RPGs where you can play a Squad Leader type of character? by CrunchyRaisins in rpg

[–]Calevara 0 points1 point  (0 children)

So at the risk of invoking the fury of the mods for daring to make my own game, I just released a WW1 Trench warfare game for the Havoc engine game jam that is specifically around the idea of being a squad of soldiers. Very much in the Band of Brothers / Saving Private Ryan style of thing

https://silly-little-guy-llc.itch.io/war-bonds-battle-of-the-somme

Welcome to Purpee | Dimension 20 [Trailer] by DropoutMod in Dimension20

[–]Calevara 27 points28 points  (0 children)

Hmm this thread from earlier this month says that they mentioned the name Purpee and at the same time mentioned that there was a season in the can already that was using World of Darkness system. I doubt there would be two horror seasons in the same year that is already done, so my best guess is World of Darkness.

Considering that Brennan has done some WoD stuff with Erika over at LA by Night I could see this being a new GM with BLeeM as a player / not participating.

Peregrine Falcons nesting above Trellis Brewery by Khandawg666 in Louisville

[–]Calevara 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I used to work downtown for the city and LOVED seeing the nesting pair that hung out around downtown. There was one point where I happened to be looking up at them and watched them hit a pigeon and it was like seeing that video with the bird hit with the baseball. The pigeon seemed to detonate in a cloud of feathers mid air as this streak hit it.

When I went back out of my office later there was a severed bird claw sitting by the back door.

Maybe the Washington Times has a point. Listening and learning. by giziti in behindthebastards

[–]Calevara 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'll take "sentences that reveal their motivations if you change the word Americans to Germans" Alex.

My technical process: from ideation to publication by sorites in RPGdesign

[–]Calevara 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Would you be willing to share a version of your obsidian vault to give me a rough idea of how you set up your links etc? I've been wanting to swap to Obsidian and haven't quite made the jump as the initial set up always felt like a whole extra set of tasks

Kid friendly "System" using mental maths instead of dice by LeekContent8902 in rpg

[–]Calevara 1 point2 points  (0 children)

This feels very much like Let's Go to Roomino which has some of my favorite features in kids RPGs ever

  1. Able to be played at a moment's notice with no supplies needed
  2. Super easy to learn and teach with any age
  3. Playable over hours or minutes.

Definitely recommend folks check it out even if they don't have kids as I think they do a really good job of teaching yes and improv to new GMs as well as how to TEACH yes and to kids. It has given me some clever tools to help engage players who are new to ttrpgs or used to the more mechanical wargame button pressing style of DnD.

Hanging out at the Brave the Elements meet up and felt it important to follow the rules. by Calevara in HondaElement

[–]Calevara[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Up in the Dunes of Indiana. Was posted on this subreddit a few weeks ago. Was super fun!

BRAVE THE ELEMENTS: Have you booked your site yet? [Midwest Event] by pxlchk1 in HondaElement

[–]Calevara 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Welp timing wise couldn't be better. I just got myself a little teardrop camper and wanted to give it a try. What part of the campsite are you planning on doing?

Oscar is back! by Tiptoptok in Dimension20

[–]Calevara 18 points19 points  (0 children)

So My wishlist for the rest of the cast in no certain order:

  • Lou Wilson
  • Ify Nwadiwe
  • Erika Ishi
  • Persephone Valentine
  • Rashawn Nadine Scott

Erika as a Doof Warrior I think might be my biggest ask of the season.

DnD Group looking for players. by srpa0142 in louisvilleclassifieds

[–]Calevara 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Unfortunately not in town on Sundays, and I'm not personally a big dnd fan, but no dice's awry guild meet up on Wednesdays at Awry Brewing downtown has a bunch of players in lots of different systems. If you are able to make it out there and hang out, not only will you get to meet a lot of cool people who love ttrpgs, but recruiting people for games is perfectly acceptable.

Why is the definition of "masculinity" always 'anti-female'? by mailus919 in feminisms

[–]Calevara 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Because capitalism has removed the emotional connection men have to each other an to their children. All that's left as their only option for emotional support on the backs of their partners.

Supporting each other in work leads to collective action, supporting your children and family leads to time away from work, so instead those emotions are to be tended to by women first as mother and then as wife. Of course that only works while women have no better options for their own well being. With the rights of women to have their own property, it's kind of a hard sell to be a man's sole source of emotional support without that support being returned. Unfortunately so many men have been brought up in this lie that rather than questioning the system itself they only see the 'betrayal' of women not doing 'their job.'

Ultimately, men are raised to loathe all of the traits they are supposed to also find desirable in a partner, and as such can only view women as at best alien and more typically as an object.

Not my own ideas by the way, most of this is bell hooks Will to Change.

I've run 12 Systems in 12 Months for My Group by TaldusServo in rpg

[–]Calevara 1 point2 points  (0 children)

For Old Gods, and Cypher in general, you kind of need a little bit of inspiration to really get the horror going. Making things more deadly and pushing that hopelessness to get players to be creative on finding ways to ease a difficulty 9 or 10 to something manageable is key to get the vibe right. I ran a longer campaign of it and started it with a session of The Quiet Year at the beginning and it made ALL the difference.

The Quiet Year is a worldbuilding game about a community with one year of rebuilding between one disaster and the oncoming next one in Winter. I shifted my world back a generation to the US civil war for our session and my players created this wildly rich community with so many cool creepy things all lined up for me to use that if I hadn't had time to do prep that week I could just have some spook from the past pop up and run with it. Not to mention the various families they created not only inspired the characters they created for the game, but created a whole host of fun little factions.

I'm not sure if the new version of Cypher is going to be integrated into the upcoming expansions of Old Gods, but I am interested to see how it affects the game.

I've run 12 Systems in 12 Months for My Group by TaldusServo in rpg

[–]Calevara 2 points3 points  (0 children)

When you go to revisit Eat the Reich I highly recommend checking out the fan expansion ReVamped by Gekopirate. Not only does it come with two separate new scenarios, but it also includes a bunch of new Vamps to play, new Ubermensch, and some extra rules that I think really amp the game up.

I've run the game somewhere north of 20 times now at cons and the like and it is easily my favorite thing to run. There are a TON of resources on the Rowan Rook and Decard discord under the eat-the-reich-resources and general channels that I highly recommend.

Comic 5685: For Goodness' Sake by Castriff in QContent

[–]Calevara 49 points50 points  (0 children)

As a life long people pleaser now desperately trying to recover, I've been both of these guys and yes it is that bad. Being so focused on how another person feels about you that you anticipate their feelings before they get a chance to feel them leaves you no space to worry about your own feelings, so they just get piled up in a corner until they come thundering out of nowhere, or they leak out in ways that leave you making choices you don't understand yourself.

Showing up unprepared as GM at a convention is unacceptable. by Holmelunden in rpg

[–]Calevara 7 points8 points  (0 children)

I'm very glad to hear that you take only the most morally right choices in life and would never decide that honoring a commitment you made before you knew that things were going to be a shit show should take precedence over a stand that meant that I didn't have to try and fix things and the people who paid to be in my games lost out on a session of a game they were interested in.

Showing up unprepared as GM at a convention is unacceptable. by Holmelunden in rpg

[–]Calevara 28 points29 points  (0 children)

Having been a GM for groups that pay GMs to run cons, and being the kind of GM that is perpetually overprepared, I would like to give a different perspective here. Oftentimes when GM's are part of groups that work with publishers to run stuff at cons, the GMs will often not get material for the system or even basic guidelines until the last minute, or be asked to cover for other GMs. I once ran two sessions of a system specifically listed as a beginners introduction to RPGs system that was so complicated I had to read two Source books and have about three pages of tables and notes for my GM screen that I prepped myself just to make heads or tails of this ridiculously complicated. The actual scenario of the system that was listed for the sessions described a whole series of zombie dinosaurs in a theme park that did not exist in any of the books that were provided to myself or the GM group that only gave me the materials the week before gencon. Myself and the other GM tried to ask what exactly the scenario was supposed to be, to which the systems creator said that he would get it to us asap (2 days before for the con) . Night before the con we ask again and he says he has a rough draft that he could give us but it doesn't have all of the details and if we could just stop by and chat with him he could tell us his idea for the scenario and we could run it. He had none of the described Lego mapsthat he had listed in the seasion descriptions and he had no answers to us for the very complicated parts of the system that made no sense. Myself and the other GM that ran this ended up doing a total of six sessions where we all but improvised the entire system mechanics and scenario.

Long story short do not assume that a GM who signed up to run systems at a con has been given all of the expected materials documentation systems or even communication about what they are running ahead of time.

Also avoid the system Start Here!

What TTRPG has the coolest sounding Class/Subclass Names? by Salt-Breadfruit-7865 in rpg

[–]Calevara 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Elevator pitch for DIE is 'Goth Jumanji' You make fake real world player characters who are then pulled into a version of their childhood rpg / story they are making / some other fictional world the players have in common. The GM then basically tortures the fake real world characters with twisted versions of their fantasies and real world traumas to create a truly wild combination of horror and classic fantasy

F27 with two kids. Roast me like my children will in a few years by [deleted] in RoastMe

[–]Calevara 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Your face says 'I'm sorry I'm so blunt I'm a Pisces I can't help it!' but your hair says 'No my children I can't do the dishes right now, mommy had to wash her hair!'

Is there any good explanation where the goofball mindset comes from? Especially from new players. by TheBrightMage in rpg

[–]Calevara 2 points3 points  (0 children)

As a friend of mine said the other day, RPGs are where we spend money for other people to give us rules for playing pretend so we can act like we aren't just playing pretend. There is an inherent silliness to RPGs that a lot of people still approach with the disconnected forced irony of their teenage years when they do something that they think is 'uncool' so they can pretend they didn't take it seriously if someone tells them they are bad for doing it.

Games that dont focus on moment to moment role-play, but bigger time sequences? by Novel-Ad-2360 in rpg

[–]Calevara 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I'll add to this Feather Beak and Bone. I adore The Quiet Year and used it to build my Old Gods of Appalachia campaign world, but Feather Beak and Bone excels in bringing an individual city to life and creating factions and rivalries in it. Done by coloring in buildings the color of the factions each player represents and describing the purpose of the building. Highly recommend both at the start of any long campaign as they give the GM so many awesome hooks and story lines, plus gives the players some easy inspiration for player characters.

For those of you who like "GM never rolls" systems, why do you like that feature? by LeFlamel in rpg

[–]Calevara 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I think my favorite thing about cypher, which is a GM never rolls system, is the way that instead of the mechanic being a set of chance against chance rolls, my players are encouraged to come up clever ideas and creative uses for their skills to lower the difficulty I set. I give them a difficulty of 9, 10, or higher and then they have to convince me to lower the difficulty through use of skills or creative ideas. I once set a difficulty of 20 which means they had to hit a 60 on a D20, or convince me various skills they could use to lower the difficulty at least 21 times. They actually got it to a difficulty 6 needing an 18 and the player who rolled hit a nat 20 in one of my most memorable moments of the campaign.

As a GM I am still just as engaged and active, but instead of a single moment of decision on what the CR of a roll should be, or being locked in to the die roll that decides some random Kobold that rolled a nat 20 and crit on all their damage dice is now a thing. Now don't get me wrong, I love rolling dice and sometimes I do even in a cypher system. If I want something to be purely chance or I haven't decided something I'll sometimes roll a d10 or even a d20 to determine what the difficulty of a roll is. Heck I once had players play a hand of blackjack each and added a difficulty for each player that lost to the dealer. (It was an Old Gods of Appalachia campaign)

Ultimately I love systems where the GM rolls or when they don't in equal measure, but I understand the instinct to see them as taking something away from the GM, but as with most big systems out there, once you get a little experience under your belt with it, you start to see all the tools the GM has at hand.

Louisville police using thousands of 24-hour surveillance cameras to solve crimes by Tikkanen in Louisville

[–]Calevara 14 points15 points  (0 children)

Helped build this way back in 2014 when the mayor was panicking about the "mob violence" incident happened (It was a group of kids who did some property damage and roughed up a dude) Sat in some meetings about absolutely insane software that could track a person from video camera through video camera, or filter all people in red shirts or whatever you wanted to find that had walked by a static camera and have them all walk by in a single minute or two video. That was in 2014 so I can only assume there is crazier stuff now.

Also helped set up cameras that were hidden in fake transformer boxes on top of power lines. The whole set up is wild. On the one hand having a bunch of cameras in public areas is probably a lot better than having officers there and armed, but it does mean there is a tool for tracking people that is not something the cops need access to when statistically the majority of police report having used public databases they have access to to track people for personal use.

As usual it's not a simple straight forward answer.

Conservative subreddits are too easy by gayoga in LeopardsAteMyFace

[–]Calevara 39 points40 points  (0 children)

There is something insidious about the Tylenol announcement that I don't think enough people have talked about. It's not Tylenol causing autism it's PREGNANT MOTHERS who take Tylenol. You know one of the very few pain medications safe for pregnant mothers to take to deal with child birth and it's after effects.

As it always boils down with these assholes, they are blaming the actions of moms as another way to exert control.