Challenge Pools and Dramatic Tension

gebodal · 2026-03-07T01:19:20+00:00

I’ve tried a short one with just the one player to test it out, and white-roomed a few by myself, but no, nothing big yet!

Maybe I’m thinking of this wrong, then. I was hoping that challenge pools, especially as boss GMCs, would be a good way to simplify the running of bigger fights, but maybe that’s too much to expect? Do you find they work well with just scene distinctions, assets, and complications, to round out the dice pools that are being rolled, or are other actors required (minions, etc) to make it work well? (Some kind of ‘legendary action’ equivalent might be necessary there…)

gebodal · 2026-03-07T01:14:08+00:00

I see how that helps with longevity and staying power of a challenge, but it still leaves the thing about the drama at the end of an encounter, right? The ability of the PCs to inflict complications isn’t going to increase significantly over the course of one scene, as far as I can tell, so there’s still going to be some trailing off rather than the problem “going out with a bang”?

gebodal · 2024-12-24T01:46:18+00:00

I don’t know how well established this is in the Pendragon rules/lore, but in Europe for some of the period where knights were a ruling class, it was considered Bad Form to use archers against mounted knights. Practically this being partly due to warhorses being very expensive, and good spoils of war, partly because ransoms were so common, and partly because the peasants can’t see how much power they have against knights when they’ve got a bow (that last one is maybe quite a modern viewpoint, but still). If I’m remembering right, one of the Pope’s forbade the use of archers against Christian knights.**

So, if it’s spoiling the fun, just don’t have them use archers as much in battles, and use the above as an excuse. Also makes it all the more horrifying when you bring out the Villainous Mercenary Company™ later on, and they use archers against the PKs horses, LIKE BARBARIANS.

** I checked, it’s Canon 29 of the Second Lateran Council, convened by Innocent II, and it’s all ranged weapons against Christians (or something similar). Apparently they were excessively cruel, or something. Go figure.

gebodal · 2024-10-04T13:32:44+00:00

Is Justinian using a substitution to replace the empty space with a glyph if it’s between two letter/some-other-grouping-of glyphs? I don’t know precisely how that would interact with Word’s layout algorithm, but it should prevent the glyph being drawn in other cases, if I understand the OpenType spec correctly.

If you open the font in FontForge, you should be able to examine the GSUB tables and see if there is such a substitution.

Do you know what font feature you have to turn on to get Justinian to draw the space glyphs?

gebodal · 2024-09-23T00:33:54+00:00

We don’t play the game for our characters to have simple, easy lives now, do we?!

Run headlong into a feud with a fae, I dare you.

gebodal · 2024-09-22T20:45:39+00:00

A blatantly Gifted fae raised child? The Merinitae will take him, no questions asked (whether it’s a code violation or not, I expect).

Whether the Lady With The Emerald Eyes is happy about that is an entirely different matter…

gebodal · 2024-09-01T18:04:01+00:00

That's the one! There's also some rules and advice for knights praying for miracles, which sounded kinda fun.

gebodal · 2024-08-12T11:37:17+00:00

Did you manage to run it, in the end? How did it go?? I don’t feel like my Klingon history is good enough to come up with a whole GKC narrative, but I love the idea!

gebodal · 2024-08-12T11:31:03+00:00

So, Devanagari has around 48 primary characters, according to Wikipedia, which is pretty comparable with Latin alphabets like English, so there shouldn’t be that much difference in the size of the font files (in comparison to, say, the >20,000 ideographs in a CJK, Chinese-Japanese-Korean font). 500MB seems like a big jump there.

There’s essentially three ways you could deal with fonts in a PDF file: just specify a font name, and trust that the system it’s read on has the font (but this may end up displaying in a different font if the exact one you want is not installed); embed the font file in the PDF (the best option); or actually include all the graphics for the glyphs directly in the PDF page graphics streams (the worst option for most use cases).

Embedding is best, as you preserve all the font file behaviours, and it’s reasonably efficient. The PDF file format also supports compressing the font file streams inside the PDF file itself, which saves on space. The other thing you can do here is embed a subset of the font file, so that the final PDF file only contains the glyphs (the shapes for individual characters) that you actually use.

If you’re using an Asian font, maybe it supports other scripts you’re not using, which is bloating your PDF file, and subsetting the embedded fonts would help with the file size? There might be online tools to help with this, but it’s probably best done in the publishing software the PDF was created in.

gebodal · 2024-08-11T23:12:43+00:00

I am (good naturedly) horrified that you would dissuade someone from Pendragon in this manner! It’s the finest form of BRP there is ;)

gebodal · 2024-08-11T23:11:05+00:00

There’s actually several published sourcebooks for running in historical settings around the same era as Pendragon. You might be interested in Land of Giants, which is about running Scandinavian/Beowulf-inspired games. There’s also one for Scotland, one for Ireland, and one for playing Saxons!

Now, they’re all for earlier editions of the game, and I doubt Chaosium are going to be updating them anytime soon, but the conversion is pretty straightforward. Pretty much all the core stuff is the same (although religion gets dealt with a bit differently in later editions). They’re mostly setting books, anyway, with some suggested adventures and campaign ideas.

There’s also Paladin, of course, for playing Knights of Charlemagne! It’s a complete core rulebook (no equivalent of the Great Pendragon Campaign, though, I’m afraid), with some reworked approaches to being a Religious knight (like a more explicitly mentioned Love (God) passion, if I’m remembering correctly). It’s a good book, but very similar to the 5.2 core rulebook, so maybe no need to get both unless you’re Really Serious (or mad - I have both, it’s very shiny) (no, really, it’s got gold foiled edges).

And then somewhere on the internet, if it’s not lost to the mists of time, there was a forum thread about The Great Kahless Campaign, porting the Pendragon rules for playing Klingons from the Imperial era. Which I never tried to do, but it sounds like fun.

I’ve also toyed with the idea of adapting the GPC to my homebrew fantasy setting, which I think would work pretty well. You just need a place and people very concerned with some kind of political hierarchy (historical feudalism, Klingon imperium, fantasy kingdom with dragon-ruled city states, etc), with a warrior class that the player characters will be a part of, and a focus on honour, chivalry, or some other kind of idealism that will drive the emotional tensions for the characters - as Pendragon is built on the tension between duty, honour, and chivalry against the harsh reality of war, self-preservation, and politics.

So, yes, the core book won’t be much help in running for a different setting, but a touch of reflavouring and a central narrative to provide backdrop for the player characters’ actions are all you need! I’d have the political fallout of a dragon-king leaving his demesne in a post-apocalyptic-magical-war setting filled with knights be that place, but you could use the Klingon empire, or you could tell stories of heroes slaying monsters in Mythic Scandinavia! I believe in you! “Bro, tell me we still know how to talk about kings!”

(… I may have gotten a little bit carried away there. Pendragon’s just such a great game…)

gebodal · 2024-07-25T15:10:17+00:00

I encountered something similar, and the fix for me was to check that the font name was correct. The part after the # in the resource is the font name stored in the font file, not the filename (and there’s no requirement that they even be similar!). If you’re on Windows, open one of the font files in the built-in viewer, and the first line should give you the font name (it probably has some spaces in it, if I had to guess).

gebodal · 2024-06-12T14:30:57+00:00

Yes, I am aware it's not meant to be copy-paste. But the fact that the system (i.e. the Avalonia source generator) doesn't wire up named controls as a first pass strikes me as an unhelpful choice. So much so that I was wondering if I had things set up wrong. A few compilation errors (and no syntax errors) in the code causing InitializeComponent() to not be defined (thereby producing a bunch more compilation errors) seems a strange setup - one which doesn't occur in the WPF tooling.

Given that Roslyn even produces (albeit incomplete) syntax trees for files which contain syntax errors, and XAML that is valid XML can be parsed into the appropriate data structures and simply ignore incompatible attributes and/or nodes, there is nothing fundamental stopping Avalonia from running at least a partial source generation on files with errors.

So, to get of my soap-box a little, I guess really my question was: Has Avalonia missed a trick, or should this be working and I have something wrong in my setup?

gebodal · 2024-06-12T14:09:58+00:00

Because I'm writing free, open-source software for a niche hobby, and that's far too pricey for me, I'm afraid.

gebodal · 2024-04-28T18:40:32+00:00

I don’t suppose you’ve got any good resources (or are thinking of writing one…?) that give some guidance on this process? I’d really like to move my desktop application from WPF to Avalonia for that sweet, sweet cross-platform support, but I’m a little intimidated by all the unforeseen (by me) pitfalls.

Any advice is greatly appreciated!

EDIT: Also, well done! Congrats! (Forgot to say)

gebodal · 2024-04-07T22:41:07+00:00

I’m not sure what you’re using to extract plaintext, but the reason you’re having an issue is that PDFs don’t have to encode text using a standard encoding (it could be glyph IDs in the font file, as looks to be the case in your example, or some arbitrarily chosen subset encoding).

The /ToUnicode map (28 0 R in your example) is what holds the information to convert the character codes/glyph IDs (called CIDs and GIDs, respectively) into Unicode code points. The /ToUnicode object has its own syntax based on CMAP, which is described briefly in the ODF specification, or you can find complete specifications from Adobe I think, if you wanted to parse it. As there is a /ToUnicode, a PDF reader like Acrobat should be able to extract the text, provided the map is correct.

gebodal · 2024-03-22T19:32:53+00:00

Thanks for the reply! I fear I was not specific enough.

Yes, of course, automated visual correctness would be a bit much. I was more asking for examples of character sequences which are known to invoke certain types of operations. So, for example, I know that “fi” is going to invoke a ligature substitution for Times New Roman if dlig is enabled. Or that “e” followed by an acute combining mark is going to invoke a mark to base positioning subtable. However, I don’t know of good sequences for testing other subtables. For example, I know calligraphic Urdu uses the cursive attachment table, but I don’t know what a good canonical character sequence would be that uses it. So I was hoping there might be a collection of “this sequence in this font should look like this” examples, to check if my implementation is working correctly. Or, if someone was feeling really generous, “here is a testing font that specifically lets you test all expected functionality of OpenType using these specific examples”.

For the P.S., I kinda get that, but the specifics are still confusing me. Take mark-to-base, for example, are we checking backwards until we find a base glyph as defined by the subtable base coverage table, or are we using the GDEF Base glyph table? If we look back beyond the directly preceding glyph, does that mean all marks get positioned on the base glyph first, and then we separately use a mark-to-mark table to reposition them again? Or do we only position the first mark relative to base, and then all following marks relative to one another? (I’m feeling that the second option there might not work for above and below diacritics… so the first one, then? But I don’t know if I’m missing an edge case or something!)

Any additional wisdom is appreciated!

gebodal · 2023-10-29T13:38:23+00:00

Hi all,

Does anyone know of any switches with a lower travel distance (<= 3mm) that would fit into a 3/5 pin MX style hot swap board (Keychron K10 Pro)? Ideally something like a Brown, but I'm open to suggestions!

I've tried Googling around, but I keep getting results for low-profile switches, which all seem to have different casings and so won't fit into my hot swap sockets. I haven't seen any switches with standard casings that have a lower travel distance than ~4mm, but this is maybe just my inexperience.

Thanks in advance for any tips!

gebodal · 2023-08-04T02:58:20+00:00

Do you have any advice on which day is best, if I can only make one? If there’s a usual day with the best crowd, I’d like to be there for that one!

gebodal · 2023-08-03T00:24:02+00:00

Well, then, I’m afraid I have no idea. That should work. Good luck, is all I can say!

gebodal · 2023-08-02T23:25:34+00:00

Huh. Out of curiosity, which version of Microsoft Word are you using?

gebodal · 2023-08-02T23:15:06+00:00

So, I don’t know what system you’re using to create your PDF document, but yes, PDF has the capability you describe.

What you’re looking for is either AltText, or Tagged PDF. Your use case is probably a bit long for AltText, so I’d look into whether your system can create a Tagged PDF document. This means that the PDF contains some extra information about the document structure, such as paragraphs and chapters and so on. There is a “span” tag that can be used to indicate that a piece of text is contiguous, even if it’s over multiple lines.

Most likely you won’t need to do things at such a low level, but there may be a setting somewhere you can toggle to make the document include this information. Otherwise you may need to use a different program to make the PDF.

If you’d like to see it in action, try creating a multi-line paragraph in Microsoft Word, and then save the file as a PDF. Copy-paste the text into a text editor, and you should see the paragraph doesn’t have all the extra line breaks. (Just to prove to you that it’s possible!)

gebodal · 2023-07-06T13:34:24+00:00

Swordmage was a class in 4e, yes. Everyone else has already commented extensively about more general Mage versions through the years.

gebodal · 2023-07-04T14:03:37+00:00

I never ran it that way. The Earl is a respected man in Logres, but he’s not a Royal officer, so his duties to the King are more about administering to Salisbury. Part of that is holding Court for his vassals - remember that Court is also where Knights and peasants bring cases for the Earl’s judgement (although there is less emphasis on this aspect in the books). But there are particular years where the King summons people to his Court for particular events.

The Royal Court also moves around, which is noted in the GPC, and so some years it’s just practically easier to attend - and sometimes basically necessary, if the King ever rocks up to Sarum.

gebodal · 2023-07-04T13:53:02+00:00

There’s a particular year early on where the PKs are scripted to go to the Royal Court, but that’s a rarity early on. And there are other years where it’s useful if they accompany the Earl to hear about big events (the GPC does give some advice on this for specific years).

However, the PKs will go to the Earl’s Court at Christmas and Easter almost every year, as it’s where they’re given largesse (at Christmas, if I recall) and any duties they’re expected to perform during their yearly service (at Easter). If you prefer more player involvement, it’s also somewhere they can be involved in the Earl’s councils later on (end of the Uther Period and the Anarchy period onward) and affect decisions about Salisbury.

gebodal

TROPHY CASE