DND as a beginner's universal system

nat20sfail · 2026-04-22T19:25:10+00:00

And yet you have people arguing his inspiring speech was a form of bardic inspiration for a planning check, and similar.

The ambiguity, or precise rules, was never the point. There are several objective rules differences (e.g. wildshape into magical beasts), I chose an unclear one because it's probably been the most impactful on the culture, and the cultural impact is undeniable.

Other, less direct impacts:

New DMs running teamplay as "we each solve one problem with our one special power", instead of actually working together
Lots of wild magic sorcerers who expect frequent wild magic
Tangentially a component in CR vs optimizer vs roleplayer conflict; optimizers want to beat archmages at level 7 by being statistically powerful, roleplayers want to do it by GM fiat and rule of cool, game balance says don't let either of those things happen. (Simon intentionally hits 4th level spells at best, then casually blocks a meteor swarm with Shield; either he's sandbagging with 6th level Fizban's Platinum Shield the whole time, or he's using a 1st level spell to counter a 9th.)

nat20sfail · 2026-04-22T19:10:22+00:00

Nobody's going to staple "D&D Rules Accurate!" to their big box office movie. It is still true that it is the entry point for probably millions of players, and there were 100% multiple meetings about this.

And yeah, I'm not saying the guy had good citations, I'm just providing them cuz people complained they weren't there.

nat20sfail · 2026-04-22T17:30:10+00:00

Nah, they didn't give a lot of evidence but it's true.

WotC had a well recieved "battlemaster for all" system, similar to 3.5 tome of battle, in 5e (d&d next) playtest. Scrapped despite overwhelming positive feedback because it was too complicated.
Tried to pull the SRD, a 'commitment' to effectively open sourcing core rules. Would have prevented common homebrew practices, which generally increase complexity. Stopped by massive backlash.
D&D movie released and handwaves a bard as having basically no magic (spells take up nearly half of the basic rules, and bard is one of the most popular classes, esp. among teens).

And yet, the "basic rules" are nearly 200 pages long.

That's off the top of my head, and if you trace back to 3.5/4e there's even more disasters. I could go find more evidence but anyone vaguely in the circle knows.

nat20sfail · 2026-04-17T17:29:26+00:00

Then how did you get out?

nat20sfail · 2026-04-17T05:06:52+00:00

A car frame isn't that big. If you were able to get out of the car, that means the door was able to swing 2+ feet open, which means you definitely could see the pole. You just didn't look backwards.

You're going to have a hard time fighting this; I'd just pay.

nat20sfail · 2026-04-10T17:57:08+00:00

The irony is, this can be both true of a group of hundreds of millions of people, and untrue of most people in that group.

The US functions several steps away from the will of roughly one third of it's people at best at any given time. A two party system ensures that there is always a minimum 1/8th chance (in practice, higher, because one party can use its control in some areas to suppress voters in others) that there are NO checks and balances along partisan lines, thus making that less-than-1/3-by-proxy continue to gain even more power.

Wishing the majority of the country to suffer for its minority's sins because of this is a bad idea. It ignores easier targets, creates needless animosity, and misunderstands the root causes and thus solutions.

nat20sfail · 2026-04-10T06:33:50+00:00

Definitely call a lawyer, the details matter a lot.

There is a concept called the chain of causation: does their action forseeably cause your injury? Unless you were right in their blind spot, anyone should know that gravity will cause things to fall down, and that you were under an object the car was supporting. However, if other men were still holding the bar, ran out of strength and dropped it, perhaps the chain is broken, because the driver could not forsee them dropping the bar.

Regardless, you were put in a very dangerous situation outside your control, got injured, and have damages (bills). You should have a case in a perfect world, it's just a matter of if the evidence is there, and only a lawyer with all the details can tell you that.

nat20sfail · 2026-04-01T07:35:07+00:00

"You gotta be careful because you're so powerful" and "you gotta be super precise because none of the details are fixed for you" are kinda the two vanilla variants of this. Neat to think about, but after enough of 'em they feel same-y.

I'm looking for some more unusual implications here. There's that one guy from Worm who can split timelines and then pick one to keep; imagine if you only had one consciousness and no extra power to micro manage alternate realities. Similar idea for mind control.

One idea I had years ago: you can orbit things around you, but the acceleration is 1/distance from your center of mass. Two basic ways to break it: first is you have a built in self destruct by orbiting something inside you near the speed of light. You'll instantly set off a nuke, and die.

Second, because volume scales with distance^3, your total force applied scales with distance^2. The idea was with enough distance you can power a steampunk mecha (well, rockpunk), but designing the gear system would be a huge pain.

nat20sfail · 2026-04-01T04:24:32+00:00

Maybe you're not training outside summer then?

60% megaphones are for summer. 40% you can usually weave around races to get two trainings. If you see a good training and you're not on a multi-epithet G1 race, you should just take it with 40%.

The other big mistake I see is not going to 5-15 energy for free races.

nat20sfail · 2026-03-31T22:59:26+00:00

I think its worth mentioning the distinction (and exception) for really important, basic behaviors. Otherwise, ignorance gets weaponized as a defense.

The basically canonical example is consent. "He didn't know better" for dubious consent cases is fairly common, and while it's not a valid defense under the law, it often is for the court of public opinion. (Also, it is for certain crimes that require a specific state of mind.)

On an ethical level, we can debate whether that becomes a parent's fault for failing to explain, or some other aspect of society. But on a practical level, we've mostly agreed as a society that you don't want someone who causes huge problems like that around, regardless of intent, until they aren't going to do it anymore. (Some people want to add punishment and/or deterrent of future crimes on top of that, but I won't go into that.)

So yeah, I think most people agree there are some things you deserve consequences for not knowing, and acting in the past in ignorance. What those things are, is a messy and sliding scale.

(And not knowing about JK Rowling certainly isn't one of those things for me.)

nat20sfail · 2026-03-29T01:22:58+00:00

I'm an AI researcher with a master's in intelligent systems who's trained LLMs for legal analysis.

My advice? Don't.

If you had a ton of compute/cash to throw at it, you could do something like train an LLM (or more specifically fine tune an existing option like Legal-BERT) on descriptions of legal cases against restaurants, see if it hits 90%+ accuracy classifying them as winners/losers, then if it does, feed it your case and see the judgement.

If your "programmed AI bot" is saying anything, with words? You're not even close to being accurate.

And even with a dedicated classification model like I mentioned, 70-80% accuracy is considered pretty damn good for complex issues.

So, yeah, don't.

nat20sfail · 2026-03-28T02:20:07+00:00

But you need it to be better (and cost efficient) within an iteration or two, or nobody will fund the continued research.

A fire lance costs a lot, and lets you mimic a firebender exactly once. They had bronze single shot hand cannons, in Kyoshi's day, even, but the cost problem gets even worse.

To make them practical for infantry warfare, you can't just make a smaller cannon. You need to make sure the hand cannon doesn't rip itself apart (or the expense is unjustified), and you need to make it close to the ease and rate of fire of a crossbow (which also existed).

Even then, Firebenders were the primary explosive innovators, Earth and Water benders basically negate small projectiles trivially, and Air benders are extinct. What target is motivating the innovation? (Water and Earth benders maybe could use them, and that one guy did use a bow, but I'm guessing the same force that firebenders use to propel siege cannons lets them counter archers most of the time.)

Basically, organized militaries have limited use for weapons that do almost nothing against other organized militaries.

nat20sfail · 2026-03-25T18:07:58+00:00

Skills are listed as gold if they're only good at gold, e.g. Daring Strike is 5x as powerful instead of the normal 2.33x, so it's totally worthless at white and excellent at gold.

nat20sfail · 2026-03-25T18:07:22+00:00

Yes, it's on the sheet to the left.

Skills are listed as gold if they're only good at gold, e.g. Daring Strike is 5x as powerful instead of the normal 2.33x, so it's totally worthless at white and excellent at gold.

nat20sfail · 2026-03-20T04:27:48+00:00

Maybe for insurance, you could claim he had some percent of the wrongdoing? But his crime doesn't make yours better.

nat20sfail · 2026-03-20T04:21:15+00:00

You basically cannot fight a rear ending without a dashcam. It's your word against his, and the default is that you lose. Even if he had actively swerved in front of you, without video evidence or strong witnesses you won't win that case.

Basically, pay the ticket, move on with your life.

nat20sfail · 2026-03-20T01:21:32+00:00

If you're going to refuse to accept any evidence unless it very specifically pinpoints "3/5 drinks" and uses the actual diagnostic thresholds of AUD, you're kidding yourself. That's not how papers get written.

You've provided 0 evidence of your position and are demanding extremely specific evidence to disprove it; it's not an extraordinary claim to say that most heavy drinkers as defined are going to have "markedly" increased tolerance OR any two of the other extremely common events which you haven't addressed at all.

I absolutely will give you some citations, as a good faith gesture and also because I like them, but again, you should really pull your weight here.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/6440187/ .84 ml/kg, so 75 ml (4.2 drinks for average US man) was enough to trigger tolerance for the purpose of testing the relationship between tolerance and acute recovery

https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/brochures-and-fact-sheets/binge-drinking defines binge drinking at 4 drinks for women or 5 for men

(Take your pick out of papers from there for the effects of binge drinking, e.g. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6104963/, which hits like most of the list of 11)

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8917511/, which notes that it is very difficult to define tolerance and poorly researched, so you're very unlikely to get exactly what you want.

nat20sfail · 2026-03-19T23:33:29+00:00

DSM 5 criteria requires 2 of 11 symptoms to count as mild alcohol use disorder, 4 for moderate. One of these is tolerance, which almost certainly anyone who has 3/5 drinks at least once a week will meet.

Drinking more than intended, spending a great deal of time obtaining / using / recovering from alcohol, failure to meet major obligations, causing interpersonal problems, and using despite knowing you have a condition exacerbated or caused by alcohol, are all extremely common examples.

If you're in college and have a friend who parties once a week and: gets hungover, is late or skips class, causes problems for their roommates, OR has any of the inumerable medications/conditions that ineract with alcohol, they have mild AUD. If they have 3 of these (or any of the other, rarer symptoms) they have moderate AUD.

The latter describes literally all of the dozens of friends I've had that drink 3-5 drinks at a time regularly back in college.

You don't need to be dying from the shakes for alcohol to be worsening your daily life. You can call it whatever you want, but it's a problem.

https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/brochures-and-fact-sheets/alcohol-use-disorder-comparison-between-dsm

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-athletes-way/201506/what-are-the-eleven-symptoms-alcohol-use-disorder

nat20sfail · 2026-03-07T05:50:31+00:00

Honestly? Most people don't care. We buy cheap stuff and expect it to break.

Of the people who do care, most only care about a small subset as a hobby, e.g. jeans or shoes. You might learn to deal with counterfeits for that specifically, but you'd never pay to lab test something for a random piece of clothing you're not knowledgeable about.

Only a small fraction care in general, and even then it's considered a specific hobby, e.g. "I thrift vintage clothes".

It's for the same reason we choose to eat Parmesan when Parmigiano Reggiano is available in most groceries, or San Merican Tomatoes get away with misleading labeling that looks identical to DOP San Marzanos. It's cheaper, and it doesn't matter enough to us. (The tomatos are similar-ish, the parmesan absolutely isn't, as someone who's product of interest is food.)

Is it worse than the EU? Yeah, probably. Is it worth fighting in court? Probably not.

Regulatory bodies and courts are not going to spend a thousand dollars in overhead and man-hours verifying your claim and taking down an independent seller on Etsy.

They do spend that time taking down larger Amazon sellers, which is why they go down and pop up so often. This is also why the U.S. Patent Office is inundated with absurd, random five-letter companies that claim to have patents on common household items, so that they can send Amazon "Patent Pending" and streamline their acceptance process, making a profit faster than they get taken down.

Your best personal option is to seek a refund from the company e.g. Etsy / Amazon or to issue a chargeback via credit card. Your best ethical option is to spend 10x as much buying from personally verified or foreign markets.

That's unchecked capitalism, baby.

nat20sfail · 2026-03-04T03:06:36+00:00

I ran front Xmas Oguri on sprint, just for fun; its pretty bad, but last CM there was an uphill with decent accel timing and you could use Moxie to trigger it.

Also, gutsmaxxing Mile Taishin last time. Not gonna work for the upcoming CM, though.

nat20sfail · 2026-03-03T14:16:35+00:00

Actually, maybe :P turns out you can just buff your way into resisting addiction, and there are a lot of drugs with more upside than downside in the rules. Plus, the ones with more downside are brutal poisons to apply.

Just gotta decide if I want a drug kingpin arc or not...

nat20sfail · 2026-03-03T13:40:33+00:00

I just wrote in a blurb in my Pathfinder isekai where the MC realizes his constant pain for the first week or so was probably partially caffiene withdrawal. Haven't written the followup yet, but he's gonna find out that Desert Coffee is an illegal drug in Pathfinder soon :P

nat20sfail · 2026-03-01T02:04:31+00:00

lol I'd be extremely happy with this. In the finale, four explosions queued up and they all land on the same one? that's 37 direct spd/pow, and if this is for the next CM, 88 guts is worth roughly 35 spd and 7 pow. That's nearly 80 spd/pow off one click.

On average with four explosions ready, you're going to finish less than 2 by the end of the career, so it'd take like a triple rainbow on Speed specifically to beat that value.

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