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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • I had one really good game of Vampire. Lasted a couple years. We still talk about it sometimes, and its best scenes. Like how one PC saved an NPC by jumping out a 10th story window with her. Or the time they had a huge in character fight because the job they’d tried to do went sideways.

    But I’ve also had a couple really bad games. There was one where they just didn’t read and retain anything from the books. One of the players on like session 4 was like “wait. How do I get more blood? Do I like… Bite people?”. My friend what do you think was happening in the other scenes when people were hunting for blood? They also didn’t retain anything about the different factions, so they didn’t really understand anyone’s motivation. It was bad. Still feel bad about it.













  • When I play an RPG (or RPG-like game), I want to know upfront: is this a storytelling kind of game, or a problem-solving kind of game? The rulesets that try to blend both often feel like they pick up the worst of both worlds, demanding players switch between two very different sorts of minds or risk spoiling the whole affair.

    This is an interesting point I’d thought about before but never articulated.

    I think it was part of why I didn’t gel with one of my old DND groups. They’d sometimes be faffing around doing “funny” stuff, but I mostly was sticking to the “use your resources wisely or perish” mode of DND.





  • I think I’d need to see more examples to understand this better.

    If I’m a thoughtful (d6) wizard and I want to carefully open this portal, what do I roll? What if I’m trying to do so but the building is on fire?

    It really does seem a lot like Fate Accelerated. You’ve both got four actions (though they theirs are more general purpose. create an advantage, overcome, attack. defend). Their approaches are (by default) careful, clever, flashy, forceful, quick, sneaky.



  • Sidebar defaults are bad. There’s no home directory. How do you get to your home directory? Cmd+shift+H, but can you get there without that special shortcut? You can’t see the file system’s structure in Finder. The GUI doesn’t have a way to go “up” in the directory structure. I don’t think you can do it in the GUI alone.

    It won’t let you see stuff in like \tmp\ without a fight, too. I don’t know how to open stuff in places like that without cd’ing to the location in the terminal, and doing open . in the desired directory.

    The list view is the least bad, but it gets unwieldy if your directories are deeply nested. It’s also bad if you started in the middle of the tree and want to go up. Gallery and column view are really bad for anything non trivial.

    I often want to see the entire file path, and it really doesn’t want to cooperate. If I do find the file I’m looking for, and want the full path, it doesn’t want to give it. I don’t even know if there is a way to get it. Other than like cmd+clicking -> “new iterm2 tab here” -> pwd, which is not really that helpful of Finder.

    Contrast with windows’ default explorer. It’s not perfect and I think windows11 made it worse, but still. Open it up, there’s the “my pc”, click through to my user directory, music, some album, then i can click the top thing and get the path. I can also see the whole tree on the left.

    Whatever I was using in Mint was similar to windows’ Explorer. Had no complaints about it.