“Why is a Raven like a Writing Desk?” “Because they both start with ‘R’.”
This is Lewis Carroll’s classic riddle the Mad Hatter asks to Alice in her titular Adventures in Wonderland. Interestingly, it is never answered in the story and was intended to be a nonsensical riddle that would have no answer. But Carroll did give a fun and clever answer later after years of people asking him. His answer was “Because it can produce a few notes, tho they are very flat; and it is never put with the wrong end in front!” Other writers have suggested clever meta answers as well, such as “Poe wrote on both,” and “Because there is a ‘b’ in both and an ‘n’ in neither.” I like to think that your fake sphinx would both be not very imaginative in his answer, and also clearly a poor speller.
I have no issue with AI in tabletop roleplaying. Being able to create an NPC and just define its position and what it’s motivations are could lead to some really organic interesting gameplay.
I totally disagree with how that articles author lumps in AI with NFTs too. AI is supplemental. It’s just a tool to further expand on existing technology like search engine optimization. NFTs don’t provide anything like that. They are just gimmicks.
AI discourse has way too much “Throwing the baby out with the bathwater,” especially from a lot of people who have no idea what they’re talking about. AI, as a thing, is not a perfect system. It’s not a magic panacea that will cure all. There are legitimate concerns about how much it infringes on creative spaces and how it may put people out of work. There are also legitimate concerns about the AI training data scraping web-hosted content indiscriminately without permission. However, these are not the same as AI just being “bad”.
Do I think a D&D campaign led by a ChatGPT-like DM would be “good”? Probably not as it stands. I’ve played a lot with ChatGPT and its limitations are pretty obvious. Could it get better in the future? Probably. Is it an interesting possible way to get to play D&D if you can’t get a group together? I mean, it’s gotta be better than nothing, right? But the real interesting prospect to me is machine-learning powered tools for the DM. A System that’s trained on WotC-owned resources that lets you just choose a paintbrush that’s labeled “cave” and draw out a series of tunnels and have it automatically populate with crystals and mushrooms and visual points of interest, which lets you sketch out a good-looking map in minutes. Then, as your party is in the cave, the system knows what type of “biome” you used so it has a button to let you generate a random encounter, which it takes from your character levels and where your players are. There’s a lot of ways that “smart” tools could take a lot of work off the DM’s shoulders that would be great. I don’t know if they’re in the pipeline, but the point is that AI isn’t a boogeyman that’s just out to steal jobs and IP.
I really like that you mentioned machine learning. ML is a great practical application of a subset of AI. You don’t necessarily need an advanced AI DM. Sometimes you just need a tool to simplify DMing. I remember writing cellular automata that would build maps and dungeons. That’s not using ML or neural networks or anything like that, but it was code that simplified my task. People tend to think about the hype behind buzzwords and not how they are practically applied.
Fun fact: Monopoly was originally called The Landlord’s Game and was made by a Georgist to illustrate the inherent unfairness and ruthlessness of capitalism and especially the exploitative nature of land ownership.
Then ruthless capitalists made a couple tweaks and made vast riches selling a derived but legally destinct version celebrating the very things the original vilified before being bought out by Hasbro who now control D&D.
I’m sure he is quite right that the CEO has never played D&D though. Or any other game. He was produced in a lab and spends every waking moment (which are all of them since they engineer CEOs not to need sleep) devising ways to be an even more terrible facsimile of a human.
Would be more useful if they weren’t visually distinct and obviously unfair. Also, if you have to take into account the surface as well, this is just fully misleading.
This seems like a good opportunity to get creative with your magic items!
The wizard got ambushed from behind and needs to get out of reach with his Misty step (Bonus Action). Then he turns the tide on his attackers with his Staff of Fireball (Action)!
True, although I feel like requiring proper resource management would encourage the same sort of creativity. Maybe you want to keep that 3rd level spell slot available in case you need a counterspell, or to cast Fly for exploration later on
“You are driving a carriage. The carriage is empty when you begin your route. In the morning, you bring 2 merchants to an auction. In the afternoon, you take 3 farmers to the market. In the evening, you bring a noble to a ball. What color are the driver’s eyes?”
The creature was told this riddle by someone else, and misunderstood the answer: when the creature was “the driver,” the answer was “purple,” because its eyes are purple. It still believes the answer is “purple,” even though the players’ eyes are not purple.
“A man is sentenced to death. He has to choose from three rooms to receive his punishment. The first room has a firing squad holding fully charged Wands of Magic Missile. The second room is full of deadly poison. The third room is full of bulettes that haven’t eaten for six months. Which room should he choose?”
The creature believes the answer is the second room, because it is immune to poison. It does not understand that bulettes feed constantly, so a bulette that hasn’t eaten in 6 months would be dead, and refuses to grasp the answer no matter how many times it’s explained.
I always wanted to see a huge battle scene, like Lord of the Rings thousands of fighters… and before they start fighting, two gigantic d20s drop from the sky and make a roll.
I’m not saying I would have preferred that to what the Dungeons and Dragons movie was, but… okay, I’m saying that.
My DM once fudged something and I didn’t question it at all. It was in curse of Strahd, the party was level 3. He was using the RAW rules in the adventure for random encounters, one of which says the party can get jumped by 3d6 wolves. He rightly surmised that us getting ganked 10 wolves wasn’t a very interesting conclusion to our story, so he made up some dumb deus ex machina, and I was 100% there for it. If WOTC can’t make a balanced random encounter table, why should we be beholden to it?
I think this is pretty funny but depending on your players, they might check all 3 for mimics! Some of us were traumatized once and now we are very suspicious…
@plum This is the first time a Mimic I placed that was successfully triggered, and this particular group of players didn't vocalize any suspicions on the book being the Mimic. We ended the session with joking that everything is now a potential mimic, especially that rock over there, or perhaps that Stalagmite, maybe even my sword is a mimic now.
I just gotta patiently wait for the Mimic funny business to calm down before I place another one, muhahahahaha.
So, RAW here is how a round with a spell is supposed to work:
Character A announces that they are casting a spell. The name of the spell, and other information such as its level are not mentioned.
There is a short pause to allow someone to use a Reaction.
If no one uses a Reaction, Character A either rolls or tells people what they need to roll.
Side note: This is where someone could technically cheat by changing their spell slot level, and is one of the many reasons why Counterspell is a terribly-designed spell.
After this roll (and any effect that would apply to those rolls), Character A describes the effect and can optionally state what the spell was:
You all take 36 Fire damage, as an explosion of flame blooms at your feet from my character’s 6th-level Fireball.
RAW, Counterspell would occur during that second step. The creature that casts it has no idea what the spell they’re countering is, beyond context clues (i.e. they’ve seen that armored spell caster has been casting spells that heal their allies earlier).
As you said, there are rules to identify a spell. They were added by either Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything or Xanathar’s Guide to Everything. A character can use their Reaction to identify the spell. This usually means you’ll need 2 spellcasters working in conjunction for Counterspell to work with an identified spell.
As for how I run it at my table: I don’t. I really don’t like it. It’s anti-fun, and the awkward pause and wording that’s required to cast spells in case someone wants to counter it. There’s some equally awkward metagaming thats required if someone accidentally blurts out the name of the spell, and it plays really poorly with how most VTT software handles spells (most just spit them out in the chat for everyone to see). It is just so un-fun that I just ban the spell outright at my table and it makes everything much simpler.
Having said that, if I do play at a table where it isn’t banned, we usually go about it as I described above. The Reaction needed to identify the spell is an intentional design decision to prevent spellcasters from identifying every spell cast their way before deciding to counter them, and needing 2 spellcasters to work together to “cleanly” cast it is perfectly fine, in my opinion. Spellcasters are already bonkers in this game, there’s no reason to empower them further by letting them save-up their Counterspells until they’re absolutely critical.
It’s just important that every player is on the same page and doesn’t blurt-out their spell names whenever they cast a spell.
I like giving all my spells new names (for example, I was playing a cleric who worshipped the god of bees. Cause light wounds was “sting” in my spellbook) if the dm is down with it. Gives that layer of abstraction and lets me add flavor.
Yeah from what I know it’s one of the more commonly banned spells. Personally I just don’t like the idea of banning published content. Making an effort to keep things mysterious until the spell is actually taking effect is a bit cleaner of a solution, and I do like the teamwork aspect of a RAW spell identification + counterspell
Glad to help! I’m somebody who wishes more videos were blog posts so I totally get it. I tend to enjoy Matt Colville’s videos, though.
There’s a short summary at shop.mcdmproductions.com/…/the-talent, with a few excerpts from the PDF (in images, unfortunately), but I felt like in this case the video covered it better.
And yeah, I feel like strain could be so much fun to roleplay, compared to spell slots.
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