grym [she/her, comrade/them]

Excited for 0.5.0, there’s some much needed upgrades I need like the proper bluetooth headset mode switching. Hope wireplumber can really grow in the years to come, the linux sound stack has always been utter shit and a nightmare to deal with, my biggest problem with linux still.

Musicbee with wine! I have never been able to find something that does it all as well as musicbee, and I’ve tried almost every single linux music player. I have a huge music library, I add a ton of music regularly. I need auto-tagging, i need to be able to sort, filter and search, a very customizable interface, all of the mp3 tags including obscure ones, gapless playback, configurable fade-in/fade-out, etc etc. With the exception of a few little nitpicks like not integrating well with the KDE media widget, and some occasional annoyances with pipewire, everything works great.

Thanks for your response :)

I agree with most of what you said, I think my case is not entirely applicable however, since I’m playing hexcrawl in PF2e. I understand your dislike of hexcrawl and it is a difficult type of game to run, you can’t really run it in a traditional way with a prepared plot, even though the plot will emerge gradually. My hexmap doesn’t really have any filler, but playing a hexcrawl does require the players be invested and interested in exploring and discovering things, and learning about the land around them in detail, even if it’s not directly important for the plot. It’s a very different kind of tone and not suitable for all plots and types of players.

It’s less about “forcing” encounters or having boring contents, it’s simply that when there is a large level-range in a region where players might go in any direction and explore anywhere, even your map is full of interesting stuff like mine, I can’t really set/prepare the levels ahead of time too much or a lot of the stuff prepared will have to be adjusted or thrown out because it doesn’t match the level of the players. So I don’t really include levels in the stuff I do prepare long-term, I just setup a web of interesting interconnected stuff all over the place, and the precise level of encounters/stuff to do is prepared just ahead of the players. I can still say something like “those mountains are very dangerous for your level” and if they do go there, I’ll set it at higher level than them in a way that makes sense and where it’s clear it’s going to be very difficult, but if I set it up long before they ever go there and arbitrarily decide “this mountain is a level 10 area” then it won’t just be difficult they’ll be killed in seconds, so It’s better to adjust as I go I think while keeping a relative safe/dangerous vibe to places.

Anyway it’s not that important, just a pretty common frustration of the hexcrawls I like to do which focus on exploration is that systems where levels matter a lot (like PF2e) make it harder to run and you kinda have to scale things relative to the players at least a little bit. All of what you said still applies!

Great post !

I’m always torn on the zone level thing, and it’s always the place where having a leveling system feels like it eventually runs against a sandbox. I love playing sandbox, I have huge area like this full of mystery, wonders and blanks, and I run it as a huge hexcrawl. Obviously, that’s too many hexes, so I tend to just have a very vague idea of what’s there and when I know the players will go somewhere or are moving in a particular direction I prep a little and fill-in some blanks/hexes.

But it’s very hard to decide ahead of time where things will be higher or lower level, especially since I don’t have any particular limits for this campaign and it could very well go from level 1 to 20 which is way too large of a range for hexes. Either I include all the ranges and some zones will basically never be interacted with (good luck doing anything related to a zone 15-20 as a level 2), or the hexcrawl portion is a more limited lower range (say 1-10) and all the higher levels are specific locations, dungeons, villains, etc.

So far, I don’t really decide the level of any given area as long as I’m not sure the players are even going there or near it. Obviously there’s a general idea of what areas are more or less dangerous, but since i’m always making interesting encounters that stay fun for their level, it does feel like I’m going to have to scale things along with them.

How would you handle this? Do some areas basically become “useless” at some point? Let’s say my players get to level 8, and I have an area near where they started that logically should be around the 1-5 range, then are the plots, encounters and things in it stuck there and incredibly easy? I guess some interesting and more challenging plots and locations can always be inserted anywhere, and the stuff that was planned to be low-level becomes more of a background that the players ignore or quickly stomp through.

These kinds of problems make me want to give a limit of 10 to this campaign, at least in the hexcrawl form. Beyond level 10 it feels like it’s going to be very difficult to keep the crawling/travelling part challenging and interesting while also making sense. Can’t have bloodstorms, hordes of zombies and super villains everywhere when travelling or the inhabitants would have all died a while back. So if they reach 10 the campaign would transform into more a high-stakes thing and the travelling part would be mostly skipped, I think that could work?

Sadly still no alternative that comes even close to MusicBee.

I need one that does it all. Extremely large library, complete and complex searching, filtering, changing which columns are displayed/how, complete tags editing and display including less common ones, and the ability to add custom library tags (such as tags for grouping purposes, which I use extensively on top of Genre and Comment). Also need gapless play, ability to add fade in/out and control the length of that fade either when skipping or between all tracks, ability to edit the start/end of some tracks, etc. And good tools for auto-tagging, automatically fetching album art, easy re-organizing like MusicBee which allows you to auto-rename and move selected files along customizable rules, etc etc etc. MusicBee has tons of really good tools and 90% of them are basically required for how I organize and add to my library. And a clean and configurable UI where I can decide what I want to see and where it is, wavebar, visualizers, good controls and a nice auto-DJ, etc etc.

Works really well with Wine now, but still there’s some annoying things like it not being detected as a media source, and not being recognized by the normal media buttons/widgets. Also recurring audio problems (need to refresh Pipewire or switch the sink) which have gotten better but still not quite there.

God audio stuff on linux still has a long way to go.