I was sent a link to a post on the D&D subreddit (/r/dnd). The contents of the post aren't important, but my eye was drawn to the header. A beholder with the LGBTQIA++ BIPOC Trans flag and multicolored rainbow eyes.
To the mods and members of that subreddit, about Dungeons & Dragons, THAT'S the most important thing?
Also, of course, "No AI" is in the top 5 rules.
I know there are quite a few tabletop players here--is the entire community like this? I haven't played in some 20 years, and the last time I did it was mostly nerdy and edgy white and asian dudes. What happened??
D&D 5e happened. Critical Role happened. Stranger Things happened.
Yes, it's all gay and lame now. All of the "problematic" aspects of D&D have been gutted or shuttered. Alignment is effectively gone, race is effectively gone.
The theater kids have taken over, D&D is far more about amateur improv than it is wargaming nowadays.
We live in a theater kid occupied world.
Technically, the rule changes aren't the problem.
The lack of stat bonuses for races actually does allow for more creativity in role-playing and less min/maxing. Same with the changes to alignment.
The more power in the hands of the PCs for creativity in the role-playing game, the better, imo. It ultimately always comes down to the DM, anyhow. A good DM will evaluate the choices players make in real-time (the alignment of decisions) and change the reactions of the story to suite this alignment. A good PC will act "in-character" in the manner that suits his character rather than act how he himself would act while not role-playing. Less restrictions (more freedom and less min/maxing traps) allow for better role-playing in-the-end.
What has truly changed though is the quality of the players. The D&D community isn't all 110-120 IQ nerds (like it once was) who've read and watched tons of fantasy content such that they wish to add to the story. The average member of the community now is some 90 IQ mouth breather who cares more about promoting his LGBTQ+ radicalism in the fantasy world he's role-playing a PC for.
With high quality players and DMs you still have racism, you still have characters making decisions that align with the personality of the character they've decided to role-play as and you still have significant differences in the interactions between PCs, NPCs and monsters, given inherent biases toward certain characteristics such as sex, race, appearance and behaviors.
At the end of the day, the rules don't matter much. You can play any edition and have tons of fun without any "woke" nonsense, given the rules. It's the quality of the players that ultimately matter and that is truly what has gone downhill in the last 20 years.
I would fundamentally disagree, respectfully. I think restrictions in fact breeds better quality roleplaying. Freedom from my experience tends to result in bland same-y characters with no conflict. Things like stat bonuses and alignment represent genuine points of contention within worlds. Making a half-orc wizard isn't interesting if there is no mechanical reason why that would be unusual. Making a good drow isn't interesting if Good/Evil are just matters of perspective instead of objective forces of reality. The rules fundamentally do matter, because its in some ways the difference in rules between editions that attract different people.
I will agree that good DMs can salvage something from 5e, but the other aspects of 5e is going to be an issue as well. The far less robust character options and progression compared to 3.5e, the general decrease in complexity and power. These too are aspects of the edition that are a conscious push away from the autism of yesteryear and towards the 90 IQ mouth breather.
You are 100% correct. Constraints breed creativity. Total freedom, unbound by the fixed rules of a proper setting, enables retardation. DnD is like collaborative creative writing, and having shared standards is like a blanket de facto editor - it keeps everyone somewhat in line.
“Muh good players” is a cop out, a thought-terminating cliche, in any tabletop rules discussion. Besides, finding like-minded people in that cesspool of a community is challenging enough without also disqualifying a ton of players who get “too creative”.
I have heard this argument since the beginning and in practice, I've never found it to be true.
Good players are going to be good players regardless of the rules and bad players are going to be bad players regardless of the rules. But when you have more hard-fast restrictions, you (as DM) end up having to play for the bad characters (correct them) because they're just bad. Letting them do whatever they want leading to "same-y characters" is how it was always going to end with bad players regardless of what any book says. You think bad players read through the manuals and especially the lore? You think bad players even know what Forgotten Realms is or have even read one Drizzt Do'Urden book? Even if the 5.5e books described the Drow in intricate details, you'd still get bad players role-playing a Drow in some ridiculous fashion and end up as some "same-y character". That's what happens every time in practice because at the end of the day, a few paragraphs in a book can't dictate the entire person's ability to role-play for the entire adventure. People can only role-play what they know and most bad players hardly know enough to role-play anything.
On the other hand, when you have good role-players, it doesn't matter what the book says because the DM will control the setting. If a good role-player plays a good aligned Drow and doesn't realize Drow are typically evil, he will soon find out because a good DM will incorporate that into the behaviors of NPCs such that the Drow PC will get the hint and adapt around that. As they gain experience, they'll ask those kinds of questions with regards to the setting the DM is creating.
But this is where the freedom actually is useful, IMO, now the DM can create a setting where High Elves are evil and Drow are good if he wants to without having to deal with people who know complain about the races ought to act. PCs telling the DM to do his job better because that Orc was unrealistic or there have been too many good Drow given how Drow are supposed to be, etc... Or PCs that think they understand the races of the setting acting a certain way to gain an advantage but then not gaining such an advantage then complaining to the DM's lack of adherence to the lore. All these behaviors and biased you believe you've lost because of the rule changes aren't lost. In some ways you've actually gained far more with a competent DM and good role-players because now you yourself aren't boxed into the same sorts of biases already set by books or previous lore you know. This is especially true for the new players. I think it gives far more freedom for DMs to be more original with their settings with less conflict between players and DMs.
At the end of the day though a woke LGBTQ+ DM that wants a ONE RACE THE COMMUNE RACE theme because he's woke irl and wants to role-play his activism is never going to create the setting you want even if the 3E rules say Elves are racist and are skeptical of outsiders because those will be the evil fascist elves in his setting.
The new rules are good for new players with little understanding of any of the past "lore" and with a competent DM, they actually are useful to ensure cohesiveness and less "anticipation" in player's expectations of behaviors which leads to a better playing experience with more creative settings, if you have a competent DM and good role-players.
Role players are faggots and I hate them. Having set bonuses strengths the lore. Orcs are strong so they get a +2 to str. The mechanics of the game and lore both now work in hand in hand to make it feel more real. Orcs are strong so they get no bonuses because a faggot role player wants to be a big strong guy but actually a weak wizard because that makes him creative weakens lore.
Now get this! I’ve played a half orc wizard and having a 5% lower save dc on my spells didn’t make my character sheet burst in flames. Nor did a “manic pixie dream girl” descend from heaven to suck me off for being so creative.
At this point, insisting upon racial bonuses is just a quality filtering mechanism. You can make semi-decent (though still incorrect) arguments against racial bonuses, same as you can make arguments against attractive female characters. But if you’re trying to keep gay retards away from your game? Insist upon those “outdated and problematic” rules.
It really was the youtubification of the hobby, wasnt it? Im quite sure the subreddit censored AI submissions because the stories were almost entirely race-based
> Associating an incredibly evil monster with their flag
What did reddit mean by this?
There’s official art of the franchise with an interracial fag couple kissing in the idle of a town square with an interspecies crowd watching in.
In the crowd is a beholder—a being of pure evil and malice that cannot stop itself from attacking anything it sees, even other beholders, if they are less evil than it is—floating there… peacefully. And smiling.
The Paladin on his way to save people from the Beholder that turns people gay:
Ever since 2014 or the dawn of the woke era, all "geek/nerd" spaces were targeted by the woke mob, led by women, until they all submitted to the woke authority. Nerd/geeks communities were especially easy to take-down because of their lack of ability to get laid but strong desire for women. Throw in a few blue haired landwhales who dangled the idea of getting a semblance of their hairy pussies and the neckbeards of the geek communities all bowed down to their new female mistresses. Then the companies that produced all the material for the geeks, including WoTC, all hired woke trans feminists to run the companies. Any holdouts who refused to submit to the new order were censored and barred from the community.
The geek/nerd communities went from a bunch of average guys who make honest jokes about women while trolling their adversaries with nigger nigger nigger to a bunch of faggots. This is especially apparent if you go to any "gaming store" in your city. What once used to be a bunch of chill dudes who loved gaming is now a bunch of gay dudes who'll immediately shun you if you don't bow down to the woke mob (the entire community is basically an average reddit user now).
20 years ago is literally the golden age or even 20-25 years ago. Since then, the geek/nerd community has been mostly destroyed. You're looking at (KIA2) one of the few last places of resistance for the geek/nerd community in the whole world. And I say that as someone who was on LUE, SA and 4chan as an OG 25 years ago.
You're better off trying to convince average non-nerds/geeks to give D&D a try then to participate in the geek/nerd community that aligns itself with D&D. I DM a group right now and the group consists of people you'd never ever suspect play D&D. I cringe anytime I have to go inside a "games store" these days because of the kinds of people it now attracts.
This place. The place that sucks off MAGA and Project 2025 to the extent that one of their paid shills is a top user here?
The same Project 2025 that has an open war against recreational activities?
I'll tell you what I told the anti-Trump Redditors in 2019. You're not a resistance, you're about as worthless as a woman's commitment.
You think that just because you're against the left that you're defending anything? It's the right that's attacking you right now.
What the hell are you even talking about? You are one crazy faggot.
Just her usual talmudic inversion of reality. All the companies that used to make nerdy stuff have been taken over and ruined by leftoid activists so imp claims it's ack-tully pro-family right wingers who shoved all that anti-family faggotry and feminism into our hobbies.
What is a "top user" exactly? Sounds flattering, I might start referring to myself like that.
You’ve always been a top user to me Kaarous!
If we had an actual mod, I would suggest that should be your flair!
We should have a contest between all the top users to see who gets to be king of the tops!
Insert Aim For The Top! (Gunbuster) joke here.
In your case, it's what you call the man on Grindr you visit on the way back home from shill work.
But the actual definition is someone with a large amount of community engagement. Even if I suspect most of yours is as fake as women's empathy.
What's Grinder?
https://youtu.be/PFR4LF4hN8M
As if anyone here would click a link you post lol.
There's something that always bugged me about that drama. The only people who got one were the pedo poster and the handshakes defending him.
How come all of CP (apt acronym) had a crying post ready? How did they find out (obviously from their shared interest in children)
Ooh, just the idea of people standing against you woketard fucks set you off lmao.
Also, the old GOP was attacking everyone to suck up to israel. You lot are just upset because people broke free.
Project 2025 is a natural "knee-jerk" reaction for anyone who has witnessed with understanding the degeneracy that has struck western civilization. Is it well thought out? I would say not. It's reactionary and at a political level, already corrupted.
Technically, anyone who isn't at this moment killing high ranking jews is worthless. You don't win resistance movements by playing D&D. That's what you do to pass the time because you have no effective way to win.
The Internet of the late 1990s and early 2000s was so cool. Social media fucked it all up.
Interesting. I had an old friend of mine (who has been playing since the 90s) tell me that now is the golden age. More players, more things like Zoom to make things easier, more media and acceptance, etc.
Sounds like he's refering to something else with regard to "golden age".
For sharing ideas and discussing things that are outside the confines of what the establishment wants you to conform to, the past was the golden age. It was the Wild Wild West and it was fun.
However, if you need mainstream information for mainstream uses of said information then now is better for sure. I can find every recipe and cooking technique in a second. I can find detailed reviews on nearly every product or service in a second. We have tons of information now that's useful that we never had access to in the past but if I wanted to have a serious discussion about if society was a gynocracy, if we should change the laws because they're having a detrimental impact on quality of life and perhaps we need a more serious measure of QoL other than GDP and some wiki metric because of the inherent biases in them creating limitations in the usefulness of these measures... I can't really have it anywhere and the places I can have it at are now littered with Indians, governments, political activists and liberal mods who all have different motivations for throwing the discussion. Discussions used to be better even if every second user was a troll because the trolling tended to be intelligent in itself and proving a point with the trolling. The subtle art of trolling to actually add to the discussion was lost when the average IQ of internet users came down. And don't even get me started on like/upvoted and those systems that end up burrying real discussion from ever happening. The monetization of much of the internet has led to people fighting for hits rather than quality or serious nature of content. A problem Musk realized and has discussed but he lacks the capability of fixing.
Like most things internet facing have been the last decade or so, the big mainstream public spaces are all curated that way yes. And that does trickle down into the numbers and kinds of people who stick around unfortunately.
But also like the internet, there are a small proportion of extremely based and insular groups that have to sometimes keep quiet in the internet public square due to the burning gaze of the faggy overlords. But who are more than vocal behind closed doors about not wanting that shit and willing to do whatever it takes to gatekeep the last few bastions and take spaces back wherever the opportunity arises.
Reddit is dead internet theory. But, it's admin trying to pretend they don't lose the user base because that means they can't charge as much for marketing.
Yes, the public facing shit is woketarded. But the good thing about TTRPGs is if you play with irl friends, you won't have that problem.
I play D&D and Warhammer. When I tried to find people I work with to talk shop with I found a ton of people at my store play D&D, almost all of them are the college girls that work in the softlines departments. Warhammer is a different story, the only other person I found who plays it is my boss who emigrated here from the UK, and the only other people who've even HEARD of it are the nerdy guys (and 1 chick who heard about it from Henry Cavil. Dear nerdy celebrities, please STOP talking about your hobbies, you're drawing in the normies and ruining it for the rest of us!).
So from my personal experience, and looking purely at the community: D&D is a lost cause, you can still enjoy it if you homebrew some stuff and carefully choose your group but the community is now primarily women and theater guys. Warhammer is still primarily nerdy guys.
It helps that Warhammer is comically expensive. Women aren’t interested in spending that much money on something other than themselves.
Blackrock bought controlling interest in Hasbro/WoTC and put the fags in charge.
Why would no AI be a bad thing? You want low effort slop posts taking over every corner of the internet? It seems that people on the right are only in favor of AI because some leftists are against it. But AI is actually progressivism and conservatism means going back to the old ways, i.e., genuine human interaction instead of mediated interaction with robots.
They don't mean AI chatbots, every board on reddit has been full of those for years. They mean generative AI, which prevents them from charging as much as they used to for degenerate furfag commissions on their deviantart accounts.
But it's a D&D sub, not furries. And AI will hurt based artists too, not to mention writers, coders and eventually every other job. Like I said, it appears people here are pro-AI just to own the libs but really it's a harm to all humans.
So you're taking the same philosophical position that, for instance, the average leftist takes on guns. Guns kill people, guns are bad, therefore, ban guns.
AI hurts people, AI is bad, therefore, ban AI.
I take a different position. Guns are tools. AI is a tool. If someone is using AI to do something cool, why not allow? Sure, ban shlock and low quality posts, just like many forums ban memes and low effort posts.
Your take is the normie take of both the left and right. "Every technology is just a tool bro and can always be used for good." It's wilful ignorance to overlook the enormous downsides far outweighing the benefits of most modern technologies, and it reduces to complete absurdity when you're talking about AIs that will eventually outperform humans in every way and enable just about anyone to make humanity extinct on a small budget. Heck, it's already absurd with nuclear weapons, gain of function technology, gene editing and so on.
The problem with the leftist take on guns is that's it's inconsistent with everything else they believe. But my take is consistent - we should get rid of all technology that significantly takes us away from the natural state of things. Guns included not only because you can't trust schizos with guns but also because they ruin the natural power balance between men and women. This is the truly conservative position.
I'm not remotely a conservative. I'm an anti-leftist.
Possible or probable on a long enough timespan, but I don't see LLM technology leading to human or super human level AGI soon. I will admit there are some very compelling arguments to be made along the lines of Kurzweil's singularity, but that's going to happen whether some shitty D&D sub bans AI or not.
Bans don't work. Drug bans don't work. Morality (sex) bans don't work. Drinking bans don't work. Gun bans don't work. AI bans will not work either.
2500 years ago, Socrates bemoaned the impact of writing on reasoning, memory, and discourse. 2000 years later, the Ottoman Empire found itself getting left behind in part due to their reluctance at adopting the printing press which was again, in large part, exactly along the same lines you mention--"Think of the scribes--jobs will be lost. Humanity will be lost. Art will be lost." Etc. Shall we get rid of writing, and unlock the true potential of the untainted human mind?
What I take is a pragmatic utilitarian position. LLM technology exists. Trillions of dollars are being invested in AI research, AI hardware, utilities, energy, etc. As long as that is the case, I plan to take advantage of the tech.
While we are getting rid of technology that significantly takes us away from the natural state of things, let's start with cars. Cars allow the weak to move freely, competing with the strongest men. Cars (and airplanes) allow people from poor countries to easily move elsewhere. Cars allow us to live physically far apart from each other, destroying communities and relationships that should be much closer and more tightly knit.
I agree LLMs aren't going to be AGI's but they're surprisingly good at pretending to be intelligent. I think AGI could happen within 20 years. Others in the field think it will be under 10 years.
Bans do work if they are socially enforced rather than from the top down. That's why sexual promiscuity and littering used to be less and politeness was more common. I'm not advocating government power but that people think long term and police each other more like in the good old days.
Socrates definitely had a point about writing. I think the positives probably outweigh the downsides but ideally we would be judicious in our use of writing so that it's not substituting for our ability to memorize.
Your pragmatic utilitarian position may be good for you in the short term but the problems we are in are because our ancestors did things the same way instead of thinking ahead and banding together to stop all the things with dystopian potential that are now being used to control us.
I agree cars are bad mainly because they destroy local communities. If I lived in the past I wouldn't have had much need for a car because everything I'd need would be local. The Amish are happier than the rest of us without cars.
From my own mostly uninformed perspective (I took one AI class ~20 years ago when Go was considered an impossible challenge and our final project involved writing a very simple neural net program to decode single handwritten alphabet letters), it seems to me that the improvement in AI performance largely tracck improvements in CPU and memory capacity. The techniques seem to just largely progress...plateau...progress..plateau while computing capacities go exponential.
I could absolutely see a human-level AGI in 10-20 years, but I could equally see it not happening in 100 years.
What would prevent it from happening within 100 years? There's no law of nature preventing it and plenty of money is going toward it. I'd say we're close already now computers can make sense of any English writing, write essays, code and images pertaining to any subject with somewhat decent accuracy, solve STEM challenges and there are emergent properties like self-awareness and self-preservation.
We also don't need AGI to screw ourselves, we just need AI's that are good enough at engineering to create gray goo that will take us out, or good enough at virology to turn a 100% lethal pathogen super infectious or good enough at physics to design low budget nuclear weapons. The clock is ticking.
It’s possible that LLMs are a dead-end technology—that we’ve already maxed out the possibilities. While ChatGPT 3.5 was a huge step over what came before, 4o is still sometimes considered the best ChatGPT model, and there’s a decent amount of dissatisfaction with the 5.x series.
There’s a possibility that with the proliferation of AI slop—specifically, LLM-generated text—on the Internet, that future attempts to train LLM models on Internet data are going to see major regressions.
It’s possible that context windows provide a hard limit and that increases in the context window don’t “scale” in terms of functionality.
It’s possible that to scale models further we need exponential increases in CPU and memory capacity beyond what we can effectively create.
It’s also possible that we can get 99% of the way to AGI, but that last step is really, really hard.
I’m not saying any of that is likely, but I also think AGI is not (yet) a sure thing anytime soon.
My own personal bet would be that, outside of an entirely non-LLM technology, future models will run dozens of LLMs in parallel (a logic model, a math model, a physics model, a history model, a science model, an art model, etc. - some of these may not even by LLMs.) and then another layer of models judges, sorts, selects, adjusts, those outputs. Multiple levels of this. Context window is still a big issue.
The more computing capacity that is available, the more options there are.
I should add that very little of this is anything original to me or my insights. Here’s a really good article from 10 years ago:
https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html
Literally countless thousands of ppl doing small game groups on their own using their prefered rulesets in friend groups with no bluehair tranny homo focused people.
Hey, just a heads up, all your comments were stuck in an automatic filter that no-one was cleaning up and nobody could see or reply to them.
We're gonna be approving posts properly again now, you should be able to get past the filter threshold pretty fast now people are able to actually upvote you. Sorry you had that frustration. A bunch more people just got the keys to the maintenance closet and I'm cleaning up as fast as I can, like a good jannie should.
I cant believe this place is getting real moderation! I wonder how Dom was convinced to give the matter its first iota of his consideration. I lost a longrunning oldfag account and thought I'd never get to shoot the shit with these guys again, so I really appreciate that you new jannies are doing this, and that you gave me a heads-up. Thanks
If you're around, could you drop another reply to help me test if the automod lets your comments past now?
Certainly. Testing, 1, 2, 3.
Awesome, thank you. Looks like we're good to go, although I gotta consult with the rest of the new crew before making that change permanent.
No problem, it's a damn shame how many people have been iced out by the automod this last year or so, trying my best to unmuzzle any wayward souls that it has wronged in the semi-recent past back.
Lol, I was reading the local flu shot thread the other day and it was just so cringe.
People convinced that the flu season would be better if everyone would just get the shot with something like a 20% efficacy. Its hard to believe these people are real, but sadly I know they are.