@BESW My favorite art program is probably Clip Studio Paint Pro (which I have seen go on sale for $15 twice). If I'm just doing lineart, I've often used AzDrawing, which is free but really not good for anything else.
Well, I should say drawing program. For photo editing and graphics the like, I use Gimp or Paint.net if it's a simple task.
This is all I've done in Krita thus far. I couldn't finish it because I was using my Fujitsu Stylistic Q550 at the time, and it could just not handle it. I should give it another shot now. P:
my question: should I consider picking up a drawing tablet, or should I spend a bunch of time with manual media before I ever consider working in the digital domain?
Ah, here's AzDrawing and AzPainter. These are pretty lightweight. As noted, AzDrawing is really only for lineart. AzPainter is the painting companion, also free, but I'd much rather pop my lineart into Sai or Clip Studio.
(And a lot of it depends on which physical media, and which digital media, you're using.)
Photoshop uses a lot of film-developing concepts and many of its tools are inspired by or similar to light-based media. If you come into Photoshop from a watercolour or oil-painting background, it won't help you understand Photoshop much.
On the other hand, Krita has more in common with acrylic and oil techniques and very little to do with photography.
@BESW well, my experience with physical media is limited to line-sketching and diagramming in pencil
@BESW digital-media-wise, I've poked at vector and raster 2d tools (Inkscape and GIMP) and artistic 3d (Blender) as well as my diagram-drawing standby (GNOME Dia)(although for some bizarre reason, I find it easier to work with engineering-style solid modeling tools on the 3d front)
My primary experience and training is in Photoshop and Illustrator, but I'm still making the transition to being comfortable in digital art spaces and looking for new programs better suited to my own styles.
(Strictly speaking, my formal training was in physical art media and digital composition/layout media.)
I mostly have a background in inking and cel shading because, well, baby Pixie (unfortunately) learned to draw from anime. :P But my goal is to branch into watercolor and pastel type digital coloring.
(There's a distinct point in my art chronology at which you can see: ah, this is when Sailor Moon happened. Then you can watch its influence soften over the years.)
Though before that it was Pokemon, whose daily lives I would illustrate (before Pokemon, dragons). I'm... probably still better at drawing Pokemon and similar creatures than anything else. As for image editing, I got into that because of RP. My threads needed banners.
I am absolutely more of a writer than a drawer. I do not think I have the required drive to change that, and I'm okay with that, but I still like to dabble.
I hope you find a program that suits you. I'd definitely at least give Krita a shot and see if you can get along with the interface.
@BESW The Pokewalker was a little device that game with the HeartGold and SoulSilver games, shaped like a pokeball. It was a pedometer, but you could put one of your Pokemon into it. They could find items and catch Pokemon, dependent upon how much you walked, and you could get gift items by connecting with others who had them.
I think the reason Pokemon Go has blown up so much, though, is that it truly understands what people want from the Pokemon experience. It offers a way to both feel more like a real trainer and a way to come together with other fans. Pokemon is a really social thing. So many people have fond memories of it across several generations now, it's not hard to connect with people on the basis of Pokemon alone if you've both played (or watched, or read).
Right. And first experiences with it are often (but definitely not always) during childhood, too, so there's nostalgia, and it's socially acceptable to keep liking it forever because so many people do. Regardless of when someone starts playing, the game is one that people tend to inject themselves into. Your Pokemon are your Pokemon. Observe trainer Ursula Vernon, for example.
@BESW Sorry, nope. If it's a normally paid program, the only ones I've used are Illustudio, Clip Studio Paint (the successor to Illustudio), and Sai. I don't think I've used it yet, but MyPaint seems well-received and says it's available in MacPorts, if that means anything to you.
so, yeah...I'm trying to imagine what it'd be like to fight against a mounted archer who is sitting atop a one-ton beast capable of charging at you at oh, 45mph and giving a hard day's ride at oh, 30mph or so steady...
@BESW heheh. I'm not sure if "mercifully swift" can be applied to the mount hitting you on a charge. (heck, I'm not sure what'd happen if you tried to spearhedge against a RL bison -- and I don't think I'd want to be the brave-but-foolish soul to find out, either!)
@BESW I like SAI but not as much as Clip Studio. That's mostly a personal preference for lineart tools in Clip Studio, though. I can color fine in both.
Depending on any further cultural bits you've established for them, too. I mean, we don't know any language conventions you've already assigned to your orcs.
I've been using compound words because smashing two words together to make a third seems like the sort of practical (and metaphorically violent) approach to linguistics that Orks would appreciate.
@BESW Medibang Paint is apparently a sibling program to Firealpaca which uses it as a base but has extra tools for comic-making. This is actually looking pretty appealing to me... I'll try it out later myself.
NPC questing thought: NPC has a mystical staff. Sends adventurer out on a quest, they complete it, decide they want something better than the mystical staff. The NPC sweats bullets, finds another adventure, promises a mystical staff if they bring back {thing the first adventurer wants}. Repeat, as the NPC begins sending out a constant stream of adventurers to find artifacts to pay the previous adventurers. (They figure out how to get some extras on the side, get work done, etc.)
I have beaten it before (riven) but yeah I intend to work through all the games now
the worst part about the piano puzzle is there is no button to increment, Im not tone deaf and Ive played instruments but because you have like 5 seconds between hearing the tone and matching it
but I spent like 20 minutes and got it tonight
I totally cheated for the tram puzzle
because I had heard bout it and thats not a puzzle so much as blunt force trial and error and mapping
@doppelgreener Because it's really hard for such a resource to convey the nuance, connotation, and context of the word/phrase/whatever, but it'll give the author they impression they do understand all that.
I recently found Strands of Fate and it looks like a really fun system; so, naturally, I want to run a short campaign in it to try it out. Unfortunately, the book doesn't seem to give any tips for how to set up encounters in terms of number and quality of NPCs so they're an appropriate challenge ...
^^^ only thing I can suggest is the old "start small and turn the heat up slowly with subsequent encounters until the party starts sweating and chewing into their resources" trick/idea, but I'd much rather defer to someone with experience with that system or a relative (if we have any of that around here, that is)
I want to know if there is a good homebrew somewhere for dnd 5e. I see that we've revised our game recs policy, so I was curious how this extends to homebrewing. Is that something i can ask about here? If so, how can I ask it correctly?
@Alyksandrei tense, but cool, yeah :) also, hoping to get another playtest done soon on my experimental 3.5e dungeon, so there's that to look forward to
that, and ruminating over rodent names for my 5e campaign world...
(there's a species of domesticated rodents-of-unusual-size in the world, and I need a name for it :p)
Given that game-rec questions are no longer on-topic for the site, should we change the tag description to make this clear? At the moment, its existence with a full description gives the impression that those types of question are still OK.
Ouch! I've just seen a low level wizard send her hawk, with a light spell on it to allow vision at night, scouting for githyankis and red dragons. 1200 px lost, no familiar for one year unless someone resurrects it.
@Shalvenay yep, but I don't play strands of fate. It's a pre-Fate Core game, and a matter getting into the nitty gritty like that is something I'd have no idea about, since it would be quite different.
The voice of Charles Babbage in my head is that of Harry Secombe as the Goon Show's Neddie Seagoon btw https://soundcloud.com/sydney-padua/seagoonyehti
Ouch. If you like the general interface of Firealpaca/Medibang, waiting for Clip Studio Paint to go on sale for $15 again might not be a bad idea (it's happened twice, so I figure it will happen again). Other than that, I think that is the extent of programs I know.
But that's one of the reasons I have a slight preference for Mac over Windows; at the cost of fewer options, I have fewer "likely to totally bug out and paint the system brown" options.
(And most of the "fewer options" tend to fall into categories I'm less interested in, like video games... fair trade, especially as using a Mac also gives me a bit more street cred as a graphic designer despite there not being any functional difference between platforms anymore.)
@Zachiel yeah, bad move -- about as bad as fireballing your own familiar into oblivion, or sending said hawk to go scout KJFK at night
@doppelgreener I'm suspecting the Stack as a whole lacks expertise on this -- it may very well be the case that the answers that already exist on that question are what will have to suffice
@BESW yeah -- the question is "will there be more questions for that tag?" -- it seems like an esoteric enough system that finding an expert will be one in a million
@Pixie yeah, one of the big unanswered questions for SE in general is "how long should you wait for an expert?" there are quite a few users out there who simply won't stick around for long periods of time waiting for an answer.
@Shalvenay How long you should wait isn't really answerable, I don't think. If there's no one available who can answer your question (properly, to SE standards), you're going to have to wait. That's just reality.
@BESW actually finding out someone's answered your question. I've seen this all the time on newb-heavier Stacks -- someone asks a question, doesn't get an answer for a little while, and then abandons the Stack completely
Hm. We're been playing Strands of Fate. I didn't realize how different the rulesets would be. I don't really know some of the terminology you're using.
I recently found Strands of Fate and it looks like a really fun system; so, naturally, I want to run a short campaign in it to try it out. Unfortunately, the book doesn't seem to give any tips for how to set up encounters in terms of number and quality of NPCs so they're an appropriate challenge ...
@Shalvenay If you're giving an answer that isn't specific to the system at hand, because you have no experience with the system at hand, then you're just guessing that your experience with other systems will carry over.
That makes it, for the purposes of the Stack, a bad answer because you don't actually know if it's useful. You're just speculating based on potentially unrelated experience.
@Shalvenay The querant wants answers that are SoF-specific, and you don't have SoF experience. If you're really confident that the question is one of a more general bent, that's one thing, but looking at the question, that doesn't seem to be the case.
@Pixie yeah, it's not very clear for me why they're looking for such specific advice though -- have they already tried the general strategies to no avail due to just how odd the SoF crunch is?
@BESW (you're also implying I should delete my single most upvoted answer at 61 upvotes, because it's a pure simulationist answer to a VtR question)
@Shalvenay Not really. If you're the world's leading expert on Java, you still shouldn't be using your Java experience to try to guess the answer to a C# question.
@Shalvenay this is a peculiarity of any space which cares to cater to so many topics. That makes up very few places in the RPG forum space, and also the Stack.
@Shalvenay Remember this Lady Blackbird question? It has five answers that don't seem to know anything about LB at all (including deleted answers), and consequently make entirely erroneous assumptions about how it works.
That's different from giving an answer that fills a space the system doesn't fill, which your touchscreen question does.
Given that game-rec questions are no longer on-topic for the site, should we change the tag description to make this clear? At the moment, its existence with a full description gives the impression that those types of question are still OK.
