may genuinely be unskilled when it comes to computers in general.

I do not accept this idea that people are so unskilled at computers they can’t install Linux, and are so immutably so they can’t get better.

Like yeah sometimes you have to ask for help or watch a YouTube video. That shit’s free and right there.

Yes, you can fucking do “stand on the table and make a speech” work. You know how? By breaking it up into detailed steps (pun intended), something that LLMs are awesome at!

My intended point was the LLM at run time taking user input wouldn’t be able to do “make a speech” if the game engine doesn’t have that concept already encoded. And if the game is presented as “take user input and respond believably” then users are going to ask for stuff the engine can’t do. Maybe there’s no animations for climbing. Maybe they did some shortcuts and the graphics look bizarre when stuff is elevated.

I wasn’t talking about Skyrim specifically.

But also you’re being unpleasant in this exchange, so you can win.

lol if you had read the rest of my post you would have seen I admitted you might be right. But go off, I guess.

LLM generated code is notoriously bad. Like, “call this function that doesn’t exist” is common. Maybe a more specialized model would do better, but I don’t think it would ever be completely reliable.

But even aside from that, it’s not going to be able to map the free form user input to behavior that isn’t already defined. If there’s nothing written to handle “stand on the table and make a speech”, or “climb over that wall” it’s not going to be able to make the NPC do that even if the player is telling them too.

But maybe you’re more right than I am. I don’t know. I don’t do game development. I find it hard to imagine it won’t frequently run into situations where natural language input demands stuff the engine doesn’t know how to do.

I don’t think it would be easy to map free form text to game behavior. Not just like “make the NPC smile” but complex behavior like “this NPC will now go to this location and take this action”. That seems like it would be very error prone at best.

It would be interesting if NPCs could react believably to free form input from the player, but that seems unlikely to be reliable. I’m not sure how you’d map the text to in game actions.

Like, you could have the LLM respond with “ok I’ll let you have my horse if you leave in the morning, and solve the zombie problem” but it’s not trivial to make the game world respond to that. Not even counting it breaking out into “sorry as an LLM I can’t …”

Sometimes I feel like everyone who would care already knows , and everyone who doesn’t care won’t care no matter what the facts say.

You could prove definitively that LLMs summon demons that eat live babies, and they’d shrug and dismiss it.

This whole conversation is at least using the words “DND” even if one could argue they’re not actually talking about DND specifically. Thus, I was making the point that if you do want a system that rewards creative players DND is not a good one.

What system are you thinking of that stands in contrast to dnd’s “explicit permissiveness”?

I’m not even sure what you mean by the “permissive interpretation”. Is that the Calvinball mode? Games can definitely go badly when it turns into an inconsistent, unpredictable mess. Games have rules so we don’t argue like children on the playground going “I hit you. No you didn’t. Yes I did. I have a force field. Well I have an anti force field laser…”

Personally I rather dislike “5% of every attempt will be wacky”, especially when multiplied by “higher level people are making more attempts, and thus are having more wackiness”.

The fighter who makes three attacks a round is going to have three times as many “hilarious fumbles” compared to the lower level fighter only making one.

This is part of why I prefer dice pools over a flat single die system.

If you have a machine that runs Windows and the hardware is still good,

Linux is often more forgiving on hardware requirements. I recently put Mint (with xfce) on a like 2013 laptop and it’s fine. That’s not even an especially lightweight distribution.

D&D is great because it allows for creative freedom

This is not something unique to dnd! In fact, DND is not even especially good at this!

It’s like people are saying “mayonnaise is great because you can add it to any meal”, which is technically true, but meanwhile salt is right there being ignored on the shelf.

It’s funny because the character who said that was very verbose, if I recall

Well, maybe. I think some people on the inside are embarrassed, and they then lash out or deflect to cover that up. “Yo reading is stupid”, the guy says, crying on the inside because it’s hard for him and he’s too ashamed to ask for help.

But maybe some people are just regular proud to be illiterate

I think of lot of people are semi illiterate and embarrassed by it

But dnd’s paradox is it is both open ended and rigid. My problem is it’s too open ended in many ways (eg: social conflict), almost completely missing rules in other parts (eg: meta game mechanics, conceding conflicts), and too rigid in others (eg: Eldritch blast targeting rules, unarmed smite and sneak attack). That’s not even going into the bigger problems like the adventuring day or how coarse class+level makes many concepts impractical at best.

On top of that, it is so mega popular many players have no other reference points and don’t realize its assumptions are not universally true. It’s like people who have only ever watched the Lord of the rings movies, and they’re like “of course movies are four hours long and have horses. That’s just how movies are.”

The main things DND 5e does well are popular support, and the very small decision space for players makes it hard to make a character that’s mechanically very weak or very strong. It brings nothing special to the table for roleplaying.

Compare with my go-to example of Fate, which has simple systems to encourage it. CofD, my second favorite, also does.

DND is a team game, and both have agreed upon rules. Not sure I follow your objection

I’m pretty sure the browser has more sandboxing than a desktop app running as me. The desktop app could do anything. Firefox tries to prevent webpages from doing nefarious stuff.

There’s a spectrum of play that runs from strict rules-as-written to complete calvinball. Calvinball can be fun, but it’s not really a transferrable game. It’s very particular to that moment and that group.

Sometimes people post wacky calvinball moments (eg: rolling damage against the floor, a free action to eat tiles, a +2 bonus to hit) as if that’s baseline RAW DND. It is not. Many tables would be like “wtf, that’s not how this game works”. So it can be kind of weird when it’s presented as obvious, as if it’s raw, when it’s just make pretend.

Imagine if the post was “we were playing basketball and I missed the shot, so I got in my car and drove up close so I could jump off the roof and dunk”. Like, wacky story but not how you’re supposed to play the game.

Furthermore, DND specifically is kind of bad at creativity. It’s very precariously balanced, with specific rules in odd places and no rules in others. Compare with, for example, Fate, which has “this thing in the scene works to my advantage” rules built in. DND is almost entirely in the hands of the DM.

When I have to use discord, I use it in the browser. I don’t trust the app not to get up to no good.

I’ve recently started to have to use Teams at work and wow it’s awful. In subtle and overt ways.