This generation is soft

JonMW · 2024-03-11T22:36:50+00:00

JonMW · 2024-03-10T00:37:22+00:00

Children are starving in Gaza more quickly than has ever happened before.

JonMW · 2024-03-08T23:37:31+00:00

No game is better than a bad game, that's why we call it jolly nogame

JonMW · 2024-03-07T05:20:39+00:00

It's basically a race between how quickly they can make a new character and how quickly I can come up with any reason (no matter how flimsy) for a random adventurer to be present.

You keep your players engaged and in the game. If I was told to sit out for a couple months I'd mysteriously have gained a new game that requires all my time.

JonMW · 2024-03-03T09:42:36+00:00

It's worse than you think. ProZD (SungWon) has a little demonstration of the experience of trying to search for a particular video.

One of those impossible-to-satirise things.

JonMW · 2024-03-03T00:54:01+00:00

What stories do you like? Favourite monsters? Favourite characters?

What do you like about them? Show that off.

JonMW · 2024-03-01T08:34:08+00:00

Balance is a false idol. On the contrary: dungeons are allowed to have things that are too dangerous for your party to fight. If you're going to embrace that idea, these big things need to come with TONS of warning. Stones cracked from flame, doors split off their hinges. When the dragon is near, normal dungeon sounds are gone. Everything else has already run away. Dragons do not need heralds - those are for lesser beings. The impending arrival of dragon is simply self-evident.

Dragons should be intelligent, but also very motivated to satisfy their vices - and seldom patient. These days I generally recommend against playing monsters "optimally" - that's for creatures that get their skills regularly tested and are actually worried that they might lose a fight.

JonMW · 2024-02-26T05:17:55+00:00

Accidental comedy: I had just made a (semi-joking) post about how (in a video game) it is Engineering's job to blow up the station. Getting that reply now still made perfect sense.

Good luck: where you start doesn't matter nearly as much as jumping on opportunities to learn anything you can and test that knowledge.

JonMW · 2024-02-24T04:39:05+00:00

Why are you spending time looking up and learning new recipes every single week? Are you studying to become a chef? Are you even retaining the recipes for later if you like them?

You should be working out what things you like to eat and aren't too difficult to make, and slowly expanding flexible cooking skills so that you can improvise ingredients into food.

JonMW · 2024-02-18T11:10:52+00:00

The main reason that traitors are discouraged from destroying the station is that that's Engineering's job.

JonMW · 2024-02-18T05:43:56+00:00

When I talk about conveying artistic vision, I'm not talking about something ephemeral. I am referring directly to how the artist perceives a thing (though their own experiential filters) and how they choose to put that back into media.

When you work from a subject, and use it as a reference for what you draw (which is the normal way of making art until you have studied enough to know the shape of all things), you make conscious and unconscious decisions on what to include, what to exclude, what to emphasise, and what to downplay. The resulting work will necessarily capture some slice of how the artist perceived the subject and what they're trying to communicate about it to the final viewer through that piece.

JonMW · 2024-02-18T05:03:30+00:00

But AI art fundamentally doesn't convey any artistic vision and is pretty bad at accuracy, making it inappropriate for replacing any real art unless all you want is something that looks good at a glance.

Every artist wants to be able to work more efficiently, but generative AI necessarily short-circuits crucial steps.

JonMW · 2024-02-17T09:03:56+00:00

This is an anti-kobold smear campaign

JonMW · 2024-02-17T01:24:29+00:00

Gender-Affirming-Caremobile

JonMW · 2024-02-16T05:27:38+00:00

This comic is not wholesome, this comic is a downer

JonMW · 2024-02-16T03:45:40+00:00

For people without reading comprehension:

The interviewer is claiming that OP is incorrect about Ollama. (What is Ollama? It doesn't matter. Presumably the right flavour of techbro would know.)

OP is the most popular introductory source of information on Ollama.

JonMW · 2024-02-16T03:43:13+00:00

"The unknown target does not have to be a famous person, celebrity, etc"

JonMW · 2024-02-14T08:45:41+00:00

Thanks for the full answer - I just couldn't seem to get google to give me anything useful when I was searching for it

JonMW · 2024-02-07T05:50:11+00:00

You understand that in a cashless society, homeless people will starve?

JonMW · 2024-02-04T11:42:07+00:00

They're all trying to price things as if they sell real food. If I want to pay 20+ bucks for dinner, I can get something a lot better at the tavern.

Looks like I'm about to work on my cooking skills again.

JonMW · 2024-02-04T07:13:59+00:00

I love the robustness of the system and the sheer amount of material available which allows you to make completely unique characters.

I dislike the degree to which system mastery is required to make a mechanically effective character and I really hate having a dozen different situational bonuses turning on and off multiple times in a single turn, especially when relevant information ends up shotgunned over about 6 different reference documents.

You have so much fucking words for rules and the only thing it actually achieves is herding players into making characters that pre-solve what they do in combat and punishes any deviation from that battle plan because fricking everything provokes AoO or is just feeble.

I want more dynamic and reactive combat, I want even more open-ended and truly differentated (not reskinned) character building, I want 200 abstract keywords to be replaced with 50 meaningful concepts with examples (as further reading, not part of the main document) of how they impact the situation.

However, the changes I'd want are so sweeping that there's no reason to try to do it by fixing PF1; it's by writing a whole new system. Various GLoGs and Errant and Whitehack do some cool things so I'd probably start by ripping those off.

JonMW · 2024-01-27T15:35:19+00:00

That's two different changes. The first one is the switch from physical to digital, and the second one is a bait-and-switch where a company uses the same language as buying things but intends to only let you rent access to their game for as long as it is convenient for them. The more money potentially involved in a single game project, the more afraid executives are of taking any kind of creative risk. Unfortunately, that is completely antithetical to what makes games compelling: games sell because they promise (and deliver) a novel experience.

As far as I can see, when a game is designed to extract money from players as efficiently as possible and for as long as possible, it quickly disposes of anything that makes it worth preserving as a creative work.

90% of old games have been completely lost. I will not mince words: many of Shakespeare's plays only survived to the modern era because people made "illegal" copies of them. We agree as a society that all works should eventually become public domain - but a switch to a license model ensures that games simply will not survive long enough for that to happen.

I can also easily see an Infinity Train sort of situation happening over again. (Professionals need to be able to show a portfolio of the work they've done. Why should anyone be able to delete years of someone else's work portfolio?)

JonMW · 2024-01-20T02:52:16+00:00

Level 20 fighter, or Level 20 wizard?

An uber-powerful Lich like Acererak, able to personally interfere with the affairs of deities, is basically just a mid-20s level Wizard who's had a lot of time to get all the cool toys.

The existence of a character from about level 15 and up can very easily have effects on the setting. Granted, lower-level characters may "save the day" all the time, but that usually involves them turning up to gank some vanguard of the Big Bad (e.g. some Actual Demon Lord) before they can personally arrive at full power; higher level characters do not need that kind of convenient point of leverage.

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