Prince Wang’s programmer was coding software. His fingers danced upon the keyboard. The program compiled without and error message, and the program ran like a gentle wind.

“Excellent!” the Prince exclaimed. “Your technique is faultless!”

“Technique?” said the programmer, turning from his terminal, “What I follow is Tao – beyond all techniques! When I first began to program, I would see before me the whole problem in one mass. After three years, I no longer saw this mass. Instead, I used subroutines. But now I see nothing. My whole being exists in a formless void. My senses are idle. My spirit, free to work without a plan, follows its own instinct. In short, my program writes itself. True, sometimes there are difficult problems. I see them coming, I slow down, I watch silently. Then I change a single line of code and the difficulties vanish like puffs of idle smoke. I then compile the program. I sit still and let the joy of the work fill my being. I close my eyes for a moment and then log off.”

In general the impression I have from reading various sources is that Cyberpunk missions are good sources

So far I like some of missions in Tales of Night City.

You mean this?

Yeah, in the end you’ll always end up doing an inspiration rather than running it directly. But among pre-prepared missions there are those that are flexible and those that rely on assumptions. I was hoping that maybe someone had looked at this book and has an opinion which category these fall in

Request: if you decide to add new blogs, could you also make a post about it on your blog, please?

After some time I discovered that I’d prefer narrower choice of blogs, so I copied your selection and manually created my own list. But I’d still like to leverage your moderation, so if you wrote about it on your blog, I would know to check them out

I don’t think there’s one answer to that. To me it depends on the context of the clock and what’s your plan for pacing. Also it will be part of your style that you just have to find for yourself, what works for you

(Cyberpunk examples)

• Tripping guards suspicion on-site: one small clock
  Consequence is not an alarm yet but from now on everything that has to do with guards can have lower position
• Tripping alarms for the whole building: bigger clock
  Or don’t set up such clock at all if everything going completely south doesn’t fit your overarching plot plans
• Mafia responds to characters asking around: small clock
  They have reputation to uphold, they can’t have someone nosing around in visible way Consequence:
  • someone who said something gets in trouble, making others harder to work with (lower position)
  • Mafia learns who they are (if that would be serious problem for the whole run, I’d make it a bigger clock)
  • They get set up and have an unplanned meeting with a bunch of enforcers
  • It gets so obvious that they get contacted by this group’s opponents and the situation is stacked that characters either comply with demands or will have very hard time completing the run
• Police/corp responds to characters doing runs against the corp
  • If you plan the corp to be present in the plot, make it a big clock to fill it after a few runs
    • Or make it small to force the characters to manage their footprint from the early stage (lower position when doing things the corp can piece together)
  • If it makes sense that corp would first send police after them, make it two small clocks
  • If you don’t care about the corp, make it a short clock, to hopefully resolve it during this session
    If they manage to not fill it, after all, keep the clock for the future. The next time you feel it’s going too well for them, you can fill this clock instead of more current one. Suddenly bringing old grudges into the mix

So depending on what you want to do it’s either bigger or smaller clock, with consequences either in fiction or mechanical

Characters in the title are not the regular ones making it look like a spam mail, no link, description sounds like corpo LLM. If there really is some podcast somewhere, I think it deserves better

WONTFIX: Works as intended

Hell has frozen over?

sometimes my notes are more detailed than his

Impressive! :)

Two way as in “upload too” or “another share from other device”?

https://f-droid.org/pl/packages/be.ppareit.swiftp_free/
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.daemon.ssh/

I create a Directory, and that directory and it’s files become available to network

So basically you want to set up an ftp server?

You mean like LocalSend, croc, Share via HTTP or ShareX?

I think I’ve found an app some time ago that was just setting up an HTTP file server, so you could share whole directories. But I didn’t have use for it and I forgot the name

No, that is actually useful. Blocking access for anonymous users is not

If anything, the boom of LLMs like copilot and chatgpt actually shows the power of open source and open access to information. Underlying algorithms would mean nothing without open source, open access to stackoverflow, forums, etc

Microsoft acquired Github and the discussions around the future of opensource on a microsoft owned infrastructure

Personally I’m impressed it took them so long to start driving it to the ground

I moved to Codeberg

Codeberg is a non-profit, community-led organization that aims to help free and open source projects prosper by giving them a safe and friendly home

From what I read around, the first RPG to have flashbacks and something like downtime was Leverage. The downtime part was not as prominent, but with the parts about closing the hooks from the beginning of the heist, I think it is very close. Whole game was rooted in some tv series about criminals breaking the law. So I think these rather come from other media that depict heists

I almost never use battlemap, but sometimes I prepare map

Wait, what’s the difference? A grid?
I prefer to have some kind of grid on mine as it helps with seeing the scale. But the moment a player starts counting squares of movement, so the the squares of range fit, I get triggered ;) I don’t play rpgs to measure ranges with a ruler

A map of the crime-scene sometimes really helps the PC figuring out how the clues say something about the story

Exactly! it can backfire, though. You put something somewhere becuase “it fits” but suddenly your players are sure something you didn’t intend has happened because of the layout

Once in a few sessions. Party because that’s on our characters to decide how they address the goal and partly because I create jobs where “covert” seems to be first thought. Not that I would be against them going berserk, it just often seems like the proper approach

I still prepare maps, though. I’ve learned that theater of mind does not work with me, my players were sill lost in what’s where. Probably it would be a good idea to learn how to do ToM properly but I feel I still need to learn other things first. And these are still useful for showing where the cameras and the doors are

I only played Karma in the Dark, I’m not sure how vanilla it is

In the end it’s just a game. If skipping some consequences makes everyone happy with the game, then everyone is happy ;)
But my 2¢ would be:

GM told us about all the holds he didn’t use to try to stay in the “plot” and not add extra complication to an already complicated story

1. I think the plot might have been over-defined
   1. Take a look at Onion Plots and Lazy GM, these work very well with loosely defined plots. Instead of having a plan point by point, have a “bag” of points to choose from when complication happens
   2. I don’t want to say railroaded because that’s a loaded word, but I’d guess that they focused too much on how the job will progress, instead of the moving parts of the situation. Also, if the planned story was complicated in itself, maybe they moved too few of the planned complications to the “complications to reveal when a complication comes out from the dice” bag. You can have a few “really have to reveal those” in such a bag. It just takes a little practice to know how many
   3. When a complication happens, it does not have to be a plot-changing heavy hitter. I’m not familiar with Kult but a consequence could also be a Clock that means “someone in the setting will figure out something (connections, location, identity) when it fills”. And it’s ok if it lays dormant for a few other jobs. When you have many plot Clocks open it can lead to culmination when a few of these suddenly fill up a few jobs later. “play to find out” also means that there will be some loose ends in the plot, you never know if a random 4-out-of-6 Clock won’t come in handy just before a plot-important job to raise the tension
   4. When a consequence occurs, the GM has the control over how hard it is in fiction - whether it should be a twist or just business as usual
2. A consequence does not have to be a complication. It can be
   • a lower effect - you are progressing towards the goal but the obstacle is well guarded and so far only managed to get half-way
   • harm - if the fiction is in a state you want to keep, you can always deal harm as a cop-out. A sprained ankle can happen to everyone
   • lost opportunity - you hear footsteps down the hall
3. Complication does not have to be something right here and right now. “When hacking the node an ICE managed to identify part of your signature. This is not a Trace Clock, but if you don’t Resist or address it somehow later on, your Contact/Hideout will be in trouble because the Police (not the Corp yet - here’s my choice on gravity) will come looking for you and they won’t be asking nicely”

Yes, I can. But you need much more to accomplish this

1. You need reach: are there any mods/admins that would feel ok with vouching for your abilities? And preferably have info about your proposal stickied on a bunch of communities where it could reach people open to chip in?
2. You need to convince those you reach that you’re not a Nigerian Prince. Mod/Admin saying you’re legit could help with it but maybe there’s something more you could do to convince the public?
   Maybe I simply don’t know who you are, maybe in reality you are second in command after Dessalines. But either you are a random dev saying “I can do that” - in this case you need to somehow convince others that you really can. Or you are not recognised for your work - in this case you need to point us to what tie you to. I saw the fedi project on your GitHub so you probably can code (I’m not going to be auditing your project in order to asses your skills, sorry). But are you just a dreamer or are you serious?
   I’m sorry if what I’m saying sounds harsh. I just feel that how you are coming through to the other side gets lost in translation here
3. GitHub is not the most popular support medium. Why not also have Patreon/Koffi/OpenCollective/etc? Many will chip in easier if they’re already present on the platform