Anafroj @ Anafroj @sh.itjust.works

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2 yr. ago

Sure. I don't know how familiar you are with TTRPGs, so I'll be exhaustive. While rules for TTRPGs can be greatly different when it comes to combat (if they have combat at all), they all implement some sort of skill checks for outside combat. Your character is good at some skills and bad at some others, which usually translates to having a modifier on the result of your dice, or rolling more or less dice, etc. In the normal flow of the game, the gamemaster describes a situation, the players tell what they want to do about it, and if what they ask to do is non trivial, the gamemaster asks them to roll for a skill check. If a player said they want to jump across a pit, the gamemaster may ask for an Acrobatics check, for example. The player rolls their dice, they succeed or fail based on the difficulty level the gamemaster decided, and the gamemaster describes the result.

When writing, I do basically the same thing. For each action my characters want to attempt (the key being to give them a deep personality through an elaborated backstory, so it is obvious what their personal reaction to an event will be and what decision they will make), I decide if it's non-trivial, assign a difficulty target, and roll to see if they manage to do it. Then I have my result, and I have to decide what happens. Did they succeed by much or barely? This immediately triggers the imagination about what may have gone so well or so bad. And this creates turns of events you wouldn't have thought about : if that character barely succeed jumping across that pit, it may anger that other character who is in love with them and terribly anxious. Which in turn may impact their next perception roll, as they are arguing while a lurking predator is getting closer. Depending on the theme, different skill lists and rulesets work best. I have three stories going on : high fantasy theme with Dungeons & Dragons, cyberpunk theme with Shadowrun, and Space Sci-Fi with Traveller. On top of the rules, they also provide tons of content to play with, like worlds to visit or equipment to try. That being said, I use them because I already have them, but any free ruleset found on the web would do, it doesn't matter that much, in the end (be it for writing or playing with friends, btw).

Since last year, I also discovered Mythic (the 2nd edition has been released sooner this year), which also helps randomizing the overarching story. I still prefer to decide on the main events, but it's great to add trivial details and side plots. It has a quite deep set of rules by itself, but the basic idea is to use an "oracle", which means asking a question, and roll dice to see if the answer to that question is "yes" or "no", with a modifier depending of how probable you think it is to get a "yes". Are there guards watching the side of the castle we're assaulting? Is the marchand trying to scam the characters? Does the king have a sense of humor? Those dice rolls can have quite an impact on the events. :) And when you don't know what to do next, Mythic offers keywords tables you can roll on to trigger your imagination. For example, let say we're in an antichamber, waiting for an audience with a queen. I roll dice twice on an event table, I get the keywords "support" and "distrust" (I've just rolled that). From that, I may decide an advisor of the queen is coming to see us and give us a hard time. Or, on the contrary, someone knows we're going to have an audience and ask us to have a word with the queen to advise her to be more cautious toward a third party. What is this third party? Let's roll again! "Excitedly" and "peaceful". Ok, that may be a neighbor country which has been very friendly, but people find they are meddling a bit too intensely in the affairs of the kingdom. And imagination build a world from there. :)

He's clearly laying the groundwork to sell it to Alphabet (Google's parent company). /s

That's a recurring theme in the gaming industry, I don't understand why buyers accept it (my guess : they don't know about it). If you read the End User Agreement of the games you buy, almost all of them (all of them?) tell you that you don't own your copy of the game, it's the property of the publisher, and they only sell to you the right to execute the software on your computer. As it's been successful at locking in users, hardware manufacturers try to do the same thing, usually by mixing in online software to make sure they can take your hardware down (and it's not just in gaming industry, see printers and tractors). The ultimate incarnation of this attack on property are the game streaming platforms. There, everything is a rental, now, good cash flow!

The usual answer about such abuses from software producers would be to go FOSS (Free and Open Source Software), but it doesn't really work with games : while there are some great FOSS games, the amount can't compete with the proprietary industry. My personal solution has been to replace consumerism with creativity. Every night, instead of playing videogames, I write. I use tabletop RPG rulesets to spice up my writing, so that I don't know what happens next and I'm surprised myself by where the dice rolls make the story go (instead of deciding of everything). I also don't write to be read, nobody will ever read what I write, so I feel no pressure. It was hard at first (I guess my imagination was atrophied by too much consumption), but after a few years going on, it's insane everything that happens in my games, videogames feel lame, comparatively. I call that "exploring my imagination". I can do anything, and this time it's not an hyperbole, like it's the case in those videogames where they tell you "you can be anything" (no you can't). And it's free, and nobody can take it from me. I highly recommend.

I played an arcane trickster without a focus, once, it was a fun experience, especially since it was in a world where magic was frowned upon. So my character was constantly looking for some weird components, trying to make it look like he had a perfectly sane reason for that and it was not at all about magic, it gave us great roleplaying moments. But then again, this was a rogue, with a bit of magic : he could manage without spells. Playing a wizard at level 1 is already punishing enough without going through such ordeal. :) i would totally have the wizard of the group buy a new component pouch from time to time, though, just to remember them it's not a magically infinite source.

Solving it the unix way:

    
ls -1 | sort -R | sxiv -f -s f -S 5 -

  

So it's ls -1 to list the content of current directory (presumably where your pictures are), with one file per line, so we can then pipe it to sort, with the -R option to sort randomly, then piping the result to sxiv, a lightweight image viewer available on most distro (I just checked, it's available on Debian). For its options : -f means it's fullscreen, -s f makes it scale to fit the image on screen as well as possible, -S 5 tells it to start in slideshow mode and change picture every 5 seconds, and - is to tell it to take the files list from stdin (thus from the ls and sort commands).

This won't work for videos, though, only pictures.

They are all awesome, congratulations to the artists!

My favorite would be 3, but its brightness would be too aggressive for my eyes on the dark theme, so my vote goes to 2!

You're going to have a pleasant surprise, then. :) There are RSS feeds for basically everything, on Github : a repository commits, an issue/pull request activities, a user activities, your social feed (the homepage), project releases, etc. Same for Gitlab. Gitlab even recently added a RSS feed for topics, allowing to get notifications when a project matching given topic is created (example: the feed for 3d printing projects). Too bad they don't have as much activity than Github.

While it's not articles, you probably want to follow your favorite projects using Github and Gitlab's RSS feeds for repositories, especially the releases feed. I often learn more about actual trends (not just things people talk about but do not implement) by reading releases changelogs than by reading medium or press articles.

Otherwise, Hacker News (mentioned by temp_user) and Lobster (rss) both are good ways to follow news. HN is more verbose. Lobsters filters what they think is the best content from HN, but it usually comes a day or two later. One interesting aspect of those aggregators is that they help you discover websites that may contain their own rss feed.