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DnD has the Dungeon of the Mad Mage that's supposedly level 5 to 20. Dunno how good it is though.
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May 9, 2024 14:53
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MonsieurChoc posted:I really wanna run Gradient Descent, the sci-fi mega dungeon for Mothership.
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May 9, 2024 14:55
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Maxwell Lord posted:I've gotten interested in Megadungeons as of late. The giant complexes that are supposed to last an entire campaign, etc. There aren't a lot of published ones and the ones that are aren't necessarily good, but it strikes me as a fun potential creative exercise. Caverns of Thracia (as mentioned before) is an excellent megadungeon.
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May 9, 2024 15:14
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I've been running The Sun King's Palace, it's not a combat heavy one by any means but if you like that kinda Weird Spooky Dreamy Surreal vibe it's got it in spades.
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May 9, 2024 15:25
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JMBosch posted:Playing in a campaign with this right now, and it's Very Good. Hell yeah. How did it start? That's honestly the part I'm having some trouble with: how to hook the pcs into it.
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May 9, 2024 15:51
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MonsieurChoc posted:Hell yeah. Like a lot of OSR-ish games, money (or trying to get out of severe debt) is usually the main PC motivator in Mothership, so hearing about the high prices someone's willing to pay for an artifact should typically be motivation enough. If the PCs aren't struggling financially, you might want to, uh, address that first. Then when they need some cash, "You keep hearing talk about how much someone's willing to pay for an artifact from the Deep..."
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May 9, 2024 16:18
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It's a very genre appropriate motivation too. Forfeiture of their share of the mining contract is the threat hanging over the crew in Alien when they receive the distress signal
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May 9, 2024 16:33
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after recently finishing running Abomination Vaults I had the thought that the dungeon itself would be fairly well-served by a touch more OSR style play than pathfinder 2e is really capable of. the book even seems to want to push you there at points, but paizo is generally allergic to committing hard to GM advice or plot hooks
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May 9, 2024 18:31
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Maxwell Lord posted:I've gotten interested in Megadungeons as of late. The giant complexes that are supposed to last an entire campaign, etc. There aren't a lot of published ones and the ones that are aren't necessarily good, but it strikes me as a fun potential creative exercise. The thread petered out and nobody's posted in it in ages, but aldantefax started a really good megadungeon thread that might be worth a review for ideas etc. https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3948939
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May 9, 2024 19:21
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Leperflesh posted:The thread petered out and nobody's posted in it in ages, but aldantefax started a really good megadungeon thread that might be worth a review for ideas etc. I had nothing to contribute, but I miss that thread.
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May 9, 2024 19:26
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Mister Olympus posted:after recently finishing running Abomination Vaults I had the thought that the dungeon itself would be fairly well-served by a touch more OSR style play than pathfinder 2e is really capable of. the book even seems to want to push you there at points, but paizo is generally allergic to committing hard to GM advice or plot hooks Paizo’s module authors have a real problem making the system match the story in PF2. Sometimes it’s too easy, like the big quest in AoA to retrieve an Orb of Dragon Control which has a save DC so weak that it is basically impossible for it to work on the dragon it was supposed to be used on. Sometimes it’s daft, like FotRP expecting the PCs at one point to just jump in to combat with a group including a spell caster that can disintegrate Hao Jin. And in AV, it’s instead way too hard.
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May 9, 2024 19:38
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the difficulty of vaults is a bit overhyped, i found, and mostly due to people coming in with more 5e based expectations in terms of how much strategy the system wants you to use. as long as you have a coherent fight specific gameplan most encounters in vaults aren't really that nasty. the real problem is that because of the separate books structure, and the overall house style for paizo's setting writing, you have to do a lot of legwork in terms of logically connecting stuff that happens around and between dungeon levels, or properly foreshadowing some stuff the game really wants to be impactful. this applies to their setting books too, where there'll be a lot of plot hooks laid but no suggestions on motives or overall plans for the presented characters because they want every gm to fill in all the background themselves, rather than commit to crafting an interesting plot. it's frustrating because in my view, the use of things like modules and setting books is to be given more of a baseline to work from if you yourself don't have any ideas. like ok here's an example. in extinction curse, the transition from book 4 to book 5 is that you go where the next plot item is supposed to be, and the druids there tell you "nope. no idea where it is. never had any idea. maybe you should just look in the underdark for the deactivated sixth orb instead." and the adventure makes a point that they're being super suspicious, hiding something, trying to get the players away, etc. the answer to what they're hiding is that the head druid took the orb away from its place years ago, and planted it down in another city to make a huge tree grow. the remaining druids are here because they disagreed with her, but still refuse to answer where the orb is unless the players scare the information out of them. this isn't a fork in the plot, though, as the module simply continues on regardless as if the players took the suggestion to go into the underdark. the module does not present anything about the fact that there's a whole other mcguffin out there they could easily use that doesn't require crossing a radioactive desert cave. in the setting book for absalom, the other half of this plot is mentioned when it details the dryad queen who moved the orb there and used it to grow that big tree. it only says "yeah she did this" and doesn't give any indication of why she did it, what purpose it may serve, how she might respond to adventurers coming along and saying "hey we need this orb to save the world," etc. just like, hey, this is there for some reason, people don't want to talk about it for some reason, and something unclear is being done with it. just the absolute bare minimum of writing. Mister Olympus fucked around with this message at 20:18 on May 9, 2024 |
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May 9, 2024 20:10
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What's a good web site for resolving my "Between Game Points" in a party? Ideally I could documents / files for people to look at ("here are the magic items currently for sale", "here's what's goin in the kjngdom", "here's a rumor") and players could make posts /threads about what they want to do? Ill prioritize easy to use over functionality, this is for a group of brand new gamers. I'll be playin person but I live in a different town from them and don't really communicate with the whole party outside of the game, so I need someone other than a group text message, group email, etc for managing the bookwork that occurs between games.
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May 9, 2024 21:25
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I use Notion.
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May 9, 2024 21:32
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A Discord server would work for this, with the added ability to run remote games there if desired
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May 9, 2024 21:48
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MonsieurChoc posted:I really wanna run Gradient Descent, the sci-fi mega dungeon for Mothership. Reading this now and its really extremely good. Absolute steal for $8, its absolutely system shock,isnt it?
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May 9, 2024 21:52
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what is up with buying mothership? all I can find are excited press releases about first edition, from two years ago. Can I by the 1e pdf from anywhere? e: oh, looks like physical copies have literally just started shipping. I'm still puzzled about how to buy the 1e pdf though. I have money! let me give it u! ee: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/publisher/13232/tuesday-knight-games ah here it is. weird how that didn't show up quicker though.
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May 9, 2024 22:15
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sebmojo posted:what is up with buying mothership? all I can find are excited press releases about first edition, from two years ago. Can I by the 1e pdf from anywhere? The final 1e release was available for pre-order for the two years after the crowdfunding, where you'd have access to a WIP PDF that was updated regularly through development. (People have been playing for years with these WIP PDFs.) With the final copies and box sets going out to backers, they stopped taking those preorders. They'll be releasing it for regular sale a few weeks after the (current) fulfillment is complete. Tuesday Knight Games definitely had some real growing pains with the success of Mothership, but they've been super engaged with the community on their Discord for a long time, which is one reason why the 3pp scene for the game is already so big.
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May 9, 2024 22:43
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Ah, so I just came in at the wrong time! I think it looks great, I've added it to the top of the list of games I'd like to run (after finishing Masks of Nyatlathotep, hahah)
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May 9, 2024 22:53
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Yeah, I got lucky and kickstarted the deluxe set. It came with multiple adventures that look like bangers, but the not-System Shock/not Blame! one hooked me first. I got some interested friends, gonna try and get this running in June.
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May 9, 2024 23:29
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This is only tangentially related to tradgames, I know, but since we have a lot of people who play on Discord / VOIP, maybe this is a good place to ask: any recommendations for a wireless headset on the basis of mic quality, rather than sound quality? The headset I use for my Discord sessions has basically disintegrated, and while I'd love to get a wired one because the mic quality is so much better, I'm one of those GMs who has to pace around while talking, so it's wireless or bust. Really missing my Turtle Beach Stealth 450s, hands-down the best mic I've ever encountered on a wireless headset, but they're impossible to find now for less than $250ish new. The Stealth 700s were somehow a massive downgrade. Kestral fucked around with this message at 03:44 on May 10, 2024 |
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May 10, 2024 03:38
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Kestral posted:This is only tangentially related to tradgames, I know, but since we have a lot of people who play on Discord / VOIP, maybe this is a good place to ask: any recommendations for a wireless headset on the basis of mic quality, rather than sound quality? The headset I use for my Discord sessions has basically disintegrated, and while I'd love to get a wired one because the mic quality is so much better, I'm one of those GMs who has to pace around while talking, so it's wireless or bust. You can turn a wired headset into a wireless one with a DAC. You plug the headset into that and then sync it to the PC via Bluetooth. Then you keep it on you and walk freely. As a bonus you can pump better quality audio out of your machine with that.
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May 10, 2024 13:03
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I recently read through a Mothership adventure called VR Dead. https://spacepenguin.ink/products/vr-dead I like the whole problem of characters trying to figure out if they're in a sim or not. Have tried in the past to run versions of this idea in Shadowrun where a corp found a portion of Yog Sothoth and were using it to jack into the Matrix and bypass everything. Sadly, my players were more into stats than story so it didn't go over well. Curious if there are any decent adventures like VR Dead for other games.
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May 10, 2024 13:40
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I'm fairly sure that's the plot of at least one Digimon series.
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May 10, 2024 15:16
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Kestral posted:This is only tangentially related to tradgames, I know, but since we have a lot of people who play on Discord / VOIP, maybe this is a good place to ask: any recommendations for a wireless headset on the basis of mic quality, rather than sound quality? The headset I use for my Discord sessions has basically disintegrated, and while I'd love to get a wired one because the mic quality is so much better, I'm one of those GMs who has to pace around while talking, so it's wireless or bust.
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May 10, 2024 15:22
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I bought a Logitech USB headset for 20 bucks. It works fine.
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May 10, 2024 15:37
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I purchased two books at the game store the other day. It's the only place in the area that stocks lots of Indie RPGs, which is usually a death sentence for a brick and mortar store. I can't fully review either because I haven't run them yet, but here's my initial read. Stone Burner This one is Deep Rock Galactic meets Doom. You're a dwarf in a space rig and you go into a mine to fight monsters and get treasure. Stone Burner should be a winner but falls short. I am not a huge fan of the System Mastery show but they made a very cogent point about 1990s RPGs in their Kult 1e episode. Many games from that era were a big pile of character build options, a thin layer of setting detail and then the barest suggestion of what kind of game you could actually play. That's Stone Burner, a game that came out this year. There are a lot of character options (PBTA/FITD style playbooks), some player facing rules and some GM facing random tables. The rules are all taken from Blades (position/effect negotiation, resource depletion/stress accumulation with rests in between) but the overarching structure that makes it all work in Blades is not present in Stone Burner. The GM advice section is all about theme and tone, there isn't anything that ties all the subsystems into a cohesive economy. It's a lot of mechanics in search of a game. The setting is in a similar state to the rules. You get the broad strokes of the game world but every encounter, NPC, monster and area to explore is just a big list of questions. Who is this corporation? Why are these minerals here? Very sparse improv prompts that offer little help filling in the blanks. You may recall I have a similar beef with Unknown Armies 3e, where the players and GM are asked to collaboratively build a large amount of content before they even know what they're doing. The difference is, once you get the basics nailed down in UA3 session 0 the book gives you tools for fitting all the pieces together and bringing the world to life. Whereas reading Stone Burner is like arguing with a Rabbi who answers every question with a question. There are bright spots. The great deed mechanic (where players declare a cool feat they want their character to do in the session, then gain character advancement resources if they complete it) is cool. The base-building system (where each structure you build gives you a flexible bonus you can spend during missions) has the perfect blend of flavor and mechanical benefit. I'd love to try it out and see how it runs, but my biggest problem is I don't see how all the pieces fit together. Maybe I'm overthinking this, but it feels like I'd have to write the game before I could run it. The book has a lot of "oracles" for solo play so I could start there. Monster Manual Overhaul This is a bestiary for d20 retrofantasy. 200 monster entries plus supporting information to make them table ready. The creatures on offer are a mix of standard fantasy and new ones invented by the author. The book is lavishly illustrated with each chapter drawn by a different author for stylistic consistency, but the content is strong enough to stand on its own. Monsters are sorted by theme and separately by use-case. You can pick a monster that fits a specific biome, or with a specific power level, or because you want a social challenge or puzzle. Creature stat blocks have a heavy emphasis on behavior and motivations. Superpowered genius monsters have personality defects and disorders that give the players a chance of survival. Wild animals have a couple tricks up their sleeve. Only mindless undead and cultist berserkers fight to the death on sight, everyone else has circumstances under which they attack or run away. Monsters which are boring/do nothing in B/X either get a new thematically fitting ability or are removed, to reduce the number of creatures which are just the same thing with higher/lower HD. Entries which would normally take a lot of complicated subsystems (like NPC spellcasters or rival Adventurers with magic items) get flexible generic systems with an option to bolt on pre-baked special effects for flavor. Mundane entries like peasants and townsfolk get huge amounts of flavor detail to mix and match. The random encounters are great. Each one comes with framing details like what the monster is doing when you find it, and what hints you get before you see it, allowing the players to prepare, avoid or seek out encounters. Everything is given a reason to exist and be present in the adventure, without veering into boring realism. I have stalled out on a couple projects where I started with a mundane concept (a longhouse. a loan shark. a festival) and then tried to add fantastic elements. Monster Manual Overhaul takes the opposite approach, beginning with fantastical creatures and then coming up with ways to incorporate them into a believable world. Supernatural beasts are hunted or farmed for spare parts. Monsters fight each other or live symbiotically together. Peasants and priests reach accommodations with the forces of evil, or fight back when their depredations become intolerable. These aren't just random encounters, you could make a whole dungeon with this book. It's not all fun and games. The treasure tables are too stingy. I haven't compared every entry but on average they clock in at about a tenth of OSE's treasure tables. Also if I write a dungeon that uses any of the original creatures then I have to explain to the DM what a Grey Horse or an Alpine Spectre are, because they aren't in the standard d20 fantasy lexicon. But that's the price you pay for creativity. Some of the beasts also have random tables for what happens when you eat them. Most of these are a chance of a bad result, a chance of a good result, and a result that's in between. I would prefer a more consistent tradeoff that imposed benefits and costs, because that would make eating creatures an interesting decision instead of mutation roulette. I had a fun time creating some dungeons using How to Host a Dungeon 2e for the FATAL and Friends thread, and if I "review" Monster Manual Overhaul I will probably do the same thing.
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May 10, 2024 18:01
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Kestral posted:This is only tangentially related to tradgames, I know, but since we have a lot of people who play on Discord / VOIP, maybe this is a good place to ask: any recommendations for a wireless headset on the basis of mic quality, rather than sound quality? The headset I use for my Discord sessions has basically disintegrated, and while I'd love to get a wired one because the mic quality is so much better, I'm one of those GMs who has to pace around while talking, so it's wireless or bust. What's your budget like? I use a Jabra headset for work: it's probably not ideal for high fidelity music, but it's made for voice/call quality and to be comfortable for people in call centers to wear for hours. The really good ones are $200+ but I think they have some sub-$100 models. e. the cheaper ones seem to be wired-only.
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May 10, 2024 19:06
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Nessus posted:I do not know your budget but I have had good luck with Steel Series headsets. Same.
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May 10, 2024 21:15
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Re: Megadungeons I am looking to get Ave Nox at some point over the summer. itch.io posted:Ave Nox is a system-neutral mega-dungeon of forgotten history and disaster buried deep in the dark of the earth. https://feral-indie-studios.itch.io/ave-noctis
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May 10, 2024 22:22
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Leperflesh posted:What's your budget like? I use a Jabra headset for work: it's probably not ideal for high fidelity music, but it's made for voice/call quality and to be comfortable for people in call centers to wear for hours. Ideally under $200, but I’m happy to trawl eBay for a deal on something. Something like what you’re describing sounds great if I can find a wireless version, since voice quality and being able to walk around is all that really matters here. Time to investigate this brand!
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May 10, 2024 22:29
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Helical Nightmares posted:Re: Megadungeons How big does it have to be to count as a megadungeon? Is 250 rooms enough? Most I ever wrote was a 218 room dungeon that lasted about eight sessions.
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May 10, 2024 23:26
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Nemesis Of Moles posted:I've been running The Sun King's Palace, it's not a combat heavy one by any means but if you like that kinda Weird Spooky Dreamy Surreal vibe it's got it in spades. Whoa, how did I not know Snow had made a megadungeon?
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May 11, 2024 00:57
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sebmojo posted:what is up with buying mothership? all I can find are excited press releases about first edition, from two years ago. Can I by the 1e pdf from anywhere? Did we ever figure out which pdf to buy to replicate buying the box set?
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May 11, 2024 09:30
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ninjoatse.cx posted:Did we ever figure out which pdf to buy to replicate buying the box set? The books in the Core Set are: Player's Survival Guide Warden's Operations Manual Unconfirmed Contact Reports Shipbreaker's Toolkit Another Bug Hunt Conversion Kit Pamphlet The first four of those will be made available again once fulfillment is completed. The Deluxe Box Set also came with: Dead Planet Gradient Descent A Pound of Flesh The Mega Bundle also added some pamphlet adventures and supplements: The Haunting of Ypsilon-14 Hideo's World Terminal Delays at Anarene's Folly Chromatic Transference Piece by Piece Cryonambulism The Hacker's Handbook All you actually need to play is the Player's Survival Guide and an adventure (if you don't want to make your own), but the Warden's Operations Manual is a really good compilation of solid GM guidance for any OSR-ish game.
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May 11, 2024 15:10
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JMBosch posted:The books available with the KS pledges? Don't think it was ever a mystery. They're shown on the campaign page. One thing that's super good and I like is the companion so I want to give that a shoutout. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mothership-companion/id1606212377 Of course, there's always the super fun debate around device usage at the table but I find this app to be neat and useful.
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May 11, 2024 15:53
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PuttyKnife posted:One thing that's super good and I like is the companion so I want to give that a shoutout.
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May 11, 2024 16:41
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Someone else move this thread to CD for me the weird video game one. Thank you , Namaste.
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May 11, 2024 22:20
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Some intrepid fans decided to create an automated simulator for the Digimon TCG. If anyone is interested in checking it out, here's a video with instructions for getting it set up. The image extraction part will take a while because everyone in the digica community is running it at the same time, though. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZN8Km6ONoiE
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May 12, 2024 02:44
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Hollismason posted:Someone else move this thread to CD for me the weird video game one. Thank you , Namaste. Sorry?
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May 12, 2024 07:11
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