I love learning new rules. It’s honestly almost as much fun to me as actually playing the game.

Does OOP always play characters with the same backstory beats? I’m always making up new insecurities/obsessions/neuroses for my characters because I feel like I can’t use the same backstory twice. (They have to have something going on, though, because well-adjusted people don’t make a career out of going into trap-filled holes in the ground and fighting to the death for the inhabitants’ pocket change.)

Unfortunately the DMG says that if a character somehow acquires the same feature more than once, only one counts.

I feel like I first saw this pic before AI image generation was any good, so it might just be good old fashioned Photoshop.

Nah man, the older I get the less I trust adults. They let me be one and I’m the biggest fuckup I’ve ever met!

OP already accounted for social situations where you would expect to meet people, though, and his parents seem to think that he should be approaching people in other situations—like in a store, or on the street. I’d be very cautious about that.

Not quite the same but I used to work at a local, family owned supermarket chain that is now out of business. I started at one of the busiest locations, but after I moved apartments I transferred to another location that was out in the 'burbs. At the first location I worked at, all our equipment was well maintained, stock was reasonable, stuff seemed normal.

At the suburban location, our equipment was all falling apart. The roof leaked. The other stores sent us their overstock and charged it to our departments. I was in the deli, and one day the contracted maintenance guy was there and I asked if he could take a look at one of the meat slicers. He said sorry, corporate told him not to do any work at this location that they hadn’t pre-approved.

My first hypothesis was that this location didn’t make any money, and that’s why they didn’t want to spend to fix it. One day I decided to ask the store manager about it—he was pretty chill and we talked sometimes, so I figured he wouldn’t mind. I said “Does this store actually make any money?” and he said “Well, let me put it this way: the numbers I report to corporate show that every department here, except floral, makes a profit every month. And then the numbers they put out in the quarterly reports show that we’ve never made a profit since we opened.”

“Where does the money go?” I asked.

“That’s above my pay grade,” he said.

I’m convinced someone was embezzling funds. A couple years after I left, the whole chain closed one day with no notice to the employees.

The problem with “body type” is that it is actually a gender selector too, but they don’t tell you that. If you’re body type 1 NPCs refer to you as she/her, and if you’re body type 2 NPCs refer to you as he/him. They needed to add a separate pronoun option, but didn’t, so right now the body type option is just the gender option but pretending not to be.

I mean, it depends on the edition. In AD&D the damage of fireball increases faster than your HP: you deal 1d6 damage per level and you gain 1d4 HP per level (and you don’t get an automatic max roll at first level), so on average a fifth level caster has 12.5 max hp and deals 17.5 damage on a failed save.

Nowadays with higher hit dice and higher average Constitution scores and potentially larger Constitution-based hp bonuses, it’s more survivable for sure. It also doesn’t expand to fill its nominal volume if cast indoors, so it’s a lot easier to find space to cast it in dungeons without frying yourself.

Edit: This is ignoring the fact that not all mages are equally likely to survive to fifth level; rolling higher HP makes you way more likely to survive to the next level, so I suspect if we surveyed players of fifth level mages the actual average HP would be somewhat higher, with the low rollers having been filtered out by dart traps, lucky kobolds, etc.

I guess the video games probably aren’t canon, but I think it was The Force Unleashed that “revealed” that Vader intentionally planted the seeds of the Rebellion to create an opportunity to overthrow Palpatine, which makes all the times he or his troopers “fail” to stop the heroes make more sense.

Inspire allies to perform better or push their limits, bolster them against mental damage and heal mental damage they’ve sustained, raise the morale of a group (especially if that group shares my religion). Bonuses to public speaking, negotiation, religious knowledge, etc.

If I belong to a more fire-and-brimstone type religion, perhaps I can intimidate sinners, make my allies more effective against heretics, etc.

Yes, I think we should abolish the police and dismantle the army. That’s, like, the whole point. They’re responsible for most of the violence!

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Lying requires intent. Currently popular LLMs build responses one token at a time—when it starts writing a sentence, it doesn’t know how it will end, and therefore can’t have an opinion about the truth value of it. (I’d go further and claim it can’t really “have an opinion” about anything, but even if it can, it can neither lie nor tell the truth on purpose.) It can consider its own output (and therefore potentially have an opinion about whether it is true or false) only after it has been generated, when generating the next token.

“Admitting” that it’s lying only proves that it has been exposed to “admission” as a pattern in its training data.

Recently my friend was trying to get me to apply for a junior dev position. “I don’t have the right skills,” I said. “The biggest project I ever coded was a calculator for my Java final, in college, a decade and a half ago.”

It did not occur to me that showing up without the skills and using a LLM to half ass it was an option!

Right, but… what does it have to do with Jeeps showing in-car advertisements?

I don’t understand how this is related to the Streisand Effect. The Streisand Effect is when you try to suppress unflattering info about yourself, and in the process you call attention to it, so now everyone knows. But we didn’t learn about this through Jeep trying to suppress the info, we just learned about it from people who saw the ads.

Isn’t every baby a meat baby?

Just scroll past it? I just assume it’s going to be wrong anyway.

I liked healing in MMOs when all I had to do was click healthbars to fill them up. Other people did all the hard work of actually fighting monsters, and I got loot!

Now MMOs want to make healers “interesting” so that more people will play them, and this means I have to contend with actual mechanics and sometimes even deal damage. Sorry, my brain does not multitask, I’m simply not cut out for this anymore. :P