Or, like my creative director, make a gravedigger in Diablo 3 into a reference to Digger O’Dell from Life of Riley.

The chalice with the palace is the brew that is true…

It really depends on how wide a net you want to cast & whether you can outsource tutorialization to YouTube, or otherwise rely on players teaching each other. Also depends on whether the audience you’re targeting / have attracted are invested enough to stick around when confused.

Then every time you lost after that we would pop up a dialogue that let you choose between the main menu and the roster, and we would badge the roster button if you had characters you could train or gear up. This lost any meaning after about a week of play, but by then you knew how it worked.

Friction is even more of a huge deal in mobile or other F2P spaces. You could beat the first 6 chapters of Marvel Strike Force without leveling up or equipping a single piece of gear on a character, and then we had a mission where you’d 100% die if you hadn’t powered up, to force you to that screen.

This is one of those "tractably hard" problems; general-purpose optimizing is tricky but you can throw a lot of heavy math at it and get somewhere.

It takes a while to realize that for most applications this is the *easy* part of the problem.

D&D is a lot like a boardgame in that it's more popular than RPGs.

i got some rhyolite that looks like pork belly