oh no, someone discovered that they can farm me for luck tokens with stupid word plays.

knowing where something happens is not knowing what happens and especially not knowing why it happens.

A big import of data caused a specific datapoint to be inserted twice into the database, but that only happened in our shared testing environment not in our development environment, logs made it clear that we tried to insert something twice into a join table but not why.

the fix was easy, we can remove the duplicated datapoint from our data before writing it to the database, and we found an edgecase we can handle further upstream so we don’t end up duplicating it in the first place, but why didn’t we run into this issue in dev?

the data is consumed from a kafka topic with a single partition and read order is allways the same as write order, so our service behaves the same way if the same data is written to the topic everytime, but it turns out the producer does not necessarily write in the same order to the topic given the same input and gaining that understanding was a goose chase with debuggers, logs and combing through code of multiple services written by multiple devs working at multiple companies and thats the true horror of enterprise development jobs, teying to get someone from a different team or even company on the phone who can actually explain something to you with whom you can analyse a bigger part of a system.

depends on how you define “adversarial”

I’ve given out powerful items, that had downsides when used, but my players enjoyed figuring out stuff like that.

I’ve also ran dungeons that featured potential lethal traps, but i think thats ok if the presence of such a trap is telegraphed enough that players know they better go slow and ask questions about their environment or describe how they are checking a room. I did not plan that you could get a pressure plate stuck by pouring sand between tiles, but you described doing it and explaining your intention so it became the solution. if you’d chosen to rush through the room filled with gore or strange scratch marks on the floor or obvious vents in the ceiling, then i’d have rolled if you trigger a trap, and then you might die trying to escape poison gas or being crushed by a moving wall, if the dice keep falling that way.

i only create situations (and those are often dangerous, and have a chance of characters dieing), but at the table i am the biggest fan your characters have and can’t wait to see how they crawl out of the dungeon with treasure beyond believe.