The is me with my PhD thesis. I wrote it, submitted it, planned for an absolute grilling in the Viva, got waved through the Viva with just minor corrections for grammar, went overzealous with corrections, submitted for review, got accepted, finally graduated.
It still makes me sick to look at it on my bookshelf.
Ah shit. Reading is hard sometimes.
A pint is 568ml.
Edit: the extra 30ml might be accounted for with the patented Guinness widget, a little ball of nitrogen gas that ruptures and forms a foamy head when the can is cracked.
GPT4 is wrong and it doesn’t require a price per litre comparison to prove it.
4 cans at 440ml cost £4.50. Therefore 12 cans at 440ml cost £13.50, £1.50 less than 12 cans at 330ml.
On a phoneline service that I have to call about twice a month, you also get a frequent click and a second-long pause in the music, that makes you think you’ve connected to an operator. Given how the service is outright malicious to its users, it wouldn’t surprise me if that was hard coded into the system to keep callers on edge.
This is a great observation. I just generally think a world that poses questions such as “why haven’t wizards fixed this” is more interesting than a world with arbitrary precision measurements and walk-in cancer curing services in every hamlet.
Some good points. I’m just going to continue this discussion because it’s interesting and it helps me prepare my games to consider these things.
1: Universal answers don’t necessitate universal acceptance, and it can make for more interesting lore when that’s the case. As an example: in the lore of Legend of the Five Rings, it’s common knowledge in the Empire that the official map of the Empire has a massively inconsistent scale, with journeys of similar charted length having up to a threefold difference in travel time. Savvy travellers know to plan accordingly, but no one would ever question Imperial doctrine, as the charting of the Empire was an act of a very real and tangible living god. This is where I got my praying at every temple comment; it’s common for people to avoid accidentally badmouthing the Empire by saying “I took longer than expected as I took every opportunity to honour my ancestors at every shrine on the road.”
1b: The pantheon of the Forgotten Realms is ever expanding and there are gods in that pantheon that are opposed to Mystra, as well as luddite gods who are oppose the gods of innovation such as Gond. Gondians certainly promote the advancement of science, and Mystrans and Oghmans promote the advancement of magic to a very certain extent, but there are gods in the pantheon who would task its worshippers with direct opposition of these missions, if for nothing else than to piss off their rival god.
2: This comes back to point 1. Different states will have their own standards of measurement, often using the same name, and the usage of these standards are very often more political than logical. A famous example from history is Napoleon’s height. Napoleon was “5 foot 2 by the French measurement and 5 foot 6 by the English measurement,” which made him a French adult man of average height. It was a common political tool to report him in the British Press as 5 foot 2, thus implying that he was short of stature.
Imagine the compounding issue of different species interacting in the Sword Coast. A human-majority patriarchal city state may define an inch as the average length of the the second knuckle of an adult human male’s middle finger, while an elvish-majority patriarchal enclave may define it exactly the same but for an elf’s finger. These slight discrepancies aren’t an issue until they can be exploited for political gain; an elvish embassy may be established at a distance no closer than a mile to the Palace of the Magistrates, but there’s roughly a 10 human-yard difference between an elvish mile and a human mile.
If someone casts a spell asking for a measurement and they are told “10 miles,” is that 10 miles from their perspective, 10 miles from the perspective of whoever invented the measurement spell, 10 miles according to some third “universal” perspective, or something else entirely?
3: Again from my previous comment, the precise limitations of spells are assumptions and generalisations made for the purpose of codifying into a game. In the actual fiction, spells are quite variable dependent on the caster and their abilities. The only general assumption we can actually make is that a set of repeatable actions yield roughly the same result: if you rub a glass rod with a bolt of fur and sing the chorus of Tubthumping backwards, lightning appears. The reason that in the current edition of the game we have somewhat concrete descriptions of spells is that we as the players require a certain level of abstraction in order to play the game; The GM shouldn’t need to have an idea of wind speed, the aerodynamics of the flier, and all other forces in order to make a quick decision to determine how the flier flies. Some randomness of outcome is still evident on the modern game rules, such as the damage from spells being random and spells like sleep affecting a random number of creatures. Older editions were a lot more meticulous with this.
Edit: specifically tackling Wish, assuming even a perfect casting would not yield a perfect map. Check out the Coastline Paradox for a real world example of how natural bodies such as coastlines fail to have well-defined length. No amount of arbitrary precision measurement is going to change the facts that coastlines and waterways have fractal dimension.
4: At least in 5e rules as written (and I dislike this and usually houserule it when forced to play D&D), with the exception of protection scrolls, reading a spell scroll requires caster to have the given spell on their spell list.
There are a couple things that need addressing in this line or argument.
First is a certain assumption of rigour in logic; rigour in proof was a very nebulous thing until concrete efforts to codify rigour in the 19th century. We used to simply assume Euclid’s Elements was true because it was old, reasonably argued, and some easier results were verifiable. There’s no guarantee that Forgotten Realms wizard, who lives in a magical late renaissance analogue, would hold a scientific philosophy similar to our modern philosophy, rather than having a scientific philosophy similar to that of a renaissance scientist.
Supplementary to the first point, there is also the question of religion. Given how much the Catholic church impeded scientific progress that challenged their worldview, we could expect the many churches of the FR pantheon - many with opposed views to one another - to interfere with scientific progress.
The second point comes from the measurement units used in the rulebooks of the game. Unless we’re accepting that FR society independently came up with the imperial system or a measurement system that translates rather cleanly to the imperial system, we can assume that the measurements in the game book are approximations for the purpose of ease of use to the player. I doubt a wizard in canon is calling a distance “about 10 feet” and Ed Greenwood is just doing the common fantasy thing of “translating their language and measurements to a form understandable by earthlings.”
The third point is the Wish issue. The Wish spell is undeniably the strongest spell in the canon and requires a wizard of tremendous power to cast. Given the hubris of powerful wizards in the Forgotten Realms and fantasy in general, it’s doubtful that a wizard would use their one 9th level spell per day to either altruistically progress the knowledge of the realm or to improve mapping methods to sell a better map. If a wizard were to use their strongest spell for something as trite as monetary gain, That same knowledge gained from a Wish could be hoarded and exploited for substantial personal gain.
Finally, there’s the time commitment. You mentioned using Find Familiar to measure distances but that still requires a wizard in the field, essentially using a sentient trundle stick. Mapping requires a ridiculous level of effort from a huge team of surveyors, and is almost always backed by a government. The Sword Coast, where all the main plot happens in FR canon, is a handful of city states and frontier towns in a wild region. The Open Lords of Waterdeep would probably have hired a set of wizards to accurately calculate the acreage of farmers fields in the immediate vicinity. For something like the distance from Baldur’s Gate to Elturel, distances would be approximate, about 200 miles or 10 days travel with time to pray at every shrine.
There are just so many quests in the Lower City, and they’re all great.
That’s capitalism and it’s obsession with ever-increasing profits for you. Often times a video game company sees the most layoffs the year after a major release. Cutting expenditure such as employee salaries simulates profit.
Well therein lies the answer: not everyone is into it. I have to admit that it’s odd considering Ed Greenwood’s very meticulous (and often problematic) coverage of sex and sexual positivity in the Forgotten Realms lore, but poly isn’t everyone’s thing. Maybe I’ll be proven wrong in the future but my understanding, and current consensus among my very progressive crowd, is that poly is not on the same level as sexuality or gender representation. BG3 needs ace/aro representation first.
Spoilers for Act 3 stuff. Prewarning because spoiler tags don’t work on some mobile apps.
Shadowheart feels very liberated once you’ve spared the Nightsong, and Halsin is very much a free love character. There’s even a scene where the PC and Shadowheart can hire a pair of sex workers and invite Halsin to join.
The 19 that is face up is the check after modifiers are added. Your unmodified roll is 9 and you have a +10 modifier
Turns put I’m a bit basic with my choice of Dragonborn Paladin (Oathbreaker Dark Urge). I’m a sucker for charisma classes that can hit like a truck.
I’m hoping for some unique interactions as a tiefling next time around.
I need a HD train suplex.
It’s been a while since I’ve run D&D but there’s some info to be gleaned from how Pathfinder runs swarms. My procedure is based off of some PF2e rules together with some house rulings for off the cuff swarms, and is intended to be quick, minimising admin and adding some exciting flavour to the encounter:
Choose your creature(s) which occupy the swarm
Set the AC to the lowest AC among creatures in the swarm
Don’t worry about the precise number of creatures in a swarm. Just do it based on size. If you want a rough idea of how many creatures fit into a swarm of a certain size, have 4-6 creatures of the same size occupy a space one size category larger. 4-6 groups of creatures of a certain size form a group of one size category larger.
Take average HP of the most populous creature in the swarm. For each size category the swarm is above that creature’s size category, multiply that average HP by 4.
Characters can occupy the same space as the swarm with no penalty
Any creature sharing space with the swarm is automatically hit, assign damage based on the median among damage values in the swarm (5 snakes and 8 kobolds, probably does the damage of a kobold. Could roll luck to see if they take a random venomous bite)
Swarms are immune to grapple, restrained, prone, etc. Swarms are vulnerable to area spells.
Optional: Mind altering magic could affect a swarm hive mind as if the swarm is a single creature. This is completely discretionary. You could probably manipulate a swarm of bees with a single charm spell, but not a city-spanning mob.
Optional: Give resistance to B/P/S damage. If a significant number of creatures in the swarm have a resistance (down to your judgement), add that resistance to the swarm.
Optional: Characters in the middle of a swarm could probably swing wildly and hit something. Give players advantage if they are attacking the swarm while stood in the swarm
Optional: Be narrative about the health of the swarm. Every so often mention one or two of the swarm falling dead or disengaging from the conflict.
They’re the same picture.