Commander Pulsar

It's rowing distance from the city (usually; it doesn't stay in exactly the same place) so some details can be guessed from afar. There are buildings, we think. Gilded white marble, maybe? And glades, definitely not just overgrown like the shoreline. But no one knows for sure.

Don't be distracted by the bicycles in your office.

No locations that are so mysterious and secret that no one has ever heard of them. Those may as well not exist, but
Several places known to be WEIRD, and a bit Scary, though. The Goddesses' Isle: the PCs have visited, but I always cut from arrival immediately to departure. No memory of the place.

When I hear "The mechanics get out of the way," it either means "I couldn't deal with these rules, and when I ignored them the story didn't break, so..." OR "I've learned these rules well enough to use them without breaking my flow."

Ideally, you want the latter. But I think it's often the former.

No way someone is selling a DeLorean for $100. I mean, maaybe if you had to ditch it before the Libyans find you with it *and* all the plutonium, but how likely is that?

Not saying don't buy it, just... keep an eye on both pines, maybe.

Mothership. Hands down, @mothership.bsky.social . Literally written for a scenario exactly like this.

It just kinda sucks that the outcry got so bad that it poisoned everything good in 4th edition, so it couldn't be in 5th. They had to go from "when this creature is Bloodied..." to "when this creature is reduced to half or fewer hit points..." because using a 4e term would cause an uproar.

I liked the basic idea of tiering PC abilities into once a day/once an encounter/any time you want, but it's certainly fiddly. The average table is 4-5 players to one GM, so if you're only making one out of six people happy, it's going to matter less how much you're innovating for that one person.

Absolutely. I also think a lot of the ease-of-use, quality of life improvements were on the GM side: condition tags (including "bloodied"), roles for NPCs/monsters, easy encounter building, excellent digital tools. The player side, on the other hand, got /more/ complex.

It made it easier to create more dynamic encounters, and it wasn't hard to reskin a stat block if you needed to. But it was 4th edition, and everyone had already decided we hate 4th edition, so it didn't go forward into 5th.

D&D 4th edition did this. For each creature, you'd get several stat blocks with varying roles. A goblin warrior would be a Skirmisher, a goblin with a bow would be Artillery & stay back to shoot. There would be Lurker types to ambush, fade away & repeat, and Controllers to buff and debuff.

I would be happy running a laundromat / cyber cafe on Hard Wired Island's Grand Cross station.

This is a gorgeous production and one of my games of the year for 2024.

If you haven't played yet or want to know more about how it all works, check out our deep dive: www.indiegamereadingclub.com/indie-game-r...

...late December back in twenty-three,
what a very special time for me,
as I remember, what a night!

A teacher confronts Bobby Hill outside a classroom. Through a window, we see inside several children looking confused. The teacher holds the crumpled remains of a sign Bobby had put in the window, a sign saying something inciteful and/or incendiary. "If those kids could read, they'd be very upset," scolds the teacher. Bobby fails to look chastised.

Happy James Introcaso Day to all James Introcasos who celebrate, especially @jamesintrocaso.bsky.social

The Star-Pattern: a Pitfall of GMing When someone tells me about a session of a GMed game (like D&D) that they didn’t enjoy, I put on my ...

New post from "ars ludi"!
#ttrpg #blog

Yeah, you should probably get out your Farnsworth and check in.

I’m looking at this keyboard, but I can’t find the “Any” gender.

My black & white pair are called Cinder & Ash. Ash is short for Ashiok, because I play Magic: the Gathering. Cinder is short for Cinderblock, because he kinda dumb.

Napalm Era, clearly.

The hell I can't.

An empty booth with a sign that says “vendor removed for selling AI art #ArtBYHumans”

I love the smell of consequences in the morning. Thank you, @dragoncon.org

I was looking up synonyms for 'hills' and discovered that "an isolated hill or mountain rising abruptly from a plain" is called an 'inselberg'.

Remember, folks. Your incelbergs should be isolated.

My tl;dr on WotC making another version of Dark Sun is: let them. It feels like a team scoring on their own goal in a playoff game, but it is their time, money, and effort to waste. Who knows, it might avoid the yawning, gaping pitfalls and be... all right.

Not holding my breath, but it's possible

Drones are, like most aircraft, expensive out of all proportion to their size. Folks are likely to get upset if you disable & likely damage their expensive aircraft. The American legal system is not your friend.
You can freely flip them off, I understand.

Not agile in the project management sense. Agile in the 'easy to adopt the trappings of different themes & genres' sense. Seriously, just check out the range of things Dimension20 has done: Misfits & Magic, Mentopolis, Never Stop Blowing Up.

cover image for Kids on Bikes 2nd edition. The background is the reddish purple of just past sunset, with five silhouettes of kids, on bikes, in the foreground bottom of the page. Some of the bikes have lights, which appear here as yellow circles. Treetops encroach at the top of the image, from trees growing on the side of the street the Kids ride down. They're on their way to confront some sort of adventure, clearly.

#10: Kids on Bikes (1st or 2nd ed.) is a fun system for what is (in /my/ head) the Encyclopedia Brown genre. i.e. teens (usually) solving mysteries in weird small towns. It's certainly a lot more flexible than that, adaptable to space, magic schools, the mind itself (cf. Dimension20). It's agile.

Cassette Futurism needs no justification in this house, but yes. Durability & repairability over flash. I think that’s why I like the exposed piping & wiring in corridors in the Nostromo, for example. The crew spends most of the trip asleep, why bother with pretty, especially if it’s easier to fix.

You might look at games that are pitched as Cyberpunk or superheroic, maybe. I think if you’ve got a modern scenario where people are using magic and you need some bad guys, it’s going to get difficult to keep horror tropes out of the equation.