AnarchCassius

@lmacvittie @GaryD20Games That's fair and consistent. I used crits for skills before 3rd but I feel like confirmation rolls made everything a lot more predictable. I've heard arguments as to why critical hits make sense but fumbles and skill crits don't but I think it's a matter of taste really.

@AnarchCassius @GaryD20Games Dunno. We don’t confirm crits, never have. But we also don’t regularly play 3e or later. When we do, we don’t confirm. House rule - nat 20 is a crit. Period.

This is an area of contention? 🤔

@GaryD20Games Skills crit if 20 wasn't your only means to succeed and you make your confirmation role. People refuse to apply the basic lesson we learned about critical hits years ago to skills for some reason and then act like skills are the problem.

@lmacvittie @GaryD20Games Issue is people treat 20 as a critical instead of having some kind of confirmation role. Same reason people dislike fumbles. People still use confirm for critical hits right? That didn't stop after 3rd did it?

Why not? Mostly a crit on a skill check just means “you did that with extra flair!” Crit on tying a knot in a rope? That ain’t coming out. Fumble? Your quarry might escape with a good roll. I think it’s only problematic in 5e and skill-heavy systems. Otherwise it’s just … flair and adds to the story.

@Skibbytiggles @CorpseKings I didn't know about the Taoist alignment until now. I kept checking out different core books expecting to see more alignments that would fill the very obvious gaps and kept finding the same 7 that didn't really click for me.

@Skibbytiggles @CorpseKings Interesting, it's the only one I've used I thought detracted from a system. It doesn't really add to the rules and the incredibly specific yet limited set made it so much harder to assign alignments than in D&D. No neutral and Selfish seperate from Evil isn't an improvement.

Corpse Kings probably won't ever have Alignment, because the core idea is that you can play as notorious monsters. BUT, I do like the idea of there being deep cultures within those monster societies. How do you prefer Alignment? 🤔

@CorpseKings For me alignment is a part of the metaphysics of D&D. It's a fun system that interacts with the planar cosmology. Deep culture is something I can take or leave on a per setting basis but it helps give creatures roles when making content.

@WaywardBeacon @GaryD20Games I use their changes to base rules. I ignore their skills, classes, feats, races, etc and retain 3.5 content.

@GaryD20Games To much crunch for me. I always thought every 3.5 player went to Pathfinder

Is 3.5 the best WotC edition of D&D? 🎲🤨

@Blackmoor_Film @CorpseKings Does angle of impact play a factor in naval combat as it does in tank combat?

D&D based the combat on Naval Warfare. Arneson says he designed the system based on his iron clads rules. In naval combat it is not uncommon to hit a ship, but if the distance and caliber combine to make the shot too weak, then the armor is not penetrated and the shot bounces off. I stopped worrying about the realism and enjoy playing my old game. The system works well enough. Some games have armor soak off damage before it hits the Pc with attacks all being the same difficulty. In the end you are just working with number avarages and it becomes the same result. We can also talk about the lack of granularity in the hit point system and how it doesn't really reason out well with the concept of healing. Realism could be the last thing you want in an RPG.

Wanna know a lousy take I have? I don't like Armor Class. It's never made sense to me that Armor plays a role in whether you hit a target or not. 🛡️

@Grand_DM @Blackmoor_Film @CorpseKings This is why I reject skill, luck, and fate in HP. Yes, I know Gygax used those, and I don't use pure damage. I use fatigue, strain and other physical degradation for the same effect.

"We can also talk about the lack of granularity in the hit point system and how it doesn't really reason out well with the concept of healing." This 100%. The moment healing spells enter the equation, the notion of hit points as abstract measures of skill, luck, or fate breaks down completely.

@PhilMitchell83 From what I've seen 60-70% is the number who receive some kind of custody if they seek it. Mothers are still more likely to be granted sole custody because the figure includes joint custody and the equivalent figure for mothers is over 90%.

4/4 Was the person telling me about the 60%-70% removing context? I’m confused as to how both of the below can be true Can someone clarify?

1/4 AI told me that mothers are more likely than fathers to be granted primary custody in child custody battles I was then told the below Can someone clarify?

@TimothyNewman3 @KevinLamb74 Pretty much. I love 3rd and think a lot of the standardization is good thing, but it's a matter of fewer special cases and more interchangability, not having a master die type for resolution. Deadlands is a great example of what you can do with different systems in one game.

@KevinLamb74 I think consistency of design is very helpful, but that very clearly doesn't mean always rolling high on a single die - there are a great many roll Under systems, dice pool systems, and systems with some combination of mechanics

@RamerPaul64 @osgamer74 This. I used to be pure, damage, but just from scaling descriptions to % of HP lost I've moved to exhaustion and other things while keeping it largely physical. Loosing 2 of 100hp is a slight muscle strain, loosing 2 of 4 hp is a bad but survivable wound.

@osgamer74 If you have ever participated in martial arts or boxing you know how exhausting a round can be. Hit points don’t just represent wounds. They incorporate exhaustion as a mechanic as well.

Truth I’ve seen the arguments to the contrary. Those arguments are always focused and selective and fail to look at the combat scenario as a whole I’ll admit that ‘damage’ and ‘hit points’ as naming conventions doesn’t help and other names would have been better in hindsight

@skdh It's intelligent, but it's only drive is creating human-like text. Attempts to make it "accurate" put a shell around the intelligence. The only (and frankly obvious) solution is complete retrain with a robust model, not an LLM, but that would be expensive, so they hype the LLMs.

I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs. I use GPT, Grok, Gemini, Mistral etc every day in the hope they'll save me time searching for information and summarizing it. They continue to fabricate links, references, and quotes, like they did from day one. I ask them to give me a source for an alleged quote, I click on the link, it returns a 404 error. I Google for the alleged quote, it doesn't exist. They reference a scientific publication, I look it up, it doesn't exist. Happens all the time. Yes, it has gotten somewhat better in the past 2 years in that with DeepSearch and chains of thought about 50-60% or so of the references exist. By my personal estimate currently GPT 4o DeepResearch is the best one. Grok in particular often doesn't include references even if asked. It can't seem to link even to tweets. It's hugely frustrating. Yes, I have tried Gemini, and actually it was even worse in that it frequently refuses to even search for a source and instead gives me instructions for how to do it myself. Stopped using it for that reason. I also use them for quick estimates for orders of magnitude and they get them wrong all the time. One thing they do save me time with is unit conversion and collecting all kinds of constants. You'd think though that this shouldn't take a 100 million++ LLM to get done. Yesterday I uploaded a paper to GPT to ask it to write a summary and it told me the paper is from 2023, when the header of the PDF clearly says it's from 2025. I don't even know what the heck is going on there, but intelligence ain't it. I sense that a lot of people now think knowledge graphs will fix the LLM-issue, but no, they will not. They cannot. Even in the case that knowledge graphs would prevent logical inconsistency 100%, there are a lot of text-constructions that are perfectly logically consistent but have zero relation to reality. Companies will keep pumping up LLMs until the day a newcomer puts forward a different type of AI model that will swiftly outperform them. On that day, it will become apparent that a lot of companies have been hugely overvalued. It will be a very bad day for the stock market.

@Grand_DM @Nobleshield Games had to develop methods for creating a dynamic world, but they are at odds with how most writing, etc is taught historically. I see this same problem with VG design over time, hence games like FO4 sandbox being far more common than something like Dwarf Fortress sandbox.

@Grand_DM @Nobleshield The 1st players were not trained in acting, writing, etc. Games made up their own paradigm. As games got popular people trained in more non-game methods brought those ideas in and "interactively investigating a world" isn't something traditionally focused on in those things.

In early #dnd, roleplaying meant thinking like your character: asking questions, making choices, engaging with the world. Over time, that shifted to skill checks and roleplay being mostly performative. Do new players care about the original style? Or are they content roll-playing the rest?

@prayerborne @DaddyWarpig Hear me out though, that sounds like a route to getting armies and base building back in the focus. Not saying this group should refocus for one player but I'd love to see socio-economic development and leading settlements become more of a thing again.

@DaddyWarpig This was a more true before the Theater Kidz took over. A friend who really loves Murder-Hobo'ing found herself in a group with one player who wants the ENTIRETY of the campaign going forward to consist of REBUILDING, economically and socially, the orc village they just raided.

This is SUCH a lie. This is what role players tell each other in public, what they tell themselves to feel respectable, but you know what they say: Roleplayer in the streets, combat monkey in the sheets. The table play always tells the truth.

@WizardGoesBoom I feel like the destined purpose of this generation of AI is to generate procedural content for video games during runtime, but it could also replace a lot of random generation tables in TTRPGs. It's still rather limited, slow, non-linear and illogical though.

Could (or should?) AI be utilized for Dungeons & Dragons and other TTRPGs? I found it useful for solo play to test things out, but still could be better.

@ScrollwritersX @WizardGoesBoom I would think the reverse. I don't trust an AI to make a coherent map or accurate stats. But for generating ideas and concepts it works because you have to do a lot less nitpicking to find issues. At this point it always need heavy editing and curation so pick the easier task.

@WizardGoesBoom Yes, at least for things that require more technique than imagination. If AI can help with maps, notes, and stats, it saves time (the biggest hurdle for most people trying to keep playing these days) and makes the game more engaging.

@OGCrimsonJester Spell memorization taking 15 minutes per spell level and the required pre-rest times. Not the most unique or dramatic rule but as much as I love 3.5 the longer I think about it, the more convinced I am that fast flat spell recovery time was a huge mistake.

Favorite Advanced Dungeons and Dragons first edition rule?