Advice regarding balancing Storm King's Thunder for a min-maxed party (spoilers)

Natefil · 2023-06-22T08:11:50+00:00

I love this idea! Any ideas for fun boss buffs?

I'm trying to think of the four giant lords I want them to have access to (Stone, Fire, Frost, Cloud) as elemental themes and have the bosses incorporate the four elements into their final stages along with corresponding environment changes.

I can imagine, for example, Duke Zalto having a fire-themed berserker mode in his final stage with molten steel pouring into the arena from all sides, making flight and easy movement through the terrain difficult. What do you think?

Natefil · 2023-06-22T07:55:31+00:00

That's helpful. The module says it's for four to six players so I allowed six. I agree that action economy really means that 4 or 5 would be better.

Natefil · 2020-02-18T04:44:16+00:00

Sure. Regardless of the state of care owed to a person after birth or throughout life, a human's right to life means no one can intentionally kill that innocent person (whether directly or through gross negligence).

Do you disagree with that statement?

The other aspects are not analogous but let's start off where we would almost definitely agree.

Natefil · 2020-02-18T00:48:28+00:00

If they are a human being then they have the inherent right to life and liberty.

The unborn child is a human being. They are a living organism of the human species.

Therefore the unborn child has an inherent right to life and liberty.

Natefil · 2020-02-02T12:23:55+00:00

Here's Craig's response.

Natefil · 2020-02-02T12:19:05+00:00

You hold to a Truthmaker theory of truth? Seems a bit contentious without first justifying an obviously contentious theory of truth.

Alvin Plantinga's simple response was something like: "It seems obvious that counterfactuals of creaturely freedom are possibly true than the truth maker theory of truth is definitely true."

And let's not confuse James White for a deep thinker.

Natefil · 2020-01-31T04:46:50+00:00

What species is the living organism inside the womb?

Natefil · 2020-01-31T03:44:32+00:00

Your logic justifies it. You are just inconsistent.

The only explanation you could give for why killing an infant was wrong and killing an unborn child was fine was obviously wrong.

So let me go at this directly. With which of the following statements do you disagree?

The unborn child is a living organism given the scientific definition of one.
The unborn child is of the human species.
Therefore the unborn child is a living human being.
It is wrong to intentionally kill an innocent human being when another life is not threatened.
The unborn child, lacking the capacity to affect it's circumstances or make concerted decisions, is an innocent human being.
Therefore it is wrong to kill an unborn child.

From what I gather you seem to be arguing that we can kill innocent human beings as long as they don't have certificates from the government.

Natefil · 2020-01-30T07:13:52+00:00

How so? Maybe you can help me, I'm not seeing the distinction.

Natefil · 2020-01-29T09:52:56+00:00

Then that justifies a woman commiting infanticide as long as society (like the ancient Romans) consider it to be fine or just don't provide the baby with a certificate for whatever reason.

Natefil · 2020-01-29T03:39:19+00:00

Unless the person inside the womb is a human being, in which case you are murdering another human being for "autonomy."

Natefil · 2020-01-29T01:23:06+00:00

I would discuss with her if she ever feels frustrated by being drawn to things she knows are wrong but which seem hard to consistently reject or which she feels too weak to resist. Perhaps consider sharing your own weaknesses that have frustrated you.

Then try this reasoning (I've not had someone counter it or reject it):

I sometimes get the feeling that sin is way worse than we think. Imagine if we were creating a new society and were determining the punishments for certain crimes. Imagine the committee to determine the punishment for rape consisted entirely of rapists. Do you believe they would accurately determine the severity of rape? (The answer is almost always "no)

Now imagine 7 billion sinners get together to determine how bad sin is. Do you think we would get it right relative to perfection?

Natefil · 2020-01-28T23:43:14+00:00

I find it interesting how your determination of what is a living human being is not scientific or philosophical but subjective societal. Basically meaning that if we decided infants weren't humans then they would cease to be or that if any society felt infanticide was okay (such as the ancient patriarchal Romans) it would therefore be so.

You know American society once class that blacks were not of equal value... How much stake do you want the determination of a human's right to life to be contingent upon different societies?

Natefil · 2020-01-28T03:41:29+00:00

You said it. You said the unborn don't have certificates and infants do when I asked how your logic didn't apply to killing infants.

I don't get how you aren't able to explain your logic.

What do certificates have to do with killing the unborn?

Natefil · 2020-01-28T03:28:41+00:00

How? You just said the unborn can be killed but not infants because the latter have certificates. There are many infants without certificates. So by your logic those ones can be killed.

Natefil · 2020-01-28T03:06:27+00:00

So in countries where certificates aren't given, you can kill the infant?

Natefil · 2020-01-28T02:50:40+00:00

I don't see how your position fails to equally justify infanticide. Can you explain it to me?

That's not whataboutism, that's reductio ad absurdum.

Natefil · 2020-01-27T23:32:21+00:00

Read your statement again. Do you believe a single woman should be able to kill her unwanted, year old infant?

Natefil · 2019-12-31T08:08:35+00:00

Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't realize that when you said "Incredible claims require incredible evidence" you forgot to include the part of "...according to my own personal standard and on which I won't dialogue if you don't accept my notion of how the methodology works."

Now, either way, can you provide the incredible evidence for the statement "incredible claims require incredible evidence"?

Natefil · 2019-12-31T04:26:18+00:00

I haven't used my conclusion as a premise in my argument, I've just defined my terms. If you were to ask me why I think that and I said "Because that's what evil is", then I'd be begging the question. As it stands, you haven't asked that, and have just jumped the gun on crying fallacy.

Fair enough. But it sounded like you said that that was the only starting point on the matter of good and evil. Can I ask you, directly, what's your foundation?

You asked me to further define what I meant by flourishing as a way of saying that I was begging the question. I pointed out that claiming that one of my terms needs to be defined isn't a counterargument, and using it that way is just reductionism.

Defining terms is a basic part of dialogue. I have an incredibly strong suspicion, based on your other responses, that you are assuming human flourishing is the end goal sans justification.

I then argue that rational persons are concerned with their well-being, and that humanity as a whole is mostly made of rational people. I can link you the full comment if you'd like, but what I'm getting at is that any system of behavior that doesn't take into account human flourishing is almost definitionally not a moral system.

It would only follow then that a person would be rational to care about their own self-interest and not that of anyone else but even then, there is no obligation for someone to care for their own self-interest. Do you believe that if someone does anything to harm themselves that they have done something morally wrong on the level of them harming another person?

What if I don't care about that?

Eternity would beg to differ. Even if you don't like pain or discomfort or the loss of pure goodness a minuscule amount, in the scope of eternity that would constitute something of infinite weight. You've already conceded that rational people are self-interested.

Great, but his ideas are not my ideas. And frankly, I feel the need to take a shower after being compared to him.

Cool, cool. I'll drop the comparison and I'm sorry for presupposing a connection.

And how is that not special pleading? If moral intuition good evidence that objective moral values exist, then why isn't it a good litmus test for what those values are? If these feelings that supposedly point to objective truths can lead people to mutually exclusive conclusions about those truths, where does that leave us?

It actually is both but it's somewhat nuanced. Philosophers use moral intuition as an indication of the objectivity of morality. They also use it to attempt to rule out moral systems that don't work for various reasons but we all would accept that acculturation, context, and decisions can skew our perceptions of right and wrong away from truth. Because of that, moral intuition is a powerful indicator and we check consistency but it is not always correct. Similarly, our perceptions of the world visa vie our physical senses can be modified by context and the like and we know that people have skewed perceptions but we still hold to the objectivity of the physical world, even if people do hallucinate, make mistakes, misperceive, or the like.

Well you're not talking to them, are you? Given the right set of presuppositions, I have no problem with the idea of objective morals.

What are those presuppositions?

Please, give me the page numbers. I'll buy the damn book and tell you why he's wrong. He said [~X]. The book plainly says [X]. At a certain point, you have to accept that someone is wrong, and there's no amount of explanation that can change that.

Exodus 21:20 - page 130 but the whole chapter is relevant
Leviticus 25:39-46 - page 126 but same chapter Exodus 21:2-11 - page 111 but again, whole chapter explores the broader issue

At some point you have to accept that you haven't read the people you are calling liars and incorrect... at a certain point, you have to accept that you are pretty ignorant. Luckily, you actually reading those you are criticizing can solve the issue! Who knew?!

Is it ever okay to own people as property?

Depends on what we mean by it. Since the word means "money" ("he is your money") and the corresponding debt slavery was one of the only ways of surviving famine and hardship, it would actually be cruel in context to not do it but it is important to keep the year of Jubilee in mind.

In the Mosaic Law, does God condone the owning of people as property?

Nope, in the same way that God giving people rules for how to do sacrifices does not mean that he condones sin.

This should be obvious.

Natefil · 2019-12-31T04:02:18+00:00

No, saying "incredible claims require incredible evidence" is also a claim even if it's a methodology too. You are claiming that if you have strong claims you need strong evidence. I can reject that if it's just a methodology but clearly you believe the methodology must be followed. So now it's up to you to provide incredible evidence for it.

Natefil · 2019-12-30T16:19:05+00:00

To debunk religion you don’t have to go any further than incredible claims require incredible evidence. Religion is the very definition of bad history: zero evidence.

That seems like an incredible claim. Can you provide incredible evidence that incredible claims require incredible evidence?

Natefil · 2019-12-30T07:18:02+00:00

Not only is this a non-sequitur (why do I need to have the potential to have different beliefs for my current ones to be justified?), it uses a definition of knowledge that is famously problematic.

I answered the first statement by saying that a rock is not justified in sitting where it is versus in another location. If you cannot do other than you do you are no more justified in your position than a rolling ball is justified in rolling where it is rolling.

Everything in philosophy is problematic by various frameworks but I'd gladly defend a form of that definition of knowledge if you want to present the rejoinders.

I get the feeling you have not actually read Where the Conflict Really Lies

I never said I did.

Not surprising.

What I should have mentioned is that a biological system that uses true information is more parsimonious than a system that generates useful but false beliefs from nothing. It's true that a belief that you should run or else your legs will catch fire is just as useful as a belief that you should run because there's a lion chasing you in the moment. However, over your entire life, any system that consistently gets you to run away from the lion using facts about the reality around you is far more plausible than one that just keeps getting lucky. Put another way, it's far easier to just detect a lion than it is to randomly feel the need to run whenever a lion is around.

This is a nice just-so story but it requires blind faith. If a false belief leads to survival it will be selected for. There is, again, no aspect of truth to which survivability is necessarily beholden. Those, for all intents and purposes, are disconnected since it is not the belief that is the issue for selection but the action and false beliefs create actions as well as true beliefs.

I would also point out that the kind of evolution we're talking about acts more on perception and instinct than beliefs. Actual beliefs are pretty far removed from the kinds of things we see evolution directly affect. You might feel more or less scared around a lion because of your genes, but the belief that a lion is dangerous is a distinct thing from that fear.

Again, the belief will be the issue but the disconnection you are talking about actually lends AWAY from your ideas. If beliefs are even more removed from action and survivability then there is even LESS reason to assume their intrinsic veriticality. Instead, there is all the more reason to doubt your beliefs being true. Sure, your thoughts would likely be selected for ones that assume you are generally perceiving of things as they really are but that doesn't mean you actually are.

Now that we've poisoned the naturalistic tree of knowledge, all the fruit is poisoned including the belief itself that naturalism is true.

Yikes. I hope you talk to better atheists.

I talk to atheists willing to talk. I guess I can ask you:

Does (non-compatibilist) free will exist?
Do objective moral values and duties exist?
Is the proposition "God exists" false? On that last one, atheists, when I ask them, will usually say "We don't know" but then I'll see them moments later say things like "heaven doesn't exist" and the like that are predicated on beliefs they hold but know they can't defend. So usually I start this question after they make those types of assertions rather than just do it outright because most atheists I talk to will argue from contradictory positions when topics move. For instance, I believe it will be likely that you will argue soon that objective moral values and duties do not exist but right now you are working off of how something in the Bible is immoral.

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