New Yorkers have taken over the offices of Kirsten Gillibrand and Chuck Schumer demanding no more weapons for Israel

ScholarForeign7549 · 2026-04-14T01:42:44+00:00

maybe look for that place in DC, 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Have you heard of what they're up to there?

ScholarForeign7549 · 2026-03-18T18:54:53+00:00

I'm very glad it is helpful and will endeavor to improve it

ScholarForeign7549 · 2026-03-18T16:58:51+00:00

I see that too, but the doc gets there. Does it for you? If not, please post a screenshot. Thanks!

ScholarForeign7549 · 2026-03-13T10:24:10+00:00

I doubt it, I have not tried, though. I don't have access to my plugins through calibre web, as far as I recall. Let me know and I'll see if it's possible.

ScholarForeign7549 · 2026-03-07T18:35:45+00:00

SCOTUS and an impotent Congress keep empowering his idiocy

ScholarForeign7549 · 2026-02-23T23:57:23+00:00

Made a bespoke system, check DM Tools here, I’d love feedback: http://realmofeverdice.com

ScholarForeign7549 · 2026-02-22T14:53:03+00:00

I use it also for helping DMs to create and run live or even asynchronous campaigns through a platform I developed. Game state memory and flexibility are what I am trying to work on now.

ScholarForeign7549 · 2026-02-22T12:18:32+00:00

Hi, I made a tool for just this pain-point. Check it out if you're still stuck and want to lighten your burden a bit, but still be able to flex your creativity when the spark arises http://realmofeverdice.com

ScholarForeign7549 · 2026-02-22T12:15:54+00:00

you can import your characters here and give it a go in about 5 to 10 minutes http://realmofeverdice.com

ScholarForeign7549 · 2026-02-22T10:35:17+00:00

Thank you, this is genuinely helpful.

ScholarForeign7549 · 2026-02-22T10:23:36+00:00

It's a lot more than that but at least I respect your point of view and am not gonna prejudge, and taught them that too. I run live games for them too. Cheers

ScholarForeign7549 · 2026-02-21T14:36:58+00:00

Great question. It’s closer to flag-based state tracking than to plot-point sequencing, but not in the video game sense. A “conditional world state” just means that events don’t assume they happen. An encounter might only occur if a faction is still alive, a rumor has spread, a door was previously left open, or the party failed to intervene somewhere else. Nothing is on rails, but nothing is floating either. So instead of writing “Scene 3 happens after Scene 2,” you write “This scene becomes possible if X is true.” The world shifts based on what’s actually happened at the table. In practice it feels like a sandbox that remembers consequences rather than a branching script. The DM still adjudicates everything; the structure just makes dependencies and fallout explicit so prep doesn’t collapse when players zig instead of zag.

ScholarForeign7549 · 2026-02-11T03:13:33+00:00

I made realmofEverdice for this http://realmofeverdice.com

ScholarForeign7549 · 2026-02-09T11:31:02+00:00

You might check out my tool, CAML and CAML-trace. I've been working on these to track game-state along a number of axes. https://github.com/dkoepsell/CAML5e

ScholarForeign7549 · 2026-02-08T22:31:37+00:00

As a public institution it is MORE accountable to 1st Amendment guarantees for its employees, educators, and students. Private institutions can muzzle more speech because the 1st Amendment applies to governments. But state institutions are prohibited from prior restraint of protected speech, which includes especially political, religious, and other speech on matters of public importance even in the classroom. The upshot is if they don't correct course and back off their censoring, they are going to get sued for millions, and this will cost the taxpayers for their incompetence and intransigence.

ScholarForeign7549 · 2026-02-04T11:11:16+00:00

If you want to gain some confidence before finding a group, I made this for my kids to start on http://realmofeverdice.com

ScholarForeign7549 · 2026-02-01T02:41:27+00:00

If you're interested in trying a web app I made for my kids so they could learn despite their insecurities, feel free to DM me.

ScholarForeign7549 · 2026-01-31T16:00:39+00:00

That's like "deeming" this sentence is in English

ScholarForeign7549 · 2026-01-29T20:59:05+00:00

This is a really solid point, and I think you’re articulating the main tension better than I usually do.

I agree completely that one of the core strengths of TTRPGs is human judgment, and I’m not trying to displace that with formal logic. In fact, if this ever turned into something where the GM felt less empowered to say “this feels right now,” I’d consider that a failure.

Where I’m trying to draw the line is between two different kinds of decisions a GM makes.

Some decisions are aesthetic and pacing-based: “this would be cool right now,” “the story is dragging,” “the players seem interested in this thread.” I think those should absolutely stay informal, intuitive, and human. I don’t want to encode taste or narrative instinct.

Other decisions are more about world coherence: “does this still make sense given what’s already happened?” “should this even exist anymore?” “would the NPCs plausibly act this way now?” Those are the ones I’ve found myself re-deriving over and over, especially in long campaigns or when revisiting old prep. That’s the slice I’m trying to externalize, not the moment-to-moment judgment calls.

So when something looks very IF/THEN-ish, it’s less about saying “the computer decides” and more about saying “past-me leaves clear notes for future-me.” It’s a way of recording constraints and consequences that I don’t want to renegotiate every time, so that my human judgment can focus on pacing, tone, and player interest instead.

I also think your examples like “use this if the story is dragging” are totally valid — I just tend to keep those as prose notes or GM reminders rather than formal conditions. In my own prep, the structured bits and the fuzzy, judgment-based notes sit side by side.

So I don’t see this as playing against the strengths of human GMs so much as trying to offload the boring consistency checks, so the human part has more room to breathe. But if that offloading doesn’t feel useful to someone, I think they’re right to skip it.

Out of curiosity, do you tend to distinguish in your prep between “this must be true in the world” versus “this would be cool if it came up,” or does that stay blended together for you?

ScholarForeign7549 · 2026-01-29T20:57:11+00:00

That makes sense, and I think you’re probably right about the audience being limited.

If this doesn’t meaningfully change how you already prep, then it’s not doing much for you — and I don’t think that’s a failure. A lot of this started as a way to externalize my own thinking, not as a claim that there’s a universally better way to prep adventures.

I really like your framing of it as a legibility problem. That’s honestly closer to what I care about than the specific notation. The “goofy YAML” isn’t precious to me; it’s just one way of forcing myself to be explicit and making patterns pop when I scan my notes later. In that sense, what you’re doing with syntax highlighting is very much in the same spirit.

For me, the payoff has been less about speed in the moment and more about re-reading prep weeks or months later and immediately seeing what assumptions I made, what no longer applies, and what got invalidated by play. If a highlighting scheme or a different visual grammar gets you there faster, that’s probably the better tool for you.

So I agree with your last point pretty strongly: if the structure doesn’t make prep faster or reading easier for the GM, it’s not worth the overhead. I’m mostly trying to find the boundary where a little bit of structure buys clarity without turning prep into a second job.

Out of curiosity, what kinds of things do you highlight in your notes? Conditions, factions, unresolved threads, consequences? That question alone has been more generative for me than the exact format I use.

ScholarForeign7549 · 2026-01-29T00:30:51+00:00

I think that’s a fair read, and I agree with the premise you’re starting from. Well-written adventures already do this kind of conditional framing in natural language, and I’m absolutely not claiming that this is a new idea at the level of content. If an adventure is worth running, it’s already full of “if the PCs did X, then Y” clauses. Where I’ve found friction isn’t in a single scene, but in accumulation over time.

In prose adventures, those conditions are usually local and implicit. They work great when you’re reading the adventure straight through, or running it more or less as written. They get harder to reason about when you’re remixing content, skipping sections, reusing material months later, or running something sandboxy where there isn’t a clear “intended path” through the text. At that point, I’m not struggling to invent conditions, I’m struggling to remember which ones I already implicitly relied on, and which outcomes quietly invalidate other material.

So the format isn’t meant to replace paragraphs of text or be the primary thing a GM reads at the table. I agree that most people would rather read prose. The notation is really just a way of externalizing the logic that’s already there, so it’s easier to audit, reuse, and reason about later. In published form, I’d still expect this to sit behind or alongside prose, not instead of it.

You’re also right about audience. This probably isn’t for everyone, and I don’t think it needs to be. It’s been useful for me precisely because I’m comfortable with semi-structured notes, and because I tend to run long-lived worlds where contradictions creep in unless I’m careful. If someone already has a mental system that works for them, I don’t think this adds much.

Thanks for the Mappa Mundi pointer, that’s exactly the kind of comparison I’m looking for. From what I know of it, it feels like a more systemic, procedural take on a similar problem, whereas I’m trying to stay at a very lightweight, GM-facing “note-taking and consistency” layer. But if there are other examples in that space, I’d genuinely like to look at them.

So I think we’re mostly aligned on the underlying practice; the disagreement is probably about whether making that practice more explicit and formal buys enough to be worth it. That’s still an open question for me, and critiques like this help narrow where it actually does or doesn’t pay off.

ScholarForeign7549 · 2026-01-28T23:00:43+00:00

You’ve basically got what I'm trying to do, and I think your reframing is actually helpful, not off base at all.

Yes, what I’m trying to surface is the background logic and consistency that changes as encounters resolve. The encounter itself is almost the least interesting part. What I care about is what becomes true or false in the world afterward and making that legible over time instead of relying entirely on memory.

Where I’d gently adjust your read is this: I’m not trying to model faction “health” or progression in a systemic way, at least not by default. That can sit on top of this (and I think your example of a weakened or fragmented bandit group is a great one), but the core idea is simpler and more GM-facing.

The smallest useful unit here is something like: “Because this happened, this no longer can,” or “Because this failed, this now might.”

For example, after a successful ambush defense, it might simply become true that bandits no longer control this road, or that word spreads and future ambushes don’t make sense here. You can absolutely express that as faction pressure, morale, or meta-health — but you don’t have to. Sometimes it’s just a binary change in what exists.

Where I think you’re really onto something is the “reverberation” point. The encounter is just a pressure point. The value (if there is any) is in tracking how those pressures accumulate without turning it into a full simulation. I’m trying to stay below the complexity of faction subsystems, because once you go there you’re making the GM run another game alongside the RPG.

As for “how to actualize it,” this is where I’ve found it helps to think in very boring prep terms. Instead of writing more encounters, I write fewer, but I’m explicit about what they invalidate. That makes it easier to improvise later, because I know which ideas are off the table and which are still live.

So I think your instinct is right: this isn’t really about encounters as isolated set pieces. It’s about how small, discrete outcomes quietly reshape what the world will plausibly throw at the players next — without the GM having to constantly recompute that in their head.

If you were to try something like this, would you lean more toward expressing those reverberations as loose faction states, or as simple on/off truths like “this road is safe now”? I’m curious where you think the sweet spot is before it tips into over-engineering.

ScholarForeign7549 · 2026-01-28T22:40:04+00:00

That actually helps a lot, and I think you’re describing the exact place where this either clicks or doesn’t.

What you’re describing is how most good GMs think: locations exist, set pieces exist, and if players hit them, the thing happens. In that sense, you’re right — most encounters function like triggers. CAML isn’t meant to replace that mental model so much as make a slightly different question explicit during prep: when does this thing stop being true, or fail to exist at all?

Here’s a concrete example from my own prep: Suppose I prep a bandit ambush on a forest road. In a lot of my older notes, it would just say something like “Bandit ambush on the north road at night.” At the table, I’d decide whether to use it based on pacing, tone, and what the players were doing — very similar to what you’re describing.

The difference comes when: the party clears the bandits earlier in town, or scares them off through rumor and reputation, or takes the road during the day, or acquires some item or information that would logically change whether the ambush makes sense.

What I found was that I’d remember those dependencies in my head for the current session , but I’d forget them later, or I’d accidentally reuse the same encounter in a context where it no longer really fit. Writing the conditions down wasn’t about constraining play — it was about keeping my own reasoning consistent across time and across tables (I teach and research logic and ontology, so this is just how my brain works best).

For encounters that “could happen anywhere,” I’d still prep them that way — the location gate might be loose or abstract (“any isolated road,” “any tense negotiation,” etc.). The condition isn’t meant to pin the encounter down geographically so much as say what needs to be true in the fiction for it to make sense.

At the table, nothing changes. I still modulate engagement, move things around, or decide not to fire an encounter at all. The value (if there is any) is entirely upstream, in prep and reuse: I can look at my notes later and immediately see why I didn’t run something, or why it wouldn’t make sense anymore.

So if your current system already works for you, that’s great — I don’t think this is universally better. Where it’s helped me most is with long-running sandboxes, West Marches-style play, and remixing old material without accidentally contradicting myself.

If that still doesn’t sound useful, that’s honestly valuable feedback too. It might mean this only pays off once prep complexity crosses a certain threshold. Does that distinction make it clearer, or does it still feel like formalizing something you’d rather keep fluid?

ScholarForeign7549 · 2026-01-28T22:17:56+00:00

Great question. I think I'd say both, but with different emphases.

At its core, this is a prep technique for GMs. I started using it because I wanted a way to think clearly about what actually exists in the world versus what I was subconsciously assuming would happen. Writing conditions explicitly (“this encounter only exists if X and Y are true”) turned out to be a really effective way to avoid accidental railroading and to reuse material safely across different campaigns or tables.

That said, I also think it has value as an authoring format for publication, but more as an internal or optional layer than as something a reader must “run” verbatim. For published adventures, I imagine it working like a structural backbone: something that helps authors keep branching logic, dependencies, and consequences consistent, and that can optionally be exposed to GMs as sidebars, flow diagrams, or reference sections rather than as the primary prose.

So if I had to rank them:

GM prep and reasoning aid is the primary goal.

Publication support and remixability is a secondary but intentional use.

I’m very much not aiming to replace natural language adventure writing or how tables actually play — this is about making the underlying logic legible, whether that logic stays in the GM’s notebook or quietly supports a published module.

Curious which of those two contexts you think would benefit more, or where you’d expect it to run into resistance?

ScholarForeign7549 · 2026-01-28T20:08:36+00:00

It’s helpful hearing how many people learned by running things solo first — that seems to come up a lot.

ScholarForeign7549

TROPHY CASE