I had a really bad time once where I wanted to run a dark souls inspired “explore the cursed island” game, and only two of four players were on board. One literally tried to open a BBQ shop. The other was more of a wonder around and pick flowers, not fights, kind

I’m the kind of guy who will look stuff up. I think it’s really important to admit when you’re wrong and the other person was right. Don’t move goal posts or claim you misunderstood. Just own it.

Like I was having a debate with my partner about if it was faster to go all the way up and over, or make a lot of turn-right then turn-left. I thought the ladder was faster because it approximates a straight line. She was like no that’s crazy. Eventually I found that’s called Manhattan distance and she was right, and I fully admitted defeat.

I think the best game I’ve done started as “it’s a DND world and you’re a band on tour”.

It started with a simple “the bridge is out on the way to your next show”, then there was a battle of the bands, a sketchy record label, and then the players organized a recall of the mayor that was in bed with the capitalists. That game went great places.

Yeah I don’t think I would happily play another “and then you all meet for the first time and work together” game unless it was like intentionally subverting the trope. It adds so many problems and suspension of disbelief problems.

The bit about avoidance might be insightful. Some people have anxiety about reading and writing, and the LLMs feel like they’re helping. But as this post says, they’re not. They’re making the anxiety worse in the long term.

Many people legitimately are bad at reading and writing. You’ll won’t find a ton of them here, on a platform that’s mostly text, but they’re out there. Struggling though life, probably embarrassed. An LLM that purports to let them skip uncomfortably engaging with text probably feels like a godsend. But it’s a trap. It’s a tarpit they’ll get stuck in and never develop skills of their own.

Would not expect Texas to go to bat for this. Maybe they’d be okay if they were doing it to hurt women or something

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.

If I ever play D&D again, I think I’m going to spend a lot of time in session 0 getting on the same page about if we’re playing D&D as a resource management game, or as a wacky hijinks game. So many people want to play the latter, but expect a long rest to be as easy as it is in video games.

“I’m out of spells! Can we long rest?”

“You’re out of spells after casting nearly every single round of combat in the past 3 fights, and you want to chill out for 8 to 16 hours here, in the court of the evil duke’s castle, while he’s working on a ritual to summon a demon lord in a few hours?”

I mean, I kind of get it. The game is set up so you have all these cool toys. Of course you want to use them. That conflict is why I dislike per-day resources.

I bet someone has compiled a list of common video game tropes people try to bring into tabletop games. “Expecting a merchant to buy the blood soaked armor without questions” would definitely be on there.

Summons a surprisingly strong (ie: hard) familiar (ie: aid) in the form of a lemon.

Sort of a variation on this old joke: https://starecat.com/how-to-summon-demon-lemon-man-i-hate-cursive-wizard-fail/

Maybe! The way stress, harm, and trauma worked seemed to be pretty baked in, but I haven’t done a lot of digging. You could probably make some hacks to allow easier recovery, but I’ve been happy with Fate instead.

Blades in the dark is such a monkey’s paw for me. I’m happy people are playing something that’s not dnd nor a close relative, but I don’t actually like it very much.

It felt very downward spiral to me, which I do not like at all. I’ve got “and you’ll never fully recover” enough in real life. The book (or maybe just a quick start pdf the guy in my old group gave us) was like “horrible things will happen to your character! They’ll suffer and break! It’s going to be fun” and I was like no thank you.

Also I didn’t really like the group I played it with that much, so that didn’t help.

Squash your branch first

More choices could allow you to make a mechanically strong character even with bounded accuracy. You could, off the top of my head, do more with the advantage system. It’s real close to being a dice pool system, so you could just give that a nudge. You could give players choices that result in “roll X times and take the best result” to make them more effective without breaking the bounds. Elven Accuracy already sets precedent for this.

You could also do more with action economy. Have choices that result in extra reactions. Have choices that give players legendary actions.

You could tinker with damage, because that’s not constrained by bounded accuracy. Give more options to change damage types, to exploit weaknesses, or just “reroll and take better”

Just off the top of my head. There’s a lot of ways to increase character power and competence without giving bigger bonuses to the d20 check.

However, I think they want to keep the game very simple because a lot of players aren’t, well, very good at rules.

I don’t love Pathfinder’s “a class for everything” design, but I think I like 5e’s “barely any choices to make” less.

I recently came to understand that 5e’s shallowness is a strength. It’s hard to make a bad character in 5e. But it’s also hard to make a mechanically strong one. There just aren’t enough choices to make. But that’s really good for a lot of players who aren’t going to develop any system mastery, and many of them frankly don’t want to. They just want to sit down and play, and don’t want to worry about “I need 13 Dex so I can take combat reflexes so I can take improved feint at 5th level” or whatever.