Just an FYI, pict-rs (the picture service used by lemmy) will be going down for an upgrade tomorrow morning. It should only last for about an hour or so, during which time image upload, image viewing, thumbnails, etc. will be unavailable. The rest of the services (lemmy, comments, discussion, etc.) will all be available during this time.

Yesterday we had a bit of an outage with image storage on our instance; Got some messages about it at one point, but that said, everything should be back up and running. Is anyone else running in to issues? I had one user mention that they had a problem this morning, but I wanted to see if anyone else was running in to problems.

Let me know! If there's issues, we can get to the bottom of it, and get things hammered out.

Just putting this out here to share some of the work I've been doing and to create some content for this community. Also because I'm not quite ready to share the full thing with larger groups.

I've mostly been creating a system for fun, and to exercise my art/design chops. I've got the base rule book done, but I was wanting to create a "pack in" adventure to go with it, which i have yet to start.

I'll include some screen shots as I go along and give some of the details around the setting and system. The title I'm currently running with is "Stellar Knights of Pendragon" and it is a sci-fi RPG based off of the myths of King Arthur.

Stylistically, I'm trying to make the book look like something from the 16-bit/SNES Era of video games, mostly because I'm pretty ok at pixel art (and not much else), but also because the concept sounds like something you'd see on the sega genesis or SNES

Cover Page:

Table of contents:

For a lot of the art, I tried to base it off of existing cover art/images from popular video games of the times, as you'll see (some are pretty obvious tracing/reinterpretation of famous images)

For the game system, I tried to go with a fairly simple resolution mechanic that lends itself to a lot of depth when it comes to including character powers and abilities. The basic mechanics are that everything is an "opposed" check, where characters roll 4d6 + bonuses against a target number/DC. Every 5 points you beat the DC by is one success. Opposition successes cancel out your successes on a 1-for-1 basis

So for example, combat is roll 4d6+stat+skill for your attack, vs a "target" number of the enemy's armor and the enemy gets to make an opposed defense check. If the enemy's armor is, say, 15, and your roll a total of 20, you have achieved 2 successes, but if the enemy rolls 1 success on their defense, it reduces you to 1 success, which represents the amount of damage you deal.

There's also something similar to advantage/disadvantage called banes and boons.

As stated above in the screen shot, the reason for a 4d6 resolution mechanic is partially because its novel, and in addition getting together 4d6 to play can happen virtually anywhere and doesn't require specialized dice to play.

The setting takes place in space (duh) in a nebula. You can see the write up below, but the basic idea is that the gasses and all in the nebula cause psionic powers to be extremely common in creatures living within the space gas. Psionics obviously take the place of any sort of magic in this setting, as i'm a big fan of psionics in general. I just think they're fun.

The king arthur stand in (Named Artur, which is barely a play on the name) is essentially an evil, paranoid, ruthless despot bent on dominating the galaxy, forming a large army akin to something like the empire in star wars.

"Knight's Armor" in this setting is also effectively something akin to power armor, and there's rules for spaceship combat, though do note that it largely follows the same resolution mechanics.

The game is class based, and each class has a list of skills you can be trained in and "knacks" you choose that give you character extra powers/abilities

monster stat block:

That's kind of a very quick write up around how the game works, there's obviously a ton more details to both mechanics and setting, since its about a 50 page PDF, which was approximately my goal for the length of the document. I didn't want it to get too long.

What do people think about this premise/idea? Anything you'd like to hear more about? Anything that sounds off-putting to you? I'm open to all feedback, positive or negative.

When it's done, I'll probably post about it, but also put it on my itch.io and on my drive thru RPG account. Note that i generally release everything i put out for free, so i'm not planning on charging anything for it.

Character sheet:

Just an fyi, we will be going down temporarily for a postrgres upgrade tomorrow morning around 9AM cst, this is in preparation for upgrading Lemmy to 19.5. downtime shouldn't be significantly long.

Edit: upgrade complete

Just a small FYI update, the host that we used just informed us that our website is now certified green hosted by the green web foundation, meaning that our site is completely hosted by clean energy.

You should see the badge display in our sidebar about it starting today.

Just an FYI, ttrpg.network has updated to 19.2. There's apparently some potential issues with cached logins, and you must delete your cookies/cache, or log out and remove and readd your account to most apps. Let me know if you have any other problems.

Just finished updating to 18.3 here. Supposedly there's a good amount of DB improvements so you should see some improved performance. Let me know if you have any issues.

It caused some significant downtime earlier as it was updating, so apologies if you noticed the site offline for about an hour or so.

I just removed the restriction on creating communities. Originally this restriction was put in place to that any reddit mods jumping ship could claim their communities, but now that it has slowed down, I removed the restriction.

New communities must still have TTRPG relevance, however.

Powered by mlmym.org, for anyone wondering.

Hi all!

Another post from me! This time i wanted to talk about the lemmyverse and more broadly the fediverse.

We have a previous post talking about some tips and tricks with lemmy over here.

However, it was recently brought to my attention that some users of ttrpg.network might be going out in to other TTRPG communities in other fediverse instances, and either harassing users or asking them to close down and consolidate to here!

I don't consider this ok. I would please ask that you respect the rules and etiquette of other communities and instances.

Multiple communities across the fediverse for the same topic is a feature, and not a bug!

There's many reasons this is good, however, chiefly among them - No one person or team can be all controlling on a subject. If you don't like what I, a mod here, a mod/admin on lemmy.world, etc. do, you can merely subscribe to a sister community on a different instance! You can also subscribe individually to all communities covering the same subject and create yourself a mega-feed of all the communities across the lemmiverse. Again, this is considered this a feature, not a bug.

So if you're going in to other communities around the fediverse, please be respectful, nice, and participate in good faith! Doing this will actually help this community grow as it reflects well upon ourselves here, and seeing your username being from this instance will drive extra traffic to us!

Hi, all! I'm Eerongal, the admin who set up the TTRPG Network.

After merely a month after working out the details around this lemmy instance with a number of other reddit TTRPG mods, the growth of this instance has been quite explosive! This is a good thing, it's always good for a community to grow.

However

Growth is not without its costs. For transparency, the current projected costs of running this instance is about $25, around $12-ish dollars for the hosting, and another $13-ish for mail hosting, plus about $6 every year for domain registration. this is ok. I signed up for this knowing the cost, and being perfectly ok with fronting the bill for now.

This seems like it's definitely going to be a more long term thing.

Originally when setting this up, I had no idea if this would just be a temporary refuge during reddit blackout, or if this would be something more. As it stands, we've had a ton of growth in just this short amount of time. As stated above, this is great! Far more than I expected.

Another However

I got a notification just earlier today from the host that we're using a large percentage of our memory (not a huge deal at the moment, it was just a heads up, and our memory footprint is relatively low, this is just due to high user traffic over the past 24-48 hours), and after some checking, we're also nearing almost 50% of our file storage! Admittedly, this is merely a paltry 200 GB, and includes everything to run the server. Scaling this up with the host is fairly minimal (about $1 for every 200gb).

The host also let me know that over the past 24 hours, our instance serviced over 5 million requests. This is likely because of combined user traffic and certain posts (not naming names) trending in the wider fediverse.

What this means, and why I'm posting this

I'm posting this, because in an effort to better prepare ourselves for the future, I'm setting up the ability for people to provide donations through ko-fi.

As stated above, our costs are currently fully under control, and there's no real issues right now.

I'm merely setting this up so that this instance can position itself in a positive spot as we continue to grow.

Does this mean I have to pay to use TTRPG.network?

Absolutely not. Donations are, and for the foreseeable future will be, optional. I merely want to rip the bandage of not accepting them off right now so that we can make sure this community is around for a long time.

What will you do with the funds?

Use them to pay for the server. Any excess funds will sit around to accumulate in a "war chest" for future needs. I'm certainly more than willing to do whatever is needed to appease the community as far as transparency goes, if there's ever problems or concerns around the site's funding.

What (besides paying) can I do to help?

First thing would be to be mindful of resources. If you can use an image hosting service, such as imgur, or whatever you prefer, will help cut down on the growth of these resources. That said, i currently have no plans to disable the ability to upload images in any way.

Spreading the word and helping the instance grow will also help out in a positive way. In addition, participating in the community by posting, voting, commenting, etc. helps to grow the community in its own way too.

Overall, I'm very proud and happy that we are at this point where I even have to consider these things. Because the alternative would be that the server never caught on, and went unused and eventually closed.

overall, I'm just happy I can provide something akin to the community we had back over on reddit. I know I personally have been avoiding reddit as much as possible since the debacle.

All in all, I want this to be an open dialog, that's why I'm putting this out to the community. If you have questions, feel free to ask. If you have concerns, also feel free to voice them. If you want to complain, well, i guess go ahead, though that doesn't feel too productive.

As for donations, you can donate, either one time or monthly right here

And i will also be adding this link to the sidebar of the main page.

Thank you for hearing me out, hope this doesn't rustle anyone's jimmies, and may all your rolls be 20's!