I think you can do // prettier-ignore, because I remember facing that exact situation.

https://prettier.io/docs/ignore/

I like a short backstory that provides hooks. “Disgraced son of a noble family that became a warlock when everyone expected a sorcerer” is fine.

12 pages where all the cool stuff already happened is bad. Write that as a book.

I got some people really angry at me when I suggested writing some math expression with parenthesis so it would be clearer. I think someone told me that order of operations is like a natural law and not a convention, and thus everyone should know it or be able to figure it out.

Difficulty settings are, first and foremost, accessibility settings.

I’m not opposed to more options but I think this tactic is distracting and generates more pushback than it wins converts.

Are games art? I’d say so, usually. Some are more like toys than art, but many have creative expression

If they are are, must all art be accessible to all people? Well, what does accessible mean exactly? To understand it completely? Then I’d say trivially no, because there are many books that are incomprehensible to many people. No one is going to say “House of Leaves” is inaccessible and the author did a gatekeeping by writing it as such. No one is going to say Finnegans Wake is ableist because it’s hard to understand.

Must all aspects of all art be completable by all people? I’d also say trivially no. You might have a segment in French that doesn’t translate well. You can dub it or subtitle it, but the original experience will remain inaccessible unless the audience spends years mastering French.

I bring that up because some games will have within the game, not a metagame menu setting, easier or harder routes. For example, Elden Ring with a big shield and spirit ashes is significantly easier than a naked parry build. Is the expectation that everyone should be able to finish in both styles? If there’s a hard mode, must everyone be able to finish it?

Should everyone be able to trivially 100% every game?

Personally I think the floor is everyone should be able to interface with the game. Change inputs. Add subtitles.

I don’t really think “I can’t party this spear guy” is an accessibility problem the same way “I’m color blind and can’t read the text” is.

But again, I don’t care if someone wants a god-mode with auto-parry. It just feels like it’s bundling some unrelated ideas together. You’re not necessarily disabled if you’re bad at parrying in dark souls.

People don’t really like change.

Think about free public libraries. They’re fairly popular, and not controversial outside of fringe libertarian types and assholes. People like that you can borrow books and other media for free. Usually there’s a bit of a backlash if there’s a movement to shut down libraries or limit their services.

Imagine if free public libraries didn’t exist, and someone tried to invent them today. People would be having screaming fits about communism. It’s stealing from the authors. it’s ruining publishing. We don’t need tax dollars for this when we have amazon. Blah blah blah.

It’s the same with other things we could socialize. health care is a privatized nightmare. If we somehow got a public option in, eventually people would start reflexively defending it.

So what I’m saying is many people don’t really have a set of internally consistent beliefs. They just don’t like change.

There was a website where users could request something or other, like a PDF report. Users had a limited number of tokens per month.

The client would make a call to the backend and say how many tokens it was spending. The backend would then update their total, make the PDF, and send it.

Except this is stupid. First of all, if you told it you were spending -1 tokens, it would happily accept this and give you a free token along with your report.

Second of all, why is the client sending that at all? The client should just ask and the backend should figure out if they have enough credit or not.

Buying power is down. If they want me to spend more, capital has to pay me more.

Any time I realize the optimal path is really boring or tedious.

Like, imagine you could sell junk to vendors for money, but for some reason you get more money if you sell them one at a time. Spending five minutes splitting inventory stacks sucks, but it’s 30% more gold and that’s the difference between the cool sword or the basic sword.

A made up example, but hopefully gets the point across.

Related: long travel times with nothing interesting or challenging happening. I remember playing some shitty MMO and you had to like run through a building, go up an elevator, and down a long hallway every time you wanted to learn skills. Just five minutes of nothing. Gotta juice those playtime stats, I guess.

It’s different if there’s stuff to do en route. Monsters to fight or whatever. But when it’s just jogging? Very disappointing.

ls never asks you to create an account or to update.

Don’t give anyone ideas.

“Pay $2.99/mo to see hidden files!”

Yeah, it mostly worked. Mostly.

It’s hard to say if my previous group worked better because they were used to my style, or just a better fit for me, or some other factor.

Wizard I ran DND for in didn’t love this, but understood it.

The real problem with that group is we kept changing DMs, and some were a lot more easy going. You gotta get on the same page as a group

Yeah I would use python and pytest, probably.

You need to decide what you expect to be a passing case. Known keys are all there? All values in acceptable range? Do you have anything where you know exactly what the response should be?

How many endpoints are there?

Personally I feel like SQL syntax is upside down, and things are used before they are defined.

SELECT 
a.id -- what the fuck is a?
, a.name
, b.city -- and b??
from users a -- oh 
join city b on a.id = b.user_id -- oh here's b

I’d expect it to instead be like

From users a
join city b on a.id = b.user_id
SELECT
a.id,
a.name,
b.city

I can see why you might feel that way. Playing in that mode still has some properties of roleplaying- you’re often focused on one character and thinking about the world through their perspective - but you’re not trying to be them the whole time.

Maybe it’s like being an actor and director at the same time, for a film or play? You drop into the character but also zoom out for the bigger picture. I don’t think anyone would say like “Branagh wasn’t acting because he was also directing”

I don’t agree with “can’t accomplish both at once”, but this is a reasonable thing to disagree on. It can definitely be a mode of play people don’t enjoy!

I feel like there’s two poles of the RPG experience. At one end, there’s the writer’s room “let’s tell an awesome story together”. At the other, there’s “I am my character and I am in the world”.

I am super far in the writer’s room direction. I don’t want to “immerse” in my character. I want to tell a cool story about my character. So for me, when I try to jump onto a moving train and flub the roll, having input into what happens is great. I like being able to say “what if I land and roll and my backpack falls, so I lose all my stuff?”, or “what if I crash through the window of the wrong car, and it’s like a room full of security goons having dinner??”. If the GM just unilaterally does that, by contrast, it feels bad to me. I like having input.

It’s probably no surprise I GM more than play.

I imagine at the other end of the spectrum, thinking about that stuff gets in the way of trying to experience the character.

I think charm effects were moved to rituals, from a quick search.

https://dnd4.fandom.com/wiki/Call_of_Friendship for example.

It makes sense to me to move the non-combat spells into their own thing (ie: rituals). Details like should they take 10 minutes or 10 seconds can be debated. I think you need to compare 3e’s Charm spell to rituals for a fair comparison. They seem pretty similar to me.

5e and 3e often have this unpleasant (to me) tension around like “I could solve this problem with a 3rd level spell slot. I could just fly over the chasm. But… then if I need fireball I won’t have it later. So let’s do it the mundane, slow, boring, way that doesn’t use magic.”. Rituals were a decent solution for that.

I played GW1 back when it was new. I remember it being a lot harder than gw2, but I might’ve just been bad at it. Gw2 is very forgiving though.

What kind of evil?

Power fantasy of abuse and subjugation?

Have them play vampires or demons. Awaken from their slumber in a small town and go about setting up a cult and securing their safety. Make thralls out of people. Add some sort of mechanic like “eating someone’s soul gives you a stat boost” so mechanically they’re rewarded for cruelty. Have NPCs beg for their life. Have some sell out their neighbors and loved ones for favor. Let the players kill them anyway.

Maybe some heroes show up to fight them and free the people. Maybe it’s just two hours of crushing limited resistance and making their temple.

I’m getting old and senile but I don’t remember a lot of clever use of magic in 3e. I know there’s a lot of jokey posts about it in 5e, but often to the tune of “I cast create water IN HIS LUNGS LOLOLOL”, and then people go “that’s not how the spell works”. 5e also has weird interactions and limitations like sneak attack or smite unarmed, or Eldritch blast and objects.

You mentioned the zeitgeist and I think that’s actually the key. When 4e came out a lot of 3e grognards didn’t like it, but casual players also didn’t like it because it was still kind of crunchy, and you had to make choices that could lead to a bad character.

5e came out and is vastly simplified. Now there’s a lot of players who would never touch 3e or 4e playing, because it’s easy and kind of a shallow game mechanically, so the online sentiment is different. More positive. Also a lot of the grognards have aged out. Without those new players, I feel like people would be repeating “5e is baby’s first RPG. It sucks” the way people said 4e is an MMO, it sucks.

My argument is that 4e has some dubious similarities to video games, but it was a loud minority and then bandwagon jumpers that cemented the idea. Without that loud minority, I think a lot of people who came to 4e as it was would have enjoyed it fine. People who dismissed it as “an MMO” would not have drawn that conclusion.

The 5-min adventuring day is more of a “poor GM management” problem than anything. If time effectively stands still when the PC’s rest, of course they’ll rest at every opportunity.

I think it’s partly poor GM management , but it’s also what players want clashing with what DND-likes are. Players want to use their cool powers. The game wants them to save them for when it “matters”. There’s no squaring that. So that’s why you get players blowing all their cool powers in the first couple scenes, and then wanting to rest. The GM can add consequences (eg: the villains plot advances), but that’s punishing players for how they want to play.

There are some players who truly, sincerely, naturally enjoy the resource management aspects. They are a minority. People pick wizard to do wizard stuff, not to use a crossbow for three hours.

In my personal opinion, player’s choices only feel important if they have real consequences

I am inclined to agree. One of the games I like, Fate, has a mechanic literally named Consequences. It’s still pretty open ended. Players make up consequences as seem appropriate, rather than looking them up in a book. It’s up to the table to enforce them. If you took a consequence “broken arm”, you have to remember that means you can’t swing your greatclub around like before.

I’m not sure I’ve seen a lot of people trying to weasel their skills in Fate. I’ve had “sure, your best skill is Fight so you can totally body slam the bouncer to get into the club, but then you’ll have body slammed a bouncer and people react appropriately”.

I’m not sure what your advice for making crunchier systems work for non-crunchy players would be. I tried to do Mage and the one player that never really learned the rules was always lost and frustrated. They had a strong power set but they didn’t understand it, so every challenge didn’t work. I didn’t want to have someone else back seat driving them, but they didn’t understand how to solve even problems tailored to their character’s strength. And then they didn’t understand the tradeoffs of the different options.