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There was a certain period of writing when authors seemed to like to stop in the middle of a story and add a few dozen pages on whatever topic interested them that morning, so long as it was somewhat vaguely related to the text. Or not. There’s an entire book within Les Miserables titled...

Every word, jargon or not, is viewed differently to different people. "Jargon" in this context is a set of words we (this group) uses that are not immediately clear to outsiders. Are they helpful? yes, very much. They enable me to get a sense of what is being discussed immediately. Are they...

I love Moby Dick, but I appreciate that when you are faced with entire chapters such as the following, fury or despair may be warranted: The Whiteness of the Whale Of the Less Erroneous Pictures of Whales, and the True Pictures of Whaling Scenes Of Whales in Paint; in Teeth; in Wood; in...

A note of optimism here. Under Trump's first term, solar continued the upward trend despite his policies. In the current regime, he's actually just made the usual sorts of emotive statements, but actually done nothing except allow more pollution, which does help fossil fuels significantly, but...

There is no need for the “if” in your statement here. Below is a sample chart -- I'm sure you can find others. Even for the same family, costs are dropping rapidly, and when you combine that with computational advances, it's a very large decrease. And inference cost is almost all power cost, so...

It’s worth pointing out that this article is a year and two months old, so written on data from 18 months plus ago. His estimates are almost certainly now out by a factor of 2, as the A100/A1000 chips then used have been replaced by more efficient versions, running about half the power...

This. All the way. It's GRAVE OF THE FIREFLIES levels of sad.

So .. isn't that exactly what I do when I am a GM? I respond using words in orders that seem likely to be appropriate to the statements of my players? I'm not going to respond to "they can't think" since there is no solid definition of what thinking is. But they certainly can come up with...

One thing I'm not sure was clarified was how may sessions you have been at in the campaign., For me, it takes 3-4 sessions to get into any new moderately crunchy system, and I'd allocate at least the same time for a new GM to settle in, so I'd honestly expect the first 6-8 sessions to be rocky...

Well, you could also break it down as: Calculate situational modifiers to determine attack and defense modifiers to apply to next strep Roll to hit, incorporating modifiers Check for a critical hit and/or for fumbles Check for interrupts that may be used to affect this roll If applicable roll...

Well, in the last month it occurred in one online game at PaizoCon and in another game at Origins -- and this mirrors my experience in LG, LFR and LF campaigns. It's mostly confined to crunchy systems. I'm honestly surprised that you haven't encountered it -- maybe you don't play crunchy games...

So, I do a lot of optimization for my day job, and a couple of concepts there I think are useful in the context of this discussion. The second is CONSTRAINTS. You must have constraints to optimize within, and although those can be just the rules system, many players optimize within a...

So, I do a lot of optimization for my day job, and a couple of concepts there I think are useful in the context of this discussion. The first is GOAL. Although you could say a character optimizer's goal is to make the most effective character possible, I think that in practice I've seen a...

Wining and losing are what characters do; do not what players do. As a player, your focus is having fun and (I strongly hope) helping others have fun. A player does not win, unless they happen to be in an actual competition (like the Cthulhu Masters). But players can be happy with how their...

I grew up in the British Isles both watching the movies and reading the books. One of the reasons I strongly enjoyed Daniel Craig as Bond was that I felt he had the necessary coldness. James Bond, in the books, shows an ability to be clinically businesslike and switch from romantic mood to a...

Sites used by ChatGPT to form the above article (enworld did not make it ...): adeptplay.com amazon.com amazingstories.com anyflip.com blogofholding.com brandesstoddard.com critical-hits.com d20srd.org dandwiki.com dmdavid.com dnd4.fandom.com dndbeyond.com dmsguild.com dungeonsmaster.com...

So, to provide another version of the same question I used o3 to evaluate the following prompt: You are a professional writer creating an article for experienced roleplayers. Your task is to create an article that describes D&D 4E as a TTRPG. In your article, use headers to organize the...

Mechanical Characteristics of D&D: Class & Level Progression Six(-ish) Ability Scores Hit Points - Damage chips away at a single pool D20 - Roll 1d20 + modifiers vs. a target number AC - Armor makes you harder to hit, not mitigating damage Play Experience Characteristics: Kitchen-Sink High...

The graph shows activity over time, but was actually pretty stable for the last few months. In the past I have used Gen Con catalogs to measure popularity, weighting events by number of people that could attend (PFS and 5E events often have a lot of tables running). It's not bad for...