In this video I show off some different Lemmy instances and discuss why the lemmyverse and even some individual Lemmy instances can become a better alternative to Reddit....
What deeply frustrates me about it is that a lot of people who would otherwise be big advocates for FOSS software get completely turned off by creeps like this being absolutely everywhere.
This is a very good point, trademarks are pretty much identity theft protection for things other than individuals and that's pretty important to have.
Copyright and patents... lately, I'm feeling like the world is just kicking and screaming against the single most beneficial aspect of digital technology, the ability to freely copy information. If the ability to freely copy information makes something unprofitable, honestly, I believe the importance of not nerfing that benefit comes first. It would be better than the cyberpunk DRM hellhole we've created for ourselves.
Me and my buddy are using different system now. I’m in PC and he’s in PS5. We were playing Genshin and it started to be very boring. Do you guys know any games that support crossplay, free or paid, that are good....
It's a lot closer to a typical fighting game than Mordhau, TBH. Combat is more structured around "moves" that you have rather than being able to just drag a weapon around wherever.
The Fediverse doesn't require that anyone provide any personal information, though. Literally none. It's the user's responsibility to choose not to post any.
I'm new to Lemmy. I've been on Mastodon for a while. I tend to access social media on the web and by app. I use Fedilab for Mastodon and I am comfortable with it....
Jeraboa hasn't been working on Beehaw for me due to Beehaw sticking to a slightly outdated version of Lemmy, I'm using Connect for Lemmy and it's pretty good.
Anarchism, to me, is the thing people did before someone decided to do otherwise. It doesn't matter that it's how most human beings "naturally" congregate, because the fact is that the very moment someone decides to start consolidating power, they seem to do so successfully. Every state began with someone with a clear goal gathering other people with the same goal- and often, then gathering people who don't share that goal through force. (People are power.) Clearly Anarchic societies failed to prevent that process from occurring, they are not hardened against violent, coordinated groups. Saying that "the majority of societies were essentially anarchist" fails to notice that far, far, FAR more people have existed within "stateful" societies. More individual anarchist "structures" vs. many more people consolidated within stateful structures is just down to the nature of both. To defend the anarchic nature of a group permanently, you'd need to get the people who actually cared enough to defend it all together and arm them as a militia. Even as an "as-needed" militia, you now have a power structure and it will grow from there. Without that coordination, someone else will step in and take power for themselves. It only takes a few greedy people.
I just wrote a comment on my own thoughts, and essentially, I think anarchism "works" until a sufficiently willful person shows up. There's a reason the majority of human beings have existed under states of some kind, anarchist societies failed to prevent states from arising.
For what it's worth, I've been having a private anarchist bent for a little while, now. Plenty of people seem to recognize that socialism seems nice other than the power structures it creates, and anarchism is the natural next step along that line of thinking. But... healthcare. And food. Food and health care. For this to ever work on a major scale we all need to re-learn how our ancestors lived self-sufficiently, which few people (even among anarchists) seem willing to do, and medically advanced healthcare, I'm not sure anyone is willing to give that up. I would have straight-up died at birth if Boston Medical Center didn't exist. Even if I think charitably of the level of healthcare an anarchist society could provide, I can't imagine it involving me being alive. There's a huge level of self-sacrifice there.
For that matter, good luck solving our destruction of this planet. Most major climate-destroying activity is occurring because groups that aren't as well-off as the preeminent first-world countries are (rightfully, I'd say) looking to fast-track their way to higher standards of living the same way that western Europe and the United States did. On one hand, sure, in an egalitarian society it'd be "easier" to teach them the right way of moving forward. But who's gonna bother doing that? I just can't imagine enough people ever really grasping the idea of collective action.
...And of course there's the Anarchist Library's apparent love of Ted Kaczynski's jackass patriarchal, ableist rants against the "over-socialized left".
...And another thing, despite putting a massive level of value on individual freedom as a movement, anarchic societies are inevitably very close-knit culturally to a degree that harms anyone who doesn't gel with that culture. Keep yourself socially acceptable to the majority, or find yourself shunned and completely, utterly alone. Truly alone. See Ted Kaczynski's assessment of the "over-socialized left", from the perspective of a truly anarchic society, he's correct, and that's a huge problem. You're stuck with whatever bigotry the community develops.
Wikipedia's page on Fidel Castro is pretty fascinating. Dude was the IRL equivalent of movie villains who get some people like "wait, but they have good intentions, though", he was batshit insane, and his life was very public.
I was barely alive in 1998, but I definitely think Win98 was the perfect sort of skeuomorphism, not super showy or maximalist like a lot of skeumorphic design is. It's like modern minimalism without the suck.
At the same time, I kind of respect their conviction to only sell in Europe where they don't need to participate in global shipping to the same extent, and don't need to grow unsustainably. We want something like the Fairphone? Someone here has got to make it.
So right now im experemting with diffrent hobyy, i wante dto make a video game but im putting it to th eside for a while. i just thought making some other game might be easier like a table top game, i would play one but i have a hard time finding any that i like, cheap/free, and i dont have anyone irl to play with which is...
I'm going to list off some free games (or at least System Resource Documents) you can check out, because the key to being a good TTRPG designer is recognizing just how broad the idea of a TTRPG is, and that a lot of your ideas have probably been done before-- maybe you just need to mash them together in a new way.
I'll say also, though, that some of the more radical ideas around unfortunately aren't free and it'd still be good to check some of them out eventually.
I'll also talk a little about different "categories" of RPGs that people use and some terminology because it could probably help map what's out there. Note that these aren't exclusive labels and many could apply to one game.
Crunch:
A game is "crunchy" when it has a lot of rules for specific things or the rules it does have inevitably involve some math. D&D 5e is generally considered a mid-crunch game that somehow manages to be more complex than most other mid-crunch games.
"Traditional" / trad games:
D&D 5e is more or less a "trad" game, but D&D 3.5e is, like, the trad game. Trad games are those that hew close to the conventions that D&D set, more or less.
Simulationist / Gameist / Narriativist:
This is an old trinity that's fallen out of favor now, but it's still a helpful idea sometimes. As usual, not exclusive categories.
"Simulationist" games are those that try their best to closely simulate reality, or at least the reality the game is presenting. The mechanics exist to make sure that whatever happens makes sense within that world, and these games typically reject vague, "meta" mechanics like 5e's Inspiration.
"Gameist" games are those that focus a whole lot on "being a game rather than just a story". It's a vague idea but they're typically concerned with balance between characters, and giving players interesting mechanical choices regardless of whether they really makes sense in the story you're telling. D&D 5e is a very "gameist" sort of game.
"Narriativist" games are sort of a new-school idea. They're typically less concerned with mechanics that describe specific actions you're taking, and more concerned with pushing the story you're telling in an interesting direction, rather than relying on the GM to do that. You could say that this is the rulebook and the GM swapping roles, with the rulebook helping to set the pace, the tone, what characters are like, while the GM has more say in ruling exactly what players can do.
OSR / NuSR:
OSR stands for "Old School Rennisance" or Revival, depending on who you ask. In it's purest form, it's what it says on the tin. People wanted to bring back the attitude and, to some extent, the mechanics of early RPGs, typically the D&D edition we call B/X (Basic & Expert, essentially 1st Edition.) Most games that consider themselves "OSR" are actually compatible with content written for B/X D&D, a couple OSR games like Old School Essentials are literally rewrites of the B/X rulebooks. In short, OSR games are typically focused on player ingenuity over character stats, would rather put players in challenging situations than give them a power fantasy (sometimes falling into outright survival horror, although others are very whimsical), and try to keep their rulebooks relatively short and concise.
"NuSR" is an acknowledgement that there's a new wave of games which definitely came out of the OSR scene, but have little to no resemblance to what the OSR was initially about. This is the realm of quirky Itch.IO RPGs about racoon pirates or reflections on what it's like to be transgender.
Generic:
In the context of TTRPGs, a "generic" game is one that strives to be setting-agnostic. A game you could use for your typical Tolkien fantasy thing, a cyberpunk dystopia, or courthouse drama all in one package. These games are super diverse, but they still tend to focus on a specific style of story or play. A lot of these games are considered "toolboxes" that give game masters the tools to basically build their own setting-specific system. I'm a big fan of generic games and I think a lot of people looking to make a ruleset could get a lot of mileage with the right generic RPG.
Free Kriegspiel Revival:
Kind of a small one, but basically Kriegspiel was one of the first games with a game master rolling dice, and a good "referee" was one who sometimes ignored the dice entirely because dice are stupid. FKR games are the most minimalist things you'll see in your life and it's surprising that there's even room for more than one.
Game families:
OK, I just made this up now, but there's a lot of "families" of TTRPGs. D&D and all of the games obviously based off of it are the biggest, but there's also probably a hundred Basic Role Playing (BRP)-based games, hundreds of Powered By The Apocalypse (PbtA) / Forged in the Dark (FitD) games, FUDGE / FATE have quite a few games built off of them, almost certainly others I'm not thinking of right now.
Free stuff:
Ironsworn (Ironsworn's core rulebook is free. It's designed to be played solo, so you should probably check this one out!) Forge Engine, a seemingly underrated generic game. Roll for Shoes (A teeny-tiny Free Kriegspiel Revival game) Worlds Without Number (Somewhere between a trad game and nuSR, famous for having really helpful tools for GMs.) Stars Without Number, it's sci-fi system game. Rowan, Rook & Deckard's one-page games (When people say NuSR this is what they mean.) FATE SRD (FATE is the narriativist system, once described as the best game people rightfully don't play. The rules aren't too complex but somehow confusing.) Basic Role Playing SRD (BRP is a generic system built off of one of D&D's first rivals, RuneQuest, the game Call of Cthulhu is also based on it. It's generally considered simulationist.) Mythras: Imperative (Mythras is another game built off of BRP, but it's generic like BRP is, and really more like an evolution of it. Mythras is my favorite RPG of all time. This free version is alright but a little confusing because of missing rules.) Delta Green: Need to Know (ALSO BRP-based, it's Call of Cthulhu set a century later.) Risus: The Anything RPG (This one's a lot of fun for very goofy games.) Basic Fantasy (One of the original OSR games. Totally open-source. I'm making an EPUB of the current rulebook!) Apocalypse World (The game that started the label "Powered by the Apocalypse". The other the narriativist system, if you can really call PbtA a "system" rather than a grab-bag of philosophical ideas about RPGs.) Blades in the Dark SRD (Kind of a "powered by the apocalypse" game, but Blades in the Dark did enough cool stuff to get it's own label for games based off of it, "Forged in the Dark".) Gumshoe SRDAnd the official version here. (A game built entirely for mystery-solving. Very good at it's job.) Quest (Quest is sort of like if you took D&D 5e, made it extremely cozy, and took all the math out. I love it, personally.) Archive of Nethys' Pathfinder 2e site (pretty much lets you learn how to play PF2E for completely free, not that you'd probably want to.) Cairn (A great example of the more minimalist, modern OSR scene.) Zafir (Bids itself as a "tactical RPG", so lots of combat like 5e and Pathfinder.) Lightmaster, (A free sci-fantasy clone of the legendary, famously crunchy Rollmaster.) The Void (Apparently a "Lovecraftian hard sci-fi horror setting" which I haven't seen much in the TTRPG world. Pretty cool.) Stardrifter (Scroll to the bottom. Dude wrote a bunch of stories and made a space opera RPG based off of them!)
I have a pretty sizeable group of friends who like to hang out and play RPGs together. We've done a handful of games, ranging from crunchy stuff through rules-lite games. But one common theme is that our games can go pretty slow. We're a group of 7 most of the time, which means 6 players + 1 GM, which is can make stuff very...
Honestly, I do think early D&D games kinda show the way to some extent. Large groups made sense when games were games were more procedural, with a designated map-maker, a designated "caller" who settled on final decisions, a designated inventory tracker. Combat that makes people want to avoid it more often than not, morale rolls. The very episodic nature of adventuring vs. modern campaigns where every session is highly coupled probably helped too.
I think early first-person dungeon crawlers and JRPGs are closer to how "serious" AD&D groups actually ran things. Players literally glued to the hip and doing something more like piloting a multi-person mech than all trying to run around doing their own thing.
...Because most of us play TTRPGs with friends and strangers with whom we're super not interested in either? And if we were, we'd just actually be interacting with each other rather than doing so through a TTRPG of all things.
Cogmind is what I mentioned too, the developer is borderline obsessive and somehow it never gets the attention that other roguelikes get. I'm always shocked to see that it's still getting regular updates.
When you are setting out to invent the universe, follow the thread. Literally. Thread is one of the foundational inventions of people, for tying things, carrying things, making nets and fishing lines and etc etc, and turns into cloth fairly soon. What do people in your world spin? How is it gathered? Who does the work? Who...
I'm working on an unofficial Elder Scrolls sourcebook for Mythras and I'm putting a ton of fanwank into it, it's very much a passion project. More of a PGE1, r/teslore, AlinAll, Elder Kings III, Lady Nerevar's Nibenay fanon vibe than Bethesda's official stuff. (If you don't know what any of that means, it's more culturally nuanced and more weird sci-fantasy).
Although I don't think following thread specifically would be too interesting for The Elder Scrolls beyond a look at Ancestor Moth silk, because it's all too generic to matter, what I do want to do now is dive deep into how the hell Tamriel has so many books. Proper paper based books, seemingly, which is doubly weird because paper in the modern sense is actually pretty anachronistic. All we've really got is a few silly notes in ESO about an Orc blacksmith who learned how to "smash letters instead of swords". There's got to be a relatively huge bookbinding and printing industry.
Hi, I'm sorry that I didn't see this post earlier. I'm autistic, and I have sensory processing issues, but not synesthesia.
The single biggest problem architecture causes for me is noise. Public spaces are inevitably noisy. But if the acoustics of the room are poor, then no one can hear themselves over anyone else, and everyone starts trying to talk over the room... which gets crazy pretty quickly. Independent restaurants in older buildings are the worst. Hollow plaster walls + 45 degree corners for the ceiling in some spots + a rowdy Italian family nearby with that one lady that laughs at the top of her lungs = sensory hellhole.
Extend that 10x to stadium concerts. The audio engineers crank things up so much that the sound waves bounce around until you get something like feedback from the room itself, it all just turns into a white noise assault on your eardrums and I've straight-up left concerts because of it.
Nothing is ever "quiet" for me, really. Actually, I lost it recently when a beginner guided meditation focused super hard on being aware of everything around you- that's my experience all the time and I wish I could filter things out like most people!
Shopping: Florescent lights suck. They don't bother me too much specifically, but they're a major pain point for a lot of autistic people. Personally it's just the constant traffic and unwritten "waiting for that one person to stop staring at the canned sauces shuffle".
Museums are amaaaazing. I love museums. The Boston Museum of Science is one of my favorite places. Now that I think about it, my favorite designed spaces are all either very large and spacious or very small (in the way that historical homes tended to have more small, private rooms). Anything in-between gets... like, there's enough room for stuff, and just barely room for quite a few people, and they end up even more crowded and chaotic than either of those two extremes, somehow.
I like stuff like this. A lot of games seem to try extrapolating their smaller-scale movement stats out to long-term travel and at that point it makes way more sense to just go off of what makes sense.
...OK, as someone who's always wanted to push Dokapon Kingdom's gameplay into a genre of JRPG monopoly, but have always been baffled by how multiplayer is actually built in practice, this is cool as hell.
Mental Outlaw | Lemmy - The FOSS & Federated Reddit Alternative (www.youtube.com)
In this video I show off some different Lemmy instances and discuss why the lemmyverse and even some individual Lemmy instances can become a better alternative to Reddit....
askBeehaw: should copyright even exist at all? and if it should, how long *should* the ideal term of copyright be?
a perennial favorite topic of debate. sound off in the replies.
BattleBit Remastered is dominating Steam because there's no catch: it's just a lot of game for $15 (www.pcgamer.com)
Crossplay games that are not f2p cashgrab
Me and my buddy are using different system now. I’m in PC and he’s in PS5. We were playing Genshin and it started to be very boring. Do you guys know any games that support crossplay, free or paid, that are good....
Meta's upcoming AcitivityPub-enabled app Threads will only come with an "import from Mastodon" option. The new network won't federate on day one. (mastodon.social)
Full report is on The Verge.
Apps?
I'm new to Lemmy. I've been on Mastodon for a while. I tend to access social media on the web and by app. I use Fedilab for Mastodon and I am comfortable with it....
FediPact is an Organized Effort to Block Meta's ActivityPub Platform (wedistribute.org)
What is anarchism to you?
Hello, I'm a bit new here. Wanted to ask you all that question. Answer as you want....
What is the most fascinating Wikipedia article that you know of?
I just finished reading "Last meal" and it was really something else.
Windows 98 Icons are Great (alexmeub.com)
Exclusive: Here's our first look at the Fairphone 5 (www.androidauthority.com)
How hard is it to make a tabletop game? (by yourself)
So right now im experemting with diffrent hobyy, i wante dto make a video game but im putting it to th eside for a while. i just thought making some other game might be easier like a table top game, i would play one but i have a hard time finding any that i like, cheap/free, and i dont have anyone irl to play with which is...
Games that support campaigns with large groups (6-8)
I have a pretty sizeable group of friends who like to hang out and play RPGs together. We've done a handful of games, ranging from crunchy stuff through rules-lite games. But one common theme is that our games can go pretty slow. We're a group of 7 most of the time, which means 6 players + 1 GM, which is can make stuff very...
Roleplaying is the perfect medium for stories of sex and romance – so why is the genre so underserved on the tabletop? (www.dicebreaker.com)
Roguelike recommendations?
Getting into DCSS a lot recently. Still just running Minotaur Berserker with the furthest I've made it being the 10th floor aha....
Looking for mods
Hi all,...
Follow The Thread: A Worldbuilding Guide (part 1/4) (lumpley.games)
When you are setting out to invent the universe, follow the thread. Literally. Thread is one of the foundational inventions of people, for tying things, carrying things, making nets and fishing lines and etc etc, and turns into cloth fairly soon. What do people in your world spin? How is it gathered? Who does the work? Who...
Looking for experiences of the influence of architecture on people with synesthesia and /or sensory processing disorders (fedia.io)
Hey folks!...
Starfield’s 30fps frame rate is “a choice,” God of War dev says (www.pcgamesn.com)
Realistic Travel Time Guide (i.postimg.cc)
cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/537639...
Introducing Ambient 0.1 - Multiplayer First Engine (www.ambient.run)