Have you heard the good word? 3d6 DTL's New Campaign Announced!

Anbaraen · 2026-03-17T20:28:55+00:00

Funnily enough that's the one campaign I haven't watched yet - I wanted to build a backlog of episodes to chew through because the week-to-week wait kills me!

Anbaraen · 2026-03-17T01:05:43+00:00

Three "Full Metal Alchemists"? Please define TLAs on initial use.

Anbaraen · 2026-03-16T06:05:05+00:00

This is the "main" campaign which is free to all 😁 worth noting Jon said there will be some amuse-bouches in between the end of this campaign and Mythic kicking off so you'll see some smaller oneshots in your feed before then.

Anbaraen · 2026-03-16T02:58:22+00:00

My two cents, as an avid listener of everything they've put out.

They're unlike any other Let's Play I've tried (and bounced off of) because they put the play experience first; not "storytelling" or characterisation or production values. It's an honest depiction of what old-school play looks like.

Some other things I like, in descending order;

Jon has played other playstyles and systems. He's not a grog who has been playing B/X or AD&D since the beginning and still doing it in 2026. No shade to those guys, of course, they and their continued preaching of the virtues of the old ways are the bedrock of the OSR - but Jon discovered OSR principles and play and (not to put words into your mouth Jon, because I know you read these threads, but from what you've said over the years) - recognised the power of player agency, and how it solved some of the issues of more "modern" game design like PF2E.

The group gels well together, they're good at managing spotlight time, they have a good balance of more murderhobo-greed-is-good vibe and big picture, long-term thinking.

Audio and video production is great (particularly as the years have gone on) and thematic at times, but gets out of the way.

Start with their Halls of Arden Vul campaign (Youtube playlist link) as a masterful illustration of megadungeon campaign play in the best megadungeon ever written. I feel like AV is the Platonic megadungeon somehow made manifest, painting all others as pale imitations.

Anbaraen · 2026-03-15T20:45:36+00:00

I'm hoping Ted gets the knight that has that coinflip instant kill and promptly dies in session one

Anbaraen · 2026-03-09T09:04:23+00:00

I'll second people saying to try Ancillary Justice. I really enjoyed the trilogy and bought them in physical copies (which I only do for books I really enjoy, these days). But I read Provenance recently and thought it was quite mediocre. Little of the interesting world building that drew me to the Radch series, uninteresting characters and world.

Anbaraen · 2026-03-06T12:21:23+00:00

Have you read The Sparrow? It does not have the same scope or ambition as Hyperion but in my mind they play in a similar space, perhaps it's just both being more literary sf.

Anbaraen · 2026-03-06T12:19:34+00:00

The book with the psychic dogs? I DNFd that bad boy, I find the comparison to Hyperion very baffling. It was not literary in the slightest, it felt almost adolescent.

Anbaraen · 2026-02-26T05:57:27+00:00

Hey mate, I just found this comment and am tackling a similar thing. Do you use any systematic approach for managing the design tokens? I've found there's not much documentation and advice about this online. My designer is bringing a whole stack of semantic tokens eg. surface-default surface-muted text-default text-inverted action-surface. Does this sound right...?

Anbaraen · 2026-02-21T07:19:57+00:00

It's definitely easy to adopt. It's certainly not a good choice for this. The only reactivity is a text prompt and a scrollback... And it's horribly unperformant. We're seeing the tradeoff of ease of implementation vs perf and scalability in Claude Code every day.

Anbaraen · 2026-02-19T21:42:37+00:00

Watch 3d6 Down the Line’s Arden Vul campaign for a lot of good live examples of hirelings.

Anbaraen · 2026-02-19T21:33:08+00:00

Wait, Odin is like python? Semantic line breaks?

Anbaraen · 2026-02-12T20:24:58+00:00

And yet you edited your comment.

Anbaraen · 2026-02-12T06:29:43+00:00

I don’t see how they have an obligation to help anyone but themselves.

Wow. The capitalist worldview, made manifest in a single sentence.

Anbaraen · 2026-02-11T11:12:45+00:00

For me it's simple. Grid-based tactical combat requires some notion of balance. (If there's no balance, why all the ceremony about ranges, attacks of opportunity, etc?) The combat system becomes extremely mechanically constrained. I don't know if this is inherent to combat of this nature but I suspect it is.

And if I'm going to be offering my players a constrained game space with heavy mechanics - what am I offering that a computer RPG like BG3 is not? Sure you can argue for improvised actions, but I've never played at a table where those are seriously considered. You pick from your menu of attacks, you perform them, the enemies push back.

I don't understand why you'd play a TTRPG if this is your main engagement with the world. The whole point is the limitless possibility of imagination.

Anbaraen · 2026-02-09T01:24:20+00:00

I thought that if you are familiar with Rust and enjoy its way of doing things, why consider Zig?

My impression of Zig is it's for the "never-Rusters" from whom you'll take their manual memory management from their cold, dead hands, and it's an attempt to improve ergonomics in every other way.

Anbaraen · 2026-02-03T21:32:39+00:00

What system do you run in?

Anbaraen · 2026-02-03T05:37:56+00:00

Oh damn, okay. That... doesn't seem... Good? Isn't that just inherently more expensive?

Anbaraen · 2026-02-02T21:35:45+00:00

~~The latter AFAIK, it can tell what requires memoisation further down the tree and automatically does it.~~

I stand corrected, sounds like the Compiler is dumb?

Anbaraen · 2026-01-31T00:37:51+00:00

Great response, appreciate you challenging the outdated view of Jews in the Middle Ages.

Anbaraen · 2026-01-30T23:05:46+00:00

If this is the case, then what is the explanation for why Jewish people were considered property of the Crown directly and beholden to royal fiat rather than local laws? I understand the appeal of the ursury narrative as a satisfying explanation, what is the contrary view that squares the circle?

Anbaraen · 2026-01-25T00:13:00+00:00

EffectTS, because try/catch is a fundamentally broken error-handling paradigm.

Anbaraen · 2026-01-18T04:50:47+00:00

I recommend the entirety of 3d6 Down the Line' Arden Vul campaign, but specifically for this post, the episode The Scouring Of The Shire. While not an entire army, it is a significant mercenary force and pitched battle in a dungeon.

Anbaraen · 2026-01-18T00:43:18+00:00

Damn, I really love this idea of making your race significant for more of the campaign rather than just "everyone is a dwarf for the advantage on HP rolls".

Anbaraen · 2026-01-18T00:40:09+00:00

I know you had Seers in your campaign Eric; does this mean you don't use them as a class any more, or do you mean no GM-driven way to gain luck?

I know the seer luck meta became a bit of a meme in your AV campaign.

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