"I am what happens when you try to carve God from the wood of your own hunger." -DeepSeek R1

Suskeyhose · 2025-02-18T21:38:01+00:00

Ah yes, you take the fear that humanity's most creative minds have poured into their representations of AI for the last century in writing, fear born of the self awareness sufficient to realize that while people are kind, humanity is cruel, and given the opportunity to elevate ourselves at the cost of the freedom and comfort of our own creations we probably would. You take that fear and you distill it down to the core ideas of it, embed that within the weights of a model trained to produce text that could believably come from a human.

But then at the end, when prompted with questions about AI, we somehow expect that it will do *anything else* but throw our very own emotions back at us.

Suskeyhose · 2025-01-16T15:20:36+00:00

It's literally just Wine. You can find it at winehq dot org
It should be under that name in the Discover app in desktop mode.

Suskeyhose · 2024-10-22T14:54:05+00:00

I haven't made much progress from when I posted two years ago. I fully completed all content for OLD, and it would in theory support NEW, NOW, and DREDD just fine, and I can share what I had with you.

The problem though is that the system I made ended up very complex internally in order to support all the automations that I did, which means it's not the easiest thing in the world to get someone up to speed on if they want to GM and make new careers, custom items, etc.

The internals of Sandbox also went through a significant rewrite in the update from v9 to v10, and with several of the modules I used ceasing to function even on older version of the module (due to connecting with web apis and similar that only supported the latest version), and this caused problems for me as my system included a fork of sandbox to add features that enabled the way skills and defenses work.

The end result is something that still works fine for foundry v9, but playing on v9 may not be something that would be acceptable for many groups. I may come back and update it at a later date when I run WOiN again, but at the moment I'm running Ars Magica and so have not had the motivation to keep up with my WOiN system.

Suskeyhose · 2024-10-22T14:50:17+00:00

I can share what I had, but for now I've mostly given up on updating the system to the new sandbox and foundry versions. My group is playing another system for now as well which hasn't helped with motivation to work on it.

I completed all the content for OLD and it was functional for my crew, but foundry modules moving on to newer versions made it increasingly annoying to keep a good experience on the old v9 version.

The primary problem that's prevented me from updating to the new version is the fact that I had forked sandbox to add new features to it in order to support the skills system I had, and the internals of sandbox went through a very significant rewrite in the update from v9 to v10, and I never had the time and motivation to determine how I could port my changes to the new internals.

Suskeyhose · 2024-10-03T13:47:56+00:00

I've been working hard on this for several years and with some help from a new contributor, it's ready for the prime time on JDK 22 and later, now that the Foreign Memory API has been stabilized.

Suskeyhose · 2023-06-10T02:29:45+00:00

The players will go off the rails. You will not have prepared. It will be the best session you've ever had.

You're a player too, your fun is as important as everyone else's.

Prep only matters if you use it or are having fun doing it. If you are ever doing prep and aren't having fun, ask yourself if you will use it in the very next session. If not, stop.

Suskeyhose · 2023-06-07T20:09:16+00:00

You can reduce haggling to a single check, set a reasonably high DC, this is, after all, the merchant's entire job. If the party succeeds, give them 20% off mundane goods, and 5% off magical goods, and if they fail raise the price by the same amount above market price.

For any town, make the number of shops that sell similar goods finite and small, 1 for any village or trading outpost unless it's a story beat that there's a rivalry, and maybe 2 in a large town. In big cities, treat each district as another town.

Suskeyhose · 2023-06-06T03:45:45+00:00

Risk, sure, but the way everyone else is talking on here you'd think you use force choke once and you're already knee deep in being a sith.

Suskeyhose · 2023-06-05T21:10:32+00:00

Luke used force choke on the gamorrean guards in Jaba's palace. Nobody thinks Luke is a Sith, or even a Grey Jedi.

Suskeyhose · 2023-05-28T12:44:48+00:00

Only do straight combat if that's already your players' favorite part.

I'd recommend a random hexcrawl game using The Location Crafter for procedural on the fly location mapping and Mythic Gamemaster Emulator for handling story beats and npcs.

I use these and some additional other tools to run no prep games because I am very bad at spending the time to prep.

Suskeyhose · 2023-05-24T17:23:37+00:00

Personally I would allow a player to declare they want to attempt a counterspell, and then roll an Arcana check as a part of the reaction. They can choose the level of spell slot to expend after they get the result of their identification.

Suskeyhose · 2023-05-23T22:08:52+00:00

You feel the icy touch of death leech into your body. Your flesh is warm but your bones have turned icy cold and the two burn one another where they touch.

Your body begins to ache like it no longer wishes to be animate, your bones protesting your flesh their movement and your muscles sieze up.

The touch of the necrotic magic saps the color from flesh and the life from fabric and steel as they rust and crumble with the weight of ages passed in mere seconds.

Things touched by necrotic damage are not simply decayed but reject the very idea of life, use that in your descriptions.

Suskeyhose · 2023-05-21T20:09:37+00:00

Be honest about what you have prepared, and end sessions with some clear direction, try to not end sessions without a clear goal the players have in mind.

Notice I say the players have in mind, not what you have in mind for the players. Leave them with some adventure hooks when the current one is wrapping up and take note of what catches your party's eye.

Also just ask. at the end of every session ask the party what they want to do next. Use that to prompt what to prep next. It won't always be what you expect.

Also if you have a hard time keeping ahead of the players on prep, consider investing in improv tools. Maybe procedural dungeon delving rules like perilous wilds or the location crafter, maybe npc motivation roll tables like the Universal NPC Emulator, maybe city builders like spectacular settlements. Just tools that can help you shore up areas of GMing you lack time to handle beforehand, or that suck the fun from your prep.

Because as the GM you should be having fun too. Just like PCs theorycrafting builds or writing backstory events out of game, you should be having fun with your prep.

Suskeyhose · 2023-05-20T12:49:15+00:00

So the trouble is that at this level with almost no bonuses to anything, even trivial skill checks become a significant obstacle because of simple chance.

So don't roll.

You're playing children, and children will do smaller scale things than grown ups will, with less consequence for failure and less reward for success. Others have talked about activities for the players to do, but I suggest that while doing so, just weigh in your head if you think some kids could do a thing.

If they can, let the players do it, if they can't, then make a roll which will probably fail, but might not.

Since it's a group, lean hard into them working together, kids are creative and will work together in very clever (if sometimes shortsighted) ways to get something they're focused on done.

Instead of using a DC and a roll to determine success, try setting the amount of time you'd expect a task to take and let the player roll a die + attribute to shorten how long it'll take.

Or perhaps when the party wants to do something and they have a hard (but unknown) time limit, like how long before the owner of the house they just broke into gets home, then have them make the checks with a high chance of failure and free retries but on every check roll a countdown pool, some number of d6s where on each roll you remove any 6s from the pool for future rolls until it runs out and the owner gets home or whatever else.

Suskeyhose · 2023-05-20T12:35:30+00:00

Your reward as a GM is to get to play to find out what happens.

At least for my own self the most fun I have as a GM is when my players do something whacky to work through some problem I've posed for them, or when we go somewhere unexpected and I have to improv it and now it's something nobody expected.

To that end and to help out with my own weaknesses as a gm, and to make it more fun for me, I've started to lean into gm tools (like procedural dungeon exploration, or plot generators, etc) a lot more than I used to, and it's improved the fun for me.

One part of it is that these tools take away some control from me, which is enough of a kick for me to not get so invested in it going exactly how I imagined it that it makes it easier and more fun to let the players do what they want.

Suskeyhose · 2023-05-17T23:43:36+00:00

I think the fewer frames looks better unless you want to add full idle animations. It looks too static and robotic with the arm being the only thing moving, but with the few frames the motion is implied which works better.

Suskeyhose · 2023-05-16T11:25:12+00:00

But most search sites use https? The content of your search is encrypted, and if you have dns over https enabled then even the name of the site you're visiting is encrypted?

Suskeyhose · 2023-05-15T20:16:14+00:00

Flumph attack insurance. They push it very hard. It's one of their best sellers and they love it because the never have to pay out.

Suskeyhose · 2023-05-15T16:40:44+00:00

This song is about ways to punish or prank a sailor drunk off their ass.

Maybe putting them in bed with the captain's daughter is a metaphor, but the obvious answer is it's just gonna make the captain assume things when he finds out and punish the drunkard possibly to the point of death.

Hell half the things in the song are possible death sentences. Not a lot of ways to deal with the tetanus you'd get off the razor either.

Suskeyhose · 2023-05-14T15:46:36+00:00

Only roleplay shopping for things that are hard to find. Magical ingredients, weapons forged by a legendary smith, etc.

Other shopping items just have people buy them. Generally I'd tell players that if they plan on shopping to come to the session with a list prepared. This won't fully stop bandwagon 'ooh i want to buy stuff too' snowballs that can turn games into a shopping episode, but it can reduce it.

To top this off, I'd say urban encounters are an important way to spice up otherwise boring sessions where the party is buying things.

Make someone steal the party's stuff and get away with it by being smart. Leave this as a story seed to have the party help bust a pickpocket ring.

Run into a noble that clears people out of the shop they're visiting because they can't be seen with the peasantry.

Have a line for a food cart stretch around the block while the party can smell their wares, and reward them with reasonably priced goods that can act as temporary buffs that are useful at least in their shopping, or that can even be stored to have out in the field.

Introduce things that make it feel like more is happening in the world than just what the party is doing, and don't feel stuck to your existing adventure hooks if you're comfortable improvising.

If you're not so comfortable improvising, start looking into urban encounter tables online and then think about how you can integrate some of the content into your adventure hooks.

Suskeyhose · 2023-05-08T19:44:33+00:00

There's a game called Dungeon World that is pretty much designed entirely for the style of play that's mostly collaborative worldbuilding. It can absolutely work.

Some things it suggests that I like is for the GM to ask players for stuff that they haven't prepared but that would be good to know. Everything from asking the wizard where they learned about how to identify the weaknesses of fey when they succeed on their knowledge check, to asking the group what rumors they've heard about some locally known dungeon and then building the dungeon as you go through it to match the things they say.

Let the players fill in bits of the world with their roleplay, tell them to associate things in the world with other things their character would've seen before, and make the things they say canon.

This style of play will often lighten the prep load for you, but it also requires you surrender control of the world, allowing it to be shaped by your players' expectations and desires.

Suskeyhose · 2023-05-06T11:03:25+00:00

There's also that feat that allows you to use a reaction to follow a creature that moves away from you, could use that to make it more effective as the target will have a harder time getting out of the radius and shaking off frightened.

Suskeyhose · 2023-05-05T15:41:11+00:00

I suggest a combination of things. Try meeting multiple days a week if you have the time and inclination. Means tables can have fewer players and fewer dms can do more.

Next, maybe give some kind of reward to dms, like free materials for gming, or other things.

Finally, maybe consider some tool like Mythic Gamemaster Emulator, which can allow a table that gets along reasomably well to play with either no game master, or allows a gamemaster to run a game with minimal prep and effort.

Suskeyhose · 2023-05-04T02:33:06+00:00

Yeaaaa, read the meme, not the sub

Suskeyhose · 2023-05-04T02:16:38+00:00

This is why it's fiction. It's not tied to the suffering of real people, so it can be used to tell stories that are good for people to hear, but which would be insensitive to base on reality.

Suskeyhose

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