I’m reminded of a very passionate post I once saw about how tiktok dances have made some people afraid to dance because they aren’t as good as people who literally live in dance training camps to factory -produce dance videos. Anyway, the plea was to just ignore that and dance! People largely have an innate desire to move when they hear music, and its OK to just vibe with it.

The internet has got people thinking that everything they make must be step 1 of their plan to monetize that thing and release it for global consumption. Write stories for yourself, letter for friends, and poems for no one! Dance no matter who is looking. Make art everywhere. And for goodness’ sake, play table top games with friends, make up stories, and let yourself get wildly obcessed about it! It’s yours! It’s ok to just love the story your friends are telling and to talk about with people, and you don’t even have to lament that your friend group isn’t charming enough to carry the podcast of your game.

I’m a big fan of the "wisdom " check before players do something that seems, to me, completely stupid. Like, hey, before you set out to storm the castle, roll your highest knowledge skill.

Tactics, architecture, history, etc, all good. But any success on any skill (or even, literally, Wisdom if nothing else) gets you a little hint that this is a terrible idea.

“OK well, as a Baker, you understand that the huge wagon pulling 500 loaves of bread into the castle means there must be an enormous amount of guards. Since you got a natural 20 on your Cooking check, you can estimate the number precisely to around 150. Even if they weild the baguettes as weapons, you are certain they will defeat you.”

And then, most parties I’ve played with will then begin formulating their plan to sneak in on the bread wagon, which is a much funnier story. Or they’ll complain that they meant the druid should cause a storm to distract the guards or something like that. It’s kind of amazing how often these bad plans arise from a miscommunication.

Oh you have no idea how deep my paranoia on this goes! We’ve been implementing Dynamics 365 at my office, MS made software that manages your entire business from the accounting ledgers on out. Copilot AI is everywhere in it, trying to encourage you to teach it how to do things.

MS wants to offer the next generation of knowledge worker. No more accountants, no more senior managers of inventories and all those many miscellaneous titles it takes to run a company. Certainly no more technical support. AI is going to do it all. MS wants to tell every business how to do business.

I hadn’t heard of this book, but I’m entirely unsurprised to see that this is the same duo that made Veins of the Earth. The monsters in that book are so, so delightfully fucked up and this has that same energy. Have to add this one to my wishlist.

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.

People in this thread apparently aren’t paranoid enough or have some ridiculously optimistic beliefs about the US and surveillance policing.

Here’s an article about how the police in my city (New Orleans) worked a secret deal with spy company Palantir to consolidate data from numerous sources to create a crime-prediction system that we’ve been the unwitting beta testers of. https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/27/17054740/palantir-predictive-policing-tool-new-orleans-nopd

And here’s a page from my own city government bragging about the same: https://nola.gov/next/homeland-security/topics/real-time-crime-center-en/

I can’t find the story now, but at one time (less than 10 years ago), Palantir and NOPD were working a deal that would require the CCTV feeds from every bar and restaurant in the city to be fed into the “crime control center” which would have instantly made NOLA the most surveilled city on earth. The citizens voted down the bill that would have made it happen, but there was no technical limitation. I’m not convinced they don’t have secret access to them anyway.

Police can also subpoena camera operators for footage. This happens with Ring doorbells, Amazon is only too happy to hand over footage from the camera on your front door to the police.

If you are buying cameras for yourself, any video that goes “to the cloud” is now government property. Very few companies have the desire or power to deny their host government’s or their police’s access to the video. If the cloud is in the USA then our spys already have it. Keep your video local or sync it through your own networks.

If the camera is attached to a business though, you should just assume that government can look through it.

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.

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.

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.”

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

Tembra, his music downloaded. Darmok and Jalad with the AUX cable.

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.

D&D is starting to look like the pattern of even-numbered releases being slumps. 2nd was the end of TSR, then 3rd was the Renaissance of the game. So successful it kept Paizo and others in business for years after it’s “replacement” by the controversial 4th edition. I could see his argument being the case, with a closed off 6th edition leading to division and sales slumps. But it does lay the ground work for a flourishing indie scene to set up the eventual 7th edition, which maybe gets back to being open and unifying.

Or the division leads to lots of minor successes. The future is ever unknown.

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?”