those are milk duds?

yes I have indeed shopped at Costco lol

Saw this and immediately thought of Dave the diver LOL

oh yes the standard reply.

Rs actively tearing it down like in Alaska

Ds putting forth a bill to do it but only started by three of them this time around

“both sides are the same!”

yawn

SLAY THE SPIRE!

which is just perl mode

no one that has used it would be surprised by that.

also did they write the study with ChatGPT?

yeah I feel like that is the minimum I am okay with.

like if a player just wants to roll dice but does not want to be involved in the story itself at all I don’t know why they would be playing a role-playing game.

knowing what they’re trying to get out of the situation or at least how they are sort of going about it is the bare minimum.

I will say though that makes it less fun for me personally. I am just more into the heavier character focused stories and if there is no role-play involved it just feels like basically playing a board game.

I like board games but that’s not why I play TTRPGs.

I don’t know exactly where I fall on this spectrum.

on the one hand obviously you want to be encouraging to your players and create an environment where everyone is having fun.

on the other hand if I wanted to play a game solely based on its mechanics I would play something else. the R in TTRPG is there for a reason.

some of my favorite moments in games I’ve run have been when players improvise something in character and completely derail.

I don’t think I’ve ever run a game where we didn’t have more fun when players act like they are their character rather than act like they are controlling their character.

to be fair though I moved away from 5e and Pathfinder and other crunchy games for that reason, I just have a lot more fun with games that are less heavy on the rules and more involved on the story were telling together.

so could just very well be my gaming groups preference that leads to that experience rather than not.

I use awk all the time. a very common and probably simplest reason I use it is it’s ability to handle variable column locations for data.

if you know you always want the last field you can do something like

awk '{print $NF}'

but usually using it as for performing more advanced operations all in one go without having to pipe something three times.

sure you can do grep cut grep printf, but you can instead do the pattern matching, the field, the formatting, whatever you need to all in one place.

it’s also got a bunch of more advanced usage of course since it’s its own language. one of my favorite advanced one liners is one that will recognize if it is going to print a duplicate line anywhere in your output and prevent it. in cases where you don’t want to sort your output but you also want to remove duplicates it is extremely helpful and quick rather than running post-processing on the output in another way.

all that said main reason I use it is because I know it and it’s fast, there’s nothing you can do in awk that you can’t do in Python or whatever else you’re more comfortable with. The best tool for the job is the one that gets it done quickly and accurately. unless your environment is limited and it prevents the installation of tools you’re more familiar with then there’s no real reason to use this over Python.

I really love pbta games but I would agree with you that they are not rule light so much as “rule lighter than d&d”

there’s lots of one page systems out there that are truly rules light.

that said once you know the rules I would say that it provides a system that is easy to plan for, it’s easy to play in, and it flows very naturally.

I ran dungeon world and monster of the week campaigns for years, playing probably 3 to 4 hours once a week on average most of that time.

I think I did maybe 2 hours a month of prep? something about like that.

I loved how pbta games would allow me to basically spend all of my prep time coming up with cool ideas and not having to worry too much about the mechanics because I either had a framework too accomplish them already or I could just make it up on the spot.

some of my group’s favorite moments in our campaign have come from me just making things up on the spot and them being able to react to it.

when I used to DM for d&d or Pathfinder those kind of moments would take hours of prep work.

I would say the obsession is more people finding something that has freed them from the heavy rule set rather than something that is truly rules light.

I got to have an intro session but then never play deadlands. I need my weird West fix!

honestly any insect that primarily feeds on blood would be good to go.

• mosquitoes
• bed bugs
• tics
• fleas

screw all of those things

agree with one and two and younger me would have agreed with your third point but I think I don’t anymore.

yes cut is the simpler and mostly functional tool you need for those tasks.

but it is just so common to need a slight tweak or to want to substitute something or to want to do a specific regex match or weird multi character delimiter or something and you can do it all easily in awk instead of having to pipe three extra times to do everything with the simplest tool.

honestly I got one of these and ended up going back to brushing my tongue. maybe I am like more thoroughly brushing my tongue than other people or something but it never was as clean from a tongue scraper as from brushing

yeah my brother and I played it non-stop lol.

did anyone else play bonks adventure

there’s literally dozens of us!

or maybe just 2 idk

yeah that’s where it used to be for me, and I had it set up.

it just literally vanished after the update.