Ok, so I've been hammering away at my homebrew ttrpg-wargame and I decided to give clerics the ability to conjure troops. Different alignments get different things. So far, I've given clay golems to the good alignment, flesh golems to the evil alignment, and awakening plants to the chaotic alignment. I am unsure what to give to the lawful alignment.

To clarify the vibe I am going for, here's a a paraphrased version of each one's fluff text:

• "This clay golem you have given life to is a person. It is, by its nature, inclined towards kindness, helpfulness, and generosity."
• "The flesh golem you have constructed is a person with a different alignment from yours. They respect you as their creator, but may rebel if you do not discipline them, or if they feel disrespected, or if they disagree with you strongly enough."
• "You grant sapience and mobility to a number of plants of your choice. They may or may not appreciate this."

Vibe-wise, whatever I give to the lawful alignment should be obedient, predictable, and honest. My first thought is to give the lawful alignment stone golems, as in animating statues. However, i think it needs to parallel the mass troop creation i have granted the chaotic alignment. I have a number of ideas, but everything I've come up with either doesnt seem to follow the Lawful vibe in at least one way (Animating armor seems very scary and somewhat evil) or doesnt seem sufficiently exceptional or awesome (You have a class feature that lets you rally a peasant mob? Watch me do that with a Persuasion roll.)

I am also very averse to giving them the ability to call down angels, as I think creatures that powerful or abstract should never be easy to call upon unless the DM wants them to be easy to call upon.

For a last bit of context, lawful-aligned clerics are basically paladins. So, a better version of the question would be how you think paladins would conjure or fabricate troops if they had a class ability to do so?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/49854495

Came across the Bunnies and Burrows ttrpg, and it made me wonder if there was a wargame equivalent. I mean, the Warriors series is still super popular, sk there's gotta be a cat-bases wargame somewhere!

I have been chugging away at making my own fantasy ttrpg for several months now, and a decision I made early on has been bugging me as possibly being misguided.

I really want a fast combat system. However, there are two ways the interpret "fast" here. The one I committed to early on was to make each round one second long, so on your turn you only have time to either move or act or do nothing. This does mean each turn feels really fast, since the amount of choices you need to make each round are extremely small, and this also make spellcasting seem way more risky and expensive than it actually is since you need to commit multiple rounds to the casting. It feels fast, but combat can take hours.

The other option I did not pursue is to compress each scene into one big roll, creating a system similar to the Narrative Dice system of Genesys where you spend several minutes gathering a pool of dice which represent the chaos and misfortune of the scene, roll them once, augur the bones, and then combat is done. Usually the entire combat scene will take less than 5 minutes, but it's a long 5 minutes filled with details, debate, and checking your work.

The reason I was attracted to the more granular first option was mainly because it's ironically the less crunchy option, since your options each round are to either Move, Fight, Defend, Aim, or do a quick Skill Check. However, as the system is growing it's becoming more clear to me that my game is fundamentally not about the fighting, its about the journey there and back to the community you call home. So, I'm starting to think I should have taken a more zoomed-out approach to combat, maybe starting with wargame rules and then working backwards to derive 1-person combat, maybe trying to make my own narrative dice system using the normal polyhedral dice.

In the end, my priority is to avoid what most DnD-likes end up doing, which is combat that feels slow and also takes hours, but I gotta go in one direction or other. I'm curious what y'all's preferences are. When you are playing a TTRPG, would you rather play combat that feels fast but actually takes hours, or combat that feels slow but actually takes minutes? What's more important to you?

I'm doing some conlanging for a book and I'm having trouble finding the word for how we can take a verb, add -er at the end, and get a word for a person who does that thing. For example, a driver is someone who drives, a commander is someone who commands, a lawyer is someone who laws, and a finger is someone who fings. I am having trouble finding out how other languages noun their verbs in this way since I don't know what this thing is called. Pls halp.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/37539827

Small Criminal Got Preempted

The context is that this bnuuy hopped over the garden fence to munch on some veggies, but couldn't jump back out. He was then chased mercilessly by The Claw 🫳 which just wanted to free him from his imprisonment

I missed out on the genre as a kid because I am boy

So, Ive recently gotten back into writing and been thinking about how much more fun it would be to write Outside. Problem is, the sun hates screens. I have an Alphawrite Neo, of course, but I've always been insecure about lugging a weird educational device around with me in public. So I started looking into Eink tablets that could be used with a keyboard and

Jesus H. Christ, that price tag!

I just want something to type on something. Apparently thats strange, so maybe there will be something cheaper as just a word processor. It seems that the only reasonable offering here is the Freewrite Traveler, though, so I look it up and

WHY‽ It's the same price!

Okay, maybe I could just get a Raspberry Pi 400 and attach an eInk monitor to it. Apparently, this is not the usual use-case for E-ink, but there are in fact e-ink monitors out there! Most were around a thousand dollars for some reason, but here is the cheapest one I could find:

That's around the price point of a Boox Go, for reference, which has a really slow screen refresh rate.

Why is there no affordable e-paper products that arent a pain to use? I am aware of cheaper ones, but the ones ive seen reviews if aren't able to keep up with typing in a way that seems responsive. And I'm aware that you can find eink displays (as in the component) for as low as $30, so they should be able to be cheaper than this!

Back in high school when I was able to use my parent's insurance, I was on Strattera. But the generic version is, like, six times more expensive than Ritalin, so I'm thinking about trying something new.