tbh i think any reasonably simple and fast game could work for your endeavor(the borgs, cairn and so forth), if you accept the inherent challenges of your higher player count. shadowdark just happens to be the game i enjoy to run the most.

shadowdark might work, but the biggest group i ran that for was 7 people and the torchtimer became somewhat short for that amount of people, but instead of a real time clock you could use a 10 round counter. The system itself is simple enough to avoid lengthy rule discussions and keep the players eyes in the game and not on the character sheet. however most adventures seem to be writte n for 3 to 5 people, so thats something to keep in mind.

have you considered running two games, with a gamemaster for each game, that influence each other or share a finale where all players participate? i think that would run better in most systems, simply because downtime between a players turn can get really long with that many people and discussions what to do take way longer with 12 people than 5 or 6.

on first glance it seems like the affected packages are not something someone outside of redhat would use, so i guess the fallout of this will be more interesting than the infected packages themselfs.

there was 3rd?

is it as good as 1 and 2?

turning this into a webapp is a fine choice and if it’s intended to run locally without sharing state with other players you can do this completly in browser with javascript no problem.

https://eloquentjavascript.net/ is a good book for learning js, that is freely available online.

the selection is all over the place tbh.

I suspect this is mostly for Bob to get a better idea of how much his audience consists of players of “modern” D&D Editions vs Players of RPGs in general and not much else.

what suprised the most:

• how much time things take at the table
• what players don’t get that seemed super obvious to me when i prepped a murder scene for example
• how much time i put into things, that don’t matter for the session.

what advice i would have liked to have:

• if something hinges on the players finding a specific thing, the thing exists atleast 3 times.
• don’t prep a plot, prep situations and know the motovations of your npcs, the story happens at the table and trying to prep that beforehand only restricts you.
• get your things in order before the session, if you know you need specific statblocks write them down in a way you can reference them quickly, if you need a dungeon with a complex layout, draw yourself a map before hand, have a roomkey where you can quikly findt it and so on.
• present players with possible hooks for the next session, that way you can prep 2 or 3 specific things instead of “everything”, and the path they did not follow might still be something you can use later.

Onslaught is band from the early days of thrash and still sounds like it.

what seperates a normal notebook from a campaign notebook?

if it’s a book/folder full of templates to fill in:

• dungeon templates, probably a 2 page spread, with space for map, numbered and otherwise empty squares to uses as room key + description of the rooms and a 2d6 random table to fill in.
• space to describe a bigger region (name, capital, system of goverment, list of subregions like cities, forrests, etc. with a reference to the filled in templates for those regions)
• templates for cities, simmiliar to the dungeon template
• wilderness template with a bigger focus on space for descriptions and without a drawn map, but maybe multiple 2d6 random tables to use for example as day and night encounter tables.
• 2 page spreads consisting of 3 lists containing 6 spaces each on every page. i’d use that to keep track of npcs, left side allies of my players, right side enemies or neutral parties. that way i can use those tables to generate random events involving npcs if i don’t have a cool idea for a session. I’d roll a d4 to determine if i use an npc from the left or right side on a 3 or 4 i’ll use npcs from both pages, but on a 3 the left side npc is doing something to a right side npc and on a 4 vice versa, if i can’t decide from which list to pick i can roll a d6 for that and if then cant decide which npc to pick, i roll another d6.

and i think those templates could be setting and system agnostic, an alien space ship is as much a dungeon in the rpg sense as a literral subterranean dungeon, and a wilderness could be a canyon on mars or the swamp next to an evil wizards lair. Setting here would be more for trimmings like dragons perched on top of tables or lists depicted as output on a computer screen.

hmm there are probably multiple cool ways to setup lists and tables to assist in writing your own random generators for various things…

if they repeat a joke i hope its Yoghurt presenting a flamethrower as “the thing you used to love as a kid”

“The Quest for more Money” happened offscreen and the heros should complain that such an important event was only communicated through some obscure Event in a totally unrelated medium after being flabbergasted that Money for a Mission was somehow found.

i guess you’d also want some horror along with that so:

basically all “call of cthulhu” rpgs from “achtung, cthulhu!” to delta green has strange fish people mutants.

rippers, a savage worlds setting/game/supplement/whatever they call those now, allows for experimentation with monster parts, that can be easily reflavoured as mutations or lead straight up to mutation.

I did with most of them, but they still made me scratch my head a bit, simply because they don’t quite fit into my mental model of “game master” or in the case of “narrative vs rules heavy” because i am not sure what kind of games are what and ultimately if those things are mutual exclusive to begin with.

questions i had trouble with because of build in assumptions

Do you prefer to plan and track events going on in the background, or improvise them?

i utilize a lot of random tables in prep and at the table, so i guess improvising? but on the other hand i keep track of things that were the result of random stuff.

Do you prefer rules heavy or narrative heavy systems?

systems like shadowdark, black hack and its off-shoots are rules lite, but are they narrative heavy?

Who does the worldbuilding in your setting?

i plant seeds and do a bit of initial landscaping how they grow is determined during play, but those first sessions are what sets the tone.

Do you integrate players’ backstories into the plot?

My players don’t come up with intricate backstories, but earlier adventures might have consequences later and characters created after a first characters died often get some in-world knowledge, because they are not a random farmhand setting first out to be an adventurer.

How much setting information do you share with your players out of character?

i often only have broad strokes, before it comes up at the table and if it comes up it’s often a players idea that becomes “canon”. I am discovering this world almost as much as my players.

Who is responsible for immersion?

everyone at the table, i am not a story dispenser. my role might be called Game Master, but i am as much Player of the Game as the Players of their Characters are. We are doing this together, none of us is offering a service.

Do you spend more time prepping lore and clues, or events and encounters?

i don’t see how those things are opposed to another. An armed Caravan of Drows is Lore and Encounter, the idea might have started as one or the other, but at the very least after the session is over it will be both.

How much do you enjoy PC death?

Sometimes that becomes a great story, which i enjoy, sometimes it just happens, which i don’t feel much about and sometimes it happens because I did not communicate danger well enough or players interpreted a situation way different than i did, and we only realized after the fact, which feels bad. It’s nothing i have a general opinion about.

polish notation is fine, but the need to get rid of argument names is beyond me, and i don’t really get the need for the fork-operator, that thing seems redundant.

Dungeon delving is probably the default mode of play, and best supported by the rules, but that does not mean it has to be at the center of every session. characters still have a charisma score for social checks, they still have backgrounds that can give them advantages in a given situation, if the dm grants them, it’s just more free form and less guided.

for example one of my players rolled up a thief with pretty high charisma with the “noble” background, we decided that he belonged to a lower house before adventure called and he fell into disgrace, nothing major but with enough renown that his sigil ring would be recognized in parts of the world which gave them an in with an opportunistic mayor hoping for a favour. roles where mostly used if i was not sure how the mayor would react to offers of vague promises in exchange for information or making sure the city guards would not be patrolling the harbour during the night so they had a chance to inspect the shipment of a merchant they believed to be a supporter of an evil cult.

stuff like that does not need much support from the rules, just something to resolve questions the dm does not know the answere to and people being able to improvise a bit. neither of us knew much about that low noble house, i don’t even think the sigil ring was my idea, but they are now a thing. they are magical and hurt everyone trying to wear them who does not belong to the house and my players house apparently controls some fruitful tracts of lands and is known for a very sturdy horse breed.

I’ve run a couple sessions of shadow dark now and i really like it.

I feared players would be bored because character progression is very random and mechanics are very simple, but so far that’s not the case, there is way more “oh maybe we could jam that door with some of the bones in this sarcaphogus” and “we might be able to get into the spooky temple if we get our hands on some cultists robe” and way less looking up skills and spells.

I also spend way less time prepping specific encounters, because ‘balance’ is not expected and my players tend to tackle situations very different from what i expected, so i have more time to think about the people they’ve met or tie things together that started as random encounters and things happening in the background that they might stumble over.

as for running ‘an OSR game’ that will look different for everbody else, some people will dive in to a different dungeon every session, others will spend a lot of time in a city talking to people, gathering clues about old dangerous places or dragon kidnapping princesses and a dungeon is more of a giatn set piece, the only things that i find to be common in OSR are:

1. have fun.
2. Rulings over rules, if it seems right to ask for a check with a dc of 12 in a given situation that’s what will be done even if there is a rule stating the dc should be 14 and the players gets advantage. we are here to have fun and not stopping every 15 minutes just to see if we have fun the ‘proper’ way.
3. combat is not the default state of an encounter. Orcs don’t just teleport in surrounding you, the encounter starts with the players noticing them and they might not be out for blood, they could be paid off with some rations, or they could be avoided entirely, or they are fleeing from an owlbear.

what about the other hat based platformer: “a hat in time” ? lots of fun.

unreal engine renders in real time oposed to a process that had days to run. verbinski pretty much laments that neither care nor time are invested.

yep, a team with “enough” workers when everybody is there and not sick is understaffed, working in those teams can become a nightmare the whole year round.

and for questions the colleague does not know the answere to? we are atleast two people with a functioning brain, we can figure stuff out. Most of the time if a new dev asks me something and i have time, i’ll comb through docs with them or we debug something together even if i am pretty sure what’s to do, because i don’t want to become a search engine for my colleagues, i want colleagues who can figure stuff out, so i’ll show them how I figure stuff out, and I learn stuff along the way pretty often doing that.

if I don’t have time I probably have some links that should lead to answeres and often enough a time window later in the day where we can talk, just because its christmas time and most of my meetings are cancelled :D