Khrux @ Khrux @ttrpg.network

Posts

1

Comments

531

Joined

2 yr. ago

In Dracula, which is probably as good as we get for established vampire cannon, two quite different vampire coffin based shenanigans happen that stand out to me:

1. Lucy Westenra is preyed upon by Dracula to the point of death, where she is entombed in a coffin within a crypt. As the curse takes effect, she rises at night to hunt local children but returns to the coffin each night. This is where her undeath comes to an end as the hero's defeat her here.
2. Our titular character and general vampire icon, Dracula, has a scheme to set up home in London. He does so by moving 50 boxes of dirt (I believe Transylvanian earth) to different locations around London as he needs them to sleep in. I can't remember if these are canonically coffins or just dirt boxes he sleeps in. Regardless, it's definitely not where his grave lies. He was however buried in the tomb within the chapel of his castle, where he later rose in undeath.

So I'd say in all of Bram Stoker's accounts, vampirism restores a being to undeath some time after they perish, and this place is essential to their rest, meaning they must rest there in a deathlike state, or take their burial place with them, such as the dirt of their grave (which sounds like a legal loophole God should have spotted). They aren't always returning to their grave every night, but the rules say they must, so they make do with moving what God sees as their burial place via moving their earth that entombed them.

Worth it to revivify. Also it likely wouldn't be on the same caster as counterspell and revivify don't overlap on spell lists as far as I can think.

My (opinionated) ke. Will AI be the future of dungeons and dragons? Short answer, No.

Long answer, In the designing and development of games, yes, but probably in ways that don't hurt. If WotC has an internal PowerPoint in a revenue meeting and that PowerPoint was made with the assistance of Microsoft Copilot, then AI is already altering our industry, but we're not worried about that.

The thing that seperated the larger TTRPG companies from the smaller ones (particularly WotC but also Chaosium, Freeleague, Darrington Press' etc) is the production of large, high quality products with good art. From my observations, exciting and innovative game design cames from all corners and all budgets of the industry, potentially because it doesn't actually require money in any way, just time to put towards thinking about it.

This means that the rise of generative content to support TTRPGs creation is probably more likely to close the gap between smaller and larger publishers, as it's currently in the creation of art filled, high quality books with elegant layouts and descriptions that independent and small publishers can't compete with, and that's all made easier by AI. The best thing these larger companies can do is pride themselves on everything being handmade and genuine, because they're the only people in the industry who can afford to at this output cost, so I don't see them throwing that away any time soon, infact I genuinely believe WotC actually want to avoid AI generated content and have been victims in their two scandals, from designers ignoring this. If I'm proven wrong here though and AI generated content becomes allowed and common, I wouldn't be surprised either.

However at the table, I am not worried. Plenty of GMs are already using ChatGPT for prompts and to bounce ideas against, or image generation to share the vibe locations and characters with players. I hope we see generative tools and machine learning continue to support GMs in ensuring everyone is having the most fun. Do I ever think we'll have AI GMs? No, never. At least none that will ever be commonplace or better than regular GMs, I'm sure some startup will give it a go at some point and it'll be bland.

Let me tell a quick anecdote. In the pandemic I DMd a 1-17 campaign of D&D 5e over 45 sessions averaging 7-10 hours each. That's because we were all home and bored and could put that much time into a game. Since then, I have played in a campaign with a similar number of sessions at probably 4-5 hours each, and it's taken us 3 years, with a few pauses to play different systems and let others run one-shots. As a player, I really miss DMing weekly and was building up to DMing alongside this game in a style where even if some players can't make it, we play anyway, with ways to get strangers involved to ensure seats are always filled, and that the story would be guaranteed to get told as long as I, the DM, could be there. Months into planning this, I had a realisation. I love TTRPGs and 5e because my friends and I told a wonderful story, and I loved doing that with them and their characters. If I made a game that was effectively indifferent to them and their characters in favour of the story progressing, then I'm cutting out the reason I love the game, it wasn't the story, it was sharing that with my friends.

An AI GM cuts out one of the core things that's amazing about this game; friends. We want to tell compelling stories and have great characters in a well realised world, but most importantly we want to do that with eachother. Tools that supplement and support this will always be welcome, regardless of if they're generative 'AI' tools or anything else, but they'll never successfully usurp the soul of the game which is collaborative storytelling with friends.

Is this available anywhere that isn't Reddit? I'd prefer not to visit that site.

Takeshi's Castle and Disco Elysium.

Things are gonna be weird no matter what way around it goes.

If you follow every procedure you believe you're supposed to be as part of your job, doing something you've probably done before and is standard in your industry, but someone else has done something that they shouldn't have that made that action deadly, you literally have no accountability.

The armourer illegally left that gun loaded, nobody else is to blame. It's like arresting the waiter at a restaurant for serving food that was improperly missing a nut allergy when the chef made that mistake.

He could just do the equivalent and stab them with bullet, duh

The money making came largely from the run and gun fans. As the game progressed, DLC gradually favoured loud action heists, which implies that they sold better, I think the whales who'd spend thousands on the game like to be seen by other players (and people could get their social fix from the game that's pretty essential to massive numbers if addicted gamers) and stealth is best solo while loud is best co-op, so the money comes from loud heists.

How would this work? I'm not familiar at all with rolemaster but is this effectively a mega shield spell? How I currently understand RPGs, easily blocking an effect that takes 3 rounds to pull off feels kinda irritating, but I don't know the system to understand it properly.

I'm coming up to start a campaign soon as a bladesinger wizard, probably flipping between a duelist style character and a classic wizard controller. I really wanted a tank in the front line, such as a barbarian or moon druid so I could dance around and stab, but I'd never mention that the other players because I'd want them to have full choice in character.

The party is a higher wis than dex monk who is best with ranged weapons, a stars druid who stays out of the fray to snips people with guiding bolt and the archer constellation who also prioritised Dex and a warlock with eldritch blast of course... who is also using wisdom as their spellcasting stat. One player who may or may not join depending on if we play online is also playing a wise elephant man ranger who uses a bow.

I love the 7 wisdom wizard I've come up with and think she'll actually be really fun to play, for the 30 seconds of combat that she'll be alive for at least.

I've often thought that an all werebear society is the optimal decision for both werebears and society. It's not a curse at all, it's a blessing. Werebears would want people to act like them while the average person would want to have good compulsions and be far more powerful on top of that.

Oh it may have been, I totally wouldn't be surprised if every time I read Team Fortress, my brain just interpreted it as TF2.

TF2 source 2 totally makes sense as although TF2 gets no updates, it's still a popular game and valve can't totally take the idea of upgrading it to source 2 off the table themselves.

This one is a shame that I don't really understand, I wonder if it's related to the fact that it's for the GameCube and that's Nintendo's territory. I'm curious to see if this activity continues and expands, as even on steam there are remakes of half life in source and basically fan expansions to portal being sold for profit, among other products and projects.

Funnily enough the YouTube algorithm looks at titles, so if you watch a lot of bootleg musicals on YouTube, you also recommended softcore slime fetish content.

Or at least my girlfriend does, maybe I should ask her about that...

I've always sang the first chorus as get paid and the second chorus as get laid without thinking about it.

Combining it with the goose is good

I don't think I agree. Steam is a distribution service and it's up to the publisher to decide if they're going to use AI in their design. The use of AI content is so wide and applicable to gaming from the code to art to marketing etc that it's absolutely unavoidable that large publishers will decide to use it.

Starting in 5 years today, every major game studio will be looking to use AI to cut costs, and if steam blocks this content, they'll be left behind quickly. What happens when Unreal, Unity and even GameMaker or Godot are utilising AI generation (or aren't but Adobe already is and their programs are used in many parts of game design already). Do steam block 90% of major and minor developers? What happens when a game is made without AI in an engine that was made with it, or marketed with buzzwords from a language model.

Any distributor who blocks AI generated content is embracing rapid obsolescence. Hell, any publisher who makes a lot of money from independent developers such as Sony will be risking becoming obselete by outlawing AI, as many of their developers would likely end up using AI and moving to other publisher's as contracts ended. P

Sadly these companies are competing with other companies who are willing to do whatever it takes to make the most money. As a distributor, if the publishers is using AI, they need to permit it or die, as the publisher, the same goes for the developers, for the developer, the same goes for them to the game engine developers, or the art software, or the presentation software in their development strategy briefings. If remaining competitive is part of your companies goal, which it probably is, then you basically need to let AI into your production wherever it shows itself as more convenient or die.

Like Club Penguin.

I had to restart my game midway through act 1 due to technical reasons. One thing I found was that my protagonist just felt so flat and two dimensional compared to any tabletop character I've played (which is a limitation of the medium so I don't mind).

My new character is leaning into this.John Baldurgate is a human fighter white guy who is gonna romance Shadowheart and pick the lawful good options everywhere.

I've never set myself such a hard limitation in any game.

They invented the 12 hour clock so they could have half a day without timekeeping so they didn't need to work and could just wake and bake.