Love me some Plasma. I’m still running the default styles after over a year as well. It’s just nice.

I really should spend some time experimenting with customizations though

That reminds me that I actually have the pdf of his book return of the lazy dm, I just haven’t finished it 😅

The parts I did read were extremely helpful and I am definitely going to finish it and incorporate that into my prep. Thank you!

Yeah, every thing they say is “horrifying” about this, and that they call “AI gone wrong” is just describing exactly how LLMs work and what they are designed to do.

Like of course the AI doesn’t have opinions on your actual writing - it cant! And of course it says whatever the user wants to hear, that’s literally just describing what an LLM does.

As much as I get frustrated with AI companies pushing this stuff so hard, if users bothered to understand even at the most basic level what they were using, we wouldn’t have these issues

It’s beautiful <3

I do that too 😅 I’m getting better at avoiding the scary trigger words and getting them to agree with the principles

Good points! There are definitely limits to this.

Foreshadowing is something I have tried to do and would like to do more of. My current campaign and the only long running one I have experience with is all homebrew, and we did start at a place where I had the world itself pretty well fleshed out, but a lot of the character and faction stuff changed quite a bit over the first couple of months. The big changes were early enough that it didn’t really cause problems for our table, but I have experienced what you say, where some of the foreshadowing that I tried to do in the first couple of sessions kind of became irrelevant. This was mainly because I realized the thing I was originally intending to foreshadow wasn’t that interesting and needed to change as the players began living in the world. We are at a place now where the players have mostly uncovered all of the key lore, and I believe they will confront the BBEG soon.

I have learned a lot running this game and it makes me excited to build and run more!

I’m the guy but instead of a pyramid scheme I’m just trying to get all of my friends to install Linux and switch to fediverse social platforms

Kind of frustrating that one of the main points against Linux is anti cheat, which basically comes down to Spyware that assumes you are a hacker if you run Linux, so the game publishers ban your account. That isn’t a Linux problem, since often these are games that run fine on Linux.

Bees: mix of the top 3

AI art is unethical

I love this idea. Would have been perfect for my current game, though I have enjoyed the flexibility to adjust things the players don’t know yet.

That could still work with this approach but you’d have to be intentional about keeping changes within the same scope / size

I have been playing Genesys, and I LOVE it. I’m not playing in a sci-fi setting, but the whole premise behind Genesys is that is is adaptable to any setting, and from what I have seen of the system, it would be great for something like that. There are tons of rules for vehicle stats, combat, etc. and it has guidelines for how to design and balance your own vehicles.

If you are interested in making and playing in your own setting I would definitely recommend Genesys.

If you are wanting something with an existing setting that matches that vibe, then I’d first check and see if some of the community made settings will fit that, and if not, then maybe look elsewhere.

There are a ton of community made resources for Genesys on DriveThruRPG and also in a dropbox maintained by one of the community members, and that dropbox has some resources for an Expanse setting and other sci-fi stuff that would be a good starting point: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/raqr7usuzwizglm/AACMnwsNyT5DPHyjokWZwQLOa/Community Content?dl=0&lst=&subfolder_nav_tracking=1

I would also say you should definitely get the core rulebook AND the expanded players guide, as that has tons of good resources and better guidelines for creating vehicles, as well as other useful things. It’s really a fantastic GM toolkit.

EDIT: Also regarding the dice, which can be kind of hard to get, they have an app that you can use, as well as charts for converting normal polyhedral dice to the Genesys symbols, and what I personally do is just use the Star Wars dice, which are the same (with slightly different look to the symbols) and are more available, at least where I am.

I know this is an old post, but I will give a +1 to Hero Kids for a few reasons:

• There’s like 4 stats and all you need is a bunch of D6.

• The character sheets fit on an index card and are easy enough for a 6 year old to grasp everything on it.

• If you want to run their setting, tons of info is provided with quest seeds and pre-made adventures, and it is super easy to adapt to a different setting, or even totally different genre, because of how simple the stats are.

• It has a great monster compendium, with tons of fantasy monsters, with notes on balancing encounters.

• If you want to get creative and make totally custom monsters, the information included on balancing gives you all the tools to do that.

• The PDF bundle on DriveThruRPG is like $20 for the PDFs of most of the adventures, the core book, the monster compendium, and the gazetteer, all of which are great.

I’m running an ongoing campaign with a 6 year old, a 7.5 year old and my 16 year old sister. We had a 3 hour session last time, and the ADHD 6 year old was there for the whole thing (with a couple 5 minute breaks).

If you have any questions about it let me know. I’m not a super experienced GM. I’ve only run Hero Kids and Genesys, with being a GM in Hero Kids being my intro to TTRPGs.