I assume the person who made the video did more than just read the cited papers, but added some of their own analysis and commentary on top. Like, for any paper that cites sources you cannot get the its meaning merely by reading the cited sources. That’s absurd.

Presumably you thought the video’s content was worthwhile, because you linked it instead of the papers directly (which aren’t even about DND).

Video is a shitty medium for many use cases, but is popular because it is monetized more, and many people are only semi-literate.

I don’t know who or what SciShow is. i guess it’s good they linked their sources that’s not really the contention.

I also am really tired of whole ass videos that could be a three paragraph blog post.

I’ve been pushing to add some basic checks on PR, and people are reluctant. There’s one repo that I’m code owner on so I spent the like 15 minutes to apply a code formatter and add a GitHub action to check. But on the main repo people are dragging their heels. I’m like just pick ruff or black and do it. It’s going to take like 10 minutes. I’m not asking for us to go crazy and add automated tests right now, but can we at least get something to verify the python code is syntactically correct?

The other day something went through code review until I looked at it and saw there was an extra (, and that shit wouldn’t even run. I’m like please please add an automated check. I’ll do it. Please.

I think a lot of people just aren’t familiar with how other places do software. This is the same place that was ssh’ing into prod and making changes right on the machine until like this month.

Mint is fine. I went with pop!_os because at the time mint didn’t play well with my hardware.

Make sure you test things from the install live disk before you commit. Internet access, displays, audio should all work.

I’m kind of bummed no one at my job really does code reviews seriously. I don’t really get any feedback, so it’s hard to improve.

That’s also probably why the older code is an idiosyncratic mess of mutations and "oh yeah you need this config file that’s not in source control " and “oh sorry I guess I hard coded that file path, huh?”

Under the proposed settlement agreement, RealPage admitted to no wrongdoing and faced no financial penalties.

What a fucking joke.

And as always, Ars has a significant number of boot lickers in the comments. At least they’re mostly down voted to oblivion.

There was a website where users could request something or other, like a PDF report. Users had a limited number of tokens per month.

The client would make a call to the backend and say how many tokens it was spending. The backend would then update their total, make the PDF, and send it.

Except this is stupid. First of all, if you told it you were spending -1 tokens, it would happily accept this and give you a free token along with your report.

Second of all, why is the client sending that at all? The client should just ask and the backend should figure out if they have enough credit or not.

ls never asks you to create an account or to update.

Don’t give anyone ideas.

“Pay $2.99/mo to see hidden files!”

6th grade is reading for plot. It’s able to read the story and understand that the hobbits brought the ring to Mordor, and Aragorn fought in Gondor.

Anything about symbols, themed, subtext, unreliable narrators all comes later.

Yeah I would use python and pytest, probably.

You need to decide what you expect to be a passing case. Known keys are all there? All values in acceptable range? Do you have anything where you know exactly what the response should be?

How many endpoints are there?

Personally I feel like SQL syntax is upside down, and things are used before they are defined.

SELECT 
a.id -- what the fuck is a?
, a.name
, b.city -- and b??
from users a -- oh 
join city b on a.id = b.user_id -- oh here's b

I’d expect it to instead be like

From users a
join city b on a.id = b.user_id
SELECT
a.id,
a.name,
b.city

I can see why you might feel that way. Playing in that mode still has some properties of roleplaying- you’re often focused on one character and thinking about the world through their perspective - but you’re not trying to be them the whole time.

Maybe it’s like being an actor and director at the same time, for a film or play? You drop into the character but also zoom out for the bigger picture. I don’t think anyone would say like “Branagh wasn’t acting because he was also directing”

I don’t agree with “can’t accomplish both at once”, but this is a reasonable thing to disagree on. It can definitely be a mode of play people don’t enjoy!

I feel like there’s two poles of the RPG experience. At one end, there’s the writer’s room “let’s tell an awesome story together”. At the other, there’s “I am my character and I am in the world”.

I am super far in the writer’s room direction. I don’t want to “immerse” in my character. I want to tell a cool story about my character. So for me, when I try to jump onto a moving train and flub the roll, having input into what happens is great. I like being able to say “what if I land and roll and my backpack falls, so I lose all my stuff?”, or “what if I crash through the window of the wrong car, and it’s like a room full of security goons having dinner??”. If the GM just unilaterally does that, by contrast, it feels bad to me. I like having input.

It’s probably no surprise I GM more than play.

I imagine at the other end of the spectrum, thinking about that stuff gets in the way of trying to experience the character.

A lot of those places suck and they’re not going to turn into vibrant cultural centers with social services quickly.

I think charm effects were moved to rituals, from a quick search.

https://dnd4.fandom.com/wiki/Call_of_Friendship for example.

It makes sense to me to move the non-combat spells into their own thing (ie: rituals). Details like should they take 10 minutes or 10 seconds can be debated. I think you need to compare 3e’s Charm spell to rituals for a fair comparison. They seem pretty similar to me.

5e and 3e often have this unpleasant (to me) tension around like “I could solve this problem with a 3rd level spell slot. I could just fly over the chasm. But… then if I need fireball I won’t have it later. So let’s do it the mundane, slow, boring, way that doesn’t use magic.”. Rituals were a decent solution for that.

What kind of evil?

Power fantasy of abuse and subjugation?

Have them play vampires or demons. Awaken from their slumber in a small town and go about setting up a cult and securing their safety. Make thralls out of people. Add some sort of mechanic like “eating someone’s soul gives you a stat boost” so mechanically they’re rewarded for cruelty. Have NPCs beg for their life. Have some sell out their neighbors and loved ones for favor. Let the players kill them anyway.

Maybe some heroes show up to fight them and free the people. Maybe it’s just two hours of crushing limited resistance and making their temple.

I’m getting old and senile but I don’t remember a lot of clever use of magic in 3e. I know there’s a lot of jokey posts about it in 5e, but often to the tune of “I cast create water IN HIS LUNGS LOLOLOL”, and then people go “that’s not how the spell works”. 5e also has weird interactions and limitations like sneak attack or smite unarmed, or Eldritch blast and objects.

You mentioned the zeitgeist and I think that’s actually the key. When 4e came out a lot of 3e grognards didn’t like it, but casual players also didn’t like it because it was still kind of crunchy, and you had to make choices that could lead to a bad character.

5e came out and is vastly simplified. Now there’s a lot of players who would never touch 3e or 4e playing, because it’s easy and kind of a shallow game mechanically, so the online sentiment is different. More positive. Also a lot of the grognards have aged out. Without those new players, I feel like people would be repeating “5e is baby’s first RPG. It sucks” the way people said 4e is an MMO, it sucks.

My argument is that 4e has some dubious similarities to video games, but it was a loud minority and then bandwagon jumpers that cemented the idea. Without that loud minority, I think a lot of people who came to 4e as it was would have enjoyed it fine. People who dismissed it as “an MMO” would not have drawn that conclusion.

The 5-min adventuring day is more of a “poor GM management” problem than anything. If time effectively stands still when the PC’s rest, of course they’ll rest at every opportunity.

I think it’s partly poor GM management , but it’s also what players want clashing with what DND-likes are. Players want to use their cool powers. The game wants them to save them for when it “matters”. There’s no squaring that. So that’s why you get players blowing all their cool powers in the first couple scenes, and then wanting to rest. The GM can add consequences (eg: the villains plot advances), but that’s punishing players for how they want to play.

There are some players who truly, sincerely, naturally enjoy the resource management aspects. They are a minority. People pick wizard to do wizard stuff, not to use a crossbow for three hours.

In my personal opinion, player’s choices only feel important if they have real consequences

I am inclined to agree. One of the games I like, Fate, has a mechanic literally named Consequences. It’s still pretty open ended. Players make up consequences as seem appropriate, rather than looking them up in a book. It’s up to the table to enforce them. If you took a consequence “broken arm”, you have to remember that means you can’t swing your greatclub around like before.

I’m not sure I’ve seen a lot of people trying to weasel their skills in Fate. I’ve had “sure, your best skill is Fight so you can totally body slam the bouncer to get into the club, but then you’ll have body slammed a bouncer and people react appropriately”.

I’m not sure what your advice for making crunchier systems work for non-crunchy players would be. I tried to do Mage and the one player that never really learned the rules was always lost and frustrated. They had a strong power set but they didn’t understand it, so every challenge didn’t work. I didn’t want to have someone else back seat driving them, but they didn’t understand how to solve even problems tailored to their character’s strength. And then they didn’t understand the tradeoffs of the different options.

I’ve heard nothing but good things about Pathfinder 2e. I initially ignored it because I really disliked 1st edition.

I really intensely dislike powers-per-day and the five minute adventuring day, but I think PF2e has less of that?

The players available to me are probably more of a lightweight narrative game crew, though.