Not a very high quality article. Makes constant reference to “faction and domain play” without adequately defining the terms for someone that didn’t grow up with them. (Presumably, the target of the article.) And a lot of typos.

Fun fact, any game dev’s financial data can be stolen if you’re capable of answering my riddles three

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

I didn’t overlook it, I specifically used the term “plagued” in reference to that.

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.

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.

What was the game

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

Pointy Hat had a great video on this subject!

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

3 weeks to do real life shit, 4 days to procrastinate, and 3 days to hurriedly slap everything together :P

I don’t schedule a game if I’m not going to be prepared

I like to start with some kind of action that also gives the group a reason to work together. Eg the inquisition drags you all out of your beds in the night and chains you together, or (in the game where everyone was a werewolf) you’re out in the woods hunting and this deer can run faster than you, how do you work together to take it down, or you’ve all been pressganged to work on some evil bastard’s ship, what do you do about it. That kind of thing.

I vaguely aim for 1 combat encounter and one social or puzzle per session, but it mostly comes down to what the players decide to do.

I have a list of setpieces I want to put in front of the players (an island that’s actually a giant turtle, a treasure hunt, being lost in the ocean in a rowboat, etc) and around the halfway point of the campaign I try to figure out a climactic finale to build to. But beyond that, I don’t plan beyond the next session. I just plan my sessions by recapping what happened last session, putting forward any consequences of that, and a little light prep for a couple of the most likely courses of action my players might take next. Maybe dropping in one of those setpieces if it seems to fit.

They can’t destroy the oil rig, because that would just release a ton of oil. And if they disable it, it will be relatively easy to repair. What real terrorists would do is cause an accident or a malfunction, then murder or kidnap the responders.

(I went to EMT school and it’s something they told us to be careful about, I swear I’m not a terrorist mister NSA man please don’t gitmo me)

Honestly, it’s a niche service for an already niche hobby. Why would I leave my house, where all my snacks, drinks, prepared game materials, minis, computers, and audio devices are, to come play at a noisy expensive card table somewhere else? It’s only really going to appeal to people who, for whatever reason, can’t play in anyone’s home, or aren’t welcome at the tables of anyone they actually know.