I had a really bad time once where I wanted to run a dark souls inspired “explore the cursed island” game, and only two of four players were on board. One literally tried to open a BBQ shop. The other was more of a wonder around and pick flowers, not fights, kind

Maybe an unpopular opinion, but DND doesn’t do Star Wars well. There’s no adventuring day in the source fiction, really. Jedi are hard to model- they either shine too bright or don’t live up to the fiction. Force powers don’t really map to existing DND systems. Class+Level is very coarse, which makes it hard to model some concepts. DND is almost entirely a combat game, but I guess Star wars is mostly fighting so you won’t feel the absence of other systems that much.

I’m sure it’ll be make some people happy. The previous d20 Star wars games had their fans. I just don’t think it’s something I’d enjoy, and it’s a shame this is going to suck the air out of star wars tabletop game options.

A good post.

I personally find DND unsatisfying for many reasons (little to no degree of success, static magic system that encourages hoarding, the primary defense is all or nothing avoidance, very coarse progression, some character concepts are simply not representable, etc)

But what is even more annoying than that is when players respond with “but you can just change the rules!”. I know! That’s true of any pen and paper game! It’s not some unique property of DND. But sometimes I don’t want to do the work of designing a system, and I almost never want to play some stranger’s pre-alpha homebrew.

This supports my hypothesis that most players “playing” DND could easily swap to some other rule system and not even know. Many of them would probably be happier in other systems.

I love mage, but its magic is so involved and powerful I wouldn’t want to use it in a game unless everyone was a mage. You don’t really want one players options to be “I hit him with my club” and the others to be boundless.

Awakening 2nd edition was really good, imo, but I never actually got to play Ascension

I used nWoD for fantasy games. The core dice pool system works pretty well, and few things are tightly coupled to any setting in particular.

I mostly don’t like d20, so when someone tells me they’re doing a game about secret vampire societies in it, I’m a lot more disappointed than if they ported a system I like or am neutral on. Also 5th edition in particular makes a lot of assumptions about how things work.

Isn’t that what people were calling it anyway? Well that’s nice I guess.

I dunno man. I’ve had a lot of conversations with players that go like “do you think your character is the first to come up with this hijink? If it works, why doesn’t the entire setting revolve about this infinite damage trick you’re trying to sell me?”

Like, if it was as easy as casting Charm Person on the king to become the new ruler, other people would already be doing that. Therefore, there must be reasons why it doesn’t work.

Depends on the app. Some let you see all versions, I think.

Editing is a power not all people should be trusted with.

You all know at least one person (or are the person) who would text a yes/no like “Did you see Dave today?” and then when you write “yeah” edit their message to “Can I borrow your car?” or something you wouldn’t have said yes to.

Sometimes I still see job postings that are like “MUST KNOW OBJECT ORIENTED PROGRAMMING” and I’m wondering who in 2026 isn’t at least passably familiar with it.

But then again I also see job posts that are like “must know Java or JavaScript”

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.

Sure, could be. They didn’t have any automated checks, and I saw errors like “that’s too many parenthesis” and “you’re trying to use a library you didn’t add to the dependencies list” sail through.

I feel sorry for you and hope you cna find more fulfilling work that will let you grow, but I dont’t know what the job market is like right now

Where I work, there’s really no emphasis on code quality or testing. There’s also like no mentorship or senior developers leading the way.

They hired a guy with 1-2 years of experience and I feel really bad for him. Not only is he learning very little, he’s learning actively bad patterns. No one is teaching him about automated testing. Code reviews are just “you skim it. Don’t spend more than 30 minutes”.

Management of course loves LLMs and wants more usage.

Could be interesting. I did a fair amount of wvw, but the points system always felt kind of meh. People didn’t really care about defending that much. You’d often find a Zerg just running around the map flipping things.

On the one hand, you don’t really want to give people the power to decide what books are available. Assholes would use that to remove queer books, for example.

On the other hand, that power is already implicitly in place. There’s finite space in a library, so they must choose a subset of all possible books. I’d want to know how the existing processes work before suggesting changes.

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

Well, we were literally walking in Manhattan when it came up, and couldn’t take the euclidean straight path. We could only walk on the grid of streets.

(This is setting aside factors like waiting to cross, or a busier street)

I’m the kind of guy who will look stuff up. I think it’s really important to admit when you’re wrong and the other person was right. Don’t move goal posts or claim you misunderstood. Just own it.

Like I was having a debate with my partner about if it was faster to go all the way up and over, or make a lot of turn-right then turn-left. I thought the ladder was faster because it approximates a straight line. She was like no that’s crazy. Eventually I found that’s called Manhattan distance and she was right, and I fully admitted defeat.

I’m ready for that style of language to be passé. But probably the next slang will also be unpleasant.