D&D is not a survival horror game. Goblins and kobolds and stuff should be trivially easy to kill. Give big obvious hints on when to fight and when to run away. Stick to easy, straightforward classes and races that you understand after reading the book.
Keep the adventure simple and trope-ish. You're in a tavern. A mysterious stranger asks for help on a quest with some sob story, and will pay you 30 gold, half now, half later. The quest leads to a cave in the woods just outside of town. Kill some baddies with the new friend through acts of derring-do (or stealth it with a Rogue or something). Collect cool magical treasure. Play with it, figure out what it does. Bask in glory of a job well done...
SHOCKING REVEAL: the stranger was a bad guy the whole time! They will definitely overpower the PC if they stand and fight, so they should either get their ass beat (but not killed) or the PC runs away. The stranger disappears, and now is the villain for the rest of the campaign.
New Episode: Is Football Possible Anymore?
Ben recounts his 2007 startup building a database chatbot (before LLMs were cool). Matt tries their methods live with Claude. Ben foolishly uses his phone as a microphone stand.
https://twoscomplement.org/#podcast/is-football-possible-anymore
JIC any other OldBytes denizens find themselves wondering they're sending rhaamo@sigpipe.me a recurring contribution, that's @dashie and you're helping keep the site afloat, so go past you, keep up the good work and don't cancel that payment :)
(I DO wish #kofi would add a payment note to the Paypal transaction. Thankfully this is easily solved with a Google, but still.)
Announcing: https://justaqrcode.com.
Tired of "free" QR code generators that are full of ads and trackers, that share your data, and that want to sell you something? Me too. Here's my act of resistance: I made a one-page site that works entirely in your browser to generate a simple QR code. And that's all it does. You can download the HTML page and run it locally, even. Read the source; nothing up my sleeves. Just a QR code.
My offer to you -- I will continue to pay for the domain name and web hosting for it, myself. If you find it valuable, you can pay it back by creating your own useful thing for the world and releasing it for free. Let's take back the friendly web, one vexingly-monetized utility at a time!
I have the ssh movie player back online!
This is running on a custom ssh server built using russh as the backend. To convert frames, I used the python tv package, subtitling and playback is all custom.
You'll need a terminal that supports 24 bit color.
Try it! ssh ansi.rya.nc
Tod Beardsley
Two's Complement
Zeppo
Feoh
Keyboards
Existential Comics
Gabe Schuyler
kamatahvel🇺🇦
Ryan Castellucci 
gloriouscow