“Install this bloated spyware in exchange for a little bit of convenience” is like 80% of modern tech and I don’t know how people are just ok with that

I installed Bazzite and it felt so much like installing Windows for me (huge install image, slow process, lots of loading wheels and user friendly “pretty” screens to get set up). It didn’t feel great, but I figured I’d give it a fair chance and learn how to use a different setup than I’m used to.

I still haven’t had a chance to actually do much with it (only a couple of hours between work and other stuff) but I am really interested in the concept. After reading up more and watching some videos I now understand why the install process is so big and the reasoning behind it. This type of distro really does seem like a great option for regular users.

Only issue I’ve had so far is connecting to my RaspberryPi to control my 3d printer using the .local hostname, since flatpak apparently has a bug with mDNS. IP works fine, and I did rps-ostree install a browser, which was kind of a pain, and probably not the correct way to address the issue, but that was within the first hour or so of using it and I haven’t figured out the best way to do that type of thing yet. Really looking forward to learning more about the setup and how to customize stuff on top of it. Distrobox seems extremely powerful and sounds like it will give me everything I want.

Still have vanilla Debian on my laptop, which I absolutely love, but using it on my desktop PC was kind of a pain due to some proprietary drivers required there (nvidia).

pretty

This is the real pro tip. “Debian packages are behind” but you can just clone the repo or download the .deb and get the latest version of the tool you want. I know there can be dependency issues but I haven’t run into any with the stuff I use.

This is amazing! I will definitely be making use of this

Expeditions are amazing, but I’ve only finished one because I’m usually out of the loop and start them way late. It would be amazing if they brought old ones back into rotation so people who are new or just missed them could earn the rewards eventually. I feel like they have enough now to make a pretty good rotation without feeling repetitive

You have the r and n flipped: userjourneys.ai

Definitely recommend playing or replaying old games. I’ve recently put hours into replaying Morrowind and Jedi Academy.

The main game I’ve been playing lately is Mount & Blade Warband from 2010. Got it for a couple $ and have been loving it. I missed it when it came out and recently a friend had been talking a lot about how much fun it used to be.

I have played a few newer AAA games that I uninstalled after a few hours. Sure there’s some great new games, especially from small publishers or indie devs, but there’s a lot more slop like you said.

Nah, we’ll just SELECT * from both tables and loop through the arrays in JavaScript to associate the records.

The simple shapes come together to make some really interesting linked paths! And I did design it with the idea of being able to add in more rooms, or spells, etc, as you want, since it is a solo game. I really wanted to keep everything 1d6 friendly

I would have Daggerfall flashbacks if I tried to map that 😅

You could do that as an alternative to finding stairs down - instead you find a gentle slope that goes under the previous tunnels, then start a new floor.

Since I’m playing in a notebook, I will just shorten or slightly extend rooms as needed and make doors (they must have been hidden the first time through 😅) to connect to previous rooms. Here is a messy example from a recent game.

I love the approach of having “hard coded” rooms that happen at certain intervals. I wish I would have had this a few weeks ago when my group was exploring a cave system. I love that d20 table. I may use that for the game I’m running with my kids that is (of course) set in the Minecraft world 😄

Ended up going in a slightly different direction with this - I made a mini solo RPG that uses random maps (6 different room shapes) but you could play it with your magnetic tiles as well! I’m still finishing up development and making tweaks as I play, but it’s finished enough to play test, if you are inclined to try it out with my maps or your own 😄

https://aldinthemage.itch.io/notebook-rpg

I will do that if I can manage to get it done! 😀

I love the magic system in Genesys, with just basic spells (attack, heal, augment, curse, etc), some varying effects with suggested flavor (e.g. “Ice” adds ensnare to an attack, but mechanically it doesn’t matter if it is vines, goop, whatever), and how much that effect increases spell difficulty. It lets the players go into a brainstorming session trying to come up with a spell to get out of a very specific situation, and having the game support almost anything.

E.g. this create water idea could be an attack spell with the poisonous quality (making it a hard check), which requires the target to make a hard resilience check or take a bunch of extra damage and strain, which for a skilled mage against a non-boss creature (e.g. an overly ambitious bandit) is well within one-shot range. If they pass the check, they would still take damage from the attack, but would be able to cough up most of the water before it got too serious.

This system sounds very cool also, and I have recently heard of Mage in another thread. I would like to play a system that gives players the ability to come up with spells that the GM doesn’t know ahead of time (I seriously dislike long lists of predefined spells), but also has a little more of that hard magic-science set of rules to satisfy my inner Sanderson fanboy. I have built in some external scaffolding around the magic in my Genesys setting that does this, and it has been a ton of fun so far.

My main gripe is that I wish I had more time to play RPGs (more than a couple sessions a month) so I could try out more systems.

Love that! Makes me want to set up a bunch of map tiles and run a random “draw the next room from a deck” dungeon crawl.

In the old Bionicle Adventure Game, whichever player got to the edge of the map drew the next tile, and got to choose how to connect it, if there were multiple valid paths in/out.

Bees: mix of the top 3

I love this idea. Would have been perfect for my current game, though I have enjoyed the flexibility to adjust things the players don’t know yet.

That could still work with this approach but you’d have to be intentional about keeping changes within the same scope / size