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  1. Umbran

    Game Balance, what is it to you, why is it important, and what if you all but threw it out?

    Overpowering the PCs is easy for the GM. It takes no skill, nuance, understanding, or imagination for a GM to dial an adversary up to 11. In that sense, your dragon is unimpressive. For a traditional RPG, it is very useful for a game to provide for the GM, not so much balance, as a clear...
  2. Umbran

    D&D General Wildly Diverse "Circus Troupe" Adventuring Parties

    With the right GM and players, I'll try anything once. But it still sounds like having to make decisions NOW, on the spot. Choose a card, NOW. Make up what it means NOW. Next round, next card, NOW. If I'm not particularly creative in that moment, I'm stuck with it for the months or years...
  3. Umbran

    Sales Information for TTRPGs

    Not that I'm aware of, no. Remember - sales data is proprietary business information. Other people having that data can impact the business. For drivethru to release it would be a breach of trust that would likely make sellers abandon the platform in droves. I think that there's one...
  4. Umbran

    D&D General Wildly Diverse "Circus Troupe" Adventuring Parties

    So, that's not necessarily a GM's job - it is a style choice. Many GMs like to take that on, but it is not a requirement to run a game. The FR GM in question did not claim they'd work backstories into play. They were not violating an agreement by not doing so.
  5. Umbran

    Time travel doesn't exist because time travel wiped out the timelines where it did

    I guess I wasn't clear. I, personally, here and now, cannot pass through one without the other. I, personally, here and now, am restricted to motion governed by Einsteinian Relativity. But I, personally, here and now, don't have a time machine. Time machines, in general concept, can violate...
  6. Umbran

    D&D General Wildly Diverse "Circus Troupe" Adventuring Parties

    One of these was in the FR, and yeah, I kind of recognized that as a likelihood for that reason. I positioned it as, "This is why I am in the area the adventure would take place in, and it is available for the GM to use, if they want." The other cases weren't in FR, but followed the general...
  7. Umbran

    Sales Information for TTRPGs

    Mostly not. Companies are by no means required to release sales data, and there are some good reasons for them to not make such information public.
  8. Umbran

    D&D 5E (2024) What's New with the Artificer in Eberron: Forge of the Artificer

    Mod note: I see a number of folks here getting a little testy, rude, insulting, and so on. Being a jerk isn't going to have much payoff here, folks. Dial it back, please and thanks.
  9. Umbran

    D&D General Wildly Diverse "Circus Troupe" Adventuring Parties

    The last several times I have tried to use the setting, as presented, as a solid basis for my characters, I found that the bits I'd chosen to connect to were bits that the GM decided they weren't going to refer to, pretty much at all. My connections to the setting were relevant only to my...
  10. Umbran

    D&D General Wildly Diverse "Circus Troupe" Adventuring Parties

    So, as a player, putting me on the spot and saying, "You must come as a blank slate, and do all your character creation right now," is a great way for me to end up with a character I'm not really interested in playing, and that probably won't be all that interesting for others to play alongside...
  11. Umbran

    Time travel doesn't exist because time travel wiped out the timelines where it did

    Well... Since we are talking about weird things like time travel.... If we are, in fact, a hologram or a simulation (two kinda weird, but technically possible cosmologies), then "height" may, in fact, be an illusion.
  12. Umbran

    Time travel doesn't exist because time travel wiped out the timelines where it did

    Not quite. Einstein's Special Relativity tells us, in effect, that there is no inertial frame of reference in which physical laws of the universe differ. If you are looking at two different frames of reference, and you account for the (constant) velocity difference between them, the laws of...
  13. Umbran

    Time travel doesn't exist because time travel wiped out the timelines where it did

    In reality? Quite possibly. But also, proving a negative like, "there is no way to travel backwards in time" is incredibly difficult.
  14. Umbran

    Time travel doesn't exist because time travel wiped out the timelines where it did

    Well, what do you mean by "without any time passing"? Because, if we are thinking of this as spacetime, then time never passes - we pass through time, just like we pass through space. Right now, I have some control over how I move through space. A car is a machine that does not...
  15. Umbran

    D&D General Wildly Diverse "Circus Troupe" Adventuring Parties

    We can add to that an element of how some GMs do not want players inventing anything in the scene. Players asking questions are then looking for what they can, and cannot, use in declaring their actions.
  16. Umbran

    Time travel doesn't exist because time travel wiped out the timelines where it did

    Um, no, that's not anything like what Einstein said. In physics terms you are close to "not even wrong". Einstein recognized all motion in as a vector in a 4-d spacetime, that could have components both across your field and towards/away from you.
  17. Umbran

    Time travel doesn't exist because time travel wiped out the timelines where it did

    No. Einsteinian Relativity does not prohibit closed timelike curves through spacetime (which is what you call time travel in relativity). But the solutions that have closed timelike curves are not "extreme but naturally happening". They are things like infinitely long cylinders of neutronium...
  18. Umbran

    D&D General Wildly Diverse "Circus Troupe" Adventuring Parties

    First, please note that dismissing, or labeling things as bad, because of "political correctness" is against the site's inclusivity policy. So, please watch it. More conversationally, claims like, "In a modern RPG everyone must be 100% equal," seems pretty vague, and very poorly supported. It...
  19. Umbran

    Time travel doesn't exist because time travel wiped out the timelines where it did

    "Informatics" is the study of computational systems. In much of Europe, it is synonymous with "computer science". Typically, it is used in the context of recasting information to be something useful to humans. In this context, it may mean "the science of information processing".
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