The basic equipment for carrying out rod calculus is a bundle of counting rods and a counting board. The counting rods are usually made of bamboo sticks, about 12 cm- 15 cm in length, 2mm to 4 mm diameter, sometimes from animal bones, or ivory and jade (for well-heeled merchants). A counting board could be a table top, a wooden board with or without grid, on the floor or on sand.

Someone made a pie chart of the tiles in the Ra boardgame ♥ (is PDF on BGG ← requires login💔)

IIEE properly explained

Clarity in design ♥

Självklart förstår jag att han inte är seriös, men det här är så typiskt för rassarnas lösningar oavsett om det gäller våld, övergrepp, fattigdom, svält, utsläpp: dom tror att problemet är löst så länge det sker tre centimeter utanför rikets gränser.

They realize that the reason for the activity is to hang out with friends & fam. Winning is merely the beacon or signpost that directs that activity, and as such, they play the game to the best of their ability, accepting the current limits of that ability while still trying to improve. The never-ending road towards mastery of a craft or hobby can be a very satisfing experience.

Kind of interesting thread on 7th Sea 2e where both GMs and players express frustration over the core flow of the game, the core back-and-forth of the convo and how it leads them to state things just for those things to be immediately negated

Olivia Jaimes has been knocking it out of the part the last few years and Nancy is, as far as I know, the best of the currently-running daily strips. It’s more similar to Peanuts than to Bushmiller’s version of Nancy, but that doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Here is a gem with Fritzi struggling with the overwhelm of todo lists.

I think it’s good that non-blorby games fully take advantage of not having to be tied to the limitations of blorb. You give up the awesomeness of blorb and in return you hope for things like pick-up, zero prep, character-tailored play.

Tailoring play to character’s abilities is usually a bad idea, but in a heist scenario the upside is that you make all “roles” relevant.

The Rules Cyclopedia is my second favorite RPG that we never ever get to use (well, we use the occasional rule from it) because it’s too close but yet so far to our normal, slightly more 5e-tilted edition mashup. During the OGL scare, the RC was one of the games I considered (not that it’s open source either, but OSE and DD are and they’re reasonably compatible).

I was reading some OSR fanzines with a ton of custom classes and monsters today and they’d probably be usable with RC too, with maybe just the XP curve changing.

I have the kinda blurry (but works just fine) PoD reprint of the US original. This Japanese edition is especially beautiful.

Feilin’s move list in the original Fighter’s History 💁🏻‍♀️

Filmed live desk concert with theremin

“execline is a (non-interactive) scripting language, like sh - but its syntax is quite different from a traditional shell syntax.”

How do people feel about this compared to rc from Plan 9?

Org mode has an option of “comefrom” links similar to Tomboy and Howm, called “radio targets”, but it’s frustrating that you have to mark them specially. I sometimes wish every header could be a radio target.

I only used Tomboy briefly (obviously it was annoying to have to have Gnome and not be able to just rock out in Emacs) but having fully automated links without any syntax at all, just powered by n-gram indexing, was pretty awesome.

“The pipe trick uses the pipe character (“|”) to save typing the label of a piped link for several kinds of wiki links. This can avoid potentially making an error while typing the label.

An even better way to save keystrokes that doesn’t need any additional characters is by simply attaching text to the link, as in “[[train]]s”.”

Zettelkästen enabled German researchers to edit cross-referenced text non-linearly, but we’ve got something better than what they had: search.

“One of the most unforgiveable things that mainstream D&D has ever done was to make Diplomacy a skill.”

I agree 100%. This blogpost is great and is exactly how I’ve been trying to run it over the last decade, inspired by @robindlaws@dice.camp’s chapter in Unframed.

I also sort of agree with Arnold in what you need to add to 5e to make it work. Encounter checks definitively, and removing Persuation, Intimitation, and Deception—did that day one when the Starter Set came out in 2014.

Reaction rolls, I’m not so sure. Instead I have a table where I roll up something like “She knows, but doesn’t wanna say because she is afraid the PCs will get her in trouble” or “She doesn’t know, but wants to string them along and get some coin out of it”. The table is independent of the PC’s charisma bonus 🤷🏻‍♀️

Great approach to generating wilderness hexmaps with a lot of semanticity.

Luke Gearing generously posted some side-by-side comparisons of bullet points vs prose.

It’s great that he did this because we almost never get to see extended examples of how the exact same location would look like with bullets or with prose. I just prefer the bullets.

Paintings. Eerie mix of sharp and fuzzy, light and shadow, ornate and plain.