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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • so as not to affect the game balance

    Obviously ask your DM first, but it’s worth noting that Crawford himself says that they literally just don’t take damage types into account when designing spells, so changing them shouldn’t break anything.

    Of course, that’s kind absurd, but a slightly more sane take, from the homebrew community, is that damage types are roughly aligned in trios, and you can safely change damage types between the same level or worse without hurting anything.

    Those trios being:
    bludgeoning/piercing/slashing
    cold/fire/poison
    acid/lightning/necrotic
    force/psychic/radiant

    So a cold fireball would be fine, a slashing fireball would be slightly weaker, but a necrotic fireball would be a bit much, and a force fireball is (self-evidently) quite a bit more powerful. I use this myself, to allow casters to be a bit more thematic; at my table, when you learn a spell, you can set it to any equal or lesser damage type and reflavour it however you want. E.g. if someone took fireball, they might say it does piercing damage and flavour it as a blast of needles.





  • Dungeons: The Dragoning 40,000 is a d10 dice pool game with “stunt dice”

    If you make any attempt at all to describe your action in-character (such as your example), you got +1 die

    If your description was especially cool, or interacted with the environment in some way, you get +2 dice instead (I guess technically your example would likely be here, because a chair is part of the environment, probably)

    And “crowning moments”, the kind of really hype action that gets the whole table invested, the sort of thing that happens once or twice a session at most, earn +3 dice

    It really helps keep people invested in the role play


  • I feel like you’ve missed the point of the comment you’re replying to

    No, a barbarian is not expected to deadlift IRL. But if a barbarian walked into the middle of a situation and declared he was going to solve it with Athletics, without explaining how he was going to do that, he would be met with blank stares. You need to state intent. “I’ll use Athletics” is meaningless. “I’ll pile up these boulders into a staircase so we can climb over the wall” is a course of action.

    Similarly, “I’ll use Persuasion” is meaningless. Worse, are the people who just say “I’ve got proficiency in all the charisma skills, so I’ll just use whatever one’s most effective” lol. “I’ll use my wit and charm to convince the guard that we have been invited to the castle” is a course of action. “I’ll use facts and logic to convince the guard that it is in his best interest to allow us into the castle” is a course of action. I don’t care if you’re charismatic in real life, but if you can’t even summarize what you’re trying to say, how is the rest of the game world supposed to respond to it? “I’ll Persuade them” is only the first half of a sentence.



  • It doesn’t. The original data is nowhere in its dataset. Words are nowhere in its dataset. It stores how often certain tokens (numbers computationally equivalent to language fragments; not even words, but just a few letters or punctuation, often chunks of words) are found together in sentences written by humans, and uses that to generate human-sounding sentences. The sentences it returns are thereby a massaged average of what it predicts a human would say in that situation.

    If you say “It was the best of times,” and it returns “it was the worst of times.”, it’s not because “it was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” is literally in its dataset, it’s because after converting what you said to tokens, its dataset shows that the latter almost always follows the former. From the AI’s perspective, it’s like you said the token string (03)(153)(3181)(359)(939)(3)(10)(108), and it found that the most common response to that by far is (03)(153)(3181)(359)(61013)(12)(10)(108).


  • Back in the early days, I noticed my town had a wikipedia entry, but no demonym (word for people who live there; e.g. New Yorker, San Franciscan). I thought of a slightly rude word whose first half happened to be my town’s name (think if, say, Parisians were called “Parisites”), and added it as the demonym, totally unsourced, as a joke to show my buddy. It stayed. For a few years it stayed, never questioned. Then, the new Mayor used it in a speech; presumably, she’d looked it up on wikipedia. That speech was published in the local paper. The local paper was added to the page as a source, and not by me. A high-school gag between friends was now a sourced and cited fact.




  • That actually is probably the only valid part of this complaint, but it’s a bit opaque without context. In Splatoon 1, each gender had a different victory pose for each weapon type; a girl winning with a minigun would have a different pose than a boy winning with a minigun, or a girl winning with a paintroller. In Splatoon 3, instead you choose your own victory pose from a few dozen options. One of options they added earlier this year is to just use the ones from Splatoon 1.

    Except… Despite the name (and social media posts, in the runup to its release) implying it’s all the Splatoon 1 ones, it’s actually only the girls’ poses. The boys’ poses are not available at all.

    All his other stuff is pretty ridiculous, the games are absolutely inclusive (equality feels like prejudice when you’re used to privilege, and all) but I do get feeling like you’re being given the cold shoulder when you’re told “here’s all the poses from Splatoon 1!” and then your entire gender is left out.