Call the function from the if block.

Now your tests can more easily call it.

I think at my last job we did argument parsing in the if block, and passed stuff into the main function.

I saw this joke in 2007 from three panel soul https://www.threepanelsoul.com/comic/on-man-law

no different than taking a bunch of books you bought second-hand and throwing them into a blender.

They didn’t buy the books. They took them without permission.

This doesn’t seem like a good idea.

One, releasing should be easy. At my last job, you clicked “new release” or whatever on GitHub. It then listed all the commits for you. If you “need” an Ai to summarize the commits, you fucked up earlier. Write better commit messages. Review the changes. Use your brain (something the AI can’t do) to make sure you actually want all of this to go out. Click the button. GitHub runs checks and you’re done.

Most of the time it took a couple minutes at most to do this process.

This is pretty good advice. I’ve sort of stumbled into it a few times.

Sometimes I’d be like “ok so here’s the room. Blah blah blah details. What’re you doing?”

Andy will be like “I’m gonna check out that detail”

I’ll get like “cool. You all see Andy head over to that detail. Good?” And sort of pause there for a beat to see if anyone wants to interrupt or preempt.

I think the linked article is a generally better method as it’s more complete, but I think mine is a little faster. Especially if you have a couple passive players.

One of the bars by me has a DND group in the back.

There’s a “community center” also near me that lets people hang out in the basement, and there are rpg groups that meet there

They dont usually have benefits (eg: health insurance) or time off

They didn’t say, but like

• if they’re a criminal enterprise there’s no guarantee they’ll pay you
• my lawyer friend said i’d be exposed to criminal and civil problems
• you’re just helping some other corpo

This week I had two scams, too.

One just solicited me to do crimes. They wanted me to interview on behalf of other people. Just came out and said that’s the deal

The other seemed a little off in its email, so I contacted the company directly and they said the position doesn’t exist, and they didn’t email me.

It’s a hellscape

yeah, it really depends on the group. Some people love learning new stuff. Some people are like absolutely phobic of it.

Though I have a half-serious hypothesis: Some players are so bad at rules, the kind of player that asks every week “what do I roll to attack again?”, that you could just change the system without telling them and they wouldn’t notice and do any worse.

Though that’s less true for systems that require creative player buy-in like Fate. D&D in the “I move and attack” mode can be phoned in easier, I think.

I do find it puzzling when people homebrew and tinker and modify D&D 5e to fix all the things they don’t like, but they don’t want to just change to another system. It’s mostly harmless, at least.

I think I would take a different route, because big randomness isn’t fun for me.

Have you played Fate? It’s very good, and free. It has “stress” that’s kind of like hit points, but it also has this idea of “consequences”. When you take a hit but don’t have enough free stress to cover it, you can take a consequence instead. Stress is easy to recover, but a consequence sticks around until you get treatment.

As I said, I don’t really like big randomness. In Fate, it’s always up to the player if they want to take a consequence or not. Sometimes the alternative is the character just gets taken out. But if you do take a consequence , it’s up to the table to negotiate what it might be. Fall off a ledge? Could be a broken leg. Got stabbed? Could be an infection. Bothered by a ghost? Now you have a fear of the dark.

To port this over to DND , I’d add three “consequences” boxes on the sheet- minor , moderate, and severe. Each one could be used to soak one hit. The minor one could be 25% of their hp, the moderate 50%, and the severe 75%. When you take a hit that’s less than the box, you can mark the box instead of it going to hp. Probably tweak the numbers a bit since I just made those up. If you want to be even harsher, lower the max HP some, too.

This probably would be a mess, but I started typing it out and don’t want to just throw it away.

But I do recommend looking at how other systems do stuff for ideas, and stealing them

Also make sure your players are into whatever ideas you’re pitching.

Anyone entering through web development. If you’re self taught or did a “coding boot camp”, it might be the only language you’ve used. A lot of places use it for backend stuff now, too

I saw that one too and thought similarly!

I don’t know about “fine”. It has a lot of weird stuff baked in. Hoisting. Unexpected type coercion. Too many ways to loop over something and I always forget which one is which. “There’s more than one way to do it” is kind of a recurring problem, come to think of it. Several function declaration syntaxes. Dot notation AND bracket notation for objects.

Also it will forever bother me that object keys aren’t quoted.

const foo = "hello"; const bar = { foo: "world" }

That should be, in my mind, { "hello": "world" } . It’s not. It’s { "foo": "world" }

But if you want to do that, you need to do const bar = { [foo]: world }. Which looks like your key is an array with one entry, a string with a value of “foo”

You also end up learning a whole framework, with its syntax and idioms, every couple years. Angular. React. Redux. Whatever.

There’s also a lot of people who have never used anything else, and want to use javascript for everything.

Javascript is basically D&D. Wildly popular. Full of legacy jank. People try to use it for anything even though there are better or more specialized tools.

The level scaling in Oblivion and Skyrim are worse, true. It’s kind of impressive how bad an idea and execution the level scaling in Oblivion was. They place enemies based on your total level, so if you leveled up from non-combat skills then you’ll have a bad time. It makes exploring kind of pointless, because you’ll never find anything interesting. And then there were the bandits wearing thousands of GP worth of equipment mugging you for 100gp.

one of the original developers recently came out and said it was a huge mistake: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/elder-scrolls-4-oblivions-level-scaling-was-a-mistake-says-designer-so-why-is-it-in-the-remaster

In morrowind, not much scales with you so it matters less. You can’t raise a skill above its stat, so you can kind of paint yourself into a corner with bad leveling. (Though I think you can use fortify-attribute to get around that at trainers)

Morrowind’s combat system is… if you’re feeling generous: weird. if you’re not: bad.

You click on an enemy and it rolls dice to see if you hit. Your chance to hit is determined by your skills and stats, and your fatigue. yes, fatigue. If you’ve been sprinting and your fatigue is empty, you’ll probably miss more. This combos badly with the glacial movement speed of the game.

You also want to hold the attack button a little longer to do more damage.

If you start with a good axe skill (like 50), you can often hold to attack and knock people over, then finish them off. You might want to set “always use best attack” to true in the options- weapons typically have like a few moves, but one is usually better.

The “bound weapon” spells are also good- they’re kind of cheap, and give you a high damage weapon that also boosts your skill by 10. There’s a merchant that sells a couple weapons that turn into bound weapons in Balmora.

Blocking is also just a dice roll. I think it’s better to just get a giant two-hander and kill them faster, but opinions differ.

Also fun: If you damage someone’s strength to 0, they can’t move. If you have a spear, your reach is probably longer than theirs. You can kill almost anything this way.

also, while i’m here, the native leveling system is bonkers. You gain levels when your major skills improve. You get three stat increases based on any skills that went up. You can get up to +5 for each stat increase. This is not retroactive. If you level up and pick a +2 in strength, that’s what you get. This creates some utterly bizarre incentives. People would pick skills they don’t want to use as their major skills so they can control leveling, and pay trainers to bump skills tied to stats they want to increase. It’s horrible. You can kind of ignore it, but you’ll be much weaker than you would be if you play into it.

Reminds me of my first big success at work. There was a weekly report that people wanted generated - it showed how much like each operator had done, how much each warehouse had shipped, how many orders we lost from stock issues, etc. it was a low tech company, so they had someone going through the limited UI, looking up each thing one at a time, copying it into excel, and making the report that way. It took hours, and was error prone from stuff like mis-pasting or accidentally skipping a user.

Took a look at it and was like you could definitely automate this. Used some very primitive scripting to pull all the info out of the system’s UI and dump it into a TSV. Took like a couple minutes to run it, import into excel, and add the colors. But it was super janky because it was manipulating the UI like a user instead of, like, directly querying whatever underlying data store it was running on.

Still, management was impressed. I later learned no one actually looked at the report most weeks, so that took some of the wind out of my sails.

This is an ancient joke but they replaced the original pigeon with a blue thing instead. :confused:

I recently reinstalled BL3 for a bit and I think I spent more time downloading it (like 100gb for unknown reasons) than I did playing it.

The pacing is bad. Too much walking around or listening to people talk, not enough doing stuff.

The itemization is kind of bad. Like yeah there’s millions of guns but most of them are trash, and looking through a dozen to compare [damage, clip size, reload speed, etc] in that fucking awful UI is tedious.

The gameplay is kind of bad. Most things don’t really react to being shot. It’s just shield and HP sponges.

They haven’t really changed much since like the first game launched in like 2009. That’s like 15 years. Still basically the same game.

It’ll probably sell a bunch of copies because of the brand, and a lot of people are low information, but I don’t think it’ll be good.