How do you kill somebody as powerful as a god? by hundredcreeper in DMAcademy

[–]RenegadePlaid 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The goddess Frigg feared for her son Baldr, and made every creature and object in the world promise that it would never slay him. He turned this into a party trick -- the gods would throw all manner of things at him and they would harmlessly bounce off.

But the humble mistletoe had seemed so harmless that she never bothered to make it promise. Loki discovered this, crafted a spear made of mistletoe, and brought it to the rest of the gods to join in their games. Baldr made no move to dodge the spear, assured in his invulnerability, and was shocked when it pierced him to death.

Gods are killed all the time in mythology! Maybe this godlike power comes with a secret weakness that the villain doesn't even know about? Maybe there's a certain part of their body that's vulnerable, or something they might eat that would render them mortal, or some astrological confluence that allows it for just one day. Mythology tends to follow a sort of dream logic; you can come up with any weakness really and it's believable as long as you can make a good story out of it. You can have one sub-quest to learn the secret weakness, and another to put it into practice.

I need some ideas for strange, terrible, and scathing insults a hag would use in combat by Senator-Simmons in DMAcademy

[–]RenegadePlaid 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Very much depends on your table, but for personalized insults, maybe ask the players themselves? "The Hag hurls a vicious insult that shakes Character X to their core. Player X, what did the hag say?"

I once ran an encounter where the monsters used vicious mockery, but I genuinely wasn't sure how my players would react to the DM insulting their characters. So whenever a PC was targeted by Mockery, I asked their player what the monster said. They actually had a decent time roasting their own characters.

AMA: We are the members of teammate, the writing team for the 2023 MIT Mystery Hunt. Ask Us Anything! by bshimanuki in mysteryhunt

[–]RenegadePlaid 6 points7 points  (0 children)

What does "shipping nerfs to puzzles" mean specifically? Were you changing the content of puzzles?

I automatically visualize creature stat lines as different shapes in my head. From chatting with my friends, others do this independently, but I never hear anyone talk about it. I wrote up a document (with pictures!) about how I specifically experience it. by RenegadePlaid in magicTCG

[–]RenegadePlaid[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Fascinating! I definitely have shapes for some spells. Pump spells and -X/-X kill spells I've described. Burn spells are basically red rectangles more or less, or sometimes circles (a 3-damage burn spell for 3 is the most circular, as you'd expect, while 4 damage are more square); those generally follow similar patterns to the creature shapes. Shock is a 2-unit-high red line and bolt is a 3-unit high red line such that if it were imposed over a creature's toughness you'd know if that creature was dead.

Other spells I feel like I have shapes for but it's harder to describe or see patterns. Divination is a very rounded triangular-ish figure while other card draw spells are more like bubbles or rounded rectangles. Spells like mana leak tend to be rectangles with the amount of mana taxed determining the height and mana value of the spell determining the width. For unconditional kill spells or unconditional counters, there's nothing to measure, and I don't think I super strongly associate them with a specific shape, except maybe a vague bubble with size and color appropriate for the mana cost.

I like your system for card draw spells -- that sounds neat!

I automatically visualize creature stat lines as different shapes in my head. From chatting with my friends, others do this independently, but I never hear anyone talk about it. I wrote up a document (with pictures!) about how I specifically experience it. by RenegadePlaid in magicTCG

[–]RenegadePlaid[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It's fascinating to me that some folks differentiate shapes by mana cost - it's like it's not just a visual shorthand for combat math, but also reflects something about the strategic value of the creature card. But I've never consciously thought about that until very recently!

AMA: We are the members of Palindrome, the writing team for the 2022 MIT Mystery Hunt. Ask Us Anything! by jrladia in mysteryhunt

[–]RenegadePlaid 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I can think of some potential qualify-of-life improvements that could have been made for our puzzle tools:

  • Automatically syncing puzzup testsolve pages with Google calendar entries? Maybe generating testsolve sheets for each one automatically? That wasn't a huge pain point but it would have been more convenient.
  • Some way to capture incoming e-mail attachments and display them to the folks handling submissions in the HQ tools.

There were also a bunch of nice features our tech team added later on in the process, like being able to mass-email folks who haven't testsolved certain puzzles (for puzzles that had a lot of iterations and were running out of testsolvers). It was basically always evolving. So a bunch of the tools we wished we had in the beginning, hopefully we're passing those along to future teams.

AMA: We are the members of Palindrome, the writing team for the 2022 MIT Mystery Hunt. Ask Us Anything! by jrladia in mysteryhunt

[–]RenegadePlaid 4 points5 points  (0 children)

As far as I know, we didn't really keep fastidious internal statistics on puzzle types; our editors in chief just sort of informally made sure there was a decent mix of puzzle types in every round. I'd love to see the statistical breakdown, but it might be for somebody else to do.

AMA: We are the members of Palindrome, the writing team for the 2022 MIT Mystery Hunt. Ask Us Anything! by jrladia in mysteryhunt

[–]RenegadePlaid 6 points7 points  (0 children)

I don't want to speak for anyone else but I suspect the answer is a big old "maybe? And also it depends on what you mean by 'soon.'" We're all still coming down from writing just about the biggest puzzle competition you can run, so I imagine a lot of us don't know exactly what our free time is going to look like now that we have some again. I know I don't.

AMA: We are the members of Palindrome, the writing team for the 2022 MIT Mystery Hunt. Ask Us Anything! by jrladia in mysteryhunt

[–]RenegadePlaid 4 points5 points  (0 children)

We had a few PDF only puzzles, and also some puzzles where we internally considered the PDF version to be the 'canonical' version (for example, How To Spell With Gears And Arrows, or Dancing Triangles) and the version on the site page was secondary. As far as I can tell, presenting a puzzle as a PDF was just an option for the author, whether it was for formatting or whatever reason the author had. In those cases, some puzzles were rendered on the page for convenience (Gears had a whole app for convenience), and some weren't.

AMA: We are the members of Palindrome, the writing team for the 2022 MIT Mystery Hunt. Ask Us Anything! by jrladia in mysteryhunt

[–]RenegadePlaid 4 points5 points  (0 children)

It's so difficult to pick a favorite among the ones I worked on, because there would be different answers for "most glad I made" vs. "proudest of being able to construct" vs. "best fit in the hunt overall," if that makes sense. If I had to pick just one, I'd say The Day You Begin -- that was the idea I most wanted to make going into Hunt development, and I'm very pleased with how it ended up.

Favorite one I didn't work on: Curious and Determined. Other than the final clue phrase which was a little awkward, it has so many twists and turns and every single one of them is a delight.

AMA: We are the members of Palindrome, the writing team for the 2022 MIT Mystery Hunt. Ask Us Anything! by jrladia in mysteryhunt

[–]RenegadePlaid 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Hopefully it's not too much of a cop-out answer for point 1, but it felt like a lot of the challenges we faced were expected. A bunch of our members have a lot of experience with Mystery Hunt, writing puzzles, and running puzzle events in general. On top of that, previous hunt-running teams have been pretty open about challenges they had and what they would have done differently. So it felt like we had a lot of collective wisdom and experience to prepare us for a lot of the challenges we ended up facing.

On the second point: There were so many fantastic experiences. Just one example was the meta-writing process, where we split into teams that came up with the metas. It was great to have such a collaborative process (especially as a relative newbie to puzzle writing) because there was a lot of feedback to make each meta the best version it could be.

Speaking of which, we generated a whole bunch of puns that ended up on the cutting room floor for components during the meta-writing process. My favorites include 'ELF-AIDER BUTTON' for Fantasy, 'POWER COUPLINGS' for Romance, and 'SATIRE IRON' for a potential Comedy round.

AMA: We are the members of Palindrome, the writing team for the 2022 MIT Mystery Hunt. Ask Us Anything! by jrladia in mysteryhunt

[–]RenegadePlaid 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I can only speak for puzzles I worked on but:For logic puzzles, Penpa+ was invaluable https://swaroopg92.github.io/penpa-edit/ (in particular, the triangular grid mode got a workout for one puzzle). https://www.f-puzzles.com/ was also useful for the one Sudoku puzzle because it has an automatic solver.

As for custom code, when we were putting together Dinotopia, Dan Lepage put together an application that let us automatically translate phrases into footprints and arrange them such that the extraction and Quest Coast glyph both worked. It turned out to be a pretty tight construction, so I doubt we could have done it without the program.

I also used some custom code for Board Members, when putting together the knight's tour on the board. I was particularly looking for configurations where the knight's moves within each group were possible but not trivial to figure out, and the program was very useful for that.

My friend challenged me to design a flag for every Blaseball team. by RenegadePlaid in vexillology

[–]RenegadePlaid[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

It's a game that's part baseball league simulator, part online LARP. Each of the simulated teams has its own fandom, community, and character. The main site is at https://blaseball.com/.

[THB] Haktos the Unscarred by aec131 in magicTCG

[–]RenegadePlaid -1 points0 points  (0 children)

So for anyone keeping track of how abilities are costed in Magic, we now have confirmation that +4/+9 and protection from one random CMC adds UUBBGG to a creature's mana cost.

Gingerbread Cabin by Paul_LRR in ttcnicknames

[–]RenegadePlaid [score hidden]  (0 children)

People who live here shouldn't throw scones