Recent content by BrassDragon

One element that strikes me as I move into Act 3 of Baldur's Gate 3 is not a mechanical thing but the consistently mature and tragic narrative tone of the game. Even though it's set in the Forgotten Realms, the notiously everything-but-the-kitchen-sink grandfather of gonzo settings, the stakes...

This is going to be such a quaint thing a year or two from now, when everyone has AI copilots checking, editing, translating, filtering, converting and sprucing up their content just by virtue of the digital tools they're using daily. Generative AI will be in every smartphone, content-producing...

Although it probably won't catch on, I like the way you're framing the technology as a content generation tool, rather than a humanlike intelligence. To consider the impact on our hobby, we really don't need all the philosophical baggage that is taking us into unproductive debates (like, for...

Running the actual game works fine one on one, and I've done so a few times. You have excellent fine grain control of the difficulty and the esclation as a game master so difficulty is not an issue. What you lose mostly is the chaos of several specialists having different ways to 'lie to...

This is the crux for me... social interactions typically involve compromise and consensus building to avoid negative outcomes for all participants. We really need a resolution system that can reliably determine outcomes like 'Yes, and...' (resolved with additional positive outcocmes) / 'Yes'...

This sounds similar to some of my experiences playing with neurodivergent people who could not fully engage with unspoken assumptions, unexpected developments/setbacks and switching between the meta ('what do we, the players, expect from this social activity') and the fiction ('what's happening...

If RPGs are, indeed art, they are probably too hard to capture in a single universally accepted model. Cinema never managed to square this cricle - very simplified example, it's valid to use a technical / aesthetic critical lens to view a movie like The Birth of a Nation and give meaningful...

If we want to learn from critical film theory, a more fruitful approach could be to not just hash out terms and frameworks in the public square but actually pick a critical model and start critiquing game publications / actual plays through that lens. The body of criticism that builds up will...

I feel a lot of innovation and codification in this space is happening away from the large shadow that D&D casts; for example, playing a few years of Forged in the Dark, GUMSHOE and Powered by the Apocalypse games gave me a lot of concepts and words that help me better describe stuff that's...

To whom it may concern, inside the community, the press, the creators, the publishers and, yes, the offices of Wizards of the Coast: My sincere thanks for getting the message through with reasoning, righteousness and undeniable clarity.

WotC is still in the long process of finding out.

As an activist outside of this hobby, it's a more than a bit infuriating to see the struggle for human decency reduced to a PR fig leaf to hide behind (and ineffectually at that.) There's enough to be mad about already so I'll just drop it and pick the more relevant battles... but it would...

It's also interesting to note what they haven't been rumored to be discussing: the threat of hateful and discriminatory products or blockchain-based content tarnishing their brand. To this very day and in multiple communications, that's the stated reason for nuking the OGL 1.0a... and...

Alright, I've been trying to separate the new 'factual' (but unconfirmed) information in this video from the gossipy 'this is how people act and feel' stuff that seems be to the main focus of the conversation so far. Feels like there is more to the implication that Wizards is an unsafe work...

Spot on. A responsible journalist would have stated something like 'To discuss these issues between themselves, WOTC employees had to take extra steps to make sure their communications could not be monitored by management' not 'The employees were using X feature of tool Y'. It's silly...