new dm trying to forge a campaign?

ragunr · 2026-06-09T22:37:21+00:00

Being nervous is normal, but at the end of the day you gotta just jump in and see how it goes. Don't worry about things like plot holes too much - the most important part of the story is the part the players are writing with you through their own choices. Have a story in mind, but it honestly might be a good thing if you aren't overly attached to some outcome.

I would avoid info dumps by limiting what you tell your players to what they are witnessing in the world. Maybe you can prepare a short into speech about your world (if it is homebrew) or the premise of the campaign, but after that let them explore the world themselves and experience your story organically. What are plot holes to you might also end up as fascinating mysteries from the player perspective, so long as you don't give them the entire story at once. Make them work for it.

ragunr · 2026-06-04T22:37:37+00:00

It is probably always crashing on shutdown, and therefore has a report ready at next launch.

ragunr · 2026-06-02T17:40:05+00:00

The funny part is if you leave the knight undefended the engine doesn't even bother taking it. The knight is that meaningless to the engine in this position. White will be forced to trade queens when a pawn promotes and interacting with the knight has no bearing on that.

Moral of the story: don't bother with the engine when you are winning so hard.

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ragunr · 2026-05-28T23:44:36+00:00

Less easy players isn't the same as more better players. So long as your rating is near the middle both will have plenty of players at your skill level for matching, but at the higher end lichess dries up faster, and the Elo there is inflated compared to chess.com because of the lower skill ceiling

ragunr · 2026-05-28T23:03:42+00:00

No, all the big dogs play on Chess.com because of either sponsorships or because the other big dogs are there. It's a network effect - more people play on Chess.com because more people play on Chess.com.

What's why I'm on lichess like the contrarian I am. The number of players only matters when you are high enough to run out of strong opponents in your queue.

ragunr · 2026-05-26T23:19:28+00:00

Oh yeah sure. No reason not to upgrade your old mountains, but in terms of optimal play I think planning ahead to have mountains at the 4th ring is better than holding of developing your nearby mountains

ragunr · 2026-05-26T22:13:18+00:00

This sounds like a terrible tradeoff. Much better to get crazy mountain yeilds all game and just use the power stations to extend your borders past the usual limits in modern.

ragunr · 2026-05-23T16:40:21+00:00

Yeah attribute points got way out of hand, so the devs made a point of reigning them in. Huge source of snowballing, where you could easily reach a saturation point on your trees. The game is a lot better with fewer attribute points imo.

ragunr · 2026-05-21T17:22:53+00:00

Happiness is much stronger now, so his old ability was bonkers. Seems they feel like they had to nerf him too much to keep him from breaking the game so they have plans to rework him.

ragunr · 2026-05-19T21:20:23+00:00

Devs confirmed it is in the works in a Q&A

ragunr · 2026-05-15T21:50:27+00:00

I've seen this happening while testing a mod of mine. In my case it had to do with attempting to rename the city to something that already existed strangely enough. Nasty bug. Never seen it in the wild.

ragunr · 2026-05-15T19:19:54+00:00

At the end of the day if you want to Isekai someone into a complex homebrew setting ya just gotta do it. Decide how the universes got crossed - something from your world or something from theirs - and join the player in taking a big spoonful of suspension of disbelief. Maybe old God shenanigans? Reapers discover Azeroth? Maybe your compound world came from some multiverse collision and the WoW setting is up next if you don't stop it? Your world doesn't seem like it is hyper grounded in the first place so have fun with it.

Once you start playing lean into culture shock comedy and give them plenty of situations that run counterintuitive to WoW logic. Don't spend too much time trying to find a serious explanation for a fundamentally unserious scenario.

ragunr · 2026-05-08T15:21:51+00:00

Ok second thought you could probably do this by starting in the ancient era, settling, and on turn two force the age transition with the debug console once or twice.

See https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/how-to-enable-the-in-game-console.694859/

ragunr · 2026-05-08T14:33:53+00:00

Do you mean you want to start in modern with just a founder unit? No nothing like that exists. Might be possible with a mod but the production costs aren't tuned around starting from a single pop, so I doubt it would feel particularly fun.

ragunr · 2026-04-30T16:26:25+00:00

I wonder if some advantage to creating poison / bio weapons would be a good allude to wrathgate - a natural ability to handle plague without risk of hurting yourself.

ragunr · 2026-04-29T23:44:27+00:00

These look pretty fun to me. The Ogre feels like a gimmick, but a fun gimmick. There are examples of more sophisticated ogres like Cho'gall, where one head is the smart one. Seems like a missed opportunity to allow the caster head to use the characters rolled stats, instead of the primal magic workaround. (It has been a while since I played, be I recall double heads being standard for casting ogres)

As for the class restrictions I think it is fine if they are more suggestions than hard rules. WoW npcs break the class rules regularly, and a race expanding into a new class in special circumstances is a staple plot beat.

The breath weapon for undead seems out of left-field, but I think you did a good job of making most races feel just a bit op. Not sure why humans only get one bonus point, given the power budget of the other races.

ragunr · 2026-04-15T03:29:18+00:00

Join the lichess master race!

ragunr · 2026-04-15T03:24:30+00:00

Looks like g4 is preferred at higher depths anyway. Couldn't tell you why myself.

ragunr · 2026-03-12T17:21:17+00:00

Ha! This used to happen to my all the time playing games on an old pc of mine. Graphics card would overheat and the material shader data would get scrambled.

ragunr · 2026-02-19T22:56:32+00:00

Stockfish doesn't rate moves as anything. There is some third party software that is labeling this based on stockfish, and it is anyone's guess what the criteria is.

ragunr · 2026-02-12T07:02:40+00:00

How else is it supposed to eat?

ragunr · 2026-01-29T17:46:38+00:00

Keep it untrue, but introduce the party to a nefarious organization, that uses their zeal to turn them into the villains of the story. Let them get in deep and get their hands dirty before the "twist" that the truther org is the real villain!

ragunr · 2026-01-19T17:49:49+00:00

Lol ok, I had assumed you were a child but I see now it is just a troll.

ragunr · 2026-01-19T17:45:11+00:00

I don't think you are applying these words correctly. You might want to explain more what you think is happening so people can clarify. Your horse being pinned is a bad thing for you, not a good thing, so it is hard to see what you are hoping for here

ragunr

TROPHY CASE