I enjoy @Jonah Fishel 's Coffee Talks on Friday, and I was wondering if anyone would be interested in finding a time to do a shared hour of focused work. When I've done them in the past, they work this way: everyone jumps on a call/meeting and briefly introduces themselves, their project, and what specifically they're hoping to accomplish in the next hour (so rather than "prep for my next session" it might be something like "create 3 forest encounters for my next session"; rather than "work on the TTRPG I'm writing" it might be "edit the section on ranged combat in the TTRPG I'm writing"). At the end of the hour, we all meet up again, talk about whether we achieved our goal or not, and what obstacles came up -- and maybe ask for help in overcoming the challenges if that seems appropriate. I'm East Coast USA, but would be willing to do this in my afternoon if there were a bunch of folks in Europe who were interested. I also might be in interested in doing it in an evening, but I feel like a lot of us already have evening commitments. If you're interested, drop a comment below with some general availability preferences.

Sorry it's late! I've been totally out of commission the past few days with a nasty virus (which had me canceling our last two games! Sorry folks) I am fully recovered and excited to play. Here's the link if you'd like to sign up: https://www.signupgenius.com/go/70A0B44AFA723A2FB6-63313928-blades#/ More info on what this is is available here: https://www.skool.com/game-masters-laboratory/play-with-us?p=0c940865

This post is certainly not intended to make people angry or start some sort of online war. I will go out of my way to say that I'm not a "strict" DM by any means and I have in the past found D&D a bit restrictive both as a player and a DM so I tend to run games loosely. Right now I'm running a game for 4 players using 2024 rules and they are currently all level 4. The players are just about to open a tomb which has a warning on it about it containing a "warrior" which is basically me hinting that there is an encounter in the tomb. I want the encounter to be challenging because the tomb holds a vital piece of information to the story The last encounter I built for them was according to the builder "deadly" but they cleared it with ease. I find the whole challenge rating thing incredibly confusing, even more so because we are not using XP. Any encounter builder that I have used has said "this might TPK the party" and it just does not have that effect. I'm not trying to TPK the party, but I do want them to feel challenged and feel potential danger. It's incredibly frustrating and something I really dislike about D&D. Rant over.... Advice welcome

I use AI a lot for RPGs, in my case DnD 5e. I’m confident some of you hate AI and for good reasons. Some may be unaware. We may know people who let it replace their own creativity. I brainstorm with it. For example, we had Session -1 last week. It my first time facilitating it and I’m sure it needs inprovement. We developed factions. Well…we developed a ton of ideas for factions. I will use one as an example. The players feel done, so I want to organize their faction ideas into something cohesive and then ask them to edit it (we need one more short Session -1) So I said to AI, “Now let’s create factions. I’ll give you the notes from Session -1 and then let’s discuss the faction. Discuss! I don’t need you to create a faction for me.” Then I gave it these notes: The world is a little bit like Harry Potter, with some people that know about magic and most people do not. - This faction wants everyone to know about magic, wants to expose magic and make it public. They want power and to control it - They are hunting the party. Opposed to the magic group and the cleric group that dislikes use of magic not sanctioned by the gods. They are working behind the scenes — working with the assassin’s guild. It’s a network of cells, not centralized AI asked about their motivation, what they thought was wrong with the world, and what their methods were. Also, why are they hunting the party? Finally, it asked how united or decentralize the cells are. I used voice-to-text to give it a long answer in response to everything it provided. 1. It clearly didn’t understand my notes because my notes are out of context. So I explained them. 2. It asked a lot of really good questions and made some suggestion suggestions. 3. I disagreed with a lot of the suggestions, liked some of them, but the best part was that it launched my own creativity. I know all the other background for this world and the probing questions and ideas allowed me to really think about what the players wanted.

Hey folks, Like most Accountability Posts this is a bit of a Humblebrag. I have a lot going on and I believe the meme tells you all you need to know about how my brain works. Like many of us, I get super-excited about something and drop everything I can to work on that...until the next cool thing comes along. Fortunately/unfortunately for me, my brain sees a lot of opportunities and creates a lot of exciting ideas. What tools and techniques do you all use to both manage your time and to prevent the shiny new thing from keeping you from finishing the shiny but slightly less new thing? My list will give you some idea of the differing scales and timelines for my projects and commitments -- and that doesn't stop me from looking for/creating new thing... **Short Term, with Deadlines:** - Prep for my bi-weekly Old Gods of Appalachia Role-Playing Game (Unofficial) on Startplaying; post notes in @Jonah Fishel's follow-up question from Friday's coffee convo - Appear on ZealZaddy's Paperbag TTRPG Gameshow (dress/tech: April 7; 1st live: April 21) - Play Blades in the Dark (Wednesdays in April) - Charity game of "Eat the Reich" on Friday, April 17 (Session 0 on Tuesday 4/14) - Finish the *new* adventure I'm running at Concoction (May 29) - Refresh the other games I'm running there; refresh my classes - book my flight to GenCon; find a roommate for the con. - finish enough of the Cypher supplement I'm writing to give away a preview of it on Free RPG Day (June 27) - edit the interview with Jayson Elliot about ModCon (ModCon is May30) **Short term, no deadlines:** - put an Eat the Reich adventure up on Startplaying - Ad hoc "Expanse" for Rachel Savicki - Schedule teaching sessions for Cypher System Gaming and Old Gods of Appalachia on StartPlaying - contact a couple of local gaming stores about scheduling one-shots - Reach out to Phil Wert and Ron Meischker about how I can help with P.A.G.E. - more content for video channel **Medium term, with deadlines:**