Jameson Quinn

Jameson Quinn died in a fall in Guatemala on March 23, 2025.
This is his mother Helen Quinn, just to inform his followers here of this tragic event. We will check this profile for your responses. Anyone who has copies of recent writings from him not posted here please let us know.

Anything about how Teslas have the worst safety record of any car company?

How about all the crappy builds and recalls?

How about how they make you look like a Nazi?

I posted something pro-AOC the other day and immediately got three of them. The ick. Makes you regret agreeing with them even when it's actually the other way around.

Rob Roy (he/him) Follows you @robertroy.bsky.social 15.7K followers 31.7K following 1K posts Retired AVCM US Navy and ITIL Expert. Avid reader and love history. Politically I am a centrist. I believe in fiscal responsibility, a strong defense bolstered by allies, and everyone is equal before the law. i-l

Rather than banning Palestinians in Gaza desperately trying to survive @moderation.bsky.app should be labelling these mass-follow engagement hacking accounts as SPAM and banning them

I swear a solid third of my followers are these fuckers and other worthless blue-MAGA meme accounts

(I guess I should tag this thread #ttrpg too.)

In other words, I sympathize with the designers of the various editions of #DnD. Making wizards not be quadratic is hard.

/end

I think I've done a pretty good job here balancing all of this out. I think these rules will, in practice, narrow the martial/caster gap versus vanilla #5r. But it was a struggle, and to some extent, I let the drive for simplicity win over the drive for balance.

But the very name "hit dice" implies that, when spent on nonmagical healing, they are an essentially linear resource. Meanwhile, if I don't want to add complex math and tables of spell points per slot level, the design constraints push spell slot recovery to be more quadratic.

I also wanted to add as little extra complexity as possible; and in particular, not to add any new resources to track. That meant using the existing "recovery" resource, hit dice.

In designing this homebrew, I wanted it to "slow down the pace, but keep the basic feel". In particular, I didn't want the amount of time it takes a spellcaster to recover their resources to grow quadratically with level; the person playing a wizard should never be saying "let's go rest for a month"

Campaign Pace ( These rules slow down recovery and make it less “all or nothing”. That means that, for instance, resources spent in a single-encounter travel day can still matter the next day when you arrive. They al...

This is where my homebrew comes in. If you don't recover all your spell slots overnight, but merely some of them, the burden on the DM to provide a story with multiple challenging battles every day is reduced.

In order to keep balance, then, a DM must design punishing "adventuring days" with lots of battles to drain spell slots — so that the martial characters' ability to "just keep bonking" shines through.

But in the 2024 revision of the rules, the "adventuring day" guidance was dropped.

And front-loading this power into "nova rounds" early in a battle makes them act like "more goblins", getting the advantage of the inherent quadratic-ness of group battles.

So if you converted spell-slots to an undifferentiated pool of "spell points" (there are optional rules for this), and graphed the total spell points versus level, it would still be roughly linear.

But! As a spellcaster levels up, they're more and more able to front-load this power.

And the growth in overall power from spell slots is designed to be semi-linear. When leveling up, lower-level characters gain multiple lower-level slots; mid-level ones gain one mid-level slot; and higher-level ones gain just one slot every other level.

The inherent tradeoff in #5e's design is supposed to be "spell slots"; that is to say, spellcasters have a limited reserve of power, while non-caster martials can keep bonking all day.

In practice, this means that the most powerful spells can usually do more damage in one turn than even the most powerful martial characters. (This may not always hold if you optimize the martials obsessively; let's assume we're working with "vanilla" not-heavily-optimized characters.)

But let's ignore that quadratic-ness, and call the fighter "linear".

In DnD, you want magic to feel magical; to have it be possible magically to (at the cost of spending finite magic power) accomplish things mere physical training can't.

In DnD, as a fighter levels up, they have more hit points and do more damage — and each of these growth curves tends to be roughly linear. But if you measure in "number of weak enemies they can face and win", even this "linear" growth is already a bit quadratic, for the reasons above.

Obviously, there are some underlying assumptions. For this to be true, both sides would have to (be able to) "concentrate their fire" to efficiently kill enemies and remove them from the fight, rather than spreading it out to merely wound enemies.

This means that, if a pack of 50 goblins fights a pack of 40, the larger pack will tend to win with about 30 survivors (like a 3-4-5 triangle), not 10 survivors (with casualties a linear 1-for-1 on either side).

(This is not a fact just about DnD, but a general principle of combined forces.)

In a certain sense, even this simple monster is already quadratic. Say you have 10 goblins fighting a powerful but slow monster that can kill one of them each round. The first round, they'll attack the enemy 10 times; then 9; then 8; etc. The total number of attacks is (n²+n)/2; already quadratic.

Before I delve into the problem, there's a brief detour: actually, everything is quadratic.

Imagine the most boring DnD statblock you can; say, a goblin. It has a certain number of hit points, and it can bonk others to reduce their hit points.

Campaign Pace ( These rules slow down recovery and make it less “all or nothing”. That means that, for instance, resources spent in a single-encounter travel day can still matter the next day when you arrive. They al...

Here's a thread on #DnD, game design, and balance. It comes from my experience working on a homebrew for #5r (that is, 2024 #5e) to make recovery slower.

Since the dawn of DnD, there's been an issue with "martial/caster balance" or (in older parlance) "linear fighters, quadratic wizards".

every college, corporate, and nonprofit president right now

Listen: maybe I'm wrong and this is just the worst software deployment of my career, not actually a conspiracy against democracy.

Maybe these guys just don't see they are frittering away all product and service design knowledge in the agency. And don't even know that they lack this knowledge.

(The idea is that local moderate Dems would join in her rallies and say something like the above.)

"I don't agree with @aoc.bsky.social about everything. But we do agree about 3 important things.
1. Trump and Musk's Republicans are trying to make your life worse.
2. We Democrats are trying to make it better.
3. It's time to stand together and fight."

I'm a little sick, and I just watched a show (Adolescence) that made me cry, and there are all those handbaskets. But there's beauty too and I love (some of) you guys and all of those little guys.

A dark, brindled great Dane/boxer mix with face close to the camera. Part of another blond little dog also visible.

A black and white shitzu/poodle being petted and rubbing his face against your leg. Part of a croc visible.

Touch fur.