init @ init @lemmy.ml

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2 yr. ago

If it's a conservative or religious person trying to justify something:

"That's really interesting, why do you think --insert brief summary of their topic/first sentence-- ?"

Continue this until they realize they've either painted themselves into a corner or they realize I'm trolling them several monologues/pages later. It's the uno reverso card when they try wasting my time.

I came here to recommend this book series. Very fun, compelling, and breaks down complex ideas into smaller digestible plot devices that actually mean something later in the series.

With the caveat that you should absolutely not do banking or log into anything personal on the clearnet from TOR, although it would surprise me if most sites even allow traffic from known exit nodes. There are a disturbing amount of exit nodes that absolutely monitor outgoing traffic, and if one of those is malicious, the owner can and will steal your shit. And that's just the exit nodes not controlled by law enforcement.

I wouldn't recommend using TOR without first routing through a VPN, as entry guard nodes are another target for law enforcement, and receive your IP address when you connect.

I'm a newer DM who started a campaign 3 years ago during COVID with my brothers. Take my advice with a grain of salt because it may be different from others. My campaign is based around a group of characters that go from start to finish. My campaign revolves around some star wars fanfic I wrote back when I was too poor for college classes, yet knew my writing needed work. Thus, as a DM, I'm the one unwilling to allow player character death.

I am extremely lucky to have very mature players that mostly don't try to cheese the game. I usually give them a time limit for a mission to be completed, either explicitly from the quest giver, or implicitly where "bad things" will start to happen the longer time goes on and the mission isn't completed.

Could my players take more long rests? Absolutely, but that could cause them to fail that quest. Could my players take a long rest in the middle of the day right after waking up that morning? Absolutely, but they better have a plan for what they are going to be doing that night when all the shops are closed, it's dark, and NPCs want to be left alone. And besides, it's tough to fall asleep once your circadian rhythm is off... It would be a shame if characters needed to start rolling constitution checks to see if they can fall asleep to get that long rest for the next couple of days, and imposing exhaustion levels for not getting a long rest if it goes on long enough...

You're NTA, but your friend is also NTA in my opinion. There is a lot of communication that needs to happen here and they also need to be able to trust that you're not "trying to kill them". You, as the DM are trying to tell their story in such a way that they feel epic, yet balance that by in-game consequences. It might be a good idea to try and sprinkle in some consequences for constantly resting, like the insomnia/circadian rhythm mentioned above, or maybe an ambush from bad guys that figure out the heroes location and prevent a long rest from happening. Forcing them to flee and hide after the ambush, wasting the rest of the day, might help them get moving. Those ambushes should be scary enough that they would go to great lengths to avoid a repeat.

And one final thought is to possibly think of your campaign like a movie. Yes, you're telling their story, but you're not telling every moment of their story. You're not forcing their characters to stop for 3 meals a day, go to the bathroom, and occasionally wash their clothes and take baths. No, you're hitting the important parts of the story, and filling the gaps with downtime where they can fabricate things, work "jobs", etc,.

I hope something I've rambled about helps you out!

It just blows my mind that mainstream Republicans would rather work with extremists than normal Americans.

I think Google maps does something similar with Firefox, where it won't zoom in with the mouse wheel--only the '+' and '-' buttons work. It also seems to lag quite a bit on Firefox. On chrome it works just fine.

Same. I kept switching between the others until Boost was released. Boost just "feels right" to me in a way others can get close to but never quite succeed at.

Boost. I used it's reddit app exclusively because I liked it so much, and the Lemmy version is perfect too. 10/10

"Honeybadger don't care! Honeybadger just takes what he wants!"

If we are being honest, Russia would probably appreciate some of the heat getting moved from Ukraine to the Middle East.

That series took me something like 5-6 years to read, broken in the middle with Game of Thrones. WOT gets extremely dry by book 9 and Robert Jordan is tied up in something like two dozen plot lines with no way out.

I only finished the series because I was overseas with nothing to do except listen to audiobooks on my time off for a year and a half. The last 3-4 books being written by Brandon Sanderson was the best thing that could have happened to the series.

I don't use ChatGPT for scene creation, but for creating stat blocks for minor NPCs. My scenes are all handwritten in a notebook unfortunately. I keep telling myself someday I will digitize them into PDFs/modules, but I'm at about 3 years of content right now 😬

There are a few good creators on r/battlemaps that have patreon subs available (with many freebies too on that subreddit). I also have purchased dungeondraft, but as of yet have not delved into creating my own maps. I generally find something "close enough" and then tell my players what specifically is different in the scene should it come up.

I've been running a Star Wars DnD campaign since mid 2020. The 5e rules module incorporating SW5E.com content is top notch. It allows me to easily create battles with tons of low level minions that my players absolutely love mowing down.

How do I plan sessions? My campaign is less of an open world and more of a story. I always try to set up any puzzle/combat/scenario so that there are three ways to solve it. 1) way of the warrior (players just want to kick in doors), 2) way of the scholar/mage (players find a secret that allows them to mitigate or more easily defeat the boss), and 3) way of the scoundrel/investigator (a hidden exploit that allows them to completely bypass or nullify the problem).

I try to follow this strategy in fights, social intrigue, investigations, and so on. It can be as simple or complex as you want, although the more complex it is, the more likely your players will miss it. Many times it comes down to if-then analysis. I'll describe a scene, my players will describe how they want to interact with it, and then I'm forced to think about how things would be in relation to what they want to try. Sometimes I will roll percentage dice to see how close the scene is to what players described (usually reserved for theater of the mind).

As far as setting up battlemaps, I'm really lucky. I'm a subscriber to

Bottom line, FoundryVTT and ChatGPT have allowed me to save HUGE amounts of time with scene creation and NPC stat blocks so that I can focus on the story plot, and then allows a LOT of automating battles. This allows my players to feel epic and like the world is their oyster.

I have an Nvidia 2060 Super with Pop_OS driver version 535.xx(?), and I haven't run into a game proton doesn't work with.

I don't think I like the idea. I've come across too many posts elsewhere that describe strategies for using AITA, JUSTNOMIL, etc., to get enough karma quickly to enable new alt accounts to post elsewhere on Reddit where minimum Karma scores are enforced. I don't want fake shit here even if that means we have less content.

BS Galactica was so cool. It was so sad in the last season how beat up it was. Amazing show

The USS Defiant. Coolest ship in Starfleet.

The app literally just updated and it says it is Boost v1.0. I was signed up and using it as a beta tester for the last week or so.

It sounds like you're more familiar with Linux than the average person, so I'll forgo advising Ubuntu or Mint. I personally prefer Pop!_OS, but that's also because I was a MacOS user for a while and like the feel of that.

I am also more comfy on distros that use the apt package manager, but learning a new one is pretty minor.

As you said you like Win7, which feels fairly straight forward, there are a couple that strike me as something you might like. They are less flashy, lower on resource requirements, and generally stay out of the way.

1. Xubuntu - it's based off Ubuntu, and is downstream from Debian, so there is quite a bit of support in forums that is applicable. It's pretty lightweight, and gets the job done. Everything generally seems to "just work". The bad: resizing windows with the mouse cursor is sensitive and difficult.
2. MX Linux, or a distro with a KDE environment (there are several (Ubuntu, neon, or pop_OS(?)). KDE feels a lot like "windows", but also incorporates some sensible enhancements. The enhancements aren't flashy (not like Mint)... they just make sense and feel right. The Bad: you need to go into settings and change single-clicking a file/program from opening the item to selecting it. One thing to note is that MXLinux does add a few things to the right click contextual menu, which might also drive you nuts--it does me. MX is good, but didn't feel right for me. The other KDE options don't do this IIRC.
3. EndeavorOS - A pretty lightweight option that also feels very traditional with few frills like Win7. I don't have as much experience with this distro as I would like. It uses Pakman and AUR, which I am least familiar with, and is also a rolling distro from what I understand, which might eliminate this option if you're looking for stability. Although, I've read many comments from people who have had zero issues for years with it. But, there are things you have to be proactive about like snapshotting before updating that can make it a hassle.

Distrowatch.com is a great tool to check the pros and cons out if you haven't seen it already.

EDIT: I don't know why I didn't think of this earlier, but you can also simply install KDE on Debian as well. This might be a really good option since you're already familiar with it.

Any idea what distro you're leaning toward?