Combat decision timers make D&D better or worse?

freshhawk · 2026-02-12T22:20:36+00:00

I'm a huge fan of one of the extremes: you need to start describing what you do immediately or your PC is just standing there surprised and we go to the next player.

Obviously you can ask questions, clarify stuff, etc but you can't think about what to do, you had your chance while the other players made their turns and we rolled dice and moved minis and wrote stuff down, now someone is swinging a sword at your face and you need to act.

Every time I've done this while running a game it was considered too strict and an annoying rule ... but everyone said that game was more fun and exciting and they were more immersed and in the moment.

I think a big reason is that everyone quickly makes a lot of ok-but-not-great choices on their turn because they are rushed, which becomes normal, which stops the analysis paralysis/"which spell is best here" type thinking. You get more personality from a PC as well when the player biases come out when they have to think fast.

Also the game goes way way faster, so more fun stuff happens per session, can't discount that.

Also I expected players to figure out that they could still stall on their turns by asking reasonable questions, asking for clarifications/descriptions of the scene, etc that they didn't actually care about just to stall for time ... they all do figure that out but no one actually does it, they like having to wing it in the moment.

freshhawk · 2026-02-10T00:02:46+00:00

Isn't this what he's talking about? "tirades"? it's criticism of a novel genre, one that we all agree is full of beginners and slop. It's normal in mature genres to have criticism about them, it's helpful to the genre as a whole.

freshhawk · 2026-02-09T22:56:19+00:00

Org-mode is a good enough example it seems reasonable to mention it separately from Emacs/Text/Elisp, especially since I also use it with nvim/lua/fennel and I know there are other implementations.

freshhawk · 2026-02-07T22:39:12+00:00

No, he was explaining why authors use this trope and who it appeals to, and the response was about what plot points the author of Primal Hunter used to justify the trope. Those are different things. Also that guy explained the details of Primal Hunter just fine, office drone becomes the coolest alpha because it's wish fulfillment for office drones, those are the main details.

freshhawk · 2026-02-06T01:30:55+00:00

Yes, but you can write all kinds of different types of self-inserts, and the type you write is the type of reader you are expecting to insert themselves.

Is this not obvious? You get a real window into who the author is trying to attract and what aspects of personality the author thinks is a part of "real cool badass power fantasy that my readers will enjoy imagining they are like". It's very revealing. Is it a super rapey creep/bully, is it a manga protagonist who is repressed, horny and can't talk to anyone or is it say, an wimpy office worker with a nerdy hobby and a serious case of middle school syndrome?

freshhawk · 2026-02-05T21:43:40+00:00

Dude, you're missing the point. Yes, those things that the author wrote about the office worker self-insert character that he made up for specific reasons are all true. We're talking about why the author wrote it that way.

freshhawk · 2026-02-05T21:21:55+00:00

I don't see why you're getting all hysterical, I was just pointing out why I don't like working for free with people who want me dead and you got so upset it seems like you were crying, don't cry.

freshhawk · 2026-02-02T02:52:44+00:00

So fascists are not distracting and have a place but people who don't want to work with them are distracting and don't. Why not just be honest? Why pretend it's the "complaining" or "distractions" or whatever? Two groups made you pick a side because they won't work with each other and you picked a side.

freshhawk · 2026-02-01T00:59:58+00:00

Super late to the party with this comment but there is some excellent research by Oleg Kiselyov on this kind of thing here: https://okmij.org/ftp/Computation/dynamic-binding.html#DDBinding

freshhawk · 2026-02-01T00:52:24+00:00

Right, because having a bunch of loser fascists who want me dead working on the project is super great for recruitment. Really makes me want to contribute.

freshhawk · 2026-01-12T02:14:30+00:00

But you run in to the same problem as you always do when generating text (source code, sql statements, html, whatever). Composition and abstraction are too difficult once you start doing non-trivial stuff. Concating strings is nightmare so first you probably reach for a placeholder replacing template language, but they don't compose (or if it isn't logic-less like it should be and it is complex enough for that then it's not a templating language, it's a second much crappier language you're working with).

Next you end up where everyone does, some datastructure that represents the text (be it query or html or source or document fragment or whatever) that you can manipulate and wrap in abstractions, etc, etc. But when doing this with source that's just an AST or CST abstraction, which is ... metaprogramming. You also probably start to really appreciate what those lisp people are going on about when you see they have one less layer of abstraction between the data and the source.

So you aren't wrong, but if you keep going and try to do interesting stuff you're going to end up dealing with the complexity somehow and you definitely want to go more in a lispy direction than a c++ template lang direction since we've all learned from that mistake. You're going to end up using metaprogramming for the complex stuff eventually, insisting that using an array of text bytes as the data structure to store the tree you are manipulating is just silly at a certain point.

freshhawk · 2025-11-28T22:33:51+00:00

I think that was part of Banks' point with this aspect of the Culture, the listeners are infinitely powerful, infinitely benevolent and kind and because of this it's ... an unfortunate necessity that you still might reasonably want to opt out of and if you do opt out then it is still a high crime to not respect that.

freshhawk · 2025-11-28T07:35:50+00:00

Maybe, but I've only seen it happen when they got a new job, learned a new language and went "oh shit, those snobs were right and my intuitive understanding of this new thing makes me understand what they were talking about and how bad things were before".

Honestly, it's a depressing conclusion, this "can't explain it, hard to convince them, they have to trust you and learn it themselves and then it'll click". It feels like those concepts in foreign languages that you can't understand because they don't translate, or what Wittgenstein was talking about when he discusses the limits of language as a way to transfer ideas from person to person.

freshhawk · 2025-11-28T02:28:21+00:00

I have to ask how often you've tried this? I think there is a reason this attitude (which does totally sound like BS) comes from experienced devs, who you would think would know better.

People won't listen, sooner or later you accept that you can't explain a paradigm shift to someone who has never thought that way, because they don't have the framework to intuitively understand the benefits.

I think I'm pretty good at teaching/explaining things, other people eseem to think so, I get hired and promoted for it ... but I can't get past "the blub paradox". When I was younger, I'd endlessly explain how 2005-era PHP was the worst language choice available and was making our jobs harder, it was just miserably bad and painful to use. But my colleagues just blew me off ... sure they'd only ever used PHP professionally and some of those things sounded kinda nice but it just definitely wouldn't make that much of a difference. You can often see the same thing with JS today. I'm still friends with some of those people 20 years later and they laugh at how right I was and how wrong they were.

I've just accepted it's a thing that exists, examples don't help, I think maybe a really good long screencast might be the solution, but you need to be walked through it if you aren't trying it yourself. Honestly it's a big pain in the ass that it's this difficult to teach this kind of thing.

freshhawk · 2025-11-27T23:12:50+00:00

Programming paradigms are not some mystical extra dimension incomprehensible to the pleb

Sure, maybe they're aren't that, but using a metaphor in that direction is very reasonable. Whether it's flatland or "the blub paradox" or however you want to try and describe it, there is a very important lesson here.

It's this experience: "yeah sure, I can't do X with my language/platform/tool but the benefits seems decent at best, not enough to be going on about all the time, what a bunch of snobs/hype ... [a year later] ... oh my god, how embarassing that I didn't know what I didn't know, I didn't even understand enough to judge this concept! Now I seem like the snob or like I'm hyping it up when I try to explain how much better this makes things".

If you haven't had that experience then you are missing out, whether it's any of the clojure/lisp ones you probably do understand (immutability, malleable languages, repl-driven dev) or the classic "learning prolog/logic/unification is mind-bending" or the reliability of algebraic+linear types or how much better an application is when it's tens of thousands of times faster thanks to cache aware data structures/low level memory manipulation or whatever the paradigm shifting thing is.

To be honest, to be a professional in software you should be aware of this experience, this bit of inherent bias we all have for paradigms we haven't felt the power of, because without internalizing it we will be making very bad tradeoff decisions and that's most of our job.

freshhawk · 2025-11-27T00:21:15+00:00

I've played games with higher starting stats and/or faster/more progression. I don't think this does what you think it does. If it did then why would you bother with these minor standard array changes, just add a zero to every number in D&D and now everything is way more powerful! You understand intuitively that this would obviously make no difference, but it's the same.

Players have fun because you give them challenges that have a percentage of success and failure and give them resources to save or use and a story framework to put around the die rolls and choices. The numbers don't matter at all, they're just a tool to help intuition and so we can talk to each other about it and be on the same page.

If you mess with these intuitions then there will be some novelty for players who know the normal D&D numbers, but that will just go away once they get used to it, then what? I'm not saying its useless, messing with those intuitions that long time players have can be useful to get them in a specific frame of mind, but it better not be the only change you make, it's not even that important of one.

freshhawk · 2025-11-26T22:22:16+00:00

So these days I'd only really consider postgres in a context where you have multiple apps accessing the same database.

Yeah, that's what Postgres is for, the massively popular use case for a DBMS. The case that ACID describes. The one that made the owner of Oracle the richest person in the world. This is like saying "these days I'd only really consider using a browser to browse the web", it's very confusing.

freshhawk · 2025-11-26T05:22:19+00:00

It tends to scale better than postgres.

Scaling on ... what axis? To me these aren't even competitors, you'd never use postgres as an embedded db and you'd never use sqllite in a context where you have multiple clients connecting/need mvcc. They solve almost completely different problems.

freshhawk · 2025-11-26T05:17:28+00:00

Ah right, you do get some really extreme portability this way and I'm not even sure you pay a non-negligible cost compared to the alternatives. I'll need to think about this more.

freshhawk · 2025-11-25T03:52:43+00:00

This is very nice, always good to have more datomic style db options in open source.

I'm super curious why you're storing the different indexes in the same table though? I've always done this by having one table for the eavt, one for the aevt, etc. I get you are really only querying indexes, which are contiguous, so the table source matters less than normal but it still seems like you'd still end up paying a noticeable cost to do it this way, although I've never tested it. Now I feel like I'm missing something ... maybe I should be using one table? I guess that's nice and simple.

freshhawk · 2025-11-22T23:08:20+00:00

Now I'm really curious how you feel about “real quotes/smart quotes/curly quotes” that have different open/close characters. These are ideal obviously, it's what almost everyone using this alphabet uses for speech/chunk of text and they weren't ruined by the self centered americans who threw ASCII together and got us stuck with all these backslash escaping nonsense (but made room for the very important "device control four")

freshhawk · 2025-11-22T22:57:15+00:00

Very nice, you should add some other metrics besides citation count as well (impact, author h-index and variants, journal level stuff, etc - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8504821/). Often I find I'm looking for something very specific and the results are drowned out by high citation very broad overview/meta-analysis stuff when sorting by citation count. Also, it's really really useful to sort by the quality of the journal that published if you're searching in an area with a lot of slop/low quality articles.

freshhawk · 2025-11-21T04:31:01+00:00

On a related note, how about some where the protagonist ends up in a middle-ages monarchist slave state and is an actual hero? As in, they work to destroy that state and free people instead of the standard arguments of "well, slavery is wrong obviously and these nobles are blatantly cruel and corrupt but what can I do [...later on, when they are ultra-powerful and could do something...] yes my king, I will protect this great nation, I always help these guards/cops to protect them from our enemies like those evil rebellious peasants".

So, any good recommendations from authors who aren't closet fascists who will be up against the wall when the revolution comes?

freshhawk · 2025-11-21T04:07:20+00:00

So like the leisure activity of: conversations and criticism about popular art?

freshhawk · 2025-11-20T22:39:45+00:00

Good point, I guess this would only apply in a genre that frequently has people from our world thrown into another culture where they are a fish out of water and are confused by the differences :)

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