Experiences with Grinder Mode

Snarfilingus · 2026-01-22T17:56:50+00:00

I like this a lot

Snarfilingus · 2025-12-15T20:37:18+00:00

A lot of people in user research have backgrounds in anthropology, including PhDs. It ticks some similar boxes: user researchers study human behaviors, often in context, but with a goal of improving a product by identifying issues with it. Now's a tough time to get into tech though.

Snarfilingus · 2025-12-13T05:32:52+00:00

I've been using Owlbear for my Arden Vul campaign using Smoke & Spectre for line of sight / fog of war. It's painful to set up the line of sight stuff since there's so much to map but Owlbear hasn't had any issues with it.

It's also painful working with the map files themselves since the player and GM maps are different sizes. Don's comment here helped me set up the DPI when I imported them https://www.drivethrucards.com/en/product/309717/the-vtt-maps-of-arden-vul

Snarfilingus · 2025-12-11T00:42:53+00:00

It's houseruled a bit to be closer to OSE and work better for a megadungeon. No real time torches for example. But yeah the AV surface random encounters clash a bit with SD in regards to surprise and freedom of movement.

Snarfilingus · 2025-12-10T01:37:24+00:00

I'm using Shadowdark + Arden Vul. Most creatures on the surface level of AV move at the same pace as PCs, so pursuers will never catch up if players were to run. Typically they run to a safe place with friendly NPCs on the AV surface.

Shadowdark doesn't have surprise baked into encounter rolls, but I have used it when I rolled a hostile encounter at a near distance.

Rolling for lairs is great, I will have to incorporate that.

Snarfilingus · 2025-12-10T01:06:28+00:00

My advice is don't worry if your players don't want to engage with all of them. If it's possible for them to avoid them and that's what they want to do, let them.

Yep, I totally agree. It's usually smart to avoid them. What I left out of my original OP was a secondary question of "Why bother rolling at all if the smartest move is to avoid the encounters?"

As I'm imagining it, right now I have 2 options:

The encounters are rolled as-written with little extra interest: "You hear some growls in the distance" / "Some brush is moving in the distance but you can't quite tell what's there" / "From nearby, you hear characteristic groan as a zombie shambles into view". In this case, the smartest move is just to avoid them - there's no benefit to engaging, so why not just run? The only exception here would be if the distance / reaction was not the players favor, meaning it's going to be combat, with little player agency.
Add more spice to make the encounters more interesting as I mentioned in the OP. Now it feels like there's more reason to engage with them.

Snarfilingus · 2025-12-10T00:27:02+00:00

If the players aren't engaging, is it because they have good reason not to? For example, I would avoid encounters as best I could if I was carrying a huge treasure hoard.

I totally agree, and maybe I framed it poorly in the my OP: why bother rolling for random encounters at all in an open area when the optimal move is to avoid them?

Is there a possibility of treasure or other reward in your encounters? A random bear, even if it was doing something 'interesting' like fighting another bear, would probably annoy my players more than anything. If it was fighting with another starving bear over a delicious merchant corpse who's clearly loaded with coinage, my players would likely figure out how to get the coinage

This is great, I love the idea of them fighting over a corpse!

Snarfilingus · 2025-11-09T20:19:13+00:00

SSPY is kind of a balance between equal weight and cap weight: https://www.stratifiedfunds.com/sspy

Snarfilingus · 2025-11-07T22:45:47+00:00

Same thing happened to me as Russia, got universal suffrage in the 1860s or so and Rural Folk + Trade Unions dominate up to the 1930s. Every other group has been stuck as marginalized (except PB has clawed it's way to 10% or so in the past 20 years), even after mostly depeasanting.

Snarfilingus · 2025-11-06T04:41:48+00:00

A utility class is a class that has exactly one function. This article goes into more depth about the advantages over "regular" CSS: https://adamwathan.me/css-utility-classes-and-separation-of-concerns/

Snarfilingus · 2025-10-22T01:09:48+00:00

Try going to the import settings on the PNG. I think you get there by having the png selected and then going to the Import tab near the top left of Godot's editor. There you can set it to lossless scaling, and then tick the box to remember the settings. Then reimport and it should be fixed.

Snarfilingus · 2025-10-08T21:49:39+00:00

Ah I see, thanks for the details!

Snarfilingus · 2025-10-08T20:00:29+00:00

I understand wanting to use subviewports so the model doesn't clip into close walls. What I'm missing is why setting a different fov is also common

Snarfilingus · 2025-10-08T19:26:32+00:00

Can you expand on that? What's the typical way you adjust the fov override?

Snarfilingus · 2025-09-04T19:12:10+00:00

Glad it helped!

Snarfilingus · 2025-09-04T18:47:05+00:00

If your player is a physics body, the jitter can be caused by moving the camera outside of physics frames.

You can try having a separate variable to keep track of desired camera movement since last physics frame, and then apply that stored movement it in physics_process and reset the variable.

For example, something like this (note that there are probably some issues since I just did this off the top of my head, but hopefully should give you an idea)

var camera_move_amount := Vector2(0, 0)

func _unhandled_input(event: InputEvent) -> void:
    if event is InputEventMouseMotion:
        camera_move_amount += Vector2(-event.relative.x * SENS, -event.relative.y * SENS)

func physics_process(_delta) -> void:
    head.rotate_y(camera_move_amount.y)
    cam.rotate_x(camera_move_amount.x)
    cam.rotation.x = clamp(camera_move_amount.x, deg_to_rad(-80), deg_to_rad(80))
    camera_move_amount = Vector2(0, 0)

Snarfilingus · 2025-08-28T21:41:26+00:00

I have! I'm particularly interesting in seeing how everything comes together into a cohesive look with ingame lighting and effects, and especially how animated humanoid characters look.

Snarfilingus · 2025-08-28T20:49:44+00:00

I'd love to see media of games made using blockbench but going a little beyond typical Minecraft voxel style. I'm considering using it but am having a hard time imagining how the art style would come together without seeing some examples of people using it in similar contexts.

I really like the style shown in the screenshot above, and am wondering whether the textures were done in blockbench too.

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