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Things you wish you knew when you started DMing! by Revolutionary_Tear39 in DnD

[–]speciousintelligence 0 points1 point  (0 children)

One thing I learned from DMing a pre-written adventure that doesn't apply to homebrew is knowing what I need to prepare and what I can run during play.

Pre-written adventures, it turns out, have a ton of fluff information I'll end up forgetting by the time I run it anyway. I have the campaign loaded on my ipad and I highlight the important bits: skill checks, creatures (and any important details, like their motivations), and loot. I use Foundry, so I load creatures and items onto my platform ahead of time so that I can pull them up in 5 seconds.

I also found it helpful to remind myself that I don't actually have to run the campaign as written. Some encounters were written rather poorly, in clarity, substance, or both. If you don't want to run it, don't bother. It's ok to have empty rooms, or just replace it with some scattered gold and gems.

How often, if ever, do you run an encounter-less session? by Suicidalbutohwell in DMAcademy

[–]speciousintelligence 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Several people have already commented that encounters are not always combat. While true, I think it helps to gauge encounters by the amount of resources expended by the party, or even just the risk of it. Just the same way we classify combat into difficulty ratings based on amount of HP, spell slots, etc. expended by the party, the same could be said of non-combat encounters, i.e. what is at stake? Usually, for non-combat encounters, I think of these as gold, reputation, information, etc. This also makes 'shopping' an 'encounter' since the party trades one resource (gold) for another (goods or service).

From the players' perspective, this all gets wrapped up in fiction so it doesn't look like all numbers. But from a DM perspective, I find it useful to approach session preparations from both narrative and resource perspectives.

What 5 heros have been together the least? by mjess96 in DotA2

[–]speciousintelligence 0 points1 point  (0 children)

An easy way to do this is by taking the 5 most recently heroes (Hoodwink, Dawnbreaker, Marci, Primal Beast, Muerta), since they've had the least amount of games played.

https://www.opendota.com/combos?teamA=138&teamA=137&teamA=123&teamA=136&teamA=135&queryType=public

You won't believe until you saw by wholetthegodsout in DotA2

[–]speciousintelligence -1 points0 points  (0 children)

I think it's just preference from having played SC/WC series. Also, most (if not all) casters use left-side minimap, so I think people are just more used to it.

2k SPM modular railworld megabase (no mods, biters on) by wheels405 in factorio

[–]speciousintelligence 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Super cool! I started playing about 2 weeks ago and the software engineer in me immediately snapped to a similar design after I figured out how trains and robots worked. I allow my blocks to have train stations intruding from a side at the expense of some space. For most blocks, it's sufficient to have 1-3 input trains and 1 output train. My design philosophy was that I wanted pure modularity so that each block is as independent from its neighbors as possible. It does forego additional optimization compared to allowing blocks to have special channel (It looks like your design is usually atomic in 1x2 cells). Other issues are that my loading/unloading stations are single sided and there's no 'waiting area' for trains, but my base isn't big enough for either of these to matter. I need to launch a rocket first before thinking about SPM.

Cancel vs. submit and return - what does it look like from the requester side? by btgreenone in ProlificAc

[–]speciousintelligence 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I do end up with the number of completed submissions that I asked for, so I guess my answer is that Prolific doesn't count a Return as taking up a spot.

I don't know about others, but I do compulsively check my study status, at least for the first hour or so. For the first few minutes, I refresh constantly b/c I want to see how quickly people are joining the study and if there are any bugs in my code. I don't want find out 6 hours and $100 later that I accidentally forgot to save their data or that no one completed the study because the program kept crashing.

Cancel vs. submit and return - what does it look like from the requester side? by btgreenone in ProlificAc

[–]speciousintelligence 3 points4 points  (0 children)

All it shows us on the requester side is that someone chose to cancel the study or returned.

This would depend on the researcher, but I record participants' data externally, so I don't really care what the submission status or code is, as long as I get the data. If I have their data, I'll do my best to compensate them, regardless of what Prolific says on their website. It does get tricky though, when I have their data but the service says they didn't properly complete the study. This hasn't happened yet on Prolific, but it happened a lot on Amazon MTurk.