I am leaning towards Foundry at this point but it’s also starting to seem like yawing VTTs really well is like another hobby unto itself. Like painting minis.

I’m not sure if I have room for that in my life. I’ll still give it a go and see if it clicks.

I am really leaning towards Foundey at this point but you make the simple map format sound very appealing.

Foundry sounds like the winner so far. I love that it is a purchase and I have the option to self host if that’s what I want.

Thanks I’ll give it a look. When you say miniatures does that mean that’s it’s a 3D map or is it more like tokens on a 2D map?

Another point for Foundry.

I have never played Pathfinder. I’m mostly focused on D&D right now while I’m getting back into the hobby but I live to run a Cyberpunk Rd game at some point.

The pay model on Foundry is huge for me too. I love purchasing and owning things over subscriptions.

Good recommendation, I wasn’t even looking at Owlbear. Do you have a sense of the ease of use for the players?

I definitely want to try a VTT over just a map. Honestly, I wish there was a DM software that was like a VTT that I could use to organize my in person games and export sessions to a printable format.

I agree with you. I’m a privacy advocate but there are some things I have given up on. I have an iPhone and just live with the fact that it has much more telemetry than I want. It’s better for work because everyone else has an iPhone, etc. However, on my personal computers I run Ubuntu LTS with all telemetry turned off. I use Firefox with ublock and privacy badger, if I want extra privacy I’ll use a VPN. But even then you have to trust the company that runs the VPN isn’t secretly recording your browsing data, it’s a gamble.

My main point is, fight for privacy where it makes sense. Don’t waste your limited time fighting it where it doesn’t. That’s become my personal philosophy, your mileage may vary.

Play Balduts Gate 3 on steam deck. You’ll be done in ~45min. Or rather the battery will be.

It’s cool. I actually prefer it to being a player.

‘Almost right’. I prefer the term: confidently incorrect.

I’m playing the DM. My first in person table top game since 3rd edition. It’s going really well. Three sets of parents with kids. We hire a babysitter to watch them all when we meet.

I also dual boot, to separate physical drives, and the Ubuntu bootup process is constantly breaking. Every other restart I have to fix it so that it will boot. Having said that, gaming on windows was untenable. Every single game would crash between 1min and 30min, always with an nvlddmkm error code showing in the event viewer. Using a laptop rtx 4070. I tried absolutely everything to fix it. I even tried buying new ram sticks. Same error. I started to think something was wrong at the hardware level.

Since switching to Ubuntu, I haven’t had a single crash, playing every game on steam with maxed out graphics. It works perfectly. Also I’ve noticed that booting into windows sends cooling fans into overdrive while booting into Ubuntu is quiet as a mouse. Fuck windows, it’s basically spyware at this point and it doesn’t even work.

I was going to mention this one. LMStudio is much better than ollama.

This is why Mamdani I is going to win.

The art and science of drawing by Brent Eviston really help me. I highly recommend it.

https://www.brenteviston.net/

1000% I say gif too, like gift. If you wanted it pronounced like “jiff” then you should have spelled it with a J.