RPG

One of the more informative posts on the current OGL curfluffle, from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, written by Kit Walsh, both a senior staff attorney at the EFF and designer of Nebula- and Ennie-winning RPGs.

He is not a lawyer (and neither am I) but Doctorow knows a great deal about licenses and rights, and I definitely learned some interesting things from this.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/2681

Is there a consensus on what #Pathfinder is going to look like after the dust settles on the #D&D / #OGL changes? I've just shut down my dndbeyond subscription as a result of the changes and told my group we need to move the campaign to another system. But #Paizo and Pathfinder are the main targets of the changes, so I'm not sure whether that will even be an option for us!

Return of the fanzine!

Download the spreadsheet, type in your name, and you'll find a randomly generated spreadsheet.

• Your name becomes a seed for a hash.
• The hash creates a random numbers through modulos.
• The modulos become D6 rolls.

It's taken a few days to make, and the results are interesting - having to put every rule in the game gives a new perspective on the rules.

I'm not a big fan of spreadsheets - TTRPGs feel like a little haven away from the screen. But sometimes in-person play isn't on the cards.

I think a heavily-automated spreadsheet makes a good introduction to a game's rules. You just click on all the yellow-coloured squares, and fill in what you can until you don't have any XP left.

D&D's corporate overlords have "ideas" about milking more money from the franchise.

#ttrpg

As in turns out in 2022, quite a few of the texts mentioned have made their way into the public domain, and are available as freely downloadable ebooks.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/384969

Just started playing around with this for Solo RPGs and I'm digging it. I paid but there is a free version to try.

Given the price of art, I've been playing a whole heck of a lot with Machine Learning (ML) images (along with ever other indie RPG designer out there), and the results are bad. This one is Midjourney, which seems to be one of the better generators.

If the problem is just my lack of skill, that still sounds like a problem. If I have to hire a professional, I'd rather just hire an artist.

I'm writing a campaign about Vampires in Belgrade (Hungary) in the year 1230.

Starting with something without too many parts, a young Tzimisce vampire in the story (well, he was embraced young), has a ghouled raven he speaks with.

dark ages boy speaks to raven in the moonlit rain

Oh dear... it doesn't know that human boys are bigger than ravens. So it's beatuful, and enchanting, but doesn't convey information, and the kid looks like 'the little prince', not like a sinister flesh-crafting vampire.

Making some variations, I finally got here:

It's better, but the raven also looks like a humming-bird, and the moon looks like someone spilled it. It really conveys nothing more than 'boy and raven', so it's not about to enhance the passages - and RPGs really do need good images, because every one conveys a boat-load of strange ideas.

Next up, what about a that scene where a vampire-hunter finally tracks down the coterie's lair? He finds them by sunset and has to flee before they wake up, but he'll be back tomorrow to kill the lot. He rides a horse, and has an ovcharka (bear-hunting Russian dog) by his side. The coterie will find signs of his passing, such as footprints.

After some bad images, I finally left the dog out - most of them blended the dog and horse into a single image, if the dog appeared as anything more than a shadow.

Slavic, of-the-night, noble hunter reading tracks, horse, footprints, village, 1300s

So we have a ruddy-great horse dwarfing the world in one, and lots of horse-butts which look out of place.

Time to make lots of variations again.

Slavic, of-the-night, noble hunter reading tracks, horse, footprints, village, 1300s

... so now we have more of a centaur-creature as the horse blends with the man.

Overall

RPG images should explain things, and the explanations should involve the interactions of multiple elements, such as one person shooting an arrow at another, or threats, or setting a building on fire. AI seems to mix styles well - want a vampire drawn by Picasso? I'm sure the results would be stunning. But if interactions are missing, I don't see how anyone can use these results.

Machine Learning In General

I suspect machine learning will simply not work in our lifetimes. Consider the story of machine learning when translating:

1. You make a basic dictionary, so you can type 'cat', and it gives you 'le chat'.
2. You give it rules about nouns and adjectives - now you type 'the black cat', and it returns 'le chat noire'.

It gets 5% of language, then 10%, then 20%, and it's tempting to imagine that 99%-accurate translations are coming soon, but they're not, because if we go to translate 'James is right, Alice is left', the machine will return 'James is correct', because translating this statement does not rely on rules, but on understanding intention and meaning. Those hold-out sentences may require that we start by programming real AI, with real consciousness, and only then teaching it multiple languages.

Folks who've been watching my release stream of late have likely noticed a trend where I'll put out a fantasy RPG supplement one month, and then half a dozen months or a year later a sci-fi version of that same supplement comes out.

Some nice information with graphs!

The artist Vladar's putting together (mostly) generic fantasy map-pieces.

It's CC-BY, so it's open for commercial use. I've commissioned it for my own RPG, but all the pieces should work for anything faintly related to Gygax.

There are more pieces to come, and of course it's open, so if anyone out there can do drawing, feel free to add a wall/ mace/ dead goblin in a new file.

A deck of many things-style artifact for Dungeon World, based on the real-world Decktet. Creative Commons and free.

The revised version of module B3 "Palace of the Silver Princess" by Tom Moldvay and Jean Wells receives less attention than Wells' original, although for almost two decades, it was the only version that most of us knew existed.

Right now I am waiting for Fragged Empire 2 to be released.