Seaside2

Quote from: Slumber on Jun 28, 2025, 10:51 PM

Quote from: bunwizard_tammy on Jun 28, 2025, 10:31 PMheyyyyy, rod! other than the Big Work News^TM i got earlier in the week, life has been kinda quiet. im gonna be taking some friends over to a local burger joint while they're here for AC later next week, and im pretty excited for that! i wish that i could time travel until then so i don't have to deal with the fluff lol

Omg, that's such a fun thing to do for friends, Julian!! Are you going to AC yourself? :3c

i am not! my sole mission is take friends out for food! maybe one of these days i should attend if social anxiety allows :3

Quote from: bunwizard_tammy on Jun 28, 2025, 10:31 PMheyyyyy, rod! other than the Big Work News^TM i got earlier in the week, life has been kinda quiet. im gonna be taking some friends over to a local burger joint while they're here for AC later next week, and im pretty excited for that! i wish that i could time travel until then so i don't have to deal with the fluff lol

Omg, that's such a fun thing to do for friends, Julian!! Are you going to AC yourself? :3c

Quote from: TrikznHeartbreaker on Jun 28, 2025, 08:31 PMhi love! as you know i recently moved, so we're still unpacking and settling in. We need to wait for a few wifi extenders to arrive before I can pick up streaming again.
I have mixed feelings about living here. it;s a new adventure, sure, but it's also so quiet and frankly, dull, that I have difficulties finding the joy. Thankfully I do have the outlook of getting my own house or appartment. So, hanging in there!

Omg, you're always so great at looking at the positives in a situation, Trikz!! I hope the moving process ends soon and that you get that much closer to getting your own place!! :3 You got this. *hugs*

heyyyyy, rod! other than the Big Work News^TM i got earlier in the week, life has been kinda quiet. im gonna be taking some friends over to a local burger joint while they're here for AC later next week, and im pretty excited for that! i wish that i could time travel until then so i don't have to deal with the fluff lol

hi love! as you know i recently moved, so we're still unpacking and settling in. We need to wait for a few wifi extenders to arrive before I can pick up streaming again.
I have mixed feelings about living here. it;s a new adventure, sure, but it's also so quiet and frankly, dull, that I have difficulties finding the joy. Thankfully I do have the outlook of getting my own house or appartment. So, hanging in there!

i have a deep fondness for the original suite of Windows XP games. As a kid, growing up at a time when home computers were becoming ubiquitous, they were a sort of comfort to me. Anywhere i went, i could usually find a computer and it would usually be running Windows, which meant kid me also knew it would always have the same games to play. They gave me an easy and consistent outlet for my attention. Whether it was when my parents would drag me along to their friend's house or to see some extended relatives, whenever i needed to occupy myself i would boot up some minesweeper or solitaire and play for hours. i was too young to really "get good", but that wouldn't stop me from messing around and trying to make sense of things. i think that's where my affinity for math and logic puzzles came from, just my young mind being fascinated by the numbers and systemic methodology of these games.

Today i want to talk about my love of Solitaire specifically. For those unaware of the rules of Solitaire, there are a ton of variations each with their own specific intricacies, but the core mechanic that unifies them all under the name 'Solitaire' is the act of moving cards onto one another according to some criteria.(Note: i say "all" as being based on my own experiences, there are games out there with over 150 variants of Solitaire and i have played a total of maybe a dozen or so meaning my knowledge is far from complete) For now i want to mainly focus on the classic Klondike variant that i remember from early Windows. So, from here on out i will be specifically talking about the rules for that variant.

To set up a game of Klondike Solitaire, you take a shuffled standard deck of 52 playing cards(4 suits, 2 colors, 13 cards per suit, no jokers) face down and deal them out into 7 piles as shown below.
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The specific order this is done is one card at a time from left to right. The number of cards in each stack should correspond to the stack number(the first stack has one card, second has two, so on until the seventh stack has seven cards) The final card of each stack should be placed face up and then that stack should be skipped when the next round of cards are dealt. The remaining cards are placed aside, usually above the stacks as pictured. You may also notice the four empty spaces in the screenshot above. Those are called your foundation and they will come into play in a moment, but this is the initial setup of the game.

The objective of this variant is to move every card in the deck into the foundation, so let's talk about how you will accomplish that. The foundation must be built from low to high according to suit, meaning that the an Ace of any suit may be moved onto an empty foundation space, but then the next card that may be added to that foundation stack must be the Two of the same suit. The foundation is built in this way until all four spaces are filled with stacks of each suit from Ace to King. When that happens, you win! Cards moved in this way are moved one at a time, but that isn't the only kind of move you can make. Cards can also be moved from one stack to another, but only if the card that is being moved is the opposite color and the next card sequentially down to the card it is being moved onto. For example, in the image above the only legal move(besides moving the Ace to the foundation) would be to move the Red Jack onto the Black Queen. By stacking cards in this way, they become a sequential unit and can be moved together. So, say you did move the Jack onto the Queen, you could then move both cards by moving the Queen. If you then had a Red King, you could move both cards together onto that King making the sequence even larger. Sequences can also be split by moving less than the entire stack so long as the move is legal. The other thing you might notice about the Red Jack move is that it leaves an empty stack.
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Suddenly the first stack has no cards in it, so does that mean you have one less place to build your sequences? Of course not! Different variants choose to use empty stacks in different ways, but in this version of Klondike, an empty stack will accept a King of either color allowing you to build out complete stacks on the empty ones. You may even notice that the stacks go in Descending order, but the Foundation is build in Ascending order. This is to ensure that by completely organizing your stacks, you have effectively already completed your Foundation. You just need to move the cards over into the Foundation one by one, in order.

Those are the core mechanics and rules of the game, so now you just have to build up your foundation and that's it! Well, not quite as we still have that big deck of leftover cards, don't we? The facedown deck is your lifeline and resource pool for building out your sequences within the stacks. If you never touch the deck, you will notice you run out of legal moves pretty quickly. When that happens, you have no choice but to pull from the deck. This is done in two ways, typically, depending on the type of Klondike and difficulty you want to play. The easier way is flipping a single card face up which can then be moved into the Foundation or Stacks if a legal move exists. If a legal move does not exist, or you simply don't want to make the moves available, you may just flip over the next card. Once the deck runs out, just flip the stack of faceup cards over again to reform the deck. This way is easier because essentially you can pull from any card in the deck in any order since the cards are turned one at a time. The harder way to do this is to flip the cards over three at a time. With this approach, only the last card flipped over may be used, the first two cards in a set of 3 are considered locked and moving them is illegal unless the card(s) on top of them are moved first. When all desired moves are made or no legal moves remain, another full 3 cards are flipped over in order onto the remaining faceup cards. Then of course, as with the other way, when the deck is empty the faceup cards are flipped over again to become the new deck and the pattern repeats. This creates additional challenge as some cards can't be accessed unless other cards are moved first which increases the risk of deadlocks if the player is moving cards senselessly.

Now, that is really everything for real! The only closing remarks i have left to make about Solitaire XP(my new name for it, hope it catches on) are that it does include an undo feature, but it isn't as useful as it sounds. You can only undo your last move, and not if that move is flipping a facedown Stack card faceup which means there is no way to "peek" at the games hidden information and then return to the previous state as a way to try and avoid deadlocking yourself. This extremely restrictive undo function coupled with the fact that the game doesn't allow you to replay an identical deal, means that the game has a huge luck element and managing that becomes integral to the strategy. i don't even know if the game will avoid giving the player an impossible deal. All that made the game such an alluring and mysterious challenge to younger me. i wanted to master its mechanics and strategy, but every attempt to dive deeper into its intricacies felt like it left me feeling like i had barely grasped the basics. It is only years later, and after getting actively back into Solitaire in general, that i realized i really did know nothing back then. i have never wanted to really read guides or anything about the game because for me it is a deeply intuitive kind of problem solving. The challenge that comes with recognizing patterns and traps is what keeps me coming back to the game and i feel like simply following other people's strategies would ruin it a bit for me, so instead i just play around and experiment and that's fun for me.

i think that's officially all i have to say about Solitaire XP for now, so if you read this far thank you for listening and i hope you enjoyed! Now for the big plot twist, Solitaire on Windows XP is NOT my favorite Solitaire... that honor goes to the game which this entire topic will be dedicated to, The Zachtronics Solitaire Collection. my reasoning for beginning this thread with Solitaire XP was twofold. One, Solitaire XP was my introduction to Solitaire in general so it seemed right to start there to provide personal context about me and my connection with the game. And two, it allows me to establish the core rules, for anyone unaware of how to play, for a pretty foundational variant of the game. Over the next few days or weeks(however often i am able to make these posts), i will go into great detail about the Zachtronics collection; the variants of Solitaire included, the history of the game and my personal connection with it, and most importantly which of the Zachtronics Solitaire games has the great honor of being my favorite and why. i hope you will come with me on this journey, but i'm really just doing this for me. So, whether you get on board or simply wave as we pull out of port i appreciate you taking the time to pop in and see what this is all about. <3

Hello, beautiful people! Sorry I haven't been on Discord much, it's been a little overwhelming with all the alerts in the other servers I belong to. >.>

How are y'all doing? Up to anything fun? Our internet is kind of on the fritz so I haven't been able to stream even though I've had some time. Hoping it gets corrected soon! Although given all the thunderstorms lately, it's probably better that I just wait. We lose power often in this house.

Now that I have established what the Sentiment system is, and hopefully some of you have begun your descent down the rabbithole watching one or more of the shows running it, I can introduce you to my own rabbithole. I stalled on making this thread because I wanted to have a name to call my setting but oops, brain no work good when prompted. If I ever find a name I'll update the name of this thread.
So. Sentiment. Rolls to Do and Dye and attributes and colors. All of this initially appealed to me because it was very rules-light and would allow for greater freedom to tell a story without getting bogged down in a numbers-game where everyone had to memorize 3 books or more to even get started. I wanted to run a game that would be friendly to beginners using a setting of my own design because I am unconscionably averse to using premade modules.
Quite literally all of this started because I wanted to play D&D, but with WotC being what it is and the state of the OGL being what it is, the idea of "maybe an alternative" stuck in my thinkmeat. Pathfinder is... an option. I was raised on D&D 3rd edition, and Pathfinder first edition is a natural evolution of that, but P2E is different. I don't know this system. It seems interesting, but I don't want to try running a game I don't know inside and out. I'm neurotic and have extreme ADHD, I have to know what's happening or I'll become stressed to an extreme. So the hunt began.
I stumbled onto Sentiment through a series of associated shows and it immediately clicked for me. I would revisit something old, something that defined my early days on the internet and much of my early adulthood. In the mid-to-late 2000s I was a moderator for the roleplaying section of an independent forum, and one that had a relatively large population, (I think we had 400 registered users, though the most active at any given time was a tenth of that) and I helped build the world where all of that took place. I wrote what might as well have been a doctoral thesis on the Laws of Magic, setting hard rules that prevented the "it's magic, i don't have to explain shit" excuse. Nobody likes a god-moder.
My part of this setting was built on a harmony of magic and technology, two forces that were otherwise anathema. Abundant magic overloads electrical systems and causes modern/advanced technology to fail, and the development of technological systems depletes natural magic and slowly kills the land. The goal of this nation was to develop a means to bridge the divide, to create technology that worked in tandem with natural magic. I named this nation Elmgarde. This would be my primary point of development on the continent, with other contributions including a prestigious academy of magical learning in the largest city.
That forum is years dead. That world exists only as memories in the minds of a handful of scattered people. I live with one of those people, the rest I haven't spoken to in about a decade. But this world and the many, many characters I created within it, have occupied space in my thoughts and my hard drive all this time. It may come as no surprise, after reading this, to learn that I've always wanted to author my own comic. There's obstacles to that, artistic and narrative skill that I feel I don't possess. It's still on the horizon. And this is my world.

The first challenge I faced when adapting the Sentiment system for my purposes was that I wanted magic to be a core mechanic. I struggled for weeks trying to assign elements to colors and determine how they interact in a way that wasn't heavily weighted to make any one feel overpowered. When I found my solution, it not only shaped the system I would use, but the very foundation of the world.
All things in this world are made of magic. The rocks, the trees, the waters, the people. Everything is made up of coalesced Mana. The world itself is formed from the overlap of pure elemental Circles within the Astral Sphere. All living things are made up of a significant concentration of at least 3 elements bound around a core of Light Mana with threads of Dark Mana.
The foundational elements of Lightning, Fire, Earth, Ice, Water, and Wind form the world and its natural forces. Most of these are self-explanatory, but for the sake of clarification: Lightning represents energy, most notably electricity and magnetism; Fire represents heat and flame; Earth represents firmament, stone, soil, as well as the flora that springs from it; Ice represents cold, capturing other elements in solid form; Water represents fluidity; Wind represents gasses, air, and vibration, including sound. The higher elements of Light, Dark, and Astral are somewhat more abstract. Light and Dark should not be confused with the concepts of good and evil. Light represents vision and the soul; the foundational elements may make up your body, but the soul is the very core of your being, the breath of life that flowed through you from the Astral Sphere. It's also literal light. Dark represents obscuration and the body. It is literal darkness and shadow, but it is also flesh and blood and bone, bile and sinew, the tissue that binds the foundational elements to the soul. Astral represents the universe, the immutable, the laws that govern all things. Astral is gravity, it is space, it is time. Light, Dark, and Astral are the cosmic trinity of Man, Earth, and Heaven: the Self, the Body, and the Universe.
Magic is typically performed by expending a portion of the Mana within your body, creating a physical toll on the caster proportional to the desired effect. There is a reserve of Mana within the body that can be expended before damage is done to the body, and it is restored through rest, eating a meal, etc. (in this way you can think of MP as being equivalent to stamina) Absolutely everyone has the capacity to use magic, as absolutely everyone is made of magic, but reckless use can be hazardous to one's health. It is all too possible to spend every last ounce of Mana within yourself and die. The Central Ackademy of Magick, located at roughly the geographical center of the continent, stands to teach anyone and everyone how to properly and responsibly harness this power, and graciously funds research conducted by faculty and alumni. One of the most important lessons at the Ackademy is the practice of imbuing Mana into objects for later use. Not quite enchanting, this practice allows one to functionally turn any object into a secondary MP pool. Alumni who have successfully learned this technique are officially called Mages.
Nobody knows who built the Ackademy. It's stood for as long as anyone can remember. Over time, students and faculty from the Ackademy began to build their homes around its base, and a singular structure became a small settlement, and eventually that settlement grew into a sprawling city. This city, known as either Central City or Guild Town, is home to numerous guilds of prospective heroes, hunters, and mercenaries.
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This map is still very much a work in progress, but these are the places I have fleshed out so far. I'll go over each of them in the future but this post is already getting stupidly long and I've barely started to scratch the surface.

Quote from: sdomult on Jun 27, 2025, 03:48 AM"adjusting" to the fora is right. it's kind of a lot for me. lol

If you didn't grow up with using them a lot I think it's a hard format to get used to, for sure! Especially since it's older tech. But that's part of why I like it, to be honest. :3

"adjusting" to the fora is right. it's kind of a lot for me. lol