Peter Drake, he/him, LFHCfS 🔥 @peterdrake@social.cleverlibre.org

Live in Portland, OR? Want some FREE training in disaster preparedness to improve your (and your neighbors') chance when the Big One (or next year's wildfire, ice storm, etc.) hits? Want to avoid the most common deathbed regret of never having discharged a fire extinguisher?

Portland is training Neighborhood Emergency Team members (equivalent to CERT in other cities). Sign up here:

https://www.portland.gov/pbem/neighborhood-emergency-teams/volunteer

#portland #pdx #net #cert #disaster #preparedness

Weirdly, unless I missed something, the @mongoosepub #Traveller core book doesn't give any advice on GMing or creating adventures. Apparently you just create a universe and let the Travellers loose in it. #ttrpg

In my quest to find a #ttrpg to run next year, I bought the Dungeon Fantasy (GURPS) and Mongoose Traveller 2E Bundles of Holding -- both very good deals.

Some initial reactions:

DUNGEON FANTASY

The initial adventure, I Smell a Rat, seems pretty good. While no plan survives contact with the players, it tries to enumerate various things that might happen. It's set in one location that will be easy to translate to any standard fantasy world built before or after running it.

The rules, though ... maybe crunchier than I wanted. The general rule is "roll <= the appropriate skill on 3d6", but there are a STAGGERING number of modifiers in the 114-page "exploits" book. There are also some very weird corner cases, like:

"If a supernatural attack permits a resistance roll and the subject is living or has IQ 6+, there's a cap on the attacker's effective skill: 16 or the defender's actual resistance score, whichever is greater."

Normally rolling low is good and modifiers are applied to the target number (rather than the dice), but for reaction rolls both of these things are reversed. Why?!

Maybe with time one internalizes the 33-page combat section, but I'd be reluctant to spring this on an audience that didn't have experience with RPGs.

MONGOOSE TRAVELLER

I went with the deluxe version of this bundle, which is huge: 15 books!

The campaign that comes with this bundle (part of the Starter Set), The Fall of Tinath, is set in a new subsector half a galaxy away from charted space. I can see that they did this so that new players wouldn't feel intimidated by the lore, but on the other hand it means that the vast majority of setting books published by Mongoose and its predecessors are irrelevant. That complaint aside, it seems (on a light skimming) to not simply hand all the work to the GM as often as other Traveller adventures.

It all still feels a bit dry in a straight-to-VHS-80s-movie way.

#ttrpg #gurps #traveller #BundleOfHolding

Croissant, literally "cross ant", is a bread traditionally baked by the Knights Formicidae.

Take it away, @futurebird

Overheard: "Boy, it's a little Mt. Doom out there, isn't it?"

I'm feeling an urge to run a #ttrpg next semester, while I'm still on sabbatical and have the time to make this plausible.

Genre? Probably space opera or fantasy.

System? That's the question. I recently ran FATE and I think I want something a little crunchier, more on the "players face the challenge placed by the GM" end than "collaborative storytelling". I'm interested in a good pre-written adventure.

Candidates:

Savage Worlds. I like the level of detail, as well as the use of polyhedral dice, but the settings and adventures I've looked at (Seven Worlds, The Last Parsec) seem dry and vague.

GURPS. Maybe too heavy? The focused Dungeon Fantasy box is intriguing and has good reviews.

Traveller (Mongoose). Again, the adventures out there look very dry. It sounds like you might get through the first two Marches adventures without any combat. I'm not saying I want a mercenary campaign, but action/adventure works better than extended wandering.

D&D 5E. The obvious, easy answer, but overdone and a bit too Hasbro-y. All other things being equal, I prefer skills over classes.

Dungeon Crawl Classics. Fun to be had from the 0-level funnel and spell misfires, but the 1970s-era worldview is borderline problematic.

Nudge me, Mastodon!

#SavageWorlds #gurps #traveller #DnD #DungeonCrawlClassics

Prediction: Republican state supreme courts will start disqualifying Biden because ... well, they're pretty sure he must have done some kind of crime or other.

Every Unity GameObject has an associated transform, which comprises three vectors: position, rotation, and scale.

If you want to change the rotation, you use the Rotate method.

If you want to know what the rotation is, you'd think you'd access the rotation field. There is such a field, but it's not the one you want. You need to use eulerAngles.

🤦‍♂️

#unity #unity3d #GameDev #naming

Behind the scenes, rotation is actually a Quaternion. I understand there are reasons for this, but displaying it in the Inspector as Rotation (with three components), and setting it using Rotate (with a Vector3 and an angle) made me expect that rotation would be a Vector3.

Pupdate: #Violet sees a squirrel out the back window. #DogsOfMastodon

I'm seeing numerous surveys that most people are now "using AI" in their everyday work. I *think* this means generative AI, but I'm not sure.

1) Are you? How?

2) Should I be using it, and teaching my undergraduate students to do so?

3) Is my resistance just a later-generation version of "calculators will make us stupid", or am I correctly smelling an enshittification trap? It's not gonna stay free once we're all dependent on it.

#ai #ChatGPT #GenerativeAI

Vigilant dog is vigilant. #Violet #DogsOfMastodon

Neat -- the artist who illustrated my Siva Afi card game is selling some of the art:

https://www.redbubble.com/people/uc3wave/explore

#SivaAfi #fireknife #samoa #fire #dance #CardGames