Kempeth

"Ima scout ahead" - our rogue, 5 minutes into our (players and DM) very first campaign.

Wow. I didn't know it was this easy to get an article made about you. A card and nine paperclips!

I definitely gonna have to post my spell book when I get home...

Spellbook Pictures

First iteration I simply took some small post-it's wrote the spell slot level on it and attached them to whatever spell I used them on. This worked fine for a bunch of sessions. If the glue would lose its tack I could simply write another sticky.

Second iteration I made myself a fancy A5 sized spell book in NanDeck, slots were still tracked by post its but I fashioned little bookmark tabs that were affixed to the pages so I could pull them out to indicate the spell was prepared and push it in to for those that were not. This again worked pretty well. The tabs would get partially pushed in when the book rattled around in the storage box but it was generally not all the way. Biggest gripe was that I didn't actually need to know which spell had which slots used on it. The post it's were overkill in that regard.

Current iteration now has a front page with paper sliders for the number of spell slots I have. It's prepared all the way to max level. All I've got to do is use scissors or an exacto knife to extend the sliders to their proper length. The preparedness of spells is also indicated by paper sliders on the respective page. I originally used bookmarks so I didn't have to browse the whole book but I found myself doing that anyway so they didn't serve much of a purpose. On the contrary I find it quite thematic that my cleric would rummage through his spell book to find the correct incantation for the situation.

Both second and first version had their spine punched in regular spaces with an office hole puncher and then bound with string in my player color. When I get more spells I simply have to print the additional pages and can rebind the book.

You're missing the point of this. Right now all the aid Ukraine is getting is dependent on piecemeal decisions, which if Europe and America get bored, can dry up extremely quickly. Russia is banking on that and is investing heavily to try and produce this outcome.

A statement comitting to long term aid undermines that. And at least somewhat shores up Ukraine's aid. I don't know how binding this declaration is to any party but as the article says: it is a signal that the West intends to keep up the aid for as long as Russia keeps up the invasion.

Shouldn't be downvoted just for liking things differently.

The point is to tell an exciting story - there's no right or wrong definition of what that means for you.

The dice's purpose is to take you down paths you might not have chosen deliberately but the goal is still to have an exciting story. If the DM wants to be like "I recognize the dice have made a decision but given that it's a stupid ass decision, I've elected to ignore it" then he has my full support.

Maybe a cleaner way would be to decide up front: which outcomes am I ok with? and simply cap the roll at that. You know the paladin only has 17 HP left and you don't want the paladin to go down so the maximum roll you want is 16. So if you have roll 4d6 damage. You do: roll 3 roll 8 roll 12 roll ~~18~~ 16.

I mean it's JS. I'm not touching that if I can help it. But what you describe is less of a problem with the concept and more one with an immature technology.

but it’s less portable and more verbose

you misspelled "less obtuse and more expressive"

Also it doesn't compete with regex. It's an abstraction layer. You know, the thing programmers have been building since the dawn of programming to make everyone's lives easier. There's a reason why everyone who has the option to has stopped working directly with assembly and C.

I disagree. Anyone familiar with regex can debug these statements post conversion. Anyone not familiar with regex is going to have to learn something in order to debug the statement. I'd rather learn something that's expressive and easy to visually parse.

regex syntax is a vestige of the old "as few bytes as possible" era where every character of code had to be written personally. It's an obsolete way of thinking for the vast majority of programming.

hey hey! Regex are awesome! Fuck regex syntax!

When you want to get better using a hammer, just treat everything as a nail.

Sure. I just very rarely need just basic regexes.

And once you go beyond these the syntax gets very obtuse. Which means I'm spending an hour+ googling something close to what I need and then using a sandbox to try and tweak it until it does what I need. Then I paste something into my code that I won't understand anymore 5 minutes into the future - which isn't exactly great for maintainability.

me for example. I don't write regex often enough to be really familar with the cryptic syntax. But I do use them every once in a while and dread the occasion every time. Having a more expressive way to write pattern matching instructions would be really useful to me.