How do you feel about tracking equipment and encumbrance?

Are these two different things to anyone else? “My hoodlum has a knife, some lockpicks, and a lucky charm” is different than “I’m carrying 12 of 50 pounds for light encumbrance”

Which should be prioritized more in a campaign: realism or drama?

Also really depends on genre, heh.

What has the more authority: GM rulings or game rules?

I put rulings but that’s because “I’d love to have fun but the book says no” is kind of stupid. But I do not really like when the GM unilaterally, capriciously, changes things. I like having a workable mental model of how the game works. One that doesn’t include the GM’s mood.

I had the same thought on a lot of these. It depends

Maybe an unpopular opinion, but DND doesn’t do Star Wars well. There’s no adventuring day in the source fiction, really. Jedi are hard to model- they either shine too bright or don’t live up to the fiction. Force powers don’t really map to existing DND systems. Class+Level is very coarse, which makes it hard to model some concepts. DND is almost entirely a combat game, but I guess Star wars is mostly fighting so you won’t feel the absence of other systems that much.

I’m sure it’ll be make some people happy. The previous d20 Star wars games had their fans. I just don’t think it’s something I’d enjoy, and it’s a shame this is going to suck the air out of star wars tabletop game options.

A good post.

I personally find DND unsatisfying for many reasons (little to no degree of success, static magic system that encourages hoarding, the primary defense is all or nothing avoidance, very coarse progression, some character concepts are simply not representable, etc)

But what is even more annoying than that is when players respond with “but you can just change the rules!”. I know! That’s true of any pen and paper game! It’s not some unique property of DND. But sometimes I don’t want to do the work of designing a system, and I almost never want to play some stranger’s pre-alpha homebrew.

This supports my hypothesis that most players “playing” DND could easily swap to some other rule system and not even know. Many of them would probably be happier in other systems.

I love mage, but its magic is so involved and powerful I wouldn’t want to use it in a game unless everyone was a mage. You don’t really want one players options to be “I hit him with my club” and the others to be boundless.

Awakening 2nd edition was really good, imo, but I never actually got to play Ascension

I used nWoD for fantasy games. The core dice pool system works pretty well, and few things are tightly coupled to any setting in particular.

I mostly don’t like d20, so when someone tells me they’re doing a game about secret vampire societies in it, I’m a lot more disappointed than if they ported a system I like or am neutral on. Also 5th edition in particular makes a lot of assumptions about how things work.

Sometimes I still see job postings that are like “MUST KNOW OBJECT ORIENTED PROGRAMMING” and I’m wondering who in 2026 isn’t at least passably familiar with it.

But then again I also see job posts that are like “must know Java or JavaScript”

Sure, could be. They didn’t have any automated checks, and I saw errors like “that’s too many parenthesis” and “you’re trying to use a library you didn’t add to the dependencies list” sail through.

I feel sorry for you and hope you cna find more fulfilling work that will let you grow, but I dont’t know what the job market is like right now

Where I work, there’s really no emphasis on code quality or testing. There’s also like no mentorship or senior developers leading the way.

They hired a guy with 1-2 years of experience and I feel really bad for him. Not only is he learning very little, he’s learning actively bad patterns. No one is teaching him about automated testing. Code reviews are just “you skim it. Don’t spend more than 30 minutes”.

Management of course loves LLMs and wants more usage.

So as a senior, you could abstain. But then your junior colleagues will eventually code circles around you, because they’re wearing bazooka-powered jetpacks and you’re still riding around on a fixie bike

Lol this works in a way the author probably didn’t intend. They are wearing extremely dangerous tools that were never really a great idea. They’ll code some circles, set their legs on fire, and crash into a wall.

I didn’t like the last few GMs decisions and calls, so I don’t play with them anymore.

“Unilateral” GMing is completely necessary to the style of play and opens up player creativity and engagement in the ways I discussed in other comments.

I don’t think a unilateral GM and the mother-may-I it implies are the only way to get player creativity and engagement.

They want to test themselves against an organic, immersive world where their actions have consequences, good or bad. You cannot get that experience from collaborative storytelling games,

Maybe?

Imagine a scene where the players are trying to jump from one roof top to another to escape pursuit. It’s a pretty long jump, and there aren’t explicit rules in this game for jumping distances. The GM says to roll the dice. On a good roll, they’ll make it. The dice come up Bad.

In one mode of play, the GM unilaterally decides what happens. Maybe you fall and get hurt. Maybe you land in a pile of trash. It’s all on them, and you have to accept it to keep playing. The actions have consequences.

In the mode I prefer, the player has more of a say. Maybe they suggest they succeed at a cost. They can offer “What if I make it across, but lose my backpack?” and the group can accept it, or say that’s not an appropriate cost. They can also fail, and offer up ideas for what that looks like. The group achieves consensus, and the story moves on. The actions have consequences here, too.

That first mode, where the GM just dictates what happens and you take it? I hate it. I want either clear rules we agreed to before-hand, or a seat at the table for deciding ambiguous outcomes.

We don’t have to play together. Many people want to immerse in their character and any sort of meta-game mechanics (like succeed-at-a-cost) ruin it for them. Some people love metal and some people love jazz. Neither’s better than the other.

I probably shouldn’t have posted in an OSR thread knowing I dislike the genre.

I mean, terrible GMs will be terrible no matter what system they are running.

True, but I think osr games encourage unilateral GMing, which encourages terrible behavior.

The company’s CEO, Michael Kustermann, announced a new policy where customers order food and drink on their phones,

Michael Kustermann should be fired, his compensation clawed back, and he should be barred from ever holding another decision making role for the rest of his life.

Hand in hand with this is, as the above commenter mentions, “rulings over rules” which emphasizes the GM making decisions about how player actions play out in the world rather than looking for mechanics in a rulebook.

It’s kind of funny but I really like how Fate is open ended, but absolutely hate it in OSR games. I think because OSR games often feel unilateral and top down from the GM, and I don’t enjoy that. Reminds me of teenage games where the DM would be like “you’re crippled now because the orc hit your leg” just because they said so, and your only options are deal with it or quit.

I also never play in the “I am my character!” mode. I’m more of the writer’s room style where we’re writing a story together, so it doesn’t take me out of the scene to be like “what if my succeed-at-a-cost roll means I get the window open, but wake up every dog in the house?”.

One of my friends still uses google hangout to talk with me. I’m the only person they talk to on there. I ask them every so often to switch to signal. It’s, like, trivial to install. it’s free. They won’t do it. It’s too much.

I do not understand ADHD depression brain and I want to be kind but I’m also like “just give me your phone I’ll do it”.

I’ve never really been into random tables. Like,

I want to see more wizards and dragons and shit! 2.78% is way too low to see these cool guys on the end of the table,

So just put more wizards and dragons in. You don’t need the dice’s permission.

I guess they can be helpful if you’re out of ideas, but then you just need a list.

It’s not really that different from like

my_get_mock = Mock(side_effect=Some exception("oh no"))
result = some_func(http_getter=my_get_mock)

There’s many ways of writing bad code and tests, but mocks and patches aren’t always a bad tool. But sure, you can definitely fuck things up with them.

Javascript has mocking with jest: https://jestjs.io/docs/mock-functions

There’s an example there of mocking our axios (a common library for network requests, a la python requests)

It’s been a long time since I’ve used java, but mockito exists: https://site.mockito.org/javadoc/current/org/mockito/Mockito.html#2

(Usage note for anyone unfamiliar, but despite the name java and JavaScript are radically different languages.)