I like 3D printing. I'm not good at other methods of producing three-dimensional objects, like woodcarving or sculpting. So a 3D printer gives me the possibility to make a real object out of an idea. That is pretty cool. However, the technology has some serious limitations, most of them related to the material: A home 3D printer can only make plastic objects. Thingiverse is approaching 2 million objects, which is obviously a lot, but there are many more objects in your house that a 3D printer would not be able to reproduce, because the material or the size or the resolution is wrong. So 3D printing frequently ends up being a solution in search of a problem: You could create objects, but you don't know what to make.

For many years now I had overcome that issue by using my 3D printer for one of my other hobbies: Tabletop role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons. Yes, you can use coins or beads or other small objects to represent the heroes and monsters of D&D. But printing a dragon or beholder or paladin at the right 1:60 scale, printing puzzles for the players to solve, or even whole dungeons as tiles is way cooler. It really helps with the suspension of disbelief if your dragon looks like a dragon instead of like a coffee mug.

The world today looks very different from the world three or six months ago. Some of the changes are big and scary, others are small and curious. I don't want to discuss the big and scary stuff here, at least not for the moment. So I'll talk about the small and curious changes instead: My Dungeons & Dragons games now look very different than they did before, they went virtual. I am playing on Roll20 instead of around a table. While one of my previous groups isn't playing at all anymore, because they didn't want to go virtual, the other group is now playing more than before. And we have been open-minded enough to realize that playing on a virtual tabletop does in fact even have certain advantages over playing around a real table. And one of the small advantages is that creating a good-looking hero or monster token for Roll20 is fast and easy using Google image search and a tool like TokenTool.

The weird result is that I haven't 3D printed anything for months now. As I can't sit with people around a real table anymore, I don't need 3D printed figurines anymore. And without that application, there isn't much else that I would want to 3D print.

I reported the first two sessions of this campaign in a previous thread. That ended with me looking for a better adventure hook. I did find a good one, but I admit that it isn't terribly original. I did a small encounter which is normally part of the Logger's Camp quest, but which I had skipped: Meeting one of those half-orc druids in boar form in the forest. And when the group killed him, they found a letter on the corpse explaining that the worshippers of Talos were looking for a powerful magic item, a staff of thunder and lightning. However that staff had been broken up into three pieces and those three pieces were in the three places that I wanted my group to go to. Simple, but very persuasive.

So in sessions 3 and 4 they did most of those three quests: The Shrine of Savras, Mountain Toe's Gold Mine, and Axeholm. They had been warned that there was an army of orcs at the Shrine of Savras. That turned out to be 21 orcs and 3 ogres, which is quite a lot for a group of level 4 characters. Especially since according to the adventure they all were in the courtyard, and there was no obvious way to isolate them in small groups. Furthermore one of the orcs was on a watchtower, with no easy way to approach without being seen. The group managed this challenge by sneaking up to the tower at night, because darkvision is only 60 feet. They managed to get up the tower and kill the orc, but that alerted the rest of the orcs and ogres. For the rest of the battle the heroes held the top of the tower against the orcs that broke through the trapdoor from below or were given a leg up by the ogres. At one point the battle looked like this on Roll20:
Note that this is in the dark, with everybody having darkvision, which is why the colors aren't brighter. I had sorted the orcs into 5 groups of 4 orcs each for purposes of initiative; otherwise you end up having 20 orcs acting at the same time, or need to deal with 20 individual initiatives. I decided that the ogres couldn't get up the tower, so once they had helped the orcs up, they retreated into the shrine. The group managed to kill all the orcs, and then hunted down the ogres. They found the first piece of the staff and the hidden gold treasure.

As the gold they had found was very heavy, they then returned to Phandalin to exchange it for lighter gems at the Phandalin Miner's Exchange. They also bought everything they needed, and to my surprise even checked the job board. So I gave them the job board quest that led to the same location as the letter said the second part of the staff was, Mountain Toe's Gold Mine. However the mine had been overrun by wererats, which were immune to damage from weapons that weren't silver or magical. I had made sure that all the characters had some magic or silver weapon, but that didn't mean they could do all of their attacks: The monk had a dagger +1, but his bonus karate chops weren't doing any damage; the fighter had a rapier +1, but was normally a crossbow specialist with crossbow expert and sharpshooter feats, but without any magic or silver crossbow bolts. In addition I staged the main encounter in the mine with the wererats in giant rat form among regular giant rats, and had set it up in Roll20 in a way that the two were indistinguishable by the players until they attacked. The mine was also full of narrow tunnels, and a part of the monsters was able to circle around and attack the group from the back. Another quite interesting fight, but the heroes prevailed and found the second part of the staff. They also reached level 5, which is a huge increase in power in the somewhat uneven power curve of 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons.

Now I did try and push the group to do some knowledge checks, for example to know more about Axeholm. But intelligence is often a dump stat in 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons, and so the group went there with no more information than the name and location of the place. They missed out on the backstory how an evil elf ambassador had been caught causing mischief in the dwarven fortress of Axeholm, been killed, transformed into a banshee, and forced most of the dwarves to flee, while others had been transformed into ghouls. I let the banshee appear early, do its wail, and then flee (which is easy, because the banshee can fly and move through walls), while the group was attacked by ghouls. The wail knocked two characters to 0 hitpoints, which made the group respect the banshee. They cleaned out the lower part of the fortress, except for the throne room (where ironically the third part of the staff is hidden). They then went up and fought a bunch of giant spiders, but that section was a dead end. But then they found other stairs to the second upstairs part. There they met some ghouls, and as they started to fight those, the banshee appeared as well.

Now there are two types of dungeon masters: Those who fudge dice to influence events, and those who roll in the open and learn to react to the randomness that brings. I am firmly in the latter camp, and do all the rolls in Roll20 in the open. In this case that ended up with a somewhat interesting result, as both the ghouls and the banshee rolled a natural 20 on their initiative. The ghouls surrounded the group, and the banshee used her horrifying visage ability to frighten them, with 3 players failing their saving throw. That made the fight a lot tougher, but also more interesting. We ended the session after the fight, because it was getting late, and in Roll20 it is relatively easy to continue playing at the same spot where you stopped.

Overall I was quite proud of the two sessions. I certainly am not a Matt Mercer, I can't do voice acting; and because I am doing my roleplaying in French, which is my third language, I sure ain't the best at describing scenes. But 40 years of playing and DMing D&D, and especially the years of 4th edition D&D tactical gameplay have taught me a lot about how to stage epic fights. In each of the three locations I had at least one epic, nailbiting combat experience for my players, which they enjoyed a lot. And now I have another good fight planned for the final scene of Axeholm, by upgrading the undead dwarf castellan who guards the third part of the staff from a ghoul to something considerably more dangerous. I also have to say that for our play style, with both the DM and the group liking tactical combat rather than doing a lot of in-character voice acting, role-playing and theater of the mind stuff, Roll20 is a very good platform. It is especially good if you buy pre-made adventures, and you can cut down significantly on the preparation time, because all the tokens and battle maps are already there. Between that and the lockdown we managed to go from a session every two weeks to up to two sessions per week. Lots of fun!

I tend to read or watch reviews before I buy a game. Usually that gives me a good idea of what to expect. But with XCOM: Chimera Squad I felt that several of the reviews I saw were misleading. They tended to compare XCOM: Chimera Squad to XCOM 2, and pointed out that Chimera Squad isn't quite as great a game as XCOM 2. What they fail to mention is that it isn't supposed to be a full sequel.

XCOM 2 still normally costs €50 on Steam (but right now it is at a 75% discount, so grab it if you don't have it yet). XCOM: Chimera Squad is labeled as a €20 game, but if you buy it before May 1st, you only pay half, which is unusual for new games. In short, Chimera Squad is a €10 game on release, compared to a €50 game. Does it have less content than XCOM 2? Yes. Does it have some bugs? Yes. But is it great value for the money? Hell, yeah!

Note that you will especially like XCOM: Chimera Squad if you like the tactical combat part of XCOM more than the global strategic map. How you feel about soldiers having actual personalities instead of being random is up to you. But the new mechanics, like breaching a room, sure are nice. And if you already played hundreds of hours of XCOM 2, Chimera Squad is a nice bit of new content. And better value than some of the less good XCOM 2 DLCs. Recommended!

I am on the 45th and last stage of the Battle Pass event. And while I was originally very skeptical about the event, it unexpectedly led to me having a lot more fun in World of Tanks than before. It ended up being one of these "quests" that manage to steer a player in the right direction, towards more fun. Which is far from evident, so I would like to take the time to talk about quests.

The very early MMORPGs didn't have much questing. In spite of the name, you rarely did a quest in Everquest. A lot of players called it Evercamp, because the most efficient way to play was to "camp" the same location. After "breaking a camp", that is to say dealing once with a full group of monsters at a location, you would stay at that location and kill the respawns one by one, which was a lot easier than moving to another location with another full group of monsters. It is hard to imagine today, but back in the days you would go into a zone and shout "camp check" in general chat, and the players in the zone that were camping a location would reply, so you knew which camp wasn't taken yet. People would stay on one camp for hours, even days, until they leveled up and needed a different camp for xp.

The situation that we now consider normal, every zone having quest hubs and hundreds of quests sending you all over the place, was a novelty when World of Warcraft came out. The combination of quest rewards and a less deadly combat system made camping a bad strategy. You would gain more xp and rewards if you worked through the list of all quests in the zone. And that obviously led to you seeing a lot more of each zone. Quests were designed to make the game more varied and more fun, and for a time that worked. Today there are barely any games left which don't have some system of quests or mission system. And neither the intent nor the result is necessarily to make the game more fun to play. Quests can be boring grinds in an attempt to hide a lack of content, or they can steer players towards monetization options in a game. No wonder quests aren't as popular anymore than in the early days of World of Warcraft.

In World of Tanks there are daily quests and new events all the time. Some of them, especially the daily quests, are simply ignored. You just play whatever you wanted to play, and at some point by chance you fulfill a quest condition and get a minor extra reward. At the other extreme there are events like mission marathons, which with the promise of much bigger rewards entice you to change the way you play, usually trying to steer you towards playing a lot more than usual. In some cases an event requires you to play a specific tank, which is problematic if that tank is sub-optimal or just not what you like to play. Missions can also be frustrating if they require you to win battles: With you being just one player in a team of 15, it frequently feels as if it is way outside your control whether a battle is won or lost. You end up just hating your team mates.

The Battle Pass event is fortunately not very restrictive. It's main requirement is that need to be among the top 10 of your team to get any points. You get 0 points if you are among the bottom 5, 3 points if you are among the top 10 of a losing team, 5 points if you are among the top 10 of the winning team or among the top 3 of the losing team, and 7 points if you are among the top 3 of the winning team. With that system, how well you perform in battle compared to the rest of your team counts for more than whether you win or lose. Being teamed up with a bunch of idiots means that at least it becomes easier to be among the top 10 or even top 3.

But what ended up with me having a lot of fun with the Battle Pass event is that it steered me towards playing at the right tier for me. I have always said that if you plot fun over difficulty in games, you get a curve with an optimum. Too trivially easy is boring, while banging your head against frustrating difficulty isn't fun either. Somewhere in the middle there is a sweet spot, where the game is interesting and challenging without being frustrating. For me playing World of Tanks at the top tiers is frustrating. While reflexes are everything in World of Tanks, they sure do help, and I in my mid-50s can't compete with teenagers. I also didn't play World of Tanks for years, so I can't compete in experience and benefits from accumulated rewards with veterans that have played far more games than I did. While many game mechanics in World of Tanks push you towards playing at tier 10, the top tier, that is very far from the fun optimum for me. I am simply out of my leagues. I am doing a lot better in the low tiers, but that isn't very challenging.

The Battle Pass encouraged me to optimize: The requirement of being among the top 10 of your team resulted in me only making 2 points per battle on average when playing in the high tiers. With some experimentation I ended up finding an optimum at tier 6, where I am among the top 10 most of the time, I even am among the top 3 sometimes, and I end up with 4 points per battle on average. But this process didn't just optimize how many points I got, it also simultaneously optimized my fun: Doing well compared to the rest of your team feels like me having more of an impact. And because you can only earn up to 100 points with a single tank at tier 6, the even encouraged me to play a lot of different tanks, which again was good for fun. I made most of my points playing nearly every tier 6 medium tank in the game. Medium tanks were another optimization result: Artillery and tank destroyers are often too passive for me, heavy tanks are frustrating when your armor is useless against tanks two tiers higher than you, and light tanks are fun for scouting, but pack less of a punch than mediums.

I think that I have found my league, and that I will in the future play the large majority of my games in these mid-tiers. If a future event pushes me towards high tiers, I'll just opt out. Life is too short to play a game in an un-fun way for some measly virtual reward.

I use a mod called XVM in World of Tanks. It calculates a score called WN8 for each of my battles, and gives an aggregate score of my and the players I meet in battles (if they don't want that, they can use the anonymizer). The WN8 score has its limitations, like not counting assisted damage at all, and over-emphasizing damage over other contributions to the battle. But I still find it useful as a learning tool to improve my game. However, I don't obsess about it, like some people do.

In every game there are people who use the available scores as a source of self-worth. "Look at me, I am a better human being, because I have a higher score!". So a WN8 score is extremely important to some people, which is not always a good thing. Besides leading people into actually playing worse, more selfishly, and lowering the chance of their team to win, the most obvious thing is stat padding: If you play a lot, your WN8 improves; but that can take thousands of games, and your statistics are forever weighed down by the low scores you had at the start. And the further you advance along the tiers, the harder the battles become, which also tends to lower your score. So there are quite a lot of people who make a new account, and then systematically only ever play in low tiers. They have thousands of games on low tier tanks. That makes their stats look good until you look at the details. But it is bad for the game, because they are basically preying on new players, which makes World of Tanks a less good experience for new players than it could be.

So some people argue that it would be better if XVM and WN8 or similar scores were removed. While that is unlikely to happen, at the very least today patch 1.9 will kick off another discussion about stats: Patch 1.9 massively changes a lot of tanks, especially at lower tiers. They will get more hit points, thus survive longer, more ammo to be able to fire for longer. A lot of tanks will also be rebalanced, and the tech trees will be revamped. And all these changes will mess up the statistics. WN8 calculates you score by comparing your performance with an "expected value" for your tank. And these expected values will change dramatically, especially a low tiers. But the databases that XVM use don't hold individual values of each battle, just averages. If you drove in a tank before and after the patch, XVM can't know how many of those battles were before the patch and how many were afterwards. XVM just sees the average, and compares that to a new expected value, which I assume will be recalculated upwards.

In short, the more battles you did before the patch, the worse you will look in the statistics. Even the stat padders who spent countless hours to achieve a high looking score on XVM by driving low tier tanks will suddenly not look all that good anymore. If you want better looking stats, you will have to reroll again and start over. At the very least there will be some heated discussion with veteran players complaining that their 10 years of playing World of Tanks are now dragging down their statistics, because post-patch values will be much higher. Some people will certainly shout for Wargaming to reset all statistics in the database that XVM uses.

For me that will be interesting to watch, but I don't feel very affected. I don't care what my average WN8 stat is saying, I am more interested in stats for individual battles or sessions, and whether I am getting better or not. I simply won't compare my new stats with the old ones, and disregard the now somewhat irrelevant average. But I am interested in seeing whether this will lead to changes of the XVM mod.

Sunday I DM'd the second session of Dragon of Icespire Peak on Roll20. That went pretty well, everybody had a lot of fun, and we didn't run into any major technical problems with playing at a distance. Now the premise of Dragon of Icespire Peak is that the players are in a mining town and get quests from a job board. In the first session they did the three starting quests from that job board, which were all about going to some location and warning people about the dragon menace; and then at each location something more adventurous happened. At the end of the third quest they ran into a group of orcs, who had been displaced from their mountain stronghold by the dragon, and were now roaming the lowlands.

Now those orcs are actually a major theme of the adventure. The orcs get displaced by the dragon, ally with a bunch of half-orc druids of the evil storm god Talos, and become an increasing menace to the humans. So for the start of the second session I didn't use the job board, but other adventuring hooks: The players heard a rumor about a lighthouse on the nearby coast that lured ships onto rocks. And I gave the aasimar paladin of the group a vision from his guiding angel that the orcs, the lighthouse, and storms were connected to some greater evil. That led the group to the Tower of Storms adventure, which I had modified a bit, mostly following advice from a video on YouTube. I also added some more treasure to the adventure: A staff of healing for the druid of my campaign, because he had played the role of the healbot in the previous session, and I wanted him to be able to use other spells as well; and a silver maul, because in another adventure later in the campaign the group can meet monsters that can only be hit by silver or magic weapons. To make it a bit more interesting, used an altar in the Shrine to Talos that existed in the adventure as a possibility to charge the silver maul to become a magic +1 maul dealing lightning damage for 30 days. Both me and my players were really happy when they actually figured that one out. Instead of the Charm of Storms from that altar, I had Talos speak to the storm sorceress, offering her great power if she would agree to serve him, but she declined.

So after the Tower of Storms the players were aware of the half-orc druids of Talos. Back in Phandalin they found two new quests on the job board: Check on Butterskull Ranch, which had been attacked by orcs, or transport provisions to the Logger's Camp in Neverwinter Woods. It was pretty obvious which quest was the more urgent one, so the players fought a lot of orcs and liberated Butterskull Ranch. And then there was only the Logger's Camp quest left, and the paladin wasn't really interested. And I realized that the job board wasn't actually that good as an adventure hook, at least not further along in the campaign. If a group is already aware of a menace of orcs and half-orc druids worshipping an evil storm god, the offer of 100 gold to bring some provisions to a Logger's Camp sounds rather unexciting. Well, the group went anyway, but more out of lack of alternatives. They found the Logger's Camp mostly destroyed, fought a bunch of ankhegs, and discovered that the ankhegs had been lured to the camp by a half-orc druid who hid an evil totem in the camp. They destroyed the totem, got their reward payment from the foreman, and we ended the session at that point, with them taking a long rest and leveling up to level 4.

But from the end of session chatter it was pretty obvious that the players weren't interested at all in going back to Phandalin and doing another gofer quest. The premise of the campaign that the group does quests which don't sound very interesting and then run into interesting adventures had run thin. They would rather search Neverwinter Woods for those half-orc druids and destroy them. The good news is that the adventure to do this is in the campaign material; the bad news is that it is designed for level 6, the players are supposed to do another bunch of quests before going after the Talos worshippers. So what I will have to do is to come up with more interesting adventure hooks for the adventures of level 4 and 5, and have the players overcome those adventures as obstacles on their way towards the half-orc druids. I think I can forget about the job board, it won't work anymore.

So I uninstalled Animal Crossing, having grown bored with it. But there were parts of the game that I liked. I particularly liked gathering resources, e.g. chopping wood, and then using the wood to craft stuff with. But then I realized that there are lots of games with that mechanic, and in terms of crafting Animal Crossing isn't really all that great. On my Switch I have for example My Time at Portia, which after a patch that resolved some loading time issues is much more satisfying as a "chop wood and craft" simulator than Animal Crossing is. I don't consider city building games like Anno 1800 here, even if wood is being chopped in them, but only games in which you control a single character that does the wood chopping.

One kind of game that frequently has this mechanic is survival games. Some people don't like chopping wood in survival games. Me, I'm just not a big fan of the survival genre. For me, survival games are frequently just building games with an arbitrary fail condition. I prefer games in which I just build something up, and have the freedom to experiment, without the threat of doom over me if I don't play like the developers intended.

Another type of game that has wood chopping and crafting is those blocky games like Minecraft. Minecraft itself is a bit too sandboxy for me; but I did buy Dragon Quest Builders 2 for the Switch, and haven't played that yet, so this would be one option. Chopping wood and crafting is also a part of many MMORPGs, but usually only a minor part, except for the short-lived Everquest Landmark. But preferring single-player games, I would be mostly interested in games of the general "life simulation" gathering & crafting genre, like Stardew Valley.

Is there a game of this type I haven't mentioned and that you would recommend to me?

I just got my credit card statement, and the period it covers is the period in which I was confined at home due to the coronavirus pandemic. And I was a bit surprised how much I spent. I am among the privileged who still have 100% of their salary because they can work from home office, but I definitely shouldn't continue to spend money online at this rate.

Part of my spending was that I kind of started a new hobby, playing D&D on a virtual tabletop. So I bought a bunch of D&D books in Roll20 format, although I had already paid for the same books in the physical space and on D&D Beyond. A bit annoying, but at least it is a one-time purchase, the Roll20 subscription is not so expensive. The part I need to watch is online shopping for all sorts of things, physical and virtual. I ordered a lot of DVDs from Amazon. I bought games on different platforms, including expensive ones like Animal Crossing. And I spent money on virtual purchases in various mobile and online games, like World of Tanks.

In spite of being reasonably good at math, and having an interest in economics, I am not really good at personal finances. I don't balance my spending, budget, or record all my expenditures, like my father did. It just happens that my needs and wants usually cost less in a month than my income is, and so I have savings, which is a good thing (even if I obviously just lost a part of those savings to the stock market correction). I can afford a month of splurging, it is just that I recognize that it isn't a good idea.

The lockdown situation we now live in changes our needs and wants. In my case, which is probably in no way unique, the lockdown resulted in me spending more time in front of a computer looking for entertainment. All the time I used to spend commuting, on business travel, on holiday travel, or going out, is now spent at home. And that influences my spending habits. Online shopping is dangerous, especially for things that you get immediately, like a downloadable game; it triggers our instant gratification urges. I decided to tone it down now, because I don't think we will go back to the way it was anytime soon. There must be better ways to treat cabin fever!

Different virtual tabletop programs have different advantages and disadvantages. Roll20 is one of the easier to learn, but it isn't highly automated. You need to do a lot of things by hand, which takes time. But you can program macros that automate some stuff and speed the game up a lot, especially for things that you as the DM will use a lot. So here are my Roll20 macros:

1) Initiative
The tricky thing about initiative in Roll20 is that it is only correctly added to the initiative tracker if you selected your token before rolling for initiative. So the correct sequence by hand is to select your token, Alt+doubleclick to open your character sheet, then click initiative on your character sheet, then close the character sheet to see the tracker again. But you can have a macro as a token action, so the sequence is down to select token, press initiative token action button. As you can't see the initiative token action button if you don't have the token selected, this is more or less fool-proof. The macro looks like this:

&{template:simple} {{rname=Initiative}} {{mod=[[@{selected|dexterity_mod}+@{selected|dexterity}/100]]}} {{r1=[[1d20+@{selected|dexterity_mod}+@{selected|dexterity}/100&{tracker}]]}} {{normal=[[1]]}}  {{charname=@{selected|token_name}}}

It works for both players and NPCs, so you need to select "Show as Token Action" and "Visible to Players: All Players" at the bottom of the macro window. Oh, the "+@{selected|dexterity}/100" part is optional, I use it as tiebreaker for people with different dexterity scores rolling the same initiative.

2) Saving Throws
Another macro I set up as a token action and visible to all players is the saving throw macro. It pops up a menu in which you select which type of saving throw you want, and then gives you a nicely formatted output for a single roll. There are fancier versions that take into account various special cases like advantage, but I felt I didn't need those.

@{selected|wtype}&{template:npcaction} {{rname=Saving Throw}} {{name=@{selected|token_name}}}{{description=?{Save|Strength, [[@{selected|d20}+[[(@{selected|strength_save_bonus})]]]][STR] |Dexterity, [[@{selected|d20}+[[(@{selected|dexterity_save_bonus})]]]][DEX]|Constitution, [[@{selected|d20}+[[(@{selected|constitution_save_bonus})]]]][CON]|Intelligence, [[@{selected|d20}+[[(@{selected|intelligence_save_bonus})]]]][INT]|Wisdom, [[@{selected|d20}+[[(@{selected|wisdom_save_bonus})]]]][WIS]|Charisma, [[@{selected|d20}+[[(@{selected|charisma_save_bonus})]]]][CHA]]]}}}

3) Monster attacks
The following macros only work for NPCs, as NPC character sheets are different from player character sheets. What I wanted was a quick way to have a monster make a standard attack without me having to open its character sheet. That turned out to be exceedingly simple, as the macro for the first attack on the monster's list of possible actions is

%{selected|repeating_npcaction_$0_npc_action}

Change the 0 to 1, 2, 3, .. and you get the second, third, fourth, ... action on the list of NPC actions. The output depends on how you set up your game. Personally I have it set up to make 2 attack rolls, as advantage and disadvantage in attack rolls happens a lot more often than for saving throws. I have it set up to not immediately roll damage, but if it is a hit, I can click on the name of the attack in the chat window and get the damage.

So how do I know what the first, second, third, and fourth action for a NPC are? Well, I could open the NPC character sheet. Or I use the following macro:

/w gm&{template:npcaction} {{rname=@{selected|npc_name}}} {{name=Actions}} {{normal=1}} {{description=1:[@{selected|repeating_npcaction_$0_name}](~selected|repeating_npcaction_$0_npc_action)
2:[@{selected|repeating_npcaction_$1_name}](~selected|repeating_npcaction_$1_npc_action)
3:[@{selected|repeating_npcaction_$2_name}](~selected|repeating_npcaction_$2_npc_action)
4:[@{selected|repeating_npcaction_$3_name}](~selected|repeating_npcaction_$3_npc_action)
}}

This macro is far from perfect. The output gets ugly if a monster has less than 4 possible attack actions. And while the output is whispered to the GM in the form of buttons that I can click, if I use that function the attack and damage is also whispered. And I am more a "roll in the open" kind of DM.

In my Dungeons & Dragons career I have been the DM of the group more often than I have been a player in a group. Nevertheless I do like to be a player from time to time, and I also think that it gives me a better perspective on the game and thus improves my DMing. Right now me and a group of friends are playing every Sunday on Roll20, in two different campaigns, with me and another DM alternating. Both campaigns started at level 1 and have just reached level 3 after two sessions.

In the campaign where I am a player, I chose to be a human fighter. Not very original, I know, but at that point the group didn't have a tank (in the second session a paladin joined us), and I think that the battle master fighter subclass is actually quite interesting to play. I made the fighter lawful neutral, and a noble, with the idea of playing him somewhat as a self-centered character. He goes out "to become a hero" more because of that is what his family expects from him than from any real desire to help somebody.

In the first adventure, at level 1, things start in a classic way. We come to a village, we hear that goblins have kidnapped the blacksmith's daughter, and we set out to kill the goblins and save the girl. There are combat encounters on the way to the goblin's lair, and the lair is a dungeon with several rooms, with more combat encounters. Some of them are quite tough, with a mix of goblins and bugbears. So at one point everybody in the group is low on health, spells, and other resources. Plus the bard, the only healer we had in the group before the paladin joined, had been knocked out and stabilized, but not revived, and needed to 1d4 hours of sleep before waking up again. So we left the goblin's lair and decided to take a long rest in the forest. While we did get attacked some more that night, we made it through the night, recovered our hit points, spells, and abilities, and finished the dungeon. Only that of course when we came to the final room of the dungeon, the blacksmith's daughter lay dead on the altar to the goblin god, having been sacrificed the night before.

Obviously on some level we "failed" in our mission. But it didn't really feel that way from a player's perspective. While the blacksmith was heartbroken, the other villagers were at least grateful that we got rid of the goblin menace. We still made enough xp to reach level 2. The treasure was the same. And on the roleplaying side, whether the girl lived or died didn't really make a difference to my self-centered noble fighter, as long as he could strut around as the goblin killer. As players, we didn't feel as if we had done anything wrong. Even if we had known, the other alternative, pushing on with your healer unconscious, still seemed a much worse idea than taking a rest. Already for out-of-game reasons of not wanting to play with one player at the (virtual) table being unable to act, but also because of the resource economy of Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition.

5E is fundamentally flawed, because at some point in the design process the developers imagined a typical "adventuring day" having 6 to 8 encounters, with 2 short rests in the middle, and a long rest at the end. And they balanced the different classes and their resources around that. 6 to 8 encounters is something like 20 rounds of combat. A wizard/sorcerer/cleric having 2 spells per day at level 1, and growing to something like 9 spells at level 5 is balanced if he recovers those spells only after 20 rounds of combat. It means that even at level 5, half of the time he is just casting cantrips, and he has to carefully judge when to use the big boy spells. A warlock with 2 spell slots from level 2 to level 10, who recovers those spell slots at every short rest, is balanced too. He'll have to use cantrips more often, but if he casts hex and has agonizing blast he'll be good. As will the fighter, who has even fewer special resources, like one action surge per short rest, but whose basic attacks are inherently more powerful than a wizard's cantrip.

The fundamental flaw in the design is that in practice that long adventuring day with 6 to 8 encounters and 2 short rests never happens. A part of this is because the system of hit points and healing doesn't support this amount of combat. Attacks in 5th edition are strong compared to healing. Even a perfect level 1 healing character, a cleric of the life domain, has his best healing spell heal just 1d8+3 points, while his best damage spell deals 4d6 points of damage. Even those lowly goblins deal 5 points of damage on average per hit; even if in every one of those 20 rounds of combat per day the enemies only ever land 1 hit per round, that is a damage pool of 100 points of damage, compared with maybe 50 hit points combined over all characters in the level 1 group, and maybe 15 points of healing if the cleric is willing to play the healbot.

But apart from the healing system not supporting 6 to 8 encounters per adventuring day, the class balance thing also quickly kills the idea. Those wizards/sorcerers/clerics with their best resources recovering at a long rest will not *want* to only use those only in less than half of the rounds of combat. Them, and because of that the group as a whole, will be much more powerful if the group takes long rests much more frequently. The idea of "short rests" is fundamentally flawed, because it is very easy to explain to a group that "you can't rest here", but it is very hard to explain why it would be possible to rest for 1 hour, but not for 8 hours. Basically the DM would have to invent story reasons that constantly counter the game system and the wishes of his players. That is neither practical nor a fun way to play. In the end, players care more about their characters than about the story. And so the blacksmith's daughter dies while the players take a long rest.

I could design an adventure that would work with the 5E adventuring day. For example I would use a dungeon and give the players a limited number of days to plunder it. After 5 days the king's army arrives and takes over, or something. So suddenly there would be some motivation to get more done in a day. But it is hard to see how you can do that in every single adventure you play. And if you play through published D&D adventures, this approach doesn't work at all. The Dragon of Icespire Peak adventure from the Essentials Kit (the new starter set of D&D) has lots of small maps with few combat encounters separated by days of travel. It isn't even possible to play a "standard adventuring day" of 6 to 8 encounters before a long rest with this published adventure, because there simply aren't that many encounters within a day's travel. And because the adventuring day isn't really used, the whole class balancing done around the concept isn't working.

Final Fantasy VII was the first Final Fantasy game I ever played, because I found a PC version of it, and didn't have a Playstation at the time. I eventually bought Playstations later, and played a number of different Final Fantasy games on them. But FF7 was one of my favorites, together with FF9. So I was kind of interested when I heard they were doing a remake with new graphics. Now I've seen some gameplay videos, and this isn't the FF7 I was looking for. It is a button-mashing action game with lots of noise, lights, and explosions. Just watching it makes my head hurt. I am so disappointed!

So I have been playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons for like 10 days now. It was fun for a while, but it definitively is getting repetitive now. And while a certain amount of grind in games is okay for me, I have a certain dislike for games that not only tell me that I have to grind, but also tell me when to grind. In Animal Crossing the in-game time is parallel to real time, and days in game pass as in the real world. So as you can gather certain things only once per day, unless you "time travel" by changing the day on your Switch, you end up doing a daily routine of tasks. And I don't like it.

For me the problem is that it adds up. There are daily tasks in many of the games I play now, from PC games like World of Tanks, to Switch games like Animal Crossing, to various mobile games. It isn't so bad if you just have one game like that, but if you have a bunch, you end up with a long daily "to do" list of repetitive game actions. It gets even worse with some games where if you miss days, you not only not get the reward from the day you missed, you also reset some reward chain and get punished for not playing every day.

As game design I find daily tasks questionable. Clearly they were not designed for the good of the game, but to keep players hooked in games that either have a subscription or entice you to spend money on stuff. Daily tasks are a marketing feature, not a game feature. So I don't really understand it in Animal Crossing. Does Animal Crossing really have to reset my bonus Nook Miles if I don't get around to play for a day?

Anyway, I don't think I will play Animal Crossing for much longer. I got really disenchanted with the game at the point in the game where they start rating your island, and you need to get a 3-star rating for the main events to continue. Whatever time I took to make my island look pretty didn't count for much. But when I took all my unused furniture and dumped it in the corner of my island, I got the 3-start rating. The AI simply can't judge aesthetics, so it just counts the number of decorative items you have placed. I had to make my island look worse to get a better rating. And I much rather would like a game that I can play when I want for how long I want, rather than a nanny game that tells me when to play and for how long.

Another month, another tankrewards event from World of Tanks. These go on for like 4 weeks (27 days in this case), and to get the maximum reward, a premium tank, you need to collect 3,000 points. As you get 100 points per day just for fighting one battle, you basically get most of the rewards for no effort, and just have to do a bunch of missions over a month to get the remaining 300 points for the final reward. Which takes some time, depending on how you tackle it, something like 10 battles in the top 10 per day (you get more points if you do more battles, or use top tier tanks).

Only this time I suddenly had 500 extra points in this egg hunt event. It is only April 8, and I already got 1350 points. Just showing up every day until the end will give me the final reward, and I can even miss a couple of days. Apparently there are easter eggs in the form of hidden missions in the game, and by pure chance I fulfilled one of them, killing an enemy by setting him on fire. That is a nice surprise, although I don't think many people will go out of their way to first find out what the hidden conditions are, and then change the way they play to get there. Basically if you do as I do, just play regularly and get lucky at some point, you already get all the points you'd ever need. It's nice for me, but somehow not much of an easter egg hunting event.

Yesterday me and my friends played Dungeons & Dragons for nearly 6 hours on Roll20. It was my first time as a DM, and it was quite a success. The overall experience was part tabletop D&D, part computer game, and we managed to get the best of both worlds combined somehow. I have a Plus subscription to Roll20, which allows me to use dynamic lighting, and that is a great feature. Every player only sees what his character would see, given his vision and light situation. One character seeing things that the others don't see is possible, which is much harder to realize when playing around a real table.

Dragon of Icespire Peak, the Essentials Kit D&D starting adventure, is relatively simple and well suited for Roll20. [Spoiler Warning!] It consists of 14 mini-adventures (+3 expansion adventures), which the players mostly pick up from a job board. The disadvantage is that the individual adventures are a bit disjointed, but the advantage is that you can easily cut it up into separate sessions. In our session we did 3 mini-adventures, the first three the players get. Fortunately they did the shortest one first, and leveled up to level 2, which made the other 2 a lot less deadly. But all three adventures didn't have much combat, they ended having 4 combats in 3 adventures. As they didn't think of trying non-combat options, that was the hardest fight, five level 1 characters against a manticore. But with several characters having ways to heal fallen comrades, that still went well enough.

One fight they had was against a ochre jelly. Normally such a fight can be quite tricky, as the ochre jelly is immune against slashing damage, and splits up into multiple smaller monsters when split. However for this group the fight was nearly trivial, because none of them had the typical slashing weapons, like swords or axes. The paladin and monk used bludgeoning weapons, while the fighter was specialized as crossbow expert, which is piercing damage.

The non-combat content was also fun, discussions with crazy gnomish inventors, searching a temple for secret doors, and discussing the wisdom of taking a big gem from the statue of an evil dwarvish god of greed (they fortunately decided not to). They did pretty well, and didn't miss out on any treasure or information.

We didn't use video at all, and we used Discord for audio. I am not an expert on Discord, so I can't say how normal this is, but we did have several problems with sound quality. I had to twiddle with sound sensitivity at the start for a while, we had several periods of sound getting chopped by lag, and twice I lost connection to the Discord server. On the positive side, I was able to use Discord using just the speaker and microphone of my iPad, and didn't have to wear a headset for 6 hours. And from what I hear the built-in voice chat of Roll20 is even worse.

I'm looking forward to the next game in two weeks.

Social distancing has done it, and persuaded me and one of my regular D&D groups to start playing Dungeons & Dragons on a virtual tabletop with Roll20. Last Sunday I played as a player, and tomorrow I will start my own campaign as a DM. I will keep you updated on how that went, but here are already some notes about the preparation.

The biggest hurdle to playing on Roll20 is that you have to learn how to use the software. That is relatively easy for the players, but less so for the DM, because he has so many more options. I very much recommend CrashGem's Learning Roll20 series on YouTube. Of course the tutorial on Roll20 is also useful, but the videos explain stuff a lot better and in more detail. There are a lot of other Roll20 tutorial videos on YouTube, let me know if you have a favorite.

Once you know how to use Roll20, as a DM you need to create an adventure, that is to say a number of "pages" with for example maps, tokens, character sheets, and so on. You can do all that manually, but it is a *lot* of work. If you have money, you can Pay2Win the preparation😁, by buying a complete adventure module. I went for the Essentials Kit, with the Dragon of Icespire Peak adventure. This is basically the new D&D 5th edition starter set. The original starter set, Lost Mine of Phandelver, would also have been a good choice, but we already played part of that. If you buy a module, all your pages and maps are already set up, including dynamic lighting (more on that later), and you have the tokens and character sheets of all monsters and NPCs, the description of all locations, plus player handouts. Really massive gain in time and comfort, even if you probably still want to go through all of the stuff to really understand the preparation.

You can play Roll20 for free. If you take a $50/year "Plus" subscription, you get access to dynamic lighting, which is basically the one part where playing on a screen ends up being superior to playing on a table. With dynamic lighting each player's token "sees" only what he would see if he stood at that location in the dungeon with that vision and light. No more forgetting that the human in the party doesn't have darkvision, because the map will be pitch black for him. The $100/year "Pro" subscription adds scripts and a bunch of other stuff, but up to now I'm fine with the "Plus" subscription.

In addition to the subscription, you can buy a bunch of other stuff. The most expensive is buying the D&D books, like the Player's Handbook, Monster Manual, etc., because you basically pay full price for them. I did that for some, but I was grumbling a bit, because I already bought the books as real world books, and on D&D Beyond. Having to pay full price for a third copy of the same content isn't great. But only if you buy the books in Roll20 do you have access to everything in them for your game. At the very least the D&D Monster Manual is an important purchase here. The other books improve the function of the Charactermancer, the automatic character sheet creation tool; which is cool, but on a budget you can survive by filling the character sheet out by hand. On the Marketplace you can also buy a lot of player-created artwork for your game, which tends to be reasonably priced. You can get things like sets of a hundred tokens for 5 bucks. Oh, and you can share the resources you buy with the players in your campaign, so they don't have to buy the Player's Handbook as well.

The D&D Roll20 Charactersheet is very useful, especially with the Charactermancer. You can create a character quickly, and then click on things on your charactersheet to make rolls in the game. Your DM asks you to make a Perception check? Simply click once on Perception on your charactersheet. Don't be an idiot like me, who tends to double-click, and ends up making two rolls. Initiative, ability checks, saving throws, attacks, spells, everything can be clicked on. You can set rolls to be public or be whispered only to the DM, but I have always been a "roll on the table openly and live with the outcome" kind of DM. No fudged rolls for me. But hey, you can on Roll20, if you set it up that way.

Theoretically you can play with strangers from the internet. That is about as good an idea as it sounds like. In a perfect world you could make new friends from all over the world. In the real world you already run into the trouble of different time zones, and then you find out that many strangers on the internet are not very nice, or at least not reliable enough to run a campaign with them. But for running a campaign over a distance with friends you already have, Roll20 is perfect. You can use Roll20 for voice and video chat, but I haven't tried that. We are using Discord for voice chat, and no video.

So I ended up buying Animal Crossing: New Horizons, to form my own opinion about this game. After playing for a few days, I can give you my first impression: It isn't exactly my favorite game ever, but it is okay. I am having some fun for the moment.

Many commenters said that Animal Crossing was essentially the same a Stardew Valley. Not really, I'd say. Compared with Animal Crossing, Stardew Valley is a stressful and action packed game. In Stardew Valley one game day corresponds to 774 real life seconds, or 12.9 real life minutes. In Animal Crossing one game days corresponds to one real life day. Animal Crossing is thus 111 times slower than Stardew Valley. On the other hand, the time in Stardew Valley advances only when you play. In Animal Crossing the time passes, whether you play or not. Quite a lot of players use that to cheat, manipulating the clock of the Switch to "time travel" and advance the game faster when they want.

The overall effect of the "real time" in Animal Crossing, if you don't cheat, is that it plays a bit like many mobile games. If you play too much during one day, you run out of things to do. For example you only have 5 rocks on your island, each of which can be mined up to 8 times per day. Once you collected those 40 stone/ore/clay, you need to wait a day for the respawn. Trees give 3 wood each, but there are a lot of trees, and you can plant more. That is where the difference to Stardew Valley becomes striking: You can plant things, but they take several real days to grow. Very relaxed pace!

In my previous post I was a bit worried that Animal Crossing was too sandboxy, and wouldn't have enough goals to pursue. Fortunately I was wrong. I think the game strikes a nice balance between holding your hand and giving you freedom. There is always something to do, and you can always ask Tom Nook "what should I do" to learn your next major goal, or look on your in-game smartphone to check what activity would earn you some Nook Miles. But if you want to ignore those goals, you are free to do other stuff that is currently more interesting to you.

There are ways to "hardcore" Animal Crossing, like time travel cheating, or travelling to a deserted island and removing every tree, flower, and rock to make tarantulas spawn, which sell for lots of cash. But if you play Animal Crossing "normally", it becomes a game that you pick up every day to do some tasks for an hour or two, and that you don't feel bad for then putting away and waiting for the next day. One of the least stressful games I ever played, without being boring. That is some achievement! Certainly not everybody's cup of tea, but if you are looking for a relaxing game, this is not a bad choice.