Gaming

I’ve been meaning to write this down in one place instead of scattering it in comments throughout the Internet. Note that the following blithely ignores the question of copyrighting mechanics; I agree that mechanics can’t be copyrighted but am assuming there’s concrete value to having a license for them anyhow. I also am assuming that the ORC will have a viral component; if not, it’s almost certainly going to be strictly inferior to Creative Commons Attribution. ...

Edge-of-Town is a nautical, isolated little borough. Plenty of room for things to get weird. Also I really like lighthouses.

This is the first week’s borough from my Bastion23 project. Harshbiscuit turned out to be a fairly wealthy borough – I imagine Gilded Age mansions. Map

My rough plan for Dungeon23 is to write one borough of Bastion per week, as follows: Monday: Basic map of transit lines Tuesday: Points of Interest named and described Wednesday: Complications written Thursday: Three to five One to three factions outlined Friday: Three to five One to three NPCs outlined Saturday: Encounter table Sunday: A Treasure Update: three to five NPCs and factions was optimistic. One to three is better. I will capture the day’s work on Mastodon, hash tagged #Dungeon23 and #Bastion23. The completed borough makes a Sunday blog post, which are also tagged as #Bastion23. ...

I’ve been thinking about Delta Green in relation to copaganda for a long time. That is a different blog post, because it’s a long topic, but recently I started wondering about collective action in the Delta Green world. As a practical matter, I believe that mutual aid is a better environment for mental health than any police force. What would that mean in relationship to the Cthulhu Mythos? Let’s start with the existing rules for using Bonds. ...

New text AI! Let’s try it on some tabletop RPG work. Bold is my prompts; I’ve snipped the polite banter out of most of the AI’s answers. Spoiler: this is way better than the last one I tried. If I repeat the same prompt it gets a little repetitive, but still not bad.

I got access to Lex, one of those AI writing assistants, so I tried to do the inevitable. Bold text is mine. I’m not sure this is entirely useful.

I made a thing! I have been on a minor roll with python recently and this seemed like a fun project so I started working on it. Towards the end I reached out to the awesome person who inspired me, since she didn’t seem to have been keeping her tracker up to date, and she said I should go ahead and launch mine. So here we are. I used this as an excuse to try out new technology and libraries. Click and Cloup made the list; the first because I wanted to try out new argument parsers and the second because I needed option groups. This forced me to learn to use setuptools better, which was a win. I am gonna keep using this tech going forward. ...

Or: ”A Lyric Scenario for The Yellow King RPG” Gather no more than three people. Watch Last Year in Marienbad together in silence. Select characters from those depicted in the movie. Discuss your motivations, remaining in character. It is unnecessary to agree on the facts of the fiction. If there is disagreement on motivations, play Nim to resolve them. “It’s a stupid game.” “There’s a trick.” “Just take an odd number.” “There must be rules.” ...

I’m playing Magic: the Gathering Arena right now. I went through a few approaches while figuring out how to make it fun for me. I wanted to satisfy my competitive urge, spend as little money as possible, and not get overwhelmed with the complexity of deck-building. Here’s what I came up with.