L. Rhodes @lrhodes@merveilles.town

Anyway, tonight was my second session running DW. A bit more comfortable with the moves, and I managed to get the campaign headed in a clear direction, which means I can dig into developing some fronts for the rest of this arc.

As of now, though, I prefer Ultra-Violet Grasslands, which is the only other ttrpg I've run. DW's rule set is interesting, but I enjoy working in a distinct setting, and the setting here is almost totally tabla rasa.

That's something I need to get better about in general. I like to leave things pretty open-ended, even at the level of description, in hopes that my players will poke and prod around until they either give me a good narrative excuse to uncover details I've prepped, or opened up opportunities to improvise new details. But sometimes, they just need a nudge in some direction, ANY DIRECTION, to keep them from bogging down in uncertainty over what's supposed to be significant.

The enlightened GM way to see it is:

They're looking to you for cues as to which NPCs are significant enough to bother learning about, and providing a name upfront is a clear gesture in that direction.

Maybe it's just my group, but a lesson I'm steadily learning is:

If you've given your NPC a name, and you want your players to know it, introduce it early, because they absolutely will not ask what it is.

So, anyway, I'm in the market for a new, short history of the Renaissance, if anyone's got any favorites to recommend.

It's also the last straw when it comes to reading Paul Johnson in general. I've got a copy of his History of Christianity that I had started, put down, and was planning on coming back to eventually, but this cements for me that the parts I found dubious in my initial reading are characteristic of him as an author and historian.

Okay, well, that about does it for my patience with Paul Johnson's The Renaissance: A Short History.

Having played a session, one aspect of Dungeon World that I like but didn't fully appreciate from reading the rules is that GMs do very little dice rolling. The only time I rolled dice the entire session was to determine how much damage was done by an enemy attacker. Instead, player actions trigger GM "Moves," and the twists and turns of play emerge primarily from the decisions the GM makes in the course of playing those Moves. Which is interesting, but is going to take some practice to do well.

Had this elephant ear pal (Alocasia x amazonica) for a couple of months, and I'm just now finding out that new leaves emerge as tamales.

There's all sorts of interesting things in Dungeon World, from the GM POV. As a player, though, I think I'd be frustrated with how generic it is as a setting. By design, of course! It's meant to be a flexible PbtA alternative to standard D&D.

My plan is to run the basic version for a short campaign so that we can all get a feel for it, then inject some specific atmosphere, either with an expansion or my own modifications.

Shout out to Burning Wheel for packaging an epub version of the book with the Dungeon World PDF.

Why in the hell would Google Authenticator need access to my camera?

Hmm. My WriteFreely instance appears to have stopped federating. I wonder why?

Added a blog to my RSS reader and…

Are there best practices when it comes to punctuation in alt text? For example, are semicolons a hassle for people who rely on screen readers? Is less punctuation better? Trying to use alt texts consistently, but I also want to optimize it for the readers who really rely on it.

I dragged my heels upgrading to Reeder 5, but I've really warmed to some of the features, e.g. Pocket integration.