zifnab25 [he/him, any]

I am just personally uninterested in the direction the game is going with the OneD&D, and I think the source of this muddling path is do to the failure of the original business maneuver with the OGL revision.

I absolutely agree. Although, I think the consequences of that decision has been something of a “Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom!” D&D-knock-off renaissance. And I’m pretty happy with that, given how a lot of my old favorites from Palladium and Rollmaster and GURPS seem to have found some new life.

I don’t really see things getting better under Hasbro, so any major shakeup might be a good thing overall.

I would love to see the Onyx Path (ie, old White Wolf) folks find their legs again. Miss myself some old school Vampire: The Masquerade.

they might have been more hands-off than Hasbro went it comes to mucking with the business model,

Hasbro was extremely hands off for a long while. But then their toy lines fell apart and their board game revenue just became “How many times can we sell you the same box of Monopoly pieces?”

Suddenly WotC was their revenue stream, and the head managers decided they needed to apply their magic touch to the franchise.

I don’t really care, because D&D is more a style of playing than a product for sale. Sucks to see Faerun or Eberon cannibalized by these ghouls, but there’s just so much fucking material out there that’s never going away.

It’s just not a game you can ruin (and 4e fucking tried, let me tell you). Too much of it is bound up in what you and your friends bring to the table.

Picard was already bordering on elder abuse.

Weird how the size of your nose changes with your facial expression.

This is cool, from a digital visuals perspective, because it is building out a very detailed library of human behaviors to model after. A richer catalog provides a lot more potential for engines that want to render more complex human behaviors.

But its also kinda… illustrative of the soft upper limits of generative AI, as this is still ultimately a discrete (and presumably fairly limited) library of motions that will result in visually distinct characters all falling into the same set of physical behaviors. Both a small rambunctious boy and an elderly infirm woman crossing a gap in the pavement in the same way isn’t realistic. And while you can solve this by adding more data points, you’re still having all small rambunctious boys and all elderly infirm women crossing the gap in the pavement in the same way. And while you can solve this by adding variations… how much modeling are you really willing to do for sufficient variance? Idk.

We get generative in the sense that we can reskin a stick-figure model very quickly using a catalog of behaviors. But we don’t get generative in the sense that the computer understands the biomechanics of a human body and can create these stick-figure models in believable states.

Its broadly fantasy, although the real focus is on building a system that naturally integrates with a VTT rather than one that’s patched in under tabletop rules. Still in pre-alpha development, too. So don’t hold your breath. But it looks promising.

Don’t forget Kobold Press’s Black Flag and FoundryVTT’s Crucible.

Palladium also decided to re-release their TMNT modern adventure line, very recently.

I think its really shaken up the industry from top to bottom. So much of the last twenty-five years of TTRPGs has leveraged the OGL. WotC effectively killed GURPs, WoD, and Rolemaster when they put everyone on the d20 standard. And with every new iteration of their core franchise - from 3.0 to D&D One - they’ve been promising fully integrated software support that… never shows up (which has been a huge boon for Bioware and now Lauren Studios, as D&D-adjacent video games thrived in the absence of a real VTT system).

I don’t think we’re going to see how badly Matel screwed the pooch on this for another decade, at least. But they punched a huge hole in the community that was churning out half of their franchise’s best content.

No microphone

Its funny, because I’d love to have a sound setup that accepts audio. I do FoundryVTT games regularly from my couch, and being able to talk at my TV, rather than setting up a bluetooth headset, would be great for hybrid home/remote games.

I know my TV has a built in mic, because it occasionally goes into “Did You Say Something?” mode based on keywords I never bothered to figure out. But I can’t get it to sync with the server I’ve set it up against.

Damned near everything has a mic in it, but nobody wants to let you use it for what you want.

yeah, the comic describes it as “the virtually impossible”

We are a lot better at it now than we were, say, ten years ago. But it is nearly trivial to outwit a “bird detecting algorithm” by holding up a vague facsimile of a bird. That gets us back to the old TrashFuture line about AI just being “some dude at a computer filling out captchas”.

I’m not saying we aren’t building on centuries of work, i’m saying the rate of recent progress is remarkable.

The recent progress is heavily overstated. More often than not, what a computer does today to recognize a bird is to pull on a large library of data labeled “birds” and ask if there’s a close-enough match. But that large library is not AI driven. Its the consequence of a bunch of manual labeling done by humans with eyes and brains. A novel or rare species of bird, or a bird that’s camouflaged, or even just a bird that’s out-of-focus or badly rendered, will still consistently fail the “Is this a bird?” test.

The original problem was posited… 60 years ago?

It’s a bit like saying “I wonder how the dinosaurs died?” in the early '00s, a few years before meteor theory really got nailed down. Like, ignore the last century of postulation. We just knocked this out real quick.

A game that has barely changed in over 30 years, except to expand the color palette occasionally? What can they possibly be quality controlling? Its not even like you have to spell check stuff when half your proper nouns are gobbley-removed.

I guess it would have been nice if PokemonGO had released in anything resembling a playable state. But people still threw endless amounts of cash at it. So how important can quality control even be?