Sandra

Sandra, 3 months ago to random

I’ve said this before but I really wish WotC woulda used the name “witch” not “warlock” for the class in both D&D and MtG, with a note saying that “some witches call themselves warlocks instead”.

This goes back to sexism of the 3.5e era (warlocks were introduced in Complete Arcane). Here’s a heartbreaking example of what this has led to:

Someone’s compendium of homebrew subclasses that has separate witch and warlock classes.

https://idiomdrottning.org/wotch

Sandra, 3 months ago to random

Hexes have a north-east problem. On flat-top, sailing straight east for two hexes gets you 6/7th of the distance sailing straight north for two hexes does. (Reversed for the abomination that is pointed-top hexes.) And here, the finer granularity exacerbates the problem.

Yeah, yeah, you could introduce a rule similar to the diagonal counting rule: for every six hexes you sail straight east or west, you gain one extra. But that’s not great since A fiddly and B an even number of hexes are best when travelling east or west. “Every second three hexes gives you a fourth one” solves B but makes A worse.

https://idiomdrottning.org/oh-how-im-alting-hexes-and-squares

Sandra, 3 months ago to random

@masukomi

yes, but D&D is also a power fantasy where characters are expected to become more powerful at a ridiculous pace so I’m not sure how you could play it without making replacement characters pre-leveled.

I linked to a whole separate page about that: https://idiomdrottning.org/new-characters-are-level-one

re being in good shape… i don’t follow.

I didn’t primarily have the party’s well-being in mind when I wrote that (they can always roll up new chars). There’s a lot of other things that can go wrong, gates can get blown up, keys lost, quest-givers killed, villains victorious. Hundreds of thousands of NPCs are dead in our campaign because I ran an adventure where the party “was supposed to” stop someone from poisoning the water supply.

But as long as we’re getting into that:

They go to sleep and wake up completely refreshed with all injuries gone.

There’s a lingering injuries table in the DMG that we use. So some problems like curses and severe injuries or even death are trickier to solve than just a trip to sleepy town.

It’s wildly unrealistic sure,

We’ve been playing that HP aren’t meat points: https://idiomdrottning.org/oh-injury

but it’s also enabling the completely unrealistic power fantasy it is designed to be.

With all the issues we bring up in this thread and I brought up in my post, I’d argue that it’s not as it best when played as that kinda never-fail power fantasy.

ditto for “not really have consequences”

In our campaign one party built a stone bridge over the river near the waterfall outside of Arden Vul. That’s a stone bridge that has paid off many times over for the hundreds of times it has been used since. That’s a consequence beyond the “bubble” of a typical anthology adventure and that’s the kind of consequence I had in mind—leaving your mark on the world, for good or bad.

re encounter balance… d&d is an effing nightmare in that regard. A complete and utter failure as far as I’m concerned.

I linked to a whole separate page about that: https://idiomdrottning.org/the-self-balancing-mathematics-of-dnd

I’ve had TPKs with 1 monster a CR rating lower than the characters

See https://idiomdrottning.org/mpe . In addition to what I wrote there: D&D 5e was set up to have fights that were faster than in 3e and 4E and 13A. A consequence of that is that they can feel more glass-cannony, which in turn means they can feel like easy victories for the player characters or for the monsters. I’ve ran the exact same fights with the exact same combatants (for testing) ending up with wildly different results.

and had characters fly though encounters rated as “Deadly” for them.

That’s a good thing: https://idiomdrottning.org/deadly-encounters

It sounds more like the 1 level per adventure isn’t the problem so much as the core game’s design to he a wildly unrealistic power leveling without consequences

The leveling and XP curve is actually part of the push-your-luck tension of the game. Go to overly easy areas and the XP reward is small and unworthwhile, go to overly hard areas and the danger is too high—part of the challenge is to find a lagom area. The one-level-per-adventure wrecks that. As I wrote.

We have wildly different ideas on what the core games design actually is. Especially compared to 4E/PF, where 5e has more bounded accuracy which helps support the kind of game play I advocate for here (and that the one-adventure-per-level framework undermines).

the problem with the “attempt things out of order” games is that the “hard” areas they wander into early can kill them without blinking and everything’s too easy if they go there at a later level than the encounter was intended for.

That tension is exactly what makes the game work. The party is in the driver’s seat.

any-order adventures would be great in games like Crown & Skull

Always happy to see people experiment with new approaches but what I found is that when characters are overly flat and don’t improve, there’s not a lot of ways to improve your mechanical chances to handle a situation, leading to an erasure of agency and a hollowing-out of the self-balancing push-your-luck system that the XP curve provides. Fate is an exception since instead of improving your stats through “grinding” you improve your odds through manipulating the game world and situation so that you can stack up aspects. Fun fun fun♥︎

but i feel they end up being wildly unsatisfying and a lot of work in D&D because of the encounter balancing problem you mentioned

If you’re trying to “balance” encounters vs the party, you’re gonna be in pain in D&D 5e. But I’ve never advocated doing that. The advice I’ve consistently been giving for the past decade has been to compare monsters to other monsters so that you can roughly place more difficult monsters further away. And then let the players decide what they wanna do and what they wanna take on.

Conversely, when you’re trying to serve up “level-appropriate” encounters, that’s when it becomes your responsibility as DM to put in a lot of balancing work. A lot of DMs in that position resort to fudging. Understandable, but avoidable if they instead just shift away from that entire “serve up a string of encounters” paradigm and instead go with a more player-driven, exploratory approach. Unfortunately, the “served string” style is what the one-level-per-adventure framework affords. Which was my main point all along.

Sandra, 3 months ago to random

The one problem in common with several of WotC’s 5e adventure anthologies is that they have one adventure for each level.

There’s so much wrongness that just follow as consequences from that one decision:

https://idiomdrottning.org/one-adventure-per-level

Sandra, 3 months ago to art

I’m gonna need more than a “maybe”
#art

Sandra, 3 months ago to random

God this is so spot on:

So, designers, please find the players everyone else hates. Find them and coerce them into play games with you. Don’t guide them or help them or anything else, let them make the most ridiculous and broken interpretations and then fix them afterwards.

It will make your game and your rules so much stronger.

https://torchless.substack.com/p/low-opinion-test-your-games-with

100% agree.

But get off of Substack please 😰

Sandra, 3 months ago to random

Fun APL intro from tslil:

https://l-3.space/log-240212-1.html

Sandra, 3 months ago to random Swedish

Have keyboard, won’t travel: looking at my dwindling stacks of cash 💸 it kinda might be time for me to reluctantly acquiesce to a dayjob. Perhaps hacking Lisp? 1950’s tech is still relevant, right? 😅

I wanna stay here in Sweden. I can do Scheme, Common Lisp, Clojure & sundry. Maybe even… 😰 non-Lisp languages? I can do frontend, backend, wire, metal. Big picture architecture is fun. Or util libraries or whatever. Large or small codebases. XSLT experience. Linguistics degree.

Serious offers considered. Looking for a huge paycheck & only having to work a few hours per week. Or less.

UX design would be way more fun than hacking Lisp. I have no degree in that, though, I just have a lot of, uh, “ideas”. Icon design experience.

Sandra, 3 months ago to random

For people running their own email domains, know that sending to Google and Yahoo will require DMARC starting February 1st.

I’ve had the same requirement on idiomdrottning.org for a while. Maybe I’m missing a lot of emails from people who aren’t down with the DMARC sickness already.

Sandra, 3 months ago to random

Are there alternative frontends for @kbin the way there are lemmyBB and mlmym for Lemmy?

carcosa, 3 months ago to random

#MyFirstDistro was RedHat Linux 5.1 (1998), which I bought in a box. I had been using OS/2 up until then, but was increasingly using ported Unix applications in full-screen XFree86 sessions. At one point, the OS/2 VLB IDE driver irrecoverably thrashed my filesystem for the sin of going into config.sys and enabling DMA. It was clear by that point that Linux (or GNU plus Linux) had a brighter future ahead than OS/2, so I took it as a sign to switch. I believe the default desktop was KDE 2, though there was a GNOME 1 preview, and I actually used WindowMaker. It came with StarOffice, the extremely cursed predecessor to OpenOffice and LibreOffice.

Sandra, 3 months ago to random

It’s rare that I discover an old web page from the old web that has stuck in my mind that’s still findable. Most are gone from the Google index or not archived or whatever.

But this is a memorable one:

In any event, the board is folding cardboard with black and red squares separated by a yellow line; the pieces are black and red plastic (maybe wood in the hillbilly scene); and there is this look of intense concentration when suddenly one kid (or geezer or hillbilly) says to the other, “Ya gotta jump um.”

Some things just stick in your mind.

https://www.bobnewell.net/checkers/rediscover2.html

Sandra, 3 months ago to random

When I was young I thought that 1 was prime. The guy who explained that it wasn’t just said “they just decided that it’s not prime, a lot of stuff works out better that way”. A good, succint “a wizard did it” explanation that satisified me and over the years I found that it was true, that a lot of things really did work out better.

But reading Lamb’s essay, I see that a wizard really did do it, i.e. that it really was something that the math community actually decided rather than calculated out.

https://idiomdrottning.org/prime-one

Sandra, 3 months ago to random

High five to everyone else who still hates copyright more than ML. 🤷🏻‍♀️

Sandra, 3 months ago to random

I tried to combine the Movement Chart and the control table from Car Wars Classic into one board so you can move pawns around on that board to see how fast you’re moving, how much you can turn, whether you lose control over your cars around etc.

https://idiomdrottning.org/car-wars-control-board

Sandra, 3 months ago to random

All those “peak oil” fucks from last century are looking pretty damn wrong now. As I said back then and still saying now: We need to leave it in the ground. What’s in the ground isn’t the limit, what’s in the sky is. The lithosphere is limited but it’s still more than the atmosphere can handle.

https://idiomdrottning.org/political-tipping-points

Sandra, 4 months ago to random

Today I finally learned about xfe0e, a unicode magic code that tells modern devices to use plain text representation! So now my hearts ♥︎ can finally go back to their stylish style that WRNU and Story-Game veterans remember as my schtick since ages immemorial!

I've been actually typing that same playing card heart this whole time, it's just that modern devices started displaying it as a red heart (🤦🏻‍♀️) but xfe0e to the rescue I guess!

Yet another instance of this bullshit:

https://idiomdrottning.org/past-web