DMR recently published two reviews of Bugman's Appendix N, one strongly taking the stance that the new one fatally misunderstands what it is dealing with, and not worthy of even beaing a torchbearing peasant to Jeffro's work [https://dmrbooks.com/test-blog/2021/4/7/wisdom-from-an-angry-god-a-rebuttal-to-peter-bebergals-appendix-n] , the other, kindly, being best described as "damned by faint praise [https://dmrbooks.com/test-blog/2021/4/1/review-appendix-n-the-eldritch-roots-of-dungeons-and-dra…
All posts in games
In Part 1 I covered the basic setup to get foundry running [https://thelastredoubt.com/how-to-host-foundry/] on your own server running Ubuntu. Now, don't get me wrong. A lot of people just won't want to mess with stuff like this, or won't have/want to start a private server up. I get it. For a few bucks a month you can pay the guys at Forge [https://forge-vtt.com], punch in your license code to foundry, and get a feature set far better than Roll 20 for a lot less, in the long run,…
Part 2 is here [https://thelastredoubt.com/how-to-host-foundry-pt-2/]. I was looking for an alternative to paying the guys at roll20 $10 / month - yes, I'm aware there's a $5 tier, but I actually wanted some of the custom features that needed the higher tier - and stumbled into Foundry. The catch? Setting up your own server may run $5 / month unless you can squeeze it in alongside something else. The good news - the documentation is solid, and the app is structured in a way that makes it ea…
It's always year zero for the social justice (and believing) set - so the events of but a few short years back, namely the nomination of Jeffro Johnson's Appendix N [https://arkhavencomics.com/product/appendixn/] to the Hugo slate, and being dismissed among other works and editors for being liked by the wrong people are already ancient history lost in the antiquity of time. And one surely cannot expect a writer for a prestigious outlet like Boingboing to do better than indian tech support, an…
The phrase in the title was applied to computer games by a friend of mine. As in, "You're not playing a game, you're communing with code." I'm not going to say that computer games, or even solitaire, aren't games. They have rules and win conditions. Nevertheless, they are also in a very real sense algorithmically driven - even if randomized - puzzles without the variability or stakes or psychology that having a human opponent brings to the table. As I noted in my last post re: Battletech gripes…