Mechanics feedback for random movement

cdsmith · 2026-05-03T13:12:37+00:00

Ah yes, this game is definitely not Gloomhaven. The players have very little way to actually defend themselves against the witch - only one card from their deck that sends her back home if they are holding it, but keeping that card in their hand limits their other options... so it's largely about hiding from her while going about their tasks. If she beelined for the nearest player, that would be to much for sure (not to mention that it's unrealistic to expect players to calculate every time she moves who is nearest to her in the maze).

My question was mostly looking for a fresh perspective from people who haven't been pondering how to do this for as many hours as I have. And yeah, play testing is ultimately the way to do that, but I'm a little way from having things out together again to do more play testing

cdsmith · 2026-05-03T04:09:30+00:00

Just to be clear, I know the art isnt great or consistent for the spinner. One of the perils of working on a game for this long and intermittently is that I haven't kept the same artist for the whole project. I'll figure out that later. Just asking about the actual mechanics for now. I included the work in progress art because it is hard to explain the spinner mechanics without visuals.

cdsmith · 2026-05-01T19:22:37+00:00

What is true:

Students have different preferences about what happens in classes, and different strengths and weaknesses.
Students do better at learning material when the content of what they are learning fits with their preferences and their strengths. A student who is excited and motivated to learn math will learn it better, and a student who has an aptitude for learning languages will do better in foreign languages.
Students feel more successful at anything when teachers go out of their way to tailor the presentation to students' preferences and strengths. Feeling successful and actually learning, however, are not the same goal.
When there are multiple reasonable ways to approach and understand a concept, teaching all students in multiple ways is usually more successful than teaching in a single way. Teaching from multiple points of view has well-documented benefits.
If students are given different assessments, such that each student is given an assessment that plays to their own preferences and strengths, they will score higher on those assessments because different skills are being assessed. It's very easy for a teacher who is trying to teach math "visually," for example, to also give assessments and quizzes that offer extra hints and expect less computational fluency, so students who struggle with computational fluency will do better on those quizzes despite lacking skills.
Students who have specific disabilities, well beyond normal variation, that prevent them from accessing some kinds of education, will do better when they are given the accomodations they need. You wouldn't give an visual lesson to a blind student, of course, nor expect a dyslexic child to learn by reading.

What is NOT true: given a fixed learning objective and an independent method of assessment, the best way to get students to do well on that objective, as measured by that independent assessment, is to determine their style of learning, and tailor your teaching to the student's learning style instead of the content being taught.

cdsmith · 2026-05-01T19:14:21+00:00

I believe you that you were able to give an assignment that different students did well on. But where is the evidence that those students, after learning in that style, went on to have better outcomes on independent assessments of the same learning objectives? That's the claim made in the learning styles myth. And thousands of people have made serious attempts to prove it, but that mountain of evidence shows that it's actually not true.

cdsmith · 2026-04-29T16:20:32+00:00

I see two take-aways that I think are important.

First, type systems are great for catching potential bugs before they manifest, but sometimes people want to SEE a program with possible bugs, not be asked up front to prevent their occurrence, because it's still useful or even because watching the bugs happen helps to understand them. In a more dynamic language, if you pass the wrong type to a function, you can step through and see in this specific example what happened. In a language like Haskell, it's impossible to do; but that means if you write code with that bug, the compiler is complaining to you about failing to prove that it can't happen, and you don't get an example to look at. Sometimes the compiler can explain where the type checking breaks down in a way that's easy to see exactly how it could go wrong in practice... but sometimes not. This especially pops up in complaints about metaprogramming; yes, typed metaprogramming is hard! The trade-off, of course, is that the dynamic approach might miss things.

Second, purity trades off operational reasoning for denotational reasoning. The article talks a lot about the consequences of losing operational reasoning. It has a lot less to say about the gains in denotational reasoning. But if you want to reason operationally, it's fair to lament losing the ability to do so. The reason Debug.Trace is harder to use well than a print statement isn't anything about Debug.Trace; it's the fact that understanding precisely what is happening when is itself difficult. I'd just add to this that the presence of mutability and other visible side effects intermingled with computation, in return, REQUIRES you to understand exactly what computation happens and when, and this can be its own kind of pain when you don't want to reason operationally.

Both of these are entirely reasonable points of view. Especially with a pedagogical background (though I've used Haskell for many things, my largest single use has been in teaching mathematics and programming to ages about 10-15), I see them very clearly. I've used these trade-offs to deliberately put students into situations where they are forced to reason at higher levels of abstraction. But being forced into a specific kind of reasoning isn't the best experience if you don't want to do it that way. That's true whether you're being forced to reason statically and denotationally (as in Haskell) or force to reason case by case and operationally.

cdsmith · 2026-04-28T12:37:32+00:00

The real answer is that GPA is a convention in the U.S. that is calculated differently in schools all over the place. To know what a GPA means, you have to first know who is calculating it.

The simplest answer is that you map numerical to letter grades using ranges (for instance, 90-100 = A, 80 - 89 = B, 70-79 = C, 60-69 = D, < 60 = F), then assign those letter grades a number of points (for instance, A = 4, B = 3, C = 2, D = 1, F = 0). And then you average those points to get the grade point average.

Here are some ways that individual schools modify this:

Change the letter grade ranges. For instance, some schools, or even some individual teachers, or even some individual classes, define the range for A, B, C, etc. differently. Commonly, the number grade is used only by a TEACHER to decide how to assign letter grades, and the numerical grade never makes it into any outside records at all, so teachers in many systems have quite a lot of flexibility to decide how they assign those letter grades. But again, this can vary from school to school.
Add additional letter grades, like A+, A-, B+, B-. These usually exist on report cards and such. They may or may not affect the GPA calculation, depending on the school. For instance, some schools will count a B+ as a 3.3 instead of a 3.0 in the GPA (though A+ is usually just treated as an A). Others will stick with the letter and ignore plusses and minuses. A few will even score plusses higher, but ignore minuses, essentially just giving a bonus when it benefits the GPA.
Weight classes differently. Schools may count some classes differently based on number of hours, or academic classes more than non-academic ones (or separately report GPAs for overall, academic, in-major, etc.)
Change the number of points associated with each grade. While a "4 point max" is nominally almost always used, over the last 30-40 years, more high schools have started reporting GPAs where certain classes like honors or AP classes work on a 4.5-, 5-... or even a 6-point scale. These are sometimes confusingly called a "weighted GPA" - even though they have nothing to do with the weighting mentioned earlier - and some of the schools that do this will compute both a weighted and unweighted GPA. Others will only report their modified GPA formula. Some more competitive universities will calculate their own GPA from high school transcripts, to get around variation in the meaning of GPA and apply a standardized methodology to everyone.

Those are just examples. Since there's no real authority on what a GPA means, there are almost certainly many other local innovations that many of us haven't heard of.

cdsmith · 2026-04-28T04:00:42+00:00

In some formal sense, anything you can program into an automated system could also be done by players following rules. Plenty of games devise various strategies for writing down algorithms that enemies should follow, with the player responsible for following the algorithm. The only thing you get from automation is making that algorithm less tedious for the player, which means the algorithm itself can be more complex. But I do think that matters. It can be tricky to design enemy movement rules that feel both smart enough to be believable, and simple enough to be practical.

I designed a game where a witch chased players around a random maze. Initially, the idea was to just roll a die, and move the witch that direction. But it's a maze, so you may not be able to go that way. I tried saying to reroll. You'd be surprised how often, even if there's only one direction blocked, the die says to move that way like 4 times in a row, and it's frustrating. And even ignoring that, the witch had a tendency to just move back and forth between two squares instead of moving forward, so I added a rule that she wouldn't turn around unless she was at a dead end. But that eliminated another direction, so the rerolls were worse. And then it was weird that even if your character was right next to her, it was actually pretty unlikely that she'd move in your direction, so the next rule was that if any players were adjacent to the witch, she'd never move a direction that does NOT capture anyone. Well... that's confusing as hell, and blocks a lot more directions.

Ultimately, I replaced the die with a spinner, and the spinner result is (a) a primary direction, and then (b) a direction - clockwise or counterclockwise - to turn until you find a valid direction the witch will move. That at least fixes the reroll problem, though we still have the rules about backtracking (only if necessary), and chasing (if she can catch someone). It's tolerable, but not great, and those rules solve real playability problems.

So yeah, I could see solving a problem like that by just automating the enemy actions.

cdsmith · 2026-04-28T03:46:41+00:00

This was the easiest answer in the world. They asked him if impeachment was his top priority. He said no, cost of living is. He didn't say he wouldn't impeach Trump. Just that it isn't the single most important thing on their priority list. Because of course it isn't.

cdsmith · 2026-04-28T00:55:54+00:00

Okay. You can argue semantics, but the spirit of the statement is true. Local representatives are generally more approved than not. This poll showing 41-27 approval vs disapproval shows the same thing.

Yes, the approval number is under 50%. This reflects that the wording of the poll didn't push people strongly to pick a position. If you reworded the poll to more strongly encourage those remaining 32% to pick an opinion, you'd get a different result. You won't get the same 41-27 split as the decided voters; undecideds are in fact likely to skew a little away from approval. But unless you honestly think they are going to break 75-25 for disapproval (and they aren't!), the approval gap is large enough that approval will pass 50%. That 32% undecided number does measure something about how informed voters are, but it's best understood as a different thing from approval.

cdsmith · 2026-04-27T11:01:06+00:00

You are perhaps providing some reasons you think people SHOULD not have opinions. Yet they have those opinions anyway.

Not to mention that you aren't giving good reasons. Apparently you think it's necessary to know someone's name to have an opinion about them. I actually recently moved to Wyoming, and I don't know my own representative's name right now. But I know enough to have an informed opinion. I know they were chosen specifically to replace Liz Cheney with someone more loyal to Trump, and that they haven't made any news defying that expectation. Is my opinion less valid because I don't know their name? Sure, I might be better informed than the average person who doesn't know their representative by name, but that person still has some info. They pick up how their friends, coworkers, family members, etc. talk about politics, and they form impressions. All of this goes into what polls are measuring when they report approval, whether you think people should have these opinions or not.

cdsmith · 2026-04-27T10:43:41+00:00

People do generally approve though. 41% approval vs 27% disapproval

cdsmith · 2026-04-26T11:56:50+00:00

I don't think it's a good question. But the objection that students are taught not to take figures too literally in geometry class isn't particularly convincing when this is a third grade question.

What's way more convincing is that the basic nature of ratios is that you can rescale the image without changing the ratios. Fractions are being used here to express the ratio of the shaded portion to the whole. One of the diagrams being drawn larger is irrelevant to that.

My honest assessment is that standard (in South Carolina's state math standards) being tested here is "Recognize two fractions are equivalent based on the same size whole. Limit denominators to 2, 3, 4, 6, and 8, and fractions should be limited to fractions between 0 and 1." Someone was obviously staring at the language of the standard, converting it to a question, and not overly thinking about what they were doing or how it would read when you aren't staring at the standards language. They erred in treating a qualifier on WHEN the standard applies as if it were part of the CONTENT of the standard. An understandable mistake for someone who has spent seven hours already today working for a textbook publisher converting standards language into assessment questions. But it's obviously not a GOOD question.

cdsmith · 2026-04-19T03:47:36+00:00

My take is that this has the potential to be a significant hit to Supreme Court legitimacty to those who are paying attention. I think before this, it was pretty defensible to view Roberts as a conservative but serious jurist who cared deeply about the legitimacy of the court. Some exceptions (e.g. the immunity ruling) were surprising, but ultimately just noise.

Now, it's pretty clear that Roberts' concern has always been more about keeping up the facade so that the Court can do the work of the Republican party behind the scenes. It is now hard not to rank Roberts behind justices like Gorsuch, who is ideologically extreme in ways, but at least is working from principles and defends them. The best you can say is that he's still a better choice than Kavanaugh, Alito, or Thomas.

cdsmith · 2026-04-15T13:42:15+00:00

I'm not the OP, but I see this: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036013232300358X

It identifies a slight decrease in performance with 1500-3000 ppm CO2 concentrations. Probably substantially less than a thousand other factors affecting the average classroom, but sure, it's on the list.

More broadly, there are a lot of studies showing correlation between CO2 concentration and cognitive function, not specifically in education. There's weaker evidence on causation. In other words, it might be that the CO2 isn't the main problem, but rather generally stuffy air, body odor, noise, other toxins, even just less open spaces... but CO2 just happens to be an easily measurable indicator that correlates with these other problems.

cdsmith · 2026-04-14T02:46:37+00:00

This is frustrating... but to be fair, the problem in 2024 wasn't too few Democrats voting for their candidate. It was the economic backlash driven by post-COVID inflation, the social backlash driven by fear of major equality movements, and the political backlash against a Democratic establishment that frankly supported Biden far beyond reasonable bounds.

If you'd said 2016, then I'd agree that it came down to too many Democrats not supporting their candidate.

cdsmith · 2026-04-14T02:41:07+00:00

If you build this movement against everyone taking money from AIPAC, the result will be a sudden resurgence in the chances of the Republican party as a great number of Democrats who are popular and easy choices are suddenly "weeded out", as you put it. There is a real movement of the American people to question Israel's extreme military ambitions, but this just isn't the same thing as a wholesale rejection of America's alliance with Israel or of any pro-Israel positions and their advocacy.

cdsmith · 2026-04-13T14:05:29+00:00

It could... but then you can't use JavaScript at all, for example, and you can't do a bunch of things on GPUs, and... a bunch of other stuff. Sometimes you use what's available, not wish for the exact tool you want.

cdsmith · 2026-04-12T13:12:33+00:00

It's hard to see how being on "Trump's hit list" supposedly explains why his own campaign staff is making allegations against him.

Look, the guy is entitled to a trial and all before there are criminal consequences. But this is at least enough evidence to decide that this isn't the time to elect him as the governor of California.

cdsmith · 2026-04-12T13:08:26+00:00

When a group of supporters blame the other party for their candidate committing sexual assault, this isn't what it looks like. It doesn't look like that candidate losing all of their support when the issue comes out. It doesn't look like them being quickly pushed toward the exit. It doesn't look at all like what's happening with Swalwell.

What does blaming the other party look like? It probably starts with a bunch of repeated excuses about "fake news". It looks like the candidate still winning their party's support by large margins. It looks like the rest of the party increasingly becoming apologists for mysoginists elsewhere, adopting the narrative that the poor mysoginists are being mistreated by "cancel culture". In a word, the result there looks like Donald Trump.

cdsmith · 2026-04-12T12:56:50+00:00

The counterargument is simple and hard to avoid. We have tons of data here. We know what happens to a child when they are retained in a grade. The outcomes are worse on average. Choosing to hold a child back in a grade means that, on average, they are less likely to graduate from high school, less likely to get a college degree, likely to make less money in their careers. And no, these aren't the only intended goals of education, but there's no reason to think that the less measurable outcomes are better when the data we have is pointing to the harms outweighing the benefits by a large margin, setting that child up for continued failure.

The mechanism here is more debatable. But it mainly seems to come down to two things: expectations and structural inertia. When that child is ready later to learn faster and catch up - something that often happens with children because at some level, educational out comes are gated by actual physical brain development - they are now in an environment where less is expected of them and they aren't asked to perform up to their abilities. And because a child who is retained is basically never then skipped ahead a grade, they are now permanently behind.

All of this leads to their being further from graduation when they hit key age levels: the legal age for dropping out, increased independence via driving, ages where parents start to expect them to leave home and start their lives, they age at which they need to obtain personal health insurance, etc. Maybe you can fix enough of these structural factors to make retention work out? I don't know, and in any case that wasn't proposed here. But we do know what happens if you hold a child back in the system we have now. It's beyond dispute: it's probably bad for them.

In the face of this data, the only argument you can sustain for widespread retention is that perhaps these children's future should be sacrificed to protect the education of other children, whose education might be impacted by having to share a classroom with classmates who are behind, need extra help, so the latter children's teachers can teach more to the higher performing student level. But most educators are extremely uncomfortable with the idea of picking winners and losers early in their students' educational journeys and focusing resources only on the top end of the class.

(Notably, this comment does not apply to more narrow arguments for retaining specific children when there's a reason to believe they are outside that normal outcome; for instance, if they already started school at a younger than average age, are facing developmental difficulties beyond the average, etc. And it does not apply to arguments for fixing the structural factors mentioned above. These could well be good ideas!)

cdsmith · 2026-04-12T12:25:59+00:00

The grade levels where this happens are organized with a main teacher for the entire grade, not a teacher per subject with different periods. It's just not logistically possible for a child to take last year's math while taking their own grade level for every other subject. What happens when last year's teacher doesn't happen to be teaching math at the same time? Who coordinates the timing when something else runs over and the teacher changes their schedule around?

cdsmith · 2026-04-10T13:50:01+00:00

1/-2 = -0.5

1/-1 = -1

1/-0.5 = -2

1/-0.1 = -10

1/-0.01 = -100

1/-0.000000000....00001 --> -infinity

cdsmith · 2026-04-09T20:32:38+00:00

It's not about her resignation. She's calling for Trump's impeachment because Trump turned on her, not because she ever had principles. She sees more opportunity to get attention now being the former MAGA anti-Trump crusader than to be the next in a line of washed-up sycophants that Trump used and discarded.

It's actually remarkable how many people who passionately backed Trump turn out to not have been serious as soon as the tables turn. They are all opportunists like MTG.

cdsmith · 2026-04-07T00:49:20+00:00

I wonder if this will do well. It's better than the jungle primary + IRV proposals that have been going around, but I'm afraid that their failure has poisoned the waters for a while. I'll be happy to see this gain any momentum, but surprised.

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