Fifth edition D&D feels to me like a game which wants to let you design your characters, but has a few escape hatches to let dice decide aspects of your character. In contrast, Stars Without Number seems to take rolling for stuff as the default, but provides an escape hatch for player choice.…
After releasing a small attribute roller last October, one of the first suggestions I got received for an additional feature was the ability to specify arbitrary, custom constraints on each attribute roll-out. This was obviously a bit more complex than letting users choose from an enumerated list…
For the first entry in this series I thought I would read Stars Without Number. It's a game I've somehow heard a lot about and even purchased despite remaining almost utterly ignorant of it. The book's been sitting on my shelf for over a month, now. It's about time I actually read the thing.…
At least half of my bookshelf is comprised of RPG books I've yet to read, let alone play. So, I thought I might leverage the my to-read list guilt together with my remorse over neglecting this blog and start a regular feature on here where I read and summarize role-playing game books.…
I've tired recently of the level of maintenance involved in running this blog. I don't mean regularly producing content—lord knows I never did that; I'm not about to start losing sleep over it now—but in actually running the software on my server. I think my deployment setup is…
Git's been ubiquitous among coder-types for so long now it's almost old hat. This isn't going to be another post detailing its virtues relative to other version control systems (VCS) so much as a report on my experience using it to store my personal configuration—itself hardly a novel idea.…
Matthew Colville put up a video a while ago on verbs and role-playing games. Or really verbs and fiction and narratives in general. Matthew Colville does a lot of videos on role-playing games (and Dungeons & Dragons in particular) and I greatly appreciate a lot of his work. But this…
At bottom, Ghost is a full-fledged application, and in 2017, in my view, deploying an app responsibly generally means involving Docker in some capacity.…
This post is part of a series detailing how this site runs. You can view the previous entry here. The Domain The first thing I did after getting the DigitalOcean droplet this site now runs on was to go about getting dwgill.com (which I already owned through Hover) to…
This post is part of a series detailing how this site runs. You can view the previous entry here. This site is hosted on a $10/month DigitalOcean droplet running Ubuntu 17.04, giving it 1GB of RAM, 30GB of disk, and 2TB of transfer. The principal reason I'm not…