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Cake day: February 22nd, 2026

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  • One time we spent like more than an hour in a horrible meeting to plan out how long the next step of a project would take. 4 weeks, we said. Management came back and said to do it in 2. Well, why did we fucking have the meeting if they had a deadline in mind already?

    On the other hand, at my current job I have seen a lot of “oh that’s going to take a couple days” protests for things that are 20 minutes of work.

    Seems like the solution is to get rid of out of touch management.


  • I deeply dislike sarcasm. It’s neither funny nor helpful.

    There was a guy I worked with that was pretty much always sarcastic.[1]. I’d ask him if he’d written the run book yet and he’d say like “Yes, it’s written in the style of a sonnet with hand drawn illustrations”, and I’d be like “I don’t know if that means you wrote it or not”. Everything with him took extra steps because his communication was such a swamp of insincerity.

    [1] well, when I asked him to stop being sarcastic he said it wasn’t sarcasm. He was merely being ironic. Nonsense.












  • I think it feels fiddly to people who already know a thing or two about mechanics, but most of the fiddliness can easily be ignored or barely paid attention to and you can still manage to play and have fun.

    I mean, this is true, but if you ignore enough rules you’re essentially playing a different game. I talked to someone once who “played DND” but didn’t use skills or spell slots, and I think they just let casters interpret spells based on the names. That’s so different it’s arguably a different game. Or at least as different as a Chihuahua and a husky.

    . It’s a lot easier to just hit straight brick walls in games like pathfinder or shadow run where the player is so lost they just can’t play.

    I agree with this, but note those systems are far more crunchy than DND. Something like Fate goes in the other direction, and I think is why it’s better for fast games.

    Though as an aside, a downside of Fate is it’s so open it can cause a tyranny of the blank page effect. DND puts you in a pretty small box, and that can be helpful for people. The small decision space is a positive for some kinds of players. Though if you were doing Fate, you could just tell people to pick from some core ideas similar to character classes.

    but 5e is pretty damn good at it while also being popular enough that people have heard of it and are interested in trying. That last part is just as important as being technically good on paper.

    This is also undeniable. Someone who’s going to half-ass it will drag down a game in any system.

    I think we agree more than we disagree for what it’s worth. Check out Fate though. It’s free ( https://fate-srd.com/ )





  • It’s by design.

    This is true. However,

    It’s just meant for more casual play, that’s all.

    It’s kind of bad at that goal. It’s really fiddly and full of friction points. What bonus do you get for 16 strength? Why do they insist on keeping that mapping.

    I’ve had to kick people for just refusing the learn what dice to roll after months of sessions.

    Further evidence of it not actually being great at casual play.

    Which leads me to

    5e is a great gateway drug to get people into TTRPGs

    Counter argument: it’s actually really bad at that. It’s so specific and idiosyncratic it pushes people away. Uncountable players just bounce off the whole genre because their first impression is fiddly “what does 15 strength mean again?” and “sorry, you can’t fit your cool idea into this class/level system”

    Fate Core or Accelerated would be much more in line with how people think about this sort of stuff.