I joined a running campaign (still at the low levels) set in a magic library and I had a character with a comically egregious case of that kind of back story. The campaign had a tight foundation with everyone else already knowing each other and being there for a reason.

It wasn’t easy to recon me in, so we didn’t and I worked this out with the DM. I just had all these things I’d reference. Grand, level-inapproriate adventures, offering impossible feats as part of insane plans, being a key figure in historical events that the others were quite sure had never happened, etc. But absolutely no other sign of insanity or chronic lying in my serious, good-aligned, heroic character.

The DM let everyone have fun scratching their heads over it for a few sessions before they stumbled on my character’s series and found out he was just a fictional hero spawned by the library to assist their quest. His level was from the creation magic and had nothing to do with his real-only-to-him backstory.

It worked out in that very very specific setting.

Absolutely agree. I set a game in the real(ish) world once, so it was a setting where everyone knew the base “lore.” It was so nice! I could reference things, name-drop countries, and introduce old grudges without having to exposition it all. People just got things. We’ve since done enough games on the sword coast that that works too, now.

In a high level campaign I ran, I took the design philosophy that the villains were supernatural (e.g, dragon or lich), the average npc was weak (level 3 or less), and the characters were once-in-a-1000-years heros (level 10-20).

Every now and then they would have an obstacle involving regular humanoids or the local government and they had the option of just steamrolling everything (even whole platoons). It provided a great contrast to the magic-boss death matches and let the characters really feel special.

It also drove home that they were the only ones who could save the day.

How interesting to be living in a time of transition. Watching people fight AI is like reading about teamsters diverting irrigation into roads so only horses and not cars could pass. Or like reading about pony express riders climbing telephone poles to sabotage them.

In the article, this one was just an accident even, or so it seems. Photoshop released a new, unspecified, AI-powered tool and the human artist used it. WotC at first defended the art as they believed it was human generated (and I believe they contracted a human) and retracted it.

It’ll get to the point where almost anyone can use it and it indistinguishable or even better than most human art. Right now we’re fighting, but eventually the public will either get tired or (like with cars) become the primary users of AI art and the fight will sputter out.

Thanks, you saved me the trouble of writing out a rant. I wonder if the other guy is actually a computer scientist or just a programmer who got a CS degree. Imagine attending a CV track at AAAI or the whole of CVPR and then saying CV isn’t a sub field of AI.

Computer vision is AI. If they literally want a robot eye to scan their cluttered pantry and figure out what is there, that’ll require some hefty neural net.

Edit: seeing these downvotes and surprised at the tech illiteracy on lemmy. I thought this was a better informed community. Look for computer vision papers in CVPR, IJCNN, and AAAI and try to tell me that being able to understand the 3D world isn’t AI.

Gets back up, “also, his name is Jolam.” Lies back down.

“I hurt my friend because I took a dumb idea too far” is a very probable story. The part I can’t believe though is ending the game over a dire bite. We finally got the schedule together, we’re going to use the time, darn it!

Pretty much, only detail missing is that it was the season for fruit. So, there is an added sense that by all natural laws the tree should have had fruit and it’s lack was a particular aberration to a societythat used the fig so much.

Also, thematically, it rounds out God’s domains. Up to this point, there had been miracles showing dominion over weather, matter, human life, animal life, spirits, disease and now there’s plant life.

Okay, but real talk, this looks like the equivalent of having a cutsy cuddle session at the firing range.

Even if you like guns/spells, you don’t want to be kicking back, listening to your man read poetry while Samantha in the background is repeatedly screaming “IGNIS!” *BOOM* “IGNIS!” *BOOM* in her coked up magic voice.

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Another aspect of the puzzle is that not every evil deserves death. A bum who does minor theft almost as a habit, a hateful bitter man who antagonizes everyone but obeys the law, a teenager, a greedy business person who employs half the town but makes everyone’s life a bit worse, and so on.

Good should have the self restraint to not go straight to murder.

Simply ignores it while regurgitating my personal opinion as if reiteration and intuition could trump the cold equations themselves 😎😎😎

20 years

20 years

20 years on the other side of the planet with the average citizen so uninterested that weeks would past without a news story on it. How is that not the definition of terrifying? Hell, it was terrifying to Americans who were paying attention.

Just flee to the Astral plane, bro. They don’t extradite.

17 INT 6 WIS 😎. I’m not here for your society. I want to get rich and delve past the 4th circle of the mind brah. Not work for the man so he can forgive me for the debts he saddled me with in the first place. Or something… Look I didn’t learn how to create energy ex nilho to have to consider my actions.

That beast’s name? Saddam. 😎

This jpg rationing makes me sad for what we used to have. When I was young, the internet was young, and jpg was overflowing. But as we burned through the last of the cheaply minable jpg we had to turn to increasingly cost ineffective means, like jpg rigs to extract deposits from the ocean floor, and accordingly images everywhere became clearer and clearer.

It would all be fine if we could just make a cost effective way of recycling jpg or green jpg technology would be adopted worldwide. But that’s not something you or I can accomplish, we need whole governments embracing the switch to new jpg sources for it work.

The monk isn’t homebrew, they just used the 1d20 in order method of stat generation. They got 18(+2)/20/20/14/20/10 and a CL feat. Honestly, MADness is only thing holding a STRonk back.

Yo dawg, you got that vaporwave wizard template without the text. It’s real, yo.