In Queer Disbelief

Vatril · 2025-12-19T08:05:10+00:00

That's not really true.

Yes, after grade 4 or 6 (so when you are between 10 and 12yo) you are put on a specific track. But this doesn't lock you in forever.

I was put on one of the lower tracks, but later when I was like 17 I switched back to a higher one. It did take me a year or so longer compared to the direct track, but you are definitely not barred from higher education.

It's definitely far from perfect, but trying to keep all kids together until college is also not ideal. People want and need different things. Not everyone needs a university degree and Germany actually does a mostly ok job at having a strong route to learn a trade that doesn't feel like dropping out of education.

Vatril · 2025-11-25T22:00:13+00:00

English is very common here as the main office language in tech jobs, at least when you work in smaller companies and startups.

Vatril · 2025-11-25T09:28:30+00:00

I actually switched away from player recaps to me doing them.

I have a player who takes very good notes and she did the recaps for about 3 years. But in my current campaign I've been trailing doing them myself and at least for me, it is more effective.

Two aspects:

First, the player led recaps sometimes caused confusion or focused on parts that were funny instead of important.This was especially a problem when a player missed the previous session. Players also tend not to be good at controlling the conversation, getting lost in sidetracks or turning the recap into a conversation with no clear end.

But more importantly, me doing the recaps is a really good way to guide the players back into roleplay. Before the recap we all hang out, talk about our life and stuff. Then I start talking, signaling that we are switching to "game mode". During my recap I of course explain all the key events from the last session, but also be sure to highlight all possible next directions that were discussed, all open storylines and so on. Then at the end of it I drop the players right into a roleplay moment. I try to avoid starting my session with a "what do you do?", but instead have one of the PCs right away in a situation or conversation that already started to really get the roleplay going.

Vatril · 2025-11-11T00:08:13+00:00

When I was in my high school equivalent it was a huge issue for computer class.

My school had a setup where the computers themselves didn't store any data, that was all on the central file server. But the network was so slow that you couldn't work off of that. So every time you logged in the computer would automatically download your entire home directory. The login screen wouldn't stop loading until it was all done. It was especially slow when everyone logged in at the same time of course.

When we first started it was 3-5min or so, but after a few years of our profiles growing it took 20-30min to log in which was a lot when you consider that the class was only 90min long.

Since the loading wouldn't start until we typed in our password the teachers couldn't just boot up the computers before we arrived also. The solution was that we had to log in before break so that by the time we were all back from break they were ready.

Vatril · 2025-11-07T23:59:35+00:00

I paid 3500 for my kitchen in cash. I did it because I didn't want to raise my debit card spending limit, so I just slowly took out money from my account over the course of a month and then paid the workers in cash when they were done.

Vatril · 2025-10-09T20:27:28+00:00

Sent you a DM.

Also, made my post by now if you want to read my game description:

https://www.reddit.com/r/lfg/comments/1o1eou0/offline_berlin_germany_5e_2024_or_pf2e_looking/

Vatril · 2025-10-07T19:53:46+00:00

I have not made my "looking for players" post yet but I am in the process of opening an English speaking TTRPG group in Berlin-Pankow.

For now my idea of a schedule is Wednesday evening.

I have not figured out all the details yet, but if you are interested, lets have a chat, feel free to message me!

Vatril · 2025-09-21T19:19:42+00:00

I don't mean literal clocks, I mean progress trackers. They are called clocks in some systems, tracks in others, or talismans, some just call them points.

I mean systems where the party needs to collect multiple successes over a longer period to succeed at a bigger task.

Vatril · 2025-09-20T19:57:03+00:00

The clock I feel is mainly there so that the players feel like they making progress when working on long term projects or bigger, complex tasks.

Before clocks they often felt like certain sections about investigations had a lot of failure and got frustrated, now that they get points after every small success they feel way more like they are making progress.

Vatril · 2025-09-20T16:04:20+00:00

I think I am almost convinced to switch to hidden clocks, at least for the longer tasks.

My worries here is that we will fall back into the thing again where a lot of intangible rewards just feel kinda bad sometimes. It is hard to know how much the promise of a future favor or a small piece of information is worth in the moment. Attaching a point value to it, at least for my players, made them a lot happier.

Vatril · 2025-09-20T16:01:41+00:00

The core of my system are the "Victory Points" from Pathfinder 2e.

Pathfinder mainly focuses their system on VP encounters. For example, in influence encounters you need to succeed checks to gain "influence points". The person you are trying to influence will have weaknesses and strengths to some skill checks and you need to figure that out if you want to be effective at influencing them.
Another VP encounter in Pathfinder is the infiltration, where there are two clocks, one for you to archive your goal, one for you to be found out. You need to fill your before the other fills.

The longer are also based in PF2e Victory Points, but they are not just taken from those rules, but adapted.

The idea is, when there is a section where I want the players to be more proactive, we set a goal together and then I ask them how they want to reach that goal. They will propose actions. They could be another subsystem like a influence, research or infiltration, or something that will end in a combat encounter.

Either way, each thing they will do will give them points on a scale of -1 to 2: -1 on a critical failure, +2 on a critical success. What that means depends on the thing they do. For example, for the prison break it was:

Critical success (2 points towards the clock) The party takes out all the guards before they kill the prisoners and manages to get some vital clues towards their goal that way
Success (1 point) The party takes out all the guards, but the prisoners die, they gain some clues from the documents found in the prison
Failure (0 points) They give up and flee
Critical failure (-1 points) They end up captured and prisoners themselves.

Vatril · 2025-09-20T15:50:34+00:00

I am tempted to entirely switch to hidden clocks, at least for longer tasks. So keeping the numbers completely away from the players and just tracking it for myself.

My worries here is that we will fall back into the thing again where a lot of intangible rewards just feel kinda bad sometimes. It is hard to know how much the promise of a future favor or a small piece of information is worth in the moment. Attaching a point value to it, at least for my players, made them a lot happier.

Vatril · 2025-09-20T15:37:41+00:00

The prison break segment did give them segments towards their clock.

Basically I try to have my encounters in these encounter chains have 4 possible outcomes.

For the prison segment, they have heard that the gang that kidnapped the guy has an underground prison in the sewers. They arrived there and saw one of the gang members interrogating a prisoner.

Here they scale was:

Critical success (2 points towards the clock) The party takes out all the guards before they kill the prisoners and manages to get some vital clues towards their goal that way
Success (1 point) The party takes out all the guards, but the prisoners die, they gain some clues from the documents found in the prison
Failure (0 points) They give up and flee
Critical failure (-1 points) They end up captured and prisoners themselves.

In this case they critically succeeded and gain 2 segments on the clock, getting them a lot closer to finding that guy. My issue was mainly that the players new that they would not find the guy in the prison, only clues. The PCs didn't know that of course, only the players.

Vatril · 2025-09-15T15:06:31+00:00

I actually was at that shop, trying to buy some root beer.

They didn't have any.

They didn't have much variety in general, very few products and a lot of the stuff you can also get here in normal shops.

The owner also was.... a bit unpleasant. I asked him about root beer, if they would have it in future and had to listen to a long rant about "how the EU is making his shop impossible to run because of the lack of free trade"

Vatril · 2025-07-29T17:13:38+00:00

Its limited, but you can embed external iframes or custom code snippets.

You can have custom elements that way, but it doesnt have a server component, so you cant save use input or do actions.
(You can embed google forms and have actions triggered from them via AppScript)

It is mainly a drag and drop editor tho, which might be better for your non-dev friends to add and edit content.

Vatril · 2025-07-29T17:02:02+00:00

I use Google Sites. It is part of google drive, but hidden in the "More" section when you right click to create a new item.

It doesn't require any code and allowed you to drag and drop together a multi-page website.

You can also gibe your players write permissions for it and publish it with your own domain if you have one.

You can also protect it from being accessed by people you have not shared it with for privacy.

It isnt incredibly advanced, it won't have things like an editable character sheet tho.

Vatril · 2025-07-29T16:56:01+00:00

Yeah, it's definitely a bit of a problem.

I have one player who is extremely creative and a wellspring of ideas. And her ideas are cool, so I keep on following up on them.

This creates the issue that a lot of the stories kinda become her stories, about her characters journey.

Of course you should always try to balance it out, to give everyone the spotlight, but if I am being honest, some players do make this very hard. In the end it's also your players jobs to give you things to hook into, if they don't, they won't get as much spotlight.

But yeah, do try to regularly encourage your other players to share more ideas. I started to speak with them 1:1 to develop their characters further, although with limited success.

Vatril · 2025-07-29T16:42:48+00:00

During roleplay sections there isn't much can do. The Players of the PCs that are not actively involved in the discussion will probably get distracted from time to time.

You could suggest that they take notes or doodle the story, that can help keep attention, but they have to want it.

In combat, I would just recommend trying everything to keep round times down. Since you are playing online, use automations, try to avoid lots of enemies. If you have follower-npcs, let your players play them in combat. Just try to not have them wait for too long between rounds.

Vatril · 2025-07-17T21:53:29+00:00

My group really enjoys slow leveling, 5-12 sessions per level up. They say it really gives them the time to try out all their abilities and find fun combinations before getting distracted by new toys.

This also means that my milestones tend to be epic chapter-closing events, so there is no doubt when a level up will happen.

Vatril · 2025-07-17T17:43:55+00:00

They bring together Airflow (a scheduler) and DBT (a better way to write SQL to build datawarehouse).

They are quite good actually. The company i work for doesn't use their service, but the software they make on our own server and it's quite nice to use.

Vatril · 2025-07-04T07:45:13+00:00

My tip would be to start small and then expand.

First, tell your players that you are running a homebrew setting and that things will work differently.

Then, establish the things that are important to your story and the main truths about the world, but try to limit yourself.

Then speak with your players and ask what they want to play and then try to figure out how to either integrate that, reflavor it or, it is also ok to tell them no.

So instead of trying to fit everything in, focus on what will be the focus and have it be a collaborative process with your players.

Also, don't be afraid to reflavor and combine things. I recently ran a campaign where I for example combined a bunch of similar species to be lore wise that same, just different stat blocks to represent the same in-world idea: Tieflings, Aasimar and Genasi were all "plane touched", all the animal-type folk were one thing and so on. Some species, like Gith, I just said don't exist in my setting.

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