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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • An advanced technique: ask your players to make shit up.

    Like, the players decided to go to the wizard university the wizard PC graduated from. So I ask him, “what’s their entrance hall like?” and let him just riff on it for a while. Players feel more engaged with the world, and it’s a little less work for me.

    Warlock is trying to commune with his patron. I ask, “what is your patron usually like?” and the player is delighted to describe “the great sculpin” in detail. This then inspires me further.

    Note that some players are very much “just tell me a story” and don’t want any input, and won’t like this. Some players are also shy and don’t think well on their feet. And some players are just really bad at staying on theme. But if you know your players , this can be a powerful technique.


  • jjjalljs@ttrpg.networktoScience Memes@mander.xyzplace yer bets
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    23 hours ago

    Everyone saying “they can evacuate” clearly doesn’t remember how bad the covid response was.

    There will be anti-space conspiracy theorists. The ownership class would demand people continue working until the last possible minute (and beyond). It would be politicized, because some people are unbelievably stupid, cruel, and selfish, and enough people are so stupid they’ll buy in.

    Now, if we could make the meteor fall on a location occupied solely by the people who don’t believe in science…



  • Musk seems like the kind of D&D player who would

    • Build a horrible character (frankly impressive in 5e, which is pretty simple in terms of choices to make at the start). Like, a bard with 8 charisma, or a rogue with no dex
    • Or, pay someone else to build their character, and then not know how to play it.
    • And/or induce the other players to murder him (in the game)



  • I’m reminded of the abyssal words in Elden Ring’s expansion. There are signs that tell you “Don’t let them see you!” and “You have to hide and run!”. You find an area with some tall grass and some creepy eye-monsters. And sure enough, if they see you they come running at you. They’ll knock you over, grab you, and explode your head.

    Clearly you’re supposed to sneak by them.

    But…

    spoiler

    You can also parry their attack, and then just kill them.

    Or just fucking book it and run past them, but that’s way harder.




  • I’m not sure what you mean. There aren’t really a lot of “quests” in gw2.

    There’s the main story, which is a green marker on your map. That’s always there (unless you turn it off or finish it)

    There’s orange markers for nearby events. That’s like “zombies are attacking! Save the town!” or “help these kids pick apples” or whatever. They’re just things that happen in the world and, to a limited degree, change the world state. Like an area might be full of toxic vines until an event finishes successfully, or a merchant might only sell items after his mission succeeds.

    There’s red markers, which are basically the same as orange, except they tend to be world events and not local.

    And then there are collections, which are kind of like quests. They’re not super advertised. They’re kind of of “get these achievements for a special reward”. Sometimes NPCs will give you one- like “go find all my favorite fish” or whatever. They’re optional, but sometimes fun and sometimes have good rewards. Like if you finish the one where you get most of the achievements for one chunk of the game, you get a max-stats accessory that all your characters can share.

    Anyway. Long reply. Nothing is really beamed into your head, no.








  • Many things. I mean, you could hack a lot of stuff into Excel but generally

    SQL has foreign keys and integrity checks. You can make it so like if you delete a user it automatically cascades to delete other rows like their addresses.

    You can prevent someone from entering the wrong type of data in particular columns. This one’s an integer and that one’s text.

    It’s designed to work on larger scales. Excel stops at 1 million rows per spreadsheet, unless my search just gave me AI slop.

    You can do queries, for selecting as well as updating and deleting. You can join tables.

    It’s much easier for other applications (such as a website) to talk to a SQL database

    You can do transactions.

    There’s a lot. That’s just off the top of my head.


  • Ehh. They haven’t really abused their position. They’re popular.

    It would be something else if they were buying up competitors like Facebook and Google do. Part of how they maintain their dominance is buying out anyone that competes. Notice how Google kind of sucks nowadays? They’re not really competing on merit anymore.

    But at the same time, steam could turn around tomorrow and be like “mandatory $39.99/mo subscription fee” and it would have an outsized impact on the sector.


  • I use pycharm at work for most things. Work paid for it. It has some nice stuff i like. I’m sure other editors do all of this, too, but nothing’s been causing me enough pain to switch

    • Database integration. Little side panel shows me the tables, and I can do queries, view table structure, etc, right here
    • Find usages/declaration is pretty good. Goes into library code, too.
    • The autocomplete is pretty good. I think they have newfangled AI options now, but the traditional introspection autocomplete has been doing it for me.
    • Can use the python interpreter inside the docker container
    • The refactor functions are pretty good. Rename, move, etc
    • Naive search is pretty good. Can limit it to folders, do regex, filter by file name, etc

    It does have multiple cursors but I’ve rarely needed that.

    I use sublime for quick note taking. Mostly I like that it has syntax highlighting, and it doesn’t require me to explicitly save a tab for it to stay open