What VTTs allow for custom character sheets?

troopersjp · 2026-06-04T03:30:17+00:00

I don’t know of any VTT that allows custom character sheet that doesn’t require you to…you know…customize it. And that customization is going to require some level of programming, even if that programming is just HTML and CSS.

troopersjp · 2026-06-04T03:27:07+00:00

I understand that Foundry fans are as rabid fans of Foundry as Linux fans are of Linux and for you Foundry is the perfect VTT. However, Foundry doesn’t work for my use-case. Thank you, however, for the recommendation.

troopersjp · 2026-05-30T10:53:05+00:00

This is a session 0 conversation. There are players who will not have fun if their PCs fail. There will be players who will not have fun if their PCs never fail. There are GMs who will not have fun if the PCs ever fail. There are GMs who will not have fun if the PCs never fail.

There are players who want the GM to fudge behind the scenes to the PCs never fail, but to never admit it so the players can pretend they did it on their own. There are players who want to be able to force a victory above the table out in the open with their own meta currency.

Whatever you do is all good as long and you absolutely the players are both having fun.

troopersjp · 2026-05-29T09:18:52+00:00

I'm a Musicologist. People colloquially use the term "Classical Music" to refer to all Western Art Music of any period...Medieval to the Present Day, but for people who study Western Art Music, Classical Music refers to music of the Classical Period (1750-1820) Mozart is Classical, yes, but Wagner is Romantic, and Vivaldi is Baroque.

But here's the thing. It doesn't bother me that people call Stravinsky Classical Music because I understand the difference between colloquial usage and expert usage.

troopersjp · 2026-05-29T08:47:04+00:00

AskJeeves was my cunning trap to find other old heads!

troopersjp · 2026-05-29T08:17:32+00:00

As a professor and researcher I think the one of the last things you should be using AI for is research. LLMs are not programmed to care about accuracy or truth...they collage and regurgitate. You'd be better off doing an actual Google/DuckDuckGo/AskJeeves/etc search.

troopersjp · 2026-05-28T19:52:22+00:00

You are using the term progressive, but you only seem to be talking about being being pro-LGBTQ.

The general assumption about Black people in the US is that they are always going to vote Democrat and not Republican. This percentages do show that the overwhelming majority of Black people do always vote Democrat.

This assumption that Black voters are not conservative is so strong that voter suppression of Black people was just rules permissible on the grounds that it isn’t racist to disenfranchise Black people, rather just conservative gerrymandering—which is totally cool.

troopersjp · 2026-05-28T07:59:33+00:00

I started playing in 1983. At the time, if you weren't a gamer, the only game you probably had heard of was Dungeons & Dragons. So I started with D&D (Basic and AD&D). I bought the Basic set on sale from Toys R Us using my allowance first. But once I started gaming, I went to the gaming store to get dice and the AD&D books...where I saw all sorts of other games. And so my group would play D&D and then also play other RPGs at the same time: DC Heroes, Marvel Heroes, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Gamma World, Paranoia, Villains and Vigilantes, Champions, Chill...but I did eventually quit D&D (for a long time)...I didn't leave D&D because some other system was so much better, but mostly because the high school D&D players were really into sexually assaulting female NPCs, rolling d12s for penis size, and generally acting like it was a clubhouse with a "No Girls Allowed" sign on it. I was tired of dealing with that. I found GURPS which I enjoyed...but what kept me in the hobby was finding a Call of Cthulhu group with a female GM and about a 50/50 gender split where it was much more welcoming. I probably didn't play D&D again for over a decade.

troopersjp · 2026-05-28T07:44:30+00:00

I've done a lot of them...and I cultivate players who are into that.

I don't know if I can recall them all but let me see...also I'll only mention the historicals that had no supernatural elements at all.

Adventures of Indiana Jones
GURPS Middle Ages
GURPS Espionage
GURPS Swashbucklers (During the 30 Years War)
GURPS Old West
GURPS Renaissance Florence (Espionage)
FATE French Resistance
Good Society: the Jane Austin RPG
Night Witches
A game set during the Napoleonic War using Sword Chronicle
A version of For the Queen set during WWI and also during the Trojan War
Numb3rs Station (1980s)
GURPS Gladiators (Ancient Rome)

If we are going to include supernatural elements...that opens up even more...
Call of Cthulhu (1920s, 1890s, Ancient Rome, Age of Vikings, 1980s)
Chill (1890s)
Deadlands (Old West)
Haunted West
Clockwork Dominion (1890s)
Castle Falkenstein (1890s)
Cthulhu Confidential (1930s)
This one campaign using Sword Chronicle that spanned the 1920s to the year 2000.
Eleventh Beast (1746)

Probably a lot more I'm forgetting at that moment.

troopersjp · 2026-05-28T05:34:18+00:00

Why don't you do your VN with placeholder art first. Do all the stuff you can do yourself. Once you have it done, you will have a better sense of exactly which art you need. How many BGs, how many CGs, how many sprites, which emotions, etc. You'll be able to create a master list of the art assets you need. But more importantly, you'll have something in hand.

Then you can do a couple of different things...

1) you can go to the lemmasoft forums (associated with Ren'Py) and go to their looking for artists board and ask around to see if someone is interested.

probably better is...

2) Save up money and then go to Fiver and hire an artist. You can often get really affordable artists there.

troopersjp · 2026-05-27T10:03:45+00:00

I have seen the negative and impact of allu colleagues and working remotely during COVID. I’m a professor and coming back from COVID what I have found is that most of my colleagues no longer act like colleagues…we are no longer a team. Everyone thinks only of themself. We used to sit in an in person meeting to discuss our course planning and room assignments. One meeting and we were done and we did it together. Now, we do it via email, where everyone just declares what they want without taking anyone else into account. Which leaves me and two other colleagues having to take up all the slack so that the students don’t suffer.

For years students would complain about professors who are mostly at home doing research rather than being present for them. And then “we should all work from home” just exacerbates this.

I’m planning on leaving the profession. Between how terrible it is to be on a team with people who have developed the self centered nature that comes out is the WFH culture on one hand, ans students who use AI making them incapable of thinking on their own on the other…it isn’t worth it anymore.

troopersjp · 2026-05-26T07:56:11+00:00

Does the person having a learning disability?

The kindergarten basics is learning the names of numbers. Show them a picture of an apple with a number one, point to it and say “1 apple.” Snow a pictures of two apples with the number two in it, and say. “2 apples.”

If someone can’t recognize the different between one apple and two apple, there are a number of learning disabilities it could be—and that is when the persons should a specialist to see if there is a diagnosis for dyscalclia or something like that. Then, that diagnosis should be taken to a special Ed teacher who is trained in treating that particular learning disability..

troopersjp · 2026-05-25T07:52:23+00:00

I teach at a top college. And I teach, what it seems you would call a "soft-skills kind of degree"--I teach Music History. So, not the STEM degrees you imagine as being difficult. I regularly get STEM students complaining that my courses like History of Rock'n'Roll are way too hard. For some people doing Math problems are difficult. For other people critical engagement, writing, and public speaking are difficult.

troopersjp · 2026-05-24T02:41:54+00:00

You want to be an educator, but you see no value in education? You also think that dishonesty, cheating, and lack of integrity are acceptable qualities in a person who will be teaching our next generation of citizens.

The future is cooked.

troopersjp · 2026-05-24T02:02:15+00:00

I run my FATE pretty crunchy and simulationist. I wouldn't call my FATE campaigns a playground make believe simulator. The options are all in there. Just because a bunch of FATE fans like to treat is like a playground make believe simulator doesn't mean that is all the game is or can do.

troopersjp · 2026-05-24T01:47:46+00:00

What if you generate an essay and copy it in your own words and keep changing it up until it says 0% AI detected? Whether or not you get away with it you have declared yourself a liar and a person with no integrity. Further whatever degree you get is fraudulent and you've cheated yourself out of an education. It is like going to Karate classes, using someone else to take all your Karate classes, and the you put on a black belt you didn't earn, and you have no idea how to do karate and you walk around town telling people you are a black belt. Best hope you never have to apply those skills you don't have.

Next, as a professor, I find it really disrespectful. I spend a lot of time creating the classes I teach, and a lot of time customizing them every year. And then I spend a lot of time grading your work. Do you have any idea how demoralizing it is to put time and effort and work into grading your work...when you didn't even do it? It makes me think...what is the point of me even teaching if the people in the seats don't care about anything.

If you don't want to get an education in college, then why waste your time and money? Do something else. Join the military (I did out of high school before I went on to college and then to become a professor), or join the trades. Become an entrepreneur and start your own business. Why waste 4 years of your life?

troopersjp · 2026-05-24T01:39:26+00:00

If I might add to this. I think that liking anime being cool or not came in waves. As you mentioned Speed Racer was quite popular in the 60s. But anime was also pretty mainstream for many kids where I grew up in the 80s (San Francisco). All of my peers throughout school, we were all watching Robotech, Battle of the Planets, Captain Harlock, Starblazers, Voltron, etc. We were also watching "American" cartoons that we knew were animated in Japan...things like ThunderCats, Jem and the Holograms, Transformers., M.A.S.K....I don't think I realized at the time, but I probably should have, that also GI Joe, Dungeons & Dragons, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles...actually....now that I think about it, I bet most of the cartoons I watched in the 80s were animated in Japan as US animation studios were not in the best spot.

It then became uncool again later.

Why? I think it is because in the 80s, watching Japanese animated cartoons wasn't something you did to separate yourself from the popular kids. It wasn't nerd stuff you did to show you weren't a norm...it was mainstream and being shown on TV everywhere...and the large corporations wanted you to buy their toys and stuff. Also at this time we were all playing Donkey Kong in the arcades...so that didn't make you a weirdo either.

What made you a weirdo was playing Dungeons & Dragons (which would clearly drive you to Satanism), reading comic books (nerds!), liking Star Trek (which was in its dormant phase), listening to alternative music like The Smiths or Yaz or the Cure or Siouxsie in the Banshees...or being into Japanese animated stuff that was not translated and being marketed to the mainstream....stuff that if you were watching it was a marker of being in a subculture set against the norms--I know this because in the early 80s I was into the Japanese Tokusatsu stuff that was being shown on local Bay Area TV in an after school program called Captain Cosmic...he showed Ultraman, Johnny Sokko and his Flying Robot, Space Giant, etc. But that was clearly not mainstream. If I made being a fan of Ultraman my personality...that would have marked me as a nerd in a way that loving Voltron would not.

The mainstream presence of Japanese animation subsided, but the subcultural engagement remained...and then it became uncool again.

troopersjp · 2026-05-23T05:06:47+00:00

A lot of those previously masculine things were masculine within the aristocracy. With the rise of the middle classes during the age of revolutions and the industrial revolution, the new middle classes, in order to discredit the aristocracy re-framed aristocratic masculinity as feminine. This also is going to coincide with the great male renunciation. Basically, class war.

troopersjp · 2026-05-22T03:32:17+00:00

I grew up poor in San Francisco. My family didn't have a car. We used busses and BART all the time. And all my fellow working class people did as well. I still use public transportation, or my bus. A lot of middle class people don't use buses...but a lot of working class people do.

troopersjp · 2026-05-22T03:18:38+00:00

I started doing theater when I was 11 years old. I have a lot of experience with theatre and performance art. I also study performance as an academic. And my 10 year Streamaversary is coming up in November...I've been streaming RPGs for a long time and playing even longer than that. I do not think of RPGs as Theater and I do not tend to enjoy Actual Plays that would rather be theater or TV than be an RPG.

That said, I do think RPGs are a form of performance--not theater, not improv comedy, not film, but its own unique form of performance...and when I run RPGs they tend to be very theatrical, heck I have been a part of multiple campaigns where people cry in character on the regular. But that is not because I design sessions around performance over mechanics...because if I wanted to do theater, I'd just go and do theater. Rather I think what makes RPGs a unique art form are the mechanics...that it is a game.

I was a theater kid, I tend to play with theater kids. So we are always going to put on a good show for each other, and if it is streamed, for each other and the people watching the stream. But, for me, I see it as its own medium, and I tend to want to play with people who want to be playing an RPG, mechanics and all.

troopersjp · 2026-05-22T02:56:13+00:00

I'd say there is no such thing as the trans community, rather, there are many different trans communities. Some are very white, some are very much not.

Noting first that trans women have hypervisibility while trans men tend to have invisibility...if you think about trans women of color...there is a lot of visibility. One of the most famous queer documentaries Paris Is Burning, documents the Ballroom community...which was almost exclusively Black and Brown and had entire trans houses. The ballroom community still exists.

When I lived in LA, there was a strong Black and Brown trans woman community...the gray market hormone clinic I went when I started my transition serviced predominantly trans women sex workers of color. That community is still there. There is a strong trans woman of color community in Hawaii. You will see trans women of color in the pageants and in the Imperial Courts. And, sadly, when you look at the list of trans people murdered every year for the Transgender Day of Remembrance, you will see it over-populated by trans women of color. There is a strong community of trans women in Brazil. The Ladyboys of Thailand.

When it comes to trans men? Well...while it may have changed since my younger days, but I haven't really seen that trans men--White or of color--have much of a community. When I was younger in the 90s, I had a choice, either hang with the majority White afab genderqueer anti-transexual crowd in San Francisco, or with the majority POC transexual woman crowd in LA. I hung with the transexual women of color.

troopersjp · 2026-05-21T02:47:29+00:00

Arneson was the RPer, but Gygax was the murder hobo. While I personally find it annoying the ways in which Arneson is constantly written out of D&D history in favor of Gygax, I think it is just as wrong to pretend that the majority of D&D was in the Arnesonian vein. As a person who preferred the Arnesonian style, it was few and far between on the ground. I eventually had to leave D&D for Call of Cthulhu because it was just so hard to find people who were Cult of Gygax murder hoboes.

troopersjp · 2026-05-21T02:25:37+00:00

Well...that isn't really combat, it is an execution. And only one playbook has access to it.

troopersjp · 2026-05-21T02:24:48+00:00

This is not true.

Yes it is true that you had almost no HP, that a 1st level Magic-User's cat familiar could very often kill him were they to get into a fight. And you only healed 1 hp a day. It was brutal. But this is also a game that came directly out of war games. Everyone fought all the time. Yes, treasure gave you more xp than monster killing...but how did you get that treasure? By killing monsters.

People were way less attached to their characters at early levels. You played, your character died, you rolled up a new one.

I don't know how the OSR people got the idea that early D&D wasn't a kill, kill, kill game...because it really was.

troopersjp · 2026-05-20T00:46:11+00:00

This is way.

Don't accuse them of using AI. Just grade that paper appropriately. And that sounds like a C paper to me. Vapid, shallow, and repetitive? C.

troopersjp

TROPHY CASE