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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • The idea that players all make their characters in isolation and just show up on session 0 with them sounds like such a recipe for disaster. I know it can work sometimes, much like “just grab four things from the fridge and throw them into the soup” can work sometimes. But sometimes you get like gummy bear pizza bites with shrimp and mayo topping.

    I think a lot of games that came after D&D figured out solutions to common problems, but D&D insists on staying kind of archaic.



  • Reminds me of my first big success at work. There was a weekly report that people wanted generated - it showed how much like each operator had done, how much each warehouse had shipped, how many orders we lost from stock issues, etc. it was a low tech company, so they had someone going through the limited UI, looking up each thing one at a time, copying it into excel, and making the report that way. It took hours, and was error prone from stuff like mis-pasting or accidentally skipping a user.

    Took a look at it and was like you could definitely automate this. Used some very primitive scripting to pull all the info out of the system’s UI and dump it into a TSV. Took like a couple minutes to run it, import into excel, and add the colors. But it was super janky because it was manipulating the UI like a user instead of, like, directly querying whatever underlying data store it was running on.

    Still, management was impressed. I later learned no one actually looked at the report most weeks, so that took some of the wind out of my sails.




  • I think there’s also a pair:

    • Takes the setting and theme very seriously. Reads the lore. Knows the details. Can tell you why the Lancea Sanctum and Invictus are traditionally allies
    • Absolutely does not take the setting and theme seriously. Wants to play Barney the Dinosaur in your game of Vampire, and Punisher in your game about running a bakery.

    I’m old and tired and generally am super tired of “wacky” ideas like the second one there. I feel like I’ve come full circle. As a youth, I thought like “let’s play vampires and struggle with humanity!” was cool . Then there was a bit where i wanted to flip it- “let’s play vampires but like go to theme parks and don’t do anything sad or deep!”. Now I’m back around to wanting to just play the theme as intended.

    This is especially true if it comes up after session 0. Like, if you want to do a D&D game about running a BBQ shop, fine. Let’s do it. Let’s kill, cook, and sell some weird monster parts. But please don’t derail the whole game on session 3 when you insist on going back to town to cook the monster meat when it was clearly a random encounter and everyone else wants to continue the dungeon dive pitched in session 0.













  • I’m still irritated about when I was a youth I found a somewhat obvious security hole, and took advantage of it in a mildly funny way, the staff just punished me.

    You weren’t supposed to be able to change the desktop background, but for some reason MS Paint had a “set to background” option that worked. So I set the background to a screenshot of the desktop, and then hid all the icons and start menu. Later, the teacher thought the computer was broken because “nothing was working”.

    I think it could’ve been a good teaching moment. A talk about not messing shared resources up, and channel my interests somewhere productive. Nope. Just a lecture and week long library ban. Disappointed.