hunterhog

Pathbuilder tends to be better for that purpose, but yeah, that should be entirely possible.

Ice Cubes has been pretty good to me, personally.

For sure! Definitely something to tackle down the line.

This response is taking some time to federate over to my mainstay instance, so I'm replying from here. I'm glad you liked it!

For that you have to first know what type of game do you run? Maybe you could have emphasised that more. Or maybe that is a future article?

This article was written from the perspective of you already knowing generally what you want to do, since you'd already be looking into the phase of recruiting players for it. With that said, I did make a somewhat passing allusion of it at the start of the Be Honest & Thorough part, but it would be a little beyond the scope of just this article so I left it at that.

It's definitely something I can touch on at another point down the line, for sure, and I'll probably be looking into expanding on it in the not-too-far future.

Reposting something I wrote in another community I hang out in, but it feels appropriate to the topic:

I won't pretend "Reddit is dying" or anything of the sort, but I have noticed something interesting (that is maybe something I should've noticed long, long ago), and that is that subreddits have an insane concentration of whiny entitled lurkers that seem to want content catered and spoonfed to them.

During this whole debacle, I've seen creators and enthusiasts that drive the traffic be perfectly content creating elsewhere because it was more about expressing their passion of a topic than cultivating some kind of audience. No matter the alternative they chose, they have plenty of outlets for their creation. But everyone else hates this. All of the bitching about blackouts that I've seen haven't been "man I wanted to post cool shit" but more "where am I supposed to get cool stuff from?".

In general, what I've seen is a slight decline in activity, but a sharp decline in quality. Comparatively, my experience in Lemmy thus far has been that people creating were fine moving elsewhere to do their thing, and while communities are still small, I've seen a lot more long-form, thoughtful and respectful discussion because everyone there was a creator and enthusiast about that topic. Looking at the profiles of people commenting, they've typically posted at least once in that community already.

Meanwhile on Reddit, since the blackout wore off on certain subs, I've seen a lot of this:

[In the original, here would be an image of a typical current comment thread in a blackout-related post, but the context of it is explained below anyway]

Where people who bitch about the blackout because "but I wanted to discuss x!!" are then invited to discuss exactly that, and the conversation goes something along the lines of

"I wanted to discuss x!"

"Oh cool, me too. I like x y z about it, though I preferred if x was like this instead, and maybe z could be polished a little more"

"Well, idk I like it"

"ok 👍"

or just

"i like this"

"i like this too 👍"

because they don't actually have any proper formulated thoughts or opinions on the subject beyond surface-level observations, brand identity or attachment, or if they do have them, they don't have the drive to create or lead conversations about it and just lurk waiting for said content and thoughts to be delivered for them.

Which makes the already bad state of egregious repost bots rising to the top because people keep upvoting the same topics over and over even worse.

In a way, I guess it's kinda similar to what happened with 9gag when that hit critical mass.

To expand on this, I also find it interesting and perplexing just how far that entitlement goes. Moderators are on the verge of losing critical tools, and they're essential in maintaining the quality of the discussions held. Creators create the topics of discussion, and are the main driving force in setting the baseline quality of said discussions, and as power users are more likely to be the ones to depend on third party apps to create the content people browse.

Both seem fine with the situation, and/or migration, and very understandably go "Hey we feel disrespected on this platform and are moving to x where we feel we can thrive better without external influences deriding our community" and lurkers, who contribute nothing and have the least barrier of entry because they essentially just need to change the url they search the same terms in, stomp their feet and cry "but I want you to discuss things for my entertainment HERE!!!" like two year olds.

Edited to add, here on Lemmy:

I'm hopeful that this situation will show moderators they can curate a dedicated community anywhere with similar (actually relevant) post flow and quality, but without enduring the abuse of the platform they host it in and a bunch of on-lookers. I really hope they don't buckle in the name of "but we're already established / have so many people / are such a good resource" because all these things can be true elsewhere without receiving death threats or mod mail spam for doing the right thing.

Thanks! I'm not too worried about having success, it's self-hosted and all, so I'm not really doing it for ad revenue or views. I just find myself bubbling up these thoughts in my head and I figured, if other people might find it worth listening to, why not put it out there? I don't intend on posting super often, but I do intend on being thorough whenever I do.

I'm an enthusiast through and through, and if I can offer the occasional good read to other enthusiasts, or people looking to get into it further, I think that's good enough for me. Anything else is a plus ^^

And maybe that's also the key to not burning out. Just going through my own paces come what may, having fun with it, and maybe having fun discussions about those topics with other people. That's the part that appealed to me starting it the most, I'd say.

Thanks for compiling the changes! I love all of them, personally. While it's not the one I'd rate most interesting one mechanically (since strictly speaking it doesn't actually affect all that much), I'm really looking forward to see what we get out of Wizard schools - the diversity and flavor of actual schools sounds incredibly promising, and it'll only make me love Wizard more.

Oh, I see. Still, a very exciting prospect! I look forward to when it comes into fruition.

Ah, you found it before I could reply! Yes, the feed is available there. If you use any other federated services the blog is also federated, and you can find its posts at @[email protected]. I think Lemmy might be able to find it? I'm not quite sure, I know Mastodon can find and post/read Lemmy comments and posts, at least.

Edit: Now that I think about it, I guess I should update the 'About' article to include the feed info and stuff. Done!

Foundry can be used to run games in person quite well as long as you have a TV, or crappy projector or something. That's my plan for when I inevitably end up running a game face-to-face.

If you're willing to go the extra mile, there's a cool module under the Material Deck umbrella that allows you to roll physical dice into Foundry's dice roller, and use minis to control the tokens on the canvas.

I'm running all those services on the same Pi, and honestly, I gotta say.. not at all! Even when everyone's loading in at the same time at session start, it's snappy and responsive. It struggled a bit with 5e (5e's base system has little to no automation which means all modules need to redefine the codebase themselves. The result is a very broken, very laggy mess) but PF2e is insanely fast.

Even while doing automated rolls with complicated calculations and automated resistance values on damage taken, Node.js peaks out at maybe 30% CPU on a very complex roll, and idles at such a negligible amount it may as well be 0.

As for the modules, while I do think they're awesome, my suggestion is to play with things around in vanilla PF2e system, and add them one by one as you feel "hmm, maybe quality of life could be better on this" or "this could be spicier in terms of effects". Mostly because, while it's not too bad to follow the errors by using the web console, if you need to debug, it's easier to go "oh this thing that broke is regulated by module x" and knowing what each module does helps a lot, but also because the base Pathfinder 2e system actually already has a lot of quality of life and automation baked in and you probably shouldn't install things that the system might already automate and might end up conflicting and breaking things.

Anything prefixed by "Pathfinder 2e" and "PF2e" should be safe, but only really install them if you want the features they offer. If you come across anything while playing around with it, feel free to ask, or check stuff out in the Foundry Discord if you haven't, they've got some great resources in there for newcomers.

The 3D dice feature on D&D Beyond is notoriously horribly unoptimized. I've seen decent desktops chug to render that.