@K-O Same... games always get my real money when it comes to playing with appearance, and having some kind of pet or mount. I feel I should write some in lol.

@bramblesofice hey I'm not a dev or anything just some guy that's writing tales like you but I'd say you can use those story's just as long as you change anything that's copy written for example if a place in the story you have is named grayhawk or Neverwinter it's now called thronehill or if a realm you visited is called the umbra it's now called the paradoxiza just saying that's what I would do

@Ezra
well said. and again... i use this in my stories too. I've just played a lot of tables where the DM wants us to be emotionally tormented by the struggles of conflicts my character may have trouble relating to by design.
i think personal development of player characters hits home more for me. be it an insect hack and slash, or a complex motive campaign, i kind of just want to focus on my own bonds/flaws/ideas, and the story lies in the conflict of the party learning that they may be different, but they all want the same thing. When I'm forced to learn a lesson from outside influences, i get turned off. my life and the people in it are complex enough... and I'm pretty empathic, even in real world drama, i can almost always see the justification of both sides of a coin. sometimes i just want roll dice and bask in the glory of victory over my enemies, and it doesn't matter if i am the oppressor or the oppressed. I want to explore the character, not explore myself; the separation of art and artist, performer and performance. does that make sense?

@AGreaterMonster @Kismet Heavenly Delusion will be one-cour only (13 episodes) just airing over Spring.

If it gets a bit of popularity (as it seems to be getting, week-to-week), maybe the next season could be two cours; the manga has 5 years' worth of content so I think the only limitation is monetary.

@RavingArmy Good point. I've set up 2 beginner-focused campaigns and two regular campaigns that are open to both beginners and experienced players. I'm just starting...no bites yet in the first week. From what I hear, it's hard to get the first signups and first few games going.

If I'm ever stuck I mumble vowels in different character voices for a scene I've written which that character could potentially be in... If something sounds rhythmic enough I'll piece together consonants around them until I get something that fits the tone of the world and run with that!

Oh man, just found out that the creator of honey heist has an huge collection of similar one page games they've made over the years. https://gshowitt.itch.io/

my warforged didn't know how to swim, but i bravely tied a 50' rope to the ship and jumped overboard to fight the Kraken, announcing to pull me up when the job was done. Warfoged don't need to breathe, so drowning wasn't an issue.

the fight was over, and players started discussing next steps.

I silently crossed my arms and closed my eyes, and blew up my cheeks like i was holding my breath, leaning back in my seat. I stayed there for what felt like 10 minutes of players discussing their plans. 3 days pass in game. I started putting candy wrappers on my face as if seaweed was accumulating.

By the time they noticed I had been very quiet, the barbarian looks over at me and was like... "what is Kaj doing?" Then he goes "OH MY GOD we never pulled him back up!".

And then everyone cheered and clapped and hoisted me in the air singing songs of my glory. okay that last part wasn't real, but we all had a good laugh.

@SwampCreature Oh yea I am big on character customization lol. The more I can do with appearance, backstory, race, profession, morality, etc the better. I generate characters based off ideas, names I like, or even a couple of people I know lol. I firmly believe that most millennials are big into customization and this is the hill I will die on lol.

@Mariano TLOU part two is SO good, my partner and I played through the first game a couple of months before the second one dropped, and we were really impressed by how well the second one holds up to the first. It had a lot of controversy surrounding it because of the antagonist, which I personally think was completely unwarranted, and a symptom of how toxic the gaming community can be. The 'plot twist' that happens partway through was completely unexpected and an incredible mechanic for a game imo. It had never been done before, and I found it so captivating.

I don't know if I have ever cried harder watching something than during episode 3 of that show, lol. I was full on sobbing by the end. I also liked how they used the infected sparingly, I think the scenes that did show them showed how absolutely destructive and terrifying they were when encountered. If you run into them, expect that someone will die.

@TableTopProphet I agree 100% with the fact that NPC's will run AI dialogue in the future (or at least I really hope so). The way I see it, there's two big hurdles to overcome: from a tech perspective, how to balance having multiple neural networks that work differently so that every character feels different with their backstories and their interactions with the player's actions, without it consuming an insane amount of resources; and from a writing/designing perspective, how to write compelling stories and events that trigger off of a bunch of seemingly continuous AI states rather than the much more limited/discrete states of N dialogue trees.

When it comes to predatory monetization, I don't foresee it being as big an issue in the future, with it being increasingly easy for competition to arrive. Replika has the name recognition advantage, but nowadays there's even free tools out there (like Google Colab) that allow you to train your AI, which is the most expensive part of the process. Once it's done, if you're okay with offline learning only, you can set it up for pretty relatively cheap anywhere; so companies will have too much high-quality competition too quickly to try to gouge the users. Or at least that's my hope 😅

@Katie Cool, I'll check that podcast out. The ones that I mentioned are all free on Audible to listen to even if you don't have a subscription. I pretty much rotate through them each morning while I'm exercising. I like to pick up inspiration for adventures or NPCs or just tips and advice on running good games. I used to a be pretty religiously listening to Critical Role but I lost interesting in liveplay when they started their third season. Jumping to another rule system that I have never actually played, but I loved the liveplay series--Vampire: the Masquerade. They have an awesome really compelling liveplay campaign that ran for a couple seasons. The performances of the players is really good and the DM I believe is one of the core creators/producers/writers of the rule system? I'm pretty sure. Let me find the link...Oh yeah, on the World of Darkness Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/worldofdarkness
It's the L.A. by Night series and then N.Y. by Night. So good! But I haven't really had interest in liveplay too much because I'm investing more in DMing and learning new roleplaying game systems as well as playing.

D&D open source D20 is probably the simplest.

Although most of my gaming experience is with WW (White Wolf) OWOD (Old World of Darkness) LARP. I've played most of options but have created/run long-term WtA (Werewolf) games.