The Gaming Den

The fight about the meaning of the word "ally" is obviously silly in English; in some contexts you're included and in some you're not. ("All your allies have declared war; when will you?") What's not silly is Voss's original point, which is that if "ally" is going to be...

Frank: I think it might hold up if you have static large modifiers and frequently-changing small (single-digit) modifiers. Because I suspect the way most people would calculate this is: Roll-under: you have a target difficulty written down on your sheet, that's pre-figured, with all the large modif...

Frank: I think it might hold up if you have static large modifiers and frequently-changing small (single-digit) modifiers. Because I suspect the way most people would calculate this is: Roll-under: you have a target difficulty written down on your sheet, that's pre-figured, with all the large modifi...

Wikipedia has a pretty good writeup of how a bunch of different groups divide up the Ten Commandments and how this maps on to the two places they show up in Scripture. (It seems relevant that everyone winds up with "ten" even though they distribute them very differently. Probably because w...

Look back at my post. This was all premised on the idea that we stop having gods grant spells at all, because that leads to all sorts of stupid--firstly, that we can't have a religion of the Prophet, and in fact can't really have a religion without a quasi-activist deity. And second, you can't have...

I'm not aware of any actual mythological sources for vampires being ashed by sunlight, only a movie which was made to ripoff a popular novel after the film makers were refused the rights to the actual story. Could be a hole in my knowledge, though. Sources after 1930 still count as part of vampire ...

Lago, that goes back to K's (and hogarth's) point that you can have a bunch of different deity-type things, as long as you don't do what D&D did and insist that spells actually come from gods . Then you can have the Church of the Sun and the Cult of Asmodeus and the Followers of Bahamut and the...

Lago, that goes back to K's (and hogarth's) point that you can have a bunch of different deity-type things, as long as you don't do what D&D did and insist that spells actually come from gods. Then you can have the Church of the Sun and the Cult of Asmodeus and the Followers of Bahamut and the D...

So then, why was the Minotaur story so easy to tell? You have Icarus and Daedalus, Minos himself, Ariadne and Theseus, etc. They all stand up just fine as characters, even while Poseidon set the whole thing in motion. Because after the wooden cow exits the scene the story has nothing to do with any...

Lago, if you think that there necessarily has to be a difference between "gods" and "nature", then you are demanding too much anthropomorphization from your gods. -Username17 Well, I don't, I just don't see the point of actually making a big deal about it if the god can't or won...

Okay, so I was bored and decided to write up a monte carlo simulator (in Octave, which is free and open source) to calculate probabilities for these dice. Code in the spoiler: This code defines a function that takes four variables: the number of "good" d8s, the number of "good" d...

I think that a fundamental part of growing up is realizing that the vast majority of people who throw around terms like "Communist" or "socialist" or "fascist" or "Nazi" are simply saying "my enemy." The actual historical or intellectual context of ...

If you use "Communism" interchangeably with "Market Welfare State" then you can call Sweden Communist, but you're not using the word at all the same way the people in senses (1) and (2) are and you're talking past each other. If you do that you are an idiot or a troll (which tel...

Just for the record, neither norway, sweden nor finnland are communist. The first two are constitutional monarchies like the uk and the third is a modern democracy. It sort of depends on what you take as your definition of "Communist." I tend to consider "the absence of market-based ...

There are three kinds of genies : Genies to whom you can safely say "I wish for you to do what I should wish for"; genies for which no wish is safe; and genies that aren't very powerful or intelligent. Attempting to outwit a hostile DM is pointless. There is no feedback, so you have to ge...

Good D12's have 8 success sides, two of which are double successes. Bad D12's have 7 failure sides, two of which are double failures. So looking at that, going from basic good dice to advanced good dice is roughly a 25% bonus off the top of the board, but going from a difficulty d8 to d12 is a 50% ...

From what I remember, the plan was to incorporate this system into a world where there wasn't a clear distinction between "mundane" and "magic", basically to sidestep the whole fighter problem. The world is magical, that's part of the physics of the world, and so everything is &q...

Questioning: "...there are only about six hundred thousand supernaturals..." Does this mean that there are six hundred thousand supernatural Luminaries, or six hundred thousand overall? Because a world where the supernatural landscape is like 60,000 luminaries and 540,000 spawn is a reall...

Frank: I don't think any of us are arguing with anything you said in your last post. With one possible exception. I do agree that information in a hard drive needs to be extractable. But the more you specify exactly how anyone is extracting information from a hard drive, the more players are going t...

Of course, we're not talking the real world, and I personally am of the opinion that we just say encryption does not work and when somone at the table extrapolates outwards from that to things that should be in the setting but aren't, the DM says "that doesn't work, it's all explained on page ...

It's contentless because things that "are in P" are also "in NP" because anything that's solvable on a deterministic Turing machine is also solvable on a non-deterministic Turing machine. :roll: While I am perfectly willing to agree that P is a subset of NP because it is, I am n...

there is actual proof that machines physically exist and can be made which solve some NP problems in polynomial time. And while comparable solutions to other problems have not yet been found, they have not actually been proven to not exist. And there exists no proof that quantum computers are the w...

DSM: no one knows if quantum computers can solve NP-complete problems. They can factor large numbers but that's not known to be NP-complete. Frank has ninja'd me, but: that is why I said NP, and did not say NP-complete at all. They are different things. Though, that no one knows that is exactly the...

DSM: no one knows if quantum computers can solve NP-complete problems. They can factor large numbers but that's not known to be NP-complete. But of course there's secure encryption that isn't quite a one-time pad. If your key is a substantial fraction of the length of all the messages you ever use i...

The only option is to do the math, and the math says everybody wanting breakable encryption (without using side channels attacks) is wrong. The current math might say this. God, your vision of the future and what's possible is so...myopic. If every scientist had your view, there would never be any ...