Search results

For me, Lucas, Tolkien, and Gygax are so important as to demand a place. But I can see a lot of debate for the 4th slot. George Miller is a fun choice but I don't think my personal love for his work reflects his influence. Howard is worth it but little of his direct work has persisted. Lovecraft...

Likewise, it is not a big part for me. To be fair to @Reynard, I do think the act of playing out fantasies can tell you things about a person that wouldn't be obvious with other activities. I feel I have learned new things about certain people because of gaming. That said, none of my closest...

Thanks for your response. This question of "to what extent are unwritten rules actually rules" is I think a really interesting one. For example, if I place a ball bearing on a sloped path, it should roll down, but I've never seen that stated in a game book. It is implicitly understood by the...

It doesn't say much about how they found people to survey and I imagine it's not a representative sample. It would be interesting to see how people answered that one by generation. Are people reading mental health as "any socialization is good for my mental health" or "this game will deal with...

I have two comments. The first is--how popular is FKR really and what do its proponents consider the main example of the genre? I've not seen anyone running a game billed as "FKR". I have played a Braunstein, which I see mentioned in the same conversation, but I think there are some key...

I guess the first question is to define what we mean by simulationism. Sam Sorensen has a recent take that has prompted some commentary. For me, when I think of a world as 'simulationist' I'm looking for a large degree of separation between the GMs role as a referee and the GMs role as a...

I think this would be a great thread.

I have also found these goals in conflict. I think the game expects you to play to drive action forward rather than play to win, hence the stolen car advice. But for me it is hard to get of the 'play to win' mode.

It is similar in the US today (my wife graduated recently). The book in question is for an undergraduate, not med school, course, where this kind of thing is more common.

I find Verhoeven frustrating because his films raise some genuinely interesting themes. But rather than exploring them he takes the most ham-handed, exploitative way to answer those. Flesh + Blood: To what extent are the structures of civilization (marriage, religion, hierarchy) built atop...

This seems like what is happening with AI art in RPGs, right?

Don't think this site is a particularly good metric. It all depends what and how you count (see below). Also it is counting conference submissions...that's why you are seeing large schools at the top. Where are the influential AI labs? --- One selection A different selection

An interesting paper I saw this morning, regarding the use of ChatGPT in the classroom for students learning English as a second language and writing essays in English. They found that students who could use ChatGPT either supervised in class or whenever they wanted did better than those who...

To the extent they are via fine tuning and such, it is a tricky balance. You don't want it to agree with whatever the user tells it, so it has to be somewhat stubborn. But this can lead to it doubling down on false information. Similar to people in that way.

The first time it impressed me, back near launch, was with a sending spell. We knew what we wanted to say but had to cut it to 25 words. I typed it all out, maybe 125, and asked to shorten. It was as good or better than what we would have come up with, and it would have taken us some time.

I don't know..."not worth my time" is subjective, but there is an underlying objective metric, how long it takes to do something, that they could be wrong about. Someone could say "driving to NY rather than walking is not worth my time, because I don't mind a two week walk", and it technically...

"LLMs often return untrustworthy results" is a pretty unobjectionable statement. The jump to "Therefore LLMs have no use cases/LLMs only produce slop" is what I see as getting pushback.

The ideal use case is where the user can verify but production would longer than verification. I posted an example of Terence Tao using it to speed up a search for numerical examples earlier. This is also the case with "deep research": I could find the sources manually in a library but it would...