I can’t speak specifically to gurps but as a general rule, for any game, I highly recommend playing it as intended for a bit before doing substantial tinkering. To do otherwise is a lot of hubris.

This joke is why I will say to DMs getting railroad-y, “are you sure you wouldn’t rather write a book?”

So as a senior, you could abstain. But then your junior colleagues will eventually code circles around you, because they’re wearing bazooka-powered jetpacks and you’re still riding around on a fixie bike

Lol this works in a way the author probably didn’t intend. They are wearing extremely dangerous tools that were never really a great idea. They’ll code some circles, set their legs on fire, and crash into a wall.

Yeah I think DND 3e had some wacky stuff with templates. Big effective level penalties if I recall for most of them

“There must be in-groups that the law protects but does not bind, and out-groups that the law binds but does not protect.” That’s all it is. That’s all it’s ever been.

They are worse than villains from a child’s story.

That’s my kind of game. The “let’s not be political (even though it is political)” flavor is less appealing.

I bought a couple things on epic early on because I thought competition would be good. But epic kind of sucks and has no Linux support, so I stopped.

I tell people about lemmy and send them links. Mostly people don’t care about anything. Abstract or remote things like “should a platform be owned by one asshole?” just doesn’t even enter their brain.

People do not all have the same working definition of “politics”. Many people seem to use it to mean “overt content about contemporary issues”, but that’s not really a good definition.

If your game has sentient creatures with agency and desires, it has politics.

For example, if your game has a king, there’s politics. Having the people accept monarchy is a political statement. It’s not as hot-button as, say, having slavery, but it’s still political.

You might not be surprised if your players react to a world with chattel slavery by trying to free the slaves and end that institution. The same mechanism may lead them to want to end absolute monarchy. They see something in the setting they perceive as unjust, and want to change it.

A lot of people are kind of… uncritical, about many things. They don’t see absolute monarchy as “political” because it’s a familiar story trope. They are happy to accept this uncritically so they can get to the fun part where you get a quest to slay the dragon. (Note that the target of killing the dragon rather than, say, negotiating or rehoming it is also political)

People then get frustrated because they feel stupid, and they’re being blocked from pursuing the content they want. They just want to, for example, do a tactical mini game about fighting a big monster that spits fire. They don’t want to talk about the merits of absolute monarchy or slaying sentient creatures.

It’s okay to not always want to engage in the political dimension. That doesn’t mean it’s not there. If someone responds to the king giving you a quest with “wait, this is an absolute monarchy where the first born son becomes king? That’s fucked up” they’re not “making it political”. It already was political.

If you present a man and a woman as monogamously married in your game, that’s political. That’s a statement. If you show a big queer polycule, that’s also a statement. The latter will ping the aforementioned uncritical players as “political”, because it’s more atypical, but both are “political”.

Some of this can be handled in session 0. But sometimes you learn that some people in the group have different tastes and probably shouldn’t play together.

I had a dm once say he was thinking about saying no about my rogue’s “I shoot, move, bonus action hide around the corner” loop. But then he said he realized if he said no, my character would suck and it’d be no fun.

I think that was the right call.

I feel like every retro I’ve attended has been a farce.

“What went bad? We said doing it this way would be harder and more risk prone. Management insisted we do it that way, and it took longer than and caused a site outage.”

"What should we do differently?’

“Listen to the team next time”

“That won’t happen”

The worst is when people don’t know how the system works, and then won’t listen to answers

Like I was at a job and product was going on about “our system has no concept of project owner. We have all these projects but there’s nothing unifying them under a single owner. We need to build this!”

I was like “… what? That’s just not true. There’s a “company” object that does that. It’s got a foreign key with project in the database. I guess it’s a weird name but it’s there”

It took several back and forths over multiple meetings. They eventually got on the same page and I saved us doing a whole useless project, but they did insist I rename it to “account” in the database and code. I would’ve rather left it because that could’ve been dicey, but alas. (The rename did go out fine, but I had to go looking for every reference.)

For the code, open source is probably the way to go. People should be able to build from source. Otherwise, how do they know you’re not doing something shady. Open source is generally a net improvement on security, assuming people actually look at it.

For screenshots, first fix it so the screenshots render nicely on narrow displays.

Would probably need to be open source to be trustworthy. Running a random executable from the Internet seems dicey.

Needs more screenshots. The two that are on the site don’t render great on mobile. Can only see a small portion.

I’m unclear how you find another user and verify who they are.

Website should have a clearer feature list. The user manual wants to download a text file instead of showing it in the browser.

Yes! I usually take any opportunity to gush about Fate but I restrained myself here

The main weakness of Fate is you need more engaged players. Stuff like DND can mostly hum along with passive players, but Fate falls really flat if people aren’t engaging with it.

On player training, I like systems where you can bribe players to let bad things happen.

Like in vampire: the requiem, a player can always turn a regular failure into a Dramatic Failure, and get a little XP. This meant the players went from “oh no the cave is probably full of monsters let’s take forever stressing” to “I ROLLED GARBAGE CAN I JUST BARGE IN LIKE A CONFIDENT IDIOT FOR MY DRAMATIC FAILURE?”

Tastes vary, but I found it made a more interesting and snappier game.

I’ve seen at a very large company a workflow that involved manually updating an excel workbook and (I think) saving it on confluence, so a python script could download it and parse it later. It wasn’t even doing formulas. It was just like less than a hundred lines of text in a half dozen sheets.

As someone who works in software, I’ve been using macs at work for more than a decade. One job had Linux machines. One place had windows for developers and it was a shit show.

Apple isn’t amazing but at least the terminal is sensible.

There was a job interview once where the candidate was presented with a form that had 3 entry fields. They started as like [2, 4, 8]. The candidate was tasked with figuring out what made the form submit and what generated an error.

People would build all sorts of bizarre hypothesis and fail to test them. Good candidates would have an idea, then try to invalidate it.

It was for a QA role, where the ideal candidate would have good debugging skills instead of running with the first thing that came to mind.

Edit: oh, it was basically this guy: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/07/03/upshot/a-quick-puzzle-to-test-your-problem-solving.html

For work, a Mac and vscode. I don’t love vscode but it’s what everyone uses.

Well, some of them develop on windows with like notepad++ and it’s kind of a nightmare. There’s no ci/cd, linting, or testing, so whenever I check out someone else’s branch it’s full of red squiggles.

My personal is pop!_os Linux where I’m also using vscode because I’m too cheap to pay for pycharm.