Search results

Yeah I think most of the examples, the spider included, are eminently reasonable. I'm just responding to the absolute nature of the comment above.

Are you willing to share any details about those sessions--for example what mods you ran, if you had a fighter and a ranger or a wizard/sorcerer at the same table? Did anyone play a warlock, and if so what was their pact boon? Some details from actual play would help demonstrate the system.

This seems overly harsh imo. The GM is the one putting in extra time and effort to prepare an adventure for the players--time they could have spent playing in games. Usually at a con they are a volunteer. Approaching a table and then saying "you need to change X for me or you are a bad GM"...

Playtesting is an iterative process; writing the rules and layout is a part of it. And there is a discursive component, where you run the game, see what worked and what didn't, and modify accordingly. I consider this part of the design time. What sorts of adventures did you run in your...

Have you played the system? Several rules seem odd to me. For example, the rangers +1 damage vs a marked target is strictly worse than the fighters flat +1 to damage. Why would I play a ranger?

My least favorite experience as a player is a DM who says "hey, we can go 15 minutes over to finish this, right?" I've got just a bit of time to eat and move on...no I don't have time. When I've experienced this its been at games that were not so great anyway.

Cool project. Typical LLM text I feel confident identifying, but that was not the case here. I haven't seen too many LLM spells. Will you update us with the results? It would be fun to see.

Wanted to add, while the implementation is different from LLMs or image generation, Alphafold is using transformers and diffusion models these days.

I think the forum is split into people who (i) think AI is largely unethical nonsense and so aren't worried or (ii; a much smaller group) general AI boosters who are not that doom-and-gloom. To be alarmed you need to believe in the efficacy of these models and harbor skepticism about use cases...

Playing, I don't know. I'm under 30 and played it when it came out. It was popular when I was in high school. Really good post. No time to comment more now, just wanted to say.

The data available here are from BookScan in 2023, which excludes many sales channels (e.g., digital) and may not be complete. However, it would be odd if a particular d&d adventure depended substantially on sales channel. Plausible but requires some explanation. These show Radiant Citadel...

You, or anyone else here, would be very welcome at my table. I think the Arab-inspired setting would be pretty popular among OSR types because it is in the genre--historical fantasy--that a lot of people like. Ime, the objection is more about a specific kind of modern storytelling genre...

I don't see a lot of Avatar or Minecraft in the current version of the game. The Avatar audience is now in their 30s. What I hear people talk about are Sanderson or Riordan. Riordan especially is a good example--his early works started out more conventionally, but his more recent novels...

This post, and @Levistus's_Leviathan's, make a similar error...they assume that if someone is complaining about the new artwork they are ok with everything else (Ravenloft, Eberron, Ravnica) that has been published and therefore their position is incoherent. Basically, characterizing the...

The 1984 rendition of The Bounty takes this more authentically than others. I like Conan and you know, there really is something to the Vallejo and Frazetta art. But I'll confess I also find it very off putting to have as the point of entry or representative of the genre. It's just too easy to...

You sit down with a group of strangers and say "I want to play D&D". What comes to everyone's mind? If there is a broader array of possibilities, is that good (many types of stories can be told) or bad (it is hard to find a group that fits)?

Another thought--there is a difference between improvements in presentation of mechanics and the mechanics as such. The switch from descending AC to ascending AC, for example, doesn't seem to me to properly constitute a new mechanic; the underlying math is the same. Rules like 'roll with...

Bridge, Mahjong, Spades, Cribbage...varying ages, but all more than OD&D.

I've got a ton to say on this topic, but not the time at the moment. But for now: I think the interaction between rules and creativity is really interesting and there are a ton of parallels between how these work in art and music and how they work in games. In a certain sense, you can conceive...

This is just not a good frame for analyzing art and games. Look no further than Chess. Actually your comment reminds me of Elon Musk's post insisting Chess is a poor game because it lacks fog of war and a tech tree. But you can also look at CGI and filmmaking, or the development of new painting...