What a lazy article. It’s just restating the PHB text of the subclass with the most blindingly obvious commentary. The spells they suggest aren’t even good suggestions. They mention a bunch of blaster spells which are not great on EK due to low spell slots.
While I’ve come to appreciate and prefer the crunchier PF2e, I’ve gotta say I agree with this. I bounced off of D&D multiple times as a kid, and only when I was first exposed to 5e did I actually stick with it long enough to really discover the beautiful world of TTRPGs. D&D may not be the best system, but it’s the gateway drug.
Just so long as WOTC continues to fuck up and do something despicable once every few months which encourages all of their players to branch out and try other systems, all will be right with the world.
My friends and I started playing DnD during COVID. We’re all at least normal intelligence, college educated people (I even work in a job where I regularly research federal regulations, so I’m used to navigating complex rules). Our biggest complaint was how obtuse and difficult to pin down some of the rules in this game are.
Six of us spent a half hour trying to figure out how darkvision works, and the answers we found online didn’t seem to match up with what we were reading in the handbook. You would find something mentioning darkvision, but it wouldn’t explain how it worked. Then somewhere else would say something different about darkvision. It seemed like you needed to go to multiple different sections of the handbook to piece everything together. We encountered multiple instances of this.
Our one friend defended it all saying it’s deliberately obtuse to allow for DM flexibility, but most of us disagree with that approach. The rules should be explicitly stated, and then a caveat added that all rules are flexible if the DM wants them to be. There should not be a debatable way to play the game, as far as official rules are concerned. How you bend the rules is entirely up to you.
While it’s true that 5e places a lot of the work on the DM, I think in that case your group just failed to read the rules properly. Darkvision is one of the more well-defined abilities in the game.
When six newbies struggle to figure it out, then it isn’t well-defined. Or at the very least isn’t well structured to find the definition quickly. I will die on this hill.
I think what you’re actually alluding to is that the books are poorly organized, which is indeed a common complaint. Darkvision is very clearly explained, but the explanation is “treat dim light as bright light and darkness as dim light”. In order to understand what that means mechanically, you then have to go find the section on light levels and obscurement (and then the rules on obscurement require you to read the blinded and invisible conditions). This isn’t necessarily a bad thing and is actually how most TTRPGs handle nested mechanics, but D&D notoriously has a really bad index in the PHB, which means it’s very hard to actually find the nested mechanics you need. Lots of other TTRPGs will give you a page reference or something when they reference rules found in other parts of the book. 5e doesn’t.
Thank you! It should take about 3hrs, but since this One-Shot leans more on the roleplay aspect it can change depending on your players. I’m pretty sure you can get this done in a weekend unless you’re running 1hr sessions!
If you end up using my notes, let me know how it goes and if I should change anything
Do it, it’s so rewarding! I know it can overwhelming at first, but with my notes, it’ll be a breeze!!! The most important thing is just be flexible, your players will often times throw a curve ball. If you get stuck just look up a rule, if it takes to long make a ruling and move on!
i can imagine that its rewarding. One more thing, for how many people is this campaign? I dont think we are gonna be a whole lot, maybe more like 2-3 people without the DM
I’m not sure yet where I stand on using AI to enhance images you made. I think if it’s for commercial purposes, it shouldn’t be ok since it would essentially be profiting off others work.
But in this case, my big issue is they did this without telling their team or bosses. This is essentially no different from hiring a third party to enhance your work so you don’t have to do as much and pocketing the difference. Sounds like they’re updating their guidelines though and I hope this person is fired or won’t be contracted again. They should probably switch the art to the earlier versions in D&D Beyond and future printings too. Which is another thing, the “enhanced” one doesn’t seem better enough to have warranted this type of risk. I’m not sure what that person was thinking.
I love epic level campaigns. I love dealing with all the super powerful game breaking magics and abilities. I usually set them in the astral plane, the hells, or more recently, space. I started reading about it’s version of space a few months ago and I love everything about it. Space in D&D is fucking gnarly. Like, even the gods of Toril and other planes are afraid of space.
@RGB3x3@TheTango it makes it easier but think of all the talented people who draw and actually create art. Their skills go unused and also the fact ai art uses other peoples art without their permission to learn and create. It’s not a simple answer and there are multiple reasons why ai art is frowned upon and disliked.
Did you people even read the article? This is about an official artist creating official artwork using AI.
And expecting DMs to pay for artists to create fanworks of characters or other campaign backgrounds and whatnot is really outlandish, sorry.
You think people, including poor ones, are going to pay hundreds of bucks for some artworks for their D&D sessions? And you think I need the reality check? lol
Maybe just stop the whole bad faith trolling entirely because this is just cringe.
The linked article doesn’t provide any details, it merely states that an artist used AI to “create” or “generate” artwork. However in a different article about the same incident the artist claims that he only used an AI as a tool to enhance his own drawings, and provides before and after images. Assuming he isn’t lying to cover his ass, IMO the AI contributed very little to the artwork.
AI very provably does use other peoples’ art more than any other artist. It needs huge amounts of media that’s used as a basis for training material — far, far more than your average artist will consume. You can teach a person how to draw, sculpt, paint, model, etc. without ever showing them another artist’s work. You really can’t do that with ML tools we have currently. It’s not completely impossible, but you would be relying on getting a lot of training data in another way and it would probably require a lot of input from humans on the output end to make a model that can come up with something reasonably comprehensible. A
We don’t have much in terms of laws about this kind of usage because it’s not like in the past a company like DC comics has decided that they want to make Jim Lee’s style to become the “official” style of DC comics, but they don’t want to pay Jim Lee, so they hire a Chinese art factory to mimic his style and cut him out. Something like that wouldn’t be illegal in the sense of current laws, but probably would have been substantially more expensive than simply hiring Lee himself. However, it definitely would have been unethical. It also would likely have caused a legal challenge that might have affected how our laws deal with replication of a “style”. Even in cases where a company establishes their own style guide based on an art style of a specific artist as is common in animation (where it’s understood that the usage of that style is part of the concept art), there is typically an evolution in how that style as it standardizes- See “Steamboat Mickey” versus current versions of Mickey Mouse, or the changes from the first season to the current season of the Simpsons for example.
This isn’t about using AI tools for your average DM to make art resources for their home campaign. That’s a perfectly reasonable use-case. It isn’t as though your average DM is likely to be commissioning custom art every time there’s a new character in the campaign - they’ll do what we’ve always done: Find reference material that’s “close enough” from copyrighted works and say “something like this.” But if a company is going to start digging into AI, then we as the audience have the right to say, “No, I’m not going to support that and won’t buy a product produced in that way. I assign value to art made the ‘traditional’ way” The obsolescence of industries due to technology is not an inevitability - by all rights it’s entirely possible that an automated process to make perfect, nutritionally balanced food bars that are both cheaper and healthier than a McDonald’s burger could have been produced by now - but no one wants that. Very few people have a diet that consists entirely of Soylent. Just as there’s more to food than nutrition and value, there’s more to art than pictures. The so-called “free hand of the market” goes both ways.
I’m a digital artist. I’m in an interesting position in this debate, because I see the value and the power of tools like MidJourney and Stable Diffusion and the like. The prospect of training an AI tool on my own work and giving it to the public to be able to make their own art using my style is exactly the kind of artsy-fartsy “concept” thing I dig. I use things like “content-aware fill” tools and special brushes in my work that are basically cousins to these systems and they help me immensely. But also I think that artists should have the right to choose whether their work is used in this way and that if a company is profiting from the usage of an AI model that’s been trained from mass scraping of the internet there should be some legal consideration for that.
In particular, only human- created content is currently eligible for copyright protection.
About a decade ago, there was a case over who owned the copyright of a bunch of selfies taken by macaques with a camera left lying out by a wildlife photographer. The US Copyright Office ultimately decided the images were public domain since they weren’t created by a human.
Because of that, AI art isn’t eligible for copyright protections.
If you make a picture book using stable diffusion and chatgpt, the only thing you can protect is the layout you did by hand of the public domain text and images on the page. Someone could sell a competing derivative work with their own original layout.
@RGB3x3@TheTango
I think for the common person its fine, like making character art or some custom monster/place/whatevs for your own campaign but when you pay for it from a big, known publisher i think its reasonable and ethical to employ talanted artists.
This is particularly due to an artist using AI art for a source book they’re publishing.
That’s a problem for them because only human- created work is eligible for copyright protection; both animal-created art and AI art is inherently public domain. They want to control the IP in the source books, so they think it’s a problem if people can legally just copy the images out of them.
It sounds like Mattel will disallow the use of AI generated images in future official works:
The Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game franchise says it won’t allow artists to use artificial intelligence technology to draw its cast of sorcerers, druids and other characters and scenery.
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