Sometimes I make video games
In a high court judgment handed down in May, Mellor said that Wright presents himself as an extremely clever person, “however, in my judgment, he is not nearly as clever as he thinks he is”. He said he was an “extremely slippery witness”.
Sick burn from the judge
Initial attempts to search for this were frustrated because my search engine kept trying to find rhymes for “FOSS” or “Open Source”
However, I did find an app with credits that showed what libraries it used.
In particular, this one might be up your alley: Carnegie Mellon pronouncing dictionary. It looks like you’d still have to combine it with an existing dictionary in order to find the rhymes, but at least you can get the pronunciation
I don’t really run a lot of cyberpunk, but I’m all about subverting player expectations. The trick is usually to make them feel like they got something out of the skill, while also ensuring that they don’t circumvent the whole thing with a single check.
So say you look up the evil bad guy’s social media to find out where they live. Then you discover that they live in a hardened bunker only accessible from the private elevator of their corporate penthouse office. The knowledge of their whereabouts is useful, but it’s still going to require more strategizing to figure out how to penetrate it.
Or if they’re a major public figure, you might discover that their social media is being run by a botnet. You might not get your target’s exact location, but it gives you a chance to direct the players in an investigation at the botnet’s physical address.
Hacking the CCTV camera might determine that Joe did it. But maybe the assailant was disguised, or Joe got deepfaked, or your hacker discovers that someone has deleted / corrupted the footage. All of these scenarios have potential to turn the investigation in another direction.
If you have a hack-happy player then you probably want to do something to beef up the villains’ technological prowess. Ultimately you do want to reward the player for using their skillset, but you also want to challenge them too. Every hero needs a foil, after all.
It would probably be disingenuous to have every villain suddenly be a computer prodigy though. But it’s not unreasonable to have a few high-profile hacking antagonists or organizations. And if you’re the sort of villain who has the resources to wield a private army or a lavish ultra-rich lifestyle, it stands to reason that you’ve probably contracted out your IT needs
I can confirm that it’s not, I haven’t tried WoD yet.
I do recall there being a similar mechanic in at least one version of Call of Cthulhu. Among all your character stats you also had a Credit Rating. I think it was left a little bit vague about how to implement it, but a successful check basically meant that you convinced the target you were good for your debt.
I got the impression that it was supposed to be more about your social credit and your ability to convince people of your honourable reputation, but I definitely used it to buy a car once.
I’m afraid I don’t remember the name of the system or else I’d link the rules, but I do remember playing a game where I really liked what they did with inventory and currency.
Basically, the game divorced the rules from the settings’ currency entirely. So if you’re into homebrew, that means it works equally well with gold, credit chips, reputation, bottle caps, and seashells
When you defeated a monster, finished a quest, or found hidden treasure, you would acquire LOOT. Get ten LOOT and you level up at the end of the adventure.
Instead of writing down and purchasing all of your basic equipment, you would have a certain number of GEAR points. If you found you were in a situation where you needed some item, you could mark off one of your GEAR to retroactively have brought that item with you.
I liked it because it sped up play and was super newbie friendly. You no longer run into a situation where a career adventurer plum forgot to buy torches before spelunking. It also meant you didn’t have to roll a check for each item in the dragon’s hoard to see if you could afford to feed your hirelings.
If that system sounds familiar to anyone, please let me know. I wouldn’t mind taking it for a spin again
See, that’s exactly what I liked about the ability.
It’s an attack that even if you walk away from it, you have a story to tell about it
It’s a tough pill to swallow
Swallow Whole used to be my favorite mechanic with large creatures like dragons, hydras, or what have you.
I mean, it’s both narratively and mechanically a powerful ability. Usually the creature gets a bite attack with Improved Grab, so they get a free grapple if they hit. Then the next turn if they have a grappled creature in their mouth, they swallow them. From there it’s usually continuous acid / bludgeoning damage, but the swallowed creature gets a chance to fight their way out or get rescued.
Being grappled was already somewhat debilitating, but you could usually ignore it. But when you get swallowed it immediately raises the stakes. It also means you can’t ignore getting grappled because it can become so much worse so quickly.
Then one day one of my players noticed I was using the ability a lot and accused me of having a vore fetish. Now I don’t really use Swallow Whole at all
Found the power-gamer
Personally, I’m a big fan of the ‘useless magic item’ and try to get one to each of my players. Lots of them are cosmetic: helmets with glowing eyes, cloak of billowing, squeaky shoes. Sometimes they’re just weird, like the wand of create wand which is a one-charge wand that crumbles to dust after being used to make a wand of create wand
Story time:
I had some trouble scheduling the group together, so I ran some one-on-one adventures with each member so they’d still get a chance to roll dice.
So the cleric is cruising around town one night when this man runs out of his house yelling for help. Some horrible goober (later identified as a bodak) snatched his son out of bed and absconded into the spooky cellar. The man can’t go far to summon the watch because his invalid father is upstairs and can’t be left alone, so isn’t it fortuitous that a locally well known adventurer happens to be strolling by?
So the cleric goes down into the basement to get the baddy. The bodak has the boy hostage and has a deadly gaze attack.
My expectation was that the cleric was going to Turn Undead and scare off the monster. The cleric’s expectation was that they were going to cast Pillar of Fire and cook that sumbitch.
Pillar of Fire is a cylinder with something like a 20 foot radius and 40 foot height. I ask if he’s sure, and he is, so the monster, child, cellar, first, and second floors burst into flames.
Realizing he’s toast if he stays here, the cleric leaves the cellar and bumps into the frantic man on the street. He asks if he got the monster and the cleric shrugs.
The man then agonizes over whether he should save his father or his son, and then plunges into the cellar. Moments later, the burning house collapses on itself.
And that’s how our cleric wiped three generations of a bloodline off the map with a single spell.
I try to win as the DM.
“Winning” in this case being that everyone had a good time.
I did this one campaign which was a hexcrawl where the party was shipwrecked on an island purported to hide the lost city of gold.
The site of the shipwreck was home base, but the party obviously wanted to explore. There were some NPC crewmate survivors, so they would assign them to work on projects while they were exploring. I would always tell them that “some guy” was working on their stuff.
Cut to a few months later when they have a sort of mutiny on their hands. It seems that one crew member in particular was fed up with how much work they had to do while the party went adventuring that they turned the crew against the party.
The mutinous ringleader’s name? Sum Gai
I have the D&D 3.5 core rulebooks on my shelf in the nerd nook. I know that I’m never going to play 3.5 again, but it’s the system I first got into the hobby with. It would feel wrong to get rid of my personal history of nerdship.
The gazebo is in the right, the rogue shot first
Where can I get one? Either the t-shirt or a partner that would be interested in one, thanks
Friendly reminder that the alpha female hyena is the one with the largest penis
In my experience, the winter months kill many a game. Between the holidays, work stress, weather, and seasonal depression it can be hard to keep your group together for a few months.
My players love our game, so I’d be hesitant to say that it’s not important enough to them. Sometimes we let the important things slip when we’re busy, or a perfect storm just keeps you apart.
All that to say, we usually get back together in the spring. Sometimes there’s attrition, and usually we’re playing a different game when we come back. But that’s okay too, it feels natural to start up something new after you’ve lost your momentum
I was definitely trying to figure out how to work that in there
+1 for Dread, it’s so easy to play
Instead of dice, you play with a jenga tower. It’s a physical manifestation of narrative tension, and that goes a long way in getting the players into the vibe