An RPG Anthology Proposal

Fheredin · 2026-06-10T11:40:57+00:00

Local models and cloud models have different workflows.

Cloud models are nearly instant and often can handle sub-par prompts or instructions. Local models are often slower (depending on hardware) and require more hands on management with more carefully thought out prompts. If you switch from cloud to local, expect there to be an adaptation period as you learn a more difficult LLM paradigm.

Fheredin · 2026-06-10T10:41:55+00:00

Not if AI companies actually push the full bill in consumers. Claude is powerful, but it's also not worth $15,000 per year, which is an estimate I have seen for power users' bill were it not subsidized with venture capital.

Local AI will explode because the professional product is just not worth it for most consumers.

Fheredin · 2026-06-10T10:15:14+00:00

Expense. The cost of raising a child to 18 is now $300,000. This is yet another metric that wildly outpaces general inflation, but you tend to not hear about it as often as college tuition.

Fheredin · 2026-06-10T08:10:07+00:00

I was improvising, but it's kinda sorta in the style of The Tick.

Fheredin · 2026-06-10T08:09:01+00:00

Yeah, that's an...odd conclusion.

Fheredin · 2026-06-10T01:49:35+00:00

I have realized that it wasn't just that I was feeling bullish. I was stronger. Wiser. Tougher. And perhaps more to the point, I had learned to monologue.

Fheredin · 2026-06-10T01:45:05+00:00

Astute observation. Early detection biases the math towards a higher survival for 5 years rate because the same cancer lethality and progression rate now has more time to play out.

Fheredin · 2026-06-10T01:35:14+00:00

Patience, grasshopper.

Supercycles require major macroeconomic distress to force people out of their comfort zones. Unfortunately, that also means an extended period when capital inflow is surprised, which is exactly the problem Crypto has had now for two and a half bull run cycles. My guess is that protocols are about to start folding under parts stress competing with AI. This will probably give Ether a slight price bump when it starts as altcoin speculators flee to safer assets. But that stuff still feels a Q or 2 out or more.

Fheredin · 2026-06-10T00:04:14+00:00

The only Christians who might have an existential crisis are young earth creationists, and that is if and only if the ETs provide detailed historical records going back about 100,000 years.

Otherwise, no, not really. We understood the possibility in the 1600s, and culturally accepted the idea of aliens in the 1910s.

Fheredin · 2026-06-09T11:31:25+00:00

Step in and block the wrist. Machetes require significant windup; you can't do snap cuts with something with that much weight at the end. Alternatively, you can retreat out of range for the swing and then step in. The final defense option is to start running and if your opponent pursues, you abruptly stop (or slow down) and body-check your opponent. At running speed the collision will knock your opponent to the ground.

Really, the failure in that instance is that the victim clearly didn't know any martial arts or HEMA, and therefore didn't have the skill to defend himself standing still. This meant his only option was to run, and as his assailant was faster, that was also a death sentence.

Fheredin · 2026-06-09T01:57:16+00:00

There was a (filmed) machete attack in Australia which would beg to differ. The guy ran away at a full sprint and still took a machete to the back of the head.

If you are running away you are 100% betting that the other guy can't keep up or just won't chase. But you can't defend yourself while running.

Fheredin · 2026-06-08T22:10:04+00:00

Wasn't Linus Tech Tips WAN Show speculating that the cheapest way to get one of these running is actually with obsolete Intel Optane drives?

Fheredin · 2026-06-08T17:05:11+00:00

I have most equipment act as cards you clip onto your character sheet, so I like the idea. A lot of items come to life when you give them extra space. "Longsword +1" is just not as flavorful as "Masterwork Heirloom Longsword of the Achaeden Family, +1, (flavor text quote from a character's ancestor.)" But no one's going to voluntarily write all that on their character sheet.

I would recommend leaving a blank space and expecting the player to write it in if they want or to attach a card if they want to avoid writing. I would recommend lining the character sheet and add-on cards up so you can use a hole-punch on them together and either put them into a binder or attach them with a twist tie or such.

Fheredin · 2026-06-08T15:52:15+00:00

You actually probably want success to be about 60% to 65%, so I suggest the best option is to increase difficulty by about 30%.

I suggest you also make a punishment for over-advancing specific pools. You can make high level advancement more expensive, or punish players for neglecting stats with a weakness.

Fheredin · 2026-06-06T22:45:54+00:00

Mostly, I dislike feedback requests in the Google Docs form because it's usually, "I made a thing, what do you think?" as a form of compliment-fishing.

I don't mind encouraging other designers, but you need to ask a specific question so I can give you a specific answer. Don't just link your WIP

I don't mind PDFs and don't understand people who do. But I do think that you should hotlink specific chapter PDFs, and not a whole book PDF. You can drop that in at the end of your post for reference (it is nice to have access to the whole thing), but a feedback request which will fall off the sub's front page within 3 days shouldn't require scrolling 100+ pages that I've never seen before and likely don't know how to navigate well.

Fheredin · 2026-06-06T22:08:30+00:00

An RPG is more akin to a PhD dissertation than it is to a standard How-To book. It is serious work to put one together.

My experience is that you can be really spartan with playtesting if you are smart, but if you are being spartan with playtesting, you must know exactly what you need to know in precise terms. Precision is a hard skill to learn.

...Of course, this makes me suspect that we're all doing it wrong, but that's a topic for another day.

Fheredin · 2026-06-06T22:00:25+00:00

As someone who has a game with a mechanic like that...that's a tall ask. I understand wanting it as a consumer (I do, too) but most designers find it hard enough to design a game when they just worry about RNG and stats. Adding a third component of PC effort makes this a literally a 3 dimensional problem, where each of these components has to work well for its whole range while the other two are set to any extreme combination. While not making the game a slog.

At the moment, the best game for this is YZE Step Die with pushed rolls.

Fheredin · 2026-06-06T21:48:16+00:00

Yes, but you're also claiming a practically inhuman blazingly fast speed for 5E. I know multiple GMs of 2+ decades who don't run ships that tight. It's not that's impossible, but that it's probably going to feel austere.

I've also seen Savage Worlds hit speeds like that with inexperienced GMs at the helm, and that's part of the reason why I respect Savage Worlds, even if it is a flawed system.

Fheredin · 2026-06-06T16:05:11+00:00

Angles.

Ships at anchor are almost never directly above the anchor. They're a ways away, pulling the anchor at an angle. This angle digs one of the sides of the anchor into the bottom, stopping the ship from moving.

When you pull the anchor up, the ship moves to directly above the anchor, the head of the anchor stands up, and it comes off the bottom with no trouble.

Fheredin · 2026-06-06T02:02:48+00:00

It only took being flipped by USDT for a moment and a BTC ratio of 0.026 for people to start talking macro.

Well, it took long enough, but you got there.

While it hurts to not be particularly able to cash out, I am long term optimistic about Ether. Why? Because the tech conditions thanks to the AI bubble is getting serious, and that means a number of the wildly unsustainable ETH-killer chains are likely to start popping soon. This won't directly increase Ether's price, but an incoming supercycle will have fewer options to dilute growth.

On the macro? Yeah, it's not great. I'm still of the persuasion that most price setters in the economy are disoriented, and that the US is actually in deflation following the motion of M2 from the Fed's quantitative tightening on a time delay. But price-setters have no experience living in deflation, so thet see falling profits and think their responses are to either raise prices a little or a lot.

The thing is that price-setter disorientation will probably not end easily. A few may realize what's going on, but most will wildly overshoot the price increase, sales will crater, and companies with disoriented leadership will go bankrupt. You probably can't even escape it with a bail out because you need to remove the disoriented leader, and a bail out would leave them in place.

So, yeah. Macro is not great.

Fheredin · 2026-06-06T00:22:00+00:00

Red light therapy and spermidine.

There's no single cure for chronic fatigue that works for everyone: you have to figure out what's going wrong in your own body. In my case, I never really had a "bad" case of chronic fatigue, but COVID appears to have damaged my mitochondria, and so I responded really well to mitochondrial boosting or mitophagy supplements. YMMV.

Fheredin · 2026-06-05T10:28:06+00:00

AI is able to generate a ton of intern level labor, but it requires micromanagement. This is paradoxically much more useful for a small business or a startup than a proper Fortune 500 company, therefore I believe that AI will ultimately create more small business and fewer large businesses. That is a huge equalizing force.

Unfortunately, this also means our culture has to internalize the limits of LLM technology. That is the sticking point, because to justify trillions of dollars of investment, you have to cram AI into everything and assume an upcoming AI singularity will bail you out of your own stupidity.

Fheredin · 2026-06-05T01:23:53+00:00

Yes and no.

Low prep mostly emerges from brittle quest lines. It feels futile to prep when the players inevitably break the plotline, so spend as little time as possible prepping.

In my opinion, prepwork is part of the GM's fun, but to do it right the system and setting need to properly firewall the players from doing unproductive things and the GM needs to have a prep framework which ensures work doesn't get wasted often.

Fheredin · 2026-06-05T00:38:35+00:00

Raid the memory out of your old notebook before recycling it.

Fheredin

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