Recent content by Thomas Shey

My personal suspicion is that fell apart with the Skrull plotline post Secret invasion.

I'll look them up then. Its sometime surprisingly hard to find older fiction in digital form (at least when people haven't taken advantage of copyright experiation to turn out really bad layed out versions to get by on the cheap). As an aside regarding the discussion of book length, one of the...

That helps, but she did have non-People stories like "Something Bright". I need to really see if there's a digital edition of The Anything Box.

Fortunately the Maptool macros I put together for the two games I've used since them require them to hit a button at the start and from then on its taken care of at my end.

I keep telling myself I want to reread some Zenna Henderson, but my physical books--if not reduced to pulp--are pretty inaccessible, and I'm not sure if there's much digital versions about.

Well, the scale of mental powers in May's books has some pretty big impact here; there's a reason they can fill in for magic (and fairly high end magic at that) in the Saga of the Pliocene. The top end ones are pretty nearly indistinguishable from polytheistic gods.

Yeah, that was pretty much the default early on.

That is, I'll admit, one thing a VTT can do to you--make you fussier about how things look and are put together. Its not intrinsic, but its an easy thing to fall into.

This is why I find some expectations on VTTs counterproductive. For years all I asked of them was to support maps and tokens (and do some fog-of-war) and even now all I have added in is a little die-roll related automation. All the stuff we did face to face manually (referencing character...

I admit I both lean into the latter and very rarely use pre-published adventures and modules (I tend to find them constraining).

It varies wildly depending on the genre and kind of campaign. Probably the most consistent is notes about current events in the part of setting the PCs are interacting with, and where they are liable to go if the PCs do not intervene. That's one that can apply all the way from quasi-sandboxes...

One of my favorite books in my younger days. Last time I reread it, I noticed quite how much her personal religious assumptions colored the book in some spots. In fact, they pull one right back from the edge of sociopathy. Its at least a probably healthier way to go through life as a...

We did that back in the Very Dim Times because of the lack of D20's with separate numbers for 11-20, as you reference in the part I clipped. The habit probably stuck around for several years after that was no longer true.

@payn just reminded me that I hadn't counted work done on basic campaign support for my VTT of choice (Maptool), which probably adds some to what I quoted, though it tends to be somewhat frontloaded.

Trying to set up this sort of thing can be interesting, but its also hazardous in that the stakes can seem consistently too high to the players.