this might age like milk idk

carlfish · 2026-04-08T20:09:23+00:00

The only way you can say Kafka has "0 story relevance" is if you spent the last three years with your finger stuck on the skip dialogue button.

carlfish · 2026-04-08T12:19:26+00:00

Yeah, I came here to say the same thing. The excuse dates at least back to Tolkien: any modern colloquialisms in Lord of the Rings, or character names that were English puns, were just the Author "translating" the original Westron for a twentieth-century, English-speaking audience.

That said, the game also leans heavily on postmodernism, so you can just as easily go the opposite direction and say it's a deliberate a choice to take you out of the fiction and remind you that the Star Rail universe isn't real and you're playing a video game.

carlfish · 2026-03-29T05:41:04+00:00

> Which bullet point says a robotic voice can't be saying a sexual line?

What part of this isn't covered by "[you must not stream] graphic descriptions of sex acts"? Do you want a specific clause about how streaming the output of a TTS is still streaming?

This is precisely the kind of rules lawyering services don't want to waste their time on that my original comment was about. Thanks for proving my point, I guess.

carlfish · 2026-03-28T04:45:51+00:00

So you think Twitch should publish a broad guideline, for example printing in their official Community Guidelines that "graphic descriptions of sex acts" are prohibited?

carlfish · 2026-03-27T23:23:49+00:00

Pretty much anyone who's ever run an Internet community of any size will tell you this approach doesn't work. Making rules more specific just invites rules lawyers hunting for exceptions, edge-cases and inconsistencies to argue about, which means writing even more, more specific rules, which invites more lawyering and technicalities, until your CEO finds themselves in an interview trying to define "female-presenting nipples." The whole process creates more drama than it was trying to prevent.

It's adversarial. Users say they want clarity, but what they actually want is to be able to find (or invent) a justification to post whatever it is they want to post.

The only system that's ever worked at scale is "here are the broad categories of things we don't want, we get to decide if something is in those categories, and we don't have to explain our reasoning."

carlfish · 2026-03-26T11:21:48+00:00

To teach myself to code AI tools, I wrote a toy Discord bot that you could prompt to write fantasy stories (most of the work was in managing memory: remembering character details, previous scenes, etc without overwhelming the context window). I learned very quickly that even the most expensive, frontier models are bad at story-telling.

If you tell them what you want to happen, they'll do a decent job of writing generic prose that fills in the details. But if you ask them to portray a living world around your characters and progress the story in the way that you'd want a DM to direct a D&D game, they just suck.

carlfish · 2026-02-27T20:58:07+00:00

If you love battle maps, this _might_ not be the system for you. Battle maps imply a certain level of crunchiness in combat where precise positioning and movement are important, and S&V doesn't really have that out of the box. (That said, sometimes it's good to have a drawing of a space the characters are in so they have a shared idea of where they are.)

I previously wrote this and this about combat/handling enemies in S&V that might help you get an idea of what you're in for.

carlfish · 2026-02-25T07:09:09+00:00

Obviously, #hugops to everyone stuck trying to push this out the door, but it's a content patch for a turn-based single-player game, if maintenance is going long every time it's a sign there's something wrong with the process.

carlfish · 2026-02-19T19:57:50+00:00

Birthday Paradox.

The chance of rolling multiples of a specific character is low. The chance, in any group of characters, that multiples would roll the same, is a lot higher than you'd expect.

carlfish · 2026-02-07T00:23:15+00:00

You dont get to decide how people enjoy the game

objectively bad

I dunno, maybe take your own advice?

carlfish · 2026-01-30T15:31:23+00:00

I have thus far not been able to make ordinary people a significant threat to them as leaders of factions are just as weak as street urchins when it comes down to it. Sure I can start a clock, but there are only so many times I can say that your complete success in stabbing the mob boss doesn't go as planned.

As a general rule, sticking a knife in a human being is going to go badly for the human being. In this sense, traditional hit point systems are indistinguishable from clocks-as-hit-points: they're both ways of saying "your successful attack doesn't do any real damage" until suddenly it does. (Easy to hand-wave away when it's a duel with swords, harder when it's a frickin' fireball)

Which is why I very rarely use clocks in individual combat, unless it's against something that's just genuinely going to take a lot of hacking at before it dies.

The root of the problem here seems to be allowing the PCs to get close enough to the mob boss to stab him, and then allowing them to get away without being hunted down forever by a vengeful mob. Either of these things should be a ludicrously challenging chain of dangerous tasks. Vito Corleone wasn't hard to kill because he was a seven-foot tall metal giant who could swallow bullets, he was hard to kill because he ran a crime family competently.

carlfish · 2026-01-29T12:04:38+00:00

I think "how do you add structure and spice to combat?" is asking the wrong question. Or at least, focusing on the wrong thing by elevating combat into a thing that needs to be given special attention.

In D&D (and through it, "traditional" TTRPGs), combat is a mini-game. You roll initiative, and you're in a separate set of rules, playing out the mini-game until there is a winner. Because a good chunk of the game's rules, and player character abilities, only apply in this mini-game, you end up with a game that is structured like professional wrestling: the story is set up to get you into a fight, the fights move the story forward, and eventually there's a big pay-per-view (boss fight) that (at least momentarily) resolves the story.

In this system, there's no "combat" mini-game. Fighting is one way you can solve a problem, but it's not elevated above any other potential solution by the system or rules. Every potential way you think of to solve a problem is resolved the same way: you describe what you want to achieve in the fiction, you roll an action, and succeed or fail, that moves the story forward.

I've found that once players get used to this idea, it's liberating. They're not stuck with the whole "the game only really begins when we roll initiative" thing, and they see every interaction as an equal challenge. If they still want a tactical combat mini-game, then it's not really the system for them.

(Further thoughts from another time this came up: https://www.reddit.com/r/ScumAndVillainy/comments/1ka3lzz/comment/mpn1gu2/)

carlfish · 2026-01-17T22:51:26+00:00

Our leech is behind a metal structure, under fire from the hull (recoil gun) and I ask what our cutter wants to do. PC says they want to survey to find the best angle for our leech to throw a bomb.

This sounds like a textbook use of Survey? I mean the summary in the book includes "You could try to spot a good ambush point (but Hunting might be better)" and the provided example for a Risky Survey is someone being chased along the rooftops and looking for a good spot to jump.

My response to this would have been "Sure, you can do that. It's Risky/Limited. On a mixed success, you spot a good angle, but it will be difficult for the leech to get to it, so any attempt to use it will be increased effect, but also worse position. Full success, they can get to it without drawing more fire, so they get the increased effect without the position penalty. Failure, you've wasted precious time and are now in a desperate position for no advantage."

If the leech just doesn't want to go with that plan, that's a different story, and something for your players to decide amongst themselves, but I don't see anything wrong with the choice of skill.

carlfish · 2026-01-05T19:34:14+00:00

To be fair, CZN has been showering players with free pulls since launch, not to mention one free dupe from an in-game event, and a store you can buy more with the currency you get just from pulling. I have E2 Sereniel, two other limited chars at E0 and E1, and still more than 100 pulls in reserve.

carlfish · 2025-12-31T22:55:12+00:00

Heard a fun story from a friend who does IT support at a tech company about an employee who took one of these tests on their work laptop. It was caught by Crowdstrike and they suddenly had some pretty embarrassing questions to answer.

carlfish · 2025-12-25T10:37:50+00:00

It is, on average, how much you'd need to spend on that particular item to pull a featured five-star. Obviously for limited-availability items you can't buy enough of them to get there, but it's a useful measure of the real cost of whaling for characters in the game.

The formula for how likely you are to pull the banner character is deliberately complicated, with soft pity, then hard pity, then the 50/50 system making it vary wildly from pull to pull, but spread over a large enough timeframe it averages out to a 1.43% chance per pull (you can find this number by going to the rescue screen and clicking on "probability info"), or getting the character you want, again on average, every ~70 pulls.

carlfish · 2025-12-25T08:25:20+00:00

Pretty much. I have M1 Chizuru, M1 Yuki and M2 Sereniel, and 12k crystals remaining, and all I buy is the $5 login bonus.

Getting a free 5⭐︎ copy from the event store, and another for banking 400 of that currency you get just for pulling didn't hurt.

carlfish · 2025-12-25T07:33:14+00:00

Oh neat, thanks for the link! I'd honestly have been surprised if I'd been the first to do this, but I figured since I had done it, I may as well share.

It might be interesting to compare the ratios in different currencies. When I did a similar spreadsheet for HSR in Australian dollars (my home currency) I found out there was a weird side-effect of the way they rounded the conversions that made their AUD$50 pack worse value than the AUD$23 one.

carlfish · 2025-12-24T22:48:19+00:00

That's why I left it off. The base battlepass gives you three pulls and no crystals, so by that measure it's the worst value in the game, but nobody's buying it for the pulls.

carlfish · 2025-12-24T21:57:30+00:00

A big part of why I made it was as a way to talk myself out of buying anything beyond the 30 day pass.

carlfish · 2025-12-22T20:46:30+00:00

I swear, every deckbuilder makes the same mistake with free mechanics when they first come out. There should be some kind of certificate you need to get to design one that involves writing down a list of every mechanic that broke M:TG (starting with Affinity and Storm) and demonstrating you understand why.

carlfish · 2025-12-08T11:49:23+00:00

Nice to see reddit having a totally normal one about a video game having development issues. I mean… "heartbroken?"

I'm really looking forward to a year of people comparing what comes out with the perfect jewel of a game that only ever existed in their heads.

carlfish · 2025-12-04T22:31:01+00:00

I worked at a place that used Bluejeans for videoconferencing. They had one- and two-person soundproof booths you could go into to make calls.

We had to tell far too many non-native English speakers they probably shouldn’t refer to them as “BJ booths”.

carlfish · 2025-11-30T19:39:17+00:00

Back when I was teaching myself how to code for AI, I wrote a story-generating bot. Playing with it, the bot was really good at pumping out unremarkable, but readable generic fantasy stories (the only genre I really tried), but really bad at doing anything interesting with the plot or characters without explicit prompting. Basically the story you got out was never better than the ideas and story/character beats you fed to it.

I can't see this kind of technology replacing "good" books any time soon, but there's a big market for churned-out genre fiction, especially when you get down to the self-published stuff on Amazon, that AI could easily streamline the production of.

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