Ice Cubes has been pretty good to me, personally.

Reposting something I wrote in another community I hang out in, but it feels appropriate to the topic:

I won’t pretend “Reddit is dying” or anything of the sort, but I have noticed something interesting (that is maybe something I should’ve noticed long, long ago), and that is that subreddits have an insane concentration of whiny entitled lurkers that seem to want content catered and spoonfed to them.

During this whole debacle, I’ve seen creators and enthusiasts that drive the traffic be perfectly content creating elsewhere because it was more about expressing their passion of a topic than cultivating some kind of audience. No matter the alternative they chose, they have plenty of outlets for their creation. But everyone else hates this. All of the bitching about blackouts that I’ve seen haven’t been “man I wanted to post cool shit” but more “where am I supposed to get cool stuff from?”.

In general, what I’ve seen is a slight decline in activity, but a sharp decline in quality. Comparatively, my experience in Lemmy thus far has been that people creating were fine moving elsewhere to do their thing, and while communities are still small, I’ve seen a lot more long-form, thoughtful and respectful discussion because everyone there was a creator and enthusiast about that topic. Looking at the profiles of people commenting, they’ve typically posted at least once in that community already.

Meanwhile on Reddit, since the blackout wore off on certain subs, I’ve seen a lot of this:

[In the original, here would be an image of a typical current comment thread in a blackout-related post, but the context of it is explained below anyway]

Where people who bitch about the blackout because “but I wanted to discuss x!!” are then invited to discuss exactly that, and the conversation goes something along the lines of

“I wanted to discuss x!”

“Oh cool, me too. I like x y z about it, though I preferred if x was like this instead, and maybe z could be polished a little more”

“Well, idk I like it”

“ok 👍”

or just

“i like this”

“i like this too 👍”

because they don’t actually have any proper formulated thoughts or opinions on the subject beyond surface-level observations, brand identity or attachment, or if they do have them, they don’t have the drive to create or lead conversations about it and just lurk waiting for said content and thoughts to be delivered for them.

Which makes the already bad state of egregious repost bots rising to the top because people keep upvoting the same topics over and over even worse.

In a way, I guess it’s kinda similar to what happened with 9gag when that hit critical mass.

To expand on this, I also find it interesting and perplexing just how far that entitlement goes. Moderators are on the verge of losing critical tools, and they’re essential in maintaining the quality of the discussions held. Creators create the topics of discussion, and are the main driving force in setting the baseline quality of said discussions, and as power users are more likely to be the ones to depend on third party apps to create the content people browse.

Both seem fine with the situation, and/or migration, and very understandably go “Hey we feel disrespected on this platform and are moving to x where we feel we can thrive better without external influences deriding our community” and lurkers, who contribute nothing and have the least barrier of entry because they essentially just need to change the url they search the same terms in, stomp their feet and cry “but I want you to discuss things for my entertainment HERE!!!” like two year olds.

Edited to add, here on Lemmy:

I’m hopeful that this situation will show moderators they can curate a dedicated community anywhere with similar (actually relevant) post flow and quality, but without enduring the abuse of the platform they host it in and a bunch of on-lookers. I really hope they don’t buckle in the name of “but we’re already established / have so many people / are such a good resource” because all these things can be true elsewhere without receiving death threats or mod mail spam for doing the right thing.

Thanks for compiling the changes! I love all of them, personally. While it’s not the one I’d rate most interesting one mechanically (since strictly speaking it doesn’t actually affect all that much), I’m really looking forward to see what we get out of Wizard schools - the diversity and flavor of actual schools sounds incredibly promising, and it’ll only make me love Wizard more.

Foundry can be used to run games in person quite well as long as you have a TV, or crappy projector or something. That’s my plan for when I inevitably end up running a game face-to-face.

If you’re willing to go the extra mile, there’s a cool module under the Material Deck umbrella that allows you to roll physical dice into Foundry’s dice roller, and use minis to control the tokens on the canvas.

I’m running all those services on the same Pi, and honestly, I gotta say… not at all! Even when everyone’s loading in at the same time at session start, it’s snappy and responsive. It struggled a bit with 5e (5e’s base system has little to no automation which means all modules need to redefine the codebase themselves. The result is a very broken, very laggy mess) but PF2e is insanely fast.

Even while doing automated rolls with complicated calculations and automated resistance values on damage taken, Node.js peaks out at maybe 30% CPU on a very complex roll, and idles at such a negligible amount it may as well be 0.

As for the modules, while I do think they’re awesome, my suggestion is to play with things around in vanilla PF2e system, and add them one by one as you feel “hmm, maybe quality of life could be better on this” or “this could be spicier in terms of effects”. Mostly because, while it’s not too bad to follow the errors by using the web console, if you need to debug, it’s easier to go “oh this thing that broke is regulated by module x” and knowing what each module does helps a lot, but also because the base Pathfinder 2e system actually already has a lot of quality of life and automation baked in and you probably shouldn’t install things that the system might already automate and might end up conflicting and breaking things.

Anything prefixed by “Pathfinder 2e” and “PF2e” should be safe, but only really install them if you want the features they offer. If you come across anything while playing around with it, feel free to ask, or check stuff out in the Foundry Discord if you haven’t, they’ve got some great resources in there for newcomers.

The 3D dice feature on D&D Beyond is notoriously horribly unoptimized. I’ve seen decent desktops chug to render that.

I’m developing the wiki from scratch. I’m personally handling the frontend. Styling with CSS, Vue framework management, layouting, and also managing the server for it. My partner is handling the backend, writing the database in Rust. Really snappy and extremely lightweight! (Though it kinda needs to be. All of the stuff I mentioned in my previous post is running on a Raspberry Pi!).

For Foundry modules, this is a pastebin of my current active list, although I’m still adding some here and trimming the fat there occasionally, but this is more or less 90% definitive. I’ve added little explanations of each one which should hopefully make the list more useful, as well as which ones I plan on cutting (mostly due to V11 changes.)

Perhaps one additional thing I should add that I forgot to mention with my last post - I have also a very lightweight and tiny repository on GitHub that I back up my worlds/ folder to every week on a schedule (using cronjobs) while excluding any media data and module data (for size constraint reasons) - just actor/scene etc db and the files they point to in case the world gets corrupted or I wanna rollback something. GitHub doesn’t like binary files much, but it has worked for me thus far. I have a world dedicated to a oneshot I wrote and I’ve ran it several times and then just rolled that folder back using my back up on github and it’s worked great.

EDIT: Bah, I forgot one in the pastebin.

• Combat Carousel: Adds a CRPG style initiative tracker, generally compact and pleasant. (deprecated in favor of Carousel Combat Tracker, which works in V11 and has been back-ported to V10)

I host and play online, so almost entirely digital tools. As a sysadmin I’m quite taken to self-hosting so right now my setup currently consists of:

• FoundryVTT instance, with quite a few QoL and eye-candy modules (without going overboard). Hosted within a Docker container.
• Szurubooru, an imageboard instance, used to archive, aggregate and categorize all my NPC/Item/Battlemap/Landscape art. Image hotlinks used to load the image within Foundry. Hosted within a docker container.
• Self-made wiki for the setting (and campaign sections) aggregating all that info, similar to Kanka or WorldAnvil I guess. Can embed ingame using html in journals.
• Trilium instance for notes, though with Foundry’s improved journals and my wiki nearing fully functional completion, I’ve found myself using it less and less. Still use it for taking notes as a player, however, unless the GM gives me a Foundry journal to write in. Hosted within a docker container.
  • Used to use OneNote. Wholeheartedly recommend Trilium for anyone looking for a note taking app. The suite of community-made plugins is rich, and there’s a few nice TTRPG ones that automate session date/number tracking, you can setup world calendar-based timelines, and there’s a nice node graph feature that’s amazing for being able to see npc/item/session/location relationships at a glance and the way in which they interconnnect. Great for TTRPG uses, and I still extremely regularly use it for taking notes regarding work.
• Discord for game audio, though I’m looking into setting up a selfhosted Matrix instance and hosting there instead.

Apart from that, I use Pathbuilder to scaffold my character builds, but for the final thing I build the sheet in Foundry itself as well.

Talk about mask off, lmao