Good points. I feel like Fate does a better job staying in the interesting in-between for longer, and also supports “epic” stories a bit better (than other systems I have played).

But I haven’t tried to force Fate to support the newbie to epic growth, because the rulebook calls out that the Fate rules intentionally ignore supporting the ability to play as a helpless nobody.

Hence the number one rule: cool stuff should be done in the game, not your backstory.

I prefer Fate, where the rules practically require having cool stuff in each character’s back story.

Yes. That’s one reason that the Fate system basically disallows characters ever being low level. Low level starts aren’t actually particularly fun, and they can prevent characters from having diverse epic shared backstory.

“A wizards staff has a knob at the end.”

GNU Sir Terry Pratchett

Do you happen to also use Arch?

No. If I did, I would say so!

Haha.

(Apologies to my arch-user peers.)

That could get old. But…

I play Pathfinder, by the way.

Damn.

Pinkertons on Wikipedia

Wow. Damn.

I’ve heard that war is good for business.

Lots of huge corporation owners are suffering from making a long series of head-up-their-own-ass stupid choices, right now.

Now they must choose between hiring experienced advisors to guide a slow chain of reasonable pro-social long term profitable choices - or starting a bloody war.

I know which choice I’m expecting.

Yes. Starfinder has planets, and some planets have caves.

YouTube with a custom app seems to be the best way to actually watch your own chosen subscriptions, rather than bent force fed by the Google algorithm.

I’ve heard folks talk about how to get this from regular YouTube, but it’s wild to me that that put up with having to go to all the trouble with the official app.

Nebula is great.

It’s pretty funny to watch a quick “check out our extended content on Nebula” video exit, then just immediately watch the extended content roll along with a thank you message. (Many creators simply add the Nebula exclusive bits directly to the end of the video, on Nebula.)

It makes me feel like a fancy rich person.

Nebula is terrific!

It does take some time to find everything. It’s not (much of) an algorithm, so I just had to explore and start subscribing to things.

Find out in the next season of our campaign: “Survival in the Lands of Lava”. DM weeps quietly.

Is it still compatible with all the money I wasted on 3.x Hasbro D&D?

While technically the answer is “no”, people who emphasize the difference don’t apply the “Rule of Cool” as liberally as I did.

I re-used all kinds of D&D 3rd Edition resources while switching to Pathfinder.

Sure, we absolutely shouldn’t just dogmatically use the numbers given in a 3E book with Pathfinder.

But I didn’t find it terribly hard to whip up Pathfinder monster and NPC number adjustments based on my 3E source books, more or less on the fly.

Many numbers given are close enough. Most abilities are easy enough to convert in a way that is fun. The Challenge Rating isn’t tuned as carefully, but i find the usual GM toolkit can address that. For example, throwing in a few extras baddies from over the hilldside can scale an encounter up, and awarding the players various story advantages “for good role playing” can scale an encounter’s challenge down.

If my napkin translation went too badly, I threw “Rule of Cool” at it, and just made sure the players were still having fun.

I will say, I relegated 3E stuff to filler encounters, just as I do with anything else I homebrew.

I don’t mind being on my GM toes for a quick encounter, or a short story arc. But I don’t like having something poorly balanced have a recurring role in my campaigns.

All to say I have used 3E source books liberally in my Pathfinder campaigns, and I’m not sure any of my players have ever noticed.

I played in that party in second edition!

That’s a pretty good description of what GrapheneOS does with the sandboxed Google services.

I have found that the only apps that don’t work well with Samdboxed Google services are ones that work hard to invasively probe their runtime environment.

Thwy usually fall into these three categories:

• Bank apps that do it “for my safety”. Nevermind that a website version exists for attackers to target without the same (dubious, invasive) “protections”.
• Streaming apps that do it “because this paid subscriber might be some kind of dark web pirate and we need to protect our content from being uploaded to the dark web one more time.”
• Apps whose developers are shitty at writing code for memory management. But GrapheneOS has good options to allow these to run, anyway.

That looks like exactly what I’m looking for in my next phone. Thanks.

Do you have access to credit unions?

The GrapheneOs team is quite particular about hardware.

I would gladly pruchase a phone that came preloaded with LineageOS.

“Better than we have now.” often wins over waiting for perfection.

CoMaps is quite nice.

There are also still companies selling navigation devices that mount in a car windshield, assuming the car doesn’t already have one built in.

Pro tip - those navigation devices also often have an accident camera that records if it feels an impact - which is a good idea anyway.