Fnord

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See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
thegreatyin
thegreatyin

the master pregnancy lore highkey haunts me because we don't know WHICH masters have had children. the only confirmed trio are spices, happles, and fires. literally any of the others could've been parents at some point in their lives. Literally Any Of Them. mr wines could've been a milf this entire time. we live in a horrifying reality of schrodinger's bat babies and it's all mr fires' fault for giving us this forbidden knowledge

fnord888

@starryeyed-seer:
Hey. Do we. Do we got any clue what happened to those pups the Masters had. Are there a bunch of baby curators in a vault in the bazaar. Did she eat just them in the lacre pits.

@thegreatyin
presumably they’re in the high wilderness somewhere. beyond that we know nothing

Isn’t the implication of the Mr Transport storyline that it’s “a bunch of baby curators in a vault in the bazaar”? At least for any they’ve had since coming to the Neath. According to Mr Pages “Orthonarily, the child would be raised in the Bazaar.”

fallen london spoilers

IMO, the most toxic part of the “unreasonable DMing standards” is nothing to do with the game itself but the assumption that the DM/GM is also the person who runs the logistical aspects of the game.

Like, if you’re new to a game, it’s natural to defer to the GM on rules issues, etc*. There are good and bad ways to do that, but still.

But on out-of-game issues, well, you’re an adult, right**? You can make a calendar. You can get snacks. And if the GM is already handling that stuff, you can show some initiative (pun intended) and ask if they could use the help.

*Operating under the perhaps-unwarranted assumption that GMing is inherently for experienced people, but that’s another post.

**If you’re a non-adult in a game run by adults, you’re excused, though you can still do this stuff if you want to.

ttrpg vagueblogging drafts clearinghouse
the-dao-of-the-zerg
explolalola

one problem that i have seen in DND is that if an NPC tells the PCs a certain thing, there is this assumption that

  1. the NPC is inherently telling the truth and cannot lie
  2. the NPC's knowledge is complete and infallible because the assumption is that this DM is using this NPC to convey information directly from the DM

and it irritates the snot out of me.

this doesn't happen all of the time, but it happens sometimes with one of my PCs. i love her, but damn. the way her brain works is unique and sometimes it makes playing challenging - because when things don't work out in the way she assumed they would, she gets frustrated.

like... dude. NPCs can lie. NPCs can have half-truths. maybe they only know half the information - maybe it's true from THEIR perspective based on partial information. maybe they have their own objectives and goals and are trying to manipulate the party.

just because an NPC says it doesn't mean it's true or that it's direction from the DM on how we as PCs should proceed.

dnd-homebrew5e

It's almost as if there are spells for players to see if NPCs are lying or an Insight check to see if maybe things seem a bit off with that NPC. Man, if only players had the ability to do those things instead of taking everything the DM says at face value...

the-dao-of-the-zerg

So there's some interesting psychology going on here: namely, the GM is the actual arbiter of all truth. They are omnipotent and omniscient. And when an "NPC" communicates something, they are an abstract concept that cannot actually talk. So what actually happens is that God Herself descends from the Heaven and Declares Exactly Thus.

And this bypasses every single human instinct for detecting lies, because most GMs are not training themselves to have micro-expressions and secret tells that they're lying. They are not LARPing this NPC. It is exactly the same person using the exact same tone of voice she used to explain the rules of the game.

So we just naturally assume that of course anything the NPC is telling us. After all, it is the exact same communication channel we used for learning the rules of the game, and you're not off questioning those, are you?

---

There's also a lot of cognitive overheard, because in a normal conversation you know what the world is actually like. When an NPC tells you about something, it is quite often your sole source of understanding.

I've generally found it takes about 10 sessions into a campaign before the players have enough of a foundation to start spotting lies - until then, the first thing they hear is the truth, and the second thing they hear means they must have misunderstood the first one.

(skills and spells don't really solve any of this, since you don't have any context on when to use them - at best it's a random chance to reveal a lie, but most NPCs will probably get a bit upset if you keep casting Detect Lies on them.)

fnord888

And this bypasses every single human instinct for detecting lies, because most GMs are not training themselves to have micro-expressions and secret tells that they’re lying. They are not LARPing this NPC. It is exactly the same person using the exact same tone of voice she used to explain the rules of the game.
So we just naturally assume that of course anything the NPC is telling us. After all, it is the exact same communication channel we used for learning the rules of the game, and you’re not off questioning those, are you?

Yeah, that’s definitely the issue, but I do think it’s something GMs should actively address, at least if you’re running a mystery or politics game where lies are important to the plot. Obviously, you don’t need to train yourself to do fake microexpressions, but intentionally introduce inconsistencies into the lying NPCs’ claims (whether internal inconsistencies or inconsistencies with other evidence).

Or there are other ways to signpost potential deception. One game I was in there was a priest in an order that vows to not lie, but the GM (not me) made a point that he refused to discuss specific issues with the party, instead foisting us off to a lay temple bureaucrat. Something that could an innocent explanation, but the fact that he kept insisting we need to talk to the guy who’s allowed to lie was a clue that he was hiding something.

You can’t totally fix the problem this way (which is why you should fallback on other strategies like making sure there are multiple ways to solve the mystery), but I think it helps to actively plan for it.

(skills and spells don’t really solve any of this, since you don’t have any context on when to use them - at best it’s a random chance to reveal a lie, but most NPCs will probably get a bit upset if you keep casting Detect Lies on them.)

Spells, yeah, though that depends on the exact magical rules of the setting. But Insight/Detect Lies skills are something that can happen subtly. Passively, even: just like the GM might roll a secret Listen check to let the party detect an ambush in the combat game, they can roll a secret Insight check when an NPC is lying.

ttrpg drafts clearinghouse

Whenever I hear the “the James and Comey prosecutions” collectively there’s always a moment where I’m like “why are they saying James Comey’s name so weirdly?” before I remember, no, there’s another James also the subject of a political prosecution.

us politics us law state violence current events but like somewhat less current because drafts clearinghouse but probably still blockable for anyone blocking current events
garmbreak1
prokopetz

I know some would consider this an unreasonable expectation, but I feel like when I pick up an officially licensed tabletop RPG adaptation of some piece of media, it shouldn't be a coin toss whether or not there will be any mechanism for playing as the sorts of characters that the game's ostensible source material is actually about.

prokopetz

The source material: Cold opens with Spacewizard Lasergirl blowing up a small moon.

The tabletop RPG: Zero to hero advancement, a page-long table of melee weapons in spite of the fact that the source material depicts no hand to hand combat, and a condescending sidebar explaining why playing as Spacewizard Lasergirl would be "unbalanced".

prokopetz

You need to understand that there is both an officially licensed Avatar: The Last Airbender RPG where nobody is allowed to be the Avatar and an officially licensed Doctor Who RPG where nobody is allowed to be the Doctor. The situation is dire.

azzandra

I see how those are such missed opportunities. You could have a full party just of Doctors without contradicting canon, there have literally been episodes like that.

garmbreak1

very funny to see "this is just a 5e problem" people in the notes when neither of the cited games are 5E*

*well there is Doctors and Daleks but I assume this is referring to its sister game which uses Cubicle 7's own system

fnord888

Kinds of people, sure. But playing a TTRPG as the existing protagonist of a linear piece of media is generally a terrible idea. That applies to Sokka just as much as it does to Aang.

(Doctor Who might not count as “linear” in this sense)

is that a reason not to make a ttrpg from linear media maybe but maybe the avatar world is interesting enough to be fun to play in as a regular bender or indeed a non-bender and if it's not well letting one player be the avatar doesn't solve that problem for the rest of the party drafts clearinghouse
memecucker
memecucker

So I found out that Michael Moorecock is still alive and writing fantasy books at age 85 but John Norman the fucking Gor author is alive at fucking 94 years old and published a book in 2024 and had actually been publishing a book a year since 2008 so you know what maybe George RR Martin will finish ASOIAF after all

fnord888

I mean, I get you, but GRRM could live to be 200 and never finish ASOIAF.

(John Norman the Fucking Gor Author has published 8 books since A Dance with Dragons came out)

asoiaf drafts clearinghouse
centrally-unplanned
wiki-but-made-them-up

hot dogs were a ceremonial meal often consumed during the observation of a divination ritual sometimes known as baseball in a period known of the late American EmpireALT
kayla-denker

People love to make fun of Archeologists for how often we say objects were used ritualistically, as if we overuse that designation or just say it when we a don't know what something was used for. But that's only because people don't stop to think how full of ritual all of our lives are.

The meme is actually correct for the most part, hotdogs are ritually consumed during baseball games. Lots of people only even eat hotdogs if they're watching baseball. The expectation for us to eat turkey on thanksgiving is another example of us ritually consuming food. Drinking coffee every morning is another ritual we do. Going to the gym several days a week is a ritual.

"Ritual" doesn't necessarily mean "religious."

phaeton-flier

This is a bizarre way to use the term "ritual", almost as if it's just "used in a specific time or place". Is toilet paper a ritual tool just because its only used in the bathroom?

centrally-unplanned

Yeah this is selling the archeologists way short. Hotdogs at a baseball game are not a ritual - people may *joke* they are, it certainly could be a *symbol* in the brand/cultural sense, but most people eat a hot dog because they like hot dogs and the majority of people at a baseball game don't at all. I am happy to admit Turkey for Thanksgiving could qualify, because that is much more strictly defined and rooted in higher-concept traditions. But those are pretty rare, and I do think tradition is a better fit.

Archeologists say that historical objects were ritual objects because they actually were and the past just had a ton more ritual than the present. People actually did believe in the whole edifice of courting the god's favour, reading the world for omens, and societal rules that were formalized and inflexible. Not everyone did ofc, and the objects often also had practical uses as well as ritual. But the world was just fundamentally different in the past on this axis.

fnord888

I think you can find a lot of ritual even in modern life if you know where to look; wedding rings are just as much ritual objects as Roman bullae.

But, yeah, morning coffee and gym routines is stretching the definition to meaninglessness.

hotdogs i'm wiling to call borderline anthropology
tanadrin

portal66850 asked:

Are there any historical movements LW sees itself in even though it is oriented towards a better future? Mohism perhaps

also what are your criticisms of it

tanadrin answered:

uhh many rationalists were always pretty poorly engaged with the intellectual history of their ideas. a lot of trying to reinvent the epistemological wheel, as it were. and apparently a lot of the social science the sequences originally relied on got torched in the replication crisis. so it’s kind of awkwardly positioned in that respect, i think.

the whole “rationalism is systematized winning” thing turned out to be laughably incorrect, and as a philosophy of life “rationalism” is basically useless. the milieu produced a weird number of cults. eliezer yudkowsky completely failed in all his stated aims, in no small part because he is hopelessly naive, and MIRI proved to be useless. the obsession with race-and-iq pseudoscience revealed more than a few people to be either huge racists looking for an excuse to be racist (and thus engaging in very bad motivated reasoning) or contrarians who were happy to follow the evidence wherever it led, only if that evidence led to edgy and politically incorrect conclusions (and thus engaging in very bad motivated reasoning). on twitter and in the bay area, the social landscape seems to blend at one end seamlessly into the california looney-tunes self-help types, and i think it’s bad if your community of people attempting to raise the sanity waterline becomes indistinguishable from people who think astrology is real. via the neoreactionaries, rationalism’s biggest contribution to public intellectual life has been to foster one of the strains of thought that undergirds the trump administration. which is not a very positive development in my view.

and there’s a more systematic critique, which is that i think a lot of rationalist Poasters see themselves as lone Randian geniuses uncovering truths society as a whole seems to fail to recognize or shy away from, and then the stuff they output is like… very mid? and not at all insightful? i saw someone the other day (maybe it was eliezer? can’t remember) praise aella’s incisive writing on the subject of gender and sexuality. and like. as far as i can tell, aella has exactly the bog-standard perspective you would expect of someone with fairly unoriginal views–someone raised in a very conservative context who broke out of that context later in life and has kind of a cynical view of gender as inflected by doing a lot of sex work and having grown up in purity culture. if i were being very uncharitable, i would say many rationalist Poasters are people who were good at math, thought that made them Brain Geniuses in every area of life, and then frequently proceed to embarrass themselves in public because they do not understand the limitations of their own knowledge or experience, and they are pretty credible and easily taken in by bullshit that flatters them personally.

fnord888

In fact, I recall a couple of occasions where rationalists discussed Mohism is (qualifiedly) positive terms. But, like, AFAIK Mohism as a coherent philosophical movement has basically zero presence in the modern English-speaking world, so any affinity they might have isn’t exactly actionable.

rationality culture drafts clearinghouse