I’m a big fan of a small app called UpNote. It’s clean and simple with a few power features you can use if you really dig into it. It largely has the same baseline set of features as Obsidian, but it supports syncing across devices out of the box and has a one-time purchase of a lifetime membership.

I’m scheduled to try this system out at Gencon this year. This has me even more excited than I was already! I wonder how much I could steal that conspired structure for other games 🤔

Will this be your first gumshoe game? I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on it after you read it, as gumshoe is a remarkably different play style from D&D.

Oh damn, the UI really hides that button; that should be way more prominent in my opinion. I had no idea Lemmy supported that functionality!

I didn’t even realize Avatar Legends had a box set 🤔

That’s honestly the biggest potential upside with Meta’s Threads in my opinion: better chance to grab more of the big online personalities (e.g. it’s on the record that they’ve been reaching out to major celebrities) and (at least for the foreseeable future) Meta seems invested in full-featured Fediverse interoperability including account migration, etc.

I think this is an entirely valid perspective. Some people are just overflowing with ideas and the use of ChatGPT (or any kind of aid in inspiration, such as random tables) seems redundant. Just for a point of comparison, my own experience is a combination of (a) I simply enjoy creating some kinds of content more than others, and (b) I don’t have enough spare time to personally author all of the content I want for my campaign. With my limited time, I want to focus on authoring the stuff that I enjoy creating and/or the stuff that’s going to have the biggest impact. As an example, I’m happy to delegate descriptions of rooms to books of tables or ChatGPT if it means I can focus instead on the lore of the dungeon as a whole or the background & motivations for its overarching villain.

I highly respect this bit of advice. It’s a classic. But I have also found it can assume a certain kind of player, and that there do exist players which seemingly desire a storyline they can just follow. They still want to have agency and make interesting and consequential decisions, but I still find them a bit aimless and lost when I drop them in a sandbox.

In fairness to this received wisdom, I think the phrase interesting situation is doing more work than I have historically given it credit for. It’s not just about it being interesting in the abstract, but (at least with some players and parties) presenting a status quo and then introducing (or threatening) the prospect of changing that status quo. I suppose my tl;dr is that with interesting situations inaction should feel like a meaningful choice. The orphanage will burn down, the criminal will escape, the freedom fighter will be caught. (Ideally, you leave the determination of whether they’re a criminal or a freedom fighter up to the players.)

I feel (rightly & legitimately) called out 😭 I literally got two months into my renaissance political intrigue campaign before I discovered Court of Blades. It’s a perfect fit for my interests, but now my campaign is lousy with so many d&d tropes (Tieflings! Dhampirs! Changelings! Dragons!) that I more than likely couldn’t switch systems without home brewing everything out the wazoo 😓

I’m fascinated to hear you actually use it during a session! Can you give an example of what that looks like? I can’t imagine it without majorly interrupting play personally, so I’d love to hear more about how you make that work