I remember Drawball being pretty popular on 4chan back in the mid 2000s. It was a lot of fun.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sites/drawball

Someone has done a similar thing here: https://drawball.io

Scene cuts are a normal thing for us. We often split up quite a bit. It does take learning how to balance out how to cut back and forth. It’s like watching a TV show, you have to know when to raisr the suspense and at the perfect moment when people want more swap to the other thing to leave that suspense in the air.

Often we cut when someone needs to make a roll. We say the move, call for the roll and then cut to the next player. That gives the player a moment to find their dice, roll, see the result and think about what might happen.

Practice and try things. See what keeps the tension high and action and storytelling flowing. I’m sure you can get it!

Very recently I’ve had good experience with Mork Borg games. Currently doing a Pirate Borg game with 6 players on a weekly basis and we’ve been playing for a few months now with a pretty long, extended story. I hate calling it a campaign, because there was no real defined ending that has been primarily player driven, but it’s getting to a point now where it’s naturally wrapping up. But, this system has rules light enough to make combat fast, quick and pithy, and lots of opportunities for randomization of events, items, outcomes and whatnot to put in unexpected flair in the story. It’s very easy to learn, and great for building very random stories. The random tables of things is by far my favorite and is the best inspiration as long as players are willing to use those things as inspiration for something cool.

As an example, in Pirate Borg we had a situation where a character had access to “Ash” a drug-like substance that can be traded for profit or there is the option of ingesting it and a random table of effects. The effect we had was very non-mechanical, where a character sees darkness, shadows and feels lifeless. The player took this and ran with it, having the character feel very depressed and not wanting to do anything, really leaned in to that aspect of feeling lifeless even though there was no specific mechanic other than what the table was illustrating. It was really awesome!

I find that Powered by the Apocalypse games tend to be pretty good with 6ish players, but you also have to have very invested players who are willing to drive and narrate story along and not get too bogged down in mechanics. We did a few YEARS of PbtA games with great success, and they were immensely rewarding experiences. We played The Between recently and they were like. HARD LIMIT OF 4. We played with 6 just fine and it was an AWESOME ride and such a great story! I think a lot of this is about how your group adapts to being good storytellers and a good audience for each other. Have the mechanics be something that works to seamlessly tell a story rather than get in the way. If things are getting bogged down, it might be too much.

A few things to caveat though about our experience thought which I think leads to our success.

• We meet more often but for less time. Rather than meet once a month for 4 or 5 hours, we meet every week for a two hour session. Two hours seems to be that sweet spot where we can get a lot done, explore lots of concepts, paths and ideas, feel the pressure of time to get things accomplished, but not be overwhelmed or bored. It’s also better for our focus since it’s MUCH easier to focus on something for 2 hours and we don’t have to kill an entire day or half day on playing a game. Friday night RPG is the highlight of my week, both running it and playing in it.
• Players have a LOT of agency. I don’t often tell players they can’t do something, but negotiate with how something might happen. We have found that with players being able to present ideas and outcomes as part of the world, we get more elements of the story that become new bits that can be folded in. These are “gifts” players give us that we can then expand on to create a much more rich environment.

These things are completely system independent and really what drives why we can have a group of 7 of us effectively play games like this for years and years on end and keeps us coming back for more.

Blocked is not quite the right word here. Nobody has blocked them. Nothing is stopping you from going over there to see the content they have. You can visit that instance directly and sign up on that instance if you like.

What is better to say is that they may not be federated with the Lemmy instance you connect to. This just means that your instance does not aggregate things from there and will not show the posts from that server in your feeds.

Right now the site is 404’ing, but this is not because of federation or blocking. Their site is just down for some reason.

I found these two vaporwave communities recently

• https://beehaw.org/c/[email protected]
• https://beehaw.org/c/[email protected]

You’re not alone, friend. This often happens when I’m distracted and need to think about other things.

I often find listening to the audiobook is much better for me and I take in material without having to reread (or relisten).

I’ll keep a closer eye on things and maybe I can lend a hand for future problems. Glad they are getting addressed!

Thanks for all the hard work. It’s seen and appreciated.

On the existing bugs/issues, are these issues with the Lemmy code in general or with the specific implementation here? Do you all need help triaging or finding root cause of issues? I am a test engineer and might be able to help out with digging into finding problems.

Disasterpeace is an AMAZING composer and has done some stellar work in both video games and film as well. Here’s a couple of my favorites from video games:

• Fez
• Hyper Light Drifter

Please check out some of his other work here: http://disasterpeace.com/music

I just finished Yakuza Zero and that was a wild ride. Looks like the other games are similar. Dumped a lot of hours on that one. Enjoy it!

I often see this problem in the testing world, particularly around frontend tests that utilize UI automation tools.

The pattern I see is often to abstract chunks of common steps into individual functions that often live in places very disconnected from the test. While this might reduce the number of lines of code in a test and arguably make it more maintainable it has its problems.

Main problem number one is that readability has been diminished. It is now harder to understand exactly what this test is doing because steps have been abstracted away. Tests that can be clearly understood, read and describe functionality and behaviors are immensely important to getting others to quickly understand code. I hate to put a barrier there to making that happen.

Second, i don’t truly believe it ALWAYS improves maintainability. This decision of abstracting carries a risk. When that abstraction needs to change in one place you are faced with a tough choice…

Does this need to change in ALL places? How do you know? How can you get all places it is used and be certain it has to change in all of them? Changing for all usages is RISKY particularly when there are large numbers of uses and you don’t know what they all do.

Do i make a new abstraction? This is safer but now starts to create bloat. It will lead down paths of making future implementations trickier because there are now two things to choose from that are possibly slightly different.

For tests I’m not really convinced that these problems are worth dealing with. Keep it simple and understandable. Repeating yourself for the sake of clarity is okay. I’ll say it again… Repeating yourself for the sake of clarity is okay!

Thanks for the heads up on this! Greatly appreciated, friend.

• More vinyl record collector communities. Always loved finding new music and seeing what interesting things people are picking up.
• Communities for specific, niche genres of music. Synthwave, mallcore, house music, jazz, etc.
• Archery! Love seeing the kind of things people are shooting, how people are shooting, getting advice, giving advice and learning new things about the sport.
• Geographically centered communities. I like having communities for my local state and cities to see what’s going on in the area. Way more informative than local news.