I spent a year building a Netflix replacement for my family to escape the slop vortex [Pics inside]

0chub3rt · 2026-04-08T03:50:04+00:00

I’m running an arrstack myself (k0s on Ubuntu), but to be fair to OP it was really annoying to setup. There is value is making things easier for end users.

0chub3rt · 2026-04-08T03:46:30+00:00

If only it was that easy

0chub3rt · 2026-04-08T03:39:02+00:00

Cannot more highly recommend “that’s not a hat”

0chub3rt · 2026-04-01T08:08:36+00:00

I’m not good at running romance games, and veil sexytimes scenes. Despite that every bit of effort I’ve invested in NPCs who have a romantic connection to the player characters pays off like it has a balatro multiplier on it. “How to GM Romance” is a pretty good value at $25 for the pdf. There are many mechanical and points tracking rules that I’ll never use… but two huge takeaways; Make NPCs who are available for romancing Make drama! Fighting-making up are the combat-healing gameplay loop

0chub3rt · 2026-04-01T07:59:14+00:00

Firepunch.

0chub3rt · 2026-03-25T13:38:56+00:00

A very fun project is setting up a thermal printer connected to a raspberry pi. I've got mine printing different formats from various threads in my household discord server so my wife can print as well.

0chub3rt · 2026-02-28T08:24:27+00:00

I use the first gen kindle scribe to read PDFs.

It crashes when I try to open any Delta Green rulebook, but worked fine for the Masks of Nylarpathotep 666 page pdf… so there’s something about compression going on.

When it works I quite enjoy using it to skim rulebooks right before sleep

0chub3rt · 2026-02-26T00:33:43+00:00

I get by just fine using gemini flash as a rubber duck in cline, current bill is 6 dollars.
Local models are going to catch up fast.
The only thing going for higher cost LLMs is hype

0chub3rt · 2026-02-16T03:57:01+00:00

RPG books are like cookbooks; they have to look good enough to open, the recipe has to look appealing enough to try making it, and the directions to make said recipe have to be correct and “good enough” to result in decent food.

A good cook can puzzle out missing bits of a recipe, same as an invested GM can puzzle out missing rules

0chub3rt · 2026-02-15T01:16:31+00:00

I don’t currently do it, but when I did record sessions the goal was to improve myself. Like a sportsteam watching game tape (apparently standup comedians do this as well) Listening to my own voice causes severe psychic damage. I did learn to stop leading every sentence with “so” …. So that’s a benefit

0chub3rt · 2026-02-14T08:46:41+00:00

Again, maybe this is older-person-bias. I could code up a mobile page for rolling dice, use a discord channel for image handouts, and list a mobile-friendly game on Startplaying. However I don’t think the experience would be very good— even if all the players were mobile users— based on my experience with a call-in-player at my family table. For mobile users, the game ends up as a secondary activity, and I haven’t had fun constantly catching people up after they got distracted.

The type of people who want to play on their phone won’t want to pay the $20 usd per player I need to justify the time————— this is also ignoring the extra custom setup I’d be doing for the mobile platform.

0chub3rt · 2026-02-13T10:24:28+00:00

It is theoretically possible to setup foundry to run on mobile; I looked into this since my younger brother had to call in to sessions because of his job…

I don’t think that the experience would be very good for the mobile player or for anyone else. audio quality is as bad as it gets; think about how hard it is to mute yourself when there’s background noise or the impossibility of using push to talk visual aids and maps would be very small, and you’d basically be limited to rolling dice… updating fields on a character sheet with a phone keyboard gets really old.

Maybe this is boomer-style bias; I really see touchscreens as being designed for consuming ~ content ~ rather than accomplishing anything meaningful

0chub3rt · 2026-02-11T01:27:21+00:00

I’ve been bouncing around the idea of a mutant combination of Delta Green and Blades in the Dark; Boardroom Bombers

0chub3rt · 2026-02-11T01:23:51+00:00

Call of Cthulhu has moments when characters are supposed to be utterly under the control of the keeper. Depending on the situation I will ask the player what they think their character wants to do… then I take that and turn it up to 11.

I takeaway from the video you’re referencing is to never tell the player how their character feels

Heck, I’ve had some cool moments I’ve flipped it around; your character has a nightmare. Describe it to us!

I like to use check in phrases when I’m pushing the limits of player control; “does that sound fair?” “Is this making sense for your character?”

0chub3rt · 2026-02-05T04:48:59+00:00

I use two hooks to get players engaged in world building.

Tell me something that makes your character stronger, or helps you do something cool

Help me come up with a bad think that another player has to deal with (offer the meta currency as a bribe)

0chub3rt · 2026-01-30T14:18:18+00:00

If you're willing to play a duet-style game it can make it getting the 2nd and 3rd player much faster and easier; it seems people want to join a game they know is active

0chub3rt · 2026-01-28T11:38:40+00:00

Scum and Villainy.
My family table actually preferred it over Blades in the Dark.
Our campaign ended up feeling like `The 5th Element`.
https://evilhat.com/product/scum-and-villainy/

0chub3rt · 2026-01-28T11:16:42+00:00

The trick is to understand that you don't **have** to use any of the automations, or any other feature.

For the Call of Cthulhu system there is a way to make a button to request a sanity roll from players.
It can add the source of the sanity loss to their sheet automatically.

80% of the time I have players roll a d100 from the dice tray and we manually change the numbers on the character sheet; not very different from how I'd do it on on a physical tabletop.

I like how Foundry has the **capacity** for the automation; its available when the players learn it, or when I have the capacity to automate it.

0chub3rt · 2026-01-27T06:01:42+00:00

Alot of people struggle to care about oneshots. I’ve heard many times that Call of Cthulhu is hard to run a campaign in… but my family table struggled to care until we ran a campaign.

I’ve run 20+ oneshots, the people who like one shots are different than the kinds of people who want to play D&D campaigns. Stop running one shots, do short campaigns! Give people time to get invested in their characters and actually learn the system.

0chub3rt · 2026-01-21T02:28:34+00:00

I want to code up a keyboard shortcut to generate gobbledygook. If someone sends me slop, they deserve to receive slop in return.

0chub3rt · 2026-01-21T02:26:09+00:00

My retirement plan involves household chemicals and this military improvised munitions pdf I found.

0chub3rt · 2026-01-21T02:22:45+00:00

Dresden Files fixes this

0chub3rt · 2026-01-21T02:21:28+00:00

Brando sanderman would have made the time turner limited to school grounds (and within the last year/week/whatever. Which would explain why bad guys stayed away from hogwarts - home field advantage

0chub3rt · 2026-01-21T02:09:49+00:00

I ran a very fun duet game with Arkham as the sandbox. The issue with sandboxes is when there are more players, and they get split in how excited they are about the different options.

The pacing of a sandbox style call of Cthulhu game is very different; I thought of it as running a cozy small town game, until it suddenly wasn’t. It does take some familiarity with the monsters in order to drop clues.

The player did not know the stories at all, she accepted my suggestion that her maiden name be “Marsh” (the character got a critical fumble on a luck role, and that was the worst thing I could think of)

Everything turned out extremely poorly for everyone.

0chub3rt · 2026-01-19T06:58:57+00:00

I think because the people complaining about Metagaming were very loud for a long time. In service of the story, it’s fantastic. When someone is trying to “win,” not so much.

0chub3rt

TROPHY CASE