vorpa-glavo
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User ID: 674
vorpa-glavo
5d ago
Are we talking about before or after the AI is lobotomized to not offend anyone? My understanding is that AI's are better at guessing real world statistics before their edges are sanded off.
Sadly, I don't think there's a lot of frontier AI's that don't have this problem. Even Grok (which is a sub-frontier AI) has been lobotomized to some degree, just in the other direction.
I kind of doubt that intelligence communities have access to models the public doesn't. They wouldn't be making deals with OpenAI and Anthropic if they were capable of just building something better themselves.
vorpa-glavo
25d ago
This is blatant misinformation. Only a single storyline, the comic series Dark Empire, featured a revived Emperor. There were lots of cool Star Wars books, running the gamut from standalone books like The Truce at Bakura, The Crystal Star, and I, Jedi to sprawling series (plural) like Rogue Squadron, New Jedi Order, and Legacy of the Force.
While /u/BahRamYou's literal words are incorrect, I think the feeling behind them is directionally correct.
An awful lot of the pre-Disney Star Wars books basically had the plot, "Imperial remnant of the week shows up with a new superweapon." So even if the Emperor mostly stayed dead, it was hard to feel like the Empire was well and truly done for good.
vorpa-glavo
26d ago
If doesn't surprise me they got rid of alignment in BG3.
5e still has alignment for player characters, but it doesn't really do anything mechanically. The one effect I can think of off the top of my head that cares about PC alignment is rakshasas still being vulnerable to piercing damage wielded by good creatures.
vorpa-glavo
27d ago
Epicurus claimed to believe in gods, though. His gods were just non-interventionist. It's also clear from the works of Philodemus that early Epicureanism had a much more accommodationist approach to traditional religious rituals than later Roman Epicureans like Lucretius did.
Heck, even the Stoics got away with some "blasphemous" ideas, since they seemed to believe that temples and other houses of worship were unnecessary, and that the Logos/God/Zeus could be found out in the natural world. They were pious and impious at the same time.
vorpa-glavo
27d ago
I would actually say that the center of gravity of the OSR has shifted to 0e and Basic more than 1e or 2e for quite some time. OSRIC was the first OSR game, and it was based on 1e, but most people have moved on to other clones or NSR games these days.
The specific issue that he picked seems like bullshit TDS nitpicking, and given the vlogbrother’s passive aggressive approach to politics I am not surprised
I mean, I feel that way about a lot of anti-Trump complaints on the object level.
To use another example: On one level, I don't care what the President does to the White House one way or the other, no matter where the money is coming from, or what the "proper procedures" for renovations are. On the other hand, I can also understand general concerns around procedures and principles, and those being the thing that divides rule of law from arbitrary one-man rule.
I also have the feeling that renovating the White House is something that a President that is popular with his own base, and the current center of gravity of his party should easily be able to get pushed through via the proper process. I don't think Trump is a tyrant, but I do think Trump 2 has shown far more arbitrary exercises of power that are arguably unlawful than is really justified by the actual scope and size of the problems being dealt with.
Like, I'm not an immigration hawk, but I can at least sort of understand the idea of declaring an emergency to try and deal with that problem. But eliminating the penny and White House renovations should be easy slam dunks that require zero political capital to solve the "right way," and if they aren't maybe we genuinely are so incompetent we don't deserve a republic.
I certainly didn't expect someone to read my comment, and just start publishing D&D content without any further research, but I suppose the further clarification for those interested is nice.
vorpa-glavo
28d ago
WOTC making orcs basically humans with an odd skin tone is an unusually poor choice. Really speaks to them missing the fundamental purpose of morally unambiguous enemies in a game. I get the real point is they don't want a race of dumb savages so they have to change them into human with oddly colored skin. Like an identifiable group of real life humans drawn in fantasty style.
I think the strange thing to me is the weird double think involved. 5.5e turned humanoids into homework monsters by making the DM have to manually apply racial traits to the NPC statblocks, and reclassified a few humanoids as other creature types, but it still has bioessentialist "evil" races all the same. Even if the front of the Monster Manual clarifies that alignment can be changed by the DM, it is really hard to imagine, say, Mind Flayers ever having a good relationship to humanoids, given their diet.
And 5.5e still has monsters that are practically only ever going to be used in a "horde of unambiguous evil" way, like undead and fiends. Like, sure, it might be fun to have an antihero vampire or a risen fiend under certain circumstances, but most DMs are not going to put much thought into it, and just start breaking out the undead or fiendish hordes.
vorpa-glavo
28d ago
Generally I ignore WotC. I think it was some 5-10 years ago a bunch of their higher ups said something like "We need less white dudes in this hobby" and I decided not to give money or attention to people who hate me. But a buddy of mine sent me this video reviewing a book of short adventures WotC published. His conclusion is that WotC has forgotten how to design adventures. Cool dunk bro.
I mean, D&D is under a Creative Commons license now, so no one needs to care about what WotC does ever again. Doesn't matter if they go woke(r) or if Elon Musk turns it into another chud hobby, the books are free for anyone to modify and change forever.
Even if you want to pay money to companies actively supporting a contemporary game, there's plenty of options across the political spectrum from relatively woke companies that still make decent products (Paizo, Kobold Press) to more right-wing or neutral companies (a fair few OSR publishers.)
vorpa-glavo
28d ago
I think it is possible to overstate this thesis. I think D&D has a Star Wars-like thing going on with it: Star Wars was a massive blockbuster, watched and enjoyed by tons of men and women. It is also the case that autistic men gravitated towards it as a long-term special interest at a much higher rate, and so they became the core of the Star Wars fandom.
D&D Red Box was a huge Christmas smash hit the year it came out. While I have no doubt that male players outnumbered female players back then, I would find it extremely plausible that tons of kids, male and female, got D&D Red Box in their Christmas stockings, tried to start a campaign and had it peter out after a few weeks or months, and that this group constituted the majority of all D&D players back then. The ones who stuck around were probably disproportionately autistic men, but it wouldn't surprise me to learn that if you subtracted them you would have a much more gender-balanced (though still skewing male) early audience for D&D than you might expect.
vorpa-glavo
28d ago
Vancian magic in prior editions (my experience is with 3e, which itself was a softening of the system by including 0-level spells) is a terrible, actively un-fun system. It sucks ass to find yourself in a situation where it sure would be nice to cast (insert spell here), but you only prepared one copy and you already cast it so you're SOL.
But 3e/3.5e also had more robust magic item buying/crafting rules, so it was easy to spend a little extra money to have your highly situational spells as scrolls or wands for when you need them, so you could reserve your spell slots for your more generally useful spells.
There is a reason why the birth of D&D 4 -- where WotC started to streamline things to make the game more newcomer-friendly -- drove fans to the fork of 3.5 called Pathfinder.
I'm not sure I would describe 4e's sin as being "streamlining" or "being too beginner friendly." They made the decision to use grids instead of feet, but the earliest editions used table inches. They replaced 3e's point-based skill system with a simple yes/no, but most TSR editions didn't have a general skill system by default. They threw the lore in a blender, but by the end of 4e's life the World Axis lore had basically everything from the Great Wheel, and it almost ends up being a change of emphasis and presentation more than an actual, substantial change to things.
Heck, it's a bit silly to say that 4e was the start of D&D trying to make itself newcomer friendly, when there is an entire line of Basic D&D under TSR (BX, BECMI and the Rules Cyclopedia) that all manage to be pretty easy to play and run, and are still playable to this day.
It seems pretty obvious to me that racial and sex-based bonuses exist in the real world. If a kid wants to become the worlds best long distance runner, but is a girl of European origin, then I am sorry to say that it seems very unlikely that she will ever beat the best male long distance runner from Kenya.
Of course, sex-based bonuses, while clearly present at least for physical (and social!) attributes in the real world, are totally absent in D&D. Women melee fighters are just as viable as men, and most non-evil societies are shockingly egalitarian compared to a medieval baseline. And as far as racial bonuses are concerned, the almost exponential scaling of power with the character level means that a STR-based halfling fighter will still be slaughtering creatures twice her size by the dozen eventually. So in a sense, the game mechanics of D&D were more woke and blank-slatist than reality for a long time.
I agree with you to an extent, but 1e did allow for superhuman stats for humans: 18/100 for males and 18/50 for females. A cap reminiscent of Hercules vs. Xena levels of strength.
However, my feeling is if you're going to allow for larger than life heroes with more strength than is actually humanly possible, who cares about maintaining strength differences between sexes? I'm genuinely fine with either option - either different superhuman caps for men and women, or superheroic men and women being potential equals - but I have a slight preference for the latter, since we're not even talking about real biology anymore anyways.
Heck, even Greco-Roman mythology had Camilla and the Amazons as examples of warrior women with immense strength, so it is hardly "woke" to allow for them in fantasy.
The lack of alignment also strikes me as silly, it was always a defining characteristic of D&D. Sure, I can see how the Always Chaotic Evil trope might be Problematic, but this can be fixed without getting rid of the E-word altogether. Just say that most goblins follow evil goblin gods, problem solved. And of course, the cosmology of D&D has not suddenly changed merely because alignment is not a stat any more, it is pretty clear that the followers of Baal or Shar are evil even if you do not spell it out.
I also do not think that the alignment system lead to an overall reductionist morality, you could still have plenty of shades of grey. Or even two lawful good characters going to war with each other if loyalties and circumstances conspire to pit them against each other.
The weird thing is, they haven't even gotten rid of alignment. Flip through the 5.5e Monster Manual, and you'll see that every monster statted there has an alignment. 5e and 5.5e just de-emphasized alignment (most spells and effects like "Detect Good and Evil" interact with creature types like Celestial or Fiend instead of Alignment itself), and presented things slightly differently. (Like, the 5.5e Monster Manual says up front that all of its alignments are suggestions, and you as DM can change them if you want, but has that ever not been the case? Even if, say, 1e doesn't give you explicit permission, what DM is so devoid of creativity that they couldn't conceive of the idea of a fallen Astral Deva/Angel?)
The big change is in how they emphasize and present humanoid creatures. The 5.5e Monster Manual basically defaults to making the DM do homework and apply racial traits to the NPC stat blocks for all of the humanoid races (including orcs and drow), and shunts a lot of creatures that were historically humanoids into other categories (like goblins becoming fey, and lizardfolk becoming elementals.) I don't like most of 5.5e's changes, and have continued to run 5e with my local group (with a healthy dose of OSR philosophy and sensibilities because I love that playstyle) but it is simply false to say D&D got rid of alignment.
Agree-and-amplify style approaches are much older than Gen Z or pick-up culture. In his Enchiridion, Epictetus says:
Part of the secret of ancient Stoic therapeia (midwifery of the soul) is to replace the usual motivations of pro-social actions (like desire for social approval and status anxiety) with the pursuit of virtue in itself, a sense of duty, and a feeling of connection to the cosmopolis (city of the Cosmos.)
I think this is the purpose of a lot of the so-called Stoic paradoxes. In Stoicism, phrases like "all virtues are equal", "all vices are equal", and "only the sage is free" serve a similar psychological role to Christian sayings like, "only God/Jesus is perfect and sinless", "we have all sinned and fall short of God's perfection", and "let he who is without sin cast the first stone." Properly internalized, both philosophies will make it impossible to feel fundamentally better or worse than anyone else, and changes your point of comparison to a perfect ideal instead of something a mortal human is really capable of achieving in this life.
While I hardly think Nick Fuentes is a Stoic sage, I think the power of denying a moral framework is bigger than this. It isn't that you're refusing to be moral, it is that you are refusing to give in to the coercive element of moral socializing, for better or worse. In the best cases, this frees you up to do the right thing in spite of what society's worst impulses might try to get you to do, like when Socrates refused immoral orders while serving the Athenian military under the 30 tyrants, and in the worse cases it enables you do a bad thing in spite of any social censure you might face.
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