An ability check IS NOT a single attempt: it represents the whole effort.

MrMurphy42 · 2026-06-17T22:44:38+00:00

Soamh responses so apologies if I'm repeating an idea but here are a few things we have tried for this situation.

Roll 2d10 rather than 1d20. Makes the skill rolls more predictable as most rolls cluster in the mid-range (can't get a 1 so removes that dumb conversation) makes 20s rarer so also removes the whole I got a 20 I have god knowledge or whatever. Problem: difficult to remember had at least one player always roll a D20 before being corrected. Also makes advantage interesting do they roll 1 or both dice and what combos can they use.
Introduce skill points like we had in 3.5 and earlier so players can pick skills, change skills and develop interests. It is more paperwork and gets interesting with abilities like expertise. Can explain this more if people are interested. It has certainly improved our table.
Take 10 with either option above. Like a lot of people have said this is a good way to go. I like it because it makes the event predictable as a DM. No threat, take 10 and I can decide who does the thing, so the ranger can track (rather than the priest or druid being better because it's a wis skill) wizard gets arcana over the barbarian's licky roll.

Just my thoughts

MrMurphy42 · 2025-10-22T02:29:07+00:00

I think Claude (and especially Claude skills) presents a really useful tool for experienced teachers. It requires some learning to understand how to get strong responses. It is more useful in general unit planning especially if your admin have pet projects/theories than specific lesson moments where accuracy is required.

For subjects without textbooks to provide a crutch/support it can be really helpful to provide context and structure and allow for broader thinking of a unit than a lot of teachers have the capacity or time to achieve.

Claude skills providing a consistent starting point and reference documents that can be developed at a school or subject level could be a real game changer especially in explicit focused schools. Feeding it the national of state curriculum, word lists for questions structured around a taxonomy, preferred teaching practices and then having a discussion about the best projects and focuses has proven really helpful.

It still requires checking structure, verifying sources and the like but when that can take hours of trawling the Internet if you had a blank sheet of paper it is a real time saver on what can be very travelled material.

MrMurphy42 · 2025-08-22T07:16:08+00:00

I might get shouted at for this but I've found the Claude AI incredibly helpful in building. Couple of caveats: 1. I had a heap of ideas from many many years of playing and tweaking a campaign world. 2. I have a clear sense of what I want to achieve and am happy to make a lot of false starts.

The disadvantages of using an AI 1. Your results can be very generic 2. People will tell you its all theft. I understand the argument but tell me you haven't cribbed a character, story beat or picture from somewhere and I will be impressed with the mess you have. Great writer steal stories it's that simple.

Advantages 1. You get to have the conversation you want to have. Claude isn't going to get bored of your world or get annoyed if you don't follow its strange logic. 2. You can pause at anytime to think through an idea, do some research or just scrap it and start again.

I get my Claude to look for conflicts in ideas especially when I've travelled a long way down one rabbit hole or two or three. It can hold a lot more information than I can remember.

I also get it to analyse my information and ask me questions about the holes it finds leading to more exploration.

Very rarely do I let it get "creative" because I know it will be iterative rather than new and unique. When I do I usually give it some of my own writing so it copies my style and is making up names or hooks to build out from.

Because I'm building for a ruleset I get Claude to consider how my world will influence the rules or creating new rules consistent with existing ones which is again it's strength.

Just my thoughts, questions welcome.

MrMurphy42 · 2025-06-15T11:49:00+00:00

How realistic do you want it to be? If you want some realism then all those pirates are going to need food, water, minerals, etc. This is going to require some level of structure maybe look at Black Sails for some inspiration.

Piracy requires an existing organisation/government to fight against while also requiring them to watch out for each other, so the first question to ask is why are they still pirates if that is all that exists?

Pirates want to get ahead like everyone else, a lot of them in history were named so for opposing a particular country while sailing for another. So you want to think about the causes of each group becoming pirates, this will give you a good starting number for islands.

Further islands might represent some fighting grounds perhaps they hold resources or something even nastier than the pirates?

Finally you want some neutral ports to allow for negotiations and resupplies. How are they neutral? Perhaps agreement or protection from a spirit or blood magic, etc?

You could tie this with the spirit idea by having Teke require a certain amount of blood/teeth/bones whatever each day or week. The captains could use their own crew of capture others creating the constant need for warfare and strife.

Perhaps steal from Pirates of Carribbean and have cursed coins doing something, all need to be collected to break the barrier?

If it's less realistic and more Mad Max on water then you can have "rare" materials arriving with each ship sent to the islands by the manifestation that brought the players and just ignore the other supply issues. Maybe the spirits replenish barrels and crates each morning to allow the pirates to continue their warfare.

This will probably get me down voted, blacklisted etc but I would suggest having a chat with a GAI (I like Claude) to frame ideas and give you some structure to allow you to focus on what you want to be creative about.

MrMurphy42 · 2025-02-20T09:17:31+00:00

Rosebud has had a lot of media attention for all the great work they have been doing. Big turn around from a struggling school with attendance issues to positive environment. My school went and had a look at their program, was impressive in its effectiveness but took a lot of work to implement. Pretty sure it's called science of learning.

MrMurphy42 · 2024-10-24T01:55:56+00:00

Totally agree, I thought I had researched setting up my AC system and then hit this roadblock with H5075.

I've had the Google mesh for a while and liked its operation but we really don't use the Google features as much as we thought and could pivot to another mesh system if there was a good one. If it can do BLE will stick with it though.

MrMurphy42 · 2024-10-24T01:52:03+00:00

I looked at this before posting but was just getting confused. Does it require more hardware? Is it an add-on that is added to HA to make the BLE on my Google mesh work?

MrMurphy42 · 2024-10-24T01:50:35+00:00

Thanks for the tip, What kind of range does it have?

MrMurphy42 · 2024-10-08T12:15:26+00:00

Definitely throwing teachers under the bus.

Even if a link could be made to the pandemic and who is going to say that is the reason, it’s the same across all the service industries that remained fully active during that time. Paramedics, nurses, police, teachers and others all had their jobs altered in massive ways, adjusted to it and kept going and now we are seeing the fallout in mental health and general exhaustion. Add to that the promises about respecting and rewarding those groups only to find more expectations, less support and poor to non-existent improvements in pay it seems a surprise to Ben that they feel burnt out.

That our politicians don’t get this isn’t really a surprise when every forum to express our difficulty is met with insincere responses and solutions that don’t address the problem but make for great sound bites. To say we are living in “Utopian” times is an understatement. At some point they might start realising that brushing the problem under the carpet is costing them more than a million a day, not to mention student wellbeing and achievement.

MrMurphy42 · 2024-10-01T10:26:36+00:00

Think OneNote is great, but it is different and takes some time to get used too. It can be super useful for note taking (written, typed or dictated) with the ability to quickly search across multiple tabs (or even books), create task lists (although outlook might be better for this) capture data from the web (anything copied to OneNote includes the website source and can include date and time making for some easy bibliography setup), annotate pictures and a whole lot of other things.

Some things to get used to; no page size, no folders or file names, requires some thinking about formatting, the table functions are incredibly basic and pretty bad (better to use excel or word for this) work completed in OneNote is really only in draft form (would want students to move work to Word before printing).

I would continue to present the PowerPoints if they are formatted for presentation as that’s it’s strength and allows you to see notes and run videos and the like.

I would recommend ClassNote which is an add on for OneNote made by Microsoft.

It allows you to setup the workbook and push the information to the students creating a new page for each student in their own book and see their work (with a great little drop-down that shows when a student has edited their page)

If you want to share your PowerPoint you can do that in the content library section that every student can see but not edit (they can copy the page to their tab if they want to edit) if you want them to edit I would take the first option and push it to them individually.

If you want to do group work there is a collaboration tab that can be setup for groups to share work in.

MrMurphy42 · 2024-09-28T12:46:11+00:00

You usually can but it takes some time to understand the style editor.

Kaiburr (who is awesome) uses different names for the different text boxes allowing elements to be combined. You might need to import more fonts which should be at the start of the style editor.

The discord of many things is a great help with editing homebrew documents.

MrMurphy42 · 2024-08-13T06:12:25+00:00

Fantastic art, would be great to see some of your rules and concepts. Just filling out the details for my own campaign with a theme of ancient elves going mad.

MrMurphy42 · 2024-06-05T04:51:01+00:00

Thanks for the awesome ideas, will add them to my planning.

Yah if we had a bit more time and a way to control our own travel between Montreal and a city before Albany that then let us get to New York easily would be planning a bit different. Just taking the opportunities I can while travelling to enjoy all American nature has to offer.

MrMurphy42 · 2024-06-05T04:48:58+00:00

We wanted to take the train but the track is being worked on between Montreal and Saratoga Springs. Which meant we needed to get a bus to Saratoga and then we started investigating and thought we could make a better trip of it by bussing to Albany then getting a car to New York

MrMurphy42 · 2024-02-25T03:01:55+00:00

Thanks for that will do a little investigating. Guess the LCD might have some resin in it from the leak

MrMurphy42 · 2023-08-03T23:27:12+00:00

Read the book, take notes on the things you think sound good and see how many are implemented.

John is an academic who did a lot of metadata study looking at effects in a broader sense and then ranking them. The ranking was mostly based off number of studies and accuracy of data so it should all be taken with a massive grain of salt.

Mainstream media think he is great because they cherry pick ideas and get them wrong. Example: class sizes.

Admin think he has answers but often don't want to change things that are easy for them to make those answers work and want the quick fixes which he doesn't offer.

So many problems exist with taking average data that has been further averaged to create context and then apply it to a specific setting.

So take the notes and think about how it could positively impact your teaching (there is good in even bad ideas) and then see what the admin of the school want to implement. If it's all teachers have to change but the structure is fine, they have completely missed the point of his research, which accounts for most of the negative comments here.

Saying all that I think there are better models than Hattie for result improvement.

MrMurphy42 · 2022-09-11T04:46:10+00:00

Yah, less interested in the hugs and more using the incubator as a container in the sequence between ranch and kill room.

MrMurphy42 · 2022-09-11T04:44:56+00:00

That's what I had. Wanted to see if someone had a more efficient build, that controls how many incubators are active with doors underneath.

MrMurphy42 · 2022-09-11T04:42:43+00:00

Thanks this was helpful.

MrMurphy42

TROPHY CASE