Bay 12 Games Forum

What is this?
This is the out-of-character, meta-discussion, player banter and questions thread for Project Phoenix, an up-and-coming space opera/soft sci-fi campaign ran by yours truly!

The details of the setting are still a bit in flux (and will be uncovered by the players as the campaign progresses), but here is the pitch:

IC thread coming once I get some more things prepared, but also when this garners enough interest.

Now, why would it garner interest, you may ask? What makes this different (if not better) than other games ran around here?

For one, this is meant to follow the West Marches format of RPGs. Or the really old-school D&D format, depending on who you ask.
Here's how it works:




So yeah, for the time being, this is to check just how many people are interested, and for those who are interested to bombard me with questions to clear up things I inevitably missed/will miss (I've put off writing this for like a week now).

Site link for those who just want to jump straight into the thing.

Okay, so when it comes to tabletop RPG systems, there's two paths that people take - either they make a system highly tailored to a specific kind of genre and/or setting (the ever-famous D&D, World of Darkness, Shadowrun etc.), or they make it generic and thus applicable to a wide range of genres, themes and settings (GURPS, FATE, Tri-Stat dX etc.)

Many issues plague a lot of generic RPG systems though - whether it's being rules-ified to the extreme to account for every single possible scenario and being kinda overwhelming to try and get into (aka GURPS), or being a bit too vague in too many places (aka FATE and Tri-Stat) or being tangled up in some legal/managemental shenanigans (again, GURPS), many of them just kind of fail in some way or another, which was quite frustrating for me personally - I wanted to run an RPG campaign for myself and my friends, in a soft sci-fi setting of my own design, and wanted a nice and not too mechanically overwhelming system to grab (we were coming over from D&D 5e, and for a while even considered using just that, except with heavy homebrewing and reflavoring).

And then, a friend of mine sent me this video, and everything changed.
I reccomend watching it, it serves as a nice introduction to what OL is about. (And saves me the hassle of explaining most of the basics on my own here.)

All the core rules are available free of charge (and of red tape) on the official website, and only take a few hours to read through at most, possibly less if you skip through the flavor bits and already have some pre-existing knowledge of tabletop RPGs (such as points-based character creation, using dice for checks and the turn-based combat flow).



Oh, and in case you want more than just a basic rulesystem to work with, there's a campaign setting in the works that was kickstarted some time back called Amaurea's Dawn, a multi-genre setting that highlights OL's flexibility, as well as the A Star Once Fallen adventure (though keep in mind that it's based on a slightly outdated version of the core rules, so you might see some things in it that are going to be confusing if you're just getting into the system).

I know there's plenty of RPG enthusiasts on here (or at least, I presume), but if you want something a bit more light on the rules without sacrificing the whole "fun and tactical, mechanical gameplay" entirely, check out Open Legend - it gets a huge +1 from me.

So one could probably write an entire essay on ways in which legends mode could be improved, but I think that a relatively simple yet very convenient addition would be (hyper)links, where whenever a name of a site/figure/region/whatever comes up, you can (through some hotkeys probably) select that name to then jump to that thing's page.

I know Legends mode' status is pretty much "not at all a priority" (de facto, anyhow), but I think this could improve using the thing pretty substantially.

A brief search didn't bring up any immediate results about the existence of a thread for this (though I'm convinced that one exists somewhere in here but is probably like 20 pages deep into General Discussions*) so I felt like making one isn't inappropriate, at least.

MtG's website if for some reason you never heard about this well-over 20-year-old trading card game.

This is meant to be a catch-all discussion thread for all things Magic - physical, digital (MTGO, the newly-announced Arena, XMage, Cockatrice...), casual, competitive, draft, commander, lore, spoiler season and whatever else comes up. Newbies (yours truly included**) and veterans alike are welcome.


* - or in Other Games, as the case may be, since I wasn't sure where to put this. Can move if necessary.

** - I've been casually interested in the game since around Battle for Zendikar (so since mid-late 2015), but actually buying into it is a bit beyond me (it's not very popular in Poland to begin with, and the nearest store, at least according to Magic's website, is like 30km away from where I live, an hour-ish bus drive. Couple that with my social anxiety and the fact I'd most likely have to use English with strangers in public and you have me, playing solely online via XMage, and very briefly Magic Duels in the past.


A quick note regarding upcoming set spoilers/leaks (at the time of writing, this being for the Ixalan set): Use the spoiler tags when linking to images or discussing those until the set actually releases properly (ie. not the prerelease).
(For Ixalan, this is September 29th 2017. So until then, keep it in spoiler tags.)

So y'all might remember my thread from a few months back, about how I rambled how I thought I might be nonbinary and all that jazz, but it didn't really stick with me so I settled on being "male and effeminate" or "male but not masculine".

Well, these gender-shenanigans woes are back, and this time it's a much more...feminine.
Because medical/legal transitioning is not in the cards for me right now (and may never be, sadly), I'm currently in a test run sorta period of "hey let's use feminine pronouns and terminology to refer to myself with, and get a more feminine name* and all that", but unlike my previous nonbinary test run, this actually resonates with me much, much more.

I've also talked to quite a few transfolk, on here and elsewhere (*waves at Flan, spumpkin*) and joined a few trans-focused Discord servers, and even though I'm still less than a week in, I really do feel very comfortable with it so far, even though I can pretty much only be 'out' on the internet and even then only in places in which I feel comfortable doing that.
Which I know, does not invalidate my identity, but still.

* - Said name being River (or more fully, River Michaela Sobota), which many people told me is Super Cute™. ;w;


But it all feels weird since previously I wasn't even suspecting that I might be transfeminine 'at heart'. Like I wasn't super into 'girly' things when I was younger (though I was certainly not very 'boyish' either...just kinda a weak little sensitive nerd, and I still am pretty much exactly that.), but now that I've given it a shot for like 3-4 days (and don't feel absolutely repulsed by the idea - quite the opposite, even) I might just...stick with it, I guess? Even though it might be really awkward for a while because like I said, I'm not in a position where IRL transitioning is really plausible for me, and I haven't even come out to my mom or pretty much anyone around here, though I plan on telling at least my psychologist about it and see what she thinks about it.


Soo yeah, I'm relatively confident and content right now, so this is just a somewhat happy-ish rambly sorta thread more than anything with pretty much zero logical flow or structure, but I hope that there's enuogh to it that it conveys a vaguely coherent message.

Also I'm gay...Ace...Sex-repulsed...homoromantic...GIRLS.

So for the longest time in my life I never really questioned my sexual or gender identity - I saw myself as male and straight and didn't really distinguish between sexual and romantic orientation.

However, for a nondescript amount of time now, and especially the past couple of weeks, I've started to question that and try to move away from it.
See, I was never into the idea of sex at all - it might be some event that I don't feel like talking about on here that I experienced when my age was a single digit (not, I wasn't sexually abused although it might have been close, even if people I talked about that to said it was not and that it was fine), but I'm just really repulsed and disgusted by the idea of sex and don't experience any desire or attraction to people based on that.
Sure I jack off sometimes and have sexual fantasies but zero desire to make them a reality.

So in that regard, I'm pretty much asexual, or apothisexual which I learned is a term that exists, for sex-repulsed asexuality specifically.

However I still evidently experience some kind of romantic attraction towards girls/women, even if I'm not at all in the market for having sexual intercourse, even if some people would probably tell me "Don't write it off until you try it!" or whatever...
So in that sense, I'm heteroromantic, I guess?

Now, gender is a fun one - again, for the longest while I thought I was male, and physically am and probably will be as I'm not particularly interested in transitioning, at least not right now, partly because I'm just kind of anxious of the idea of undergoing HRT and all the legal nonsense and whatnot; not to mention the fact I haven't talked to anyone in my family about that yet, and probably couldn't afford it either.

But I'm just...I'm not very masculine at all, and my demeanor always seemed vaguely feminine, but not eough to make me feel like "I am a woman in a man's body." or whatever it is that trans people say (which...err, I don't mean it in an ignorant way like that, I apologize if it came out as loosely transphobic).
So I just kind of feel like I fall outside of the male/female gender binary, and am currently trying to get used to that idea by moving away from using he/him/his pronouns when referring to myself, in favor of they/them/theirs pronouns (which I came out to a couple of my online friends to and on the internet at large, but not so much in real life); the problem with trying to do that in real life is that Polish is a very...gendered language and there is effectively no appropriate gender-neutral singular pronoun for me to use (it/its/its kind of exists but that feels...dehumanizing? Objectifying? Not something I identify with, at least, even though I know some nonbinary people do in fact use that pronoun set.).

I wonder how much of this is tied to the fact I'm pretty much certainly neurodivergent, and I don't exactly know what the purpose of this thread here even is, because I know it's fine to 'question' my own identity and 'experiment' and "see what feels right"; I guess I am looking for some feedback from other agender/nonbinary folk on here on the matter - trans or not.

(Also right now my identity does not at all translate to my outside appearance, I'm as painfully nerdy male as I've always been, and I don't know if/how I'd go around changing that, even if, again, I know it's purely my own choice to do anything with it.)

---

"Welcome on board of your new spaceship, Perun Slimship N1, the most polished and efficient personal spaceship by Perun yet! I am Vila, and I help you control and maintain your Slimship so that you can explore and travel through space more easily and more quickly! Please, introduce yourself to me!"

Still slightly confused by your current situation, it seems sensible to give Vila an answer - who are you, where do you come from, and what powers do you posses?


Post your suggestions, or vote for others' pitches (reply to a post of your choice with a +1).
After enough time, the most popular suggestion will be picked and the story shall move forward, however I reserve the right to adjust things as I see fit (I hope I won't have to do that too much, but just keep that in mind).

So some months ago I made a thread here about my speculation/concerns/'self-diagnosis' of me being autistic. While I'm more convinced than ever that I have it at this point, the progress on gettin an actual diagnosis has been painfully slow for me.

This might be another one of those semi-pointless threads where I just put up my concerns/speculation so it doesn't grow too hard on me. Similarly to the autism thing, I'm aiming for an actual diagnosis (though it will likely come much later than I'd want it to because patience isn't a virtue I'm particularly renowned for) and getting professional support, and I do realize that at the end of the day I'm the same person with or without such labels, but if it helps me with accepting my identity and those problems as a part of who I am, and just generally makes me feel valid, then I'm for it.

Anyway, enough with that pseudo-disclaimer. The meat of my most recent issue is "I'm pretty sure I have AD(H)D even though I supposedly did not have it".
^{(I know this might ironically be a difficult read for some people who do have ADHD...Or at least, I know I'd have a difficult time reading through this.)}

TL;DR for convenience: I was tested for ADHD when I was 10 and was not given a diagnosis, but now I'm struggling with ADHD-like symptoms (mostly attention deficit) a lot and it's just weird.

Many years ago I was tested for (I believe) 'classic' ADHD (and not a subtype like ADD) and was even medicated for it for allegedly half a year (I don't remember that but that's what my mom told me recently), but neither my parents nor the teachers noticed any change in my behavior so my meds were shelved and the idea just kinda died off until about two years ago when my mental health clearly plummeted down and my mom said that I might in fact have ADD since a lot of my problems (in particular, trouble with concentration/focus/attention) seemed to fall under that umbrella.

And it's true - while my mom was mostly concerned with my extremely poor grades in some 'focus-intensive' classes (math in particular), it's fairly evident that I've been having a lot of trouble persevering with projects of any sort - a lot of you people probably remember all those forum games I've started and was initially very enthusiastic about but then just kinda left them in the dust, as well as a lot more that never even saw the light of the day, for one reason or another (but often my own inabiltiy to really 'stick with them'). Or all those unfinished drawings, digital or otherwise (and even those I did finish were often very messy because I cannot work on a single drawing between multiple sittings - or even during a single sitting for more than an hour at most - how do people spend tens of hours on single art pieces boggles my mind to its very core), and who knows what else.
Hell, I think I had the tab with the text box for this open for a good half an hour before I started to actually write this.

And recently it's been really bad for me to focus on things - maybe it's just burnout, but I can't really concentrate on most games (and it's probably why I never play fortress mode in DF, because I just can't bring myself to dedicate that kind of attention over a long period of time) and my YouTube subbox backlog (even for YTers/series I really genuinely enjoy and have been watching for months/years) is just growing and growing and sometimes watching singular videos feels like a chore.

And it's not even that bad of a problem now because all those things are mostly inconsequential, but I'm worred how it's gonna go once school starts for me again - last year I could not bring myself to read any books for my literature class (all of them are really freaking long, really freaking boring and written in mostly archaic Polish which adds extra overhead to an already difficult task of trying to read those walls of text and trying to understand what I'm actually reading; I had to resort to summaries that used more easily-digestible language but of course that didn't get me very far, especially since my teacher was pretty merciless).

Math was always a pain for me but this last year it's reached a critical point where I learned literally, absolutely nothing for an entire school year. Taking extra classes didn't help at all either. I've failed that school year and have to repeat it and math is one of those classes where I'm basically starting from scratch, and don't really see how I can even get around that because of how draining math is to me. It makes me actively want to zone out and daydream about something else.

I know I'm mostly focusing on the 'attention deficit' part here because that's honestly what I struggle with the most - I'm not particularly compulsive or hyperactive, or at least it doesn't get in the way of things for me daily in the same way struggling to focus on 85% of things does.
I also know that there's quite a huge overlap in symptoms between autism and ADHD (and that they're often co-morbid conditions) so for all I know I have one but not the other (I do also stim/fidget a lot and do have times of being really focused on/invested in things (special interests/hyperfocuses)) or I'm (un)lucky and have both. I'd be okay with it either way (in a way I'd be even 'happy' about that kind of diagnosis), and I might be making this a bigger deal than it needs to, but it's really starting to get in the way for me and it's really damn difficult for me to go through a day sometimes.

^{I know that online self-tests are a gargantuan crapshoot but all of the ones I have taken seem to point towards ADD/ADHD-PI being fairly likely in my case.}

If you've read through this all of this - thank you, but also I'm sorry if it was a waste of your time. >n>'