Search results

To be clear, I didn’t interpret OP as saying all choices should be dilemmas, but just meant to respond to that idea since several posts seemed to bring it up as a concern.

Conflict and drama in every choice can be exhausting. Sometimes you need space for decompression, and there’s a place for like “what are you doing at the tavern?” and players add a bit of garnish about how they drink alone in a corner or flirt or look a little troubled and say “just water...

I think this is generally good advice, with the caveat that if players can cleverly turn a dilemma into a problem, good on them, awesome. "Situations where all of the obvious solutions hurt" - where obvious is all the things that the GM can individually think of off the top of her head - are...

Well, yes and no. No, technically, because fanfiction is defined by its relationship to another canonical fiction and your play might or might have that - Star Wars vs. your own setting. No more generally because writing prose fiction has a number of goals that solo play doesn't traditionally...

People played TSR D&D a lot of different ways back in the day, some of which were quite OSRy some of which weren’t. (The name, in this sense, is a misnomer, but it’s the name we’ve got.) The most dissatisfactory thing about 5e by far is that character creation (especially above low levels) is...

The Constitution appears a bunch in the training data verbatim so this isn’t surprising. And if you turned in the Constitution for an assignment (the main context in which these are deployed) and I said “you didn’t write this,” I’d be correct. (That being said they are less reliable than a “can...

As you noted, this is only the first prompt, but it is super bad: incredibly long, keeps telling me what I’m doing, very few interactable objects, etc. A lot of people write that way so I’ll give it that! What ChatGPT does by default is to turn short ideas into longer prose, which usually makes...

I think this is Emmy Allen’s idea but don’t quote me, but you can also have a combat maneuvers system where, after damage is rolled, you offer the target a choice of damage or maneuver of your invention.

Earlier I said the most interesting cases of AI art aren’t going to be cheaper versions of what trad art already does, and I think the same applies to writing. Currently we have print and screen pdfs for many products. There’s totally a niche for human-readable and machine-readable versions...

I see where you get the impression but that's not quite accurate. (Insofar as it's close to accurate, it also is for a lot of other games, maybe even most 5e tables, where d20+bonus is invoked and adjudicated in pretty ad hoc ways.) Combat is a sort of rules wrapper, right? (The term of art is...

Here’s an attempt at a slightly less tendentious version of the contrast, though I also prefer the first in most instances: Version 1: 1) GM gives canned description of room, including telegraphing a trap. 2a) Players stupidly ignore the telegraphed clue, triggering it when they interact with...

If so, that’s a deviation from the playstyle (which, of course, is fine if that’s what you’re going for, but then we’re talking about something else.) Treasure tables are the standard way to handle this without illusionism or other GM fiat.

And the guy who’s dumb about when to be in the front, rather than exercising the better part of her valor, is dying too. (Combat as sport vs combat as war, and all that.)

I mean the subculture that self-consciously defines itself as OSR, whether or not an older edition of D&D is the ruleset (for instance, Mothership, which is neither old nor dnd, is a popular game in this sphere.) The Principia Apocrypha is the general canonical reference for this style. Some...

Yeah, OSR style play tends the de-emphasize character builds, and can be satisfactorily played with zero mechanical differentiation between characters whatever. (Cairn, which has no classes or skills or levels, gets pretty close to this - I'd argue its inclusion of ability scores is basically...

IMO, the most interesting uses of AI art aren't going to be in the pdfs you buy from DriveThruRPG, they're going to be from bots on Discord. Once the compute is cheap enough and the relevant training automatable enough - and I don't think we're that far from either - you'll have a bot that does...

It was a cross-sectional study, which severely limits it in other ways (I'd prefer longitudinal for causal claims), but inflation is just totally irrelevant to it. They're hitting everybody at the same point in time.

IMO, it would be obviously convenient for traditional artists, but ALSO good for AI art, to be non-copyrightable or even non-commercially useable. Hustle culture, success understood as achieving professional status, and producing for an audience that isn’t yourself are all ingredients that make...

Drawing a stick figure, snapping a quick picture of someone, and typing “female human warlock casting a spell” are all pretty similar levels of skill and effort; I would call all of them art, but I use the term in a maximalist sense. This level of skill and effort is just enough for different...

When you argue definitions, the Devil appears and drags you instantly to Hell, so I’m happy to use “art” in whatever more restrictive sense people like and “goofing’ around” for anything where people produce something for aesthetic contemplation, regardless of prestige, skill level, originality...