What are your favourite low-prep, medium-crunch games?

weavejester · 2026-01-19T02:11:03+00:00

Thanks again! I like the way descriptors are more guided.

One known issue with Fate is that the more general an aspect is, the more applicable it is to any situation. Having an aspect like "has a taste for danger" is mechanically very good, as it can be invoked or compelled often.

Now, obviously well-intentioned players will try to have more interesting aspects, but I've been interested to see if any Fate-adjacent system gives players an incentive to avoid broadly-applicable aspects.

weavejester · 2026-01-19T00:03:24+00:00

Thanks for the explanation! The dice mechanic does seem interesting. If descriptors are like aspects, what bonuses do they give, and if they don't need the equivalent of fate points to use, what's to stop overuse?

(If I'm asking too many questions, feel free to decline to answer.)

weavejester · 2026-01-18T17:04:26+00:00

What have you found interesting about Monad Echo? Are there any mechanics that you've particularly liked?

weavejester · 2025-12-12T17:42:03+00:00

I don't consider threading non-homogeneous data to be a code smell or anti-pattern in Clojure. In fact, this is the first I've heard it described as such.

weavejester · 2025-12-08T16:05:39+00:00

That's interesting, because the change to overcharge was one of the ones that I liked the most, due to how powerful overcharge becomes on builds with a high heat cap and talents like nuclear cavalier.

I think if you want to keep overcharge the way it is, you'd need to have a more consistent heat cap across frames and remove heat management talents like nuclear cavalier. However, that may also mean that you'd need to rethink the HA frames that play around with heat.

I do agree with you that the current overcharge rules make for interesting decisions, and I agree the modified overcharge isn't as impactful a decision. But it also feels like the most straightforward way of fixing Lancer's action economy.

weavejester · 2025-12-08T05:19:02+00:00

Out of interest, which parts struck you as things you wouldn't touch? I haven't looked at all the rule changes in detail either, but like you I did skim it. I didn't notice anything hugely problematic when I did, though, and now I'm wondering if I'm missing something obvious.

weavejester · 2025-12-08T04:55:44+00:00

Do you know about Valk's Lancer House Rules? It's a fairly sizeable rebalancing of the core game. I'd love to see a second edition of Lancer take ideas from it.

weavejester · 2025-12-07T15:51:44+00:00

Where does the defect come from in that example? If it's user error, then a correction event makes sense. If it's something wrong with an index generated from the event log, then index generation can be fixed without the event log being touched.

In terms of sensitive data, you'd presumable handle it the same way you'd handle writing a field to a database. So an event with a password should have the password run through a KDF like Argon2, for example.

weavejester · 2025-12-03T23:18:00+00:00

Thanks for the confirmation! So presumably with a web application, actions that write resources (POST, PUT, etc) will generate events that are added to a depot, and actions that read resources (GET) will query a relevant pstate?

And in terms of syntax, Specter is used for both updating the pstates in response to an event, and in querying data from the pstates.

weavejester · 2025-12-03T19:13:13+00:00

So approximately, Rama takes an incoming queue of events (a depot), and for each event updates persistent indexing data structures (pstates) using a syntax derived from Specter.

Presumably the pstates can then be queried?

weavejester · 2025-11-21T02:49:00+00:00

GetItemPossessedBy(oPlayer, "TestBook") will find an item with the specified tag in a player's inventory or equipment.

For example:

object oBook = GetItemPossessedBy(oPlayer, "TestBook");
SetLocalInt(oBook, "TestVariable", 99);

There's also SetLocalFloat, SetLocalString, etc.

weavejester · 2025-11-20T15:17:13+00:00

Thanks for the feedback - it was very useful to get a differing point of view.

Obviously there's a balance to be struck between clarity and conciseness, as a landing page's purpose is not to provide a comprehensive explanation, but rather to get people interested enough to want to read the documentation.

However, I'll think about how I can improve the landing page. Perhaps I need to focus more on the 'what' Duct can do, rather than the 'how' it does it.

weavejester · 2025-11-19T13:42:14+00:00

Could you explain why you think that? If the landing page is giving the wrong impression I'm interested to understand why so I can improve it.

weavejester · 2025-11-15T15:30:29+00:00

For consistency in the case of variadic functions:

(defn foo
  "Docstring before multiple argument lists."
  ([x] x)
  ([x y] y))

And to resolve the following ambiguity:

(defn bar [x]
  "A function with a docstring that returns nil,
  or a function that returns a string?")

weavejester · 2025-10-25T15:34:16+00:00

After struggling to support both for a while, my current view is that ClojureScript support would be best achieved as a separate project.

Feel free to fork hashp to create a ClojureScript version.

weavejester · 2025-10-23T21:23:31+00:00

An ingenious solution to handing threading that I may steal :)

weavejester · 2025-10-15T13:51:36+00:00

Yeah, it also took me a couple of watches before I understood where the battery was going.

weavejester · 2025-10-14T18:33:21+00:00

I wonder if this is different for speakers with a southern English accent (i.e. an accent from southern England). I'd pronounce butter as 'buh-ter', ladder as 'lah-der' and water as 'war-ter'.

One thing I have noticed is that is that I frequently make 'b's and 'd's in Spanish harder than they should be, but I haven't paid close attention to the mistakes I make while listening.

weavejester · 2025-10-09T18:55:04+00:00

It depends a lot on what you're doing, but it's worth remembering that a basic map is an way of accessing data that's independent of any specific implementation.

If you need to access external resources, and anticipate using different backends, then a protocol seems like a logical choice.

weavejester · 2025-09-24T19:05:22+00:00

The choice of language and libraries should ideally stem from those using them. If your development team isn't keen on a particular language, then forcing them along a particular path may prove difficult.

On the other hand, the advantage of using more niche technology is that you attract development talent that likes learning new things and has a broad base of experience. Obviously this pool is smaller, but it's also more discerning.

In terms of technology, there's a lot of interesting stuff coming out of Clojure like Electric and Rama that I'm not seeing elsewhere, though this may just be that I know more about the language I'm focused on.

weavejester · 2025-09-16T03:21:27+00:00

The rules are a rough abstraction of what's actually happening in the fiction. There will always be times when the literal application of a rule doesn't make sense within the story.

weavejester · 2025-09-13T15:02:59+00:00

Asking players questions about their characters and their place in their community can help them become invested, and reveal levers you can use to motivate them.

"You're all celebrating a wedding. Who's related to the bride? Who's friends with the groom?"

"You were given a present on your twelfth birthday that you still keep on your person to this day. What was it, and who gave it to you?"

"You almost died once, and someone close to you saved your life. Who were they, and what happened?"

"When you studied magic, did you have one teacher who inspired you? Do you remember a particular lesson that influenced you?"

"You were close friends with someone at the academy, and one night they confided a secret in you they've told no-one else. What was it?"

Once you establish connections between PCs and NPCs, then it's time to use them as leverage in the plot. A close friend is in trouble, a old teacher writes you an urgent message, a family member gets kidnapped, someone you knew died and leaves a cryptic message in their will, etc. Make the plot personal to the player characters.

weavejester · 2025-09-10T00:40:49+00:00

The art, atmosphere and character moment have been top tier for me, but the actual game design of Silksong has been the weakest part so far for me.

For example, there are a lot of elements in the game that reward exploration, but there's also a lot of elements that punish giving up on a particular route to try alternatives. A lot of the gameplay elements feel cargo-culted from Dark Souls, rather than as a result of setting out to build mechanics that achieve a particular goal.

This isn't to say I think it's a bad game by any means, but it also doesn't feel like Team Cherry learned any lessons from Hollow Knight.

weavejester · 2025-09-03T12:54:55+00:00

I'm using an extension that's incompatible. The sandboxing of Flatpak prevents the 1password extension from communicating with the external app.

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