I like Trilium Notes. It’s rich text based, not markdown based, but haas most of the organiation structures of Obsidian. It doesn’t have the user base nor volume of plugin support, though. It does have a canvas mode for inking, but it’s a separate note type, not part or every note.

For a purer inking environment, look at Xournal++. It’s not as feature rich as OneNote, but it has the basics.

Or, you could try running OneNote with WINE. It looks like you’d have to use OneNote 2010 or 2013, though.

“Balance” gets abused a lot, as a term. It means multiple things, and it results in people talking past each other.

Intra-party balance – that is, everyone in the party being approximately equally capable – is important for most tables because most people resent getting clowned on by their so-called allies.

Creature/encounter balance is not about forcing the fights players get into to be fair, but about having a reliable way of telling how hard the fight will be. That knowledge is not an obligation to make the fights fair.

That’s dying. Bleeding out. It’s not even necessarily truly unconscious (even if it is Unconscious).

Trolls are only common if they’re made common, though. Like, they’re common in the Forgotten Realms, or Golarion, or whatever, but commonality is out the window in a homebrew setting.

“Don’t worry, it’s just a name!”

Gets attacked by trolls.

“I thought it was just a name!”

The thing is, preventing someone from getting up - especially someone with any amount of combaat training - involves a lot more than just standing next to them. You have to get your weight on top of them, and then usually attack or manipulate one of the limbs.

That is not an act that leaves you out of the way. It kind of means being on top of the target, at least while you’re forcing them baack down.

So, the Stay Down reaction kind of needs to be imagined as something that interferes with a strike that can be done without risking an ally.

In Narrarive Declaration’s Kingmaker 2e actual play campaign, their necromancer invites people to sign contracts to be brought back as thralls after they die, because informed concent is leagues better than doing it without concent.

Plus, he promises them health and dental.

It’s really easy so long as you a) start at level 1 or 2 and avoid building out too far ahead, b) build to a character concept rather than try to optimize mechanically, c) avoid options released in adventures. Oh, and d), understand that retraining is actually baked into the rules.

Adventure character content is less rigorously tested, and mostly amounts to professional homebrew. It’s often super focused on the scenarios presented in the adventute and significantly less applicable in general.

Focusing on mechanical optimjzation rather than character concept often leads to madness, since feats are generally well placed within the same power bands (there are few stand out or trap options). For a crunvhy game, it’s often best played descriptively.

Characters become mechanically more complex every level or two, so starting at higher levels can be very overwhelming for new players. Building out a higher level character means choosing a lot of feats, and often the utility of those feats is only really understood through play.

Just downgrades the results a step, so it’s Oops, All Hits rather than Oops, All Crits.

I wonder if the upcoming release of SF2e opens the door a little more? Instead of “this is different, let’s try it” it can be framed more as “I’m excited about this new thing, want to indulge me?”

And then suddenly, Skittermanders everywhere!

The game isn’t balanced around multiclassing, either. If it were, everyone and there dog wouldn’t have difficult to explain backgrounds that involve blood magic, mysterious patrons, and devout faith in something.

DOOOOM!

And Doom 2.

Retconing things to protect muh precious twists is not compelling, though, it’s just base metagaming. The unwavering plot is the GM equivalent of the 8 page main character syndrome PC backstory. If I found out my GM was doing that, they wouldn’t be my GM anymore.

Way to unlovk splash damage as the new Battleship meta

Weird. I wonder why the formatting broke. I’m going to fiddle with it some more.

Some things you need to know about LLMs:

1. They are probabilistic text generators, which look at their training data (in a very abstracted way) and go "based on what’s written here, what’s most likely to come next?

2. They treat numbers like any other word or phrase

This means, when using them for TTTPGs, they will treat everything like it’s 5e, because 5e dominates the discussion, and that any numbers they spit out will only be right by accident.

“And fuck power levels”

FATAL fixes thi… Wait

I also (don’t lynch me) think that combat should be an RP experience. That could be my love for certain systems where you get bonuses for good, accurate descriptions and not simply, “I roll. I hit. I do X damage.”

Combat should be a RP experience regardless of system. What you’re describing is one where proactive roleplay is a mechanical system, and I’ll be honest, as someone who’s never entertained a career in the theatre, or as a pompous grim fiction writer with too many thesauruses lying around, fuck that god awful fucking noise. But the choice of what to do, and how you react after the roll should be informed by the fiction of the game and the fiction of the combat, and that is roleplay.

The fact that much of the discourse around the games and resources available to players is focused on min/maxing number munchers is a social problem, not a system one.

It’s also green accents, for PDFs. Particularly look to the “Second Edition” tag in tag in the upper right corner. Those are the ORC books.