I’ll just say: my first RPG was 4e, a bit over a year after I started playing that, 5e came out and I immediately switched.

I’ve played a bunch of others here and there, but the next relevant one is Pathfinder 1e. I hated it. After my brief experience of that, you could not pay me to play 3.5 or PF1 again.^[1] But I switched to PF2e in 2023 after disliking the direction 5e was moving in (including but not limited to the OGL drama), and I absolutely love it. It feels like it gives me everything 5e was supposed to.

It has vancian spellcasting, which I don’t love, but have to admit at least provides more legitimate diversity than 5e’s quasi-vancian system. (With true spontaneous casters mixed with true prepared slot casters, and archetype choices that allow a more 5e-style approach, for the cost of an archetype feat.) Apart from spell slots, there isn’t much that prevents a party from keeping going forever. Healing is pretty readily accessible, and most other stuff recharges on a 10 minute rest, if not instantly. Outside of spell slots, there isn’t really any sense of attrition.

The three-action economy is a genius solution to a number of awkward design problems in 4e and 5e (and, from what I gather, 3.5/pf1). Though as a GM, I tend to be relatively generous in terms of what I count as costing an action, because RAW is a bit onerous at times (one action to get an item out of the bag, then another action to use it? Nah, no thanks. Players have a hard enough time deciding to use expendable items as it is.) 4 degrees of success is excellent and should really be the bare minimum going forward in most RPGs with a “success/fail” mechanic. And while I’m not a fan of the inevitable consequences (large numbers of weak enemies have zero chance against a party, and sandbox type worlds become impossible to run, with challenges needing to be tailored to within 2 or 3 levels of the party to be achievable), or the burden it places upon GMs (a requirement to give out a pretty specific progression of magic items, unless you use a variant rule that does away with a lot of the flavour in order to automate the maths), 2e’s maths ends up really tight, and it feels really good when you are designing challenges specifically for your party as it currently stands.

PF2e has a lot of rules for specific things, but to be honest, outside of combat I tend to do it the same way I did in 5e and 4e. As GM I see what the players are trying to do, I decide an appropriate skill and DC, and I have them roll. I rarely bother with more complicated specific rules and subsystems. This is the same reason I genuinely quite liked 4e and never had any time for people who argue things like “it should have been called D&D Tactics” or “it was only a combat game, not a roleplaying game”. I want rules to be light outside of combat.

Ah ok. So in a way it’s kind of like Pathfinder to D&D? Pretty similar mechanically (I noticed in the Drivethru page that it’s dice pool d10 skill+attribute), made by a former third-party publisher.

Being designed for crossover from the start is interesting. They’ve obviously got Vampire, Werewolf, and Mage equivalents, but I’m not sure what the Outcasts or Dead are. Wraith and Mummy? (Or vice versa?)

I also wonder about theme. Each of the WoD games have pretty strong themes. Vampire asks: what does it mean to be human? It deals with human-like political and interpersonal conflicts through the lens of the supernatural. Werewolf is about protecting nature and deals with topics like ecoterrorism vs industrialism. Mage is more esoteric and about what reality is, and how our sense of the real is created. Wraith is about death and what it means to our lives. Etc. Each game has its own unique and quite strong theming that makes it stand out from the others. Not saying that a competitor needs to have the same themes, but for me the appeal of all these is that the themes are so strong. Does Curseborne manage to keep strong themes while also enabling cross-play?

Sorry, this post is the first I’ve heard of Curseborn. What is it exactly?

I’m broadly familiar with Vampire: The Masquerade, and aware of Vampire: The Requiem as a failed attempt at rebooting/simplifying that game’s universe but I don’t really know any of the specifics.

Yeah, I have to fight the temptation not to fix typos sometimes!

The biggest thing preventing me from doing something like this is that I like having my players do a recap of the previous session, as a way to help me know what caught their attention the most/what mattered to them.

I guess you could still do this, especially if you really lean into the idea that the reporter is presenting an extremely biased/limited recap.

Well at least that means you got a couple of years of using it when others couldn’t. Not like you bought it last week!

I bought an iPad Pro 12.9 inch (IIRC) back in like 2018 or 2019. If you can get an old second-hand iPad I’d highly recommend it. It’s fast enough to be really smooth even on very large heavy PDFs, and it’s nearly A4 size, so the reading experience is excellent.

But bought new it’s insanely expensive. I really wish companies would separate screen size from power. Not everyone who wants a big screen also wants the highest of high-end stuff, damn it!

Avatar is the only PbtA system I’ve ever read (and never played or GMed any), but do systems have a significant amount of mechanics unique to each system, or is it all mostly flavour on top of the same system?

My initial reaction was confusion or intrigue, but the more I think about it, the more it makes sense.

I can definitely see that Avatar might be a system that makes sense for Star Wars. Combat is largely martial arts based, with magical ability to affect things at a distance. Plus non magic using characters (with weapons or technology) are important.

Narratively, the idea of balance is incredibly important in both worlds, and the balance mechanic is pretty core to the Avatar RPG. Three of the four core stats (focus, harmony, and passion) are super important in the existing Star Wars lore, and creativity is hardly a huge stretch to add.

I’m not sure what “piece linked” you’re talking about, since none of the parent comments of this comment actually have a link in them.

This is the first time I’ve ever heard of FUTO, but I did read their statement about open source and it sounds pretty good to me. I actually think they’re capitulating a little bit too much by deciding not to call it open source anymore. As far as I’m concerned, if the source is available and anyone can contribute, that’s open source. I don’t particularly care whether or not it’s free for Google to incorporate it into their increasingly-enshitified products or not.

Creative Commons (an org to which FUTO says they have donated) doesn’t like their licences being used for software, presumably for finicky technical legal reasons. But if you imagine the broad spirit of their licences applying to software, all the main CC licences would be open source in my opinion. All combinations of Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share Alike, and No Derivatives, as well as CC0 respect the important elements of open source.

😭

Not even auto-update. Just auto detect updates. Then you go and download it yourself manually.

Auto-update-detection meant that the software was calling out to a remote server, so they updated the TOS to reflect that, and people got upset.

From what I could tell when I looked into it after a comment someone left on !nebula@lemmy.world, some people were very upset at the privacy implications of Audacity adding an update detection mechanism (which can be turned off, and which is not included at all in the default build if you build it yourself).

Watched last weekend.

On Nebula? !nebula@lemmy.world if you’re interested.

Looks like the followup ancestry feat is more applicable to this image. I do like the idea of it costing an ancestry feat to get though. Implies it’s a feature some nephilim have, but not the majority.

Oh that’s good, because I was gonna say, tieflings don’t have prehensile tails in the Realms.

So for example, “an ewt” became “a newt” or “a eke-name” became “a nickname”.

I think you might be right about what agglutination is in your description, but not in this example. Examples I’m seeing are more like “-s” to make something plural, or “anti-” to say that something is against something else.

Some Wikipedia:

Analytic languages contain very little inflection, instead relying on features like word order and auxiliary words to convey meaning. Synthetic languages, ones that are not analytic, are divided into two categories: agglutinative and fusional languages.

So unlike what I thought previously, agglutination vs fusion is not what we care about here, synthetic vs analytic languages is. English’s practice of creating compound words like “cellar door” is analytic. A more purely analytic language would probably not say “two cellar doors” but merely “two cellar door”. And an antihistamine would be a “histamine opposer”. And German’s famous “words created by shunting other words together” is not really agglutination, but morphologically the same as what English does (seemingly called “inflection”, if I’m reading this right), just with different orthographic rules.

Which I guess brings us back to the question: what does Sending count as a word? My instinct is to say that the way English puts spaces is a good baseline to follow, not least because the creators of D&D are anglophones. What, then, would Donau­dampfschifffahrts­gesellschafts­kapitän be? Probably 5. But if you asked the average German speaker (non-linguist) “how many words is Donau­dampfschifffahrts­gesellschafts­kapitän?” what would they say?

I’m not a linguist so I could be wrong, but I think that they would tell you that there is a difference between agglutination (what German does) and adding adjectives as separate words (what English does), even in spoken language. But I also know that even defining “word” in a strict linguistic sense is difficult, so 🤷‍♂️

Oh, so you came into this post to leave a comment not based on what was in the content of this post, but just because you had something unrelated to this post that you had already decided was fact, despite it not being true and being verifiably not true within 60 seconds?

I’m not super sure about a fire stick, but isn’t it Android-based? So you should in theory be able to run ReVanced on it?