Oh damn, I have just had a REVELATION regarding my West Marches game. I felt like there was a gap I could not figure out how to fill in the setting that justified more dungeon-crawling and danger. By gum, I've got it!! Something that lets me pepper the map with dungeon-like stuff that I had not considered before, and another genre of weird monsters.
@nickdrawthing very cool! Even if it’s not applicable I always like to hear about other people’s gaming. You never know what might end up being inspirational
Soliciting more #westmarches advice! This time about NPCs.
My feeling is that West Marches games benefit from being outside of civilization and safety. Danger is the whole point. So it can be difficult to justify the existence of non-hostile NPCs in that setting without undermining the challenges upon which the whole format hinges.
@nickdrawthing I don’t run WM explicitly, but more general sandboxes, and for that NPCs (and factions) are super important. They’re one of the core pillars of a sandbox game in my opinion (https://archstonepress.com/2023/09/running-your-first-sandbox/). While WM has more focus on exploration, that doesn’t mean you can’t put NPCs in. In fact, I would argue NPCs are a core part of helping to show parts of this world the players are exploring. They can also be helpful for tying together the scattered adventures that make up a WM game
so a substitute teacher somehow thought it was a good idea to ask my kid's class what their thought about their home country were. They had to write down 4 things.
I am not sure she expected the results, my son's friend (6yo), the little tiny shy mouse that he is, managed to sum it up with: *broken pavement
*dirty streets
*ugly buildings
*people stealing numberplates and just bribing their way out of trouble
good lord, that kid is a natural born cynic if I have ever seen one.
Are there any #ActivityPub blogging services that automatically slice up long posts into 500-character (maximum), threaded posts when you publish? I like the idea of an ActivityPub compatible blog but I know a lot of people (myself included) aren't wild about huge, 10K character posts showing up on their feed.
I can imagine a service like this that provides a clean looking article when viewed on the originating site, but provides threaded posts on the federated TL.
Maybe this already exists?
@nickdrawthing not quite what you are looking for, but the WordPress plugin for ActivityPub allows you to configure it so that it only posts the first 400 characters of a post, and then adds a link back to your blog to read the rest
@kyonshi Burger King is my go to fast food because they’ve had plant based burgers at every location (in the US anyway) since 2002. And the new impossible whoppers are pretty great too. It’s pretty much the most common fast food place that I can actually eat anything at
In short, I write and design TTRPGs and adventures as a worker-owner of Archstone Press, and I’m particularly interested in some of these things: #NSR#OSR#RuneQuest#PbtA#Pathfinder#BronzeAge fantasy, #Cairn (and the games that came out of it), and #worldbuilding in general!
As far as #TTRPG YouTubers go, I regularly watch @dmtales, Questing Beast, and Lexi from the Gaming Table. What others should I check out? Those engaging in clickbait and/or controversy for controversy sake need not apply.
@Tim_Eagon@Da_Gut who else are you thinking of? I always thought most OSR/NSR creators were much older than me 😂 I guess both could technically be true
@Tim_Eagon@Da_Gut interesting, now I’m really curious how old they actually are. Aside from Luke Gearing, I thought most of them were close to your age, or at least closer to you than me (28)
What I keep seeing in #gamingwithkids is that play at the party level gets old quickly. Literally every group of 8-13 year olds I played #ttrpg with (lots, cause work) wanted to play at admin level soon: manage a town, command troops, raise taxes, establish trade routes, build stuff, invented the steam machine (yes, every time). Games rarely provide even the most basic info necessary to pull that off (no. of inhabitants, soldiers, money...) and I think they are losing customers over it. #pnpde
Casual observations about my Mastodon feed:
-Lots of tech/coding posts I don't understand. Not sure how I plugged into that world.
-Lots of cats. This is, of course, the internet.
-Not nearly as many #TTRPG posts as I would have expected.
-Very few art posts.
Now, part of the reason for all this is I still am not good at finding and following folks over here. I just haven't put in the work. #mastodon
Why is it that none of the main settings for #DnD have canal cultures?
There may be single cities that are Venice-like, but there aren't the regional canal systems common to England, the Low Countries, Germany, France, Iraq, Egypt, Mexico, China, etc during the times that inspire our games,
Long boathouses!
Tow cables!
Backgrounds for operating the barges and such.
A peoples who swim a lot.
@bedirthan absolutely agreed! I’d love to see more of it. For my own part, I’m definitely going to be including more canals in my settings now that you pointed this out (I have a whole province called “The Riverlands” which is absolutely begging for some canals)