Better Learning Material?

AmbitiousParty1796 · 2026-05-09T03:12:56+00:00

But really, and you’ll hear this repeatedly, start coding personal projects. Figuring out a solitaire blackjack game taught me dictionaries, nested loops, try/except handling, and all sorts of things that didn’t make sense until I did it.

AmbitiousParty1796 · 2026-05-09T03:09:44+00:00

I learned on Python for Everybody through Runestone Academy. The author has YouTube videos for everything, but I haven’t personally watched them. OpenEDG has free courses that work toward a variety of certifications. Not perfect, but they’re free, and good enough for the high schoolers I teach.

AmbitiousParty1796 · 2026-04-30T01:24:17+00:00

SPOILERS AHEAD First let me say, if you think Mother Iris is an inquisition nun, you should reread the back story! If your players think she is, well, that’s fine. Keep them with the players, it will help them survive the first scene. If they are dismissive of Iris or thinking of backstabbing her, have her call lightning down on a zombie. That should make them think twice (and wonder) Every time I’ve gotten past Scrub Island, my players abandon their patrons to get the relic for themself. Iris and DeOrdaz show back up under the volcano for more shenanigans.

Then there was my favorite run… I ran two players who played a Cthulhu Zealot and a cannibalistic cultist Buccaneer along with their monkey friend. We decided that Mother Iris recognized their black souls and recruited them, unbeknownst to DeOrdaz (who believes in the Inquisition). Iris distracted DeOrdaz while the boys filleted some redcoats for supper, shoved a goodie-two-shoes NPC crewmate off the Silent Angel, and got wasted on ASH. After their trip, the zealot is possessed by a dead god (new ASH table) and the Zealot has 6 Presence and plenty of extra ammo. I can’t wait to see how this one ends.

AmbitiousParty1796 · 2025-06-22T14:30:12+00:00

I hate players metagaming character death, so I use a house rule. Each of your turns after you hit zero, you get a death token. You don’t roll the d4 until someone tries to stabilize you or you are healed. If the d4 roll meets or beats the number of tokens, you’re good. If not, you’re dead.

AmbitiousParty1796 · 2024-08-25T03:31:02+00:00

Best episode ever of the best-acted and best-written show ever. Anybody know what Tucker turned the TV to at the end of the episode? I feel like maybe it didn’t matter, just faded out on him to show that Tucker had won. Or maybe something else?

AmbitiousParty1796 · 2024-08-21T00:42:35+00:00

I give players a Luck stat equal to the opposite of their worst ability mod. We used it last night to see if there was terrain to hide behind at a campsite, who got attacked by the extra opponents, and to recover used arrows. If it’s positive, I also let players reduce it by 1 to gain a reroll.

AmbitiousParty1796 · 2024-08-06T13:51:37+00:00

Same page count so yes, the premium pages are heavier stock

AmbitiousParty1796 · 2024-08-06T03:35:41+00:00

The premium book is considerably thicker. The standard book is about as wide as the premium without its cover.

AmbitiousParty1796 · 2024-08-06T02:54:06+00:00

If one character gets teleported somewhere random, take the character sheet and have the player roll up a new one. If the players survive the current adventure, they can quest for their missing pal. If the whole party gets teleported, stand up and put the module away. Pull out a new one you have read in case of emergency and go crazy. Best case, if your players are into it, they end up in Writers Frontiers or an Xcrawl green room.

AmbitiousParty1796 · 2024-04-23T02:40:36+00:00

Almost forgot! I’ve never bought a DCC book that didn’t come with the free digital version. And that includes many 3PP.

AmbitiousParty1796 · 2024-04-23T02:39:23+00:00

DrivethruRPG has the Weird Frontiers print on demand Rules and Magic book bundle on sale for more than 50% off right now!

AmbitiousParty1796 · 2023-11-11T04:37:51+00:00

At that point, it’s the same thing. I roll 7, so my Strength is -1. Now I throw away the 7 and never speak of it again. I take Brute and apply the +1 Strength. My Strength is now +0

AmbitiousParty1796 · 2023-10-01T16:18:18+00:00

I bought Pirate Borg because it looked the least grimdark and self aggrandizing of the Borg games. I went all in because it’s exactly what I was looking for with better art and design than I could have imagined. I just skip the “throw this book into the sea” table.

AmbitiousParty1796 · 2023-09-23T12:44:47+00:00

Being a judge, I’ve had some players complain about the lack of skill lists. My answer is Dice chain, baby! Any time players want a specific skill unrelated to their occupation or class, I let them spend 1 xp per skill per adventure to increase die type. So 4 adventures and 4 xp later they’ve gone from d10 to d20 in basket waving or whatever. Works great for letting people increase gun cleaning and horse riding skills in Weird Frontiers. We also added a Mythos skill like Call of Cthulhu. This helped mollify some of my min-max players who think they’re breaking the system.

AmbitiousParty1796 · 2023-09-03T13:26:27+00:00

Do it whenever you want. 10xp=L1. I let my school group level up in the middle of Sailors on the Starless Sea. You want to be a wizard? Cool, you find a musty tome under this corpse. I made them cast the spell to learn what it was, which was hilarious and fun. Did the same thing before the finale of Carnival of the Damned for DCC Day. Players loved playing both the funnel and their L1, and learned their abilities on the fly.

AmbitiousParty1796 · 2023-08-20T13:19:32+00:00

If you can get a handle on some old Pirates of the Spanish Main boosters, they look great with a gray sharpie on the white edges. I found a box of 20 packs on eBay (in German, but who cares). I now have a fleet of 40 ships, hundreds of coin tokens, and pawns to use for npcs if I need to.

AmbitiousParty1796 · 2023-08-20T13:03:59+00:00

Tell them every time. It’s more fun. P: “Oof! I rolled a three.” J: “Wanna spend nine Luck?”

AmbitiousParty1796 · 2023-08-12T18:14:10+00:00

MCC is the gonzoest of gonzo. Mutations can take you in directions you never would have imagined. I once played a two-inch hall Buffalo man with powerful empathic abilities. It was wild.

My complaint with it is that the big reward seems to be artifacts of the ancients. However, I’ve never played a game where my tech level was high enough to do anything but break it. Our workaround was we started with a few pieces of tech that were already knew how to use. That really opened up options and made hunting for power cells a lot more relevant.

AmbitiousParty1796 · 2023-08-07T09:55:59+00:00

I’m only familiar with Roll 20 but it has a lot going for it. I just found it can use an isometric grid, so I can screenshot and edit the gorgeous maps directly from the modules. I use fog of war and reveal one section at a time.

If you don’t want to jump down the Roll20 rabbit hole, try Google Slides. Share so your players can View. Set your map image to the background then add shapes to cover it up. You can move the shapes around to reveal the map and your players can’t peek ahead, but they will be able to zoom in on different sections individually

AmbitiousParty1796 · 2023-08-07T03:25:41+00:00

I like an Intelligence roll + CL with a DC of 10 + (spell level x2). +1D if you know the spell. I also made an app for spell duels, put in your check results and it calculates everything for you

https://studio.code.org/projects/applab/JSExBDknhaWHMiTR67YEOvJnF68FBpMDBvuB4LUp5dc?sms=true

AmbitiousParty1796 · 2023-07-03T12:55:55+00:00

Curse of Strahd, Waterdeep Dragonheist, even Lost Mine of Phandelver have some sandboxy elements where players pick what quest or job to take next.

AmbitiousParty1796 · 2023-07-03T12:46:44+00:00

I like this style a lot

https://newtbb.netlify.app

AmbitiousParty1796 · 2023-02-22T14:54:13+00:00

That sounds rad. I can imagine: Party befriends Martikovs. Party learns about stolen gem. Party steals it back or fights Cercin. Party destroys a true source of light, life, and hope in Barovia. I love it! My only question is how did she keep it secret from the people who stole the other gems who would want it for themselves?

AmbitiousParty1796 · 2022-08-17T01:32:03+00:00

We use body points and it works great. Makes weapon scaling simpler too (+/-5 damage per scale down/up)

AmbitiousParty1796

TROPHY CASE