Recent content by giant.robot

This is only because the Winnie the Pooh copyright existed before the passage of the 1976 Copyright Act. That law makes all copyright items created after Jan 1 1978 be covered under the life of author plus 70 years. Copyrighted items prior to the 1976 act were covered under the terms of the...

Marvel-616 used to be the main comic universe. But the MCU can't help themselves.

Sad noises

I did not see anything in the official announcements but I hope this covers 2300AD as well as Traveller. I like what Mongoose has done with 2300AD and maybe someday wistful sigh I could get my group interested in a long running game of it.

Outside of a games just being badly written, this is like the biggest blocker for getting into a new game/system. It's not enough to just come up with some mechanics and world building. You need to also give the players something interesting to do. That something, at least one something...

Hey they make it up by making it super easy to buy! As we all know everyone loves random generation. So each supplement is randomly available in combinations of PDF and Roll20. It's super easy to figure out! Especially on DTRPG's new terrible interface!

Concern about the energy uses for GenAI are disingenuous at best and insipid at the worst. Computers use electricity. The CPU cycles and thus power used to generate this forum post and transfer it over the Internet and then render on your screen are no more useful than CPU/GPU cycles used to...

That's only interesting if you account for all the electricity has ever used in order to draw a picture or write a paragraph. It takes less than a cent worth of electricity for my laptop to generate a picture with Stable Diffusion. My power comes entire from solar so there's very few negative...

A small clarification, you made this point but I didn't find it clear in the description: when the GenAI is choosing the probability of the next word, it's calculating the probability of the next word in relation to the current sequence of words which includes the prompt. As the sequence changes...

To expand on this a bit. If you built a small AI that used only integer math, a fully deterministic pRNG, and a small training set the determinism of the system would be evident. Such a GenAI wouldn't necessarily be useful but it would show the determinism from first principals. The issue with...

I voted for hating it. That's not because the system is bad or I don't understand why people like it, it's just not for me. I'm not a fan of tables even though I understand why they exist in Rolemaster. If your GM isn't really well versed in the rules and has a bunch of tables handy I found it...

Here's a couple more "probably won't play again" games from my shelves that I don't dislike, I just don't think I'll ever find interested players: James Bond - Ok game but really only good for playing James Bond™ thought there's some general spy/thriller material. FASA Star Trek - My patience...

I was reorganizing someone of my books and laughed at a few I own that I'm just never going to play. Some I tried to play at some point but for whatever reason bounced off the system. Others I read and just didn't even try to play. I don't necessarily want to get rid of them because there's...

I find the idea that smartphones ruin horror games a bit silly. The idea presumes that smartphones (and the Internet) work in ways they clearly do not. 1. Consumer cameras have been a thing for more than a century. Pictures of eldritch horrors aren't magically more effective from an iPhone than...

Whereas my collection apparently is robust and awesome. Thanks a lot, ADHD. Just game in print, to say nothing of books per game, I have a lot of these listed. I've played at least one game of most of the systems I have in print. Only a few have led to multiple sessions. But at least I've...