zifnab25 [he/him, any]

Click bait headlines should be banned unless they’re spoofs.

Weird how the size of your nose changes with your facial expression.

Doing another Slay and Say.

Fighter: Barbarian’s fratbro drinking buddy

Wizard: Fighter’s emotionally distant and verbally abusive father-figure

Monk: Wizard’s even more emotionally distant and verbally abusive father-figure

Sorcerer: Monk’s third ex-spouse, mostly along to look after the Fighter because he’s like a little brother to her

Ranger: Sorcerer’s daughter by a second marriage and also the Druid’s husband (which has led to some confusing moments with the cleric)

Bard: Rogue’s legal defense counsel

Sure. But that’s one point of failure relative to the N points tied to each major update to a “supported” platform.

Spend 500 hours re-engineering your application for each platform

Just using ten year old proven technology that’s built on a universal backwards compatible framework

Genuinely love to break up a combat/dungeon-crawl heavy game with some light-hearted day-in-the-life-of gameplay once in a while. Having the DM describe the lazy cat stretched across the alchemist’s countertop, while some mischievious pickpocket tries to nick the rogue’s enchanted dagger and the knight errant helps an elderly woman cross the street can add a lot of color to a very number-crunchy game. Picking through a flea market of random niche nebulously useful magic items, while a merchant drops hints about the next sidequest, gives you a real adventurer’s vibe.

Genuinely hate having long, drawn out arguments over whether the shopkeep would have the principle material component for my most import spells or basic equipment (there’s no bat guano, one swayback horse, and only sixteen arrows in a fantasy city of 50,000 people? god damn, dude). Or digging through spreadsheets to figure out how many javelins the local economy can absorb. Or bickering over whether the Charm Person spell gets us in fight with town guards. Genuinely do not want anyone consulting a series of random charts and tables to determine why we can’t get a full night’s rest in the town’s nicest inn.

Please just make this a fun story to enjoy and not a pedantic fight over the future prospective mathematical efficiency of my stat block in the next combat.

I’m sorry, but that’s just bullshit. The rule was implemented as a patch in to deal with the fact that Strength is the most efficient stat in 2e. Everyone wanted to max out their strength score and Gygax didn’t want everyone coming to the table with near-identical stat blocks. So, for one value - 18 - in one stat - strength - he created a secondary rule that stratified characters that much further.

RPGs are games, not art, and I don’t give myself airs.

This is also nth-levels of bullshit.

Rivaling the rogue’s boutique skill system for moments of “Why on earth did they shoehorn that in there?” game design.

Old 2e game back in middle school. My DM introduced a weapon common to goblins called a “Herculean Club”. It did d10 damage and could be used by a small creature, but it would break in two if you rolled less than a 3.

Our ranger loved them, because they were ideal for two-weapon fighting (big oopsey on the DM’s part). But his rolls were shit, so he was always breaking them. At one point, he went through six different clubs in an encounter, and the DM demanded to see his character sheet. Dude had, like, 30 of these on there. But also an 18/70 strength score, so… shrug

This is cool, from a digital visuals perspective, because it is building out a very detailed library of human behaviors to model after. A richer catalog provides a lot more potential for engines that want to render more complex human behaviors.

But its also kinda… illustrative of the soft upper limits of generative AI, as this is still ultimately a discrete (and presumably fairly limited) library of motions that will result in visually distinct characters all falling into the same set of physical behaviors. Both a small rambunctious boy and an elderly infirm woman crossing a gap in the pavement in the same way isn’t realistic. And while you can solve this by adding more data points, you’re still having all small rambunctious boys and all elderly infirm women crossing the gap in the pavement in the same way. And while you can solve this by adding variations… how much modeling are you really willing to do for sufficient variance? Idk.

We get generative in the sense that we can reskin a stick-figure model very quickly using a catalog of behaviors. But we don’t get generative in the sense that the computer understands the biomechanics of a human body and can create these stick-figure models in believable states.

Me, a player: “So my options are the left door or the right door?”

You, the DM: “Yes.”

Me, a player: “I choose the left door.”

You, the DM: “FUCK!” tears up 300 pages of notes

It was such an enjoyable piece of cinema. So nice I saw it twice. Breaks my heart that Zack Snyder will be allowed to continue to make over-hyped flops while these folks are stuck in limbo.

Europeans: “Those perfidious Russians and the nefarious Chinese are the two single biggest threats to our domestic security. Why… they’ll just hack into any old thing and fill it full of evil communist propaganda. They’ll shut down our critical infrastructure, hijack our data services, and spam us so full of phishing attempts that you won’t know what’s safe to click on! And all just to watch us fail, then laugh at us. The fiends!!!”

Also Europeans: “Google’s CEO said we need to dismantle the last ten years of digital safety standards so we can undermine the YouTube adblocker. Make this our top priority.”

“What is the return on investment?”

In the case of 3Body,

That’s only very loosely a “profitable” enterprise. Certainly, the initial generations won’t see any kind of profit simply due to the length of the journey.

The same principle applies to other planets – if it’s profitable, it will be pursued.

But a practical ROI can only really be measured within a single lifetime. And extraplanetary travel will always have a return of $0, as anyone deciding to perform extra-planetary exploration today will not see the benefits for generations. One might argue a more Ursula LeGuin-esque view of interstellar colonization - as a struggle for survival that simply expands beyond the frontiers of a single planet. But then, what we’re really talking about with Martian colonization or extra-Solar travel is some kind of politically or ecologically motivated Exodus. Because the economic exploitation of the New World was mostly just hit-and-run raids early on. The Virginia Company was an abject failure as an economic exercise. It cost far more to maintain than it yielded.

The real motivating force behind early colonization was the 30 Years War and the flight of the Protestants. What you’re ultimately going to need are some Huguenots with space ships. Even then, the real labor force in colonization were indentured servants and slaves. And there’s not going to be a Trans-Atlantic Triangle to move people from Earth to the spacial frontier, because… Its space. There’s nothing out there.

Cynical take: To kill us. Dark forest style.

As a sci-fi explanation for the Fermi Paradox, I found Dark Forest Theory compelling and thrilling.

As an actual IRL explanation for a lack of First Contact, I’m totally underwhelmed. Space is big. The speed of light heavily truncates both travel and communication. Extraterrestrial life certainly isn’t common, as evidenced by all of the planets in our own Solar System that are lifeless.

It should be noted that

That strikes me as highly implausible.

Other thoughts: If aliens showed up it we wouldn’t detect them in atmo, not as a quick fly by. We’d detect something huge like engines or something going real fast way out in space. Like on the edge of the system. If they were in our atmosphere they would make themselves known one way or another at that point.

The sheer amount of energy for super-luminal travel would suggest we either can’t see them or can’t miss them.

But one posits a degree of technological advancement so beyond our current scope that we can barely conceive of it. And the other posits a kind-of soft ceiling to scientific advancement, such that alien life just can’t be an issue even in another thousand lifetimes.

If first contact is anything, it will more likely be communicative than a literal fly by. Humans tuning into the extraterrestrial equivalent of AM radio will be the first to discover an advanced off-world civilization.

Going back to 3Body, one of the most compelling plot beats for me was

Like, that’s what I imagine a real human/alien interaction would look like for… centuries. Long before either saw the other one face-to-face.