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90s Cringe Rock posted:It's funny, because major inspiration Caves of Qud makes extensive use of procedural generation for the history of the world, and some items. The non-handwritten books are delightfully pure markov chain garbage, but worth xp if you take them to the right place, and they can have directions to a very optional and unnecessary secret if you skim through them looking out for certain key phrases. The devs have given talks on how they use it all. Yeah, Qud is great. The writing and careful calibration of the procgen engine are excellent, and I think in a lot of ways Qud's style of generation is more what people actually want when they think of AI content generation but, you know, it's a different technology that requires thought and effort to deploy instead of mashing a bunch of prompts together.
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Oct 3, 2023 18:18
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Lotians? They should consult a medical professional about Fluoxymesterone, or visit hims.com for discreet effective assistance.
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Oct 3, 2023 19:14
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it puts the Lotian on the skin and puts it in the basket
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Oct 3, 2023 19:19
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TheDiceMustRoll posted:Who do you think is most likely to come out in favor of AI art in commercial products next https://gamefound.com/en/projects/awaken-realms/dragon-eclipse
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Oct 3, 2023 20:23
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JazzFlight posted:Funny you should mention that because I’m currently trying to sound the horn about Awaken Realms (a company I used to really like). I highly suspect they’re using AI art tools in their latest campaign, Dragon Eclipse. I’m also worried that it might be used in all their campaigns going forward (and I have a Tainted Grail game of theirs on the way). Along those lines I've seen Pinnacle following the Midjourney account on Twitter.
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Oct 3, 2023 22:28
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Tomb Guardians Miniatures seem to be doing a bad job at reading the Twitter-room here: https://twitter.com/TombGuardians/status/1709303906646347835 (Some screenshots for those who aren't on Twitter)   
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Oct 4, 2023 16:37
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UrbanLabyrinth posted:Tomb Guardians Miniatures seem to be doing a bad job at reading the Twitter-room here: https://twitter.com/TombGuardians/status/1709303906646347835 Reminds me of the kingfom come deliversnce board game, a fully voiced over app driven co op rpg they put up for 100k...then canceled because as it turns out they needed at minimum 1.5 million eur and they were trying to game the algo
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Oct 4, 2023 19:29
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WotC has apparently removed all the AI-generated art from their Giants book, including everything by Ilya Shkipin (who's no longer credited at all). https://gizmodo.com/dnd-bigby-presents-giants-ai-art-replace-ilya-shkipin-1850895711
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Oct 4, 2023 23:44
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dwarf74 posted:WotC has apparently removed all the AI-generated art from their Giants book, including everything by Ilya Shkipin (who's no longer credited at all).
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Oct 5, 2023 00:04
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Sidenote, drat Gizmodo has gone down hill. I knew it's been progressively worse as they've been sold off, but I fully gave up on trying to fight through the ads to read that article on mobile.
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Oct 5, 2023 00:12
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PharmerBoy posted:Sidenote, drat Gizmodo has gone down hill. I knew it's been progressively worse as they've been sold off, but I fully gave up on trying to fight through the ads to read that article on mobile. I started using this on Android and even shelled out for the paid subscription - https://adguard.com/en/welcome.html
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Oct 5, 2023 00:34
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I use this DNS on mobile. dns.adguard.com Can lead to some weird poo poo on websites that hate adblockers obviously but I just use this as my private DNS on mobile and it works.
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Oct 5, 2023 00:39
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Angry Salami posted:And a lot of the inconsistencies in the Federation world-building can then be explained if you assume the Federation's closer to the European Union or even the Holy Roman Empire than it is to a unitary state; it's an alliance of dozens of different political entities, most of which have histories stretching back centuries already, and some of those are themselves confederations of different political entities. The true reason the Vulcans are the power behind the Federation. They don't get frustrated by navigating all the multiple bureaucracies required to get anything done outside of Starfleet.
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Oct 5, 2023 00:41
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Liquid Communism posted:The true reason the Vulcans are the power behind the Federation. They don't get frustrated by navigating all the multiple bureaucracies required to get anything done outside of Starfleet. I always figured humans were so dominant in the Federation because as the junior members during the founding they eagerly took on all the work they could and ended up drat near monopolizing the government and military.
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Oct 5, 2023 00:43
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Fun discussion of why humans are allowed to do so much weird poo poo in the Federation here from a while back: https://www.tor.com/2016/10/17/the-answer-to-why-humans-are-so-central-in-star-trek/
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Oct 5, 2023 01:04
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WotC has ended their distribution agreement with Penguin Random House Books. Per the article, this is given with no explanation. Distribution will now be done solely through hobby distributors like Alliance and Diamond etc.quote:“As the owner of a hybrid book and game store, it’s frustrating, since the book publishers’ terms, incentives, and requirements are generally a lot better than the big game distributors,” Ross E. Lockhart of Petaluma, CA’s Word Horde Emporium of the Weird & Fantastic told io9. “Penguin is very easy to deal with as a bookseller, particularly when it comes to things like replacing damaged product or returning outdated items. Less so with games distributors who have higher minimums and less favorable margins.
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Oct 5, 2023 01:05
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Wait like the diamond comic book company
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Oct 5, 2023 01:49
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That seems like a really strange move if they want to keep D&D easily available to the general public
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Oct 5, 2023 01:51
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Angrymog posted:That seems like a really strange move if they want to keep D&D easily available to the general public But makes sense a lot of sense in a digital leaning future. Look at all the ways they screwed small game shops with MtG in the past 3-5 years as Arena blew up.
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Oct 5, 2023 01:52
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Ominous Jazz posted:Wait like the diamond comic book company Yeah, they serve as a distributor for a lot of hobby stuff, toys, games, etc.
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Oct 5, 2023 01:55
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Isn't Diamond on the verge of bankruptcy on account of the direct market imploding during Covid?
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Oct 5, 2023 01:59
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I suspect that those worse terms for the retailer are no small part of why WotC is making this change.
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Oct 5, 2023 01:59
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grassy gnoll posted:Isn't Diamond on the verge of bankruptcy on account of the direct market imploding during Covid? More specifically, Diamond is such loving dogshit that multiple big-name publishers have dropped them, including DC, Marvel, IDW, and most recently Image. In the comics industry in particular, Diamond is known to be a massive pain in the rear end to work with, especially for smaller publishers and smaller stores. I have literally never heard anybody say anything positive about Diamond, and the idea that they might finally go out of business is a thing everyone in the industry seems to be actively hoping for.
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Oct 5, 2023 02:17
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Kai Tave posted:More specifically, Diamond is such loving dogshit that multiple big-name publishers have dropped them, including DC, Marvel, IDW, and most recently Image. In the comics industry in particular, Diamond is known to be a massive pain in the rear end to work with, especially for smaller publishers and smaller stores. I have literally never heard anybody say anything positive about Diamond, and the idea that they might finally go out of business is a thing everyone in the industry seems to be actively hoping for. We used Diamond at my comic store and it was often famine, seldom feast with them but there was nobody else. Alliance wasn't much better on the game side but you (usually) got what you ordered but unfortunately every time we played around with a new distribution group they usually wanted some sort of insane initial order we just couldn't do.
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Oct 5, 2023 04:13
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TG distribution terms in general are ludicrous. All of the volatility of books (or more), none of the returnability. Honestly, if I were a bookstore carrying games I'd have ordered every WOTC product possible from Random House just for the returnability.
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Oct 5, 2023 04:31
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Bottom Liner posted:But makes sense a lot of sense in a digital leaning future. Look at all the ways they screwed small game shops with MtG in the past 3-5 years as Arena blew up. This sort of thing keeps being said every time something like this happens and it's been at least 20 years since I first started hearing it. I will continue to believe that the electronic side of gaming is largely in addition to physical product, not a replacement. The thing squeezing the guys on the bottom rung is deeply discounted direct sales. Smaller game stores don't even stock much D&D stuff because everyone is buying poo poo for 50% off on Amazon. Sure the stuff goes up for pre-order at full price, but it starts dropping almost immediately after the street date and in a month or two it will cost ~$30 or less like all the rest. I would guess that, even if they tell themselves in the mirror in the WotC bathroom that Digital Is King, the reason they're dropping RH is because the return is not worth the cost of the relationship with a slightly less dysfunctional entity than your typical comics and games distributors. That Old Tree fucked around with this message at 06:19 on Oct 5, 2023 |
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Oct 5, 2023 06:16
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I mean the reason WotC changed is that it's cheaper for their bottom line yes. I don't even think the notion of this hurting LGS's or smaller stores ever occurred to them, just a contract probably expired and they went shopping. I would say, I don't think it's such a stretch to think that it's a decent bet that digital tools are going to at least catch up to if not overtake physical ones(if they haven't already after covid at least in like the US), that'd be some fun numbers to look at), Obviously not all circumstances, and this is obviously anecdotal. But even pre-covid there was only like three people my LGS who used a physical character sheet, or a physical book at the like 5 or so tables of 4-6 people. One was one of the GM's using it to run Waterdeep, and the others were players using a pre-made character sheet that their GM had printed. Everyone else either had beyond or some  phone app with their character management on it. Not to mention that post covid so many people are playing on any of the various VTT's floating around, using those integrated ditital tools.
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Oct 5, 2023 06:39
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That Old Tree posted:This sort of thing keeps being said every time something like this happens and it's been at least 20 years since I first started hearing it. I will continue to believe that the electronic side of gaming is largely in addition to physical product, not a replacement. The thing squeezing the guys on the bottom rung is deeply discounted direct sales. Smaller game stores don't even stock much D&D stuff because everyone is buying poo poo for 50% off on Amazon. Sure the stuff goes up for pre-order at full price, but it starts dropping almost immediately after the street date and in a month or two it will cost ~$30 or less like all the rest. Yeah I agree with this, I don’t think WOTC is hurting stores because of Arena. WOTC is doing what it’s always done, and what corporations are made to do, which is capture as much of the pie for itself as possible. And LGSes are doing what they always do, which is refuse to engage in the kind of collective bargaining that would let them not be the smallest and weakest people going for the pie. I do think there’s been a shift at WOTC where they’ve decided LGSes matter even less than they did before, but I don’t think that has much to do with digital. If they really wanted to go all-in on Arena or whatever, it’d make no sense to ramp up their production of paper as massively as they did with the Booster Fun initiatives (collector, set, and draft boosters, secret lairs, etc). What I’d argue they’ve done is in keeping with a lot of modern collectible products where they focus much more on big spenders by increasing variety and complexity of product offerings in ways that are confusing to less invested folks but let their most invested fans spend in ways that are laser focused on their interests and budgets. This is really hard on LGSes because they get cut out of the secret lair part and the three booster types create a stocking and cash flow nightmare. On top of this WOTC can make a better margin by selling to Amazon directly than going through distribution so LGSes get savagely undercut online, and WOTC has realized that commander players are huge spenders and mostly don’t play in organized LGS events, so those events are less of a company priority (and I suspect that means they view LGSes as less critical to the model, though who knows). It’s tempting to me to think someone there has also realized that they don’t need to make running an LGS a good idea because so many people want to do it even when it isn’t, but that’s probably just me. Much more likely, I think, is that as corporate culture has changed and as Magic has become more important to Hasbro, they’ve simply moved to caring vastly more about short term growth than long term, as is the way in the era of the quarterly report. All this is in line with everything they’ve done much more neatly than some kind of weird plan to replace paper with Arena, imo. They don’t have a long term plan like that because they basically don’t have the luxury of realistic long term plans at all - their corporate leadership demands constant growth and they have to deliver however they can, regardless of implications for their own long term, let alone other businesses.
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Oct 5, 2023 06:48
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foundry owns. i would play all rpgs with digital dice rolling if possible.
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Oct 5, 2023 06:50
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Dexo posted:I mean the reason WotC changed is that it's cheaper for their bottom line yes. I don't even think the notion of this hurting LGS's or smaller stores ever occurred to them, just a contract probably expired and they went shopping. Sure, but my guess is a lot of those folks still buy at least some of the the books, or get them as gifts, or so on. I know a lot of folks who didn’t bother to bring their books to games in my store still owned a fair number of them, either for use in home games, aspirationally, or just for the love of having an object. If you can only sell someone one of the two they’d probably prefer to sell the digital, but of course they’d rather sell both. (This also applies to Magic cards, which continue to be their biggest concern.)
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Oct 5, 2023 06:52
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I don't have much hard data to add, but I feel like people have been talking about the death of LGS's since before I stopped posting in the Trad Games forum in 2010 (and back then people were still blaming it on Amazon and B&N (lol)). A solid chunk of gaming stores did die, but I just checked out where I lived back then are there are actually more stores there now than there was in 2013 when I left. I live in a place where I wouldn't expect to see too many gaming stores and somehow we have 5 within a 20 minute radius of my home, and I've commented before that I'm surprised at how successful they seem to be compared to the anemic stores I shopped at in the early 2010's. I think the key, however, is that pen & paper games like D&D/PF/CoC have very little to do with the bottom lines of these places vs. miniature games, card games, and board game nights. I play D&D with one of the owners of the store we play in, and I've mentioned to him that I always go out of my way to buy new books at his store if I can, and he basically was like, "Thanks" but also that someone like me buying a D&D book once a month was barely a blip compared to them unloading "Leviathan" WH40K boxes or $210 2-player starter sets for Lord of the Rings. Basically every vibrant gaming store I see now is basically some variation of constantly running mini or card tournaments, or being membership pay at the door places where you can run your tournaments/board games/tabletop games.
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Oct 5, 2023 08:00
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That they function as public spaces is probably the important bit. Also why Games Workshop keeps up its stores; when you have a complex, niche and expensive hobby that appeals a lot to huge nerds, you want to make sure that they have access to a place to actually play it, and there are so few public venues left you can do that, especially in this atomised and enclosed age. The books are basically advertising, even loss leaders, and more so you have ready access for potential players.
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Oct 5, 2023 08:13
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Lemniscate Blue posted:Fun discussion of why humans are allowed to do so much weird poo poo in the Federation here from a while back: Humans are central because most of the aliens are human stand-in cultures, OP
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Oct 5, 2023 10:13
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Name Change posted:Humans are central because most of the aliens are human stand-in cultures, OP the watsonian answer is the fun one tho
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Oct 5, 2023 10:25
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Oh, and Brian W. Foster, the weird Critical Role hanger-on who loved to dogpile people on twitter, is being sued by six people, including his ex-wife Ashley Johnson, for abuse.quote:Actress Ashley Johnson and six other women, including two current employees of Critical Role, have sued Brian W. Foster for abuse in a civil case in Los Angeles. The suit, filed on Tuesday in the Superior Court of California, Los Angeles County, accuses Foster of domestic violence, intentional infliction of emotional distress, sexual battery and assault, and stalking. A copy of the complaint, which was reviewed by ComicBook.com, mentions several incidents previously stated in a restraining order filed by Johnson earlier in the year, along with several new incidents. According to the complaint, Foster made "wildly inappropriate and unwanted sexual comments" to Johnson's sister while "fueled by drugs and alcohol." The suit also states that Foster groped a Critical Role employee during a live event in Chicago in February 2020. Another plaintiff (named as Jane Doe) alleges that Foster groped her and "forcibly attempted to stick his hands down her pants" while sitting in the audience at a separate event that took place in Austin in November 2019.
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Oct 5, 2023 12:25
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Kai Tave posted:Oh, and Brian W. Foster, the weird Critical Role hanger-on who loved to dogpile people on twitter, is being sued by six people, including his ex-wife Ashley Johnson, for abuse.  EDIT: More details: https://pagesix.com/2023/10/03/the-last-of-us-star-ashley-johnson-6-others-sue-ex-for-abuse/ Pretty messed up, Brian! Megazver fucked around with this message at 13:53 on Oct 5, 2023 |
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Oct 5, 2023 13:41
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Kai Tave posted:Oh, and Brian W. Foster, the weird Critical Role hanger-on who loved to dogpile people on twitter, is being sued by six people, including his ex-wife Ashley Johnson, for abuse. CR had that guy on a leash for way too long. Complaints were there about just his attitude on Twitter almost from the jump.
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Oct 5, 2023 14:07
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grassy gnoll posted:Isn't Diamond on the verge of bankruptcy on account of the direct market imploding during Covid? Definitely. Diamond and Alliance are the same company, so I am curious how that will all shake out. They are pretty separate for the most so who knows.
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Oct 5, 2023 14:24
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I have been in the RPG hobby since the early 1990s. LGSs have pretty much always been on the verge shuttering throughout that entire time. It makes it hard to see a shift in WotC's distribution model as being the straw that breaks the camel's back. If anything, this might weirdly help LGSs since it will mean that mainstream bookshops will likely stop stocking RPGs - why work with Alliance/Diamond/etc. at all when you can stock all your shelves with stuff from a much nicer distributor? So they may pick up some of the sales that mainstream bookshops lose... ...though losing that bit of mainstream visibility, slender though the advantage is in the Internet age, feels like it may hurt D&D at least a little.
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Oct 5, 2023 14:54
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Mainstream vendors have really been leaning into RPGs since the D&D boom, taking it off the shelves is going to hurt. Sure D&D has found fertile ground in the normie-sphere, but let's get it out of Barnes & Noble. This needs to go back to anime titty statue shops.
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