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D&D's back catalog, or even the entire body of work published under the OGL, is nowhere near enough to train an LLM from scratch. And even if it were, I doubt Hasbro could afford it. The alternative is to use an existing LLM and fine-tune it on D&D. But then you haven't addressed any of the...

CRPGs are notorious for long playthroughs, but ain't nobody got that kind of time.

We'll see. Being willing to spend a lot of money is something, but it doesn't mean the people running the show have any clue how to make good CRPGs. You need talented people -- and not just talented devs, but also managers and writers -- and you need to give them enough freedom to do their...

I have a suspicion that somebody was being very optimistic about this percentage. Whether that optimism is warranted remains to be seen, I guess. I am certainly not making that shift, but I may not be representative.

What, there's a problem with a nation in which the royal family literally kill and eat their subjects, who are nevertheless expected to honor their predatory rulers and rapturously celebrate the birth of a new heir, and the whole business is dressed up in a gauzy ideology making it out to be the...

Tighten up spell balance. Rework spell schools from the ground up, with an eye to flavor and theme over rigid function, and distribute the "must-have" spells evenly across the lists. On character creation, you must choose 2 or 3 schools. You can only prepare wizard spells from those schools. You...

Generative AI does indeed pose an immediate threat to some people's jobs. Turns out, those people are comedians.

Adding to that, a recent quote from William Shatner, about his first journey into space: I looked down and I could see the hole that our spaceship had punched in the thin, blue-tinged layer of oxygen around Earth. It was as if there was a wake trailing behind where we had just been, and just as...

I love curated settings and strongly dislike kitchen sink, but that doesn't mean WotC should use a curated setting as the D&D core. D&D is the game that must be all things to all gamers. Its goal is not to be the best at any one thing, but to be good enough at everything for many different...

Forgotten Realms, zoomed in on Baldur's Gate. Seriously -- from a business standpoint, now would be a terrible time to switch out the default setting. And I say that with some pain, because I deeply dislike FR. But there's no predicting where the market's tastes will be 5 years out; and right...

Sure, if you're actually literally fired. We know that didn't happen; she resigned. What we don't know is whether her resignation was made under pressure from above -- if she was essentially told, "We'll let you quit if you make it snappy. Otherwise we'll fire you. Your choice." Locking your...

I have wanted to do this for years. In theory, it's an easy change to just fold the stat bonus into proficiency. In practice, it's a significant pain, because of all the places ability mods get shoved into this, that, and the other thing. However, I think it would dramatically improve the...

That would be my ruling as well. Partly because it is the one consistent with RAW, and partly because it feels most natural to me. If petrification turned you into an object, you would be merely a statue, and turning you back into flesh would result in a lifeless body. The fact that your soul...

The BBEG doesn't know that.

It depends on whether the villain's attack requires being in melee range. If it does, target the fighter who is already in range. If it doesn't, target the wizard or the rogue, whichever seems more likely to fail the save (I don't let players know the monsters' exact hit points, so the villain...

The idea is good. I'm skeptical of the implementation as shown (and beyond skeptical of the price tag). Generally one looks at minis from a fairly high angle. They are on a map and you want to view them in the context of that map, which means looking down from above. But the way this gadget is...

No, you are turned into "a substance," which is typically but not necessarily stone. In any case, the rules specifying consequences for not eating or drinking make no exceptions for people turned into stone, nor do the petrification rules create any such exception. I'm not saying this makes...

By strict RAW... yeah, technically there is nothing making you immune to starvation and thirst. There aren't a lot of cases where I would say a DM was flat-out wrong (as opposed to "making a different decision from what I'd prefer") for going by RAW, but this is one.

Alien and Terminator managed quite respectable sequels. But the sequels sort of prove your point; both changed style and tone considerably, shifting toward action rather than horror. They didn't try to catch the same lightning as the originals. Instead, each used the original as a springboard...

I don't think "-X/+Y" should be a thing at all. It presents a decision which is boring and easy to optimize, and it's also very powerful, so players have a strong incentive to optimize it. If you want to give martials more damage, just give them a damage bonus across the board and be done with it.