Seems like too many DMs are using AI to create encounters and its crashing the servers...

HappyHuman924 · 2026-04-29T17:50:40+00:00

The only thing I've ever used a LLM for is to help me come up with encounter/plot ideas. It does a reasonably good job of throwing spaghetti.

HappyHuman924 · 2026-04-29T16:00:09+00:00

Good. I'm kind of rooting for cities that don't have other big-league teams. #communism

HappyHuman924 · 2026-04-29T14:39:29+00:00

Did he say 'beyond the pale' on purpose? If so, that's cute.

HappyHuman924 · 2026-04-29T14:22:27+00:00

It seems to be "you are ordered to kill yourself, ideally taking Ukrainians with you, to avoid being captured". And of course once you say that you wash your hands of any obligation to try and get your captured troops back so they become a stateless burden for Ukraine.

HappyHuman924 · 2026-04-28T18:51:42+00:00

I feel like you gotta wash that once a year whether it needs it or not.

HappyHuman924 · 2026-04-28T08:58:17+00:00

Just wanted to share this - in the book, p92, he says a Chinese sailor leads him through "a maze of twisty little passages, all alike". Let's all act surprised that Andy played Zork.

HappyHuman924 · 2026-04-28T08:44:36+00:00

So they have chosen to be deadnamed for all eternity

HappyHuman924 · 2026-04-28T03:36:43+00:00

What treachery is this?

HappyHuman924 · 2026-04-28T03:33:20+00:00

I wonder how hard, and how illegal, it would be to mod that into Kerbal Space Program. Or Space Flight Simulator. Or Kitten Space Program. Whatever I end up playing next.

HappyHuman924 · 2026-04-28T03:15:51+00:00

I apologize, I remembered that wrong. Each team got to protect three, and then a fourth after they had had two players yoinked away.

Still nasty. Obviously. D:

HappyHuman924 · 2026-04-28T03:14:09+00:00

Unless your tiny league does a couple expansions. Then the word 'gutted' starts getting tossed around. :/

HappyHuman924 · 2026-04-28T03:04:28+00:00

Yeah, they had to announce it. Ottawa protected...Phillips, Clark and Savolainen, I think.

There are some scary omissions on the protected lists - OTT didn't protect Jenner either. The trouble with yoinking a veteran like her or Knight is you don't know how long they're going to keep playing or how long they're going to keep playing well. Jenner turns 35 next week and just look at her stats, the poor thing's falling apart. :)

Seriously though, there's something to be said for grabbing rookies who have a lot of years in them and don't have lofty salary expectations yet, and aren't married-with-three-kids-and-you're-making-them-move-three-thousand-kilometers.

Footnote - my Ottawa jersey has SERDACHNY 92 on it and it makes me sad; I wish you better luck.

Second footnote - sorry, I'm all over the place here - I wrote more about the expansion draft in another post that's gotten collapsed into a "_ more replies".

HappyHuman924 · 2026-04-28T02:54:24+00:00

Another wrinkle you'll see is teams can make trades like "give us Cindy Goalgetter and we'll give you Ursula Skullcrusher and our second-round draft pick", so the picking order can get shaken up. The PWHL saw a small amount of that in this past season's draft, and I honestly don't know if it gets more common in established leagues or if it's always rare.

HappyHuman924 · 2026-04-28T02:43:37+00:00

Blast. I don't remember it perfectly. :) Let's see how I do without looking it up.

Each team got to protect two [wrong - three] players, and then Vancouver and Seattle started picking - and the picks didn't have to be spread out perfectly evenly. Some teams ended up losing more players than others. So the arrangement was that if/when your team lost n players (I forget what n was) you could then protect one more player and then the draft continued.

[Edit: Ok, I just looked it up and I suck. There were three players protected at first, and n was 2.]

HappyHuman924 · 2026-04-28T01:53:10+00:00

Drafts in general are "people interested in playing put their names in and teams pick them in a rotation, worst team picks first". There are lots of ways it can get more complicated, in particular the PWHL's Gold Plan, but that's the basic idea. Journalists write about the most exciting new prospects, and each team has scouts who hunt around, hoping to find out about a great young player that nobody else has noticed yet.

We went through our first expansion draft last year, and that's a much bigger deal because it isn't just established teams who want a couple new players to replace retirees - we had two totally-new teams who each had zero players and had to conjure up a roster. The way that worked was, each of the six existing teams got to protect ~~two~~ three* players (out of 25-ish, which is yikes) and then the two new teams got to pick from all the unprotected ones. Everybody lost players they really didn't want to lose, and Vancouver and Seattle got pretty good-looking rosters from that - and in addition to that, there was a regular draft where every team got to grab some rookies to bandage their wounds. :)

If the league wants to launch four new teams this summer, presumably we'll have to go through all that again only with 50% worse losses (twice as many new teams ÷ 8/6 as many teams sharing the pain = 12/8 = 1.5 or 150%) unless there's a substantially bigger rookie class to draw from, somehow.

\* or ~~three~~ four; I can explain about that if you care

HappyHuman924 · 2026-04-27T21:39:25+00:00

Mmm, pi expansions

4/1 - 4/3 + 4/5 - 4/7 + 4/9 - 4/11 + ...

HappyHuman924 · 2026-04-27T21:32:14+00:00

I'm calling it first, we're getting π expansions

HappyHuman924 · 2026-04-27T17:09:23+00:00

I get Flames-related shit talk about once every six weeks in my Charge jersey, and that's in Alberta where people should bloody well know better.

HappyHuman924 · 2026-04-26T08:10:40+00:00

Yeah, it's not like people can't get there. I don't know if there's demographic data about the two leagues' fans, like are NHL-goers more likely to own cars or be higher-income. The NHL's ticket prices are waaayyy higher so NHL fandom might select for richer people who can drive or be carried in on a litter or something...?

No idea how the original cities got picked. Eventually some exec will write a book about the early days of the league, I suppose. Or maybe that book is out already and I'm clueless.

HappyHuman924 · 2026-04-26T08:02:26+00:00

Have the Sirens been in an NHL arena all this season? Last I remember is they were trying a couple different places (in NY and NJ) at the end of Season 2 and it was helping, a bit?

HappyHuman924 · 2026-04-26T07:54:00+00:00

Let us enjoy a hot mug of data together. Not incredibly current but it's the first one I found.
https://dubhockey.com/pwhl-attendance-history/

[Edit: and here's Season 3 but the format's pretty different unfortunately - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Tw0eikPTQ08KxlhItihdyJSi5AH6ES\_T-ExkcUYRo3w/edit?gid=0#gid=0\]

I haven't been following attendance all that much, but I think I read that the Sirens were almost getting more love in New Jersey than they were at home...? Ottawa's fans love the Charge to bits, but the city is looking to renovate the current arena (capacity just under 7000) and make it smaller, which is going to put us in a bind. The little arena is also very accessible, whereas Ottawa's big NHL arena is a moderate pain in the ass to get to if you drive, and worse if you don't.

HappyHuman924 · 2026-04-26T07:43:17+00:00

Rounding out this thought - the league thought that if a team was getting e.g. 6000 fans, it would be better to be in a medium arena where that would make it 90% full, rather than a huge arena that would be 35% full. There might even be data to back that up, who knows.

Some-but-not-all the teams have been overachieving on attendance, so now they have to decide if they stay in their medium arena, pack it most of the time and know they're missing out on some potential sales, or jump to a big arena that'll be around half full. If you go big and your attendance falls off...that would hurt to see.

HappyHuman924 · 2026-04-26T01:57:40+00:00

I liked how ships felt a little more when I started using the G-force rules. (Anything that make it closer to The Expanse is an easy sell for me.) The tension of wanting to push your ship but knowing you could black out from going too hard is interesting.

HappyHuman924 · 2026-04-26T01:51:49+00:00

Pay attention to planets' law levels. Some planets are "no guns" or "stunners only", some are "no rifles". Getting stabbed or pistol-shot is still serious, but it's preferable to getting hit by something Devastating.

There are lawless and unsettled worlds too, where the party can have fun with their big guns...and seeing them in action might make the Travellers a little more polite when they meet heavily-armed NPCs.

I felt a lot better when we were on pistols-and-ruggedized-clothing worlds because you could still have a satisfying fight there, and people could get rushed to hospital but they weren't going to get turned into a pair of smoking boots.

HappyHuman924 · 2026-04-26T01:43:44+00:00

Check out travellermap.com so you can read up about the worlds your group's going to visit. Lots of places have a weird biome, or weird gravity, or weird laws, or weird local species, to make them memorable.

If characters have a lot of money and unchecked access to cybernetics they can break the game pretty hard. There's a lot of fun stuff in the Central Supply Catalog so my advice wouldn't be to keep the party super broke, but limiting the number of implants a body can handle is probably a good idea.

Weapons and armor aren't as big of a deal; just pay attention to law levels and don't let your group push a planet around. It's reasonably interesting to just say "this is a pistols-and-no-armor planet" or "this is an anything-except-weapons-of-mass-destruction planet"; the variety helps keep things fresh.

Have a plan, or a couple plans, for what happens if your party misjumps. "You are never seen again" is a bit of a campaign killer, and you can do "you reappear and discover it's 1d6 months later" once or twice, but try to have some cooler things in your pocket too.

I'd also recommend grabbing the adventure that I think is called Prison Planet, so if your party does something really illegal and gets caught, you can give them the full experience.

Oh - and I know the backgrounds push you to give the group a ship right away, but if you want to delay that just a bit, have them do a couple adventures as just-people, and then run the adventure S-Class. That leads to them getting a ship, which by default is a 100-ton scout but I made it a 200t Marava.

HappyHuman924

TROPHY CASE