agamemnonymous

Catalog all these "Pokemon", understand their "types" and how they interact, which "moves" are "super effective" against certain "types". They're just priming kids to develop, and adults to consider fondly, the same kind of competencies central to cataloging molecules and determining which other molecules they interact with, and how strongly.

Even battles are kinda like multi-stage chemical reactions.

This is fortuitous, session zero for "my" new campaign is next week, and the format is a bit wonky so any guidance or advice from anyone who's tried to do similar would be helpful.

4-5 person table, we're starting a GURPS 4e magic campaign. Fantasy setting, think like Hogwarts but community college. This isn't super important, but gives some context for the format.

Here's the wonky part:

I want to rotate GM every session. My plan is for each player to build a student who will be their PC, and also create a professor who will be their main "quest giver" when they're the GM. The idea is that each session will be a different class period taught by one of the professors, GMed by that corresponding player.

They give an assignment which is basically a one shot: "Get the imps in the walls out", "Get to the top of that mountain and back in 3 hours", "Find the center of this maze", "Kill this spectral dragon", "Find the herbs to make this potion", that kind of thing. Or they can string all their sessions together into a mini arc, whatever's clever.

The other players will be students in the class for this session; the GM's student character either took this class already, doesn't need it, or can be a TA NPC for that session. We'll cycle through everyone a few times, and maybe collaborate for a "Triwizard Cup" sort of finale.

For several players, this will be their first time GMing. I think this format could prove to be an excellent way to let players dip their toe into the GM space: they get 3 or 4 sessions to plan, they're exposed to multiple other session ideas inside the setting, they still get to play most of the time.

I think the school setting in particular is well suited to this format, though I'm a bit on the fence about TA NPCs; I don't want to encourage bad habits.

What do you think, does it have legs or is this doomed to failure? Is it already a thing, and I'm just not familiar with the term?

Wife insisted on watching an episode of the new season, and I'm just left... whelmed?

First, as a Netflix original series the "Oh, we added ads to your tier, but you can upgrade to ad-free" felt super hypocritical. Ads started playing on our previously ad-free subscription at the beginning of the episode, so thanks for reminding me I guess.

Secondly, I feel like the heart of Black Mirror is that [insert technological development here] is supposed to be the central conflict which causes problems. This episode was about people bad with money suffering because they're bad at money.

They could've downgraded to a smaller place, their house was huge. Welding has pretty significant upward mobility if you train a few particular skills. And they were trying for a baby? Their budget was way too tight for that.

Most importantly, how do you not game Lux? You can dial up Tennis, or Parkour, or Nonchalance, or Serenity. Surely you can dial up something that can earn you at least an extra $1000 a month to justify it. If you can't figure it out, just get a booster to dial up Intelligence or Strategy so you can figure out a plan, then dial up Programming or Art or whatever your megabrain thinks of to generate more income. It seemed like Lux was straight monthly, not load based. It shouldn't be that hard to leverage your subscription to not only cover the cost, but turn a profit.

In fact, I think the premise would have been way more interesting if it went in like a Limitless direction: she uses Lux to be wildly successful, both causing conflict with her normal husband and generating a class gap between ubermensch Lux users and the Common users who subsidize their success.

It just felt like the tech didn't really cause problems itself. I mean, a person that would've been dead or comatose can be alive for $800/mo, or superhuman for $1800/mo. The subscription model is scummy, but it can easily be gamed. The tech just felt like a bolted-on afterthought in a story about people budgeting poorly. That's not poignant commentary on the relationship between tech and modern life, it's just a depressing vignette about dum dummies being dumb.

I've got an appx 12' x 24' space between my single story house and tall metal barn garage. The roof of the house slopes toward the space.

I want to convert it into a greenhouse so I can grow veggies without having to chase off critters. Ideally I should be able to install gutters that drain to a rain barrel.

I'm hoping some of you fine folks have resources and recommendations for this kind of project.

Looks innocuous enough at first glance right? Let's zoom in on the problem:

These don't go together. If the semicircle on the left is correct, then this is showing moon phases, and the symbol on the right should be of a gibbous moon:

If the cookie-with-a-bite-taken-out in the right is correct, then this is showing an eclipse, and the symbol on the left should be of a 50% partial eclipse:

It drives me crazy every time I look at it.

I'm considering pulling the trigger on an X1C but the waste is a huge turn-off. I know there are options for purging to infill or a sacrificial object, but last I heard there's still a considerable amount of purge/prime. Can someone who's played with the settings tell me honestly how much progress has been made in reducing waste?

Still pretty new to local LLMs, and there's been a lot of development since I dipped my toe in. Suffice to say I'm fairly swamped and looking for guidance to the right model for my use

I want to feed the model sourcebooks, so I can ask it game mechanic questions and it will respond with reasonable accuracy (including page references). I tried this with privateGPT a month or two back, and it kinda worked but it was slow and wonky. It seems like things are a bit cleaner now

Let's kick off some activity here with a question:

How much crunch do you, personally, like in your games?

Ultra Lite? Lite? Basic Set? Every book you can get your hands on?

Light on combat, heavy on skills? Vice-versa? Light overall with some aspects way more fleshed-out? Heavy overall with some aspects way more simplified? Are there specific mechanics you like to take full advantage of? Mechanics you like to gloss over?

No wrong answers, let's just get some discussion going