#module zero

[mrdistracted]

I want a Zero Point Module table lamp. I know it has to exist somewhere. I can't be the first nerd to come up with this idea, but I don't know where to get one.

[kaito-module-of-the-day]

Today's KAITO module of the day is:

ZERO-SUM by sayu!

[iamfuckingsorry]

"Do you know where we are going next?" I asked ART.

Y'know what, I think maybe I don't need any more Murderbot books. I think maybe ending things here is fucking perfect and as much as I love Wells's writing I'm genuinely not sure it can get better for me.

Like, so much of the books are about MB learning how to be a person, about becoming okay with being a complete individual with everything it entails. The first thing it does once it's actually allowed to decide on its own is it runs away from it all (admittedly to go on a mission to confirm some things about its past, because it genuinely just wants to be *good*). It shoves all its emotions away as much as it's able to. Then shit happens, and it makes its first friends, makes decisions based on these friendships, goes through a lot of emotionally intense situations...

And we get to this point here. MB having zero doubts about going with ART says a lot about its relationship with ART, but it also says a lot about its relationship with its humans - it knows that wherever it goes, when it comes back, the humans will still be there. Its humans actively acknowledge its struggles with being a now-free SecUnit and MB is willing to entertain the discussions to an extent and share information about its deeply personal experiences. Hell, System Collapse ends with MB admitting it might be somewhat broken, but that's okay as long as it can keep doing its job, and agreeing to basically do counselling - this is the guy what would rewatch its favourite TV show again and again in order to avoid acknowledging it even had Emotions a couple books back.

Reading this, I know that MB will be okay. It has hopes and goals and genuinely believes in itself and it has an amazing support system that its willing to lean on for the first time in its life. I'm convinced it'll go on to do great things with ART. And that's really the only thing I need to know.

[jce93]

art trade 🌟

[fearandhatred]

aziraphale: i bought a bookshop

crowley: that's so bookshop buying core

[chemicaljacketslut]

okay random but. what ACTUALLY scares y’all?? i’m about to run a ten candles (tragic horror ttrpg) anthology series thang at my college and i am soo nervous tbh lol i want to make it actually scary and a good experience. me personally im scared of the ocean (vast unknown… giant thangs swimming under u while u can’t see them and are totally out of your element and can’t escape quickly) also shit like that one creepypasta about the goatman thing that kept sneaking into the group without them knowing (this one). i’m also thinking body horror a la junji ito. any other ideas for like actually chilling material? + any experienced GMs feel free to give tips lol

[ma-mariarie243]

ireori cards for the 16th eoz anniversary

this song fr changed my life.... like most things do....

[mushroom-through-the-stargate]

im such a casual enjoyer :)

[marieozeee]

today's daily control system

Eraser!! (I tried krita for the first time!!)

[mentatss]

partners in crime

[littencloud9]

i am not making it to the end of this semester i fear

[doublebattled]

my biggest beef with d&d (beyond hasbro being hasbro) genuinely is just that like. it's not... easy or even Feels Good to run without a lot of legwork. Like a lot. It puts so much on a DM in a way that is like. Straight up unsustainable for 99% of people. It's not surprising that people can't find a DM. Nobody wants to DM because d&d makes it so goddamn difficult and it doesnt have any really Good methods of player contribution in a way that can reasonably lessen that burden due to the structure of the game. tl;dr theres a reason I refuse to run d&d games over indies anymore, and also bribe your DM, they fucking deserve it. They are putting in overtime for you. Buy them a fucking pizza.

[immortalsins]

flipflopping between 'this bio exam will go ok since i did zero studying for the first one and still passed' and 'i'm going to fail abysmally i need to give up on sleep, cancel my travel plans, and lock in until i know whole textbooks off by heart' so i'm stuck here with paralysing guilt and fear obviously

[taperwolf]

A terribly designed Eurorack accessory!

This is intended to be a handheld gate/trigger generator — basically, a quick and dirty way to put a "high" signal (+4.5V) into any Eurorack CV or gate input. It's nearly the simplest possible way to do it, just running a 9V battery through a switch, then to a ÷2 voltage divider, and out to a jack. Hold the bottle with the jack on the bottom and your thumb over the button, plug in a cable, and gate away.

Now, if I had a battery holder for three AA or AAA batteries, I would have done it the simplest way. And if I needed a consistent voltage, this is the wrong way to do it; you'd really want to use a 5V regulator or maybe a zener diode. But I'm intending the output to go into Eurorack gate inputs, which are usually fine with anything above the CMOS level of 3.5V, so I don't need that level of complication.

In fact, I'm intending to use this specifically on a CMOS input, the "Reset" inputs of the MidCentury Modular "Dividers" module I recently built. The "Reset" input there on either counter will reset the count to the first step. But, if it's configured (with a jumper) to skip the gate-to-trigger conversion circuit, holding that gate high will also hang the counter, making it a sort of clock suspend; I want to manipulate that directly, so having a remote switch to hold for that will be fun.

[raisengen]

I’ve been harvesting OP from early chapter CMs with a reduced squad, and it’s been interesting to look back and see how the game has shifted over time.

For starters, big crowds of enemies were a lot more common back then, like a more traditional tower defence game. AoE options costing so much DP makes sense if they’re the last things you bring online to clear the late waves of massive swarms, but that’s just not how the game is any more.

I can’t fault them from moving away from that style though, since focusing on more complex individual enemies allows for more diverse stages. (The prank with 3 ice spiders followed by 15 slugs was pretty funny though.)

There are also several stages that serve as quite strict skill checks on your fundamentals. Have you raised your defenders? Can you use slowers effectively? It’s sometimes been impossible to get around those checks with my janky reduced team, whereas modern maps generally feel more open strategically, even if by raw numbers they’re harder.

It makes sense that you’d want to ease up and let players pick their own style in a gacha game like this, but it feeds into certain strangenesses. In particular, look at how chapter 5 is dominated by drone hellswarms (annihilation 3 released simultaneously) yet this type of stage never happens again for the entire rest of the game, outside of a few side-content maps (IS, CC, throwback vignettes). That’s an entire class of enemy, an entire specialisation of playstyle, no longer relevant.

Which led me to a different realisation: Glaucus, the anti-drone specialist, only released after Chapter 5. She was born into a post-drone era; she can’t have been actually useful for anti-drone work more than a single-digit number of times. She wasn’t left behind as the game evolved, she was already outdated on launch — you just didn’t know it at the time.

[scratching92]

So I've been working a bit on my Currently-Unnamed Lancer Module, and I feel I've hit a bit of a wall as of late with regards to what, exactly, I want it to be about.

When I started writing some background for the setting my module takes place in, I basically wanted to hit two particular notes; firstly, that the setting was a former colony that had gained independence (in this case from SecComm). Secondly, that after the revolution, the planet devolved into infighting between the various factions that had participated in that revolution, resulting in on-again-off-again warfare across the planet.

I thought this would be neat to write about because, well, as much as I love a good story of plucky rebels fighting off their oppressors and liberating themselves, I'm also from a country that actually did have, in a certain sense, a bunch of plucky rebels fighting off their oppressors and liberating themselves, and... Well, look. I'm never going to say we were wrong to fight a war of independence, but we did kinda fight a civil war immediately afterwards. Life is just messy like that. And so I wanted to kind of touch upon that sort of thing a little.

But also, after I had written that setting lore, I looked back at my outline and realized it didn't really have much synergy with what I had written, beyond that it was, presumably, one of many wars since that initial collapse into in-fighting amongst the revolutionaries. So I figured "Fair enough. Let's throw out this current outline and draft up something that does!". So I did. And I think the new outline I have is decent! But... Once again, I'm finding myself wondering if my current outline is a little too far in the other direction. I'm worried now that it's no longer about the relationship between the various factions on the planet, but about the planet's general relationship to modern Union (and the complicated relationship between ThirdComm and SecComm, with ThirdComm both being a rejection of SecComm while also in a strange sense an inheritor of it (or, at least, an inheritor of the problems it made)). And it's making me consider throwing out what I've written again.

It's possible I'm just massively overthinking it, and a lot of my problems are just things that are always going to have to be left up to a GM to prep anyway even when working from a pre-written module. I'm planning on running the first session of a playtest pretty soon, so maybe I'll feel different once I've run my current outline with an actual group and it's no longer just abstract ideas on a page. I dunno. I guess we'll see in like... two months or however long it takes me to run this playtest game.