confidentcrescent
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User ID: 423
confidentcrescent
10mo ago
Honestly, I think the concentration mechanic and spell nerfs that 5e did are the bigger sticking point for me.
They probably had more impact on my enjoyment when actually playing, but I have some sympathy for these two changes because they did at least partially solve issues that were widely complained about in 3.5e.
Spellcasters ignoring the recommended adventuring day to dump everything immediately made fighters feel irrelevant, which is less of a problem now that the spells are weaker. I also don't think anyone liked the pre-fight buff dance that happened whenever a party got to surprise their foes, which has been killed off entirely by concentration.
I disagree but I can see someone liking those changes enough to outweigh having less interesting and impactful spells.
On the other hand, the loss of proper prepared spellcasting feels like almost entirely downside since we went from having a choice between wizard and sorcerer to two flavors of sorcerer.
From what I remember of 5e, I think the "ritual" tag was supposed to handle a lot of the situational utility stuff.
I think they might have initially intended this, but most of the best utility spells got left off the ritual list. That was a good decision. Characters being able to cast Detect Magic and Leomund's Tiny Hut effectively at-will was enough of a problem. The idea of dealing with characters who get to cast Fly, Fabricate, or Clairvoyance any time you let them sit still for half an hour should fill any DM with dread.
Rituals were a mistake and if WotC ever gets tired of making slight iterations on 5e I hope the next edition removes or reworks them. At least make them limited by something other than just time!
confidentcrescent
10mo ago
5e's equivalent problem is only having space on your preparation list for a very short list of spells. It also sucks to take Fireball and find out that you actually needed Lightning Bolt or something situational like Feather Fall.
I preferred the 3.5e system because in this situation it means I still got to use that ideal spell once, and the larger quantity of memorized spells gave more space to take something experimental or niche without leaving a massive gap in my spell list.
confidentcrescent
11mo ago
Your browser has probably run a hundred little arbitrary Javascript programs so far today, and the worst they could have done would have been to churn your CPU until you closed a tab, because anything more serious is sufficiently restricted. Crooks sending you links to rnicrosoft.com still depend on you typing in your credentials or downloading and running something heinous afterward, even though the second you click a link like that they get to send your computer arbitrary programs that it will immediately run.
Firefox released a patch to fix a sandbox escape* just a few days ago. Properly sandboxing a program has not been solved; it is an active problem that consumes a lot of developer time and current solutions likely still have many holes to be found.
Crooks mostly rely on users downloading and running scripts because it's easy and it works. Writing exploits against browsers isn't worth the effort when you can socially engineer people and get the same results.
Most sandboxing is also bad for performance. Javascript on a random webpage generally doesn't need to perform well but a recommendation algorithm will.
Practically speaking, you just do what any automated test suite does: you define "infinite" to be 5 minutes, or 5 seconds, or however much you expect you can spare per run at most, and if the algorithm isn't done by then it gets killed anyway.
Any cut-off aggressive enough to meaningfully restrict denial-of-service attacks would make algorithm-writing functionally impossible for the majority of users and probably also prevent most of the possible algorithms people would like to write.
* I can't see the bug report but based on the reported severity this appears to be a between-page sandbox escape rather than fully leaving the browser.
confidentcrescent
11mo ago
Technologically it's perfectly possible to let every user write their own algorithm
I think the technical hurdles to this are a lot higher than you expect. I'd like to see someone make a shot at doing it anyway, but I'm confident it will come with some significant trade-offs. A basic algorithm is probably more likely.
The main problem is that you need to run this somewhere and neither of your choices are good.
Running this on company hardware brings large performance and safety risks. Safety because some guy is going to try to get you to run an infinite loop or virus. Performance because search algorithms over large datasets are computationally intensive at the best of times, and code written by random strangers is not the best of times. Solving both of these without severely limiting the ability to create an algorithm would be a miracle.
Running this on a user's computer instead raises challenges around getting the data into the user's computer to be searched. If you're looking at Twitter and want to get today's tweets from accounts you follow that could be thousands of records. Download speed limitations will ensure you will never be able to run your algorithm on more than a tiny fraction of the full site.
I decided to try Sorcerer in 5e so it's possible some of the problem came from having to make changing my spell list a multi-session affair. I think they've since made the UA which let you change spells without levelling up official which is a positive change.
However, I did feel like 5e gave a much greater pressure to have something optimal if you want to to properly contribute to a fight. Preparing multiple options to diversify across different saves, different damage types, and single-target vs multi-target ate up that list quickly.
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