sirblastalot

joined 2 years ago
MODERATOR OF
rpg
[–] sirblastalot@ttrpg.network 0 points 2 days ago

Oh no, you weren't supposed to take me seriously

[–] sirblastalot@ttrpg.network 2 points 2 days ago

Wait till you hear about necromancy

[–] sirblastalot@ttrpg.network 12 points 5 days ago (10 children)

See what you do is, you put the peasants in a circle and have them pass a magnet to eachother. Put a coil of wire in the middle and you've got infinite free energy!

[–] sirblastalot@ttrpg.network 1 points 5 days ago

Turns out Gamma Ray Bursts are just distant peasant railguns

[–] sirblastalot@ttrpg.network 6 points 5 days ago

Somewhat pedantical quibble, really just because I find it interesting: It's not exactly limited by barrel length. We can make faster burning, higher powered propellants, which you can get the full energy out of with a shorter barrel. The reason we don't is because that means you have a higher pressure inside the chamber and, even if your gun doesn't explode, you face more erosion from use. Your metallurgy ends up being the limiting factor, as it's all about how strong you can make your chamber. I just think it's cool because guns are a great example of how inter-related technologies are and how everything depends on everything else. Take a design for a machinegun back to the Napoleonic era and it will be worthless because without smokeless powder it will jam and clog after a couple rounds. Take back a formula for smokeless powder and it will be worthless because you don't know how to make brass cartridges. Try to make brass cartridges and you'll find you lack the precision tooling, and so on.

[–] sirblastalot@ttrpg.network 1 points 5 days ago

Every email client I can think of off the top of my head blocks images by default. And I don't see how that relates to your criticism of the whole idea of anti-phishing training

[–] sirblastalot@ttrpg.network 1 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Clicking the link hypothetically confirms to the spammer that yours is a valid and monitored email address, and that you're a sucker suitable for more targeted phishing.

Of course, it seems like every random user will also happily type their password into any text box that asks for it, too.

[–] sirblastalot@ttrpg.network 3 points 1 week ago

One time I failed a phishing test because I did a message trace and confirmed that it originated from our own internal servers.

[–] sirblastalot@ttrpg.network 2 points 1 week ago

Not necessarily!

[–] sirblastalot@ttrpg.network 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Much more so. Because the people that aren't shitlords wind up finding and staying in a stable group, while the people who can't maintain human relationships get perpetually booted back into the rando pool, so it becomes more and more concentrated awfulness all the time.

[–] sirblastalot@ttrpg.network 11 points 2 weeks ago

I started a campaign where, after 20 years of gaming with this group, we were finally going to have a dragon for a big bad. Then my entire country collapsed irl, destroying the game. It's like the universe abhors actually having dragons in your D&D game.

 

AI generated content is now banned. RPG-related discussion about generative AI is explicitly allowed. Please see this thread for more details: https://ttrpg.network/post/26260249

 

I've been reading about the user revolt on the Twin Peaks subreddit calling for a ban on AI art. As best I can tell we don't really have people posting AI stuff here yet, but I'm wondering if it would be a good idea to ban it before it becomes a problem. I'm soliciting feedback from y'all on this, please let me know what you prefer.

 

Perhaps obvious to everyone else, but I've hit upon a little trick for better coordinating game time. Instead of announcing "Game will be at 1 o'clock" I've been doing something like "Doors open at Noon, Game starts at 1." This way, the people that want to hang out, level their characters, decide what they like on their pizza, etc all show up at noon, and the people that are running late or decide to come at 1 arrive with the expectation that they're going to walk in the door and immediately start playing. It also provides a natural transition point from the arriving/hanging out mode to game time, which otherwise makes me feel kind of uncomfortably teacher-y, calling the whole class together and whatnot. Try it out, maybe it will help you too.

 

I recently started a new campaign. Two players (one who has played in my games before and their SO, who has been begging me for a spot for years) unexpectedly dropped out, moments before our first session. Their reason was somewhat baffling; they said they didn't want to spend "all day" on this, despite the game only going from noon to 3PM. They seemed to think this was a totally unreasonable expectation on my part, despite them previously having stated they were available during that time. This puzzled me.

I've been musing on this, and the strange paradox of people that say they want to play D&D but don't actually want to play D&D, and I've had an epiphany.

A lot of people blame Critical Role or other popular D&D shows for giving prospective players misplaced perceptions, often related to things like your DM's voice acting ability or prop budget, but I don't think that's what's going on here. My realization is that, encoded in the medium of podcasts and play videos, is another expectation: New players unconsciously expect to receive D&D the way they receive D&D shows: on-demand, at their house, able to be paused and restarted at their whim, and possibly on a second-screen while they focus on something else!

I don't know as this suggests anything we as DMs could do differently to set expectations, but it did go a long ways to helping me understand my friends, and I thought it might help someone here to share.

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