Recent content by Desdichado

It's technically possible. In theory. I'm not convinced that it's actually feasible for all but the most unusual and unusually rare of gamers.

Yeah, sure, the hype is that people will lose their jobs over AI, so they're not thrilled because nobody knows if that's just hype to encourage investment, or if it's real. But in rubber meets the road, what it really offers is somewhat a democratization of skills that people don't have. I want...

In my experience, that's usually how it works. People get the idea that railroads are terrible, sandboxes are great, so they decide to run a sandbox and find out that the theory doesn't match reality, and few players actually want that much freedom. They want freedom, sure. They want to not feel...

It's possible that my Zendaya fatigue exceeds my Pedro Pascal fatigue. It certainly hit earlier.

I can't wait for the AI boogeyman bad fad to die off, which I predict will happen much sooner than many of its proponents can possibly imagine. It really only exists in weird online bubbles anyway.

If there are readily available solutions that obviate the problem, then no, I don't understand throwing out the baby with the bathwater. This isn't a binary. If there are problems with how skills are used at a given table and there are readily available solutions that are already used in almost...

Both.

I love skills. I don't understand why people have a hard time with them. Heck, some of my favorite RPGs are JUST skills, like BRP or GURPS related games.

3e was great. That said, I never played with a table of powergamers, so most of what most people complained about with regards to the system never applied to me. If I could get a bunch of people together to run some shorter campaigns in 3e (avoiding the higher levels, but level scaling is a...

I thought most of the splatbook alternate classes were weaker compared to the core. I was always looking for ways to buff up options like swashbucklers, soulknives, etc. Conceptually I loved the new classes, but in practice, they were weak. That said, a lot of the feats were over-powered, many...

That had already happened, and we called them CRPGs for years. It's a moot point, I also don't really care when people started adding the superfluous TT to the front of it.

Usually, yes. In 5e, so far, always, but to be fair, I was a very late and reluctant adaptor of 5e. But in all editions forever, it's relatively rare that I play a game that doesn't start at 1st level. And many of those were one-shots by design anyway.

I got 60%. But that's a rather silly experiment. A single small paragraph doesn't reveal the inherent weakness of AI. You need to take a much larger body of work. That's where human ability to structure the work to not be repetitive starts to show. I listened to a handful of sci-fi short stories...

That's not how data works. There are things that can help encourage a solution, but it's not a guarantee that you can even FIND the right mix of truly compatible players in a given area, especially if your tastes verge on the esoteric or eclectic.

It's just you. We play on a table. But we never called them TTRPGs. I don't know when that somehow replaced RPGs, but it never did to me. This is the RPG hobby. TTRPG is needlessly pedantic.