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

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  • I think most games get shut down when they still have players. Plus they could release server code so people could host their own games, like in the olde days of the 1990s. They don’t because they’re primarily concerned with profit.

    That aside, “it brings joy” is not sufficient on its own as a justification. Heroin brings joy, but you likely wouldn’t say that’s a fine gift for a child. Why is that? Probably because we recognize the potential harms and unhealthy habits. Maybe you accept the risks and harms of digital slop are acceptable. I don’t think I’d want to encourage that in children.












  • Imagine you roll 3d6. There’s exactly one way to roll a 3. You need all three of those dice to come up 1. But there are many ways to roll a ten. [{1,3,6}, {1,4,5}, {2,2,6} …etc]. You’re more likely to get totals in the middle of the range. If you rolled 3d6 many times and charted the outcomes, it would look like a bell curve. Most of the results are in the middle, with fewer results of the outliers like 3 and 18.

    If you roll 1d20 many times and chart the results, it’s a flat line. You’re just as likely to get one number as any other.

    Go play around with https://anydice.com/program/e6 if you like.

    I personally find the flat probability of 1d20 unsatisfying. I prefer when the average, most expected result comes up more often.

    Like imagine you’re throwing darts at a dart board. You probably don’t have an equal number of darts on the floor as in the bullseye, and also an equal amount in between. They’re probably mostly clustered, with some outliers.




  • One of my jobs went to microservices. Not really sure why. They had daily active users in the thousands, maybe. But it meant we spent a lot of time on inter-service communication, plus local development and testing got a lot more complicated.

    But before that, it was a single API written in Go by an intern, so maybe it was an improvement.


  • And DMs, if you want to surprise people, do it with plot and stakes, not constant item ambushes.

    A good surprise has foreshadowing so the players go “ooh that makes sense. We should have thought of that”. If all the corpses in the room look like they died of drowning and there’s scratches on the door, it’s not a total surprise if there’s a trap that locks the door and fills the room with water.