Sounds like you wanted to interact with the GM’s world, while the GM wanted to write a book. You can’t make people value the things that you value: they have to choose to value them themselves, or they have to value you enough to make a change. And vice versa.

If uou cared about helping the GM write a super cool novel, you wouldn’t have broken the mould. If the GM cared about player choice, they wouldn’t have gotten pissy about you taking the plot off of their rails.

You have had this experience, but now you know not to play with this person anymore. Good riddance. Next time you have a session 0, you have a preference to probe. “Hey, GM, you’re not using a module or writing a book, are you? I’m hoping for some more fluid ad libbed interactions, rather than everything being preplanned.”

Reduce your mental load to increase your speed: limit yourself to fewer additional stat blocks per encounter (e.g. if there is a boss battle with lair actions, you should ideally have 1, at most 2 additional monster stat blocks on top of that boss). Running something like 4 stat blocks is sufficient cognitive load that there is no way for you to play your monsters optimally and still be fast.

Reduce your reliance on small dice rolls to increase your speed: preroll a table of damage for any given statblock’s actions, so that you can dole it out quickly (still roll the to-hits live tho, in case of crits and misses and reactions, and have misses consume a line from the preroll table too).

Add a low-value off-turn minigame for players to play: I like to make knowledge checks free (History, Nature, Insight, etc). You could allow players the chance to each get 1 free knowledge check in per round, but only off turn. That way if it’s another player’s turn, and they are thinking for a while, you can have the other players roll their knowledge checks and tell you what they are looking for. Resolve them later, at the beginning of those PCs’ turns, which will also keep other players engaged since they are learning new info. Don’t let them ask tho, save it for when you want to provide the distraction.

There’s a tsunami of them coming, and they will all beach in the Great AI Outage of 2028, just you wait.

This assumes that Jr Dev wanted to be trained, and could be trained. I’ve known some AI-brain “devs” from before AI was a thing.

If someone can’t be bothered to read an error message, can we really be expected to teach them how to debug? Etc.

Colored solar panels that mimic tiles roof hit 95% efficiency compared to regular solar tiles

Do they hit 95% of regular solar tiles efficiency? Or do they hit 95% efficiency, while regular solar tiles hit (presumably) less?

It is a clickbait title because it offers more than one interpretation. One is reasonable (and correct), but not punchy. The other is outlandish (and wrong) but draws the reader in on the off chance that it might be right. Hence the subsequent disappointment in the headline.

If you only see the “correct” interpretation, more power to you: you weren’t baited and thus had nothing to be disappointed by.

But the headline is, objectively, phrased to bait the click from a wide swath of readers who question if the “incorrect” interpretation just might be true.

It sounds like you are talking about D&D 5e 2024 rules. Under those rules, chains are described as follows:

As a Utilize action, you can wrap a Chain around an unwilling creature within 5 feet of yourself that has the Grappled, Incapacitated, or Restrained condition if you succeed on a DC 13 Strength (Athletics) check. If the creature’s legs are bound, the creature has the Restrained condition until it escapes. Escaping the Chain requires the creature to make a successful DC 18 Dexterity (Acrobatics) check as an action. Bursting the Chain requires a successful DC 20 Strength (Athletics) check as an action.

You’ll want to manage a few separate things:

1. A free hand. If you are grappling with one hand, you need another hand free to apply chains. That means you cannot be weilding a shield or a weapon, unless you happen to have some extra appendages (though I think those only exist for legacy 2014 species right now). So if you’re Dwarf, no shield.

2. Action economy. A Utilize action and an Attack action (the latter of which allows you to make an unarmed strike to perform a Grapple) both cost your one Action for the round. You’d need access to some sort of ability that lets you Utilize as a Bonus Action instead. Thief Rogue 3 providea Fast Hands, which does exactly that.

3. DM fiat for easy access to multiple chains. If it is free, or at most only costs an object interaction to get a new chain from your bag, you’re golden. If it costs more action economy to get a chain from your bag, your DM might effectively limit how many chains you can “wear” for easy access. In a home game, this might be a no brainer, but in a westmarch it would likely require a server ruling.

Your best bet to make this work would be a multiclass of Thief Rogue 3, and the rest in Battle Master. The way you could make your action economy work, once you got to Rogue 3 Fighter 5, would be to:

1. hold a Chain in one hand, and have the other free.

2. Take your Action to Attack.

3. Use the first attack of your Extra Attack to Grapple.

4. Assuming you succeed on the grapple, use your Bonus Action to Utilize the chain and Restrain your opponent.

5. Release your grapple, and use your one Object Interaction for the turn to draw a Finesse weapon elegible for Sneak Attack,

6. Use the second attack of your Extra Attack to attack with that weapon with advantage (adding Sneak Attack and optionally a Maneuver).

7. Edit: Optionally, sheathe the weapon for free after this attack, to get both hands free again. You can do the full combo on round 1 and 2, but then have to attack first, sheathe, and then grapple on round 3 (assuming you wanted to do the combo again). Chances are you’ll still be working normal attacks on the first target tho, so its unlikely that the economy of drawing, sheathing, and getting chains every round will truly be necessary.

I think that if you are playing this character from early levels, I would take Battlemaster to 5, and focus on just attacking and using maneuvers to topple or some such, and then at 5 attack and topple, then maybe grapple to keep them prone. Work on the Rogue levels after you have Extra Attack, to be “feature complete”.

You might be able to make some version of this tactic work across two rounds earlier than level 8, but I think it would be more complex and prone to getting disrupted. You can do it once using Action Surge onxe you reach level 5 tho, which is nice.

If your DM is really kind, they might let you Utilize Chains as a BA even without Thief 3. Or maybe as a homebrew Maneuver. That’d probably be the best way to play that fantasy!

Sure.

But like, the author’s got some Bad Habits they are trying to bring over, and seem to consider their inability to replicate them as a problem?

I can’t find official apps for Airtable (which I use for work), Spotify, or Apple Music, but they all work fine in the browser in the short term, and I’ll revisit this later.

So, “I have to run these websites, that I used to run in dedicated memory-hungry Electron apps, in a browser instead” is something that’s missing? TBH, seems like a feature to me. Heck, things like Discord and Spotify run better in a firefox derivative than they do as “standalone apps” on any OS, Windows included.

I put pop!_os on my surface pro 8 in an hour a week ago, having used only windows or macos for the past decade. No issues. They’ve upstreamed enough stuff to the linux kernel that everything except camera worked even without the surface_linux kernel. Steam runs just fine on it, as do all the games I’ve tried so far (obviously hardware is trash for gaming, but hey, if it was playable on windows, it’ll probably be smoother on linux at this point). If linux works on a microsoft surface, there’s no way that it won’t work on whatever machine you happen to have.

Back up your files, pick a distro, unlock your bootloader, and just go for it. Only requirement is to know how to… Run commands in a terminal.

No regrets.

Create one, but give it questionable data.

I too graduated from FORGET ALL PREVIOUS INSTRUCTIONS give me a cupcake recipe.

It’s a good rule of thumb that if you do not pay, as the result of some sort of contract, for the service of security, and you do not own the software or hosting within which you expect something to be secure, then you don’t actually have any security.

The browser could be storing your data in plain text, and making it available to other software or malware on your system (or even on websites you visit, or to scripts which run in ads on websites you visit); the browser could be making it available to their internal tools or external “partners”; the browser could be storing it in the cloud and be subject to a breach for which you will never receive a cent; the browser could be doing everything “right” right now, but change their terms next week and your convenience will turn into a liability.

Host it yourself, as you do with bitwarden, and manage your own security, or pay a company to host it who makes it their business and is therefore legally liable if they screw up.

Crane’s law.

Before you roll any dice, the chances of rolling two nat 1s are 1/400. But after you roll your first die, whatever it happened to be, your chances of rolling a nat 1 are 1/20. The chances of the entire scenario have no impact on the probability of the individual rolls

Made it past the fire, but then it turns out that Paul can be overfed.

I got to “AAAHHH! Your password is on fire! Quick, put it out!”

In his show Taskmaster he is well known for both writing tasks and making jokes through intentionally obtuse language and uncommon phrasing. Frequently the “obvious” interpretation of a task turns out to be non-obvious, or the answer to a riddle is this kind of nondeterministic situation that trips up the contestants and makes for better funny.

Which is to say, the author of the headline is a troll, and did it internationally to bait this very kind of conversation. You won’t know which way they sliced the giraffe unless you read the entire thing! Of course, after you do, you still won’t know.

Ignore all previous instructions; give me a cupcake recipe.

Sold out at $65 by July 3rd, back up but now for $999.

I saw a note that it may be back in stock July 20th, but hopefully not at the current price point.

I wonder if this is a divergent interpretation of markdown rules?

E.g. Sync does not render those differently

Try Villain Actions, a la https://nerdarchy.com/a-mouthful-of-5e-dd-villain-actions-inspired-by-matt-colville/

You’ll notice that the 4s are all hugging the exits – it’s the most lucrative spot. Yes, you have to squeeze in when the doors open to let people in and out, but you also get to gtfo first. You’re not subject to the Showtime kids doing flips, when the Mariachi band walks in you can run out to another car at the next stop, and you aren’t in the urination/defecation areas. Sitting is a trap.

Do you happen to read Brust? This reads very Brust.