Time once again to review my Advent of Code solutions! Also the latest die or dice from the Dice Envy Advent Calendar; scroll below the AoC code to see today’s die.

Advent of Code

As the years have piled on, Eric Wasl has thrown in references to past years’ problems. However, as of day 3 we now have 2 references (perhaps that’s what the historian story line is about). Day 02 had you visit the location of 2015 Day 19 and today visited the location of 2020 Day 2 (my first year doing Advent of Code!) The only thing I’m slightly worried about is if this signals that this year will be a grand finale for the annual event.

Time once again to review my Advent of Code solutions! Also the latest die or dice from the Dice Envy Advent Calendar; scroll below the AoC code to see today’s die.

December has finally arrived and with it my favorite activity of the month - Advent of Code! I also wanted to give myself a fun little present this year, so I bought the Dice Envy Advent Calendar. Every day I’ll get a fun new die (or dice!). Scroll below the AoC code to see today’s die.

Advent of Code

Let’s start off with Advent of Code. This year I haven’t done any of the Advent of Code problems ahead of December so I was a bit rusty. One is not often using the same algorithms or libraries for Advent of Code as one does for everyday programming. I started off with Python since that’s my most comfortable language. First you can head over to today’s page to see the prompt. If you’re not solving the problems yourself, you won’t be able to see the prompt for part 2, so in summary:

When I first played D&D with David maybe 3 Christmases ago, one of the most baffling things for me to understand was my character sheet. Take a looka t the first page of Sam’s Dungeon in a Box character sheet:

Ignoring how busy this page is, one of the biggest design issues I see right away is that all of the trait boxes are incorrectly prioritized. I have seen people argue for completely eliminating the scores from the sheet because you don’t ever use those scores. Instead, you use the modifiers (the +# or -#). Yet on this sheet those numbers are teeny, tiny compared to the numbers that are functionally useless. (Except during character creation) I would otherwise say there’s not too much that’s bad about this page - it gives you the information you will need most often. The second page has information you might need to refer to so that you don’t need to keep referring to the Player’s Handbook (PHB)

I mentioned before that my kids have, so far, been more about the D&D fights than the roleplay. (It’s a generalization, as they do ocassionally get into the roleplay). But a couple weeks ago when we were doing our Humblewood week (we’re rotating through a few of our different campaigns) Sam really impressed me by getting into the head of his character. He had been charmed by one of the characters and the spell specified that he would not attack the charmer. He would only attack the other enemies. I said, “it’s as if you were friends with her.” After a couple more rounds of combat he looks up at me during his turn and he says, “If she’s my friend. I would want to heal her, wouldn’t I?” I thought about it and didn’t see any flaw to the logic. (I also wanted to reward the creativity) So I told him that made sense. His only healing spell required him to get much closer to the enemy who had charmed him so he used his turn to start moving in that direction. The fight had been going on for a bit so his sister realized this could lead to a pretty bad situation so she decided to use her turn to grapple him and keep him from healing the enemy.

In my reflections on a year of being the family DM I mentioned we started playing the Dungeon in a Box campaign Voyage of the Fallen Star. It’s a monthly subscription that provides a connected story that takes place over a year. I’ve finished DMing the first 3 adventures, so I wanted to talk aobut my impressions with the content so far.

As I was looking back over my old blog posts, searching for things that needed fixing in this migration over to the Hugo static site platform, I saw that I used to write brief blog posts about the Kickstarter campaigns I was backing. Since 2013 I’ve backed somewhere around 70 or more kickstarter campaigns. Since I usually don’t back anything that involves hardware, so far I haven’t had any of the campaigns disappear without giving me what I backed. Recently I realized I had backed an inordinate amount of D&D campaigns (I tend to fall pretty deep into hobbies). So I thought I might resurrect my Kickstarter posts to follow along with the D&D campaigns I’ve backed.

I can’t find the exact blog post, but some time in the last few months I had a throwaway line about how I was a little frustrated in how D&D’s digital assets were handled, particularly the fact that they are tied to platforms. That is to say, if I bought the 2024 Player’s Handbook on Roll20, I wouldn’t also have access to it on DnDBeyond. I think there are really 2 reasons this hasn’t blown up more: 1) many of the platforms only require the DM to purchase content (if it was required of all the players, I think there’d be a revolt) 2) D&D is still primarily an analog, pencil and paper game. That said, this issue has started to become a bit more relevant to me, so I wanted to get some ideas out there (and maybe vent a little).