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I think it depends on where you find the fun in spell casting. It looks like you find the fun in carefully scouting out and working out what the best spell or set of spells is for a given situation. Others, myself included, like the challenge of trying to adapt a fixed set of spells to given...

The panic rules make it a bad plan to be in short range of another player, so it actively encourages weird plays where your colonial marines never want to be in the same room as each other. And firing in full auto mode makes marines feel stressed? EVERY TIME? The health system is just strange...

Also true for me, but I'll amplify may answer to say that for campaigns that tend more to the gamist type, where lots of the fun is working out how to do stuff mechanically and coming up with clever and cool uses for rules, clearly defined spells tend to work better for me. I love D&D 4E, and...

Great Pendragon Campaign: Nope, no big bad. In fact, it centers around Arthur Pendragon, who is very much "good". This is a known fact, and the end of Arthur will be the end of the campaign. Most of my campaigns have events things are leading up to rather than villains. In my previous...

Different genres of games, in my experience, do have their own pitfalls. For Call of Cthulhu, I have been at a number of tables with similar experience to yours. CoC is strong on narrative, and so it attracts GMs who want to tell a story, and tend to forget about the "game" part of roleplaying...

Clint, I can see you're a big fan of both anthropomorphizing computer behavior, and reducing human behavior to computer-analytic terms. I'm not sure that is terribly helpful though for people who want a better understanding. This is ancient philosophy that ends up with the only reality being...

Some info on how GenAI models handle input data: Importantly, the input data for GenAI models is not stored as part of the model. AI image generation models do not keep copies of all the images they were trained on internally. What they do do is to take those inputs and use them to modify a set...

One thing to remember is that LLMs are really exceptionally new; there are a ton of questions we don't know about how to make them more useful or how different parameterizations affect the outcome. What you see in ChatGPT is an extremely simple and generic solution for simple conversations...

@Retreater -- I can empathize with your competing desires both to ease up on the amount of work you are doing and also not to disappoint or blindside the people you are running for. I see a lot of posts in this thread that are very assertive in saying what you should do and many of them suggest...

“Randomly” should not be thought of as synonymous with “completely at random”. Most modern data algorithms work “randomly” but their outputs converge to a state that is definitely not completely random. GenAI is no different; the process of convergence from a very random state to something that...

Cogito, ergo sum

I am a professional mathematician by training, so I am very dubious of any attempt to prove anything that does not have a solid definitional structure. My only proof is evident to myself alone; my self-knowledge that I have consciousness. I cannot apply that to others.

I'd draw a distinction between rules (the relationship between THAC0 and AC) and values/instances of rules (what a monster's AC is). For rules, my thoughts are: There are a minimal set of rules each player should know to play. The fewer those are, the better as it means I can get started with...

Nice article -- thanks for the reference. As often is the case, a lot depends on what we mean by "understanding". The core technology absolutely is simply predicting the next word from a. sequence of words. However, the way in which this is done is with a vast number of parameters. The question...

Generative AI has been much in the news both in RPG-land and in the general media. I do a fair amount of work in this area, so I thought it might be helpful to give a worked example of how generative AI works. For text, the AI repeatedly tries to guess the next word in the sequence and keeps...

This is a little bit late coming to the thread, but in case anyone reads this thread in the future, let me give some hopefully helpful comments. My job is as an AI/ML Architect and I've followed this discipline for 20+ years. I am currently spending about 50% of my time researching ways to use...

So, I work as an AI and ML architect for a health care company, and get to review a lot of government and regulatory documents over AI. One of the strong principles we adhere to is that nothing goes directly from an AI to a consumer (patient, clinician, etc.) Everything must be seen, usually...

I recently needed to reskin some themes for D&D4E to make them specific to worshipping Moander, the god of rot and decay. I used ChatGPT to do so and it definitely saved me some time. Simple prompts like “show me a beast master theme from D&D4E, but focused on using a rot beast” did pretty well...

Rolemaster has more of a middle-earth feel, so spells like "fireball" are not common at all. Low-level mages won't have them. If you are casting a spell at or below your level, and you have no reason why you should fail, no roll is needed. It's only if you're hurt or overcasting that you need...

An alternative approach might be to make the success of the action dependent on the roll, but the narration of that outcome dependent on the improv, so if you fail the roll, but improv‘d well, then you negate how you fail. This also has the friendly side effect that those people who don’t like...