FAQ for TTRPG GMs

Q: Is it OK to kill off a player character by GM fiat?

Magic: the Gathering is good?

Magic: the Gathering is good! If you play it online and don't spend any money.

Victorian State Election 2022

If you just want my advice on who to vote for, skip to the end. If you want to know the who and why, here's where I go through all the parties in alphabetical order. Since I already covered a lot of them (or their equivalents at the national level) for the federal election in May, I'll repeat what I said about them then, but I'll indent those sections so you can skim past them if you just want the new information.

Federal Election 2022: Senate, Victoria

If you just want my advice on who to vote for, skip to the end. If you want to know the who and why, here's where I go through all the parties and groupings in ballot order.

The problem with D&D isn't what you think it is...

...it's that Dungeons & Dragons isn't what you think it is.

Let me back up for a second and start by contradicting myself a little bit. D&D sucks. There are a lot of problems with D&D. I don't know that I'll ever play it again. But the vast majority of the complaints I hear about D&D are... wrong. The people making them are aware that they aren't enjoying the game (or at least not as much as they want to) but rather than identifying an underlying cause they just keep treating the symptoms.

How to subscribe to a YouTube channel's RSS feed.

YouTube frequently makes changes that make it harder to keep up with your subscribed channels, but RSS still works. The instructions for using it are wrong though, and have been wrong for an extremely long time. They're also hard to find. So here's how to do it.

1. Get an RSS client (eg. Thunderbird. The following instructions will assume you're using Thunderbird but should be basically applicable to any feed reader).
2. Create one or more folders under "Feeds" to categorise your subscriptions. Or don't.
3. Right-click a folder (or "Feeds") and click "subscribe".
4. Under "Feed URL" paste "https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=" (without the quotation marks).
5. Open your web browser and find a channel you want to subscribe to.
6. If the URL contains the name of the channel (eg. https://www.youtube.com/user/Wallsy) then:
1. Open one of that channel's videos and then click the channel name under the video to return to the channel page. This time the URL should be different.
7. If the URL contains a string of gibberish (eg. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJpPXZwyo0fgu3h94R3P5pA), copy that gibberish.
8. Switch back to Thunderbird and paste the gibberish from the channel URL at the end eg. https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCJpPXZwyo0fgu3h94R3P5pA
9. Click "Add". Links to the latest videos from that channel should now be retrieved. You can set it to check for more videos automatically or just whenever you click the "Get Messages" button.

Improved Genesys Combat

The Original System

If you're already familiar with how combat works in the Genesys core rules, feel free to skip this section. This is an explanation for those who aren't familiar with it.

Do Not Poor Tea Into the Mystery Cup

It's sitting between the teapot and the dirty dishes and you can't remember why.

Lessons from Lone Wolf: Choice and Consequence

I've been running a group playthrough (or let's play) of the Lone Wolf gamebook series on the Something Awful forums, and I've gone over the books in some depth in order to provide extra information and to attempt to make some bits work a little better (eg. not letting us get into stupid dead-man-walking states). In doing this I've come away with a few lessons that anyone thinking about writing a gamebook should follow. Here are some of them, in no particular order.

The Best Lasagne

I love lasagne, and I've been making it for years, but I think I've finally figured out the best way to make it. It's not an exact recipe since I tend to just throw things in haphazardly, but it should be a pretty good guide for anyone who wants to make good lasagne.

How to play Gat Out of Hell

I've just been replaying Saints Row: Gat Out of Hell today, and this time I noticed something odd about the early missions (in which you recruit your allies and gain your powers): They're in the wrong order. Now you can actually do them in any order you like, but the game prompts you to do them a certain way, specifically Blackbeard/summon, Shakespeare/stomp, Vlad the Impaler/aura and then the DeWynters/blast.

A Simple Recipe

This is a quick and simple recipe to make for yourself for dinner when you're at home by yourself for the evening.

Australian Kindle owners

Amazon is trying to get Australians to switch to amazon.com.au but apparently if you do this you lose access to the ebooks you purchased from amazon.com. Here's log of (part of) the conversation I had with one of their support people:

Me: Lately amazon.com keeps telling me I can switch to amazon.com.au for ebook purchases. Is there any benefit to doing that other than seeing prices in AUD? It seems like a hassle to be using the .com.au site for some things and the .com site for others, especially when AUD and USD are so close in value anyway.

Regie(CSA): The reason why the system keeps telling you to transfer your account to Amazon.au it is because you're country settings is from Australia, correct?

Me: I am in Australia, that is correct.

Regie(CSA): That's is the reason, Mathew.

However, you can ignore the email about the migrating, Mathew.

Me: It's not an email, it;s a message that keeps appearing at the top of the page when I view items at amazon.com

And my question is, is there any benefit to switching, other than seeing prices in AUD, or is that the only thing that would change?

Regie(CSA): No, Mathew.

Regie(CSA): If you switch to Amazon.au, all your books that was purchased from Amazon.com will not be available to view or read unless you switch back to Amazon.com.

...

Me: Why would anyone want to switch their account if it will remove access to the books they already purchased? This is insane.

Regie(CSA): I do apologize, Mathew.

We don't have the information/

...

Me: OK, so is there some way I can make sure my account doesn't ever get switched to the au site? Because I don't want to lose access to my books.

Regie(CSA): No need to worry, as long as you will not accept the migration.

Me: So there is no way for me to just say "no, I don't want to switch" and have that be the end of it? It's just going to keep asking me forever?

Regie(CSA): Yes, Mathew.

I can't imagine what the hell they're thinking with this decision.

French toasted cheese sandwich

Take two eggs. Break them into a bowl. Use a fork or something to whisk them up a bit so the yolk is mixed with the albumen.

Take two slices of bread and dunk them in the egg. Make sure to get both sides of both slices completely covered and do your best to soak up all the egg. Depending on the size of the eggs and slices of bread there may be a little bit left over.

Melt some butter in a frying pan. Put the slices of bread in the frying pan and tip the remaining egg on top of them.

While the bread is frying, slice some cheese and salami.

Once the bread is cooked to your satisfaction on one side, turn it over and put the sliced cheese and salami on top of one slice.

Once the other side of the bread is done, flip the second slice onto the first. The cheese should now be nicely melted. If not, leave it a little longer.

Once the eggy-bread is cooked and the cheese is melted, eat the sandwich.

How to Make Tea

A lot of people like to tell you there are a whole let of very specific rules for how you should make, serve and drink tea, and they are all idiots. Tea is not difficult. It's not complicated.

How to Make a Sandwich

Not just any sandwich, though, the best sandwich.

First, butter your bread. This step is essential, don't try to tell me you don't like butter or whatever, you're a liar and you know it. Butter's delicious. Butter both sides. Really slather it on.

Next, chop up some avocado. Some people like to squish it up and spread it over their bread in a thin layer that you can't even taste. Those people are wrong. And if you even think about arguing that you don't need to spread butter on there because the avocado makes up for it, just leave now.

Next slice a gherkin¹ into thirds, lengthwise and then cut the slices in half the other way. If you like, you can do a second one as well. Sometimes I do, sometimes, I just go with one, as illustrated here.

Looking for an image editor

I'm looking for a decent program to use to edit images. The problem is that I have a few specific requirements, and so far the only thing I know of that meets them is an old version of Paint Shop Pro, from back before Corel bought and ruined it.

I can (and do) still keep using that, but it is pretty outdated and has some weird quirks, like being able to save PNG files with transparency but not load them (transparent areas get converted to an arbitrary colour), so I've been looking for something decent to replace it with. So far I haven't found anything that quite measures up.

So what am I looking for? This:

Click to embiggen.

What we have here is a single window with spots to dock toolbars on either side. I've got the tools palette on the left, the colour picker on the right and the tool options and layer palette floating, because they need more space.

It's not entirely essential that the toolbars be dockable, but it is pretty nice. The important thing is that I can open up several images within that one window and move them around over that grey background. I absolutely do not want to be able to see my desktop, it's too distracting, I don't want multiple copies of those toolbars, and I don't want images to open maximised to the full size of the program window.

I've tried Paint.net, Stylepix, GIMP, Krita and even Photoshop and none of them work for me. Is there something out there that works the way I want it to, or should I just stick with PSP?

Cooking with Tiggum: Turkish Kangaroo Sandwiches

Fear not, hungry masses, for it is once again time for me to share with you the secret to culinary success! This time we turn the making of a simple sandwich into a gruelling hour-long ordeal, made worthwhile by the fact that it results in a truly glorious meal.

Using public transport

You get an a tram and find that there are already quite a few people there, but still a few seats left. Where to sit should be obvious, but some people seem to consistently get this wrong.

Cooking with Tiggum: Something Fishy About the Lasagne

Since my last recipe seemed to be pretty well-received, I thought I'd share another one, this time for fishy-lasagne. Click any image to embiggen, and if you have any questions or feedback, leave a comment.