekly disappear on the lighting of a candle. It follows the players like a stalking predator.

The darkness is following them, surrounding them. It infiltrates slender claws behind shadowed columns, reaching towards the lantern, hungering to snuff it out. It backs away reluctantly before the light, it follows carefully and relentlessly, creeping as close as it can. It leaves chew marks in the corners of your sight.

This mindset is great. It makes me think of the player’s torches and frotzes as if it was poison, pushing me away temporarily, of course I keep track of it, turn by turn until it can no longer hold me at bay and my illimitable dominion will engulf them.

So when the box set is a second tier level of importance compared to the information I get from the map and their torches, I’m less intimidated by it. But I’ve had a mellowing of heart in one regard:

Since I think boxed text is bad compared to a more easy-to-run item-by-item format (like the excellent “Date of Expiration” uses), I’d get stubborn and refuse to even borrow phrases from it. That’s an obstinacy I no longer have. And to no-one’s benefit. Instead, I’ll now lift phrases straight up even though they’re not mine. “Towering glass windows”, “light sifts through”, I don’t speak like that but it’ll do. Saves mental energy, lets some of the module’s own flavor shine through. I’m not setting out to read the entire box, I’m still sticking to my own priorites of what I need to convey for our groups particular needs and habits, but I’m not disallowing myself to read from the box (or, in my case, translate from the box since we’re often using English-language modules).

(I’ll also paste this post into my blog 💁🏻‍♀️ that’s how I write so much on there, I just get fired up in threads like these and then find myself having ranted and raved and just go paste it in there. ♥)

Thanks to Mike for so honestly and generously sharing his process & allowing himself to flub in front of us. And showing us the app that doesn’t look very good—other vloggers who have been sponsored by them haven’t really shown us how it works. Yeah, seems like it’d create more problems than it’d solve, for me.)

Correct, and that’s exactly why it does not work for group things.

If fedi is like email, and it is similar in many ways, a Lemmy community is like a mailing list. People can send to the list and the threads on the list from different servers. And there can be separate communities about the same topics just as there can be separate mailing lists about the same topics.

But hashtags in email wouldn’t work as a replacement for mailing lists. Hashtags in email can still have some use, within a mailing list or in a specific conversation, but it’s something very different from a mailing list.

On kbin, if people think that “Oh, here is where the posts about cycling will show up” but the magazine is just based around a hashtag, there’s no way for people to participate deliberately. It’s misleading.

Using hashtags as if it were tumblr or twitter is anti-decentralization and drives people into using the biggest instances only. Groups a la gup.pe and Lemmy and Friendica is a solution to that. It’s only a partially decentralized solution, since each group itself is centrally hosted (exactly like mailing lists were), but it’s at least a solution, whereas misusing hashtags that way isn’t.

@ada @meteorswarm

Yes, it works poorly everywhere on the fediverse, is exactly what I’m saying.

Hashtags on Fedi can be good for organizing stuff within a single account or instance, or it can be used for other things like trigger specific bots, but they can not (as you know) work like an IRC channel like they did on Twitter.

That’s why I’m not happy about kbin elevating that misfeature and legitimizing its misuse as if it were as robust as the other federated group protocols are. It’s not the end of the world or the worst feature on the planet, I’m not that worked up about it, it’s just not good, is all.

(Again, not blaming you for that ofc, you only reported on it, and that was awesome, thanks.)

@ada @meteorswarm

Yes, keyword search works poorly on fedi is what I’m saying 💁🏻‍♀️
Using that as a basis for group talk can end up being super unreliable in some situations.

@ada @meteorswarm

I believe it is a mistake selecting that particular instance for those communities.

The risk isn’t just that they shut it down, there’s a much worse thing that could happen: pinpoint elision (or even editing) of reporting on the genocide.

(Not shooting the messenger, just as info for other readers.)
Using hashtags for this seems like an idea with some severe limitations because it can only see the posts it has happened to come across otherwise. (Unlike the other group formats.)

@ada @meteorswarm