Category: Uncategorized

A thought has occurred to me lately: A sufficiently large bureaucracy such that the people evaluating whether procedure has been followed have little or no contact with the people being evaluated behaves a lot like an AI that happens to understand plain English instruction. That’s not to say that it will reasonably interpret plain English instruction, just that you can give the bureaucracy a rule like “con-goers cannot touch cosplayers without their explicit consent” and it will immediately understand that rule – but it won’t understand the spirit of the rule, only the literal meaning of the words.

I’m gonna clarify here that I’m referring to a rule that the Salt Lake Comic Con does in fact have, but which to my knowledge has never actually been enforced as though it were an AI. I don’t even know if the con staff are a large enough organization to require such a detached bureaucracy – it usually takes well over a hundred people to get to that point. I’m just using the example that prompted this train of thought, and while it would probably work better with a less potentially controversial one, I’m too lazy to think of one.

It’s weird as Hell that this rule would be interpreted purely literally by a sufficiently large bureaucracy, because pretty much every specific individual human who makes up the bureaucracy understands perfectly well that the rule isn’t fully literal, that while it’s a broad rule intended to firmly forbid things like unwanted hugs, there are some things that are technically physical contact but which aren’t meant to be forbidden – tapping a cosplayer on the shoulder to get their attention in a crowded convention hall to ask for a picture, for example. The reason I first started thinking about this is because I do this all the time – in a crowded and noisy convention hall, it can be the only way to get the attention of someone whose name you don’t know. A regular human being gets this and wouldn’t even consider throwing me or anyone else out for tapping someone’s shoulder, unless they were a megalomaniac on a power trip, in which case it would be immediately obvious to everyone watching that the problem is with them. If even one other person had input to the decision and wasn’t selected by the megalomaniac specifically for loyalty, they would very likely dispute the reasonableness of the decision to throw someone out for tapping a cosplayer’s shoulder just because that technically violates the “do not touch cosplayers without express permission” rule.

Continue reading “Bureaucracies Are AIs” →

I spent a few days away from home with a spotty internet connection this week. I have two bits of good news:

1. I have made significant progress on Petals and Thorns, a D&D campaign in roll20 that I’m rather proud of and hope to have a stream of sometime in the near future.
2. The Reaper’s advance upon my grandmother has been deterred – at least for now.

This blog now has twenty followers. And I am about 70% sure that follower #20 is a bot. See, my Travelogue posts get fairly regular likes from people with travel-sounding names. I’m not surprised that people looking for WordPress blogs related to travel occasionally find my Travelogue series by mistake, but it’s super weird that they actually like the latest installments. Travelogue my have started as a joke about an American tourist bumbling his way through “Europe,” but after the first few posts I realized I hadn’t really thought this through, because the clueless tourist act stopped making sense after our hero had been there for several weeks. He’s not a tourist anymore, he’s just an immigrant. An immigrant who commands the loyalty of over a dozen dangerous individuals, so it doesn’t even work as a story about immigrants in Europe. Those posts now mainly deal in either playing the game’s grim atmosphere straight or contrasting that atmosphere against some of the game-y wackiness you ignore in play for some black humor. In short, there is nothing there that you would expect a travel blogger to care about. And yet, they give me likes and follow me.

Maybe I’m just paranoid because I’m used to platforms like Tumblr where some massive proportion of your followers are always bots. In fairness, the travel bloggers who follow me definitely seem to actually run travel blogs, but I still suspect that at least some of them didn’t actually stumble into my posts because of the accidentally misleading title and happen to be fans of Darkest Dungeon. I’m pretty sure they just have a script that likes and follows blogs it guesses might be relevant to their own.

I haven’t been as good at updating regularly since moving away from a daily schedule. However, I have recently come to a realization regarding the Vestitas project: Why am I sticking to the 10×10 hexes? If I squeeze things into 10×8, I am done with the mini-adventures. With 80 hexes, I need 56 or more filled with something interesting, and that is pretty much exactly the number that I have. I do have one mini-adventure half-written that I may as well finish up and scoot out the door, but rather than subsequently making another dozen, I can just immediately move on to the remaining urbancrawls and the one big dungeon (ish) part.

Nothing about the project requires that I have a full hundred hexes, and I am seriously scraping the bottom of my ideas doc. Nearly half of what’s left is [element]-themed Chaos sorcerer, and the rest are all just random weird ideas. The snake mutant I already wrote kind of fell into that category, actually. Some of the ones I had to get myself up to seventy were really awful. I think the worst one was trying to turn a hurricane into a hex encounter. That doesn’t even make sense. A hurricane would obviously affect more than just one 30 kilometer hex. I’ve advised in the past that if you don’t have enough ideas to make a big hexcrawl work, you should probably just make a smaller hexcrawl, and I’ve clearly reached the point where I need to take that advice.

Majesty: the Fantasy Kingdom Sim is a unique and charming strategy game released somewhere around the turn of the millennium. In Majesty, you are the sovereign of a fantasy kingdom, responsible for constructing buildings, hiring heroes, and placing quest rewards to motivate those heroes to raid the dungeon that’s spawning a never-ending tide of dragons rather than wandering off in a random direction in the wilderness to see if they can find treasure chests. Different hero classes have different personalities and priorities, and understanding these personalities, as well as the usual base building and economy management of a strategy game, is critical to victory. It’s a genuinely spectacular game, and I’m going to tell you how to win super hard at it. A disclaimer: The general strategy I’m going to lay out in this post is effective on most quests, but some of the story quests and many of the expert-level random quests require a pretty specific build order to win. For example, in Quest for the Crown upgrading your wizard’s guild takes a high priority because you absolutely need a bunch of lightning storms ready to go in order to fend off a huge minotaur rush that happens almost as soon as the quest begins. In most quests, you don’t even want to build a wizard’s guild until your kingdom is practically done.

Continue reading “How to Majesty” →

We’re doing some more of this today.

Giants

As with a lot of these less straightforwardly humanoid videos, Shad’s conclusions are more solid, which I suspect is because there’s more room for creatures with significantly different physical qualities to actually use significantly different weapons for good reasons and less need to try and invent reasons why elves would fight at all differently from humans. So mostly my work here is just summarizing his meandering videos, and when my rambling is a more compressed version of your work, you know you have information density problems.

In melee, giants are going to most benefit from spiked boots and scythes. They’re both great at attacking enemies who are waist level or below. Even relatively light armors like leather are going to be really hard to penetrate for ordinary sized opponents, although (and Shad doesn’t make this point, but it’s true) giants are still going to want proper plate and chain armor for fighting other giants, which will be even harder to pierce. Giants who suffer from the square-cube law will probably be less keen on proportionately heavy armor because a greater proportion of their strength is taken up just standing up (although their absolute strength is still higher), but some fantasy giants are well over the height where they would be unable to stand without shattering their bones if they weren’t somehow magical (when you’re above ten or eleven-ish feet, you just can’t be bipedal anymore, even if you have much thicker feet and broader proportions), and these giants presumably have perfectly proportionate strength to humans. A giant in plate armor is basically invincible to mundane attacks, although the chinks at the joints (normally too small to be effectively exploited) may be big enough for human size attackers to cut apart.

This raises the question: What do humanoids do when confronted with a leather armored, scythe-wielding giant? Assuming you don’t have any player characters with magic weapons who can hew through steel like it’s butter, you’re going to want to rely on either ballistae or the sturdiest goddamn pikes you can find. Pikes are big enough to hit weakspots like the neck and eyes and a full formation may be able to get a pike through the slits in even a plate armored giant’s visor. This is still a battle that will favor the giants by a huge margin if there are remotely even numbers, but pikes and ballistae will given human defenders the best chance.

A giant with a bow is basically a walking ballista, and a giant with a sling is basically a walking trebuchet, and in both cases at far lower material cost and not too much worse supply cost. A ballista or trebuchet requires quite a few people to operate, and a giant eats quite a bit more than one ordinary person, and that mostly balances out, which means the lower material cost and improved mobility are just gravy. Giants are simply better at sieging human fortifications than humans are. On top of that, just like with plate armor, any giants who are giving the square-cube law the finger (including, by necessity, D&D giants who are too tall to walk without doing so) can make proportionately sized siege weapons to siege each other’s proportionately sized castles, and just like with giant plate against puny mortal weapons, these proportionately sized siege weapons will absolutely wreck human fortifications.

Basically, don’t fuck with giants.

Continue reading “Shadiversity Summarized 2: The Re-Re-Arming” →

Fatal and Friends has a review of why Beast: the Primordial is bad. It is not a very good review. Someone posted a review of the review, and because that someone is a self-described information communist who doesn’t care when people repost his writings in their entirety, with or without attribution, I’m going to copy/paste his entire review² here. It’s big enough to go below the break, so I’ll mention here above the break that I’ll be following it up with a more better review of why Beast: the Primordial is bad. But first, the review’s review:

Continue reading “Beast: The Primordial Is Terrible” →

There’s a tumblr post about humans in Star Trek. If you haven’t seen it, you should read it, because it’s great, and also because my post today relates to it:

Continue reading “Humans in Star Trek” →

Unfortunately there is no way to schedule a change in site appearance in advance. If everything has gone according to plan, by the time this post goes live the site should be properly redecorated to indicate the official departure from the (long since de facto abandoned) original plan and purpose of this blog. Honestly, it will probably look worse for a while as I figure out what kind of color scheme and layout I actually want for this stuff.

Shadiversity cannot get to the goddamn point. He shares this trait in common with Lindybeige, but unlike Lindy’s charming English accent, Shadiversity has the worst voice on YouTube. That isn’t to say that Shad’s content is bad, because there’s more to content than just the voice delivering it (if I only cared about the voice information was delivered in and not the information itself, I would listen exclusively to Morgan Freeman documentaries). This is to say that much of his most valuable content can be cut down from 10-15 minute videos to mere paragraphs. Sometimes a paragraph or less. Spoken aloud, it would be about an order of magnitude faster than the original Shad videos.

Partly because I don’t want to have to rewatch an entire 10-15 minute video whenever I need to reference this content for worldbuilding purposes, and partly because this is one of Shad’s weaker series’ (his videos on castles are much stronger) and that gives me something to write about, I’m going to write up those summaries and post them here.

Continue reading “Shadiversity Summarized: Fantasy Re-Armed” →