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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • We used to talk about how to cure Vampires in Mage (awakening, 2e).

    The easiest is probably time magic. With Time4, rules as written you can rewrite their history so they never became a vampire. It persists until the spell elapses, but you could make that last a year without too much trouble (assuming time4, gnosis3, a rote skill of 4).

    With Time5, the “fuck you” level of Mage, you can use the Unmaking practice and prevent them from being embraced, though that’s big hubris and risks butterfly effects at the GM’s discretion.

    Other approaches I’m less sure about. You could probably do something with Life5 (make a new body), 5 or so points of Death or Spirit to get a new soul (fun fact: in awakening, souls are fungible), and Mind5 to put their mind in the new body. Kind of a ship of Theseus situation.


  • My current game infatuation is Fate. It’s a general purpose game so you can use it for any setting. It’s not very crunchy, so you can delegate a lot of stuff to Aspects.

    Can the elf talk to the trees? Well, his “Elf Prince of the Eldest Forest” aspect makes that plausible. The dwarf with his “Royal Gemcutter of Moria” not so much.

    Of course, this is a very different mode of play than the “I took 3 levels of ranger and took ‘Speak With Plants’ as my 4th level special power” or whatever you’d find in a crunchier system.








  • Half of US adults can’t read at a 6th grade level. I think speed and accuracy of reading is also pretty low (I read like 80 wpm and 80% accuracy somewhere, but i couldn’t immediately find a good source for that).

    If you’re on a text forum like this you’re probably well above the average person, and your experiences are not universal.

    That said, I don’t have any data on hand about readability so you could be right. I’m sure people have studied it.





  • I’ve worked with a few people who are just incomprehensible. One refuses to write commit messages of any detail. Just “work in progress”. Cast him into the pit.

    There was another guy that refused to name his tests. His code was like

    describe(''. () => {
      it('', () => {
         expect(someFunc()).toEqual(0);
      }
     it('', () => {
        expect(someFunc(1)).toEqual(0);
      }
     it('', () => {
       expect(someFunc("").toEqual(1);
     }
    }
    

    He was like, “Test names are like comments and they turn into lies! So I’m not going to do it.”

    I was like, a. what the fuck. b. do you also not name your files? projects? children?

    He was working at a very big company last I heard.

    edit: If you’re unfamiliar, the convention is to put a human readable description where those empty strings are. This is used in the test output. If one fails, it’ll typically tell include the name in the output.