I look forward to talking about my first few weeks on Lemmy in years to come: "Back then I had to use an app that was in alpha and wait ten minutes to load a page full of bean memes! And then we got hacked!"
I promise you that anything that says Tyrannosaurus was a direct ancestor of or the closest relative to chickens is misunderstanding the science, probably for clickbait because T. rex is a well known and eye-catching dinosaur name to put in the title, or just quoting one of the other incorrect articles about it. Birds evolved in the Jurassic about a hundred million years before T. rex, so T. rex definitely couldn't have evolved into them. It was wiped out by the asteroid before it could evolve into anything else.
I don't mean to ruin the joke here, but I hate to see misinformation go uncorrected.
Dungeons & Dragons is a role-playing game, so you play the role of a character in a game world controlled by the GM (the Game Master, or in D&D they're also specifically called the DM or Dungeon Master). The GM is the person who describes the world and what all the characters in it are doing, except the players control their own characters. The goal of the game is for the players to complete the challenges created for them by the GM, and of course for everyone to have fun while they do it.
Each character has a set of particular abilities that you choose for them out of the options in the rulebook. Dungeons & Dragons is a medieval fantasy game so the options are stuff like Wizards and Paladins (Knights) and Druids and stuff like that. The most basic choices for your character are their race, background, and class: so you could choose to be, for example, a Human Farmer Fighter (a class that uses weapons) or an Elf Scholar Wizard or a Gnome Criminal Rogue (Thief), out of the many, many possible options. You also have stats: Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma.
Whenever you do something important, you will most likely have to roll dice. The most common die to roll is a d20 (a 20-sided die). Rolling high is good and rolling low is bad, usually: if you roll high enough, you succeed at what you're trying to do, and if you don't, you fail (which doesn't mean you lose the game or anything, just that you fail at that one particular thing). Depending on your character's stats and abilities, you might have a bonus or a penalty to the roll, which is why you have to choose your character's abilities and stats based on what you want that character to do. For example, if you want to play a character that uses a sword, playing a Fighter and putting a high number in your Strength score will give you bonuses to using swords, while playing a Wizard wouldn't.
The game is designed so that the GM creates a story, but the exact outcome of the story will depend on what the players decide to do with their characters and some amount of random chance with how the rolls go. The most common stories in D&D are usually along the lines where characters play adventuring heroes (more or less) who go around slaying fantasy monsters and gathering treasure, but you can play a game that's about absolutely anything, really.
I've grown fond of Connect's UI pretty quickly. However, ever since they fixed whatever was going on with Jerboa recently, it's actually been working very well, really smooth and responsive. So I'm on Jerboa right now.
Sure, Lemmy's mobile website is great if you compare it to the atrocity that is the Reddit mobile website, which is really just an ugly and annoying advertisement for their app. But having a dedicated app for something I use a lot is nice.
It's sad in a way, but I've put Connect into the spot where BaconReader used to be.
Well, the main thing is that they're killing BaconReader. I've used BaconReader for about a decade now, it just isn't the same without it.
And then when I came over here to try Lemmy out, I found it's pretty nice here. Especially with all the protest infighting Reddit has been pretty toxic lately. Or always, I guess.
That's fairly accurate, yeah.