sirblastalot

joined 1 year ago
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Fun fact, any game dev's financial data can be stolen if you're capable of answering my riddles three

[โ€“] sirblastalot@ttrpg.network 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

That strikes me as highly reflective of google's position of power; from the employer's perspective, the point where the diminishing returns are no longer worth it is related to the point where they're losing too many applicants from interview exhaustion. If you're not google, not offering the kind of pay and such that google does, your break-even point is likely much sooner.

Additionally, from the worker's perspective, the only-3-interviews rule is an assertion of our power. And, as an added plus, if enough people adhere to it, it will shift that break-even point even for places like Google, and resist the shifting of that burden onto unpaid workers.

[โ€“] sirblastalot@ttrpg.network 1 points 1 month ago (3 children)

The question that raises from a process improvement perspective then is "were the first 3 rounds really effective tests?" Perhaps a better solution is not more interviews, but more focused interviews conducted by the people that actually have the knowledge and power to make the decision. (And if the knowledge and the power are divided among multiple people, another great improvement would be empowering the people with the knowledge.)

[โ€“] sirblastalot@ttrpg.network 0 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (5 children)

Yeah, it saves you money...by costing the prospective employee. There's only so much we as employees can or should be willing to give up for free, and it's 3 interviews.

I also question if more than that is really improving the quality of your hires. Far more often (100% of the time, in my experience), multiple interviews are more a symptom of bureaucracy; multiple managers insisting that they get to stick their fingers in the pie, rather than actually learning anything more meaningful about the candidate.

[โ€“] sirblastalot@ttrpg.network 3 points 1 month ago (7 children)

Never do more than 3 interviews. And that's assuming they're relatively short, maybe 1 hour apiece. Any more than that, and they don't want you bad enough.

[โ€“] sirblastalot@ttrpg.network 3 points 2 months ago

There are probably legitimate uses out there for gen AI, but all the money people have such a hard-on for the unethical uses that now it's impossible for me to hear about AI without an automatic "ugggghhhhh" reaction.

[โ€“] sirblastalot@ttrpg.network 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I didn't overlook it, I specifically used the term "plagued" in reference to that.

[โ€“] sirblastalot@ttrpg.network 7 points 2 months ago (5 children)

And America wasn't actually empty frontier, either. It was full of the native people that had been living there since time imemorial, and the ex-europeans slaughtered and plagued their way through.

[โ€“] sirblastalot@ttrpg.network 1 points 3 months ago

Battlemaps are good if you're going for a swashbuckling or strongly tactical feel. I like to say 'your players can't swing from the chandelier if they don't know there's a chandelier.'

Battlemaps are great for a certain aesthetic (in the the game design sense of the word) because they allow you to add things for players to improv with without explicitly enumerating a static set of options. If you draw the inside of a tavern, when the tavern brawl breaks out they may do something that surprises you; "Can I throw the bottles at him/flip over the table/dive behind the houseplant/throw him out the window/etc" Whereas theatre of the mind requires your player to either intuit that there would be a bottle on the table that they could throw, or you to explicitly say "and there's a bottle on the table in front of you." And if you tell them there's something in front of them, they will laser focus on it and never even think to flip the table/dive behind the houseplant/etc.

Theatre of the mind is good for games that put the emphasis elsewhere. If the focus of your game is on entrigue, or courtly drama, or in a setting that's highly improvised, that's when theatre of the mind shines.

[โ€“] sirblastalot@ttrpg.network 3 points 4 months ago

What was the game

[โ€“] sirblastalot@ttrpg.network 3 points 4 months ago

Ooh, I will have to check that out for my own game, thanks!

[โ€“] sirblastalot@ttrpg.network 9 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Pointy Hat had a great video on this subject!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIKxk96ZFwg

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submitted 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) by sirblastalot@ttrpg.network to c/rpg@ttrpg.network
 

I recently started a new campaign. Two players (one who has played in my games before and their SO, who has been begging me for a spot for years) unexpectedly dropped out, moments before our first session. Their reason was somewhat baffling; they said they didn't want to spend "all day" on this, despite the game only going from noon to 3PM. They seemed to think this was a totally unreasonable expectation on my part, despite them previously having stated they were available during that time. This puzzled me.

I've been musing on this, and the strange paradox of people that say they want to play D&D but don't actually want to play D&D, and I've had an epiphany.

A lot of people blame Critical Role or other popular D&D shows for giving prospective players misplaced perceptions, often related to things like your DM's voice acting ability or prop budget, but I don't think that's what's going on here. My realization is that, encoded in the medium of podcasts and play videos, is another expectation: New players unconsciously expect to receive D&D the way they receive D&D shows: on-demand, at their house, able to be paused and restarted at their whim, and possibly on a second-screen while they focus on something else!

I don't know as this suggests anything we as DMs could do differently to set expectations, but it did go a long ways to helping me understand my friends, and I thought it might help someone here to share.

 

I've got an unholy-water fountain, a human chessboard, and an evil hedge maze. I need 1 more thing to put in the last corner of the square courtyard/garden thing. Any suggestions?

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