PowerSeries

Lots of items in the shop are built out of other items. You want to built towards one big item first, plus boots.

Have you looked at the Lisps / Scheme / Racket yet? Racket in particular makes it quite nice to go #lang blah at the top of the file and change the parsing or interpretation entirely.

For example all the documentation pages and guides are written in scribble:

https://docs.racket-lang.org/scribble/getting-started.html#%28part._first-example%29

#lang scribble/base
 
@title{On the Cookie-Eating Habits of Mice}
 
If you give a mouse a cookie, he's going to ask for a
glass of milk.

And it has an entire document markup language created in it, which can output pdf or html. But you can still use @ syntax to drop in racket code to compute values. Or create templates.

I even implemented a #lang which took assembly directly (and interpreted it, it was for a class).

So if you are really after full control, you should study Lisps and their macro systems.

There is the black Mesa mod/project which revamps the graphics if that's a showstopper for you. But it's worth playing.

Thanks, you made me feel old today. Get off my lawn.

I've watched some slow typists program, and I think I have the answer. If it takes you a while to type the code out, you are much more likely to stick to the first approach that works, and not rewrite it as much.

Monaco is a fun example where stealth frequently fails and yet, you just have to scramble to do something and ruuuun. You can end up hiding and trying again but short of getting everyone killed, it's hard to get a game over. Your friends can revive you, as long as they don't get caught and killed themselves.

It's a good mechanic where it's more "let's go save Dave" then "thanks Dave now we need to restart".

No I don't know any Dave's, names have been changed to protect the guilty.

Loved that book.

Yeah, I remember that. I didn't like how it felt tbh. Spend 3 points to get a what, +4 on a d20 roll? That feels real bad when the d20 rolls high and didn't matter or rolls low and doesn't matter. And it doesn't matter 4/5 of the times so at the end of an adventuring day if you spent all your might on bonuses it could only pay off once.

I mean sure, you get discounts as you level up, and yes, it really pushes you to use cyphers to actually solve problems, as trying for things directly was always a toss up, and that does push you towards the main themes of exploiting random artifacts all the time but I still didn't like it.

Or even wood that is 2' by 3' by 3mm.

Forgot about deli meet for the weight. It's always "I want 300 grams of sliced black forest ham", and not whatever that is in imperial. Do they use ounces for that?

And you might even get to know people who visited the same dedicated server, and make friends.

I even got admin access and set up some mods (pyro dodgeball night woo).

Good times.

This is past the third reading though, it's far from a first draft .