Mod support has definitely been mentioned as an eventual goal, IIRC though they didn’t have plans to implement an official DM mode.

The VA for Laezel (Devora Wilde) has actually seen this meme and read it in-character. :P You can find it on YouTube.

The rarities do somewhat correlate with power in a vacuum, but synergy>raw stats, generally.

I suspect it’s been cut. Either that, or it’s just meant to be a sort of “yeah, Moonhaven was always kinda fucked, between the swamp hag, incognito Red Wizard and Underdark entrance right next to the water source, not exactly safe for children.” :P

Maybe once upon a time they were part of some sidequest connected to Ethel, the Red Wizard or the invading Sharrans, or maybe it was just atmosphere, who knows. /shurg

Eh. I haven’t seen his dialogue since they apparently tweaked it, but I didn’t find it that bad to begin with. There was a bit of a vibe in act 2 like “sorry you’re hurt, didn’t mean to lead you on, was just being nice” but thats life sometimes. /shurg

The RPGHorrorstory element… eh. I somewhat agree, mostly just in exactly how far along/established in his journey of magic he was. A young prodigy attracting Mystra’s attention, and then ruining himself (and endangering others) in pursuit of more, is an interesting twist on the traditional exploration of a Wizard’s hubris, the issue comes more from like “yeah, I didn’t just attract Mystra’s attention, I was a peer of Elminster and one of Mystra’s Chosen” (conspicuous failure to mention the magical institutions of his home, EG, the Blackstaff, Vajra, Larael, etc., aside). TBH, just changing his interactions with Elminster to either double down on the implicit arrogance of assuming himself Elminster’s peer, or have him be more of a fanboy, a la Karlach to Minsc and Jaheira, would’ve gone a long way.

You have okay options to play an ace/aro character, you have options to form close bonds with most of your companions without sex for sure. (Was pleasantly surprised that as horny as Karlach is, you have very clear options to set boundaries there and still have that relationship. ) And of course, you don’t have to romance anyone, but can still raise their approval and earn their trust/friendship.

Admittedly though, there isn’t really any representation from non-player characters, which is unfortunate.

There’s a lot of griping about the third act, and yeah, I get it, it’s incomplete and comparatively poorly optimized. But it’s still really good. :P They clearly bit off more than they could chew with the City, that maybe they could’ve solved with another year or two of dev time. (Hopefully, will be solved in a Def Ed a year or two down the line.) That isn’t necessarily dev time they had, though. Not without taking out a ton of loans (do you really want tencent to own more than 30%?) and risking ill-will with consumers and WotC. (The game was meant to come out over a year ago.)

Well… it is a Baldur’s Gate game (as much as I’ve seen claimed otherwise), so the story is centered around the usurper gods of death, their legacy and their attempts to gain power and influence in the world.

The first act is reasonably light (with exception of mindflayers and some light occular body horror :P), just normal dnd stuff, goblins, druids, etc.

The second… well, to avoid spoiling too much, let’s just say it goes dark. :P Haven’t seen the third yet, personally.

I told myself I wouldn’t read unrelated papers at work, but here we are. :P Yeah, as expected, the actual paper is way more informative about the structural properties, and about the limitations. (Difficulty fabricating larger samples without voids, said voids resulting in much lower strengths and much less plasticity, uncertain tensile strength, etc.) Fascinatingly though, (at least to me, not having known the details about DNA based metamaterials :P) the details of the properties should be tunable by way of changing the DNA lattice structure. Which makes it a two-part engineering problem, figuring out how to manufacture it at scale, and determining optimal lattice structures for different applications. Definitely exciting, and will be big once we figure these things out.

But that’s not really what I was talking about. While I get that this is an article geared to laymen/the general public, I do think we should be holding science communication to a higher standard. What was discovered is exciting, but we don’t know how it can be used yet, or if it will ever be practical to do so. Overview is fine, I’d just like some more qualifiers and less speculation. Maybe it’s just me, but I feel like some more care would do a lot to improve overall scientific literacy and trust in the scientific community. /shurg

Always a little annoyed at articles like this; “strength” doesn’t tell me anything. If this is 5x more resistant than steel to deformation, but then shatters catastrophically, that limits its use cases substantially. Likewise, compressive, tensile and shear strength are all different properties, only one of which is referenced at all. Still very cool, and I look forward to seeing how it develops and learning more details about its capabilities (when I have more time I’ll read the paper), but vague terminology like this has a bad habit of making stuff sound way more revolutionary than it actually is. /shurg

IIRC, there is a bit more complexity than that to the Pirahã understanding of numeracy. Relative quantity is something they’re just fine at understanding, (with words for single/less, plural/more and same) it’s abstraction of quantities to tokenized values where they struggle. Which, I suppose, also interestingly lines up with the study results; the initial training period resulted in nodes associated with quantity, but those nodes were separate/unrelated to numeracy systems that developed with additional training.

Conflict drives storytelling. /shurg Internal, character-focused stories require internal, character-focused conflict. The good ending will be that much more satisfying I’m sure, if you achieve it after supporting the characters through their issues and personal growth. :P And if there is pain or heartbreak along the way, that’s just part of telling an impactful story. :P