TRPG General Chat

Hot RPG Questions

12:01 AM

1

Q: Should the Beast Barbarian Call the Hunt feature just give CON x 5 temporary hit points

The feature says 14th-level Path of the Beast feature The beast within you grows so powerful that you can spread its ferocity to others and gain resilience from them joining your hunt. When you enter your rage, you can choose a number of other willing creatures you can see within 30 feet of you ...

Hot RPG Questions

12:27 AM

6

Q: How do the prone condition and AC against ranged attacks interact?

So, this is just a clarification about how a character's AC interacts with the Prone condition aside from the Flat-Footed condition. Mostly because being prone gives you the ability to Take Cover and some people I'm playing with understand that being prone gives you standard cover against ranged ...

pathfinder-2e actions conditions armor-class cover

Feeds

2:03 AM

TTRPGkids: Review of The ABCs of D&D!

posted on June 05, 2023 by Steph C.

The ABCs of D&D is a fun way for us tabletop gamers to start sharing our hobby with our kids and teach about the ABCs! I received this book as a gift from a good friend after kiddo (now 4yo) was born, and we’ve read it many times since. I’m happy to be sharing this review with you today, and I hope you enjoy it too! Continue reading “Review of The ABCs of D&D!”…

KorvinStarmast

2:31 AM

@nitsua60 Yes, that's cool, go ahead and do that.

Hot RPG Questions

3:53 AM

7

Q: Can you have more than 1 panache point at a time?

I want to play a swashbuckler, and I saw the Gymnast and Tumbling Opportunist feats where you can tumble through and then trip as a free action. Do you get to keep the panache points from both?

pathfinder-2e swashbuckler

Phoenices

Build idea: Thief rogue, Tavern Brawler and Sharpshooter, you Sharpshoot people with Oil/Acid/take your pick as your Use an Object cunning action for sneak attack damage+10 from sharpshooter. Is that stupidly ineffective, decently playable, or actually sensible?

Thomas Markov

7:31 AM

@Phoenices I don’t think any of that works like that.

doppelgreener

8:45 AM

155

Q: Moderation strike: Stack Overflow, Inc. cannot consistently ignore, mistreat, and malign its volunteers

Introduction As of today, June 5th, 2023, a large number of moderators, curators, contributors, and users from around Stack Overflow and the Stack Exchange network are initiating a general moderation strike. This strike is in protest of recent and upcoming changes to policy and the platform that...

discussion community company

2

doppelgreener

10:49 AM

0

Q: Stack Exchange general moderation and curation strike begins today

As of today, community members and diamond moderators across the Stack Exchange network are commencing a general moderation strike: Moderation strike: Stack Overflow, Inc. cannot consistently ignore, mistreat, and malign its volunteers There is also an open letter to Stack Overflow, Inc. here. ...

discussion

The Oracle

11:05 AM

5

Q: Stack Exchange general moderation and curation strike begins today

As of today, community members and diamond moderators across the Stack Exchange network are commencing a general moderation strike: Moderation strike: Stack Overflow, Inc. cannot consistently ignore, mistreat, and malign its volunteers There is also an open letter to Stack Overflow, Inc. here. ...

discussion

5

Isaac

1:06 PM

How do you make sorcerer really interesting to play? I mean, it's so boring to play sorcerer because in PHP you basically have one way - do damage. In Xanatar you can try to make a pseudo-hiller, but... really...

Phoenices

1:21 PM

@ThomasMarkov No? I'm pretty sure throwing oil is a Use An Object action, and it's clearly an improvised weapon ranged attack. Sneak Attack just requires you to make a ranged weapon attack with an ally near the target, and doesn't check if your attack deals damage. I'll check sharpshooter.

22

Q: What items can a Thief use as a bonus action with his Fast Hands?

At 3rd level, the Thief archetype for rogues grants a feature called Fast Hands that allows: [...] the bonus action granted by your Cunning Action to make a Dexterity (Sleight of Hand) check, use your thieves' tools to disarm a trap or open a lock, or take the Use an Object action. Player's Hand...

dnd-5e class-feature rogue thief objects

Sharpshooter requires a ranged weapon attack (check) that you are proficient with (check, tavern brawler), and again says... oh, actually it does say "add +10 to the attack's damage", that might require it to already do damage.

nitsua60

Raising the nigh-Talmudic question "does throwing oil at someone do 0 damage, or no damage?"

Phoenices

yeah basically.

It's probably still a viable build addition, and I'm almost certain the idea works with acid, since acid is definitely a damage-dealing ranged improvised weapon, but acid's expensive.

I mean, I think that RAW you can use Sharpshooter on dandelion fluff throws, but I'm not sure. Dandelion fluff would probably be range 5/10, but sharpshooter does annul the penalty for long-range attacks...

doppelgreener

3:37 PM

@nitsua60 this makes me appreciate one of magic the gathering's rules: if 0 of a thing happens, the thing doesn't happen.

if you're instructed to draw 0 cards, you are not considered to have drawn cards at all.

GcL

3:51 PM

@nitsua60 I recall reading a financial analogy that I liked. Being paid $0 is not a thing. That's just not getting paid.

SPArcheon

4:11 PM

@GcL At least until some government passes a law that introduces a fixed tax on free voluntary work.

Alas, sorry for dropping by, just wanted to see what the sentiment about that was here, but the pinned posts above already answered.

GcL

@SPArcheon Which that? The fast hands? Zero damage vs no damage

SPArcheon

@GcL sadly, not those. See doppelgreener posts above.

the strike. Alas, please don't let me bother you, just looking at the various site to see how bad the situation is.

GcL

Gotcha. Yeah, screw AI content. I've only had to do a couple code reviews so far where, "this is AI generated, isn't it?" came up. Those were not pleasant reviews.

@SPArcheon Hopefully reverse course before it gets particularly bad. I suspect rpg won't get inundated as I wouldn't expect ai generated answers to get a lot of upvotes.

doppelgreener

4:30 PM

VICE: Stack Overflow Moderators Are Striking to Stop Garbage AI Content From Flooding the Site

5

SPArcheon

@GcL Well, you could propose a partnership with AI Dungeon and have AI generated text adventures instead (joking - please don't, it is pretty bad quality)

@doppelgreener better version

92

Q: Dear CEO, please stop disparaging the moderators in the press

The CEO gave the following statement to the press: Stack Overflow ran an analysis and the ChatGPT detection tools that moderators were previously using have an alarmingly high rate of false positives. Usage of these tools correlated to a dramatic upswing in suspensions of users with little or no...

support status-review moderation ceo

GcL

@SPArcheon No thanks. I've been very dissatisfied with AI generated stuff thus far. It's got just enough quality to fool the common fool, but it's not sufficiently good to work in practice.

I'd rather continue using lorum ipsum as my placeholder content for copy. Less likely to be missed when it comes to filling in actual content.

SPArcheon

The only decent AI generation I saw that far is image generation but it also has is own share of problem (mostly about replacing or stealing artist works)

GcL

@SPArcheon There's the copyright issues and the issues where people think they've "made the art", but the quality and forethought and design just isn't there. At first glace, most AI "art" is passable, but becomes increasingly less so the more I look at it.

Anyway, I wouldn't mind saying adieu to SE sites if AI spam remains permissible.

SPArcheon

@GcL It is a weird problem. If you are interested we can continue this topic on a different room (just to not go too off topic here) but the problem imho is mostly how the model was trained.

GcL

4:49 PM

@SPArcheon A lovely offer, but I don't have much to contribute to such a discussion. My experience has been, "that's neat" and "that's a problem". I suspect I just like to gripe about it.

SPArcheon

To put that in context, I "made" this picture of Shantate from the titular game serie using a diffusion tool. It isn't perfect but it is one of the best I managed to do.

It also wasn't just writting Shantae: I had to fight and carefully craft a prompt to avoid the diffuser getting wrong colors, hallucinate bad hands, make the earrings the wrong shape and so on. In the end I started from a base good enough result and applied multiple small edits over and over and over. It was not a 5 minute thing: that took hours.
It is possible to actually have some care with that tool, the point is that you are just accepting that you are playing with a very complex type of Lego that is just imitating other pictures

And hopefully the authors of those pictures were asked for permission before the model was trained on their content

GcL

@SPArcheon It's one of the best you managed to get the tool to emit. It's fine at first glance and gets progressively less good the more I look at it. I think I don't mind missing details so much as I dislike details that seem wrong.

I would avoid analogies to things that are intentionally built by human hands. My experience with playing with legos is very much intentional assembly of parts.

I can see the allure of "draw me a picture" kind of generators. It's not something most of the people using the tools could otherwise create. In that sense it's kind of liberating. A "something is better than nothing" perhaps.

At least they're not eligible for copyright and can still be considered for copyright infringement.

SPArcheon

@GcL In a way that was my point: the AI is not an AI at all. There is nothing magical there. It is just statistics - the generation does indeed "use blocks", it is just that these blocks are not real block but pixels. If the AI is trained to know that when something looks like a leaf most of the time there will be a flower, it will pick out the "hallucination" that most look like a flower. It is hard to explain... but let's just drop that here.

nitsua60

5:09 PM

I knew (simple version) that generation starts basically with noise, then grades that noise on "how like $PROMPT is this?" and slowly converges on something that scores well. I heard an amazing example of that process the other day, in the voice-cloning context.

GcL

@SPArcheon It's essentially a series of deblurring filters. The text prompts aren't selecting blocks from which to build the image.

nitsua60

They played the original iteration: pure static. 1000 iterations later, clearly a male voice saying the words of the prompt, but sounded like a hundred year-old lost recording, played during a hurricane. 10K iterations later, sounded like the target voice speaking (incl. inflections, cadence), but as if their lips and tongue were bees. 100K and the clone target, presented with the recording, couldn't recall whether it were something they'd said in the past or not. (Numbers are illustrative.)

GcL

I think there's a computerphile or numberphile video on it that gives a decent explanation.

Found it. This is the one my family found the most tractable: youtube.com/watch?v=1CIpzeNxIhU

@nitsua60 I wonder how much training data you need to effectively clone a person's speaking. I wonder if there are shibboleths that would immediately catch the cloned version.

nitsua60

5:26 PM

@GcL I'll bet "shibboleth" would actually do a pretty good job. 2500 years later, and it's still got an unusual combination of sounds =)

GcL

@nitsua60 What's the odds on the mods prevailing vs calling it quits?

SPArcheon

I always forget that quotes carry a quite different meaning across different languages. In that case, "blocks" was an euphemism.
Stable diffusion usually start from noise and then applies some random mutations. Each "step" the mutation that maximized an "energy" value is the one picked. The energy value is a statistical measurement of "how similar" the picture is to images that have similar prompts to the ones specified.

By "blocks" I meant that exactly how you can't "make up" some block of Lego that does not exist, in the same way the diffuser can't make up something it "doesn't know".

You can tell it to make a picture of someone with their arm behind their back but if the model didn't include any picture of people with their arms in that position or those weren't tagged as such, the diffuser won't give any repeatable results.

sorry for the confusion I caused

nitsua60

6:23 PM

I couldn't possibly venture a guess. (Note, though: the majority of strikers aren't elected moderators.)
My naive guess is that it hinges on SO. Charcoal, SOBotics, and SOCVR are all effectively "participants" in the strike. Which means a lot of crap is going to wash onto the front page of SO.
But the vast majority of *traffic* to SO comes from search--and there's 23M questions/35M answers in existence. It's going to take a while for spam and vandalism to take a toll on that use-case.

GcL

@nitsua60 SO already has a number of accepted answers that work, but are wrong in practice. The AI generated code I've seen has been right enough for a lot of the happy path kind of work, but subtly and insidiously off the mark for specific use cases.

nitsua60

I have a lot of sympathy for everyone at every level. The Community Managers (cough @V2Blast cough) are a great bunch who, I believe, understand all of and agree with much of the frustration voiced.
The mid-levels are pulled in two directions, by community and company.
And the higher-ups have a mandate and obligation to turn this idealistic passion-project, supported for a decade-plus by infusions of angels' investments, into a profitable business.

The CEO gets a lot of flack, for example, for the Prosus acquisition. My understanding is that he was a known mergers&acquisitions guy all along; his hiring was the board saying "this current model isn't working. Turn this ship in a different direction."

GcL

6:39 PM

@nitsua60 Huh. I wasn't aware that it wasn't a profitable site to run. I did wonder why they got rid of the job postings. Those worked out pretty well for the groups that I knew and used them.

nitsua60

@GcL I mean, I don't even do a good job with my household books--don't look to me for any brilliant business insights. I just remember seeing articles every once in a while, through the 2010s, about fundraising rounds.

GcL

Sound like a job for... dun dun dun... Accounting Fan!

Not so much of a superpower, but their interesting method of rounding works out pretty well.

@HopelesslyDying I don't think spamming chats is going to help your cause.

MissMisinformation

I am neither a business person nor heavily educated on modern web infrastructure, but as a decade-long tumblr user... my impression is that large-spanning community sites that aren't wallpapered with ads or requiring a subscription model to use in a normal fashion are generally operating at a loss

GcL

7:19 PM

@MissMisinformation I'm suspicious of the statement only because of your awesome username.

MissMisinformation

XD thanks, I stole it from jack prelutsky

V2Blast

9:45 PM

@nitsua60 Thanks, nits. <3

Apparently I picked an interesting week to be out... (I moved last week)

nitsua60

@V2Blast Ah, we've found the root cause! V2 leaves for a week, and there's a literal-not-literally-metaphorically-but-those-words-are-the-same-now SE dumpster fire in the news.

GcL

10:13 PM

@V2Blast Did your move go well? Do you like it there? Are the kids too loud/on yer lawn/causing tarnashun?

Hot RPG Questions

10:25 PM

9

Q: What does "last action" mean?

Taste Blood says: [...]To drink a creature's blood, either your last action must have been a fangs Strike that damaged the target[...] If on my first action I use Flurry of Blows to make 2 Strikes, and only the first one hits (and does damage), can I use Taste Blood? Does last "action" mean the...

pathfinder-2e actions

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