I took a toot thread of mine and turned it into a blog post:
"Junk Drawer D&D"
Vancouver, Canada - Lead backend developer for all of virtual reality, or VRChat at least.
| it me | https://cube-drone.com |
| also me | https://cardchapter.com |
Cube Drone
@cube_drone
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90% JOKES ABOUT SOFTWARE / 10% PICTURES OF CAT
Vancouver, Canada - Lead backend developer for all of virtual reality, or VRChat at least.
Vancouver, Canada - Lead backend developer for all of virtual reality, or VRChat at least.
whenever I visit parents I'm reintroduced to the nostalgic concept of "television ads"
Simon WillisonThis is diabolical... a Python object that hallucinates method implementations on demand any time you call them, using my LLM Python library https://github.com/awwaiid/gremllm
The Dark Knight (2008) is a pretty memorable movie, but one character who sticks out to me is "cliche spouting cop".
Every damn line from him is a tired cliche.
Nobody else seems to focus on this guy but I hate him
for an important battle scene with my players, I pulled out the chessex battlemat, started by drawing key scene items I knew would be present, and then described the "vibe" and asked my players for items to help fill in the scenery. "It's a huge workshop. What's in the workshop?"
"Tool chests!" (ok!)
"Barrels of loose acid! For etching and cleaning!" (ok!)
"Piles of oil-soaked rags!" (ok!)
this also makes it harder to differentiate between stuff you've explicitly planned and stuff that's "off the rails" - if your players start chasing a loose thread, you can make it up as you go along, and _because_ that storyline path is ALSO made out of pepper shakers and loose screws, it can feel like you planned it all along
it leans much more heavily on improvisation and evocative description than _prep_, but the idea is that what you're prepping is things like storyline beats, big ideas, neat treasure and interesting locations rather than specifically deciding "this dresser has 10gp sitting within"
this helps to keep your universe light, flexible, and reactive: if you have poured hours into a battlemat your players are DEFINITELY going to have a fight on that battlemat, but if your area is a series of nodes with light descriptions then it is much easier to have the entire environment stay responsive to your players
if you have a Chessex grid, wet-erase pens, and some standees, or - in my case, loose trash like poker chips, erasers, and pepper mills - you can constantly establish and maintain the scene without having to have gone so far as to prep a whole thoughtfully detailed graphical battlemat environment
going so far as to prep a full grid for an entire dungeon is too much faff, and wildly unnecessary
