Pineapple Express: Someone Is Wrong on the Internet?

[Scribe]

--

Are you sure you even want D&D?

 

[overgeeked]

Some of these conversations are like…

 

[prabe]

I like the beer I like.

And I hope I've been clear that's good!

I went to Russia back in 2005, and one thing that stood out was a tour of Razin Brewery’s facility in Moscow. When we arrived, they were still giddy about being bought out by Heineken. So part of our tour included a tasting in a board room. Each of us got a whole bottle of each of their 14 products, including kvass (a nearly alcohol free beer made from raisin bread and that tastes a lot like Dr. Pepper).

This was around 10:30AM.

I liked most of what I had, so when I got back to the USA, I started looking for Razin products. I found other Russian beers, but not theirs.

So I went online to see what happened. Heineken hadn’t bought Razin to broaden its distribution, or even to relabel their beers as Heineken products. They did it to get rapid access to the markets Razin was in, and their distribution network in those regions. The company itself got shuttered; its recipes shelved.

I know of kvass, but it's one of the smallish number of beer styles I haven't tried. And the big beer companies are just that kind of ... crap. Fortunately, there are breweries that are more locally owned (even if not necessarily owned local to where I am, if I'm being clear) and I'll drink their products.

Also, the Russian drinking culture is real.

 

[billd91]

Sometimes that guy seems like a really cold fish.

 

[prabe]

Unrelated to the above (as far as I know, anyway): Well, that conversation took a sharp turn to a worthless argument. Y'all have fun with that!

 

[The Soloist]

Well, I made a fool of myself... but learn something in the process.

 

[Mannahnin]

I have been in home tiki bar groups on Facebook where the moderators would kick people out of the group if the photos of their home tiki bars weren't sufficiently tiki enough for their tastes.

That said, the hot sauce community seems pretty chill, not shaming people for asking basic questions or being excited about pretty ordinary store-bought hot sauces they've just discovered, even if the hardcore folks are growing their own peppers and bottling their own sauces.

I am genuinely happy there's a community that proves me wrong, and I sincerely hope it continues to do so.

My main example is the Patrick O'Brien Appreciation Society on FB. Almost always scrupulously friendly, welcoming, and gentlemanly. Colloquially referred to as the gunroom, people treat each other as fellow officers on a small ship, and habitually use endearing language from the books (referring to each other as "shipmates", congratulating people with Stephen's "I give you joy", etc.). Gordon Laco, the chief technical consultant on the movie, is an active member, and a couple of cast members have popped in occasionally as well. Tons of historical and sailing expertise on display in the group, but the friendliness is the key feature.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

When learning physics, it is common to have problems where you make various simplifying assumptions about the thing you're trying to calculate, such as approximating whatever you're trying to calculate as a point rather than whatever its actual shape and volume is, or ignoring air resistance/drag when calculating how quickly something falls. This is done so you can focus on whatever the problem is trying to teach, and often you will get fairly close to what the real-world solution would be.

White-rooming is kind of like that. You abstract away all the circumstances to get to the core of the issue. That is often practical, particularly when comparing two things. For example, circle of death hits all creatures within a 60-foot radius sphere, while fireball has a 20-foot radius instead. So as a first order of approximation, circle of death should hit about 9 times as many targets as fireball (3 times the radius, and square that for an area – we're ignoring height for the moment). That's the white-room comparison. But in an actual situation, it's pretty rare to be facing enemies that are so numerous and spread out that you get full benefit from the larger AOE. You might hit an extra target or two, but almost certainly not nine times as many. And in addition, the larger AOE can be a liability because it's hard to hit many enemies without hitting friends as well. And that's the kind of analysis that you generally don't get from white-rooming something.

Would this then not bring up an important distinction between appropriate and inappropriate assumptions?

Because here, the clearly inappropriate assumption is that you have a flat field uniformly dense in enemies, such that a linear increase in radius corresponds to a quadratic increase in targets hit. That, I think we can all agree, is a ridiculous thing to assume.

However, it is not ridiculous to assume that if a weapon does 2d6+5 damage when you hit with it, then we can approximate that as 12 damage (2x3.5+5). Because there, we are generalizing across time, not space, and we are recognizing a real and pertinent truth, regression to the mean. We know the distribution produced by rolling 2d6, and we know that on average high rolls and low rolls will loosely match. We would of course need to account for critical hits, since those are a significant portion of damage (doubly so for specific characters, e.g. Champion Fighters), but that's just a matter of proper arithmetic, the fundamental idea that 2d6 "equals" 7 damage on average is not changing.

Likewise, when we consider an AoE spell, it is typical to assume that the spell is going to be used on at least 2, sometimes 3 targets, depending on the exact nature of the spell. Or, if an attack hits everyone nearby, you presume it's going to be used when there are 2 or more targets nearby able to be hit. Etc. These are most certainly simplifying assumptions, but they are not inappropriate ones. Quite the opposite--in many cases they are very conservative assumptions, erring on the side of caution, rather than excess, as your "triple the radius? Nine times as many targets!!" assumption would be.

Yet functionally 100% of the time, it is these assumptions which get attacked as "white room theory", as inappropriate ridiculous nonsense that cannot capture the true depth and complexity and meaning and virtue and beauty and holistic purity and (etc., etc., etc.) of "real" gameplay. Even though....it's literally just basic math and basic logic. If you only have one target, you aren't going to use an AoE spell on it, because AoE spells of a given spell level do less damage to each individual target, that's how they're designed. It would be profoundly illogical to do otherwise, unless you had (say) foolishly failed to pick even a single single-target spell to employ. Likewise, when considering long-run damage performance, it is literally just a matter of statistical fact that on average a greatsword is going to do about 7+mod damage per successful swing.

This is why I have such a hatred for the "white room" rebuttal. It's either actively foolish--disputing very basic assumptions as though they were somehow ridiculous nonsense, without giving the slightest reason for doing so other than "REALITY IS DIFFERENT! REALITY IS DIFFERENT! REALITY IS DIFFERENT!!!!!"--or it's willfully ignorant of basic mathematical facts.

You are completely correct that in the example you gave, the argument is foolish for "white room" reasons, namely that it has a broken and trivially false premise. But I have yet to see even a single instance of the phrase "white room" being used to reject a premise such as this in real life. It is--universally, in my experience--used to dismiss anyone who ever makes any argument, of any kind, that relies on statistical analysis.

 

[trappedslider]

Well, I made a fool of myself... but learn something in the process.

then you didn't really make a fool of yourself, it's only foolish if you refuse to learn.

 

[trappedslider]

@Dannyalcatraz