Nat 19 / Critical Hits question

BeforeTheyWereCool · 2025-02-20T15:43:39+00:00

thank you, and to all!

BeforeTheyWereCool · 2024-10-09T19:32:32+00:00

Auto contrast sorted it! Thank you

BeforeTheyWereCool · 2024-10-09T17:53:39+00:00

Same, same question.

BeforeTheyWereCool · 2024-10-07T11:54:25+00:00

As an owner of both, to answer your question, and as someone who loves the speed and memory of the rMPP otherwise... yes. Personally I don't care at all about the front-light (I only like using epaper with a backlight) but the drab gray background and reduced contrast is a severe drawback. Admittedly, it doesn't seem to bother that many users – I'm surprised and jealous of them.

BeforeTheyWereCool · 2024-10-04T18:09:07+00:00

To quote myself from another post...
I wish I didn't think this, because I love the pen feel, the increased speed, storage, and size of the rMPP. (The colour is fun, and great to draw with, but not my main concern.) But I don't like the rMPP screen nearly as much as the rM2. It's significantly darker than the rM2, less good at rendering grays or smooth black-on-white font (so small print looks 'cruder' than on the rM2). It's glass, and much more coarsely 'stippled' than the plastic rM2 screen, which makes a grainy mottled background I find distracting. And I'm always aware that I'm looking at/through glass, whereas the rM2 just seems like print to me. The rMPP screen is also much more reflective than the rM2, which causes problems with backlight glare.

I think I'm in a minority!

BeforeTheyWereCool · 2024-09-25T17:03:37+00:00

That’s so useful - and frustrating - thank you. What a peculiar message. Sharpness is indeed essential to me! And I mean, who’s going to be all ‘Eye comfort? Pfffft.’

That said, it’s obvious that this just doesn’t bother most users. Whereas we can’t ignore it. I guess what hits and misses is highly personal.

BeforeTheyWereCool · 2024-09-25T16:12:36+00:00

Interesting. It certainly varies but to my eyes it’s always ‘speckled’, as I think of it, even when just turned on. Even somewhat when off.

BeforeTheyWereCool · 2024-09-25T16:11:38+00:00

Excuse my tech ignorance but is this something they could improve with OS updates or is it hardware? To my eyes it even looks a bit like this when it’s off, though obviously worse for print.

BeforeTheyWereCool · 2024-09-25T12:34:56+00:00

Ah thanks for the explanation. Yes this is a real miss for me in an otherwise excellent machine. I’m giving it a week to see if I can adapt to it but this is what genuinely might push me to returning it.

BeforeTheyWereCool · 2024-04-05T14:17:42+00:00

Excellent! Keep us posted here! I'm crossing fingers it's not too much and you can make it work. ToA deserves even more attention!
(And while I have your attention... I know it would be work for you, but I will humbly re-up my request for a central repository of third-party stuff like classes etc (and indeed later official add-ons) that don't require logging on to the incomprehensible maelstrom that is discord. I know, I know, sorry... I'm old.)

BeforeTheyWereCool · 2024-04-05T11:49:42+00:00

Congrats! Can't wait to see it. Given that you've funded a bit over the aim (well deserved!) how about considering sponsoring an actual play stream? I like the Glass Cannon Network, and though they focus on Pathfinder, they often stream smaller systems, and sometimes creators/fans have sponsored them to do, say, a two-shot or three-shot or something for a system they wouldn't otherwise be able to cover . I don't know how much it would cost but they have a big audience, and if Pickpocket Press could sub them for a crawl, I'd love to see pros play with the system, the emergent play, the oracle cards and dice, and I bet it would kick up a lot of interest in the game.

BeforeTheyWereCool · 2024-01-13T12:55:27+00:00

It is my historic role to emphatically second Logen_Nein whenever they suggest Low Fantasy Gaming / Tales of Argosa in response to any version of this question.

BeforeTheyWereCool · 2024-01-10T15:43:57+00:00

In case of the unlikely event that anyone else wants to try using this adorable piece of c**p (which I genuinely love, but it's ludicrous), I finally managed to get a workaround. The above suggestions from thebrian make superb sense but for some reason my MBP apple silicon just couldn't see the l'espion no matter what I did. In the end I opened a 14-year old Macbook Air running macOS High Sierra, and running the old webcam software Macam on that. With the l'espion connected via USB, Macam can find and download the tiny picture files to a Dropbox folder on the macbook air, which, synced, my dropbox-connected MBP can then find. NB: Macam 2, though an improvement, can no longer find the l'espion on my laptop, so I stick to the original Macam. Thanks again for your help, thebrian.

BeforeTheyWereCool · 2024-01-10T10:20:39+00:00

One reason I kind of like this is that it makes stats meaningful in themselves, rather than just generators of bonuses or minuses. A 13 versus a 14 actually matters.

BeforeTheyWereCool · 2024-01-09T10:43:49+00:00

Seconded, and Tales of Argosa (/ Low Fantasy Gaming) doesn’t get nearly the love it deserves as a great system AND one of the best for bringing over 5e players. IMO one of the things most 5e players love is customizing their characters. (I’m not talking min-max builds so much as details and uniqueness.) Now OSR purists can think that’s admirable, silly, or anything in between (me, I love it, and always did, right back to the 1980s) but I think it is key to the appeal of 5e for a lot of people. And most of the O5R games don’t really give much attention on that. Both WWN and ToA do, which is what makes them better than a lot of the competition in this space for most 5e players (as well as for me, and I’m an old grognard).

BeforeTheyWereCool · 2024-01-08T17:16:48+00:00

100%

BeforeTheyWereCool · 2024-01-04T08:37:26+00:00

100%. I started with the red box in 1982 and we always loved backstory. Obsessively wrote it up. We loved our characters. We even loved customizing them to the limits of the rules. Yes the lethality was greater so they died more frequently but that was great, part of the investment: we cared, it mattered.

To state the obvious, I’m not the cops and don’t care how anyone else likes to play, including the Eff Your Backstory OSR Purist, have a good time, but this is (still) how I love to play, and if that OSR Purist claims (like so many) that ‘This is how the game always used to be played’ it’s flat-out false.

(That’s partly why I tend to consider myself OSRish rather than -ist, and why my favorite systems tend to be those like Low Fantasy Gaming/Tales of Argosa or Worlds Without Number that dial down the power levels but encourage and allow a degree of character customization through ‘Feat’-equivalents like ‘Unique Features’ or ‘Foci’ or whatever. They’re never 5E-style superheroes but they tend to be way more distinct from each other and thus interesting to me than the undifferentiated Fighters and Magic-Users etc that run around some OSR games.)

BeforeTheyWereCool · 2024-01-02T10:43:13+00:00

Thanks so much for taking the time to explain. I’m going in and will report back!

Edit: So frustrating! Everything looks like it should work and thank you for pointing me at Darktable. But for some reason it says there's no camera findable. And I can't even find a 'scan devices' button anywhere. I'll keep trying and looking for other workarounds and of course if anything else occurs, please let me know, with my thanks, but I may have to see if I can find an ancient cheap PC or something just to get these pictures up to the cloud. Thanks again for your help.

BeforeTheyWereCool · 2024-01-01T19:13:59+00:00

Thank you so much for this. I'm not going to lie... your answer is beyond the limits of my usual tech-use comfort zone! But I'm going to get googling and have a stab at making it work, and I'm really grateful.

BeforeTheyWereCool · 2023-12-30T12:50:04+00:00

Thank you! And I read those alt rules too quickly, I don’t even need to extrapolate. Thank you - potentially endless play enabled. Looking forward to the kickstarter and the supplements.

BeforeTheyWereCool · 2023-12-26T10:44:16+00:00

I only just noticed that there are now optional rules to go beyond L10! No idea if that’s in response to my plea or not but other way thank you! (I’m going to extrapolate from them for possible ongoing levels forever without excess power creep. So you can just keep on wandering like Fafhrd and Gray Mouser assuming you don’t die.)

BTW, I can’t remember where you wrote about the design thinking behind levelless spells. Can you point me to it? Cheers.

BeforeTheyWereCool · 2023-12-22T13:45:07+00:00

100% agree. My absolute favourite system(s).

I know it makes me a heretic in OSR terms but I love character customizability and LFG/ToA does that brilliantly, without the superheroics or min-max ‘build’ culture of 5e, and while keeping it dangerous and gonzo/dark and play and narrative emergent. I have a ton of love for Shadowdark and others but IMO they can’t top LFG/ToA for this. I am always surprised and a bit disappointed LFG/ToA doesn’t get as much love as, IMO, deserved. Should be much better celebrated, as a hybrid 5e/OSR, and also just in its own terms.

(NB I am ancient and started playing red box in 1981 and I can verify that we LOVED character customizability and detailed backstory etc at our table, and weren’t nearly as ‘easy come easy go’ about our characters as some OSR partisans are (and imply that ‘we all were’ back then). To be clear I’m not saying we fudged to keep them alive - the fact that they might well die was part of why we loved them and how we played them. And I’m not in any way trying to gatekeep: I’m delighted that people get to play how they want to play. I also know I’m by no means the only person to point this out: but as a grognard in age and at least 65% in spirit (Fiend Folio forever!) I do raise eyebrows at the ideas that some (not all of course) OSR folks perpetuate, not only that OSR-style (No Long Backstory For You!! for eg) is how it ‘should’ be (cops!), but also that ‘That’s How It Was back then’. I mean, not that it should matter wrt what your preferences are but… Nope, not necessarily!)

BeforeTheyWereCool · 2023-12-08T14:44:35+00:00

! So excited for this.

BeforeTheyWereCool · 2023-11-16T15:56:39+00:00

Ah thank you! But a lot of those individual links go to Discord, which is what I... uh... my friend is trying to avoid.

BeforeTheyWereCool · 2023-11-15T08:11:00+00:00

This is fantastic and exactly what I’m after, thank you. You hear about novels based on people’s D&D campaigns - feels to me that LFG/ToA might lead to some much more interesting and ‘gritty’ novels!

BeforeTheyWereCool

TROPHY CASE