_NetNomad

NOT TIMMY

that’s just me playing Zork

i’m kind of torn on this. because, if the dice are the be-all-end-all, why have a GM at the table? i’d wager the vast majority of GMs tune difficulty and pacing on the fly without realizing it, even if it’s just “i’m gonna skip this last encounter because we’re already a half hour over and i have work tomorrow” or even just “wow everyone is bored as shit right now, we outta pick up the pace” but on the other hand, I have seen a fee bad rolls in a low-stakes encounter spiral into a character dying, and it was cool as shit. that’s part of the magic of rpgs- no do-overs or back to the title screen, instead the rest of the party (or the whole party if the player rolls a new character) needs to contend and deal with being down a person. in our case we had to drag a corpse across a continent to get to a cleric powerful enough to bring him back, and in doing so accidentally let the big bad into the otherwise secure city limits. we would have completely missed out on all of that if those dice were fudged. i guess it all down to context- fudging to prevent the GM railroad from being derailed robs you of experiences, but we also have GMs at the table for a reason, and i’m ok with them using fudging when they feel it’s warranted so long as they’re not abusing it to the point where there’s no risk to anything. at the end of the day, if we’re all having fun, i trust the GM with whatever they’re doing, and if we’re not, fudging is probably a symptom of whatever actually is the issue

i’ve always believed, i just couldn’t get a damn word in edgewise!

you’ll pry my END command from my cold, dead hands…

i mean these days you don’t really need to buy the books to play- you can learn how to play from an Actual Play, reference the rules in a VTT, and have your DM learn from a youtuber. that really leaves WotC either in the business of making solid modules and supplements, or just making knick knacks- and they’ve clearly chosen the latter, at least until they can force whatever subscription model they can on the exclusive VTT they’ll have for 6e

many retro systems have implementations of a language called BASIC, which is about as easy as it sounds. it has some quirks that aren’t transferable to newer languages and you won’t be able to make anything nearly as sophisticated as retail games for the same hardware but if you find modern engines intimidating, it can be a good place to start

that said, +1 for godot if you want to learn a more modern tool. it’s way simpler than it may seem at first and there is a huge wealth of beginner-friendly tutorials available online

different strokes for different blokes i guess but i prefer to not have to charge things and not worry about pairing and that’s that

i avoid anything wireless like the plague short of wifi. pairing is always a miserable process, and by the time everything is connected, the batteries are dead. it drives me absolutely bonkers. thankfully many motorolla phones still have 3.5mm jacks . i think my current model is the motorolla 5g stylus

dark tower, mad mage, delving through the thracian caves. castle greyhawk, arden vul, castle of mad archmage too. dwimmer mount, barrow maze, chaos way down in the caves. lonely mountain, stone hell, tonigsborg dungeon as well, WE DIDN’T START THE FIRE-

rexx is my favorite programming language. it’s an interpreted language similar to python but it has actual visible block delimiters instead of going by indentation. the error handling system is also very convienent. the reason it probably faded into obscurity is it’s wild cowboy take on typing- EVERYTHING is a string until you try to use a math function on it. i get that it’s unrealistic for writing anything performance-sensitive but for writing shell scripts and utilities it is unmatched in it’s simplicity. it definitely comes closer than anything else i’ve ever seen to the COBOL ideal of resembling natural speech. the rexx interpreter was a default feature on the amiga and i think also os/2 but these days it’s really only ever used on mainframes and the few open source implementations for desktops and servers are a bit clumsy which is a real shame

i wonder if something that size would even have noticable gravity