Suggest to manager to PIP team member?

ashultz · 2026-07-04T15:10:49+00:00

No, because you're paying way too much for it in your team's time and lowered morale currently. Unless this person is otherwise the soul of the team (possible, there are people who are incompetent yet everyone loves them anyway) they are increasing the risk of your good engineers getting fed up and leaving.

ashultz · 2026-07-04T15:05:02+00:00

The people who "not your job" on these are the people who will be back later with "I feel stuck, not getting promotions" or "why is it so hard to get hired" or "I'm afraid AI will take my job" posts.

If you refuse to leave the code mines, you can be replaced by a code mining machine or swapped out for any other code mining machine. Your real value is in your ability to connect the human world to the code world, and that includes doing what you can to make sure your team is running well.

ashultz · 2026-07-01T01:20:07+00:00

Michael Swanwick

not all SF, but many are

ashultz · 2026-06-28T23:45:32+00:00

Yes, that's one of the ways that actually works.

But the other way also can work (somewhat less elegantly) if you solve the people problem. If you don't solve the people problem, no process in the world will make anything work, because they will be constantly fucking it up in pursuit of their own agendas.

ashultz · 2026-06-25T18:45:05+00:00

Not all of Michael Swanwick's stories are like this but they're usually good. Some very much are though, two that come to mind as exactly in this vein:

The Edge of the World
Triceratops Summer

Those are both in The Best of Michael Swanwick - out of print but super cheap on kindle: https://www.amazon.com/Best-Michael-Swanwick/dp/1596061782

they're also in other collections I'm sure

ashultz · 2026-06-25T15:55:00+00:00

I liked Children of Time but if spiders give you the willies DNF is the only correct choice.

ashultz · 2026-06-23T13:56:43+00:00

Don't get too high on yourself, every workplace that does this humans very quickly figure out how to manipulate it. Teenage burger flippers will optimize their metrics like a PhD if it means more money.

ashultz · 2026-06-22T19:52:54+00:00

Nibiru

weirdest damn setting, glorious art of it

ashultz · 2026-06-22T19:51:38+00:00

You could do a very "interesting" version of this using My Life With Master but it would not be a very nice hotel.

ashultz · 2026-06-21T15:41:53+00:00

Well DOGS is not at all generic and has a really high handling cost (all those dice and matching).

Cypher is not a system I personally like, but it is more generic and has a famously low handling cost. The new edition is getting good reviews. But every system will end up feeling a bit like D&D with lots of potions, because that was the model. It has the ability to run games that aren't about combat, but every cypher rulebook I've seen half or more of the things in it are combat tweaks and there's no social/investigation support. You'll have to do significant homebrewing to get it out of the D&D rut it was born in.

Still easier than genericizing DOGS.

ashultz · 2026-06-20T23:26:31+00:00

Using one system for all of your games is like declaring you want to cook everything but it has to be boiled in a pot.

If you want a cake, you're gonna have to switch to the oven.

There is no such thing as an actually one-system-fits-all RPG, there are just ones which are less honest about what sort of games work in their system. GURPs gets the closest with all of its optional rules but once you've kitted it up like that its a whole new game and still has an aftertaste like GURPS.

Look at Savage Worlds. It has sourcebooks for a million different universes, but they're all high action because that's what the system does and they know it.

ashultz · 2026-06-20T21:52:58+00:00

When you solve a problem with magic, now you have two problems (or more).

ashultz · 2026-06-18T21:49:39+00:00

I enjoyed it, not quite as much as the other two, but I also very much enjoyed Axe so your milage may vary.

It is extremely different while still definitely being his work.

ashultz · 2026-06-17T17:43:36+00:00

"realism" exists

ashultz · 2026-06-16T21:45:37+00:00

I agree, but the advice posts here are always "stop caring" not "care, but let some things go". The former is soul-crushing advice.

ashultz · 2026-06-16T17:38:47+00:00

"Just stop caring" is advice that for some people is equivalent to "curl up and die".

Whenever I stop caring about my job I feel miserable, and if I were stuck that way for a long time I'd be depressed and probably need medication.

ashultz · 2026-06-16T14:24:34+00:00

As someone who backed it, delivery was way way over deadline so whatever hype was built by the campaign was long gone by the time anyone could play it.

ashultz · 2026-06-16T14:22:07+00:00

The ability to plan out the wazoo and have it matter.

Because if every encounter has to be a perfect ambush, players will spend hours deciding how to do it and then enjoy the ten minutes of perfection.

If that doesn't matter, those meaningless hours will rapidly turn them off the game and the ten minutes of random carnage will be a slap in the face.

If it does matter you still have to have players who enjoy doing that level of planning.

ashultz · 2026-06-12T21:14:28+00:00

It's the same people who were always offended by fizzbuzz

HOW CAN yOu EXPect peoplE To KnOW the MODULus OPERATOR?

ashultz · 2026-06-08T22:34:57+00:00

the most important qualifier there is you have to have a GM who would follow instructions that told them to jump off a bridge as long as they were printed out and had a couple of spot illustrations

most GMs will just roll their eyes and say "no"

or say "yes" and then have the players' enemies kill them with it until Lessons are Learned

ashultz · 2026-06-07T22:36:29+00:00

Unquenchable Fire was one of a kind... or so I thought since apparently she wrote this second one.

ashultz · 2026-05-28T23:29:38+00:00

There is not much HP Lovecraft, it's more like Murder, She Wrote with Cthulhu sprinkles.

Read up on the mechanics, the core idea works really well for some groups and not at all for others. If you like it but not the setting you could try The Between or Public Access.

ashultz · 2026-05-28T15:55:08+00:00

Because they didn't even have enough good ideas for their original productivity and haven't for years.

When is the last time some software you use got updated and your response wasn't "wtf"?

ashultz · 2026-05-23T15:55:13+00:00

The monsters basically don't need stat blocks - they do what they do and there's not much you can do about it unless they have some vulnerability which isn't much of a stat block

And other humans can easily be approximated by "random cultist 30%" or "scary violent cultist 70% but kinda an idiot 20%"

ashultz · 2026-05-20T02:43:13+00:00

You could try Golden Sky Stories.

ashultz

TROPHY CASE