An advanced technique: ask your players to make shit up.

Like, the players decided to go to the wizard university the wizard PC graduated from. So I ask him, “what’s their entrance hall like?” and let him just riff on it for a while. Players feel more engaged with the world, and it’s a little less work for me.

Warlock is trying to commune with his patron. I ask, “what is your patron usually like?” and the player is delighted to describe “the great sculpin” in detail. This then inspires me further.

Note that some players are very much “just tell me a story” and don’t want any input, and won’t like this. Some players are also shy and don’t think well on their feet. And some players are just really bad at staying on theme. But if you know your players , this can be a powerful technique.

I would probably make spells easier to interrupt like they were in 3e.

https://www.d20srd.org/srd/magicOverview/castingSpells.htm

These two things were key:

• Casting a spell provokes an opportunity attack
• Taking any damage requires a check or you lose the spell

Now casting when the orc warlord is up in your face is a lot riskier.

I think I get why they got rid of this system. It was more to think about, and I think they wanted the game to generally be easier so more players could enjoy it. Certain classes of player don’t want to think about tactics and positioning. They want to cast fireball. But as a result, the whole game is kind of shallower sometimes.

For mages countering mages, I’d probably give it a rework. It shouldn’t just be its own spell. It should be an action. Maybe have a separate check to identify the spell, or maybe just tell the player to skip double rolls. Then make some sort of opposed check. Use the spell level delta (and if you had them roll to identify, how thematically opposite the spell is. Like a fire and ice spell, or shield v magic missile).

I recommend players make their characters together. Fate’s rules for it are pretty good, and can be ported to many systems: https://fate-srd.com/fate-core/phase-trio . The whole “You all meet in a tavern for the first time” mode is a valid way to play, but I’ve had friends do that and then struggle with how contrived it feels to fight to the death for people they just met, or go on a whole dangerous sidequest for someone else’s hobby.

I also recommend reading other systems. Not everyone needs to know dozens of games, but if you always play d20 games spending some time in a different branch of the RPG family tree can really be eye-opening. Or if you’ve only really played really light games, looking at how something crunchier does detail can be insightful.

Musk seems like the kind of D&D player who would

• Build a horrible character (frankly impressive in 5e, which is pretty simple in terms of choices to make at the start). Like, a bard with 8 charisma, or a rogue with no dex
• Or, pay someone else to build their character, and then not know how to play it.
• And/or induce the other players to murder him (in the game)

I’ve found that when the players hit an outright failure, a lot of the time they just draw blanks or zero in on this one specific solution. It’s a weird tunnel vision.

Like, they want to talk past the doorman and he says no after they roll. Good players on their game will then think about other options. Sneak in the back. Set off an alarm. Impersonate someone who lives there. But i’ve just had so many players that just get stuck on this, and will try to spend 10 minutes on “What if I ask him nicely?”

I’ve started including a spiel about this in my session 0. “If an obstacle in the world has exactly one purpose in the story, and you attack it dead on, you may fail. Especially if it’s not also your strong suit. For example, there is a doorman of a fancy apartment building. His entire role in life is to look at people, and only let them in if they’re authorized. If you walk up to him, not authorized, and go ‘Hey bro let me in’, that will be a very hard check. That is shooting fire at the fire elemental. Disguising yourself will be easier, but still is in his domain of ‘Looking at people and only letting authorized folks in’. But going in a back door so he doesn’t see, setting off the fire alarm so he evacuates, calling on the phone and telling him his car has been towed, those ideas hit him where he’s weaker.”

Don’t put important details behind failable skill checks and just dead end it there.

Like if they find a book with ciphered text, you might be tempted to be like “make an intelligence + investigator check to decipher it”, and if they fail be like “you can’t figure it out”.

It’s better to do some sort of degree of success or succeed at a cost so the game keeps moving forward.

Like, on a bad roll they translate it but whoops awaken an angry spirit that’s now attacking them. Or they make some progress, but realize they need the key to fully crack it. The note in the margin says it’s at such-and-such flophouse, owned by the PC’s most annoying rival group.

I’ve done too many “you rolled … 0? Ok. Well you have no idea what this altar means” and then later regretted it because the players didn’t have a vital clue.

I’m reminded of the abyssal words in Elden Ring’s expansion. There are signs that tell you “Don’t let them see you!” and “You have to hide and run!”. You find an area with some tall grass and some creepy eye-monsters. And sure enough, if they see you they come running at you. They’ll knock you over, grab you, and explode your head.

Clearly you’re supposed to sneak by them.

But…

That seems fine to me.

It was kind of wild going from D&D to games that don’t have tons of HP.

Players make different choices when they have a maximum of 7 health, and a random mook with a baseball bat hits for minimum 2, maximum “well if the dice keep exploding…”

Among other problems, people knowingly spread falsehoods because they feel truthy.

The problem is people. We’re all emotional but some people are just full on fact free gut feel almost all of the time.

Match should be broken up. But apparently some people learned nothing from history and some people don’t care as long as they make money

Many things. I mean, you could hack a lot of stuff into Excel but generally

SQL has foreign keys and integrity checks. You can make it so like if you delete a user it automatically cascades to delete other rows like their addresses.

You can prevent someone from entering the wrong type of data in particular columns. This one’s an integer and that one’s text.

It’s designed to work on larger scales. Excel stops at 1 million rows per spreadsheet, unless my search just gave me AI slop.

You can do queries, for selecting as well as updating and deleting. You can join tables.

It’s much easier for other applications (such as a website) to talk to a SQL database

You can do transactions.

There’s a lot. That’s just off the top of my head.

Ehh. They haven’t really abused their position. They’re popular.

It would be something else if they were buying up competitors like Facebook and Google do. Part of how they maintain their dominance is buying out anyone that competes. Notice how Google kind of sucks nowadays? They’re not really competing on merit anymore.

But at the same time, steam could turn around tomorrow and be like “mandatory $39.99/mo subscription fee” and it would have an outsized impact on the sector.

I use pycharm at work for most things. Work paid for it. It has some nice stuff i like. I’m sure other editors do all of this, too, but nothing’s been causing me enough pain to switch

• Database integration. Little side panel shows me the tables, and I can do queries, view table structure, etc, right here
• Find usages/declaration is pretty good. Goes into library code, too.
• The autocomplete is pretty good. I think they have newfangled AI options now, but the traditional introspection autocomplete has been doing it for me.
• Can use the python interpreter inside the docker container
• The refactor functions are pretty good. Rename, move, etc
• Naive search is pretty good. Can limit it to folders, do regex, filter by file name, etc

It does have multiple cursors but I’ve rarely needed that.

I use sublime for quick note taking. Mostly I like that it has syntax highlighting, and it doesn’t require me to explicitly save a tab for it to stay open

There are some people who want to be wealthy to the tune of flaunting it, making other people figuratively or literally bow down to them. Those people should not be allowed to have power.

If I was somehow a billionaire, I like to think I’d be spending my money on socially useful stuff. More libraries. More infrastructure. Housing. Can an ultra rich person essentially run public housing and transit, at least on a city-wide scale? Probably. but the kind of person who gets to be ultra rich is probably an asshole.

I kinda like this idea that the players will be so responsible and active over their own entertainment that they’ll pick something to actively do to make something happen

This is the dream.

Sometimes I get players that have ideas, but then they’re like “oh that sounds too dangerous, nevermind”, and I’m like “it’s not going to be much of a game if we don’t take any risks”

It’s probably partly my fault for making the dangers clear to the players. I wanted them to have an understanding of the risks and factors!

Like one time, the players were told another faction would only help them with their problem if they dealt with a vampire that was in the local cemetery, and his little cult. This was a game of Mage, where even starting tier characters have a lot of strong options. One of the players just was like “you’re asking us to punch Cthulhu in the face! I don’t understand what you want us to do!”

I was like … there are so many options. Your character can literally control flame, a major weakness of vampires. You also have a strong alliance with a paramilitary group. You can go during the day. You have 3 other party members. One of them can open portals. Like, to places where it’s daytime. Trust me, you can win a 4 v 1 fight. Maybe deal with his cult first if you don’t want civilian casualties. Or maybe talk to him and see if you can negotiate.

But she just wanted to spin her wheels and complain. Worst player I’ve ever had, honestly.

It’s really frustrating how many things are bad because some assholes are making money off of it. Saint Luigi, please bless up in these trying times.

This is a revelation I think more people are going to need to realize. There’s no referee coming. The rules aren’t magic. Ultimately, the only things that matter are physics and might. If enough people just decided fuck it, all the multimillonaires gotta die, no cosmic force is going to call a timeout.

This is a good policy.

I do movie nights sometimes, and I tell people similarly: “Doors at 6, show at 7.” It’s good expectation setting.

I usually just kept a list of what the various factions are up to. If the players were like “ok let’s go see if we can convince Priscilla to smuggle the uranium with her drug stuff” I have a rough idea of what she’s up to and if she’d help, or help at what cost.