Anafroj

I'm playing evil and I'm only level 4 for now, but I would assume Astarion and Shadowheart must cause problems to good characters? Astarion doesn't even try to pretend to be good, and Shadowheart… she's a freaking cleric of Shar, it's hard to get more evil than that. :D

I actually gasped when I saw the "cleric of Shar" label in her character sheet during early access, and I decided to go evil for that reason, when creating my main character upon release. To give you an idea, besides all the various conflits with Selûne and the Harpers, Shar is responsible, with Cyric, of the assassination of Mystra, the goddess of magic (she was later resurrected by Ao, the overgod). This is what caused the Spellplague, the massive multiplanar cataclysm that marks the beginning of the 4th edition. And she did it basically because she was jealous of Mystra, and wanted the weave for herself (well, her own version of the weave, which was called the shadow weave). Oh, and also, her ultimate goal is to bring back the whole creation to nothingness, where things were pure and simple, in her views. So yeah, Shadowheart serves her. Is that evil enough for you? ^^

Here the Forgotten Realms Wiki page on Shar, if you want to know more. That wiki is the best source of information on the Realms, besides the books.

Thanks. ^^

I see it as "inspired by 5e", then I enjoy the ride. :) In the end, in this videogame like around a table, what matters is the story and enjoyment of the players, rules are to be broken if they get in the way. That's what I have to constantly remind myself when playing BG3. ^^ Plus, we get new lore in the Forgotten Realms, that's what I'm the most interested in. And if I really want a break from very loose interpretation of the rules, there's always Solasta.

As a long time 5e DM, I'm amazed by how many times BG3 can slap me in the face with totally wrong rules implementations and I still love it.

I do have to say for the purpose of tinkering I love these bigger projects because you learn so much on the way. Now having read your answer I am even more exited to try it out :D

That's awesome to hear! Welcome, and have fun! :)

I haven’t heard of most of your abbreviations/term till now

Oh, my apologies. Here is a definition list :

• SMTP : Simple Mail Transfer Protocol : the base of any mail system, it's the server you contact to send emails, which relays your mail to an other SMTP server (where your contact is hosted), which stores the mail for user to retrieve
• IMAP : Internet Message Access Protocol : one of the protocols that can be used to retrieve emails from your mailserver (the other one being POP3)
• SPF : Sender Policy Framework, a configuration on your domain name specifying which machines are allowed to send mails in its name
• DKIM : DomainKeys Identified Mail : a signing process (signing each mail) to validate the "From" email address is indeed authorized from the domain it pretends to
• DMARC : a warning system to let you know when someone pretended to be you (also giving instructions about what to do with emails when SPF and/or DKIM are missing or wrong)

I guess slapping it on my local raspberry pi wouldn’t be enough no?

Oh no, that would be way not enough. :) Managing a mailserver is a sysadmin task by itself. While you don't need to do much once it works (which often is a perk of sysadmin work, compensating for the fact that when it does not work, they may have to wake in the middle of the night to fix it), it's notoriously difficult to get right : you have the configuration of the mailserver to get right first, so that you can send emails, but nobody else can and you don't become a spam relay without knowing it. Then you have a lot of configuration to do to be able to retrieve your emails from your server, which uses other protocols that you must learn about. Then you have "optional" things that you must setup (SPF, DKIM and DMARC), which you won't be able to send mails to gmail or outlook if you don't set them up properly. And when you will have got all of that right, you will have enough experience to be hired as a sysadmin. :)

I can't provide a good resource for learning it, I learned it 15 years ago when it was way more simple (before SPF and DKIM), and picked every addition as they appeared, but any course on how to manage a mail system will do. There is no difference in doing it for your self-hosted server and for a company (except maybe that for a company, they'll make you handle users in a database, which you can forego for your own needs). I would recommend to learn how to use postfix first, then any imap server (courier-imap is a top runner), and when you're comfortable with that, you can learn about SPF, then DKIM, then DMARC. But be aware before going through it that this is basically learning a new skill (sysadmin). You can find docker images that setup everything automatically for you, but I would recommend against that, because at some point, things will break and you will have no idea how to fix them. And if you try to fix them while not knowing well what you're doing, that's a good way to end up being a spam relay. Plus, those docker images are difficult to customize, which quite defeats the point of managing your own mail system to begin with.

Well I didn’t want google to read my mails

Sadly, it only works if no one in the recipients of the mail is on gmail (or if everyone use pgp, which I would tend to think is even more rare).

I host my own mailserver as well, and I would add as benefits:

• creating as many email address as you want easily, possibly regexp based address (awesome to give every site a different address and know where the spam comes from, without using the well known schema username+something@host). That also makes routing/filtering mails way more easy, you just have to match the recipient address.
• delivering mails to software, to put email at the center of interapps messaging (basically, that means that postfix pass a matching email to the executable of your choice on your system instead of storing it in your mailbox)
• advanced rules for handling emails. When I want to block a spammer that managed to get my real email, I use regexps to match their mails and reject it with a "REJECT 5.1.1 Recipient address rejected: User unknown in local recipient table" error, imitating the error for unknown users, which often triggers a mail system to remove your address from their database
• easily configure apps to send me email. When I write an application that will send emails to me and only me, I configure it to use my smtp on port 25 without authentication instead of the usual smtps configuration they expect. It connects to it and asks to send a mail to me, which is accepted since I'm a local user. It makes everything way easier (try to do that with gmail and get your IP banned)
• easy backups. Both of the mail system (I backup the whole sdcard of the pi) and of the emails. Never lose an email again.

Actually, for once, it's a quite good implementation of the 5e ruleset. :)

In the Player Handbook (p.147) :

Improvised Weapons

Sometimes characters don’t have their weapons and have to attack with whatever is at hand. An improvised weapon includes any object you can wield in one or two hands, such as broken glass, a table leg, a frying pan, a wagon wheel, or a dead goblin.

Often, an improvised weapon is similar to an actual weapon and can be treated as such. For example, a table leg is akin to a club. At the DM’s option, a character proficient with a weapon can use a similar object as if it were that weapon and use his or her proficiency bonus.

An object that bears no resemblance to a weapon deals 1d4 damage (the DM assigns a damage type appropriate to the object). If a character uses a ranged weapon to make a melee attack, or throws a melee weapon that does not have the thrown property, it also deals 1d4 damage. An improvised thrown weapon has a normal range of 20 feet and a long range of 60 feet.

My party is level 4.

• Cleric of Talos (the chaotic evil god of storm and destruction), Tempest domain (obviously)
• Shadowheart, default class (we're the couple of doom!)
• Asterion, default class, subclass assassin
• Gale, default class, subclass school of necromancy

Not like I have a choice, anyway, we killed all other companions (except Wyll, who left by himself before it happened). They started it!

That's how I've been playing my longest running campaign. :D Counterpoint : by average word count, that would be four of five books. And very boring ones at that : want an other whole chapter on shopping? ^^ I prefer to call it "exploring my imagination". Nothing produces as vivid imagery in the brain as writing, except maybe drawing/painting, but writing can produce a new complexe scenery in just a matter of minutes.

Oh, I see. Totally makes sense. :)

I guess it depends on the country, but here in France, yes, most landline ISPs provide static IPs (maybe all? there are a couple I haven't try ; mobile IPs are always dynamic, though). It was not always the case, but I haven't had a dynamic IP since the 2000'. I feel you, dealing with pointing a domain to a dynamic IP is a PITA.

Ahah, yeah, I protected myself against accidentally banning my own IPs. First, my server is a Pi at home, so I can just plug a keyboard and a screen to it in case of problem. But more importantly, as I do that blacklisting through fail2ban, I just whitelisted my IPs and those of my relatives (it's the ignore_ip variable in /etc/fail2ban/jail.conf)., so we never get banned even if we trigger fail2ban rules (hopefully, grandma won't try to bruteforce my ssh!). It allowed me to do an other cool stuff : I made a script ran through cron that parses logs for 404 and checks if they were generated by one of the IPs in that list, mailing me if it's the case. That way, I'm made aware of legit 404 that I should fix in my applications.

Oh, ok, you whitelist IPs in your firewall. That certainly works, if a bit brutal. :) (then again, I blacklist everyone who is triggering a 404 on my webserver, maybe I'm not the one to speak about brutality :P ) You don't even need a VPN, then, unless you travel frequently (or your ISP provides dynamic IP, I guess).