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I see a lot of folks here saying effectively, "AI doesn't have a right to be trained on data without the creator's permission". Every person here who has thought about designing their own roleplaying game, or creating their own world setting, has, like it or not, been "trained" on prior...

EDIT: I found the quote I was trying to reply to :) That's at best, a gross over simplification, and at worse, flat out wrong. Truth is, we don't exactly understand how LLM's work, and that makes them all the more frightening. These Large Language Models don't just rearrange words and...

There was a whitepaper on early work for GPT4, and it did an Amazon Technical interview. It scored 100% and did it in under 4 minutes. I am pretty sure if an interviewer didn't know they were testing AI, they would hire it in a heart beat. The hiring process in software development is very...

Sad but very true. I'm a software engineer, and what I've been seeing WRT to GPT-4 (the successor to chatgpt) is pretty frightening. AI can already out diagnose doctors, outperform fund managers, and generate art or images real enough to fool people. This is the first time where knowledge and...

Somehow I missed this one :) I also just purchased a pdf of Privateers and Gentlemen from the venerable Fantasy Games Unlimited. While I have not read any of the nautical historical fiction like the Horatio Hornblower series, it has always been interesting genre to me. Perhaps because my...

Usually when I think of mechanics, I think of dice, but I also consider other systems, like for example "action economies" or "resource pools" (where you have to distribute a fixed pool of points across 2 or more kinds of resources). I've had some inspiration from other games but I usually try...

In no particular order: I spend too much time watching Youtube, mostly for news/documentaries (Spacetime and Eons on PBS for example, or China Insights). Started "getting in shape, to get in shape" with the express goal of wanting to do martial arts again (FMA Filipino Martial Arts, or Silat)...

Yes this is very true. I always have a hard time saying I am half Filipino because while technically true, the area that my mother comes from has always had an extremely strong separatist movement to it. The Sulu Archipelago region of the Philippines never truly surrendered to the Spanish and...

Yes, I mentioned some of this in an earlier reply on this thread. Like how the French used the pretext of the killings of Catholics in the mid 1800s to control Vietnam, and a reversal where the Catholics persecuted the Buddhists so that Ngo Diem could help his Arch Bishop brother (the famous...

I'm an amateur historian at best. My paternal grandfather served in WW2 and the Korean War and for a time, was the Commandant of the NROTC at Northwestern University in Illinois. He wrote 3 semi-fictional books about Naval officers during the War of 1812 (well, technically, one of them was...

Oops. Hukbong Bayang Laban sa Hapon means "People's Army against Japan" (I should have remembered that, but my Tagalog is very limited). I forgot that they changed their name to Hukbong Mapagpalaya ng Bayan which is the "People's Liberation Army" only later. Ironically, the communist groups...

Well, usually the natives don't like to be occupied by a foreign power...so yes. Almost all of South East Asia was colonized by a European power except Thailand. The rest of Indochina by France (Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam) , Burma (Myanmar) and Malaysia by England, Indonesia by Holland, and the...

I actually did historical wargaming with my father as well as role playing when I was not even a teenager yet. We started out playing Johnny Reb, a 15mm American Civil War miniatures game, and a couple times some Napoleonics (forgot the rule set we used... Fire and Steel?). I even still have...

How true this (unfortunately) is. I have often wondered why RPG gamers veered off into the fantastic so much. Back in the 80s, there were quite a few popular games that had nothing to do with fantasy or science fiction. It made me think, is it a supply or demand causation? Was fantasy what...

I guess my rejoinder would be

whoops accidentally replied to my own post :D

I remember in 1986, a (now somewhat infamous) RPG combat system came out called Phoenix Command Combat System (PCCS for short). The back of the box had this blurb... So perhaps a little harsh, but to my 14 yr old mind, I was like "oh yeahhhhhh". At the time, I was mostly a post-apocalypse or...

Can I say "Compared to Brand X..." to protect the innocent?

That's a fairly opinionated...err, opinion. But we're all entitled to one. I enjoy math, but I don't feel like it makes me smarter. And I think that having rules that require more calculation can provide a better sense of verisimilitude. I am a software engineer, so like great art, half the...

Yeah I agree there. That's my caveat about limiting player agency. Everyone has to be onboard with this play style. But I also think players should consider at least trying that play style once in awhile. As I have often said, I love pizza, but I wouldn't want to eat it every day. And...