They’re generally useful in promoting temporary content such as festivals. In places such as Instagram they’re found their use in being used for casual posts that aren’t of the quality of the users more cultivated actual posts. For example promoting a friend’s page or casual holiday pictures. Particularly if the account has a brand such as hand made goods, it’s a place for the owner to post personal content too.
I don’t actually know what PixelFed is really but I currently only use web content where I don’t really follow people as much as ideas and content, I couldn’t name a single lemmy or Reddit user, I only follow hashtags on Masterdon and I don’t really have much loyalty to who I watch on YouTube, so this content doesn’t appeal to me because I don’t often care about their stories. If PixelFed is a content site where you do follow personal content, then it’s probably right for them.
I was thinking about that when I was dropping my 6 year old off at some hobbies earlier - it’s pretty much expected to have learned how to ride a bicycle before starting school, and it massively expands the area you can go to by yourself. When she went to school by bicycle she can easily make a detour via a shop to spend some...
There are plenty of beaches and people often travel to thembfor the sake of enjoying the beach. The main issue is that for 11-12 months of the year, the water is fucking freezing. If people learn to swim, it’s often in heated swimming pools as kids.
YouTube comment sections are weirdly positive always. It could be a video of some horrible crime and the comments will be about how great the channel is and encouraging the channel to keep making more videos. When j visit actual fan pages anywhere else online there are always a mix of opinions. But youtube is constantly full of...
YouTube comments don’t really encourage conversation about the content and are largely used nowadays as a way for people to leave messages for the creators. In addition at one point (possibly still ongoing), the YouTube algorithm really responded well to comment engagement so in videos, creators would encourage commenting alongside liking and subscribing.
I think in combination this led to people commenting on the content they watched, which was largely of creators they have fondness,but having nothing to really say, in addition other like-minded people would open the comments and like the positive one, catapulting them to the top.
It must have been about 5-10 years ago that it was standard practice to block YouTube comments because they were so toxic, so it’s interesting how times change.
I find it interesting how many people are looking for the overall lemmy experience. The first thing I did was find the community niche that interested me and the relevant instance, then when I’ve exhausted that instance I switch to the Everything tab and all find the generic content.
Edit: I accidentally wrote fine the community niece…
I also use sync, although I bought the lifetime ad-free version for Reddit years ago for like $5 and now it’s $100 which I can’t afford here which is a shame. Still, it’s my favourite app and I’m very familiar with it.
It’s the reddit pricing swapped over exactly, I’m not outright against an independent app creator having a paid option, because it’s a very high quality app that deserves support, but I do feel it’s soo steep. There are also subscription options but I never take those, and the ads are reasonably unobtrusive.
The developer is definitely pocketing it all, however they were very active on Reddit in maintaining and improving the app with the most quality of life options I’ve seen across any app. Honestly if the paid option was $10, I’d go for it, since I get hundreds of hours of use out of it. Also back in the reddit days, you could find the paid version for free online pretty easily.
Or at least less so than Reddit. It’s good, but, I can’t put my finger on it. Even when the content is good, the servers are up, and I’m getting notifications responding to comments, it’s never come to me doomscrolling for hours....
If not for the fact that the ttrpg community was so important to me on Reddit, I’d probably not have migrated over, as addicted as I was to the generic /all content on Reddit, I’m glad to be rid of it.
But lemmy is yet to be able to sustain the equivalent community, I want to have access to that infinite pool of topical conversation that I can’t find anywhere, I won’t go back to Reddit but it’s just getting smaller here on Lemmy.
Homebrew is rad, homebrew options that are accidentally stronger than official options are bad and homebrew options that are intentionally stronger require one hell of a game designer to keep the game reasonably balanced.
This current wave of enshitification to online services is generally driven by said online services taking steps that they believe to be more profitable to the detriment of the people who use them.
That has always gone on but it feel like it’s everywhere at once at the moment; with the place I live in, the transport I use, the food I buy, the media and art I consume etc.
1900 years ago, the world knew that the only things people desired were bread and circuses, i.e. to have your needs met and have entertainment, a lot of people have built their modern circuses off of things that are becoming unusable or deserve boycott. It’s far better than living in a warzone or something but to have many things we rely on for satisfaction stripped from us at once.
I just wanna spend my free time entertained without having to perpetually change what provides that entertainment, is that not why most of us use this site?
Instead of a rumour that German physicists are working on the bomb, a rumour occurs that they’re working on a pact. You are the equivalent of the Manhattan project, but you’re trying to create a magical superweapon. Your campaign: beat the Germans to the wish spell....
Honestly I support the weakening of stunning strike specifically. The monk shouldn’t be crap with the exception of one ability that is so encounter breaking that many DMs are weakening it anyway.
The monk should have been buffed otherwise of course but the modifications to stunning strike are more or less required.
Wrote a new blog today about how much setting should go in a rulebook. It’s different for every game, but I feel a lot of games put too much lore in with the rules....
I sort of agree, I have never played in a premade setting except for a 2-shot for city of mist and I’ve never GMd one at all, and I often spend a lot of time reading rulerooks for ideas for my own RPGs.
I’ve been trying to write my own collaborative storytelling game recently rewards players for taking on a storyteller role but doesn’t stop players who would prefer to remain as one character for the session, and when I read Ben Robbins’ blog post about Remember Tomorrow, I thought I could use a part of this and bought the pdf. I’m trying to build a royal court political thriller type system and I know that this was cyberpunk by default, but 3/4 of the page count is really guidance on how to make a specific tone of cyberpunk lore, with the rules interwoven between them.
I feel that if your system is novel and applicable to many tones and genres, it should be seperated from that genre any related setting in the rulebook, and similarly if you’re rules and genre are wrapped up, it’s a good idea to seperate setting slightly, which we commonly seen in fantasy RPGs.
I feel they should be in the same book, but unless your rules are absolutely dependent on your genre or your the two absolutely dependent on your settings, it’s wise to seperate them to make your book more easily usable by those wanting to work your ideas into their own.
I have a piece of counter advice that allows you to on occasion plan a plot point. Generally your PCs are most invested in their beloved NPCs, either from backstory or the plot you’ve developed. If you have a cool idea, these NPCs can often be inserted into it and offer exactly what the players enjoy.
Remember when we used to look over the fence at our Magic: The Gathering neighbors and think “ouch, they’re getting screwed. I hope WotC never does that to D&D”.
To my understanding (unless the biggest controversy of all is breaking right now), the current AI art scandal seems overblown and something WotC didn’t want to happen.
Honestly although this opinion is probably as controversial as anything could be on Lemmy, I feel the mult-language SRD release of 5e we’ve just seen is a bigger good positive than any negative since the beginning of the year with the original OGL drama.
In about April, I actually shifted my stance towards WotC from outright boycott to purchasing only the content that I felt sure I wanted. So far that has been 1 ticket to see the movie and Bixby’s guide to giants, which I really like. Currently nothing else on the roster this year is catching my eye, although I’m waiting on planescape reviews.
It may only be for PR but when a company actively tries to do good, they should be rewarded with some support. If they could fuck up once and be boycotted forever, then they have no incentive to fix their fuck up.
Happy to see you here, I think your stories have been quite influential on my next character and I presumed I’d have seen the last of you at the beginning of July when I stopped being able to use Reddit due to prefering mediums without ads.
I want to go on adventures with my kid. I’m not an experienced GM so something or things that are relatively simple to run and also levelled for a 5 or 6 year old. Could be campaigns or one pages
I’ve not played it but I hear that Magical Kitties is a great RPG for kids, if it’s the kids style of course.
Otherwise I’d absolutely recommend just hacking the one-page-rpg Lasers and Feelings. Hacking it is really really easy. You just pick two good buzzwords that oppose eachother and clearly set the tone of the game, ideally a planning word and a doing word but I once ran a hack called Scandal and Virtue that worked really well as it’s basically the lawful - chaotic scale. Here are a list of hacks other people have made.
MCDM, Matt Coleville’s company, just released Flee Mortals! This 400 page book includes new takes on existing 5e monsters and a few brand new ones – all in MCDMs style of cool tactics and action-oriented designs. I had the great pleasure of designing the vampires in this book including the monstrous Count Rhodar Von Glaur!...
If this is how you feel, pick up all the kobald press monster books. Between Tome of Beasts 1-3 and the creature codex, that’s probably more monsters than WotC have printed across all of 5e.
Also check out the Monsterous Menagerie be Level Up 5e, this book can take a few extra liberties as it’s for EN Publishing’s take in 5e, and that difference means they can really make interesting monsters that are basically compatible with standard 5e.
I’m also a fan of the Grimhollow Monster Grimoure, although it’s probably the closest to current 5e content, and is only elevated by it’s consistent dark fantasy tome, sort of like the monster from Van Richens Guide to Ravenloft.
There are probably 1500 monsters across all of there which are all more interesting than many WotC monsters, I couldn’t recommend them enough.
Hello there fellow ex-DM academy scholars, Just left Reddit for good, so I’m here with a question that wasn’t answered in under spez’s shadow, so I might try it here if I can....
I don’t know of any official items that draw in ghosts and spirits, and also just to ask, do you mean summoning them on use like “when you blow this horn, 2d6 ghosts are summoned” or do you mean it like a passive effect, like “Curse. Ghosts and other wayward spirits are drawn to this item”?
To me, this sounds like a custom ‘minor detrimental property’, as seen in the DMG’s guidance on creating artifact level magic items, page 220.
You don’t really need specificity for this, if you look at the regional effects of a vampire for example, it reads “There is a notable increase in the population of bats, rats and wolves in the region”. And that’s enough of a prompt to cement that usage.
I am planning a campaign where the PCs will get stranded with some NPCs with the goal of making the survival aspect a major part of the early levels and building up and protecting the Village the motivation for adventuring....
There are plenty of resources for survival and base management out there, but honestly my advice is that you don’t need to worry about reinventing the wheel, because nobody has the wheel which fits your cart but you.
When introducing tertiary sub-systems, the fewer and simpler they are the better, over a full campaign it’s not too bad to have them become complex but there is no sense in bloating your game with sub-systems you don’t end up using, or using one set of survival rules that don’t gel with your base rules.
If you make your own rules, they may be rough around the edges, but in a way that suits your table, and you’ll be more equipped with chopping and changing them on the go to fit your groups needs.
That said, this hobby is built on us learning from eachother and celebrating our resources, so here are the resources I would suggest. I’m not going to recommend and paid resources here because I don’t think you need them when you’ll likely be using less than a quarter of the content in each.
For survival, the critical reason to look at resources is because it’s poorly supported in 5e, and the reason it’s poorly supported is because the exploration pillar doesn’t function as strongly as the social and combat pillars.
Firstly we can look at survival for your party. I’m quite fond of the point crawl approach, which is more narrative and flexible than a hexcrawl but still sets up a reason not to skip travel, which is often what ruins survival. I’m choosing sly Flourish to link to because this article links to a further dozen articles about the subject.
The next obstacle is to look at the current mechanics in 5e that trivialise combat. The fact that you’re looking for survival and settlements makes your wants perfect for the gritty realism optional rules, found on page 267 of the DMG. I’d probably alter this further and say a long rest is 3 days while adventuring away from the settlement and 24 hours when in the settlement. Plenty of spells trivialise survival too, such as goodberry, catnap and tiny hut. I can’t recall the first place I hear this advice (it may have been via Zee Bashew on YouTube) but pick out the problem spells and have them require a costly material component that is difficult to obtain, which is consumed in the casting of the spell. Suddenly having that component becomes exciting. The conversation about resting here is vast and useful.
I’d replace exhaustion with the 2024 revised rules version, and I’d give it out reasonably liberally for characters who push themselves on their adventuring day. A character who gains a point from skipping a meal, marching too far and having a disease all at once feels the weight of them without also crippling the character entirely.
The other side of this coin is survival for your community. For this, I’d look no further than Ben Robbins’ advice on the west marches. This is a ruleset really designed for drop in and out play that puts the responsibility on the players to choose their goals. Where I think you’ll find this useful is how it’s centered on a settlement that the party use as a base for their expeditions. Speaking of Ben Robbins, he set the bar for collaborative storytelling RPGs with microscope years ago, but the DNA of this game went on to inspire a game called The Quiet Year by Avery Alder. This would absolutely be my first point of thought for building a settlement survival mechanic. First I’d just play it as it is and experience how it works, then I’d lift the spirit into 5e as follows:
• Each session or in game week (whichever feels more natural, or pick something else if you think this is too fast or slow), a player pulls a card, on it are 1-2 prompts defining an unexpected event in the town, such as disease, a stranger arriving, or a resource being discovered, if you put 2 prompts in a card, the player chooses one.
• In addition, each session or in game week (again choose any scale you like here), the settlement votes on something that can be put forward by the players or a notable NPCs. I’d handle this as a council where each player character has 1 vote and there are twice as many additional votes from notable NPCs (i.e. 4 players and 8 NPCs so 12 votes). I’d simply roleplay this vote. If it’s something obviously useful like diverting a river while having a water shortage, the vote may be a no brainer, but the party will need to clear the manticore from the path of the new river or whatever. However because this isn’t locked in as a mechanical rule, story can emerge naturally. Perhaps the rogue and barbarian get into a brawl with the ealdorman’s son and now he’s pressuring members of the council to vote against your interest, perhaps your warlock develops a relationship with the brother of the person who votes on behalf of the laborers and she is more inclined to support your party’s requests. As a DM, you’ll also be getting information from the party as to what they want to handle.
• Each in game session or week, a grander part of the setting advances, perhaps a nearby kingdom becomes more totalitarian or winter approaches, whatever it is, the information is always heralded to the party, so they know the outside world is also progressing and also you can show any main plot you may have is also progressing.
My advice for what not to do for the settlement is this.
• Don’t let the settlement be able to outright lose. It’s one thing if the PCs die, but if the settlement is wiped out, there is nowhere to progress.
• Don’t give the settlement decaying needs like food, warmth or happiness. Unlike a videogame where these can be addressed as mindless busywork, the party must consistently put time to this what may obstruct the story. Think of a film, if the water shortage is solved, it is solved until it’s narrativly right for it to be disturbed, let the cards with prompts introduce this sort of conflict instead.
• The party need to be able to be the expedition team for the settlement, otherwise they have less of an inventive to leave. Somebody needs to scout the area and tackle nearby threats. I’m guilty of being a player in a game where we spent so many sessions not leaving the safe city that the DM had to narrativly destroy the city to get us exploring again.
• Don’t overthink rules for settlement defenses and bonuses to player rolls. A pre-written guide on how palisades slow advancing goblins and the effective power of putting longbows in every able hand is probably no more useful than making it up as you go, and certainly takes more time. However if you enjoy making these rules, feel free to write anything that comes to mind, do what you find fun.
I really thought I’d be putting recommend resources here rTher than my own advice but I’m pretty happy with everything I’ve said here. I hope it’s of use. I also wrote this on my phone in work so apologies for any typos.
Looks like the stories feature for Pixelfed is currently rolling out on the flagship instance
Dansup’s post: tech.lgbt/…/110997255323820201...
What's a skill that's taken for granted where you live, but is often missing in people moving there from abroad?
I was thinking about that when I was dropping my 6 year old off at some hobbies earlier - it’s pretty much expected to have learned how to ride a bicycle before starting school, and it massively expands the area you can go to by yourself. When she went to school by bicycle she can easily make a detour via a shop to spend some...
Why are YouTube comments so much different than any other comments made online
YouTube comment sections are weirdly positive always. It could be a video of some horrible crime and the comments will be about how great the channel is and encouraging the channel to keep making more videos. When j visit actual fan pages anywhere else online there are always a mix of opinions. But youtube is constantly full of...
As Twitter destroys its brand by renaming itself X, Mastodon user numbers are again soaring | TechCrunch (techcrunch.com)
It’s not just lemmy that’s benefiting from Elon Musk.
Anyone else feel that Lemmy just *isn't* addictive?
Or at least less so than Reddit. It’s good, but, I can’t put my finger on it. Even when the content is good, the servers are up, and I’m getting notifications responding to comments, it’s never come to me doomscrolling for hours....
I'm leaning towards the latter. (ttrpg.network)
I’m aware monk isn’t really great for “insane builds,” but I thought it was funny.
deleted_by_author
Campaign idea, based on Oppenheimer
Instead of a rumour that German physicists are working on the bomb, a rumour occurs that they’re working on a pact. You are the equivalent of the Manhattan project, but you’re trying to create a magical superweapon. Your campaign: beat the Germans to the wish spell....
Playtest 6 just gets worse for Monks the more I read it (ttrpg.network)
How Much Setting in a Rulebook? (lemmy.world)
Wrote a new blog today about how much setting should go in a rulebook. It’s different for every game, but I feel a lot of games put too much lore in with the rules....
My brain hurts (ttrpg.network)
It's happening! Are we surprised? (chrispychickin.blogspot.com)
Remember when we used to look over the fence at our Magic: The Gathering neighbors and think “ouch, they’re getting screwed. I hope WotC never does that to D&D”.
Tales From the Tables episode 30: So where were we? (ttrpg.network)
So… new here, migrated from r/dndmemes which apparently imploded?...
Looking for something fun to play with a 6yo
I want to go on adventures with my kid. I’m not an experienced GM so something or things that are relatively simple to run and also levelled for a 5 or 6 year old. Could be campaigns or one pages
Flee Mortals! MCDMs Monster Book Now Available (shop.mcdmproductions.com)
MCDM, Matt Coleville’s company, just released Flee Mortals! This 400 page book includes new takes on existing 5e monsters and a few brand new ones – all in MCDMs style of cool tactics and action-oriented designs. I had the great pleasure of designing the vampires in this book including the monstrous Count Rhodar Von Glaur!...
First post here
Hello there fellow ex-DM academy scholars, Just left Reddit for good, so I’m here with a question that wasn’t answered in under spez’s shadow, so I might try it here if I can....
Survival and base-building Mechanics
I am planning a campaign where the PCs will get stranded with some NPCs with the goal of making the survival aspect a major part of the early levels and building up and protecting the Village the motivation for adventuring....
The Tale of Los Tiburon (aussie.zone)
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