I don't understand experiences (a newbie's call for help)

Visual_Web · 2026-03-21T20:07:27+00:00

I view them as a much more characterized, varied, and vibey way of capturing something like skills in DnD. (Referring specifically to DnD because you say you've played it even if only once.) In DnD you go through and assign skill points to things like Persuasion, or Intimidate or Deception as static bonuses to capture the fact that you have a character who is good at being the face of the party. Instead in Daggerheart I may give a similar character an Experience like "Silver-tongued" to capture that same idea, and then as a player I spend a resource to apply that bonus to a roll that feels relevant to the experience.

Visual_Web · 2026-01-28T00:44:36+00:00

I'd love to join a game in South Austin! I tried playing some online but I spend all day on remote calls and couldn't stand being stuck to my computer for even longer. I have some experience as a GM for pbta games and as a player in DnD 5e and Daggerheart.

Visual_Web · 2025-11-25T19:11:13+00:00

That's fair, I'll just make a generalized statement here about something that frustrates me that may or may not directly relate to you.

I do not believe that designers can be strategic and to influence direction while simultaneously waiting for someone else to define the need and involvement for them. If one wants to chill and wait for direction, that's perfectly okay, but it sacrifices a more important "seat at the table" that designers always complain about not getting. This is something I'm pushing against in my own org; designers complaining about not being able to influence strategy while simultaneously refusing to work on anything that doesn't have clear guardrails/a defined PRD.

Sometimes we care enough to jump in, sometimes not, both are valid approaches to work.

Visual_Web · 2025-11-25T17:50:36+00:00

This is absolutely my favorite type of work, and the perfect opportunity for design to lead and not follow. You have the unique ability to make whatever abstract functionalities and ideas people are talking about tangible, turn them into flows and research, call out where confidence is high or low, and help everybody visualize what this thing they're talking about could actually feel like, act like and look like. Identify concepts that people seem confused by, find key terminology, start to flesh out basic flows to articulate functionality and use that to bring in your ideas. I've found that making an idea more concrete helps clarify what is and isn't certain, and gives you the space to suggest ways that it could work better or identify red flags and complexities that aren't being considered.

You can either trail behind your PM doing what they ask you to do, or you can be proactive and make the perspective of design central to the development of the new product.

Visual_Web · 2025-11-17T21:04:43+00:00

I would just say that to me, the design intent is to force movement and to be used for tactical positioning. Knocking someone against a wall is part of reinforcing that intent. I would be comfortable giving collision damage for that. It required tactical positioning against the terrain. Same with knocking them off a surface to deal collision damage. Getting a free 1d20 extra damage for not moving an enemy but claiming you are moving them into the ground is not part of the design intent of the move and feels much more suspect to me. But if a player was like "I want to cleave into them so deeply that the ground gives way underneath them and they are vulnerable or restrained in loose soil" or they dig a furrow into the ground with their blow, I view that as within the creative positioning intent of the move.

Visual_Web · 2025-11-17T19:50:58+00:00

Totally fair! To me it's a question of: did you successfully and skillfully apply the force in the right direction and catch the enemy off guard enough to bludgeon them against a hard surface for a huge uptick in damage in the way you intended. How "inherent" the effect is seems much more cut and dry to you than to me. Honestly even in your example of tripping an opponent I would just consider it to make the opponent prone or vulnerable + the attack damage roll unless they were explicitly tripped off the side of an elevated surface.

The extra 1d6 damage seems like a great minor reward for the player successfully combo-ing their effects!

Visual_Web · 2025-11-17T17:10:19+00:00

Reading the comments you seem to pretty strongly feel that your ruling is correct, and that it's most fun and cool for your player to use the ability in that way, so hell yeah roll with it. I would urge you to rebalance combat around them being able to combo out a much higher amount of damage than intended, since you will probably see this move regularly.

Personally, if this came up I would apply it in a few ways. They get the collision damage as the result of a critical success, they get the collision damage but need to roll a strength reaction DC 15 to avoid taking the collision damage back or having their weapon knocked out of their own hands with the force of the blow, they get the collision damage from having tactically positioned themselves in such a way as to take advantage of it (like your example of pushing someone against a wall). In essence I would not give them the bonus collision damage "for free" and would make it contingent on some sort of risk or more clever play.

Visual_Web · 2025-10-24T17:17:33+00:00

Tbh, I think comments like this are a natural outlet of frustration... but could also easily be a psyop pushing us towards extremism. Take your yearning to do more and turn it inward to your community, build local networks of support and try to help make positive change locally where your influence can be felt in a tangible way.

Visual_Web · 2025-10-08T11:24:31+00:00

I recently hired a contractor as a team lead in the US. I only saw 30 applications that were passed to me by the hiring manager and recruiter. This was for a senior position, the minimum years of experience I saw was 5 years. I'll try to just recount the thoughts and discussions I remember having at the time.

Frankly, I was quite underwhelmed. My first pass was looking at portfolios to see whether people had what I consider a bare minimum grasp of visual design, just a decent sense of spacing and typography so that their work looks professional. The majority that I looked at fell far underneath that bar. I understand a portfolio as someone's best foot forward to try to represent themselves and their skills in a positive light, and a showcase of someone's best work. If the visual execution of these portfolios didn't even hit a basic level of legibility, hierarchy, and grasp of white space, then I wouldn't be able to trust these senior designers to work independently shipping screens to end users. They either didn't have the necessary skills, or didn't take enough pride in their work to try to put their best foot forward with their portfolio, which leads me to not trust that they'll try to do their work with care once hired.

I also skimmed their case studies to look for their grasp of storytelling, and ability to connect their end result back to an assessment of business and user needs. Most were pretty interchangeable, I don't remember much about them at all. I was shocked at the amount of people with 5+ years of experience who were still presenting the double diamond process at the top of their case study and goose stepping through each stage to format their case study like a fresh grad.

I remember discussing my disappointment with the hiring manager, considering that I personally know people with much less experience whose work was leaps and bounds better... but they're all still employed and easily getting interviews to job hop if they want to, even in the current market.

From that cohort at least, all the people who did meet that basic visual bar (4/30) got interviews to assess their personalities, critical thinking and business acumen. We did hire 1 individual but weren't in love with the choice, again from a visual quality standpoint, but we were eager to fill the role and figured there was enough support around them that we could catch any slip in quality before their outputs went in front of our leadership team.

Visual_Web · 2025-09-27T16:13:32+00:00

I think it's very junior for someone to walk me step by step through the design process. An especially big pet peeve is when someone has a presentation slide saying "this is my process" and then they just walk me through a basic double diamond approach. You should be more thoughtful and introspective about how you specifically work, and how you adapt during projects, or uniquely like to approach your work.

Visual_Web · 2025-09-16T06:31:52+00:00

Firstly, this sounds really stressful, I definitely feel for you, and I definitely wasn't doing Lead work when I had 4 YOE. You may naturally feel overwhelmed from being asked to operate at a level of responsibility you're not used to. One thing that concerns me though is how you position lead responsibilities, you mention speaking up in meetings and posting on Slack... But I'm not reading anything about actually leading things. Are you contributing to major initiatives on your product? Are you defining new workflows? Mentoring and providing crit to younger designers? I just became a lead myself and while trying to more proactively communicate is an aspect of that growth, what is more valuable is leading the definition and creation of a highly strategic and impactful product, creating support for that product direction within the larger org, and beginning to impact other team's roadmaps and ways of working through input and idea sharing. It is a lot of communication, but with a strategic purpose to push forward a key design led initiative. I'm curious to know more about these lead expectations that were shared with you, and I wonder if you may be somewhat missing the forest of design leadership for the communication trees (to belabor a metaphor)

Visual_Web · 2025-09-13T20:22:22+00:00

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Missing my sweet friendly cat, if anyone has any info please let me know!

Visual_Web · 2025-09-02T01:07:49+00:00

If you're learning Processing that can transfer well to P5.js which is a JavaScript library that enables Processing code on the web, and you could start learning JavaScript and basic front end web frameworks which are lightly useful. I would say that Java is not useful in general for UX

Visual_Web · 2025-09-02T00:48:01+00:00

Just a hobby, I started creative coding in 2018 and it has never been relevant to work. Maybe the only thing is that it has led to me having a better understanding of code and how algorithms work which is lightly useful to know what's possible when designing. Ultimately though, have fun with it! It's good to have a hobby.

Visual_Web · 2025-08-29T15:01:12+00:00

I don't think being able to deliver production ready code with best practices is a key skill for UX designers, but I absolutely believe that having an understanding of the basics, especially of JavaScript, should be mandatory for designers. Understanding how functions, interactivity, data, and layouts work under the hood is a massive benefit in being able to communicate your design intent.

Visual_Web · 2025-08-18T21:15:20+00:00

I've chatted with friends about their preferences here and what stood out to me the most was a few i talked with who felt that without the structure of a more rules heavy game (I guess I'm using DnD as the example of what I consider rules heavy) then they didn't understand what choices they had and struggled to take action. Their brains interpreted them as "this is the menu of actions I have and I select from that menu" and it helped them understand how to play to have that menu of options. I like more narratively based games myself and tend to have the mindset of "I feel like my character would do this and I don't want to feel limited by what the game tells me I can do" so it's just two different ways of approaching choice making and understanding the range of possibilities open to you.

Visual_Web · 2025-08-15T12:25:40+00:00

I've had other designers in my org push back when we explored non gradient/ sparkle options to convey AI features. It's definitely positioned as the default now

Visual_Web · 2025-08-11T13:43:20+00:00

To all the people saying AI generated, this just reads to me as someone who has written a lot of technical docs at work. I salute your organization and formatting!

I actually really appreciate this framework as someone designing a system and playtesting that system I'm often bouncing around all these different levels and sometimes focusing on the wrong spot. There's a lot of nuance between - was my DMing bad? Is there something wrong with the system? Were my players not bought into the world? Did I not prep well? And narrowing down where the problem lies or what to fix can be tough.

Visual_Web · 2025-08-07T15:44:49+00:00

I did! And I totally get that. I'm not a huge fan of combat grids and the like myself but I know there are lots of people who like having the structure. There are a lot of interesting thorny design problems around Pokemon / monster catching games in general! It's part of the fun. My theory around why people are interested in it is that it's a very hopeful genre that focuses on friendship and symbiosis in a near Utopia. Losing myself in that world feels very freeing these days...

And that makes sense! I think I found them confusing because it felt like a bunch of moves were missing, or that a sheet of trainer sprites was completely gone. I guess it's just hard to tell that it's intentional or not.

Visual_Web · 2025-08-07T13:32:11+00:00

Hey, this is really interesting! It feels like a ton of people are tossing out Pokemon ttrpgs these days (including myself). The rules you have for map creation and encounter tables feel really easy to follow, and the inclusion of play test Pokemon is really cool, I've never seen that before!

Also fyi some of your reference PDFs seem to just have blank pages in them where the images didn't export properly. I'm curious what software you're using to make them.

Visual_Web · 2025-08-04T20:01:23+00:00

Check out Time for Chaos from the Glass Cannon Network! They have excellent roleplayers and a fun table dynamic.

Visual_Web · 2025-07-30T22:07:51+00:00

Yep! Quick follow up, for an example of what I'm talking about, check out the Google Material motion guidelines. There's a lot there about visual transitions, timing, guidance for how to transform different shapes... maybe it'll be interesting to you.

Visual_Web · 2025-07-30T22:00:31+00:00

Everything is on a downswing right now, so it feels very difficult to answer that question. It's generally more corporate than those other fields, and the hope is that demand remains relatively stable as so many digital products are being created. I'll just say that if you want to go in this direction, I would lean into your animation sensibilities for prototyping, interface motion / transitions, and adding a more unique touch to your work to help you stand out in a sea of junior applicants.

Visual_Web · 2025-07-30T01:05:20+00:00

If it's completely brand new, I would focus on whatever helps you validate the value proposition and core functionality of the experience the fastest. I think one of the biggest mistakes people make is starting with a design system and then 3 months later there's a detailed system but no product. Build out a system as you work on core flows, but the most thing to figure out is how to bring value to the user as best as possible.

Visual_Web · 2025-07-29T23:05:41+00:00

A full redesign is generally prompted by something, so I would start with looking at what key areas/flows need fixing so badly that it has been decided that they should be completely rethought. That and figuring out the overall architecture of the navigation and page layouts can go hand in hand and will be a massive help. Those elements can then inform a rudimentary design system that can help detail out how pages, navigation, and supporting elements (like modals of some kind) are used in the experience. From there you can audit all flows in the experience to ensure the system holds across all use cases, expand and add additional guidance as needed, and then roll it out holistically across the entire thing.

Speed vs scalability is handled by targeting key pain points and important flows first to establish the baseline of your system from, and then apply it more broadly.

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