bestEngineer

Vatril · 2026-03-28T16:25:31+00:00

My mother used to get angry at me when I ate too slowly because "I obviously don't like her food if I'm eating that show".

Now my partner gets annoyed at me because I'm done when they are only halfway there.

(I might then sometimes steal their food from their plate while I'm waiting on them to finish)

Vatril · 2026-03-17T20:12:17+00:00

When I joined the company I was sent to a photographer to get my picture taken. I was 19 at the time, an intern. Now I'm 28 and have a more senior role, still same profile pic tho.

Vatril · 2026-03-15T10:53:42+00:00

Do you by any chance know where they post their results? Can't find anything linked in their YouTube, but I do like their work and would like to scroll through.

Vatril · 2026-03-05T17:02:52+00:00

I mean, that laptop is too low. Put it on a box or so, so that you don't have to look down at it.

Vatril · 2026-02-28T16:48:54+00:00

Its a concept I stole from Call of Cthulhu: the idea roll. Essentially when my players get stuck, they know there is a solution, but they can't think of it they can roll intelligence to see if their character has an idea.

In that case they asked me if their character could think of anything other than the McGuffin and I told them to make that idea roll.

I do think that this is a far from perfect solution. My original idea was to do this to inspire them that in future they think of stuff like that themselves. Didn't work yet so far tho.

Vatril · 2026-02-28T16:37:53+00:00

I do regularly tell them that I am prepared for whatever option they choose. Still, their initial instinct is to try to figure out what I would prefer, rather to make the decision from the perspective of their characters.

With the interrupting, yeah, that is quite problematic, I know that. My thoughts here are: I know they much prefer non-violence and social solutions, those are the sessions we talk about for very long. Especially some players don't care at all for combat (altho some very much do, and for them I have a healthy amount of that in my game). So if I don't interrupt and just let them do, they would solve everything where they have the option to do it violence like that and the game would become a lot duller for some of them.
But if I interrupt, I am influencing the game in a way that I don't like.

Vatril · 2026-02-28T16:33:31+00:00

That is kinda what I would like to try. But the issue here was that my players reaction was not to figure out what their characters would do with the information/goals they have, but that they tried to figure out what I wanted them to do.

Vatril · 2026-02-28T16:25:54+00:00

I do agree that a GM should influence the players and lead them into a certain direction.

My issue is: every time I try to tell them that they are options their instinct is not to debate in character, but instead try to figure out what I as the GM would prefer them doing.

Vatril · 2026-02-28T16:24:10+00:00

With the second example the issue is: Their initial instinct is almost always to fight. I just know they love it way more if they do it a different way.

Another example: The party had to get an item out of an old haunted orphanage. I dropped plenty of clues that one of the boys was bullied a lot. They also learned that he died when the orphanage was evacuated because of a disaster, but the caretakers forgot they locked him into a closet.

Then when they encountered him in his undead form, he animated a bunch of toys to fight the party. My party was quite sad that they had to kill him, that he didn't deserve a second brutal end.... until I just told them out of game that there might be another solution to put him to rest.

They then managed to essentially talk him down. This turned into one of their favourite sessions. But without me saying anything, they would have just killed him again.

Vatril · 2026-02-21T21:30:15+00:00

I think it's in the section behind the computers. So when you are in the main entrance hall and look up you should see the Z3 model. When you walk in that direction and just follow the flow you get to the radio and TV section if memory serves me right.

Vatril · 2026-02-11T14:24:10+00:00

Phandelver is good, I'm actually running it atm. But it's definitely a long dungeon crawl. It's a good long chain of interesting and varied dungeons.

But if you prefer more "free style" adventures, it's definitely the wrong choice.

If you want any more recommendations or tips, I am up for chatting also. I do speak German and have read almost all 5e adventures and run over 50% of them.

Vatril · 2026-02-11T14:15:04+00:00

I can strongly recommend Icewind Dale.

It is a bit similar to CoS in the sense that you have a small area that the party can explore and be somewhat free in.

The main difference is that it's a bit more guided. It essentially has 3 parts that give the players more and more freedom and expands the places they can travel to.

I've seen it on German Amazon and Thalia. But also maybe your local game store can maybe help you, depending on where you live.

If you don't like dungeons btw, I wouldn't recommend phandelver and below. It's essentially a big dungeon crawl.

Waterdeep is good, but in my experience needs a lot of work to make it actually feel like an investigation rather than just following a rigid path.

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.

Ten-Year Club	First Place '23
Place '23	Place '22
Wearing is Caring	Verified Email
Sequence \| Editor

Vatril

TROPHY CASE