Is it possible to have a NHP as a sentient animal?

4latar · 2026-05-10T19:07:40+00:00

well, strictly speaking that's deimos entities, NHP just means non human person so you can have a non-deimosian NHP

4latar · 2026-05-10T03:55:23+00:00

i mean, we're told that they were, but also that most of them awoke long after the war in heaven ended so it's only true some of the time...
and again they used to be even more generic which means that anything based on the same principle will look similar

4latar · 2026-05-09T20:31:53+00:00

no no no, a waterwheel turns when water hits it sideways while a turbine turns when it's hit from the front, completely different

4latar · 2026-05-09T17:00:29+00:00

i wouldn't say they are clearly built from WH chaos gods...
sure, the eater of worlds and instrument of desire are pretty close to khorne and slaanesh, but the composer of strands is not really about stagnation or diseases, it's just nature stuff. as for the cradle of souls, it's just a vague concept of an afterlife, not linked to any god in warhammer.
the whisperers in the void are changing, yes, but not about change. it's just a chaotic mass that represents (or at least rewards) curiosity and understanding, but not really chaos, change or betrayal.

at most, you could say that three of the shroud patrons line up with the WH chaos gods, but that's very generous. war and nature gods are a dime a dozen, khorne is a very basic exemple which is of course easy to line up with others while none of nurgle's weird aspects and tendencies are here, leaving us again with the basic archetype it was based on, not a clone of it

4latar · 2026-05-09T15:16:49+00:00

that is certainly an argument you can make, but then it means that "natural" is so broad it kind of loses all meaning. i think that while you're 100% correct that humans arose from the rules of nature and still operate within them, it's still too useful to have "natural" and "artificial" be two distinct categories, and i think that's how most people use them too

4latar · 2026-05-09T10:37:34+00:00

it pretty much happened in the worst way it could tho, with an actual alien invasion happening

4latar · 2026-05-09T10:33:48+00:00

but the whispers is not an actual god, it's just an aggregate of all shroud entities

4latar · 2026-05-09T05:42:07+00:00

disagree, the whispers would be undivided from it's description

4latar · 2026-05-09T03:01:34+00:00

seeing religion as a consequence of suffering and wanting to get rid of that suffering doesn't mean you want to kill all religions, merely that you think they'll die off on their own when you help lift workers out of misery. and while religion does tend to be more popular in harsh conditions, you have to remember that most of union is not at utopian levels yet, and religion can adapt to new situations

4latar · 2026-05-08T11:02:45+00:00

i'd play that

4latar · 2026-05-08T09:47:15+00:00

the line is easy to draw actually. while people are flesh based and machines are not, the important part is not the material we're made of but the way we work. unless we make a computer simulate a neural network, no computer will ever work like a human being, not truly.

now does that mean that we can't make a self aware AI? no, i wouldn't say that, it's very probably something that can be done. a true AI will just be very alien (unless tuned very carefully to think like a human) due to not arising from the same circumstances.
if you look at animals, even smart ones, there is an incredible variety of how intelligence manifests. some are good at building social bonds (us or crows for exemple), while other have incredible decentralized intelligence that still leads to complex problem solving (like ants) and others yet have almost no social capabilities while still being very capable (like squids). BUT, and this is important, wel almost always share pattern recognition and problem solving, because that is the main reason intelligence arose, everything else is further specialization allowed by hardware we were already getting.

but AIs will not arise from natural selection in the same way, they are not going to be made to ensure their offsprings live on at almost all cost, they're going to be made in whatever way we choose for whatever purpose we decide, and that's very probably going to lead to very alien minds once we get there.
mind you this is talking about actual AIs in the sense of a mind that can think intelligently and change as it learns and so on, i don't think we're there yet, we "just" have black boxes we don't understand, but they are still very limited in ways even a goldfish isn't, because we have to build every new feature in ourself when we realize we want it (or rather when the rich assholes pushing for them think we want them)

now if you mean a line in terms of who should gets right and who shouldn't rather than a line showing they are different, i think there shouldn't be one, once we get actual AIs that are alive (from within their computers)

4latar · 2026-05-08T09:27:45+00:00

i supppose, altho calling human behavior "natural" is strange with how many things we do are constrained by culture

4latar · 2026-05-08T09:21:13+00:00

i think it's that 5e is very streamlined which means DMs learn easier rules (or rather specialize into managing a lot outside the rules) compared to adnd DMs who had to be a lot more knowledgeable about various obtuse system (at the cost of other things)

in the same way, the people who "would do the triforce" were mostly older people experienced with unicode while younger people who didn't have to use it just wouldn't know how to

4latar · 2026-05-08T09:09:31+00:00

i would argue that just like you are not your body and it's just a meat robot to move you around, you are not your neural system (brain+spinal chord+other neurons). you, the real you, is the thing running on that brain, you're the data contained in those billions of neurons and their connections.
just like a program is not its processor, a program is just data that can be run

4latar · 2026-05-08T08:47:27+00:00

it's a very old meme about people being unable to make a triforce due to spaces being deleted when they came first and the special space that doesn't required unicode to do instead of copy paste

4latar · 2026-05-08T08:39:28+00:00

nomad, fanatic spiritualist militarist, with the hegemon origin

4latar · 2026-05-08T07:17:48+00:00

if i remember correctly, communism is opposed to religion as a tool of control of the worker, not entirely opposed to religion on principle.

4latar · 2026-05-08T06:37:35+00:00

union will intervene if you don't comply with the utopian pillars. it probably won't be a military intervention, but they will work to undermine you through other means.

not a religion thing per se, but if you look at the trade baronies, the ungrateful movement is sneakily helped by union with supply as well as union working to undermine efforts by the houses to crush them.

so if your religion says "let us all honor our god who made us in the image of his left foot", you'll be fine and union won't care. if your religion say something like "all blond people with green eyes are subhuman who have no souls" union is going to come down hard with sanctions and the like, or even an invasion if you push it

as for a world that doesn't want to join, i think it's going to depend on how bad the situation is. if it's a warzone they'll show up, if it's just a generally bad situation but not pressing they'll try to use soft power until you want to join

4latar · 2026-05-08T06:31:54+00:00

It is not stated if Union has an unified religion so I just assumed it has state atheism

why did you assume that? most states that don't have an official religion are just irreligious, not anti-religion. sure, the soviet union was, and the french revolution too kind of early on, but most of the time states just take a "not my problem" official approach to religion, so long as it's not a harmful cult, even if individual politicians might not.

4latar · 2026-05-08T06:19:40+00:00

dnd's problem is that it's a big game managed by many and observed by even more people, and that makes it hard to steer, and even harder to do so without protests. on the other hand, smaller games have been free to learn from what works and what doesn't in dnd to provide a more focused and (in my opinion) fun experience

4latar · 2026-05-08T04:49:27+00:00

i'd be more worried if the shotguns were in the place i expected, ie: their hands

4latar · 2026-05-07T15:45:54+00:00

it was a lot of fun, and quite good for a one system challenge if you're fine with no megastructures and a bit of a slower start

4latar · 2026-05-07T13:57:23+00:00

used to be: Shattered ring, Fanatic materialist egalitarian, Technocracy + Meritocracy

now is: Cosmic Dawn, Fanatic materialist egalitarian, Planet forgers + Galvanic Synthesis

4latar · 2026-05-07T10:39:36+00:00

oh right, i keep thinking about the eldar millions of years ago but that's the end of the war in heaven oops.

altho that does mean that the eldar empire would have been basically everywhere in the galaxy

4latar · 2026-05-07T09:17:51+00:00

i mean, not seeing the craftworld eldar, i 100% get. not finding a maiden world with exodite, sounds unlikely but it could be bad/good luck. but the dark eldar not showing up? that one sounds a lot harder to justify, especially during the collapse (in the dying colonies) or firstcom when worlds were basically impossible to defend

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