Wait until you learn about econophysics, the version of economics that gets way more accurate predictions just by stuffing economies into physics equations. Really demonstrates how unscientific economics is. Apparently it’s infested with Marxists for some reason.
Ok, then why do you think they don’t let players approach issues how they want? You claim you’ve run them, but you don’t have anything to disagree with my argument, and you’ve still forgotten to defend your original point. Or have you just realised that your arguments are baseless and are just arguing back to try and get the last word in and protect the pride you claim you’re willing to put on the line?
I do not believe you have run a modern module if you don’t think they let players go wild with solutions. They might include a solution instead of leaving it as an exercise for the DM, but they very much let players approach them however they want.
Anyway, putting random monsters in a room and telling the DM to figure something out is inherently flawed. It’s literally incomplete, and has filler encounters. Those are definitely flaws in a prepared adventure. As I’ve repeatedly said, they wouldn’t be flaws in a different type of publication, but we’re not discussing that type of publication.
Also, you forgot to defend your actual point. Even if they weren’t flaws, how would that make people who don’t like that “style” cowards?
It’s taking any other path, so long as you don’t have to risk your own stupid pride
“It’s not what they’re doing that’s cowardly, it’s that they’re not doing what I want them to”. Your argument is based entirely on the fact that you are demanding that they be more creative. The assumption that they have nothing else to do and no other motivations. What right do you have to tell other DMs how to run their stories? You can add all the filler you want to your campaign, but you’re demanding that other GMs have to deal with your filler too, and accusing them of cowardice when they perfectly reasonably tell you to sit and swivel.
This adventure comes from a time when modules were a toolbox. One of the most popular modules from the era
Ok, let me stop you there. We do not live in the 80’s. We are not restricted to Gary and his friend’s single system that has been invented. We are not fumbling our way through discovering how TTRPGs work, experimenting with vague outlines to see what happens. It’s been 40 years, we have better everything now. Our superdungeons aren’t just a series of deathtraps and random encounters to kill the players. Our modules aren’t just a list of encounters held together by the vague pretense of a story. Our systems are able to handle nonhuman ancestries. They’re not releasing the adventure for Dungeons and Dragons Basic Set. You can call it a style, but it’s a “style” born of experimentally bumbling through unknown territory - if anything, by choosing to stick to it in an age where we’ve massively advanced the mechanical and storytelling techniques of TTRPGs instead of learning to run more advanced stories could be classified as cowardice - too cowardly to learn what’s changed, too cowardly to risk more advanced narrative, too cowardly to try new things. Hey, look, when I create an unfair dichotomy you’re the one that gets called a coward. Weird.
Tunnels were blocked by debris, allowing the DM to connect it to another dungeon they wanna try. You might come back to the same dungeon a second time, and the contents of the room will change.
What do you think is relevent about this? Are you not able to add things to your campaigns without those hooks, or do you believe they’ve disappeared from modern adventures? They have not. like half the tunnels in my current campaign are described as “beyond the scope of this adventure”. Honestly, it’s kinda worrying that you apparently need these structures in place for you to be inventive. If you want to argue for the creation of a learning series that would help you with things like this, go ahead, but once again, they are selling this as an adventure, and should be providing a complete adventure.
If you don’t know how to prep that, then the empty room is a boon.
Why? What are you even prepping? What is there to prep in the room? Like you said, it’s just an encounter and a featureless box. Put a desk in the room to, uh… “to make the fight a little bit more interesting” [sic]. What’s stopping you from inserting your own empty room to add an “interesting” table to? Why do you need WotC to push this prep on GMs looking for a preprepared adventure?
Think about what you’re writing here: This is a room. It’s features and relevence are entirely for you to decide. There is nothing related to the plot. If it was removed entirely, nobody would notice.
Think through the outcomes from this room - in a best case scenario, the DM can use it to do the exact same things they could do literally anywhere else in the adventure. You’re not just defending selling filler, you’re defending selling filler that you have to fill in yourself. I will admit that what you’ve described would be a great “my first homebrew adventure” guide, but that’s very different to an adventure.
You buy an adventure so you don’t have to write your own rooms and encounters. Anyone can string together a bunch of rooms that are only held together by a vague theme - every campaign I played/ran between the ages of 11 and 13 holla - but you buy prewritten adventures for the story. If there’s so little story it can just tell you to freestyle for a while, why buy it in the first place?
you can rage against the system that dared tell you to figure out a single room by yourself; dared to tell you to put your pride on the line and risk making a mistake. [… That] sounds cowardly to me.
No, anger doesn’t sound like cowardice to you. Don’t be ridiculous. It’s disingenous enough that you’re presenting this as a binary option of creativity or cowardice, so don’t pretend being angry and complaining about a low quality is product is cowardice. I was being polite when I said I disagree - you are wrong, as the examples I gave demonstrate. Whether it’s wanting a complete product, wanting a story without filler, having the humility to trust other people’s decisions instead of demanding to substitute your own, or pure laziness, there are plenty of reasons to not want to have to start writing the adventure on the authors behalf.
I disagree - it’s not cowardice to want a complete adventure as a base. The whole point of buying an adventure is that it gives you a complete story from the start instead of having to make up your own. Coming up with reasons that monsters are somewhere might be a fun little writing exercise for some, but it should just be a blog post, not a product people are paying money to run their groups through.
It might be cowardice to not change or expand on the adventure as written to customise it to your group, but even then it’s a group thing - 5e in particular has lots of groups who approach the game with the same attitude they would skyrim or diablo, and their character is just a means for them to interact with the world. Changing the story for those groups doesn’t actually add anything to their experience.
I broadly agree about ignorance being a problem, but I still don’t think it’s cowardice to not want to do things you haven’t been taught how to, and particularly not with 5e - you don’t learn how to run 5e by playing 5e, you learn by playing other systems then coming to 5e because that’s what you can get players for. You play something like 2e and OSR or 3.5/PF1 and run 5e with the mechanics from those games in mind. There isn’t a mechanical base that rulings can be built off in 5e, so it’s not cowardly for new DMs to not want to have to come up with mechanics from scratch.
You mean the same man who rejected superpositioning and made the famous cat analogy to explain how it makes no sense? Like I said, you literally know nothing about quantum mechanics or it’s history, and are just googling for famous names to point at.
Hey, notice how that’s the only part you responded to? Not the part where I laid out exactly how you don’t know shit about the subject. It’s because you don’t have a response; like the big comment explains, you’re in completely over your head.
Nah, I saw some kids stealing a bike in town the other week, and they did it in a few seconds maybe 3 or 4 metres from a security guard. Smart kids, they acted in the moment I walked between them and the guard with pit crew-like efficiency - two steadying the bars, one cutting and removing the lock, and the last getting on the bike - so by the time the security guard called out they were already riding and running away. You can steal a car fast, but not that fast, and not in the middle of a crowded city centre.
The cops definitely don’t give the slightest shit, but it’s not the only reason.
Stop trying to copy the first thing you find on google you dumb fuck, Wigner dropped his and Neumann’s interpretation because of its flaws, Penrose postulated that consciousness arose from quantum interactions not that they collapse them, and Stapp and Schrodinger were exactly the type of panpsychic new-age mystics I was talking about.
On top of that, literally not a single one is still working in quantum theory or research. Neumann died 70 years ago. In fact, none of their research is even from this century, where the majority of progress has been made. I used the present tense. Contemporary opinions, not the wild theories of the earliest days.
Now stop being a redditbrained contradictory little shit and read my comment. It contains actual information about quantum theory.
Look spacey, I need you to understand that it’s offensive that you consider yourself intelligent enough to have this conversation. To butt in and spew your completely baseless hypotheticals around as if they hold any scientific weight.
If you knew enough to have this conversation, you’d already know from the language we’ve used around superpositioning and observation that we’re discussing the copenhagen interpretation - even if you weren’t certain, you’d at least know it’s overwhelmingly the most popular theory (like you better have some fucking great evidence if you want to dispute it), and that consciouness based theories are the fringest of the fringe. You’re not going to find anyone actually employed in quantum theory or research espousing it.
If you knew enough to have this conversation, you would have at least attempted to define consciousness. You’d have some sort of working definition that you could share and we could analyse, but you haven’t because you don’t. You have no idea what consciousness is, you don’t even know that there’s a debate about whether consciousness even exists - you think, therefore you have accepted that there exists a nebulous, undefineable set of aspects that makes something conscious. Despite not being able to articulate a single aspect of it, you deeply, truly believe both that it exists and that everyone else believes it exists.
If you knew enough to have this conversation you’d know that I’ve haven’t actually discussed quantum physics at all - the only thing in each of my comments is an attempt to get you to confront your own lack of knowledge - to admit that you can’t define consciousness. I have been playing softball with you this entire time trying to lead you to your own logical conclusions, instead of pointing out that the most basic possible demonstration of quantum interaction - the double slit experiment - inherently proves that consciousness is not required, because otherwise the observation media - gold foil or a modern detector - wouldn’t be able to record the results.
Lastly, you’d know that there isn’t a “consensus definition” because it was defined by Heisenburg and Bohr when they created the copenhagen interpretation. Here are some quotes from them:
Of course the introduction of the observer must not be misunderstood to imply that some kind of subjective features are to be brought into the description of nature. The observer has, rather, only the function of registering decisions, i.e., processes in space and time, and it does not matter whether the observer is an apparatus or a human being; but the registration, i.e., the transition from the “possible” to the “actual,” is absolutely necessary here and cannot be omitted from the interpretation of quantum theory.
all unambiguous information concerning atomic objects is derived from the permanent marks such as a spot on a photographic plate, caused by the impact of an electron left on the bodies which define the experimental conditions. Far from involving any special intricacy, the irreversible amplification effects on which the recording of the presence of atomic objects rests rather remind us of the essential irreversibility inherent in the very concept of observation. The description of atomic phenomena has in these respects a perfectly objective character, in the sense that no explicit reference is made to any individual observer and that therefore, with proper regard to relativistic exigencies, no ambiguity is involved in the communication of information.
Of course, I’m sure you can find some sort of peer reviewed data or study that provides literally any evidence at all for your totally sensible and informed idea that isn’t otherwise pushed by con artists and new age mystics, instead of demanding I work to both define and disprove your idea.
Don’t you fucking dare try to lecture me about belief when you have literally nothing but. You believe so strongly you refuse to even engage with questions about your beliefs, because deep down you know they’re baseless.
but in Pf2e it looks closer to an actual circle.
Same in PF1, and all the D&D’s before 4. I’m pretty sure most games made to be played with a battlemap have a rule for diagonals, making 4e an exception.
What if the wheels fell off every single car in the world at the same time? I can come up with ridiculous hypotheticals too.
What about all the ambulances that no longer have to pick up to traffic collision victims? What about the ambulances being able to transport people faster due to the roads being clear of traffic? It’s not just a ridiculous hypothetical, it’s one that’s much more likely to happen with cars around.
No, I don’t have to define it, because I’m talking about observability in quantum mechanics, not some philosophical metaphysical bollocks about what consciousness is. My definition of observation does not in any way include consciousness, so defining consciousness adds nothing to my definition. Your definition of observation is being seen by something with consciousness, so you have to define what consciousness is. I have to define things like interactions and particles, I do not have to provide you with definitions so that your stupid ideas make sense.
if you need to take two people at once to the hospital
ambulance
to a nightclub or to the forest outside the city for fishing and barbecue or somewhere else.
shut up, those aren’t remotely urgent. Get on your bike.
A bicycle is not good enough to transport cargo or large items
Skill issue
It is very easy to accidentally puncture a bicycle wheel tube
Skill issue
A bicycle can be stolen from you more easily than a car
True, but a bike costs a fraction of a car, so it’s also much less of an issue if it happens
The bicycle does not protect you from rain and snow and is more difficult to ride on ice, mud and puddles
Skill issue
No, you dumb fuck, I don’t need to define consciousness for my explanation of observability in physics to make sense - my interpretation of quantum mechanics doesn’t mention consciousness at all. You have to define it because your interpretation of quantum superpositioning claims that it only collapses when a conscious mind observes it, so you have to define what conscioussness is.
A consciousness-based interpretation of quantum mechanics would need any conscious observer
If you’re going to claim that consciousness is the influencing factor in quantum mechanics you need to define consciousness. You need to define the point at which consciousness starts. You saying “yes a dolphin is conscious” only tells me you think humans and dolphins are conscious, and nothing about what you think consciousness is, what things you think are conscious, or why consciousness would influence particles. So either you give a real answer to their question of what you think consciousness is or you start listing the things you think are conscious until smarter minds can work out what connects the dots.
>fights off 5 ringwraiths while protecting a gang of hobbits
>kills like a hundred magically engineered supersoldiers so hobbits can cross a river
>kills an unreasonable number more at Helm’s Deep
>beats up an actual ghost
>just one of those supersoldiers could easily kill like 10 regular humans, but here he is again just mowing them down
>charges the entirety of mordor on foot: survives
But yeah, I’m sure the regular human of above average skill will be fine.