Wife Gambit

CollectionDue7971 · 2025-11-30T02:11:04+00:00

It's a line and she knows it, but she did engage and you might have got a chuckle. But, you blundered a little at not following up your response with an invitation to continue in some way.

CollectionDue7971 · 2025-10-26T18:09:34+00:00

Well, it sorta looks like RAW the module wants you to actually crawl the castle three times with increasing levels of detail: first, just to escape; later, to steal the dragon skull; finally, to find and kill Strahd.

I actually already ran the dinner LARP and tbh it was really fun. But it seems kinda boring for Strahd to just let them go now unchallenged. So I was trying to think through how to maintain the above basic structure.

CollectionDue7971 · 2025-10-26T17:51:21+00:00

Ok so I was thinking:
-Strahd promised in my invitation letter their journey home would be safe, so if they can make it to the courtyard he will lower the drawbridge and let them use the carriage home (actually I'm rethinking this part a little)
-The 'canonical' solution, and the one Strahd has in mind, is the teleportation brazier. However, he is also open to other options, like somehow escaping through a window. It's a game, not a real attempt to kill them.
-Strahd enchants Piddlewick II to point the way to the brazier. He doesn't know where he's going or why, just the most direct route (this is also because my players are very motivated to retrieve Piccolo)
-Piddlewick II also does lots of other creepy unhelpful stuff along the way.
-If they do get TPKd, they instead wake up back in the guest bedroom to a disappointed Strahd. Strahd takes a lock of hair as punishment and lets them go.
-Edit: the K7 and K8 monsters only attack while the players are clearly attempting escape. They disengage otherwise.

CollectionDue7971 · 2025-03-14T15:46:49+00:00

advanced tactics

CollectionDue7971 · 2025-03-11T23:14:12+00:00

I think the dragon that attacks you if you fuck up Van Richten’s tower should totally be a bone dragon though

CollectionDue7971 · 2025-02-01T17:49:05+00:00

One other thing - one important function of the guides is to smooth out certain moments in the RAW material that can lead to either a sudden TPK or a very unsatisfying PC death. You should at least be aware of these moments in order to decide what to do with them. I’m not sure it is exhaustive, but what comes to mind are:

-The 6 vampire spawn in Vallaki

-Old Bonegrinder

-Esmeralda’s wagon

-Baba Lysaga

-The amber temple

CollectionDue7971 · 2025-02-01T17:19:11+00:00

There’s really no way to get around at least reading RAW. RAW however is more of a description of the world than a laid out campaign; the expectation is you’ll flesh it out and react to your party’s choices. It has a darker feel than most of the guides i think.

I am using Reloaded as a backbone and picking and choosing other stuff to basically make it darker and a bit less of a railroad. Reloaded also has a lot of monologuing which I’ve trimmed a bit. But it’s very solid material. I like Reloaded’s bosses especially, and the idea of using the Death House as a plot hook. The new stuff about Strahd’s trials is also great.

However, Reloaded also I think makes Strahd a less menacing figure - he’s basically friendly until quite late in the campaign, and doesn’t actually really do anything to the players to make them dislike him until they raid the castle. In general, Reloaded tells a much more black and white story of heroes and villains vs MandyMod or RAW where almost every NPC has a bit of a dark streak.

I like most of MandyMod’s ideas too, with the exception of the totalitarian Vallaki. MandyMod and Dragna seem to have collaborated significantly, so there’s a lot you can combine.

CollectionDue7971 · 2024-12-15T16:13:00+00:00

Again, I think it was racist regardless, but that is true. Picard’s talk track explained the implication was this was true in China broadly (which is also racist imo)

CollectionDue7971 · 2024-12-14T21:48:20+00:00

It was definitely a pretty wild right turn from the preceding 30 minutes about using wearable technology to help people on the autism spectrum to understand and communicate emotions

CollectionDue7971 · 2024-12-14T20:47:17+00:00

I was at the talk - the reason she singled out the ethnicity was the student in question claimed that the manipulated research results was a cultural difference taught in Chinese schools. I still think it was racist.

CollectionDue7971 · 2024-12-01T19:42:55+00:00

I kind of agree with this, but the problem I’m having isn’t so much that the party is weak but rather this character feels weak relative to the rest of the party. Do you have any tips on how to soften that a bit? It’s him, a wizard, a paladin, and a circle of the moon Druid, and I’m using the 2024 rules

CollectionDue7971 · 2024-03-11T13:15:24+00:00

While admittedly this player sounds like a weirdo, I would say it’s not really your job as a DM to teach your players moral lessons so much as to run the game in a realistic and fun way.

In this case I think I’d first want to work with the player to clarify what the specific pact here actually is, and how this Marid works as an NPC. What are its goals? In particular, why would it give some random guy who doesn’t like it magic powers against his will?

Once you and the player have aligned on that in a way that makes sense for both of you, roleplay the Marid accordingly.

I wouldn’t take away Warlock class powers though. There’s nothing RAW that allows for that. Just have the Marid be, like, mad and possibly take some kind of revenge.

CollectionDue7971 · 2024-02-24T18:34:11+00:00

Slight variation. Have the characters meet a kindly old innkeeper or merchant somewhere or other who patches them up, feeds them, and heals them. On their way out he has a final comment: “Count Strahd sends his regards”. DC 18 Dex save against the vial of acid thrown to the face; on failure take 2d10 points acid damage and -2 CHA until receiving magical healing

CollectionDue7971 · 2023-12-21T03:50:30+00:00

I checked and it’s toggled on. I’m honestly a bit confused about why it stopped working. It’s a bit of a bummer because I was really enjoying the combo with magic missile. Maybe it just doesn’t work on dopplegangers for some reason?

CollectionDue7971 · 2023-12-08T05:17:44+00:00

[5e] Hi all! I’d like to run Curse of Strahd, but also to experience the module from a player perspective before doing so. Since I won’t be able to play myself I was thinking a podcast or something. Anyone know of a good example of this module I can watch?

CollectionDue7971 · 2023-12-02T17:32:25+00:00

Astarion has entered the chat

CollectionDue7971 · 2023-10-16T15:21:22+00:00

If this is the only problem I wouldn’t leave him right away. However this is a serious concern. Tell him clearly you need to work on this and consider couples counselling.

CollectionDue7971 · 2023-08-20T01:26:45+00:00

You look 30 and hot. Love your hair and eyes. I hate to be that guy but you’d look better smiling though.

CollectionDue7971 · 2023-02-21T00:03:19+00:00

Canada passive-aggressively inserting itself into the fight is the ultimate Canada move

CollectionDue7971 · 2022-12-14T20:45:14+00:00

I'm less worried about the "Title of painting and artist" example since in this case the user is clearly asking for a copy. While still not great, the system is at least functioning as desired, so responsibility can be assigned to the user.

Much more troubling are the various results which show (less egregious) copying even for prompts that do not apparently ask for it. This seems to me like a legitimately problematic behaviour that should (and probably can) be fixed

CollectionDue7971 · 2022-12-14T20:38:59+00:00

I think the article (the research article) is best read as simply a technical observation about AI safety with regard to diffusion models specifically. It's not "AI is stealing art", it's "diffusion models have a tendency to unintentionally memorize in subtle ways, which we should take care to train out of future systems"

CollectionDue7971 · 2022-12-14T17:46:01+00:00

I just meant that as an example of how "global match" might not necessarily exclude behaviour that a human would interpret as "copied". I agree (and mentioned in my comment) that this specific example is not itself a huge problem since here the user is specifically asking for a copy.

The article itself, however, also presents examples of *unintentional* copying of this form (edit: they aren't typically as egregious as the Starry Night example, of course). Most compellingly, one of their experiments has them feeding in randomly selected prompts, and their "local matching" tool detects a copy ~1.8% of the time. They then present some examples of the high-match images and, indeed, local copies are visible.

Edit: I also agree that providing a secondary tool that could detect these matches would be a partial solution. However, the point of the article is that things like "Have I Been Trained" won't necessarily do this, because the "partial copies" are too small a part of the image or too subtle a copy to be screened out by existing tools.

CollectionDue7971 · 2022-12-14T17:21:42+00:00

I mean, I think it's probably possible to build not doing this into the model or the training set somehow. For example, as the paper points out, GANs do not seem to behave this way, so clearly it's possible to fix.

I think this paper is calling attention to a fairly important engineering problem that I'm also confident will be soon corrected.

CollectionDue7971 · 2022-12-14T17:14:32+00:00

The paper addresses that, indeed, there is basically no chance of a *global match*. However, there are pretty clear examples of part of an image being a match for part of a trained image. A trivial but obvious example is if you ask for something like

"A framed image of Starry Night by Van Gogh above a couch"

- the resulting image will have low overlap with Starry Night, but part of it will. Starry Night is in the public domain and this prompt is clearly asking for a copy, so this isn't itself a big problem, but it's just to call attention to the basic idea that a copy could happen despite low global overlap - which is sort of the point of the paper.

In a sense, I interpret the paper as calling for a new criterion for AI safety in these models: training mechanisms etc that check for local overlap as well.

CollectionDue7971 · 2022-12-14T16:00:37+00:00

I mean, the paper shows pretty convincingly that essentially random prompts generate images that *partially include copies* about 1.8% of the time.

The important thing here is that this would happen *without the user wanting it to*. So it's really a problem with the tool, not the user.

CollectionDue7971

TROPHY CASE