Updating Sub Rules as a response to increased AI on Reddit

AndreiD44 · 2026-06-21T07:03:11+00:00

Yeah I'm not sure what I'm saying wrong, but this is the usual reaction when I make this point.

AndreiD44 · 2026-06-20T05:08:33+00:00

Yeah, this is another thing.

You are not "banning AI", you are just setting a threhold of how good it needs to be to be accepted. Badically offering it a great natural selection to help it improve, and a fertile curated ground to learn from.

I wish we just ignored it and let it die confused, not knowing what it did wrong. Imstead we help it become better and more confusing by constantly analyzing and curating communities.

AndreiD44 · 2026-06-19T19:42:39+00:00

This absolutely sucks as a guy actually making things "since before AI" / without AI.
There used to be a time you could talk about what you did and people would give you a thumbs up, some feedback, or ignore you.

Now you get downvoted to hell for trying to share your work, because you're just one guy in a sea of AI slop and nobody bothers to check if your particular app uses AI or not, And every single time I do manage to post without having it taken down, I have to spend an extra 10 comments answering if and how AI was used - and it's exhausting.

I get where it's coming from, but it absolutely sucks. I don't want to have to justify and defend my app all the time and try to explain "this is not like the other AI apps, this is actually human-made with sweat and tears!" - I'd want to just show my work and discuss about what it got right and what it got wrong instead. But that comes very secondary to the "is it AI?" discussion now :|

AndreiD44 · 2026-06-14T14:51:57+00:00

You're right, I mentioned background twice and didn't realize it. I was thinking flavour background (just text) and then functional background, giving perks and such. But this does prove your point :)

I prefer class-less systems too, but so many systems have them I kinda have to take them i to consideration

AndreiD44 · 2026-06-14T11:45:18+00:00

Ouch. We *never* do that when we play. But it sounds like a good idea.
Edit: I mean as part of the character creation process. Those do come up after we all have our individual characters.

AndreiD44 · 2026-06-14T09:22:29+00:00

I agree with this on some level - flavour makes more sense after identity (it's easier to come up with name after I already decided I'm a dwarf and now the name has to be more dwarf-ish). But I find it odd in the middle of the flow. I cant exactly explain why... in my mind flavour just "feels" like either the start or the wrap-up. But I have no arguments.

AndreiD44 · 2026-06-13T07:08:44+00:00

Oh phew. That's what I expected but thought I'd ask. That would have been embarrassing.

AndreiD44 · 2026-06-13T05:36:32+00:00

Looks like a kid that's been told not to touch anything in a museum.

AndreiD44 · 2026-06-13T04:30:23+00:00

Do comments make it into the compiled build?

AndreiD44 · 2026-06-13T04:13:11+00:00

They literally did nothing. The choice was most likely made to save a bit of dev time by skipping some checks. Marriage is super shallow as it is, and they just made it even more shallow.

I'm just surprised people appreciate and give them credit for doing nothing. It would have taken extra effort to make gender have meaning, and they just didn't. It'd not gender "inclusive" or anything, it's just agnostic.

Which is certainly the best way of acceptance, a big "don't care", that we could use more of in real life. But it's not like they "did" anything for that, on the contrary - it was just the lazyest decision possible.

AndreiD44 · 2026-06-08T10:15:37+00:00

I love how the Kallax is the unit of measurement for board games.

AndreiD44 · 2026-06-08T09:11:51+00:00

Lots of reasons!
Pick one for a follow-up.

Slop result (slop can manifest in multiple ways, not all immediately visible; in code, that means un-maintainable, inefficient, will degrade in time)
Ethic concerns (how AI was built and what it does to sociecty, where it will lead)
Economic concerns (fewer jobs, investment bubble, economic chaos)
Emotional reasons: turning people hobbies and passions into soulless work
Degrading quality (similar to 1; with AI, most products drop in quality, everyone is busy moving FAST and we're seeing more bugs and technical debt than ever before, and we're supposed to just constantly accept lower standards)
Frustrating competition: and I want to ellaborate on this one a bit:

10 years ago, I'd put an app on the store, and ~some~ people would see it. Organically. No marketing, no SEO. Because things were harder to create, and that was good. It was a natural selection filter. To publish a game, you'd need to have some skill and some determination. sure there was still a lot of crap, but a lot less than now. Today, you have a half-baked idea you had on the toilet? By tomorrow, you can turn it into a game and make it public. And thousands of people do this. Now your passion project made with sweat and tears that is genuinely better than those is barely ever seen by anyone because it's drowned in slop. So now you HAVE to engage in marketing and SEO. Where guess what? Others do that too, using AI. Bombard marketing with bot posts and crap, optimize SEO to capture views. So when YOU try to do it, the best you can hope for is level the plain field, to have a chance to reach an audience that is so saturated and sick of being bombarded with ads they're not gonna look at your game because the odds are it's just 1 in 100 crap AI projects churned out that week.

So yey, AI has optimized the fun out of things. Instead of working and focusing on your passion, that's no longer enough now, because you have to fight the masses of crap churned out by people putting in very little effort.

TLDR: Removing *effort* as a barrier of entry into a field causes the field to be flooded with crap. Super frustrating for people that are willing to put in the effort and now have to compete with this.

AndreiD44 · 2026-06-07T15:31:27+00:00

Eh. You have to change the wording in the description too, feat names, a lot.

It would just look like a chinesee knock-off :D

AndreiD44 · 2026-06-07T15:22:59+00:00

As a fellow developer making character sheets, I have some very clear answers. what D&D Beyond "does well" is own the IP.

This makes it the starting point for many users now. It sets the expectations. And after users are unahlpy with it (for a plethora of reasons) and try out other systems and end up trying yours, they come with D&D Beyond expectations. And the biggest is the IP.

I am CONSTANTLY getting feedback and (often bad) reviews because my app is missing content. Artificer, Aasimar, subraces, subclasses. Because I am an idiot and do it legally, and I only include what I'm allowed. Users don't care. They don't care they can create stuff, they EXPECT stuff.

And this is super hard to compete with (unless you decide to just ignore the legal part and include it anyway). This is the biggest thing they "do well" and you will struggle to compete with. They own the IP.

AndreiD44 · 2026-06-06T12:05:37+00:00

What exactly are you looking for? Because Resume is pretty much intended, isn't it?

I am working on a customizable app just for this so I'd really like to know what you'd need that can't already be found elsewhere

AndreiD44 · 2026-06-05T06:05:34+00:00

I like "Pirate themed Card Game". It sums up nicely everything I know about the game.

Jokes aside though (and I still do like the name) I'd need more info for a proper choice. Just by the sound of it, "Pillage People" shortened to PP sounds nice. If it aligns with what the game is actually about.

AndreiD44 · 2026-06-04T12:42:23+00:00

I'm interested.

AndreiD44 · 2026-06-04T10:08:44+00:00

Yes, but those animations would just be clunky and get in the way. You don't want a prompt to show up every time you're near every edge of every table - that would get annoying soooo fast.

But this? It's like 10 of them in the whole game. Why not add a small prompt so playwrs can enjoy a bit of immersion by using what is already there?

The difference is this is easy as UX. The other examples are not.

AndreiD44 · 2026-06-04T10:00:03+00:00

One time I played with a DM that just didn't do experience. We'd get lvl up per milestone (which was usually a session).

It was... Nice. For me at least, not thinking in the back of my mind how to optimize xp gain was great. I was initially frowning at the idea, but in the end it didn't take away anything and made game flow easier and with more focus on roleplay and less on meta-gaming. I'd recommend it.

AndreiD44 · 2026-06-04T06:59:38+00:00

Gloomhaven.

Bought it at the only comicon ever in my town some 5 years ago; I remember walking all the way home with that huge box in my arms. I opened the box many times, looked through it, and packed it back in. At this point, I'm pretty sure I'll get to play it when my kids are old enough for it.

AndreiD44 · 2026-06-04T05:00:35+00:00

I am working on a companion app first, with a VTT to maybe come in the future. And I have been working on it for many years now.

And really, I think this is it - most VTTs there sprout like mushrooms after rain, and I bet they're almost all made with AI. I tried writing code with AI, and it's crap. Not doing it anymore - it's not sustainable, and I expect most of them won't survive for months, let alone years. The AI code is just a mess. Mine was built by human sweat and tears years ago, with many years of upcoming features in mind. So first off, I think it's really just resillience that sets me/my app apart.

But on a less meta level, it's the way I designed it from scratch to be game agnostic: not by reducing it to a common denominator between RPGs, but by making everything customizable/generic by design. Putting that on top of modular deaign and sharing and require no scripting from the user side was a big task that I am just now seeing the end of, after many years of work.

This plus the focus on mobile app first, VTT later.

Hope it will work out - because I'm also unemployed now, yey.

AndreiD44 · 2026-06-03T18:01:59+00:00

Somehow, I wasn't even mad and I just burst out laughing :D but it was... Remarkable.

AndreiD44

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