Recent content by GrahamWills

@Retreater -- I can empathize with your competing desires both to ease up on the amount of work you are doing and also not to disappoint or blindside the people you are running for. I see a lot of posts in this thread that are very assertive in saying what you should do and many of them suggest...

“Randomly” should not be thought of as synonymous with “completely at random”. Most modern data algorithms work “randomly” but their outputs converge to a state that is definitely not completely random. GenAI is no different; the process of convergence from a very random state to something that...

Cogito, ergo sum

I am a professional mathematician by training, so I am very dubious of any attempt to prove anything that does not have a solid definitional structure. My only proof is evident to myself alone; my self-knowledge that I have consciousness. I cannot apply that to others.

I'd draw a distinction between rules (the relationship between THAC0 and AC) and values/instances of rules (what a monster's AC is). For rules, my thoughts are: There are a minimal set of rules each player should know to play. The fewer those are, the better as it means I can get started with...

Nice article -- thanks for the reference. As often is the case, a lot depends on what we mean by "understanding". The core technology absolutely is simply predicting the next word from a. sequence of words. However, the way in which this is done is with a vast number of parameters. The question...

Generative AI has been much in the news both in RPG-land and in the general media. I do a fair amount of work in this area, so I thought it might be helpful to give a worked example of how generative AI works. For text, the AI repeatedly tries to guess the next word in the sequence and keeps...

This is a little bit late coming to the thread, but in case anyone reads this thread in the future, let me give some hopefully helpful comments. My job is as an AI/ML Architect and I've followed this discipline for 20+ years. I am currently spending about 50% of my time researching ways to use...

So, I work as an AI and ML architect for a health care company, and get to review a lot of government and regulatory documents over AI. One of the strong principles we adhere to is that nothing goes directly from an AI to a consumer (patient, clinician, etc.) Everything must be seen, usually...

I recently needed to reskin some themes for D&D4E to make them specific to worshipping Moander, the god of rot and decay. I used ChatGPT to do so and it definitely saved me some time. Simple prompts like “show me a beast master theme from D&D4E, but focused on using a rot beast” did pretty well...

Rolemaster has more of a middle-earth feel, so spells like "fireball" are not common at all. Low-level mages won't have them. If you are casting a spell at or below your level, and you have no reason why you should fail, no roll is needed. It's only if you're hurt or overcasting that you need...

An alternative approach might be to make the success of the action dependent on the roll, but the narration of that outcome dependent on the improv, so if you fail the roll, but improv‘d well, then you negate how you fail. This also has the friendly side effect that those people who don’t like...

I recall (it's 2 decades ago, so hopefully this is at least roughly accurate) that Rolemaster applied penalties to pretty much every roll if you were injured. Some were based on criticals (e.g. if you have a broken leg, -50 to actions requiring legs), but others were just based on hit points...

Yes. I go for a concept first and adapt it to the system. Sometimes pure magic users, sometimes no-magic. If you can mix that simply opens up some new paths to play. So when D&D 4E came out I played a fighter/wizard because it was the first time in D&D I could play that concept without being...

I thought we might have a gap of three months before the next illusionism == railroading == bad thread. I guess not. For me, illusionism is bad for a completely different reason. It says that the GM doesn't trust the players and wants to deceive them. It's bad because it breaks trust, not...