Seeker of Carcosa @ WilloftheWest @feddit.uk

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2 yr. ago

These are actually my table’s favourite type interactions. Comically appropriate flubs. The funniest one from recent memory is playing arkham horror (card game with a bag if random tokens). I was attempting a dex check against falling down some stairs and was fine for every token in the bag except for the “you fail” chaos token. So confident was I that I declared “watch this”, a maneuver where I bet money and double my bet on a success.

Well I pull the crit fail token, lose all my money, tumble down the stairs taking damage, and land in a room with a fellow wanting a fight.

Edit: I remember the instance that began our fascination with fumbles. Playing the Witcher RPG, I was a dwarf merchant, another player a witcher. Coming up against a locked door, I declared that I was dramatically diving through the window. My Reflexes (REF) are abysmal but I play my characters suicidal anyway. Rolled a 10 on a d10 (dice explode), rolled another 10, etc. rolled a 36 with 3 REF, which means my unadjusted roll was 33.

The witcher, not wanting to be upstaged and having super high REF, dives through another window. Only he rolls a 1 (which explodes, except the total die roll is subtracted from your REF score). Naturally he fails and gashes his leg on a shard of glass. And thus an obsession with fumbling rolls was born

I feel your pain when browsing local or all for new communities. Luckily bots are usually marked as such. I just block them whenever they pop up. I sort by new by default and I find that the new page refreshes at a decent pace without bots. It’s enjoyable to be completely caught up within a 10-15 min window, rather than doomscrolling as a force of habit.

Looking slick. Definitely jealous with my hand grinder and moka pot.

It's been a while since I've run D&D but there's some info to be gleaned from how Pathfinder runs swarms. My procedure is based off of some PF2e rules together with some house rulings for off the cuff swarms, and is intended to be quick, minimising admin and adding some exciting flavour to the encounter:

• Choose your creature(s) which occupy the swarm
• Set the AC to the lowest AC among creatures in the swarm
• Don't worry about the precise number of creatures in a swarm. Just do it based on size. If you want a rough idea of how many creatures fit into a swarm of a certain size, have 4-6 creatures of the same size occupy a space one size category larger. 4-6 groups of creatures of a certain size form a group of one size category larger.
• Take average HP of the most populous creature in the swarm. For each size category the swarm is above that creature's size category, multiply that average HP by 4.
• Characters can occupy the same space as the swarm with no penalty
• Any creature sharing space with the swarm is automatically hit, assign damage based on the median among damage values in the swarm (5 snakes and 8 kobolds, probably does the damage of a kobold. Could roll luck to see if they take a random venomous bite)
• Swarms are immune to grapple, restrained, prone, etc. Swarms are vulnerable to area spells.
• Optional: Mind altering magic could affect a swarm hive mind as if the swarm is a single creature. This is completely discretionary. You could probably manipulate a swarm of bees with a single charm spell, but not a city-spanning mob.
• Optional: Give resistance to B/P/S damage. If a significant number of creatures in the swarm have a resistance (down to your judgement), add that resistance to the swarm.
• Optional: Characters in the middle of a swarm could probably swing wildly and hit something. Give players advantage if they are attacking the swarm while stood in the swarm
• Optional: Be narrative about the health of the swarm. Every so often mention one or two of the swarm falling dead or disengaging from the conflict.

I usually go to short stories, or old sword and sorcery novellas. For the former my go to stories are Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos, Robert E Howard's Conan, and Isaac Asimov's Robots. For the latter I prefer Michael Moorcock's Elric of Melniboné, Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, and Jack Vance's Dying Earth. If I'm feeling uninspired or experiencing a block, knocking out a few of these stories always sets me straight. They take next to no time to read and are great fun. I don't get tired of rereading them.

I don't mind romance in my fantasy as long as it's done well. I found a lot of terrible and extraneous "romance" in Teen/YA fiction growing up which convinced me at the time that I disliked any romance in my fantasy. Turns out what I actually dislike is clunky sex scenes written by Mormons whose only experience is being the third at a jump hump.

I use Bookwyrm and it works for what I need: track reading, rate books, view reading lists of people who have read the same books. My partner uses StoryGraph which does seem a lot cleaner and more polished, but I haven't felt the need to switch yet.

I've recently started setting myself goals. I used to read non-stop before university. During my undergraduate degree I slowed down to finishing only a few books per year. By the time I started my PhD, where basically my entire 9-5 is reading and analysing dense 40-page mathematical papers, I'd completely stopped reading for pleasure.

Last year I set myself a 1 book per week goal and found that I was actively factoring reading time into my daily schedule, which I really appreciated. I managed to get through a lot of my reading bucket list this way, but at the end of the year I decided I wouldn't set that kind of goal again. I ended up powering through some novels that I would've preferred to DNF purely because it was Thursday and starting a new novel would set me back.

This year I haven't set a hard goal. I've decided I am happy with one book per month, and if I'm reading properly then I blaze past that. I'm very much enjoying the ability to augment my main reading with other reading. I'm currently participating in a book club over at !lovecraft@ka.tet42.org which I find very rewarding and I wouldn't have had the spare reading time to participate in this time last year.

I'd say it's more of the same with regards to the dense jargon that requires some contextual interpretation to unravel. If you're willing to power through that, it's one of the most thrilling trilogies you can read.

To advance on this, the entire Karla Trilogy (of which Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is the first installment) is a fantastic Cold War spy trilogy. I'd recommend anything by John le Carré; he was an intelligence officer for MI5 and MI6. He left the service as a result of a famous double agent incident, which inspired Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.