[-] sambeastie@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I've never understood the "these people hate Star Trek!" take I've seen around the new shows. It's clear that nobody working on these sets out to intentionally make a bad show. Some of the Easter eggs and references are deep cuts, so it seemed obvious to me that the people working on these are big fans.

[-] sambeastie@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

To give credit where it's due, RotS and many of the Disney-era Star Wars products have gone a long way to fitting the glamorous, shiny prequel aesthetic into the gritty, used, "lived in" aesthetic of the OT. I'm not the biggest fan of The Last Jedi, but I actually think the implicication of the shiny galaxy just being a property of the rich inner rim planets was a great move in unifying everything.

[-] sambeastie@lemmy.world 10 points 1 year ago

I'm going to be honest, Klingons in the TNG era always felt too goofy to me. They weren't a proud warrior culture so much as borderline clownish space vikings who spent more time getting drunk than actually conquering anything. A redesign and change in how their culture(s) present on screen was welcome for me, and I think Discovery did a great job. I even liked the way they recontextualized the Klingon language, to make it sound more alien and more threataning than the staccato, oft-mispronounced mess that we got in the TNG era.

That said, I also think there was a missed opportunity with them. For a long time, I've had a head canon of the different looks of Klingons throughout all of the eras could be chalked up to these all being distinct peoples from within the Klingon Empire. It stands to reason that over a long enough time scale, an empier spanning multiple stars would start to consider people not originally from their homeworld "Klingon," even if they might be genetically different. I always thought it would be cool if the TOS smooth forehead Klingons were actually just one species that were culturally Klingon, where the Worf-type were another, and the General Chang type was yet another. It would provide a way to smooth over the aeshetic differences with an in-universe explanation that doesn't require any retconning except for a handful of episodes from ENT that die-hards didn't like anyway.

But oh, well. One can dream.

47

Not counting the Steam Deck, since KDE isn't actually turned on while you're running games.

Normally I'm a Gnome guy, but I'm building a tiny low power portable computer and wanting to keep resource utilization low, so I'm investigating other options.

6
submitted 1 year ago by sambeastie@lemmy.world to c/osr@lemm.ee

Hi all,

As the title, I'm looking for an adventure module that hits on similar notes to a Soulsborne game. The kind of crumbling dying world aeshetic, mixed with misty forests and long (possibly perpetual) nights and vague hints at factions or individuals from a time before. You know. Soulsy stuff. King's Field counts too, even though those games are quite different, since the worlds they portray have similar aeshetics.

I've found Vermis I, which I'm very excited to (hopefully soon) get a copy of so that I can finally actually read it, but as you might imagine, this is kind of a difficult thing to formulate search terms for. There are a lot of people who try to capture these games' mechanics, but seemingly not so many that I could find trying to capture their worldbuilding.

System compatibility doesn't matter, since I plan to just mine it for ideas

[-] sambeastie@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago

I mean it's not a comeback, it's just advice. I started using Linux in 2004, when trying to Google an answer basically never worked, and once I was told that the included manuals contained all the instructions for everything, I started having a much better time. It was humbling since I considered myself very proficient with Windows troubleshooting, but I had to recognize that I still needed to read the instructions now that I was in unfamiliar territory.

Anyway, since you're not interested in that, have a nice day, and I hope your future experiences work out better for you.

[-] sambeastie@lemmy.world 10 points 1 year ago

If it's a terminal command you need help with, type "man [command]" in the terminal and it will give you the literal manual page for the command. For example, to get the manual for tmux, type "man tmux"

If it's something else, check the Arch Wiki. Yes, even if you aren't running Arch. It's some of the most comprehensive Linux documentation all on one site and most of it can be generalized to any distro.

But to be honest, your attitude here makes me think you will never have a good time on Linux. It does require a certain curiosity and willingness to learn -- maybe even some patience while you get the experience to intuit solutions as you likely already do on Windows without thinking about it.

The manuals really do contain exact information on how to engage with pretty much everything, but if someone suggesting that you use the resources designed to help you makes them "an ass," then I suspect you will simply fail to become familiar with the environment. I'm not trying to be a dick, I'm just telling you that when you're new, you need a different mindset than what you're showing with this comment.

[-] sambeastie@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

Ben Milton's take on traps is, I think, the best way to handle them.

Don't use traps as a hidden thing. Make the trap itself obvious to the players, and describe it's positioning. The trick should be for the players to figure out how to either avoid or safely disarm the trap.

One example he uses is a pit trap with a narrow board serving as a bridge over the top of it. The smell of volatiles indicates that there may be some kind of fuel at the bottom of it. The board is on a rotating mechanism, and if anyone tries to stand on or otherwise move the board, it ignites the fuel below with flint inside the mechanism, like a lighter. Since the pit is too large to jump across, players will need to find another way across.

In my own game, I recently pointed out a section of floor filled with skeletons whose legs were partially sunken into the tiles up to the knee. Since the sections of the floor were too long to jump across, they tested what was wrong by throwing objects onto the tiles and seeing what happened. Once it was clear that only objects that had been stationary for a few seconds sank in, they sprinted through the hallway and made it to the other side fine (one character lost a boot). They had fun, nobody felt it was unfair, and I would call that a win.

Unfortunately for them, the floor on the other side of this trap was greased, so they went sliding down a chute to the fourth floor of the dungeon, and had to look for a way back up, which came in the form of a previously inactive elevator that was a shortcut back to the first floor.

Sen's Fortress in Dark Souls 1 is a good example of how traps like these can be utilized. They're all obvious and easy to avoid, and serve more as positioning puzzles than as gotcha mechanics.

[-] sambeastie@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

The good news is that The Nocturnal Table isn't actually very long as far as page count, so it's pretty easy to just print the PDF as a booklet and just staple or sew the pages together. That's all the official print version is, really.

[-] sambeastie@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I play a lot on my Steam Deck these days, but the main battlestation is just a regular old upper midrange workhorse. R5 5600x, RX 6700xt, 32GB of DDR4 3600 and a few terabytes of NVME storage.

I'm still just using vanilla Arch because I haven't found anything better for an enthusiast desktop.

I think the only part where I kind of cut against the grain is that I'm running Gnome. It does what I want with minimal tweaking and it handles my FreeSync monitor without any headaches. It also just looks pretty, and I'm not about to pretend I don't like eye candy on the desktop.

EDIT: Forgot to shill for the case I'm using: A P-ATX. I really wanted a small form factor computer, but I also think ATX motherboards are a better deal than ITX, so this seemed like a good option. When I bought it, the only other thing that came close (from Thermaltake) was out of stock, so I ended up with this and I'm actually really liking it, despite it being a pain in the ass to assemble.

[-] sambeastie@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

War crimes and human leather.

[-] sambeastie@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago

Drink a bunch of cold water when you smoke, and try to keep yourself busy.

I also try to avoid eating too much while stoned since it becomes a hassle to manage taking insulin for everything, and those two things work well for me.

10
submitted 1 year ago by sambeastie@lemmy.world to c/osr@lemm.ee

I've never actually run any of the old modules like Keep on the Borderlands or anything like that. I'm much more used to homebrewing a setting entirely or at most grabbing a few elements from a published adventure (I took a bunch from Willow, for example). I think this is why most of my favorite systems tend to be more in the NSR camp; I just never end up needing compatibility with older material.

Is running retro adventures in their entirety the most common practice for OSR tables? Or is the homebrew approach how most people are doing it?

[-] sambeastie@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

I backed it. I've gottena lot of utility out of Ben's other games, so this one seemed like a no brainer for the tables alone, much less the rest of the game underneath it.

1
submitted 1 year ago by sambeastie@lemmy.world to c/osr@lemmy.world

I posted that I've been working on my own system (as probably a lot of OSR fans have), but this post isn't really about that so much. As I've been working, there's a nagging voice in my head that keeps asking "does the world really need another system?"

And that got me thinking, with the massive breadth of options from hardcore retroclones to modernized reinterpretations, does the world need another system? Is there a more useful or needed thing I could be spending my writing time on?

So I guess my question to the group is whether you're tired of seeing new systems. If you are, what would you rather see? Dungeon anthologies? Old school modules? Micro-settings? Something else?

Personally, I like new systems that either add something fresh, or just rearrange a bunch of existing systems into something that takes aspects of all of them (more what mine is), but I could also do to see more collections of small hexcrawls, zines full of one-page dungeons to drop into a game, or even things like Vermis I, just fun lore books or micro fictions that I can draw inspiration from.

So how about you?

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sambeastie

joined 1 year ago