I liked the old ‘comments’ link way better, took me a minute to figure out that it wasn’t just a bug. It’s less clear now what is the upvote number and what’s the comment number, maybe I’ll get used to it but just wanted to say it’s a downgrade in clarity IMO. Besides that, amazing app, been using it for weeks and it’s the best one 👍
It’s interesting because not knowing exactly how powerful something is feels more realistic. I think the uncertainty has it’s place as a narrative device. One way to mitigate the problem you’re describing would be more liberal use of passive checks, like if the party is facing down a troll, a nature check might reveal it’s a powerful ancient beast. For your 17th level fighter example, a good insight check (or passive insight) would let the DM say ‘dont mess with this guy’ without it breaking immersion too much.
Did a self checkout recently at a store I’d never been to before. Went through pretty smooth, shoved receipt in my pocket, and then saw they had little security gates and a receipt scanner, so I had to fish out the crumpled paper from my pocket, fumble around trying to find the barcode thing, and of course it also had a random QR code that I tried to scan for like a minute until the security guard had to come over and help me. Luckily it wasn’t that busy, but if there had been someone waiting behind me it woulda been a nightmare.
To extend your point, the fruit analogy assumes shipping is completely frictionless. In reality there are all kinds of downsides to shipping everything 12,000 miles across the world, both social and environmental. If you ship out 12 bananas and the cargo ship, train, or truck gets delayed, suddenly you have 0 bananas. Not to mention all the extra CO2, which the companies get to conveniently ignore.
By this logic, no businesses should rely on the internet, roads, electricity, running water, GPS, or phones. It is short sighted building stuff on top of brand new untested tech, but everything was untested at one point. No one wants to get left behind in case it turns out to be the next internet where early adoption was crucial for your entire business to survive. It shouldn’t be necessary for like, Costco to have to spin up their own LLM and become an AI company just to try out a better virtual support chat system, you know? But ya, they should be more diligent and get an SLA in place before widespread adoption of new tech for sure.