Hey if it’s good enough for From software…

Look, this isn’t a diceocracy, its a dicetatorship. If they can’t roll right, perhaps they have no place in our society.

Lol, this is how I’ll eventually open source my game: completely new repo with one fresh checkin. No one will ever see how many curse words and diary-entry commit messages litter my fossil repo.

Arguably the first Dark Souls is one of these. Most of the classes push you towards shields as the cornerstone of defense. The studio felt like this overemphasis on shields was such a mistake they took 2 whole games (Bloodborne and Sekiro) in an almost entirely shield-free direction to teach players there were other ways.

Pyromancy (and magic in general) were also undervalued in DS1 initially due to how the game presents them. People eventually figured out that Pyro is so OP you don’t even need to use leveling with it to have an easy time.

But then I decided, I wrote my own solution, a thing of 1,600 lines of code, which is, yeah, it’s like thousands of times less than the competition.

And it works. It’s very popular. … I got 100 emails from people saying that it’s so nice that someone wrote a small piece of software that is robust, does not have dependencies, you know how it works.

But the depressing thing is, some of the security people in the field, they thought it was a lovely challenge to audit my 1,600 lines of code. And they were very welcome to do that, of course. And they found three major vulnerabilities in there.

He makes a ton of excellent points, but the succinct impact of this little example really hit for me. As someone who often rewrites things so that I can both understand and fully trust in what I’m depending on, it’s always good to be reminded that you literally can’t write 500 lines of code without a good chance of introducing a major vulnerability.

The tech stack is so dizzyingly high today, and with so many interlocking parts, it continually amazes me that anything at all functions even in the absence of hostile actors.

I’m following a few dozen, but as others have said, there’s little enough content that I just sort by Scaled and browse Everything. The Voyager app has an option to block all NSFW content (I wish it had the opposite for my alt account though! 😅) and I block non-nsfw communities that I don’t care about (like a lot of the sports team ones).

When I read the 4 Hour Work Week years ago it was exactly the same thing. Turns out the “secret” to getting rich has always been “get someone else to do your work for you for a pittance of the money you can make off that work.”

This would be a pretty amusing encounter I think.

Mage: “Uggghh… well I translated the inscription on the door. We have to resolve their quarrel to dispell the magic lock.”

Bard: “So hey fellas, my party and I saw you from across the dungeon…”

“So uh, did you remember to sheath your weapon after the last fight? Well, you didn’t explicitly say that you did…”

My partner got this from the library and we tried some out. Really good chilli! The man has a passion and he follows through on it!

Software devs for a long time would discuss “green field” development, which is a metaphor from constructing a building in an empty field: you start from nothing, and build all new. Most software devs prefer to write new code rather than try to learn the quirks and nuances of a large, already-existing pile of code, so “green field” is considered both desirable and often practically unattainable.

“Blue sky” is a similar concept but loftier. It isn’t just that you have an empty field waiting for you, you’ve got the infitie expanse of the clear blue sky: endless possibilities, unlimited creativity, etc. “Blue sky development” as a metaphor I think comes from designers, product managers, and other software-dev adjacent fields. It means thinking of ideas that are out of the box and unconstrained by historical limits.

That’s why everything is named that: execs and marketers love that kind of hollow promise. That anything is possible even though actually they’re almost always just clones of existing things whose greatest innovation is to loudly proclaim how new and innovative you are.

In the “Veins of the Earth” underdark setting for retro D&D, the author was clearly annoyed about this because they draw attention to the fine distinction between “Dark Vision” (which only monsters have) and “Infrared” or “Low Light” vision, which still give you some advantages underground but which both also require some kind of light source to work still.

POS I find very funny as I’m often working on Point-of-Sale equipment, and most of it is running Poorly Optimized Software, making the whole thing a Piece of Shit for the users.

Jraphical interchange format

I’ve seen that damn cart ride in Skyrim so many times that Ralof and Hadvar are basically family. I consider the alternative start mod an absolute requirement now.

I love Thief and Thief 2 but there are a few levels in there (Thieve’s Guild, Trace the Courier) that are pretty dull and uninteresting to replay. They’re the songs you’re still tempted to skip on otherwise perfect albums.

I hate group checks for this kind of thing. I mainly only use them for perception or knowledge checks (always fun when one person is oblivious). For group tests like stealth or athletics for a chase it’s probably better to either build a challenge out of it so other skills can apply and more checks balance the luck factor, or just let one player be skill leader and make the check with appropriate penalties if part of their challenge is managing the clanky loud orc in plate.

“Come on everyone, we have to solve this riddle! What if the missing Scepter of Glorificon is in there?”

“No we have to turn back! The lich ghost of the octo-king could be waiting for us, seeking revenge after we defeated him in his aquatic lair beyond time!”

“GM, I ask the old sage NPC if they know what’s past the riddle.”

Me, furiously scribbling notes and scratching things out: “Oh uh, they laugh heartily at your comments about the lich ghost. ‘Hohoho, the octo-king back so soon, that’s just ridiculous! But I know not what is beyond the door, the ancient prophicies say it is both what you most fear and desire…’”

This is probably the best way to generally handle this, but the OP is certainly the funnier option!

I also like to describe random monsters’ movement as “shambling” on occasion just to watch them hurl turn undead and other holy attacks at, like, an orc with a limp.

Say: “Interesting, why don’t you roll STAT and see?” Mean: “I have no idea, I’m improvising everything, why don’t you roll and we’ll see?”