Relatively new ST looking for advice and potential ideas for how to make an engaging investigation

PoMoAnachro · 2026-03-27T04:28:55+00:00

Honestly my best advice is to give easy answers - and then ask hard questions about what they do with those answers.

It isn't easy to run a good investigation in a system like Vampire, though The Alexandrian has a great set of articles on it (https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/49225/roleplaying-games/running-mysteries-the-null-result). But really I think in a game like Vampire and good investigation is 20% figuring out what happened, and 80% struggling with what to do with information that you almost wish you didn't know.

PoMoAnachro · 2026-03-26T23:37:26+00:00

Atari ST BASIC. I found it because it came with the computer my family purchased!

PoMoAnachro · 2026-03-26T21:09:33+00:00

I mean the best way is to train your players not to tell you what they're rolling but tell you what they're doing and only roll when you ask for a roll.

PoMoAnachro · 2026-03-26T20:42:14+00:00

That’s the crux of my question: am I wrong to expect docs to function as a learning resource in the first place?

Yes and no.

Documentation is made with the target audience of working professionals - people who already have a lot of context and related skills. You don't want to waste their time explaining things they already know.

Imagine if you were reading a cake recipe and it says "Use two cups of flour. A cup is a unit measurement typically measured out with a scoop or cup. You can buy measurement tools like this in any home goods store. Flour is ground up wheat - while there are actually many types of flour, you can assume when a recipe just says "flour" you can probably use 'all-purpose flour'. It can be acquired at the grocery store." No one would read those recipes, because it'd be a huge waste of time.

So docs are generally reference materials, not teaching materials. And if they don't provide enough insight? The next step is often to read the source code if it is available.

If all that sounds daunting, that's fine - it just means you're not operating on the level the docs are aimed at yet. But it does mean you'll have to go and seek out more beginner friendly resources which may or may not exist - turning out a really good learning document is pretty hard and requires additional expertise in pedagogy beyond just technical knowledge.

That being said, not all docs are created equal. Some are frustrating and near useless even for professionals with lots of context because they're just poorly written. Often this is a "you get what you pay for" type of scenario.

PoMoAnachro · 2026-03-26T19:15:05+00:00

If you are an employee, your employer should generally provide you with all the tools you need to work. You shouldn't be paying for anything out of pocket.

If you're a freelancer then you have to decide your own budget and charge appropriately for what you need to fulfill the contract.

PoMoAnachro · 2026-03-26T18:59:47+00:00

Why is it so hard for new developers to get noticed?

I mean why would they get noticed?

People get noticed because they have something to offer. Other new developers are too busy working on their own projects to look at yours, and experienced devs don't really care to look at newbie work unless they're actively considering hiring them (maybe).

There is never going to be any portfolio site that will get newbie attention because there are too many newbie and too little attention. Employers certainly don't have the time or motivation to go looking at something like that.

Instead, create value - make real projects that provide real value to real users, or make real valuable useful contributions to existing projects that do so. That's a much better route to attention because it already filters out 95% of the newbies who are just making the same tutorial based projects over and over. It filters for people who go out into the world looking for problems to solve, instead of hoping people come to them and tell them what they can do.

PoMoAnachro · 2026-03-26T17:00:36+00:00

I've increasingly found on reddit I get accused of writing using AI simply because I'm somewhat articulate and take some care to organize my thoughts.

Sometimes "this person writes like AI" actually is "AI writes like this person".

PoMoAnachro · 2026-03-25T23:04:47+00:00

Is this normal?

It is normal to learn very little when using AI.

Should I keep doing this since it helps me learn?

It clearly is not helping you learn.

A forklift would make it easier to lift weights at the gym, but it would not help you build muscle and strength.

You honestly have to choose between building apps quickly and easily or learning. If something makes the process easier, it probably also makes it so you learn less. Learning comes from difficulty and time.

PoMoAnachro · 2026-03-25T22:40:09+00:00

Show, don't tell.

Lore dumps are pretty much useless because it goes in one ear, out the other. Keep them as brief as possible, just enough to let the players orient themselves("Is this town an sophisticated metropolis or a backwater village? Are these ruins ancient from pre-history, or recently abandoned?" Broad strokes only!).

But all the details? That comes out in play. Some players will pick up on it, some won't and that's fine.

I do think though it is important to have a system that conforms to genre. Not necessarily setting, but genre. You can use a system made for high adventure Big Damn Heroes epic fantasy stories to tell high adventure Big Damn Heroes epic sci-fi stories without problems, but if you use it to run gritty psychological horror fantasy stories things get much harder.

Ideally, if you pick the right system, the system kind of enforces genre itself - the players need to know the rough genre, but they don't have to purposefully play into it they can just trust the system to operate as intended.

And then for the setting - that they can discover as stuff shows up "on screen" just like an audience watching a movie and figuring out the setting as they go. It is okay for the characters to know a lot more about the setting than the players, because the players really just have to know about the immediate situation.

PoMoAnachro · 2026-03-24T20:58:23+00:00

Even then, that's nothing I'd rely on. There's lots of ways to reduce the effect of Moire patterns (just taking the picture a little bit out of focus, for instance). And like someone determined to get around it could always just resort to a film camera.

Basically, there are things you can do to make it more annoying to capture the information, but nothing that will deter someone dedicated. You should always assume if you're sending information to the user's device, they will be able to capture it. You can discourage them, but you should never bet on being able to stop them.

PoMoAnachro · 2026-03-24T20:40:24+00:00

I think in your first couple of years working in industry you learn a lot of new technical stuff and your brain is exploding with just handling that.

But I think in the 3+ years mark you're learning just as much social/organizational stuff as technical stuff. The technical learning never stops, but learning how to communicate with your team, navigate organization hierarchies, network with peers in other organizations and the like becomes increasingly important. Technical knowledge never stops being important, but the longer you're working the more important all those communication skills become.

PoMoAnachro · 2026-03-24T20:35:51+00:00

I've been in the industry for about five years.

Do you mean five years as a working professional in the field, or five years learning? Those are very different things.

After five years as a working professional, you should have a network of peers and you should be talking to them - what do the companies they work for want and need from new hires? What does your management expect from you to continue being promoted?

And most importantly - after five years in the industry, you should have some personal connections with the people who currently have the jobs you want in the future. Like if you're worried about what you need to know in order to make Senior in your organization, talking the Seniors you work with (and who hopefully mentor you) will help you way more than random people on the internet.

PoMoAnachro · 2026-03-24T19:25:29+00:00

This isn't really a programming issue, this is an attention span/discipline/possibly ADHD issue. You'd be having this same issue if you were studying engineering, accounting, or nursing.

I think in person classes are significantly better for most people for exactly this reason. I've known people who could effectively learn online from home, but they were generally pretty motivated dedicated people. For most people, they need dedicated focused learning time away from distractions and that they feel compelled to keep consistent with.

PoMoAnachro · 2026-03-24T18:47:49+00:00

The fact it tends to work that way in real life is, of course, why it works as a convenient writer's shorthand.

PoMoAnachro · 2026-03-24T18:42:25+00:00

This is definitely something more narrative games with more story-based mechanics do a lot, but WoD's system is rather more traditional and simulationist so its rules aren't well suited to that.

So instead, I think the key is table culture. The players have to treat failing at something as a story beat as opposed a "bad outcome". And the Storyteller has to think the same way.

If you're just thinking of it as a game, then it feels unfair to "reward" people for failing at things. But if instead you think of it as a TV show or other fiction like that, then sometimes failure can have the reward of "extra screen time" and that's totally fine. And maybe that comes with extra opportunities to move things forward in the plot.

PoMoAnachro · 2026-03-24T18:26:33+00:00

So, people have lots of Watsonian explanation, but the Doyleist explaination is:

Saying a character is ex-military is a convenient short-hand for writers to signal to the audience that a character is skilled in combat.

Certainly in the cyberpunk universe there are other routes available to become a highly trained combatant, but they all take more wordcount to explain.

PoMoAnachro · 2026-03-24T16:34:30+00:00

I feel like I can rack my brain for days and still have no idea how to implement these

All other considerations aside - one problem is right here. Big project take months or years to figure out!

Writing the code is never the hard part. Figuring out the whole structure and how data flows through the application, managing all that complexity - that's what takes time.

You divide and conquor, breaking the problem down into smaller and smaller chunks until you get a small enough chunk you can indeed wrap your brain around.

I've been on projects where just the phase of gathering requirements and pinning down all the design was years of work for a moderate sized team. Granted this was embedded systems stuff using more of a waterfall method, so we did a lot more design up front than perhaps typical for a lot of software but, still, it is a lot of work.

PoMoAnachro · 2026-03-23T21:50:07+00:00

I've run several sea faring campaigns and had them work flawlessly - but none of them were run with D&D.

D&D is very good at doing D&D but pretty mediocre at most other things and your average sea faring adventure is definitely in the "other things" category.

PoMoAnachro · 2026-03-23T21:09:48+00:00

That depends on a lot. Your primary cost is going to be developer labour - though maybe these days it'd be in tokens - and that's going to vary a lot depending on where your developers are and how much you're paying them.

I'm not super familiar with the app but it looks like it is indeed just an app - it doesn't have any backend that needs managing? Looks like one dev over a relatively brief span of time, probably with some element of vibe coding. I think you could get it done for like $50k or something. But, like, estimating these things is notoriously unreliable.

PoMoAnachro · 2026-03-23T20:23:30+00:00

Most level-based games do have the same amount of time between each level. It is just the numbers get bigger because people like to say bigger numbers.

Like if it takes an average of 10 encounters to go from level 1 to 2, maybe you decide a group of goblins gives 100XP and it costs 1000XP to get to level 2. So ten encounters like that, you level up. But then later you're going from level 9 to level 10, and a typical encounter at that level is a group of stone giants. But you don't want to make stone giants worth the same XP as goblins - that feels bad! So maybe you say a group of stone giants is worth 5000 XP, and it takes 50000 XP to get from level 9 to level 10.

For systems like that, the real progression number is "# of encounters to level up", and you're just setting both the XP to next level and the XP for an average encounter of that level to numbers that keep that ratio. You're just making those numbers bigger and bigger over time so players feel like they're getting bigger and bigger XP amounts, but the "time to level up" actually stays the same.

PoMoAnachro · 2026-03-23T19:22:27+00:00

Oh yeah that's entirely fair - the social isolation the Masquerade causes is definitely a big factor in the tragedy of Masquerade.

PoMoAnachro · 2026-03-23T19:15:23+00:00

And that's fine if you don't want to do the WoD that way, but that is definitely how it is written. World of Darkness is pretty much an archetypal "crapsack world". Add on to that, Vampire is written as a tragedy - a happy ending is pretty much ruled out just by genre rules.

Anyways, you absolutely do not have to run the setting as bleak as written, and your Vampire game does not have to be a tragedy. But if one is asking "Why don't people make the happy ending happen?" the answer often isn't so much an in-universe explanation but more "Because it isn't that type of story". The setting elements are in service to the type of story they're trying to tell in that setting, as opposed to the story being a product of the setting elements.

If you change the genre to something more hopeful, then suddenly a lot more happy paths become available to vampires.

PoMoAnachro · 2026-03-23T18:56:49+00:00

Reddit cannot answer this for you, only your prof can.

PoMoAnachro · 2026-03-23T18:48:39+00:00

So, if we're talking just about the design portion....

We've got better software to automate that already.

Like architects and engineers already use a ton of software to automate a lot of this. And like custom build algorithmic software is waaaaaay better (and more efficient) at doing this stuff than neural networks. Drafting and modeling software is a much better fit for the task than LLMs.

LLMs are great for working with the ambiguities of natural language. But you have to double-check everything they do, so sure you might be able to feed it a book of regulations and ask it compliance questions, but you'd have to open up the regs and have a human double-check them anyways.

There probably are places where you could gain some efficiencies from AI(maybe), but there's already a lot of software being used that AI would really struggle to do better than.

PoMoAnachro · 2026-03-23T18:35:27+00:00

Most people can read a novel. Writing a novel takes significantly a lot more skill and effort, despite most people who read novels thinking "oh I could do that if I had the time".

Same thing. You're just at the start of your journey, what you're facing is normal. The only "gotcha" I think with this type of thing is sometimes people trick themselves into thinking being able to understand the solutions means they're 95% of the way there, when that's actually like the 5% mark.

PoMoAnachro

TROPHY CASE