Basically if you need the same logic in two places instead of copying it to the second place you make it into a function and use that function in both places.

That way if you need that logic to change you only need to make that edit once regardless of whether you use it one time or one thousand times.

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.

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

Relatively little going on so I’m still gonna go back to reddit occasionally because for example on the software development side I’ve found the reddit communities really useful and they simply don’t exist here.

Beyond this I’m determined to stick it out with lemmy. There are cute animal pics. There are memes and jokes. And a few other interests of mine are also reasonably active. It’s almost enough to satisfy my desires for “doomscrolling” without being a total time trap. So that’s nice.