Never thought about it before, but the two systems I like most don’t do that.

In chronicles of darkness, you get penalties when any of your last 3 health boxes (out of 6-10) are marked. In fate, you start getting Consequences, and those both adversely affect you and provide bonuses for your opponents.

I think some people don’t like this because it can cause a death spiral, where whoever gets injured first is likely to get more injured from the penalties. But, that makes sense for a lot of genres.

I routinely found it extremely irritating in BG3 when I’d do a sneak attack critical, and then the enemy would have like 3 HP left, and then they’d turn around and attack just as hard as if i’d done nothing. Unsatisfying.

I don’t need to know their exact stats, but I like (for example) having a system where you know a human’s health ranges from 6 to 10, and a gun does at least 3 damage, so you can be pretty sure if you shoot him four times he’s down. None of this, “Well, he’s a 12th level accountant so he has 78 hp”.

Maybe I mostly just dislike how vague HP is in D&D.

But it was probably mostly a GM issue.

I’m here to roleplay, not be told immediately whether or not I can take the dude.

I find it hard to roleplay when I don’t know what is in the world. Things that are very different (high level stuff, low level stuff) getting basically the same description is distracting. In real life, you get a lot of information looking at someone.

Maybe I’m still just annoyed at that game where we were all 10th level and so were the basic ass soldiers.

One of the things I realized I don’t like about DND (and close relatives) is it’s kind of hard to reason about the rules and risks. The narrative and numbers are too disjointed.

You might say the knight is hulking and looming ominously, but does that mean 20 AC, 50 HP, one attack at +6 for 1d8+4… Or does that mean 24 AC, 500 HP, three attacks at 1d8+8 (slashing) +1d4 (negative energy)? Could be either! The range of possibilities is largely unbound and arbitrary.

Compare with another system that like, constrains the numbers. Strength is rated 1-5. Melee is rated 1-5. This guy is pretty buff looking so he’s probably got a total of six. That guy’s a demigod and probably throws ten. Cool I can reason from that who I can take in a fight.

I think installing Linux exposes you to higher severity issues, like “now it won’t boot”. Once you get over that initial setup, it’s not much different than windows or apple.

If more computers came with it pre installed, it would be even easier for folks.

I think about half the time I’ve installed Linux it was fine. The other half were problems with esoteric solutions.

Still glad I made the switch.

Linux doesn’t really have the profit motives that lead to enshittification.

I guess a bigger entity could try to start charging for… something… Support, maybe, but that seems unlikely to take off.

Product owners say, "We want to change the site so users see a list of all the other users on their team with access to this project "

Okay. Do some thinking. Going to need the backend to return that information to the front end. Decide what URL that should be under (api/v1/projects/users, maybe?).

Now we make the backend actually do that. Create a new file for this endpoint. Update the routes file so that url points to this file. Write the handler class.

Does this endpoint take any particular input? We know who the caller is for free from the framework. We only want to return info about one project or all projects? Make that decision. Update URL if needed.

Write the code to get the other users on the projects in question. Maybe that’s SQL, but might also be ORM (code from a framework that generates SQL based on objects). Decide what information we actually need. Package that up and send it back. The specifics depend on language and framework.

Write automated tests for this. Make sure it works for

• 401 not logged in
• 403 asking about a project I don’t have permission for
• 404 asking about a user with no projects, or a project that doesn’t exist
• someone with 1 project
• someone with 2 projects
• someone with 10000 projects
• also consider what happens for 0, 1, 2, 10000 users on the project.

Realize this needs to paginate. Go back and change the handler code to do that.

Realize due to some quirk of how permissions work, someone can be on the project twice. Talk with the team about if we should just decide that here, or try to fix the root problem. Probably the former.

Add deduplication code, then, and test cases.

Open this up for code review.

Start the front end work.

Make a dummy page first and update your API calling code to know about this new route, assuming you don’t have that auto magically set up somehow. Make sure it calls it and gets a response.

Realize that staff users technically have access to every project in the system. Ask product if that’s how they want that to behave. If no, figure out what you all want that to do instead.

Do a bunch of react work to make the page pretty, put the response in the right UI elements with links to the right place. Realize the response you’re sending back makes building the links annoying because you didn’t send some part of it, so you’d need to make another request to the backend for every link. That sucks. Update the backend to include the user’s team-id that is for some stupid reason still in the URL. Comment on code review.

And now I’m tired of writing.

Edit: I hit submit before I was done. Finished now. Edit: fix typo

I’ve enjoyed bandcamp’s writeups. They seem to be written by real people.

I also sometimes peruse the “who else bought my favorite album this month?” listing. Find some gems and wild cards there.

Other people have good answers already. Chiefly to ask questions and talk through your reasoning.

But also I’ve noticed the difficulty of interview questions varies wildly. Some places would give dynamic programming problems I’m terrible at. Others would give trivial "find the largest number in this array of integers, in python. Don’t worry about efficiency. " problems.

There are dozens of us who preferred Vampire: The Requiem 2nd edition. Dozens!

I think there’s a certain kind of user who doesn’t really learn concepts, but rote actions. They click the start menu and then excel to open excel, but they don’t really understand that the start menu is an application launcher and Excel is an application that can be opened in other ways. It’s very one dimensional.

Then when something changes, like the application launcher is moved, they freak out. They don’t have a mental model.

That’s how my mother is, anyway. It’s all magic with no underlying coherent anything. Not sure how to fix that, because it usually comes up when they’re mad or scared, and that’s not a time anyone will learn.

I used to use the beginning of clutch’s psychic warfare. The first track is some low murdering, and then it comes in hard with X-ray visions. Always woke me right up.

I also used slothrust’s “like a child hiding behind your tombstone” for a while. That also starts a little quiet and then ramps up. Never hated the song, somehow. https://slothrust.bandcamp.com/track/like-a-child-hiding-behind-your-tombstone

Now I just have one of the default alarms and I kind of hate it.

A nightmare. I’ve never had anything quite that bad, but I’ve had plenty of work experience where management is making bad decisions and has no accountability.

My current role is hourly, so I’m happy to shut the laptop exactly 8 hours into the day. Pays a lot less, sadly.

This whole problem is such an archaic D&D-ism. Most other games provide strong guidance or even explicit rules about how to make a party that works.

Fate has the “phase trio” where you go around and make up as a group how your characters have a past together. None of this “everyone makes their dude in isolation” nonsense.

If you want DND with working rules, Pathfinder 2e is what people recommend. Not first edition. I’m not a huge fan since it’s still basically DND.

If you want a lightweight system that’s mostly about narrative, I’m a fan of Fate. But Fate is absolutely not a crunchy system, and it’s largely up to the group to agree on what makes sense. Like, if you want character differentiation you can lean on “aspects as permission” and it’s right there. (That is, stuff that’s true about your character permits you to try stuff. The barbarian can’t even try to decipher the runes, because nothing about his character implies he could do that. You can’t just blindly roll something. The wizard can try, because of course wizards know runes)

The core rules are free, but you can find books with more specifics. I think there’s a Dresden files book people like? They don’t provide a complex magic system in the core books, but it has some ideas and the toolkit book has more.

I also liked the chronicles of darkness games, but they’re generally all modern day occult. You can take the core rules and move them to fantasy, if you wanted. It’s pretty light and I like it more than DND in all the ways I care about.

Yeah, but have you tried to convince people of anything? They don’t care. They just want to do the thing with their friends. Any sort of “here’s a better game” is going to smash into “did i make a bad choice? i spent all this time and money on D&D and they’re saying it’s bad? now i feel bad. this other person is making me feel bad. they’re wrong and stupid”

Some people might on their own decide to try other games. A lot of them are just going to enjoy hanging out with their friends. (Have you talked to casual D&D players? The kind that don’t post on obscure websites. Their house rules are bizarre)

I would love for D&D to be a niche game that focused on retro dungeon crawling instead of the most popular RPG. I don’t think it’s going to happen.

It also bothers me when someone’s character has like 7 charisma, but the player still acts like the sales guy he is in real life.

I was playing a max charisma warlock and the wizard with his whole 13 charisma kept trying to lead all the conversations. Irritating.

Personally, I think D&D’s social skills are so bad they should just rip charisma out of the game. I’d rather they no-ass it than half-ass it.

One of the reasons I like Fate is it has tooling to avoid that kind of anti-climax without it feeling like an asspull.

The BBEG is sitting in his office and the players, through hard work and planning, get the jump on him. Their first attack roll is net +8 stress. That’s enough to kill almost anything! I as GM decide the BBEG is going to take a consequence (“Covered in Acid Burns” or whatever), and then concede.

Conceding is at the player level, not the character level. This is where you as a group decide on how the BBEG survives, but loses this scene. Maybe he teleports away, but leaves his computer unlocked. Maybe he drains the life force of his favorite second in command to save himself, damaging morale and loyalty. It’s up to the group.

Some people hate this style of play, and want to be told a story rather then tell one as a group. That’s fine. But it’s hard for me to take off the GM hat, so I like when players also have a lot of say in the story.

Ring of protection. Grants everyone around you protection in a fairly large radius. Might be useful for long range combat, maybe. Might also be useful to navigating certain environmental hazards.

Boots of Flying. They can fly, but only have a carry weight of a few pounds. If you’re more than say ten pounds, the little wings flap but gain no altitude. They are not autonomous. Might be useful in condunction with other magics to reduce weight.

Gauntlets of Ogre Might. Do not affect strength. They do tell you the odds of nearby ogres taking particular actions. They might do this, they might do that, and so on.

Hammer of Striking. Social bonuses when organizing labor. Combat bonuses only when near many allies.

Boots of Haste. Gain extra actions but large penalties to all checks. Haste makes waste. May be useful if combined with large bonuses or fixed outcomes (eg: DND diviner wizard).

I just assume big businesses are run by idiots.

If Microsoft had their shit together, they could’ve made something like Steam. That’s just printing money.

One of the guys I used to work with that was like that seems to have other hobbies. He likes riding his bike and learning guitar, playing video games, traveling Europe. But he’ll also just work though a weekend or on his vacation. I don’t get it.