We see a lot of promise in AI browser features making your online experience smoother, more helpful, and free from the everyday disruptions that break your flow

I don’t really see AI and LLMs as a solution there. Things that disrupt are typically ads or other capitalist nonsense. What are they thinking and how will AI help?

Lowering indent levels is nice in functions. Early returns mean you don’t have to think as much. “If it got here, I know foo isn’t null because it already would have returned”.

Yeah some comments are not useful

# returns the value as a string
return str(user.id)

Some comments are

# returns the user id as a string because ZenDesk's API throws errors if it gets a number.
# See ticket RA-1037
# See ZenDesk docs: https://etc/
return str(user.id)

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 the reasons I don’t really like 1d20+stuff. Just as likely to get the best possible outcome as the worst.

Is there a name for this trope of cramming really wacky, difficult, high spotlight, stuff into a game like DND that doesn’t especially support it?

I usually feel bad because I want to encourage creativity, but I also don’t want this guy to have 80% of the table attention while Bob the Fighter and Joy the Rogue are playing by the numbers.

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.

I think it’s the kind of thing new groups discover and then usually realize it sucks. So it’ll keep coming up as long as new players are entering the hobby.

Like every group has done the “what if we make characters based on ourselves??” trope.

Riddles are often lateral thinking or other cleverness, so they seem more finesse than power. But yes, I wrote “dexterity” when I meant “Wits”.

One of the things I liked about the Chronicles of Darkness system is it cleared this up nicely. Stats were in a 3x3 grid.

One axis was physical, mental, social

The other was Power, Finesse, Resistance.

Want to shove something? Physical + Power. That’s strength.

Want to figure out a riddle? Mental + Finesse. That’s Dexterity Wits. (Edit: wrote dexterity originally, meant Wits)

Command attention? Social + Power. That’s the Presence stat.

Lie and misdirect? Social + Finesse. Stat was called Manipulation.

Now you can have a character that’s commanding without also being a natural liar and flirt. DND doesn’t help let you do that because the concepts are bundled together into a single stat.

(You could invest separately into like Expression for making speeches and Deception for lying, of course)

Humans are rated 1 to 5, where a 5 is the peak of human capability. Presence 5 is like AAA movie stars and great leaders.

Of course, if you add supernaturals to your game a starting chump vampire could have seven presence if they take Majesty as their power, and become a nearly irresistible magnet of attention.

As GM, I would ask the party for their standard operating procedure and then fast forward until something interesting happened. I really don’t like the “well you didn’t explicitly say you were checking this tile so you set off the trap” mode .

And the ultra rich would deserve to lose everything

It’s wild to me how some places I’ve worked are like locked down, all the infrastructure is in terraform or whatever and can be deployed immediately… and other places are like “ssh into prod with the credentials from confluence, edit the config in vim, and paste the new code into a new file”

This should be a climate crime and the management responsible forced to pick up trash or some other appropriate punishment

Kind of. You only get one extra attack for most classes (and most games, since a minority reach level 11 and also have a class with third attack).

It would be interesting if con only got you an HP bonus at first, fifth, and sometimes 11th level.

I read this as Rincewind like from discworld, and I was going to say he had a great con score. Lots of cardio.

Fate is the one that comes to mind. Just skills. Your big brawler dude might be like

.

• Fight: 4
• Provoke, Rapport: 3
• Will, Athletics, Notice: 2

.

• High Concept: King of the Ring Fighter
• Trouble: Always a Show Off

.

• Stunts and backgrounds: not going to make them up now but they add more depth

You don’t need to know this guy has exactly 8 or 10 intelligence, or whatever.

DND stats are weird. Only con gets more impactful as you level. Imagine if strength was +damage and carry per level. 18 strength at first level is +3 damage, but fourth level is +12. That might be the path to reinventing Pathfinder, though.

I’ll also say, playing games that don’t have the six stats, or even character attributes at all was really refreshing. Just skills worked fine.

The confusion here is there are a few different ways of playing D&D and many different types of DMs out there.

This is an important point. There’s not really a “right” way to play so much as a “right way for your group”.

I don’t think D&D specifically does a good job of guiding groups into finding what they’ll enjoy. It comes loaded with a lot of assumptions, and then different players can sit down at a table without realizing how different their axioms are.