9.3 bits / 1:628.3
(ipadOS / safari)

…how do they quantify 3/10 of a bit?..

…or shadow of the demon lord…

…i have this loosely-developed idea of replacing the d20 in OGL-derived systems with a 3d chain which scales with tiers of proficiency for a nice bell curve: 3d4 (untrained), 3d6 (proficient), 3d8 (expert), 3d10 (master), 3d12 (legendary), 3d16 (celestial), 3d20 (demigod), 3d24 (god), 3d30 (overgod)…

…in the background are impact!/goodman dice of unusual size; they just wrapped up a crowdfunding campaign to add matching d9, d11, d13, d15, d17, d18, d19, and d22 to the series…

…in the foreground are my chessex 2507 set circa 1992, which i’m sadly unable to match with any of their modern blue/indigo/violet production runs, hence the slightly-mismatched d6 + d20 update to a fifth-edition set of eleven dice…dedicated percentile dice were a new innovation at the time, produced only in white!..

…i hadn’t even considered that compartmentalised dice bags might be thing; that looks pretty handy!..

…i checked out cardking pro’s other offerings, and curiously-enough the old speaker bag i’m using right now is nearly identical to this bag, maybe twice as tall…

…i’m tempted to say physical dice, but in truth i have many sets and switch them out for each campaign, so my most-used accessory is probably my nice padded rolling tray, followed closely by my staedler stick eraser…

…my most-used books, despite my meticulously-curated physical and PDF libraries, have turned out to be the player’s handbook and dungeon master’s guide on DnDbeyond; i always keep them open on an ipad stand during gameplay because it’s really tough to beat indexed hypertext for ready-reference during gameplay…my players use the heck out of my shared campaign subscription, but it’s becoming tougher now that DnDbeyond defaults to 2024 rules, so that use pattern may well change as the platform evolves…

…even as a player, though, i feel like a good DM’s screen might be quicker!..the problem of course is tabletop real estate, but it seems like there’s an untapped market for player’s reference screens during remote sessions, where most folks have more tabletop real estate to play with physical accessories…

…i’m considering crafting a player’s reference screen with panels focused on core rules, house rules, and class rules which can be readily swapped-out…

…don’t look at me; my bard’s half-monk…

…marvel super heroes also featured a resources ability score and feats to represent financial maneuvers akin to lines of credit; it felt frustratingly abstracted as a teenager living in a discretionary cash economy, but after several decades as a real-world adult i realise that it’s an elegant abstraction for how people actually live and conduct commerce…

…my wife came home from a chemistry demonstration with a cooler full of dry ice: we thought it would be fun to fill the master bathtub with hot water, dump it all in at once, and watch what happened…

…besides the obvious violent commotion, our entire house filled with a waist-high impetrable fog, enough that we panicked and quickly evacuated the cats lest they be overwhelmed by carbon dioxide…

…that’s exactly where my imagination went first, and then onward to the league of extraordinary gentlemen, and then i started brainstorming elements for my eberron campaign…

…i think that’s why it says elderly french pirate: he was formidable in his youth, but that was four decades ago…

^{(revolvers may rule the day but a well-timed flintlock will still f*ck you up)}

"A thin green ray springs from your pointing finger to a target that you can see within range. "

…i think the ring should be green…

…we were ambushed by a vorpal bunny a couple of years ago; managed to grapple the vicious beast and drop it down an open well…

DP1R gloomstalker/battlemaster

…the essentials kit included a pair of one-page flyers: one with free DnDbeyond codes for rest of the series following icespire peak and one with a DnDbeyond discount code for the player’s handbook…

…your campaign needn’t fizzle-out after cryovain!..dragon of icespire peak is only the first part of a four module series, followed by storm lord’s wrath, sleeping dragon’s wake, and divine contention on DnDbeyond…

…the essentials kit was published as a hook to draw parties onto the digital platform, but despite being a fantastic value as a physical boxed set, they did a poor job promoting the latter 3/4 of its adventure content, which were only published digitally…

…likewise, each character is different distillation of some aspect of my own personality; it’s kind of an integral part of the character creation process for me to figure out who they are and properly get into character…

…new sourcebooks coming next year, but fourth-edition maps kind of butchered the realms and third-edition maps compressed them into a fantasy theme park: i appreciate the proper scale of the fifth-edition map even if broader setting resources mostly entail tracking down older reference material…

…fifth edition does offer officially-sanctioned sourcebooks for the moonshaes, border kingdoms, thay, chult, and icewind dale in addition to the sword coast, though; you just have to delve into the DM’s guild for adept and adventurers’ league material…

…third-edition maps do alright in a pinch as long as you double the distances…

…cubicle 7’s uncharted journeys does exactly what you’re describing: it abstracts the exploration pillar into a series of encounter vignettes driven by characters assuming leader / outrider / quartermaster / sentry roles to engage the system mechanics…

…while it absolutely can be adapted to old-fashioned hex-crawl resource management, uncharted journeys is written to support exploration as a theatre-of-the-mind montage sequence, accounting for preparation + decision-making with tangible consequences upon reaching a journey’s end…

…it’s good stuff!..