Definitely recommend playing or replaying old games. I’ve recently put hours into replaying Morrowind and Jedi Academy.

The main game I’ve been playing lately is Mount & Blade Warband from 2010. Got it for a couple $ and have been loving it. I missed it when it came out and recently a friend had been talking a lot about how much fun it used to be.

I have played a few newer AAA games that I uninstalled after a few hours. Sure there’s some great new games, especially from small publishers or indie devs, but there’s a lot more slop like you said.

Highly depends on local infrastructure. Unfortunately the most common city planning philosophy in the US (from what I have seen) is pedestrian hostile. And really it’s not great for driving either. It just sucks to go anywhere.

If it were easier to walk or bike to get food it would be different. Sometimes I don’t want to spend 30 minutes in a metal death box for a burrito. We cook most of our meals at home but occasional delivery is nice.

Nah, we’ll just SELECT * from both tables and loop through the arrays in JavaScript to associate the records.

I love the magic system in Genesys, with just basic spells (attack, heal, augment, curse, etc), some varying effects with suggested flavor (e.g. “Ice” adds ensnare to an attack, but mechanically it doesn’t matter if it is vines, goop, whatever), and how much that effect increases spell difficulty. It lets the players go into a brainstorming session trying to come up with a spell to get out of a very specific situation, and having the game support almost anything.

E.g. this create water idea could be an attack spell with the poisonous quality (making it a hard check), which requires the target to make a hard resilience check or take a bunch of extra damage and strain, which for a skilled mage against a non-boss creature (e.g. an overly ambitious bandit) is well within one-shot range. If they pass the check, they would still take damage from the attack, but would be able to cough up most of the water before it got too serious.

This system sounds very cool also, and I have recently heard of Mage in another thread. I would like to play a system that gives players the ability to come up with spells that the GM doesn’t know ahead of time (I seriously dislike long lists of predefined spells), but also has a little more of that hard magic-science set of rules to satisfy my inner Sanderson fanboy. I have built in some external scaffolding around the magic in my Genesys setting that does this, and it has been a ton of fun so far.

My main gripe is that I wish I had more time to play RPGs (more than a couple sessions a month) so I could try out more systems.

I have been loving Return to Moria, and also picked up cyberpunk 2077. Not sure your specs but both of those run great on Steam Deck

But have you tried Outlook (NEW) and Teams (NEW)?? Microsoft made changes to deeply integrate copilot into them, while making the UI unintelligible and broken as well. It’s a much more authentic Windows experience

Love me some Plasma. I’m still running the default styles after over a year as well. It’s just nice.

I really should spend some time experimenting with customizations though

That reminds me that I actually have the pdf of his book return of the lazy dm, I just haven’t finished it 😅

The parts I did read were extremely helpful and I am definitely going to finish it and incorporate that into my prep. Thank you!

Yeah, every thing they say is “horrifying” about this, and that they call “AI gone wrong” is just describing exactly how LLMs work and what they are designed to do.

Like of course the AI doesn’t have opinions on your actual writing - it cant! And of course it says whatever the user wants to hear, that’s literally just describing what an LLM does.

As much as I get frustrated with AI companies pushing this stuff so hard, if users bothered to understand even at the most basic level what they were using, we wouldn’t have these issues

It’s beautiful <3

I do that too 😅 I’m getting better at avoiding the scary trigger words and getting them to agree with the principles

Good points! There are definitely limits to this.

Foreshadowing is something I have tried to do and would like to do more of. My current campaign and the only long running one I have experience with is all homebrew, and we did start at a place where I had the world itself pretty well fleshed out, but a lot of the character and faction stuff changed quite a bit over the first couple of months. The big changes were early enough that it didn’t really cause problems for our table, but I have experienced what you say, where some of the foreshadowing that I tried to do in the first couple of sessions kind of became irrelevant. This was mainly because I realized the thing I was originally intending to foreshadow wasn’t that interesting and needed to change as the players began living in the world. We are at a place now where the players have mostly uncovered all of the key lore, and I believe they will confront the BBEG soon.

I have learned a lot running this game and it makes me excited to build and run more!

I’m the guy but instead of a pyramid scheme I’m just trying to get all of my friends to install Linux and switch to fediverse social platforms

Kind of frustrating that one of the main points against Linux is anti cheat, which basically comes down to Spyware that assumes you are a hacker if you run Linux, so the game publishers ban your account. That isn’t a Linux problem, since often these are games that run fine on Linux.

Bees: mix of the top 3

AI art is unethical

I love this idea. Would have been perfect for my current game, though I have enjoyed the flexibility to adjust things the players don’t know yet.

That could still work with this approach but you’d have to be intentional about keeping changes within the same scope / size

I have been playing Genesys, and I LOVE it. I’m not playing in a sci-fi setting, but the whole premise behind Genesys is that is is adaptable to any setting, and from what I have seen of the system, it would be great for something like that. There are tons of rules for vehicle stats, combat, etc. and it has guidelines for how to design and balance your own vehicles.

If you are interested in making and playing in your own setting I would definitely recommend Genesys.

If you are wanting something with an existing setting that matches that vibe, then I’d first check and see if some of the community made settings will fit that, and if not, then maybe look elsewhere.

There are a ton of community made resources for Genesys on DriveThruRPG and also in a dropbox maintained by one of the community members, and that dropbox has some resources for an Expanse setting and other sci-fi stuff that would be a good starting point: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/raqr7usuzwizglm/AACMnwsNyT5DPHyjokWZwQLOa/Community Content?dl=0&lst=&subfolder_nav_tracking=1

I would also say you should definitely get the core rulebook AND the expanded players guide, as that has tons of good resources and better guidelines for creating vehicles, as well as other useful things. It’s really a fantastic GM toolkit.

EDIT: Also regarding the dice, which can be kind of hard to get, they have an app that you can use, as well as charts for converting normal polyhedral dice to the Genesys symbols, and what I personally do is just use the Star Wars dice, which are the same (with slightly different look to the symbols) and are more available, at least where I am.