This is all going to be more NSR

Cairn seems like an obvious one. It’s classic fantasy that will be pretty familiar to people, it has a good number of adventures as well as adventures for other systems that have been converted, and also all the rules are totally free.

Mausritter (modern, but nice) and liminal horror (modern, but horror) are also good. These are all Into the Odd games, there are a lot of hacks of this system for different settings and I feel like you can’t really go wrong there.

I’ll also recommend Fallen, especially for solo games. It’s more like gothic fantasy. It has some really good random tables. I use the oracle deck for other games all the time.

I’d probably join, but also I feel like I’m in 5 different rpg communities that don’t get a lot of posts.

Just throwing this out there, but what if we had like weekly themed threads for different types of games or something?

That’s basically how federated software has to work. Without defederation, running federated software becomes unusable. Either you get overrun by spammers or you become legally liable for illegal content from other servers if you don’t do anything about it (the beehaw admins mentioned someone posting child porn as being one reason for defederation). Lemmy is clearly in its early days but this kind of thing will become way more common, as it is on more mature fediverse platforms.

Email providers are a good example of federated software. They have to make sure nobody is sending spam or malware or they will get federated, and they can be very aggressive about that.

Ultimately if you don’t want defederation to ever happen, you want a centralized system run by a single organization. Those are your options.

Or you can have the government step in and have a very highly regulated system like for telephony, where almost nobody gets to run an instance, which seems unlikely in this case.

Defederation is a key feature of the fediverse. This is probably the politest defederation I’ve ever seen. I’m glad this is the first on Lemmy because if this kind of thing bothers people, they’ll be in for a rude awakening once we get some real defederation drama.

And you can’t have federated software without defederation, just wait till someone starts setting up massive numbers of throwaway spambot accounts

I really like this. I come at this from a more NSR than OSR perspective, but I feel like I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the difficulties of parleying and fighting should be matched - the situation is what it is. And even if not fighting is always the better choice, the players won’t know that and won’t always make the best choices.

I generally play these types of games with combat being what happens when things go wrong. Unless one side has a very clear advantage, combat is high risk for everyone involved and usually it’s better for everyone to avoid it. Combat happens, not because either the player characters or the NPCs would choose it as their first choice, but because you play games about situations in which everything is likely to go wrong.

I haven’t looked at that one yet, but I’m waiting on the kickstarter for issue 2!

As someone who is very much a beginner, I found it really helpful though I never finished it. At the very least it helped me figure out a lot of what I was doing wrong and get un-stuck in getting better.

ha, if it turns out anything like mastodon, it’ll be the medium to small instances that have the biggest amount of defederation drama. This whole thing is the most amicable defederation I’ve ever seen.

Small instances have otherwise been good for mastodon though

We’ve had a lot of success with that model on mastodon, as well as the sort of hub-and-spoke model where you have a larger instance (like beehaw) and a number of smaller instances that primarily interact with the larger instance and with each other. Location specific instances are also great for discussion, for telling people about events in their area, etc.

You could always start pretty small - basically if you could get enough people who want to have a Tuscon-specific community and who can be active, you could start a solid community, and probably survive off of relatively small donations at first. Once you’ve got a solid seed community it could be easier to grow from there.

I personally run (with a friend) a mastodon instance which is only for me and people we know IRL. While it’s not what you want in the long term, it could be a good starting place while you figure out how to get everything set up and figure out how many resources you’ll need and what funding you’d need. That way you don’t have to solve every problem at once - you can open it up more once you’re sure you have a solid foundation.

I think you can ignore the “pending” thing.

I did just learn that if you’re the first one on your server to subscribe to a community, you’ll only see new posts from that point forward and not old ones

I just discovered !osr@lemm.ee which seems NSR friendly!

Itch is great, I’ll second that recommendation. It also has some really indie stuff you can’t find anywhere else. I think it’s DRM free in the way GOG is, in that the platform doesn’t support DRM. A good number of games are free, and some are open source as well.

Also it has tabletop RPGs!

Yeah, I think one thing I like about it is that the distance between people making things and people playing the game is not that far. Lots of hacks and creativity, lots of sharing ideas, a good amount of creative commons stuff too.

I’m working on something for the A Town, A Forest, A Dungeon game jam and it’s been cool to see a lot of other people making something for the first time for the jam

Oh yeah, Vaults of Vaarn looks really cool, there have been a number of great science fantasy settings recently (ultra Violet grasslands is the other one that comes to mind). I haven’t gotten to play either though.

Do snakes like knitwear? Is it still cozy if you’re cold-blooded?

It is a monastery! Just maybe less historical

👋

I have a weekly game of Blades in the Dark right now! It’s maybe actually my longest running campaign - stretching the limits of the system - also we’re playing as cultists

there are some, but they tend to quickly become spam and nazi instances. I’m guessing even those ones defederate from the instances that only serve malware though

I really like Mastodon, so much so that I have several accounts for different purposes. You do need to invest a bit of time into following a good number of people who post stuff you like, though. I was pretty active on Twitter and now I’m pretty active on Mastodon and I like Mastodon better, but I had to spend a little time searching hashtags for people posting cool stuff.

One thing that I haven’t seen anyone mention is moderation - your experience will be better with a well-moderated, well-run server, otherwise you’ll have issues with spam and maybe worse. Generally a medium-sized server based around a subject of interest or a geographic location works well, where the admins are actively involved in the community.