Jesus Christ, he’s still alive?! I haven’t heard that name in years.
For those not blessed with the knowledge of our divine Lord and saviour Derek Smart, God’s gift to fame designers, oh boy, grab your popcorn, this is going to be good.
And by “good” I mean that whatever Derek has come up with will manage to be the most objectively terrible version of that thing possible, and he will aggressively defend it as the greatest thing that has ever happened in the history of everything, ever.
So, all of the 40K systems follow on from the rough rules template of 2nd edition WFRP, which is a really solid foundation, albeit a bit long in the tooth by modern system design standards. There are 5 games and they all share the same basic core mechanics:
Only Rogue Trader ever got a 2nd edition, which made the character creation much more flexible and cleaned up some other system stuff.
Since then, the license and mechanics have ended up in the hands of the same company that made WFRP 4th Edition, and they’ve given it more or less the same treatment. My recommendation would be to pick up Imperium Maledictum, which is basically a reworked version of Dark Heresy built around expanding out the concept from “You are acolytes working for an Inquisitor” to “You are some kind of peons working for some kind of patron”, with the details being a lot more flexible. So you could be members of the ecclesiarchy working for a powerful minister, low level assassins cult members doing hits, low level mechanicus working for a tech priest… Whatever the GM likes. You can still run Dark Heresy in this framework, but with the flexibility to do other things as well.
It’s also a cleaner, more modern version of the system, doing away with somewhat archaic ideas like your skill with firearms being a stat just like your strength. It keeps the core ideas of the mechanics, but strips away some cruft and generally creates a cleaner feeling system. My only complaint would be that it badly needs some expansions to up the numbers of available talents (think “Feats” or “Class abilities”) as they’re kind of the core of how you build a character and right now the small pool feels quite restrictive.
What little I know of MtA lore is nuts. Canonically, the Technomancers (who are basically the Illuminati) faked the moon landing to convince the world that the moon (actually Arcadia, realm of the Fae) is nothing but a dead rock in space. By doing so they leveraged the power of mass unconscious belief to distort reality to actually make Arcadia nothing but a dead rock in space.
Its an amazing system if you want your games to feel less like Skyrim and more like Kingdom Come: Deliverance.
But, y’know, with magic and horrifying chaos monstrosities.
As someone who has run every edition of WFRP (really weird how they skipped straight to 4th from 2nd, but let’s not get into that) along with Dark Heresy and a bunch of other stuff based on the same core, this is exactly right.
WFRP isn’t meant to be “punishing” or “difficult” or whatever other term you want to come up with for “mean to the players.” No system should ever be mean to the players by design, that’s just bad GMing. You’re here to have fun, not shit on people, and any system can be made unfair by just being unfair, that’s not an accomplishment.
What WFRP is meant to be is tense. Success and failure rest on a knife edge. Dangerous enemies can be felled by a lucky blow, but by the same token a high level PC can be taken out by a lucky hit from a goblin with a knife. PC’s still have plot armour in the form of fate points (representing the universe itself literally looking out for you), but everything feels more dangerous, not because the game is “harder” but because death is only ever a few bad rolls away.
High level WFRP characters will still become very powerful. A top tier fighter can duel three or four enemies at once and come out on top, and that’s OK. They should be able to do that, they’re a top tier fighter. But even when they hit that kind of power level they’ll never feel completely safe even though they’ll be able to dispatch most minor opponents with ease.
Seconded.
Andor is the best piece of Star Wars media, period.
Yes, even including the original trilogy.
Our most recent scheduling we had to put off by a week because one player was going to a concert.
Then we couldn’t schedule for the following week because a player had their mom’s birthday. And the weekend after that would be Easter.
Then the player who was going to the concert remembered that they forgot to buy tickets. Which they told us about on the Friday before the Saturday we were originally planning to play.
Pro-tip: If you marry said friend, they have to seat you together anyway.
This is the correct answer.
A long time ago a fellow GM taught me a great rule: Every problem that you introduce should have at least three possible solutions; two that you came up with yourself, and one that your players will find, and which you could never have imagined.
For the record, I use a mouse with my non-dominant hand and I can play even fast paced FPS games like Titanfall competently enough. I actually used to dominate on Splitgate for a while. It’s a skill that can be learned. I have the advantage of having done it my whole life and I fully acknowledge that’s hard to replicate, but I think that with some practice anyone should be able to get to the point where they can play slower, primarily mouse driven games like turn based RPGs. Real time with pause might also be doable if you bind the pause button to the mouse (a mouse with some extra bindable keys would really help here). Anyway, just a thought.
If those options don’t work, maybe look into games like Vampire Survivor, or Realm of The Mad God (though I think the latter does need some rapid mouse inputs when looting, so maybe not so good).
Self hosting email is, unfortunately, a fucking nightmare because you have to jump through a million hoops to get your server off of all the spam filters it will automatically wind up on.
Notesnook is fucking fantastic.
I have spent over a decade - no I am not fucking joking I genuinely mean that - searching for a good Evernote / Onenote replacement. I have tried everything. Obsidian, Joplin, Silverbullet, Trilium, etc, etc, etc, etc, god I have forgotten the names of all the different note apps I’ve tried. They have all sucked. Joplin sucked about the least, but it still never really convinced me to get my stuff off of Onenote.
Notesnook blows them all away. Syncing is instantaneous (literally, you can type into a note on your phone and watch the words appear one at a time on your laptop), you’ve got S3 storage for attachments, sharable notes that can be password protect and set to self-destruct, lockable notes, read only notes, everything is exportable in multiple different formats, notes can be linked to multiple notebooks, notebooks can be nested, notes can be tagged, there’s bi-directional notebook linking, an attachment manager, every note has an auto-generated table of contents, the WYSIWYG editor is beautiful and works flawlessly, they have a web-app (unlike Joplin or any of the other commonly recommended solutions), there’s a web clipper that works really nicely with multiple different clipping formats, the phone app has one for one feature parity with desktop and web, they’ve got an absolutely beautiful code-block system with a copy button built right in so it’s incredible for storing config files or instructions for a self-hosting process… I could go on but I think I’ve ranted enough.
Also, just to be clear, Notesnook is fully self-hostable. There’s an excellent guide here: https://sh.itjust.works/post/31407921. If you self-host, you get all the pro features automatically.
You can host the web-app as well if you like - it doesn’t have a dockerized version yet, but the code is all up on their github - but you can also use the web-app on their server to connect to your back-end, so it’s really not necessary.
The documentation from Notesnook sucks, but this tutorial will have you sorted: https://sh.itjust.works/post/31407921
Original Unreal Tournament shock rifle. Nothing has ever been quite as satisfying as nailing a perfect shock combo.
But close second is the Tribes mortar. Tribes 2 especially. The teamplay potential with the laser designator was an incredible bit of design.
You need to try Darktide. It’s the best bolter in any video game ever. It is massive, it is chunky, the magazines are huge, it makes big clunky mechanical noises every time you ready it, and on full auto it feels like you are unleashing the holy wrath of the Emperor with every round fired.
Ooooohhhh, the true connoisseur’s choice.
Yeah, killing Nazis is always good. And very cathartic.
Here, https://github.com/streetwriters/notesnook-sync-server
But I recommend this thread as a better setup guide; https://lemmy.ml/post/25006407
Who are definitely real people and not his sock puppet accounts.