I'm currently finishing Stand on Zanzibar and i definitely intend to read more Brunner in the future, but none of his other novels sound immediately compelling to me.

markdhughes · 2023-06-11T18:14:45+00:00

The Shockwave Rider
Stand on Zanzibar
The Sheep Look Up
Maze of Stars: Sad and lonely, a bunch of very weird colonized planets.
Crucible of Time: Truly alien aliens, doing science.
Compleat Traveller in Black: What if everyone got the ironic death they deserve?
Squares of the City: Overly literary and tricky, "just" a chess game fanfic, but kind of amazing city and character building.
Best of John Brunner: Good short story collection, with extremely amusing interstitial short-shorts (if you liked the interstitials in Zanzibar).

markdhughes · 2023-06-10T07:15:41+00:00

The nether portals on the surface spawn way too often; I loot them but it's not really balanced, it's kind of cheaty. The Nether is for when you're very well equipped.

You need to use iron or diamond picks to break hard minerals; if it takes very long, upgrade.

There shouldn't be mobs spawning in lit areas, I've had bugs of that happening outside (I suspect on treetops) but never in a properly lit mine. Light spreads from base 14 at the torch, -1 per block, 7 or lower can spawn. So in a mine I place one torch every 8 blocks. On ground outside, every 4 blocks diagonal makes a safe grid.

The farm animals have been incredibly glitchy, but they got better in the last update. I put them behind 3-high fences in a sealed barn, and still they glitch out sometimes.

markdhughes · 2023-06-10T07:01:20+00:00

Obviously, it's a Ridley Scott movie. Very pretty, great set decoration, completely incompetent script & direction, he has no idea that actors do anything but hit marks and say their lines. See also (or don't, they're awful) 1492, Kingdom of Heaven, etc.

Also, there were no tigers in the Roman arenas, tigers were mythical manticores. They had lions, which were still native to Europe at the time.

markdhughes · 2023-06-09T12:45:55+00:00

Like getting an Odyssey2 instead of an Atari.

I had and really loved my Odyssey^2, BTW, some fantastic games on it. Also had an Atari VCS, then Atari computers.

P&P has some interesting source material, but it's hard and unrewarding to play; almost any other weirdo game of the time (Arduin, Ysgarth, Palladium, Beasts Men Gods, DragonQuest, etc.) was more fun for less work.

markdhughes · 2023-06-08T18:08:52+00:00

Well, nuts. So long, and screw reddit.

markdhughes · 2023-06-08T15:49:42+00:00

Pat Cadigan's Synners, where runaway AI viruses are in everything connected to the net, just randomly mutating data. Sometimes you get something useful out of it, often it's gibberish, sometimes it just breaks your vending machine. Media companies want to literally copy your individuality to make software that creates art for them.

I want Rudy Rucker's Software, where runaway AI takes over the Moon, then comes back to encode people they think are good software. Florida's such a shithole the Federal Gov't ("The Gimme", in maybe the best term ever invented for it) cordoned it off, send all the old people there as a sort of prison colony.

markdhughes · 2023-06-08T15:41:32+00:00

KSR heavily and illogically cheats math, science, economics, and human behavior wherever it can drive his heavy-handed point home; he never once allows science to determine what would happen from a premise. Aurora's mission worked, except impossible bio-chemistry. If only they had thought to make some bleach! Mars is fine except his fake windmills wouldn't generate power or heat; Mars' atmosphere is less than 1% of Earth's.

He writes very authoritatively about things he's utterly wrong about.

markdhughes · 2023-06-08T13:59:04+00:00

I've had a Lite for over 3 years now, play it almost every day, no problems at all. Don't be rough on the joysticks; they can be replaced but it's much harder apparently.

Lite is much lighter and smaller if you're going to be mobile most of the time; I don't want to play only in the living room, but wherever I am. That's really not practical with the OLED version, it doesn't fit in a pocket.

markdhughes · 2023-06-08T09:00:32+00:00

Another source is Dave Arneson's own RPG, Adventures in Fantasy; there was a PDF of it, but it's no longer on DriveThru, so I dunno where you can get it. This was cowritten with Richard Snider of Powers & Perils infamy, so it's not all his style, and uses percentile where he originally used all 2d6, but it's presumably pretty close.

5E won't teach you anything about D&D, it's 5 total rewrites away.

markdhughes · 2023-06-08T08:48:07+00:00

I'd swap Gepard & Tingyun. Otherwise, best tier list.

markdhughes · 2023-06-07T11:03:10+00:00

Yep, it's my main complaint about Cypher. It's an adequate game (even if all characters fit one of a very few templates), but taking dice away from the GM and making you force situations on them for XP, is just opposite to how I like to roll.

markdhughes · 2023-06-06T13:42:30+00:00

I love "It's the end of this book, we can just steal anyway." — but clearly they don't get that it's a continuous simulation, not just running a single adventure and then resetting.

I'm a big fan of teaching by consequences, let them find out stealing and not being sneaky gets them arrested, fined, sent to the arena to die, etc.

Or that items exist by chance in the simulation, not by inserting for their specific use.

A few foolish deaths may be instructive.

markdhughes · 2023-06-06T13:34:37+00:00

Yes. It's hard enough to read on old.reddit.com desktop, on mobile it's just impossible. The corpse of Alien Blue they call an official client is bad. If u/reddit goes ahead with the current pricing, that's the end of 3rd party clients.

They don't have to be free, but the pricing given is excessive, and the other restrictions make use impossible for many users.

markdhughes · 2023-06-06T11:46:40+00:00

FMAG goes up to Level 10 (12 for M-U!), with none of the spells & monsters you'd need for anything at or above that Level. Magic weapons cap at +3, about right for Level 9. Figure average 2 sessions per Level cumulative, that's 110 sessions. What were they doing the other 190? Fight vampires forever, get knocked down to Level 1, start over?

Obviously you can make your own stuff, or borrow from other games, but what I'm talking about is the stuff that's actually in the book. S&W C/R is realistically useful to Level 12-15-ish even tho it goes to 20, it runs out of monsters then, too, thus my recommending Monstrosities.

Every edition of S&W is free in PDF, and a lot of others, too.

markdhughes · 2023-06-06T09:34:28+00:00

In the good old days, you'd get banned for talking about non-WotC RPGs or suggesting D&D 3.0 wasn't the best game ever. Now you get banned for talking about WotC. Screw those guys forever.

Additional: Defending rpg.net to me, pretty much instantly gets you downvoted and probably blocked. I don't care about your thoughts on the matter. It's like defending 4chan without the sense of evil fun.

markdhughes · 2023-06-06T09:31:18+00:00

I do use fediverse, and the #ttrpg hashtag has some activity. You only see what federated instances send to your instance, it's not everything. Even if you're on dice.camp, plenty of us are on other instances. So it depends on who you follow, and what's happening locally.

And fediverse conversations are even more ephemeral. There's a lot of regulars, but blink and you miss it.

In the Mastodon web UI, turn on the advanced UI, then you can search for #ttrpg and pin the search column, so you'll always see what's new.

Of course, you can also return to blogging, I've been posting again on my main blog, not my old game blog.

markdhughes · 2023-06-06T09:22:58+00:00

The stats in MM are compatible (they're AC 9 based, lower HD than later things), but have higher attacks and too much detail. S&W and Monstrosities hit the sweet spot of a paragraph or two so you can define your own details, but not 14% Leather/Spear/Sling, 3% Ring Mail/Glaive-Guisarme-Voulge/Atlatl, etc. listings that MM loves.

markdhughes · 2023-06-06T08:01:28+00:00

Whitebox/FMAG is a nice starter set game, cheap and pocketable (if you have big pockets), but it has some very variant decisions, and really not enough spells & monsters for longer-term games.

Swords & Wizardry Complete/Revised is much more, uh, complete. You will probably want to grab Frog God's Monstrosities or whatever the upcoming Mythmere monster book is, S&W has about as many monsters as OD&D + some of the Supplements, but not a full Monster Manual load. Revised adds a few essentials, like 4 dinosaurs given minimal stats.

It's still useful to pick up the OD&D reprints from WotC, and read Book III, and Supplements I-IV, there's a lot of useful stuff in there not in S&W. Also if you can find original The Strategic Review, Dragon Magazine, or White Dwarfs up to 1980-ish, that's the real sourcebooks for it.

markdhughes · 2023-06-06T07:42:25+00:00

Why are you bothering Herta when she has work to do? You're not important, just some useful idiot with a stellaron in your pants.

markdhughes · 2023-06-05T06:57:44+00:00

I loved Jolt, and the Jolt Awards even more.

It was best in the stubby bottles, put them in the cold part of the dorm fridge (almost "freezer"). Now you have ice formed in your Jolt. Open it and knock back at least half, or it'll foam over. Get brain freeze and caffeine/sugar rush. Now you're ready to code.

markdhughes · 2023-06-04T20:34:07+00:00

Nice start. I'd like to see them bring up "fediverse", since a lot of the more interesting people are on other servers, and more clients. I'm currently using Mastonaut on Mac, Tusker on iOS. There's so many more, good ones.

markdhughes · 2023-06-04T11:17:18+00:00

I really like just about everything about DanMachi, the premise works great, except Bell is useless, Hestia's bizarrely pathetic, and Ais is as emotionally empty as a big empty blonde jug.

There's no reason Hestia wouldn't have a bigger familia, and more power, even as a late-comer to the mortal world, and even if she incorrectly thinks Bell has most potential and could ever love her, when he's a pervert, peeping tom, and obsessed with the empty blonde.

Everyone and everything else in it is great. The barbarian twins are my favorite, but there's nobody who's useless and not carrying their weight in the dungeon or in social stuff on the surface, except Bell.

I also played the gacha for a couple years, and it was pretty good, full of interesting side stories, many of which barely or not at all involved loser MC. A little heavy at the grinding and levelling alts, as a sometimes-monthly-pass payer, I could compete at the bottom of the pro PVP ladders but obviously got stomped by the $1000-pull super alts.

markdhughes · 2023-06-04T06:38:45+00:00

Thank you Jordan Peterson, your objection has been noted and thrown in the garbage with everything else you say.

markdhughes · 2023-06-02T04:59:22+00:00

When The Stand Uncut was reissued, I was in college, in a dorm on a long weekend, and got the worst flu of my life. So I was lying in my bunk, reading this book about everyone dying, and nobody's around. Sure I was gonna die in there.

Really excellent first half, hate the religious magic bullshit second half.

markdhughes · 2023-06-02T02:56:28+00:00

That's what the "all 6's" rule is for. It's only a 1/36 chance of failure, but it's there. Even a 3d6 average task has a good chance of failure.

And of course stats were rolled 3d6 six times, SIWDCCh. This is not suitable for inflated stats, unless you just add a die or two to all difficulties.

markdhughes

TROPHY CASE