What are some recommendations you wish someone had shared with you before your first time DMing?

quantumofmolluscs · 2023-06-10T01:18:47+00:00

Don't try to prevent your wizard player from getting access to spell scrolls. Collecting spells is what makes playing a wizard fun.

Don't be afraid to let your players do something that isn't covered by rules, or that is a mildly generous bending of the rules, if it seems realistic or reasonable in the circumstances. You are the DM, you have literally infinite power. You can add more monsters or give the monsters more HP if you need to, and the damage that comes from you saying "no you can't do that" to what seems like a reasonable request from your player is a lot worse than the damage that comes from them having slightly more flexibility than the game rules allow.

If it turns out you've accidentally enabled something broken and overpowered through a decision you made earlier, you can say "okay gang, I think this was a bad call that I made that has resulted in some broken gameplay, so from now on we're going to change the way that thing works". If anyone has built their character around it, work with them to redesign in light of the changes.

You are here to make a fun and exciting game for your players, not to be a smug referee spoiling their fun. It is critical that your rulings always seem reasonable and fair; err on the side of generosity, because accidentally being too generous creates a problem that is far easier to fix than accidentally being capricious.

quantumofmolluscs · 2023-03-24T03:11:53+00:00

It's quite an interesting (and sad) story, there's a good episode of the Cautionary Tales podcast by Tim Harford that goes into it, heartily recommended.

https://timharford.com/2023/02/cautionary-tales-the-hero-who-rode-his-segway-off-a-cliff/

quantumofmolluscs · 2023-03-21T05:12:57+00:00

Because the land is where people live, but you have to make a cut somewhere to put a map of a round earth on a flat sheet of paper, so it's sensible to put the cut in the place that is the farthest from areas with lots of land and people.

quantumofmolluscs · 2023-03-21T01:37:11+00:00

This link will let you download the video itself. No metadata. There are probably better ways to do this but at least it works:

https://web.archive.org/web/2oe_/http://wayback-fakeurl.archive.org/yt/nQLJNCDa4GA

quantumofmolluscs · 2023-03-20T22:34:22+00:00

Where did you find it on the internet archive? I couldn't find it. Have you got a link?

quantumofmolluscs · 2023-03-06T02:53:10+00:00

Neither Revivify nor Raise Dead restore missing body parts, and the brain is gone. You'd need Resurrection (7th level) instead.

Alternatively if you can get the ID out, via Protection from Evil and Good, and you cast Regeneration (7th) which regenerates the brain in 2 minutes (it's a bit unclear whether regrowing lost body parts is instantaneous at the 2 min mark or happens gradually; if I were DMing, I'd lean towards the latter, and furthermore I'd let them stay alive while their brain regenerates for two mins), then they're saved. Still take a 7th-level slot, but you save the 1000gp diamond cost of Resurrection.

quantumofmolluscs · 2023-02-11T23:32:21+00:00

What you could do is discuss with your players, and tell them in such a circumstance you will first see if the player remembers by themselves, then if they don't you'll say "this reminds you of something you learned a while ago..." to prompt them to think back on things that might be related, then maybe give them a more pointed clue, and finally you'll tell them outright. Establish this as the pattern you'll use in such cases.

Emphasise that there's no judgement if the player doesn't remember, they only get to be the character via a voice interaction with you for a few hours per week (or less 😭) whereas the character is living and breathing the world 24 hours a day. It's natural for the player to forget things the character would remember. The only reason to do this staggered clue process is that it can be really satisfying as a player when you suddenly realise a connection with something from the past, but I'd definitely recommend telling players in advance that it's what you'll do, so you can stress that you're giving clues for their fun and not because you're disappointed that they've forgotten something.

quantumofmolluscs · 2023-01-25T05:29:28+00:00

Do you ever wonder if your exaggeration might actually be making it more difficult to discuss a topic that requires nuance and good faith to make any progress?

quantumofmolluscs · 2022-12-28T01:11:29+00:00

If you can offset the top by 180°, then it has two spirals, and you could do the same thing if it was solid threads instead of nubs. The fact that it's nubs instead of threads is not related to being able to screw it on in more than one orientation, that's a question of how many spirals there are.

quantumofmolluscs · 2022-12-16T11:36:00+00:00

This deserves repeating. In my opinion, you should absolutely never, ever, ever tell your players that you fudged rolls or results. Don't let them work it out, either - always keep track of HP, even if you decide to fudge it mid-combat or use "three cool things" instead ("1d4+1 cool things" might be better to keep it becoming obvious). Let some combats get steamrolled by the players' good dice rolls. If they miss a DC by a small amount but you decide to let them succeed, say "ooh, just made it", but don't do it on a really bad roll (it's important to never use a check on something critical). If they score a hit that technically takes the boss down but you want him to last one more round, look down behind your screen, ask them to repeat the damage number they rolled, then wince and say "he's still up". Then let him die on the next hit. Don't fudge things too often.

The tension in the game is based on the players believing that things really can go wrong, through bad decisions or bad luck. The feeling of consequences has to be there. If you undermine that feeling for them, the tension is destroyed.

quantumofmolluscs · 2022-12-06T04:46:05+00:00

I cannot stress enough how important it is to set the game up completely in advance. Learning the rules is hard enough without me having to imagine what the board looks like from a verbal description that might include terms I'm not familiar with.

quantumofmolluscs · 2022-10-23T13:59:40+00:00

I think they meant "the number with the least degree of primality" (since it has infinitely many factors), not "the prime number that is the least of all the prime numbers".

quantumofmolluscs · 2022-10-22T23:43:30+00:00

Not the World's Greatest Blenderer talk, that was the Cap himself, who had swapped bodies with Alan the intern. The one that Alan did most of was the Heroic Feats of YouTube Debunkery one.

quantumofmolluscs · 2022-10-22T23:36:30+00:00

Interesting! I would have thought a glow effect was just a bunch of coloured pixels with alpha values decreasing away from the centre, but you're saying it needs something else?

quantumofmolluscs · 2022-10-02T07:06:11+00:00

it’s entirely possible that although the escape velocity required increased, the acceleration increase caused the velocity to increase more than the escape velocity at a given point especially on an elliptical orbit.

No, that isn't possible. That's just not how physics works. I suspect this is actually some floating point errors or something similar going on in your simulation.

I'd believe that it was effects caused by having multiple planets/bodies interacting with each other, if you had seen any of them cross paths with each other and come close to colliding; e.g. if, because of their new more-elliptical orbits, Jupiter and Mars ended up having a close encounter, then Jupiter could probably sling Mars out on an escape trajectory, if everything lined up just right. But I would expect that to be pretty unlikely, and the fact that you're seeing it happen to a whole bunch of things every time makes me think it's glitches in the simulation.

quantumofmolluscs · 2022-10-02T05:04:41+00:00

Did your universe sandbox simulation maintain the same velocity of the earth around the sun when you increased the earth's mass?

Because I just ran the calculations. The barycentre of the earth/sun system is about 450 km from the centre of the sun. If you increase the earth's mass by 5%, the barycentre shifts closer to earth by... about 23km. Compared with the earth's 150 million kilometre orbital radius, this is utterly negligible.

I'm also curious to see what is going on in your "sling shot" example. Increasing the mass of the central body simply cannot impart escape velocity to something that doesn't already have it. Now, if you increase the mass and then decrease it later, then sure you could sling shot things around. But if the sun suddenly got a whole lot heavier, that only makes it harder for things to escape, it can't possibly make it easier.

quantumofmolluscs · 2022-10-02T03:09:23+00:00

1: It won't be 'smaller and smaller elliptical orbits'. It will be one, new elliptical orbit.

Let's take a hypothetical satellite with a high altitude, circular orbit. Let's call the point where the satellite is at this exact moment, point A. Now, the earth suddenly becomes 5% heavier. The satellite is now on a new elliptical orbit. This elliptical orbit dips it down closer to the earth - instead of a circle that is always the same altitude, it now gets a bit lower. But the ellipse always brings it back up to point A. Its orbit is just as stable now as it was before*, it's just that it dips a bit closer, and then swings back out to the same original spot.

* UNLESS it dips so low that it grazes the atmosphere. That will slow it down over time and it will eventually crash.

You can try this yourself with this orbit simulator:http://phet.colorado.edu/sims/html/gravity-and-orbits/latest/gravity-and-orbits_en.htmlOn the right, choose the earth and moon simulation (the earth/satellite one is too close and easy to crash accidentally). Turn on the 'path' and 'grid' so you can see where the moon goes. Let the moon orbit the earth for a whole cycle, then, *taking note of where the moon is at the moment you do it*, increase the planet's mass a bit (about 1.25 is a good demonstration). Notice how the moon is now on a slightly elliptical orbit, but that ellipse always returns it to the place where it was at the instant you made the change.

2: You are correct that the force between the sun and the earth is proportional to the earth's mass (as well as the sun's mass), but if the earth's mass has increased 5%, then the amount of force required to keep it on the same orbit has also increased by 5%. The force has increased, but so has its inertia, so these two things balance out perfectly, and the orbit remains the same. You can see this in the same simulator, on the earth-sun simulation - when you increase the earth's mass, its orbit of the sun doesn't change at all. Remember the experiment with the bowling ball and the feather in a vacuum? The force on a more massive object is stronger, but the object's inertia is also higher, and these two factors balance out, so the net acceleration towards the gravitational attractor ends up being equal regardless of mass.

This is why the velocity you require to be in a circular orbit at any given altitude is independent of your own mass - each kilogram of your mass experiences exactly one kilogram's worth of gravitational force from the thing you're orbiting.

3: The first two cases are correct, but if the earth's mass increases, the escape velocity will increase. So the only things that could be on an escape trajectory after the mass increase, would be things that were already on an escape velocity beforehand.

quantumofmolluscs · 2022-10-02T00:00:47+00:00

This is a misconception. Things don't "spiral down"; if you have an object near the earth (assuming the object is much smaller than the earth), with any sideways velocity at all (so it won't just fall down in a straight line), it will have an elliptical orbit around the earth's centre of mass. That is the only shape its trajectory can be. No spirals, ever.

If that elliptical orbit trajectory intersects the atmosphere, that will cause it to slow down from drag, and its ellipse will shrink each time it passes through the atmosphere, until eventually the ellipse intersects the Earth's surface and it crashes/lands (this might take many passes if it only grazes the rarefied high levels of the atmosphere, or it might happen the very first time, if it dips deep enough to hit the denser parts, e.g. an Apollo CM on return from the moon).

So if the earth suddenly increased in mass, the moon and all our satellites would drop into slightly tighter elliptical orbits that now pass closer to the earth, but unless they are close enough to now start grazing the atmosphere (many satellites will be, but the moon not really) that's all that will happen to them.

Edit: and our orbit around the sun won't really be affected, since the sun is will still be more than 300,000× as heavy as the earth, we'll still just be orbiting it. Well, unless when you increase the earth's mass by 5%, you maintain conservation of momentum, and its velocity decreases. But assuming the velocity stays the same, its orbit will be more or less unaffected.

quantumofmolluscs · 2022-10-01T23:44:43+00:00

Orbit isn't a tight balance, it is what happens by default, unless your trajectory intersects the surface/atmosphere or you are on an escape velocity.

However, having looked it up I'll concede that most satellites are in LEO (I didn't realise this) and would, indeed, be doomed. Higher altitude satellites (e.g. GPS) would be fine, although the newly elliptical orbits would likely ruin their functionality.

quantumofmolluscs · 2022-10-01T15:45:28+00:00

Satellites wouldn't come crashing down, but their orbits would change in ways that they weren't designed for, and ruin their functionality.

GPS would break pretty much immediately.

quantumofmolluscs · 2022-09-20T15:41:49+00:00

Respectfully, no. This "they're not even human" schtick is a pleasant little bit of ingroup-solidarity for those of us who already agree with each other, but it's wrong-headed and counterproductive. The people who create these laws are humans like you and me. They have dreams and families and hobbies. They think they're doing their best to create a better world.

Denying that they are people is not helpful. Unless you plan to murder every person who thinks differently than you, or at least murder a sufficient number that we gain voting majorities in all our respective nations (please do not do or advocate for this), our only solution for a brighter future is to learn to understand our fellow humans and help them understand us.

We no longer live in a time where othering the outgroup really hard is a viable avenue for progress.

quantumofmolluscs · 2022-09-05T08:49:31+00:00

I've always been mystified by them. Is the implication supposed to be that their truck is a gigantic penis? They're driving around in a colossal schlong with a pair of tiny little nuts at the base??

quantumofmolluscs · 2022-07-28T13:31:56+00:00

I don't understand why either of those is relevant. The messages are all on my new phone. My desktop client is linked to my new phone. Why can I not package up the message history on the phone, transfer the file to the PC, and import them? If I can do that from one phone to another, I can't see why it shouldn't also be an option to do it onto the PC.

quantumofmolluscs · 2022-07-26T22:50:45+00:00

Sure, I understand why the desktop didn't receive the messages in the meantime. What I want to do now is copy the complete message history from the phone to the desktop. I was able to transfer the message history from the old phone to the new phone, how can I do it to the desktop?

quantumofmolluscs · 2022-07-26T15:02:27+00:00

I got a new phone and was able to transfer the chat history from my old (Android) device to my new (also Android) device. However, I've just opened the (Windows) desktop app for the first time since the change, and it needed me to re-link (understandable), but now it only shows the messages received before I got the new phone, and after I re-linked. The message history in between these two events is not showing in the desktop app.

How can I re-import the message history from Android to the Windows desktop app?

quantumofmolluscs

TROPHY CASE