First question, why would we want monetization? people do amateur theatre, short movies for fun, volunteer do coach kids sport for fun so the whole society doesn’t have to be commercial, and even Wikipedia is mostly ran by volunteers.

I mean sure, federated instance and some authors may get government grant for culture (which would be better spend than for commercial movies, or all the government money spent in AI) but not monetizing won’t prevent people from contributing

Actually, to my understanding, the two mains criminal justice system are either inquistorial with a judge over-seeing the investigation (in both direction) and transmitting the whole case to another judge for the trial and indeed adversarial. I am pretty sure full books have been written on the pro and con and both system

Indeed, that’s a huge one.

Remember before streaming and VTT? You would do sketch on a white board and be happy. Some committed GM may have had a white board with a grid and copy the map from the scenario on it.

Nice textures are nice on video games, but not on rpg

I was about to comment “When one of my players asks whether they can do something completely unreasonable I look at them, roll a D20 openly on the table and without checking the result, say ‘no’”

Actually, saying no is one of weakness, so the PC wanting to do something completly unreasonable led to some pretty great player driven session or even campaign arc.

I just ask them how do you plan to do-it and suddenly the non reasonable plan becomes a suite of small reasonable tasks so I want the peace in the world, it’s easy just give the love drug to world leader and they will all start to love each others, so first step is to put my hand in enough drug, the second is to get access to the water factory that will provide water at the next diplomatic summit, do you think the militaro industrial complex will be happy with this terrorist action ? OK that one is a bit extreme but you get the point, suddently the PC are the one writing the campaign and it’s pretty cool.

I start,

My most “classic tip” is never lock a clue behind a roll if they need to find the love letter hidden under the bed to find-out about the affair explaining the murder, just make sure they find-it (the failed roll can still mean they are caught searching the room)

Another of my classic one is to ask players about their character friend and foes, it helps populating a setting, you have a black smith the warrior met while serving in the army or the young ambitious political advisor the bard went in a tavern fight with and gives pretty great plot hooks So your little sister is in the school witchcraft club, and looks like they summoned something too big

For one shot, I recently experimented a lot with LARP-style black boxes in order to play a scene which occurred before the game start, as it helps giving a clear view about everyone character and their ties while keeping these scenes shorts. It’s IMO a good compromise between loosing time in playing mundane life to get a feel on the character, and jumping to the action with unclear character ties/roles or expectation about normality

The real question is why the hell Americans (including Canadian it seems) don’t vote on Sunday like the rest of the world ? So people do not work, problem solved

There is one radiator in the apartment’s living room, at the front and down the hall from the bedrooms, and one radiator in the bathroom.

Depending how big is two bedrooms (In an era were there is cramped 40 m^2 3 bedroom, and huge 200 m^2 one bedroom loft) it’s more than enough to heat-it.

Note that, at least for people using mbins, _ upvotes are public_ and while downvotes are hidden (Which is weird IMO), instance admins, and people who know how to use lemmy’s software API, can access them.

When doing that, I follow what I saw done in LARP.

Pre-gen character, making sure that everyone has a secret, a couple of goals, and relationship with character. Then I find an “in-game” reason to keep everyone in the same-place (snow storm, hiding from the police, magical myst, on a boat), Finally, I had a couple of clues which may reveal some secrets over the game-location, and sometimes a couple of “events”, but usually letting “brew” is enough to have the plot revealing and the betrayal occuring. As any game with some PvP component, keep some time for debrief/cool-down, it can be emotionally intense

As opposite to LARP, I would still have a bunch of NPC, who would also have their goal/secrets. However, I would try to keep the “big secrets” and “culprit” within the PC.

IMO it’s harder to incorporate this kind of things in an exiting campaign, or you go to a more classic investigation (which are nice too),