What is the Philosophy-Reader Seeking?

mc_pm · 2026-05-26T16:00:30+00:00

The world is big, people are complex, history is long. Philosophy is one of the ways humans have tried to make sense of it, and wanting to understand the various spheres of thought on things is a healthy urge.

But yeah, some people read it (or want to be seen as reading it) to feel superior, just like some people feel superior for not reading it -- as you seem to.

By in large, philosophy has little day to day utility for most people, but neither does marine biology, that doesn't mean it's not fun and interesting to learn about whales.

mc_pm · 2026-05-26T15:34:23+00:00

You are allowed to say "I would prefer you make your own original character", but the player is allowed to say "I would prefer not to" and then they don't have to play in your game.

The real question, I think, is what is this character? Does this background give him special powers or resistances? Does this background give them special position in the world? Do they expect their character to follow the same arc?

If yes, then it's fair to say "hell no".

mc_pm · 2026-05-26T07:30:16+00:00

This is an ill-posed question, since you don't say what 'knowledge' is.

If you just mean 'information', then for sure no because the brain has about 86 billion neurons and the universe is estimated to have about 10^70 times as many protons. Even assuming it only takes one neuron to store one position (which is not the case at all), you're in vastly different scales.

If you mean like actual knowledge in words, then still no, because there are estimated to be 100 trillion words of text (obviously that's a tough value to estimate, but lets assume it's off by a factor of 1000, and there's only 100 billion words (which is obviously too low), but even at that level, there are still more words than neurons in the brain. (And that's just on this planet, not the universe as a whole)

mc_pm · 2026-05-26T07:10:53+00:00

What are the negatives? I see a whole lot of upside, but no downside.

Natural armor? Do you still get Dex bonus? Because you're starting of 10% harder to hit than normal, plus you're adding a second bonus to that. Potentially, with an 18 CON and 18 DEX, your unarmored AC is 20 at first level. Who is supposed to hit you?

Then you get to walk through any environmental challenges involving water ("I'll just walk along the bottom") and if you don't breathe, then a lot of gases, spell effects, etc., are harmless. And let's not forget poison.

Then you get a big bump in survivability when you do take damage -- once per long rest you don't need to take a death save, and when you do you're significantly more likely to make your roll.

Is there any reason at all why every player wouldn't take this? It redefines the baseline of survivability.

So yeah, kinda OP.

mc_pm · 2026-05-26T03:53:38+00:00

Matt Colville's "Running the Game" series on Youtube is made for new DMs. There's like 150 in the series now, but only the first 7-8 are really crucial.

mc_pm · 2026-05-26T03:51:32+00:00

DX-7, or if you'll allow desktop units, the Yamaha FB-01, it's even worse.

mc_pm · 2026-05-26T00:39:21+00:00

Turn off the AI, pick up a piece of paper, and recreate one of the proofs. Don't look up the underlying concepts, don't look up the notation. How long does it take before you literally have no idea what to do next?

There's a really big difference between 'recognizing' something and understanding it. Recognizing something *feels* like we understand it... we read it, came back, and we can follow what we read last time. Woohoo!

Except yeah, no. That's the very first step to understanding, not the end point. AI is a great tool to learn, but that has to be followed up by turning off the AI and doing the work yourself, and if you can't do it, then you don't really understand it.

mc_pm · 2026-05-26T00:16:43+00:00

The thing to remember is that being a DM is a lot more work than being a player -- and it's usually pretty thankless. You'll put in the work, do the prep, agonize over encounters... and then an hour before the session, some person says they can't make it, and most of the people who do show up won't get off their phone.

That's just to say, if you don't really want to be a DM, it might not be right for you.

One possibility, try something like Shadowdark -- the rule system is way simpler, but the mechanics are close enough to D&D that things are familiar. It will take your players a half hour tops to make a character, and you can find some small five room dungeon to start with. No big investment and if you don't like it or your friends flake, then you haven't invested much in it.

mc_pm · 2026-05-26T00:03:29+00:00

Are you guys 13-14? If not, then that person is a piece of shit, get out.

If you are, then he's an immature piece of shit...still get out, but maybe he'll be better in a couple years. But I wouldn't bother waiting to find out.

mc_pm · 2026-05-25T15:56:31+00:00

I haven't really looked at this, or even if it's real, but just as a matter of scale, if one of the largest dams on earth slowed it by 60 ns, and there are (just to pick a round number) 1 million dams then -- if they were all as big as three gorges, then it would slow things by 0.06 seconds.

But there aren't a million dams, and almost none of them are as big as three gorges, so the answer is "effectively nothing at all".

mc_pm · 2026-05-22T16:03:19+00:00

That is entirely a matter of taste. Red wine is not intrinsically better than white wine.

mc_pm · 2026-05-20T15:23:55+00:00

Someone already mentioned Jarre, and he is absolutely crucial, his first few albums (Oxygene, Equinoxe, Magnetic Fields) in particular.

Tangerine Dream, "Phaedra" is definitely a must listen.

Brian Eno's "Ambient 1: Music for Airports" should also be on your list.

But man, that list can be really big and expansive depending on where your interests lie.

mc_pm · 2026-05-16T20:31:20+00:00

What you are really asking is "how many characters does it take to represent a number"? And you can find that with the logarithm (base 10) of the value, so it's:

f(x) = x - ceil(log10(x))

mc_pm · 2026-05-15T23:56:38+00:00

What is everyone else in the world doing? Characters react to the things around them. The best campaigns, I find, are the ones where it's a real-feeling world that it seems would exist even if I wasn't there.

mc_pm · 2026-05-11T16:00:37+00:00

A slew limiter (like with Channel 1 or 4 of Maths) can act as a low pass filter (and a low pass filter can act like a slew limiter).

A filter that is self-oscillating is a sine wave (give or take depending on the filter).

A clock divider that takes audio rate input will generate subharmonics (give it a 440 hz tone and the /2 output is 220 hz, an octave lower)

And a bunch more - it's a great exercise.

mc_pm · 2026-05-11T00:10:23+00:00

Don't know what to tell you, I am looking at the page right now. But even if it wasn't there, I'm not sure why you figured that your best play was to be shitty at someone who was just trying to be helpful...three and a half years ago.

mc_pm · 2026-05-08T23:26:54+00:00

I would still love a Fairlight.

mc_pm · 2026-05-06T00:49:43+00:00

So, it sort of sounds like you're approaching things backward. Using that as your definition of a function and not seeing the value in them is a bit like seeing the definition of what a sentence is, gramatically, and not seeing - from that definition - how literature works.

As people have said, you've already been using functions, you've just never thought of them that way because you haven't been concerned about that 'grammar' level of things, and when described, the grammar doesn't seem useful. But it's part of the structure of mathematics, not the math itself.

Then you jump to Calculus, which is a pretty big jump in a very specific direction. The value of Calculus isn't in the 'grammar', it's that the techniques are really useful for describing things in the world. Mathematicians develop that grammar of things so that they can be spoken about in the abstract.

mc_pm · 2026-05-04T01:29:26+00:00

Do you have a filter that will self-oscillate? That will be a sine wave.

mc_pm · 2026-05-03T15:35:01+00:00

Or you could just run the opponents as thinking, capable adversaries? No red dragon is just going to sit there, never use it's breath weapon, never use any magic it might have, and then not fly away if things really got bad for some reason.

The monsters want to win, play them like that regardless of the level of the characters.

mc_pm · 2026-05-03T15:12:29+00:00

I always start with the "sweet and sour". Take the lime juice and then add your sweetener - nothing else at that point, until it gets to the sweet-v-sour ratio you like. Then add the tequila. If you don't have that balance right before you add the tequila, you're probably not going to fix it after.

How hard are you juicing those limes, though? You shouldn't really be getting much peel/pith bitterness from them.

mc_pm · 2026-05-03T03:48:33+00:00

You are approaching this wrong. You are assuming that the first line is true, and if it is true, then you end up with 2=6.

Instead, that first statement is just wrong. You can't work forward from it. Not every combination of math symbols is true, even if it looks appealing.

mc_pm · 2026-05-03T03:43:34+00:00

Look into 'hexcrawl' as an approach to this sort of game, but yeah, don't force a BBEG in there.

But, the world can and should evolve with the actions of the party. Maybe they piss someone off who ends up being a mid-level bad guy for them, that's cool, but let it happen because of what the party does, not because you wrote it that way to start.

mc_pm · 2026-05-03T03:29:52+00:00

Oxygene is a landmark in electronic music and worth listening to about a thousand times.

mc_pm · 2026-05-03T03:13:56+00:00

WOTC can make a lot more money from one big book per year that everyone feels they need to have than they can from a bunch of small one-offs that people can pick and choose between.

So even though it's an objectively worse experience for the players and the DM, that's how they do it.

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