Sadly I think a lot of tech bros have no literary sense and won’t read or understand this. Probably get a “is there a movie?”

Some games ask the players to define the stakes and goals when a conflict starts. This can help keep players on track.

Like, the players are on a journey through the mountains, and as they pass through a tunnel they encounter a giant spider. The default mode is “fight the spider to the death!”. But if you ask the players again “what is your goal here?” they might remember it’s “get through the mountains”, not “kill everything we meet.” Now they might focus on how to get past it safely.

If the DM rewards players for advancing their goals instead of just murder, that can also encourage non-murder behavior.

You could, but most corporations and copyright holders aren’t going to go for that.

I think copyright should be limited to like 7 years, personally. But openai et al wouldn’t be happy with that.

You’d probably also want to do something so if a smaller entity comes up with something cool, it isn’t immediately sucked up by a larger entity before the smaller one can get any fame, credit, profit, etc.

I don’t know but it seems like an industry saying “let us do crimes so we can make money and everyone else loses out” seems pretty simple to me.

In one of my old groups, I’d usually verify the player and I understood each other , and they understood the likely consequences. Like, “You can shoot her, but remember this is her club, with her friends , and she’s a vampire so she probably won’t die. But if you want to roll, it’s at -4 from her Celerity you’ve seen her use.”

One player was always like “you never let me do anything!”

I was like you can do it, but I don’t want you to be surprised and mad if there are consequences.

Another player, by contrast, would listen to me clarify what was likely to happen, and be like “cool bro let’s do it.”. We still talk about the time his character jumped out a 20 story window to save his friend’s girlfriend. Great player. Took a lot of damage, as warned, but lived.

Call the function from the if block.

Now your tests can more easily call it.

I think at my last job we did argument parsing in the if block, and passed stuff into the main function.

Yeah I was going to say. It’s like that “no take only throw” meme with the dog. Capitalists want us to spend money, but they don’t want to pay us enough money. Just spend what we don’t have.

If I had a nice job I’d be out spending a lot more money. But they want to replace everyone with AI, or off shore, or whatever.

I’m surprised management doesn’t get shot more often.

I feel like advertisers and capitalism are so gross, they’ve poisoned the whole concept.

I don’t think there’s anything innately wrong or violent to put up a flyer that says like “I’m starting a frisbee club. We’re meeting Saturdays at Noon in the park”. That’s an ad. But it’s a whole other beast from ads that track you. Or ads that try to make you feel insecure or inadequate.

Yeah, I mostly play Fate or nWoD. But a lot of people are really emotionally invested in D&D, so sometimes I think of ways to try to trick them into playing something different while they think they’re still playing D&D.

I bet some obsessive nerd has converted DND to point buy (like wod, gurps, etc) instead of class and level based.

You get XP for stuff, and you can spend that as you like on all the stuff you’d get from leveling. Follow the recommended route and get a standard looking fighter. Or go crazy and buy nothing but hit dice. Or make a glass cannon by buying all the sneak attack dice and second attack (in case you miss) and nothing else.

Or, per this meme, buy superiority dice and maneuvers, and then also buy extended crit from champion.

It would be a mess. I think part of why dnd is popular is its comparably small decision space. There’s just not a lot of room to fuck up your character

This doesn’t seem like a good idea.

One, releasing should be easy. At my last job, you clicked “new release” or whatever on GitHub. It then listed all the commits for you. If you “need” an Ai to summarize the commits, you fucked up earlier. Write better commit messages. Review the changes. Use your brain (something the AI can’t do) to make sure you actually want all of this to go out. Click the button. GitHub runs checks and you’re done.

Most of the time it took a couple minutes at most to do this process.

It depends a lot on the game.

One time, a PC got eaten by a crocodile. The group wasn’t really emotionally invested in the game so we just kind of moved on.

Another time, a much more invested group, two characters died after a series of questionable decisions escalated. We’d had a bunch of scenes up to that point establishing the relationship one of them had with their ex husband- married too young, she matured and he didn’t, but he still cared about her. The player adopted the ex-husband to give the speech, and people teared up.

I remember talking to a coworker maybe 15 years ago (I’m getting old) about family and money. He said his family struggled, too. I asked some follow up questions and he revealed that his two parents income was in the $500k range, and his sister had gotten a full ride scholarship because of military service. I was like how are you struggling with that much income? My parents combined income I’m told never broke six figures, nevermind half a million per year. I think about this a lot.

I think the richer people get the less they understand value.

Guy’s doing fine last I heard. High ranking prosecutor somewhere.

I was making good tech money for a while, but didn’t go crazy with the lifestyle inflation. i mentioned to a different coworker I thought I could get by on like $60k (higher than median, lower than average for this region) fine, and he was flabbergasted. “But you spend like $1000 a month in food alone”, and I was like what. Rice isn’t that expensive. You just don’t go out to fancy places when you’re on a budget.

Anyway I don’t really have a point beyond some rich people are bad at money.

I made a rogue bird-guy (aarakroka?) that built for strength. I really wanted to pick someone up with grapple and fly them off a cliff, but i never pulled it off.

Oh I’ve seen this joke before, slightly better, but now I don’t know which was the original.

It was like

Bard: I cast vicious mockery

Dm: cool. What do you say to him?

Bard: “You’re none of your best friends’ best friend”

Dm: …

Other players: …

Bard: So do I roll damage or…?

Dm: No… No, he’s dead.

dangit i was going to make the same pun. well done.

If it didn’t have interest it would be sad, but this should probably be illegal.

My old pandemic D&D group was the best. They cared about everything. But I remember specifically one time they arrived at a large party. I was describing the scene- large tables set with food, small groups of people mingling, and off in the corner you see a man talking to a woman, her back is against the wall and he’s got his arm on the wall so he’s kind of trapping her there. She looks uncomfortable.

The players all beelined to those two to rescue the NPC from the guy. Oh, Pretty Paul. They hated him so much. Such a good villain. (Started as a riff on Handsome Jack, and it worked so well. One of the players wrote a song about how much they hated Paul)

Order of the Stick is so good, and has such surprising emotional depth for a stick figure comic about D&D.

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