Great! Then either talk to her to come up with ideas, or if you’re determined to ask the internet, telegraph your united front in your question so that we don’t assume that the primary reason is that you are a shitty partner. Read your question again, just the words, and see if it sounds like the author actually likes their partner, or wants help from the internet changing them to make this game more fun for themselves?

Anyway.

A live session with just voice chat is already a heavy mental toll for some people. Players and DM alike are filtering and translating ideas through one or more layers (what should be done? would this PC/NPC think to do X? How does doing X look like in this setting? Do they have the materials necessary? Would they countenance doing X based on their personality? What would they say alongside it, with what accent and affect?) in real time. Imagine trying to also type while thinking through those thoughts, and wanting your words to be well written, and your grammar and syntax to be correct, and your immortal words to be self-consistent across multiple posts? AND while you are working on all those things there is also distracting crosstalk? Or worse, you’re in a quiet room typing by yourself, but you know that three or more people are talking about what you’re typing in a little huddle? There is no consistent human response to this situation.

It’s an objectively complex format. Some people may find it easy. Some people may be able to ignore or eschew some of their own internal requirements that are consuming their mental energy and game time. And some people may not, and then external pressure to do so can make them stressed, which makes all of what I wrote harder to manage.

You could go text-only, with multiple text channels (roleplay vs ooc vs initiative) and strict timers, e.g. 5 minutes (which, speaking from personal experience, is also draining) just get rid of the voice chat. Or as others said, go with truly async play-by-post with 24 hour timers. Sure, a single combat may take a week to resolve, but it gives everyone plenty of time to do all of the mental load required to play, without all the pressure of realtime translation.

“Hey, GF, what did you think of this format? I want you to have fun, but I’m worried that you’re not enjoying it. It also seems like there are some unspoken expectations from the others, and I think it’d be good for us to discuss them together to see if we agree with them, and then maybe take our thoughts to the group.”

And then be ready to either defend your GF, as well as open to potentially leaving the group with her if the other players refuse to accommodate.

Just because you think the right solution is for your GF to increase her pacing does not mean that your GF will agree with the premise, and even if she agrees, it doesn’t mean that she can achieve whatever arbitrary standard the group expects.

I haven’t read all of this (short attention span), but the thing that caught my eye was Horrible Scar. I really like the combination of Disadvantage on some cha cheks, balanced with Advantage in others.

I think the reality of detrimental and debilitating lingering injuries disagrees with the power fantasy of TTRPGs for some players, myself included, so I am unlikrly to want to subscribe to a system that is mostly “unfun.” However, if the mechanical aspects of these temporary or permanent effects include some upsides, I as a player will be more likely to consent to the implementation of such a system.

No one wants the reality of a lingering injury, e.g. blindness, yet Daredevil makes us yearn for the superhuman echolocation that he exhibits. Something like “You permanently have the blinded condition, but your other senses are heightened. You have advantage on perception checks made to smell or hear. You also have blindsight to a rafius of 5ft. For every year that you have this condition, your blindsight increases by 5ft, up to a maximum of 30ft. You temporarily lose this sense for 1d4 rounds after taking thunder damage.” As a DM, I would immediately add a Ghost encounter to my todo list, because someone afflicted in this way getting aged up would be a boon!

What is a ‘banna’? I thought you might have meant ‘banana’, but you tripled down so now I’m not sure. The internet only tells me of the Banna Strand, a beach in Ireland

Oh, no problem then! The AI bubble will carry us through far enough until it all comes crashing down in… I want to say 2027?

I recommend going to Disboard and then searching for dnd, dnd5e, or avrae, or else finding an invite to the Avrae discord server and looking through the latest posts in its looking-for-community channel (Avrae is a discord bot that helps automate D&D 5e gameplay, so I find it to be a convenient search term–but if ypur partner prefers other systems, Disboard probably has searchable tags for them too). Then just make sure the description also includes LGBTQ+ and you’re probably golden (at least in terms of finding a community that is not vitriolic to your partner).

These communities are often “Westmarches” style, where players group up for short events, so the specific group of people playing at any given time rotates. Some servers are primarily focused on being a place to find groups for synchronous play (e.g. over voice chat for a few hours), while others focus on slow asynchronous play-by-post that has participation from each player once or twice per day. Some servers combine the two styles.

Good luck!

Preface: I have a lot of AI skepticism.

My company is using Cursor and Windsurf, focusing on agent mode (and whatever Windsurf’s equivalent is). It hallucinates real hard with any open ended task, but when you have ALL of:

• an app with good preexisting test coverage
• the ability to run relevant tests quickly (who has time to run an 18 hour CI suite locally for a 1 line change?)
• a well thought out product use case with edge cases

Then you can tell the agent to write test cases before writing code, and run all relevant tests when making any code changes. What it produces is often fine, but rarely great. If you get clever with setting up rules (that tell it to do all of the above), you can sometimes just drop in a product requirement and have it implement, making only minor recommendations. It’s as if you are pair programming with an idiot savant, emphasis on idiot.

But whose app is well covered with tests? (Admittedly, AI can help speed up the boilerplating necessary to backfill test cases, so long as someone knows how the app is supposed to work). Whose app is well-modularized such that it’s easy to select only downstream affected tests for any given code change? (If you know what the modules should be, AI can help… But it’s pretty bad at figuring that out itself). And who writes well thought out product use cases nowadays?

If we were still in the olde waterfall era, with requirements written by business analysts, then maybe this could unlock the fabled 100x gains per developer. Or 10x gains. Or 1.1x gains, most likely.

But nowadays it’s more common for AI to write the use cases, hallucinate edge cases that aren’t real, and when coupled with the above, patchwork together an app that no one fully understands, and that only sometimes works.

Edit: if all of that sounds like TDD, which on its own gives devs a speed boost when they actually use it consistently, and you wonder if CEOs will claim that the boosts are attributable to AI when their devs finally start to TDD like they have been told to for decades now, well, I wonder the same thing.

Can we stop posting this headline? Again and again and again?

It’s not news.

If a sizable portion of the population did want to do something stupid, that’d be news.

This is… It’s not even propaganda. It’s just a waste of our limited time and emotional capacity for idiocy.

Level 3 feels significantly more punchy for most classes, which is nice.

Most d&d podcasts and shows get a bunch of free stuff that they feature (dice, minis, dice towers, stuffed animals, drawings of their characters, etc).

I doubt they buy things that someone wants to sell them.

You probably have to choose: do you want to sell it, or do you want to see it featured?

If the latter, then probably send a letter with some pictures, asking if they would feature it if you had it shipped, to whoever you want (most shows and podcasts advertise a PO Box or some such). If they answer such things on their show, chances are they’ll give you a shout out and let you know on an episode. If they say yes, then you ship it to them, and that’s… It.

Look into your local game cafe(s). That’s the type of place that sells board games, dice, minis, but also has gaming tables and often a small food and drink counter. There are likely nights for newbies you might be able to join, to experience it live.

Watch some youtube videos of people live-playing the game you are interested in. You’ll see the character players interacting with the DM, propped up mostly by their shared understanding of the game mechanics, and the individual mechanics of their characters. Keep an eye out for how things are different in combat vs out of combat.

You don’t need minis or dice if you play online. E.g. there is a Discord bot called Avrae, and many small communities come together around use of that bot to play, where it handles most of the crunchy mechanics like dice rolls and modifiers and even maps. Some communities play live sessions over video chat, others play without video chat but with 5 minute turn timers, and others play asynchronously with 24 hour timers in a format called play-by-post (or pbp) where they roll the crunchy math in one channel, and then roleplay their characters’ actions in another. Disboard will let you search communities who are looking for members–filter by whatever tags interest you most.

Finding a live play group to play a campaign with can be… Hard. I recommend you start by educating yourself about a system via free resources, maybe finding a game cafe to experience it in a one-shot, and try some online play, before investing too much. As you learn more, you’re also more likely to encounter people looking to start or grow a group.

I introduced a “small one story structure, its walls no wider than the span of a single door” next to the farmhouse my players were investigating. They didn’t believe the owners who told them what it was for, and went to check it out for themselves, hackles up and weapons drawn.

It’s an outhouse.

Just an outhouse.

Check out Disboard, and search for 5e or avrae (and optionally play by post) to find a discord server to play on.

There are plenty of small Discord servers that use a bot called Avrae to automate the crunchy mechanics of d&d 5e, with things like char sheets, initiative, monsters and combat, and even maps. Some servers are slow paced, where everyone is expected to act once per ~24 hours, so you get a nice asynchronous game going where you have time to learn your character’s abilities, bot commands, etc, all while typing up your roleplay that matches the mechanics of your turn. That format is great for learning and getting the hang of things in the system, IMO, because you have a ton of time to ask questions in a chat channel to have others help you. Other servers will do sync events, where you sign up for an event with a specific star time, hop into a voice channel, and play with ~5 minute turn timers to really crunch through some combat quickly. This is great once you have the basics of Avrae down (and by extension, the mechanica of 5e).

That’s usually a “westmarches” format, where the server has a large number of players who queue up for events, but each event can only accommodate a small number of players from the top of the queue. You get grouped with random others this way (contrast that to “campaign” play where you stay with the same players for many consecutive sessions). IMO westmarches really helps get you acclimated to D&D through broad exposure to lots of classes, monsters, mechanics, RP styles, etc. And it works really well for someone who is casual!

No need for the entire rehash–feel free to just cherry pick some votes from her track record that her base expected her to vote one way, but she voted another. Since she’s apparently done so again and again and again, that shouldn’t be too hard for you, as you seem to follow her career closely. When politicians do that kind of thing frequently enough to build a reputation, someone usually compiles those instances. A link to such a compilation would also work to sway your detractors.

Legitimately curious about this. Since the sources I read don’t mention this, I am afraid I’ll be doomed to relying on propaganda unless someone educates me. Please help me by providing examples of AoC selling out, and ideally link to the sources so that I may enlighten myself in the future. Thanks!

Do you even read?

Only the wrapper containing the Android UI is addressed by the fork

Discontinuation of Syncthing will cause stagnation in the fork as well, unless the fork’s devs announce(d?) they are picking up more work

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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dice

Singular: die or dice