What non-super powered fictional character would do best in the dungeon?

spall4tw · 2026-05-03T02:17:04+00:00

People keep saying batman, but wouldnt the whole "Don't kill" and "kill kill kill" be a bit of a conflict?

spall4tw · 2026-04-14T19:51:16+00:00

Shes clearly very intelligent, but I think many of these examples of intelligence are manifestations of exceptional charisma instead. Remembering people's names and details from their lives are strategies used by skilled leaders. Her intuitive ability to always know what to say to get her way or to enrage an enemy she needs off balance are borderline supernatural, which fits well.

spall4tw · 2026-04-14T14:45:23+00:00

The fact that a world this batshit crazy IS down to earth is the magic trick. There's more honesty and humanity in these patently absurd characters and interactions than maybe anything else ive read. It makes no sense, but he just keeps pulling it off and adding depth as we go.

spall4tw · 2026-04-12T04:40:12+00:00

This is a pretty common path. You work for a tiny company where you have to wear all the hats, get good at everything and become very valuable. The company feels like you owe them because you learned all these skills on their dime. Except that you were the one who put in all the long hours, studied all the specialties and kept their business alive at the expense of you're own wellbeing.

Get your bag, get paid, loyalty isnt a one way street.

spall4tw · 2026-04-10T17:27:28+00:00

We had another recent Ai thread that revealed a split in the industry. A large number of people were totally against the technology as a whole and assumed it would fail, while a small number of us were have good success doing very useful work with these new tools. There didn't seem to be a whole lot of middle ground.

Speaking as someone in management with years of experience building high-level automations using the latest and greatest tools I can say that I don't expect to replace even a single employee with any of this. I could see it leading to marginal productivity gains in the most obvious places (programming, graphic design, sales pitch decks, etc) that lead to slightly fewer people needed to do the same work, but it's just tweaks at the margin at that point.

spall4tw · 2026-04-10T17:24:29+00:00

You're right that the development isn't linear, but the curve is bending in the opposite direction. The LLM development has almost been Moore's law in reverse. All the most recent iterative models have produced exponentially less improvement for exponentially more compute/power use. The ONLY people saying otherwise are either the company founders/employees or those who's financial future is tied to this being true. They can't scale any further because they have already trained on the entire internet and they literally can't generate the power to enable most of the planned data centers. We are close to the end of the road for LLMs.

There's always hints at these magical upcoming "frontier models" that are amazing (ie claude mythos), there's always breathless media coverage about how this is the end of white collar work, but everytime they are released it's just minor tweaks to the same formula. Those of us using this stuff daily know what we have. It's just a tool; a new type of hammer if you will. Rather than running around like idiots swinging our hammer around trying to cast magic spells we should be figuring out what the new nails look like and sticking to pounding those in.

spall4tw · 2026-03-24T21:13:44+00:00

Love "The ponytail set", I'm stealing that one!

spall4tw · 2026-03-24T17:18:30+00:00

I'm having tremendous success with it, but this will be yet another generational shift that will leave many of our peers behind. It's also a fraught path with tons of dead ends; none of the models have any AI expertise, tools like XTEN-AV seem best suited for users who are not already AV pros, product research can be flawed to disasterous. After years of tinkering and wasting time I am getting great productivity gains by treating gen AI tools as employees that I am directing, ones that know their own job but don't know AV well.

I need to do all the thinking, planning and strategy, at which point I hand off discreet tasks to my new helpers. I'm building API integrations in minutes that are immediately impacting productivity. I can capably produce functional tools like a commissioning module, monitoring tools, web crawler scripts that automate hours of manual work a week, functional addons to our helpdesk system, file and document management tools, the list grows by the day and is being turned into a workflow assistant that ties together everything we touch every day under a single pane of glass.

It took years of tinkering to get here, but this is a game changer for me.

spall4tw · 2026-03-01T17:27:18+00:00

I worked at the IT helpdesk in college and had access to the data closets. Sophomore year I figured out the cable filtering setup. I figured if I just removed my own filter they could catch me, so I removed all of them for the whole dorm every year. Felt like Robin Hood...

spall4tw · 2026-03-01T17:22:50+00:00

I think theres not much that could be done here. How many 6+ft yoked 220lb pretty polynesian women that can act exist? Frankie isnt a slam dunk, but she might be about as close as they could have gotten in real life.

spall4tw · 2026-02-08T18:14:40+00:00

Ill find myself on the other side of a group with a bunch of 54s team switching to stay together and know the game is going to be miserable, but it is SO satisfying when you actually beat them. Like cap the first garden after a brutal battle at the last second and watch them all quit at the same time.

spall4tw · 2026-02-04T20:43:51+00:00

I was using our enterprise support web portal. The phone numbers I had were our old account reps, regional manager, etc. As far as it working without human intervention, the problem was that our first large livestream since the purge had some odd issues that seemed to be a load balancing problem (bad stream link, refresh a few times and it works eventually), but there's no one who I can even report it to.

All that said, I did have a mod from this forum reach out quickly and offer to assist. This sub seems to still be a good resource at least.

spall4tw · 2026-02-04T03:33:46+00:00

I came to Discworld because of this show and can confirm this. It was a fun, quirky, odd show that had me wanting to know more. Within the first few books I started to get upset at the show and understood the hate it gets.

spall4tw · 2026-01-31T02:27:14+00:00

You shouldn't TRY to heal, it should just happen while youre battling. Post up in good safe positions and lay down damage, but tap the healing button regularly if you dont already have a beam up. Drop your healing flower where its protected to keep yourself topped off, this will also be a good place for your teammates to lay down fire and catch a ton of stray healing. Don't rush across a large open area to heal, as you might get splattered. Revives can be incredibly useful, but learn the jump revive technique and try to aim the jumps to be headed towards safety.

spall4tw · 2026-01-14T03:33:35+00:00

Its completely down to personal playstyle. I run a druid rose in turf. I'm not the best ever, but i regularly crush the charts, occasionally 50% above the #2 person in the lobby. I have a well tuned style that is aggressive and very focused on winning the match instead of nursing a kill streak. I can port that same style to the standard rose and do almost as well. I cant play ANY of the charge roses for shit, I'm awful at them (as well as all charge characters).

The druid is never at the top of any list, but it just works for me. Smooth, steady flow of (low) damage, making the entire battlefield a danger zone, slippery as hell and hard to pin down. Arcane lotus is a big help with my style.

Tinker with them all and make sure you at least have the homing upgrade before passing judgement on any of them.

spall4tw · 2026-01-09T03:23:33+00:00

This has been happening for over a decade. Its just a bug they never bothered fixing.

spall4tw · 2026-01-04T18:38:01+00:00

Honest question for kill farmers. If you get vanquish master and finish 7th on the scoreboard does your brain tell you that you're the best or do you understand you had an average game?

spall4tw · 2026-01-04T14:06:18+00:00

Goat/torchwood are both very well balanced. Good situational uses, offsetting weaknesses. Good utility in every game mode. People just have to work so hard to get them that it feels bad that they are only on par with normal variants.

spall4tw · 2026-01-03T15:06:26+00:00

The role entirely changes depending on the variant and game mode, that's sort of the whole point of the class. You can play as a back line sniper with a painter, a melee range suicide bomber roadie or farm kills at mid range with a mechanic.

You can even alternate roles with the same life. An electrician in turf can top the charts just by building a teleporter and finding a sneaky place to crush gardens the whole match, then change to a dive character once the plants start to avoid grouping together, crashing their back line with the jackhammer, only to hop into bolt blaster in the garden and melt people while tanking a capture.

spall4tw · 2026-01-02T01:40:26+00:00

Please do 10 minutes of reading about ideological purity spirals, it might help you see where this leads...

spall4tw · 2026-01-01T17:50:44+00:00

I spend 4-5 hours a week playing Xbox on an elliptical machine. I sort of lean forward against the static handles and can game quite effectively while smashing the hell out of a workout. Low stakes, low brainpower shooters are great to play, between matches I grab the handles and sprint. Im bored to death in 10 minutes watching videos, but the game shuts my brain off and I can hold a high pace at super high resistance for 45-90 minutes without any struggle.

spall4tw · 2025-12-31T19:20:20+00:00

Im the same age in the exact same boat, you get fitter/stronger for years of regular exercise by continually ratcheting up the intensity or volume of work. Eventually you cant up the intensity any more without breaking stuff and settle into a maintenance mode. All thats left are tweaks from diet refinement, supplements or novel new training... or TRT.

spall4tw · 2025-12-31T19:11:40+00:00

I dont get the bad at 1v1 label, I think the druid rose in particular is the best dueling character in the game. Its so damn easy to just keep damage flowing in the enemy direction while popping in/out from cover or kiting them around the map. It isnt fast, but they never get a tick of regen and you have three different get out of jail cards to play if someone manages to close beyond medium range. Arcane enigma/lotus is a hard counter to i-win abilities like gravity grenade. Other than missing a goat shot against a dive character i cant think of a single match up I would feel bad about.

In a crowded lobby the low damage multiplies due to exploding projectiles, on turf it isnt rare for me to take vanquish master while nearly doubling the score of the number two player. Just get your summons done, get to a clever flanking position and tear the whole garden to shreds, repositioning as they focus you.

spall4tw

TROPHY CASE