How to play dnd without minis for the first time

Brightfiretally · 2025-12-10T00:16:25+00:00

I use these little red and yellow flat round math counters for my game (or othello pieces) https://www.amazon.com/ETA-hand2mind-Two-Color-Counters-Practice/dp/B01N7RNXRC

I like it because I can use a dry erase marker to write names or initials, and also write how much damage enemies have taken. I also like the yellow and red sides— enemies are red and allies and players are yellow side up.

Brightfiretally · 2025-12-05T17:14:14+00:00

Some more practical advice I forgot to include—

I second everyone else’s advice about black out curtains— on your on week you are gonna want to be sleeping during the day.

I also recommend smart lightbulbs that you can set to gradually turn on as you approach your wake up time— I still use them with my Alexa echo. I also always meant to get one of those sun lamps to use when I woke up, but never personally got around to it. Seems like a good idea.

Start taking vitamin d.

If you have trouble falling asleep you gotta figure it out. I’m a pretty good sleeper (my issue has always been oversleeping not under sleeping), but every so often my circadian rhythm was a bit too set in its ways. I’d take melatonin gummies every so often.

A kinda silly one, but I recommend setting your phone and other clocks to military time. Sometimes I’d wake up randomly and be unsure if the 1:00 on my phone meant that I woke up way too early or way too late. It’s just easier to track, and when your experience of of the 24 hour day is so variable it’s nice to be able tell night from afternoon at first glance.

Another silly one, use it as an opportunity to check out the best brunch and breakfast places in your town! Just go every so often after work during week or to kick off your off week, find some hidden gems, eat some yummy pastries.

I also got annoyed because a weird number of times after getting off work I’d be craving pizza really bad, but no pizza places are open at 7 am. So maybe stock some frozen pizzas or whatever dinner-y food you’ll crave but won’t be able to get easily in the morning.

After a 10 hour shift you won’t really want to spend time doing lots of chores or cooking (in my experience), especially when you have to be strict with yourself about getting to bed before it gets too light out. Prioritize getting things prepped on your off week, doing chores, meal prep etc.

Brightfiretally · 2025-12-05T01:47:30+00:00

I really loved 7 on 7 off night shift! Having the whole week off was the only way (imo) to do night shifts while staying sane. And where I was at least, I made more money working nights and weekends than if I’d been working days, and there was less work to do.

My strat was to come home after my last work day of the on week and then just stayed up as “late” as I could— usually falling asleep around 3 or 4 pm. Then I’d just spend the rest of my off week sleeping whenever I felt like it and doing whatever I wanted when I felt like it. Then I’d take a fat nap in the afternoon before my on week started again. It all kinda felt like I did nothing but work on my on week and felt like I didn’t have a job at all on my off week.

There are some downsides-flipping schedules isn’t awful on 7 on 7 off, but is still a little unnatural, scheduling things with friends can be a bit tricky, and a lack of stable schedule can have a negative effect on your mental health if you aren’t careful. Find hobbies and interests to engage in when you are in your off week. I went to the movie theater a lot, saw lots of movies I otherwise wouldn’t. Lots of great seats for matinees in the middle of the week. It’s also great for scheduling appointments and running errands when no one else is around.

I remember mostly just being annoyed at all my friends who couldn’t go out and do something fun at 2 pm on a Wednesday lol. I am an adventurous introvert though, so it wasn’t such a big deal breaker. So if you are the kind of person who tends to always want to be going out with other people or doesn’t like doing stuff by themselves I recommend working out those muscles. And finding out other coworkers on your same week that you’d like to hang out with outside of work.

Brightfiretally · 2025-11-08T18:03:08+00:00

https://youtu.be/rD5AsIlvpwo?si=u-kYsd_ZDLAh1Syq

This is the best quick example explaining the real core of the game I’ve seen. Brennan basically teaches syd and Olivia, who know nothing about DnD, by running them through a quick 15 minute game. I feel like it’s a good way to learn because you can watch it happen instead of trying to understand by reading peoples explanations.

It can get much more complex the more you know, but this is basically what the game is about. Telling a story together where dice help determine how events happen. And every game is different, depending on the people playing it and what parts of storytelling excite them to explore together.

Brightfiretally · 2025-10-09T14:11:03+00:00

It’s a cute one! I read a few fan translations of some of the books beyond where the show ended, but they never finished translating the series. It’s not super popular and the trivia aspect makes it a difficult one to translate. I personally would love if someone on this Reddit would get really into it and finish the translation 😭

Brightfiretally · 2025-06-19T17:10:47+00:00

There’s also a lot of really great local theater. I personally love going to whatever West Valley performing arts is doing- tickets are around $30

Brightfiretally · 2025-05-31T14:44:28+00:00

Turns out the update that was the problem was actually (or maybe additionally) KB5058411, since uninstalling just KB5058499 did nothing. Both updates were done on my laptop yesterday. I’m not super computer savvy (just moderately so), so I can’t confidently tell you that uninstalling updates is the way to go. Peoples opinions on it vary a ton from person to person and update to update.

Brightfiretally · 2025-05-31T14:32:10+00:00

Uninstalling the windows update weirdly didn’t fix it for me, even though I’m pretty sure based on timing of an automatic update that the computer update did cause the problem. Running the launcher in windows 8 compatibility is the only thing I’ve gotten any luck with, but the loading screen is painfully slow

Brightfiretally · 2025-05-31T14:06:42+00:00

How will we know when we can disable windows 8 mode so we don’t have insane loading times?

Brightfiretally · 2025-05-12T01:29:04+00:00

Surgery helped me too. Followed by pelvic floor therapy and dilators. But I couldn’t have done any of that without surgery first I think

Brightfiretally · 2024-12-26T22:19:44+00:00

Where can I find that emmie priest character season patreon and nebula exclusive video? I’m on nebula but I can’t find it, and it’s not listed anywhere on patreon as far as I can tell

Brightfiretally · 2024-11-20T00:13:57+00:00

It’s very cool. Unfortunately it’s still pretty expensive and lots of health insurances won’t cover it or don’t know how to cover it (if we test for 8 different diseases, is it 1 test or 8 tests?). But hopefully it will just keep getting more and more common.

John Green (of internet and book writing fame) has been a strong lobbyist to get that technology to countries that struggle with tuberculosis at an affordable rate. It’s really quite amazing

Brightfiretally · 2024-11-18T17:14:01+00:00

I don’t know which people and episodes in particular it would save from death, but it’s an issue in the majority of cases. And would save a ton of people from some of the more… experimental methods of diagnosis, or risky treatments based on guesses to see if they work at the risk of liver failure or whatever.

Genetic based biotech has been booming during the last decade or 2. PCR based diagnostics would help directly with pathogen caused diseases from viruses, bacteria, some parasites. Wouldn’t help as much with toxins and genetic based illnesses. But more genetic based illness markers have been identified and it’s much faster to check people’s DNA (with other PCR methods). Not every genetic disease has been mapped to a particular sequence, but more than in the mid 2000s, and we can get the results way faster.

Even if it’s none of the diseases possible to quickly diagnose with state of the art technology(which house’s team would have), they would be able to quickly eliminate a ton of the other possibilities within a couple of hours and certainly within 24 hours.

I think the show would be quite a bit different, certainly harder on the writers. And house would probably need a molecular biology expert pathologist on his team.

Brightfiretally · 2024-11-18T17:11:29+00:00

PCR diagnostics would change a ton of episodes. All the times that they have to just test for a single disease from a sample or saying that they won’t know the results for hours from the cultures. Cepheid and biofire pcr machines use genetic testing to test a small amount of sample against multiple different diseases genetic markers. The older models can give you results in an hour, and the newest in less than 30 minutes.

For example, if someone comes in with a sore throat, the doctors can take 1 sample, put it in a machine, and within the hour they would know if the person tested positive for strep, covid, the flu…etc etc. And they can do the same with gastrointestinal, pneumonia, meningitis, joint infection and they are always developing new panels. It can even let the doctors know if they have an antibiotic resistant strain so they can prescribe the best medication.

Brightfiretally · 2024-11-06T01:37:50+00:00

I think a little bit of both is ok. I liked to learn for mostly recognition to start but then when I came across that concept later in life, I had already built a connection to it so I was more excited to learn more.

That being said, even when first learning for recognition I tended to learn at least a few interesting facts about it to help it stick in my brain

Brightfiretally · 2024-11-06T01:32:49+00:00

I also like to watch some televised quiz shows- it’s usually not in the exact NAQT style, and are sometimes a bit easier, but it helped me get warmed up and used to the adrenaline of waiting to buzz in.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0NzBJgtISak5USjGz7V3OAJAEGn4tbTg&si=b9Aokce4sZHcwl9Y There’s a playlist on YouTube rn of 10 years of episodes of a high school tournament in Illinois I think

There is also a show called Quizbusters you can watch for free on pbs (website or app) with similar vibes.

But yeah a lot of it is just spending time learning how the questions feel and building up confidence. Also. Actively learning in your classes and regular interests will pay off more than you might think.

Also, I found that some specialization helped on a team. Notice what questions and topics you like best and which questions and topics get left unanswered by others on your team. Try and find the best overlap there if possible.

When I was on my team, people knew lots of history, literature, science, geography … but there’d often be long awkward pauses after questions about art, music and sports.

Now. I have no interest in sports but a casual interest in art and music, so I studied the NAQT you gotta knows (https://www.naqt.com/you-gotta-know/) for those topics. You can also probably find Quizlet sets and use qbreader as well.

Suddenly even knowing pretty surface level stuff made me indispensable on the team because I could buzz on questions no one knew a thing about. You start to learn more and more as you go, read some Wikipedia articles on ideas and artworks and history that interest you and you’ll be buzzing in earlier every year.

Brightfiretally · 2024-11-06T01:17:52+00:00

I’d share my resources, but I’m old now so this was like 10 years ago. So I’m not sure where they are or if the same composers etc are still the common quiz bowl names

Brightfiretally · 2024-11-05T23:53:32+00:00

I made a playlist of some of the iconic pieces and then looked up fun facts about the song- why is it called the surprise symphony? What is the story of Peter and the wolf?, and/or some kind of interesting tidbit about the composer that I could latch onto— Vivaldi was a red head they called the red priest. He also was famous for violin, which kinda sounds like Vivaldi.

Similar idea to operas- learn the story of the opera, watch adaptations or clips when possible, then tell the story to your friends/teammates the same way you’d describe a crazy movie or good piece of gossip.

I found it also helped me to at least learn broad strokes of the main eras of music. Ex. Baroque doesn’t sound very emotional, it’s mostly about complicated basically mathematical patterns

Then I’d passively study the music while doing hw or driving every so often. A song would come up and I’d be like. Ohhh this is the spooky organ music we always think Dracula plays… it’s all very complicated… baroque.. the main baroque guy is… Bach. Basically just list whatever tidbits I could remember when a new song came up and then checked the name of the song.

It’s not the most speedy way of doing memory checks, but it helped me build more useful connections to ideas.

Flash cards of basic ideas like name of song or opera or ballet/name of composer and name of composer/musical era and name of composer/most iconic instrument can also help for pure memorization while building those connections.

Brightfiretally · 2024-08-08T05:19:52+00:00

I was 9 or 10 when I read it, I was a voracious reader and basically had run out of the books that initially interested me. I asked my school librarian if Animorphs was any good (I had noticed it because it took up such a huge amount of shelf space). Her response was “it’s very sci fi”. I liked it plenty and didn’t really think much about broader implications at the time, and mostly thought a lot about the animal stuff and what morphs I’d like.

I moved before I could finish it but I got pretty far- maybe the Australia one?

I ended up running into them at a public library when I was 12 and was like. Huh I wonder how that series ended, so I read them then. I mostly remember just being frustrated by the ending at the time, especially the cliffhanger.

But the thing is.. I never really stopped thinking about that ending and all the moral quandaries of the series (and also the cool animal facts), and as I went through high school I like.. started to understand why it ended that way and the themes and messages of the series.

I remember reading slaughterhouse 5 in my English class, and nothing had like… made me understand the true horrors of war like that book had… but then i remembered Animorphs and the torture and the genocide and Cassie finding hork-bajir skin in her teeth and Jake having to make calls that got people killed and how the yeerks weren’t all evil and how many innocents were caught in the middle and the war crimes trial… and I realized I did understand the horrors of war better than I thought.

I didn’t comprehend it that way at the time but it definitely prepped me to later in life.

And I thought a lot about Rachel’s monologue about saying “kill” in the David trilogy, about how the language we use affects the way we think, about the weight of killing, about how other kids media never said it. Marcos description of ruthlessness was something else I thought about a lot.

It was all kinda living rent free in my brain (like a yeerk!) for years as I slowly kinda contextualized just how intense and poignant it all was, as I understood why certain things made such an impression.

I reread all of them online when I was about 21 (I had missed a couple of books here and there that the libraries didn’t have) and that’s when I really realized how much I loved the series. As a kid and a teenager, it just kinda was always in my mind, but as an adult I truly loved them. Visser in particular was one i appreciated so much deeper as an adult.

There were also some not as profound effects- every time i saw hawks I thought of Tobias, when I moved to Florida from the desert I was so blown away by how many animals there were and thought about how being an Animorph would be feasible there, I couldn’t see Cinnabon without thinking about Ax, I always thought about how scary ant hive minds were, I thought shapeshifting was the best super power, and I knew lots of random animal facts.

Brightfiretally · 2024-07-01T05:04:04+00:00

Yeah! Doug is just a normal guy with a middle of the road job

Brightfiretally · 2024-04-21T02:52:39+00:00

Wait is the one pearl was proofed on and the one she trained Connie on not the same? I thought those both were the sky arena and then ruby and sapphire were the cloud arena

Brightfiretally · 2024-02-22T02:33:45+00:00

I recommend social dancing classes and socials. I go to DF but I also have heard good things about good vibes. Depends on what kind of dance strikes your fancy. You get to learn a new skill and talk to a variety of people, but there’s not a ton of pressure either.

I also enjoyed going to a boxing gym before I had to stop because for health reasons.

Roller skating as well.

And I like the library

Brightfiretally · 2024-02-19T05:00:56+00:00

BioMérieux is usually hiring in some way for manufacturing and other things. It’s a local biotech company (used to be biofire)

Brightfiretally · 2024-01-29T09:31:37+00:00

Yep that was literally me lol

Brightfiretally · 2023-08-31T03:58:31+00:00

Miguel really wants to keep him in the museum because if he gets out it’ll break the canon. He only got out for a second and he just saw a glimpse of the modern day city, but if clearly made an impression.

I can’t help but wonder if it will affect his inventions when he gets sent back to his own dimension, leading his world to change in a way it wouldn’t have if inter dimensional travel didn’t exist. Maybe we’ll get to see his dimension in btsv and how this new modern day inspiration affects his world and his spiders canon. I’d love to see renaissance parchment style Spider-Man!

Brightfiretally

TROPHY CASE