Nacarbac

British tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch reportedly missing after yacht sinks off Sicily

The name of that ship? The Bayesian.

Sortof, but I think of it more as a part of the cooperative storytelling element. Players figuring out puzzles or locations or how things make sense can offer a better idea than you had originally - and even if not "better" they're their ideas and therefore automatically more engaging. Them not being overtly made aware that they're shaping the story in that way is, I think, good for immersion. Though there are some popular games that make that kind of interaction an acknowledged part of the game mechanics, I just haven't really explored those myself.

All adventures and plots and whatnot could be drawn out as a vast and total map of every possible option (megadungeons be crazy), but any particular group will only ever take one of those possible paths (well, megadungeons be crazy). It's an immense saving in mental energy to not have to juggle a dozen different options, and put some of that saving into making fewer, better, events.

Going "left" or "right" and them leading to the same event isn't really deceptive, it's part of a relationship where the GM manages narrative flow to enable players to play around with an interesting subset of that vast and intimidating space where "you can do anything" - and it isn't really a railroad unless they're then prevented from going back and choosing the other direction. I've had my group get ten minutes into a dungeon, find a few neat bits of loot and then just... lose interest in it and go track down the flying city that made the items because I was a fool and gave them a more interesting origin - ended up pretty neat.

Though this is all informed by my style of mostly winging it and how my group plays. I make a small network of elements in play and how they interact and then adjust things on-the-fly. I ignore things that my group aren't interested in (random encounters, encumbrance, various rules), no longer expect them to slog through twenty rooms in a crypt, and I make quiet notes of any random comments that indicate a desire for something to happen later so that I can include an opportunity for it.

I am currently in the habit of wearing a (far too warm) hat to hide my earbuds at work, so, you're absolutely correct.

I can't quite pin it down, but maybe the BG3 characters felt a bit "glossy" compared to Owlcat's? Or perhaps it's a side effect of voice acting making complex conversations drag, and lose a lot of the descriptive depth that text allows - not that they did a bad job of it!

I didn't really like any of the characters in WotR or BG3, but in WotR they felt more interesting - ah! Part of it was definitely that all the BG3 characters were like a parody of inappropriate backstories, "You would know me as Fuckslayer the Legendary Badass, Level 1", "I'm actually an Archmage, but I got knocked out in a cutscene and all my XP fell out of my pockets".

Yeah, it just isn't happening without a massive cooperative effort over generations. Not just the time for each generation of volunteers to be monitored, but also the work needed to address age-related entropy that isn't purely "lifespan" - no point splicing yourself into tortoise-person if you spend the next three hundred years as Joe Biden.

That's a selfless undertaking for tens of thousands who will never see the benefits and might suffer some real nasty side effects. Leaving aside whether or not it should be done in the first place, it's just not compatible with the Rich Man Afraid of Hypothetical Screaming Void impulse which drives modern life extension nowadays.

Lovely post, thanks for the effort.

Switching it around on the theme of misuse - motivation and praise might sometimes fit as violence (though one whose damage is probably delayed temporally). Army Recruiters seeming to be a very easy example.

Cyber City Oedo is a lot of fun - a three part OVA about three prisoners who are offered a chance to reduce their thousand year sentences (for the crime of being total badasses) by donning bomb collars and going on suicide missions for the cyber-police.

It's definitely doable in Star Trek, though non-essential genetic engineering inside the Federation is one of their few holdout prejudices.

There are other ways - it'd probably be "fairly easy" to rig a transporter into the holodeck, cross a few wires, and be uploaded into the machine, because the safety manual for both of those is just the sentence "do not turn on, if you turned it on back away from the console, if you did not back away: pray" repeated a thousand times in progressively larger letters.

Well, they do tend to be designed to be resistant to that kind of thing - and some sorta fancy bunker buster would probably disperse the fissile material anyway. Certainly a big ol' not good, but criticality depends on having enough mass in close proximity, so it's similar to how you can blow up a nuclear missile with an interceptor safely-ish.

Setting an oil facility ablaze is going to be much easier and have worse health effects in the vicinity.

I'm most of the way through Vol 1, and it got a lot more engaging. The mass of repetition and minor variation to establish concepts mostly ended (and when it comes up it's in much smaller chunks) and it got into some infuriating and fascinating historical analysis. Perhaps try skipping to those chapters to see if they work for you?

Well GM engagement is supposed to be a big part of GURPS/HERO chargen, to make sure that nonfunctional or inappropriate characters dont happen unless part of the campaign tone is supposed to be having fun with that.