[unofficial weekender] Back to the mines

[blinky465 17178xp 2]

You could just send him in armed only with ChatGPT.
I’ve heard people describe it as magic.

I absolutely agree with everything you said about AI. What amazes me is how nobody asked for it, yet it’s here as the answer to everything and is actually not very good at any one single task. Has anyone successfully used LLM-generated code? It’s great for boilerplate stuff – but dreadful at actual reasoning. Same with music; it’s ok-ish for bland, run-of-the-mill generic musak (which might actually satisfy some people) but it’s not at all creative.
So we’re literally burning the planet to make it easy to create not-very-good (mostly virtual) content, for giggles and clicks.

Hmmm. Maybe you should give your mate your magic flaming sword or whatever and you might both stand a chance of getting out of your next adventure alive!

 

[zoidpinhead 12720xp 1]

On AI – I don’t use it and don’t really see the point in its current form.  I undertand it can be fun and that’s fine, each to their own.  I had colleagues who used it to write content for work – in education this was lesson planning and tests or summarising documents.  It just felt like cheating to me.  The reason I was worth money as an educator was because I knew stuff and could communicate that to others in a form that helped them to understand and then integrate that new knowledge.  AI certainly couldn’t do that.

But I make it not for the end result, but to enjoy the process.

The same goes for painting miniatures – yes, a nicely painted mini at the end of it is a “nice thing”. But I paint because of the process of painting, not so I can be the owner of loads of armies of painted miniatures.

@blinky465 Does that mean that your load of painted armies are a happy unintended consequence of your painting?  I’m certainly aware of the positive effect of painting as part of my hobby. The creative outlet and mindefulness of the process itself are hard to find elsewhere and are a major benefit.  That said, for me the whole point of that part of the hobby is to end up with painted armies.  Their ultimate purpose is to be used on the gaming table but by far the largest role in terms of time and enjoyment is them just sitting in my display cabinet being looked at 🙂

Principes are built:

That’s the build on the Latin legion finished.  I painted the Veles when I was working on this project before.  I’ve got a few more kneeling Triarii to source, I’ll probably go with Mirliton as they are a decent match sculpting wise for the Agema Etruscans I’m using.  I hope the postage isn’t too prohibitive.

[blinky465 17178xp 1]

Does that mean that your load of painted armies are a happy unintended consequence of your painting?

I think you’re vastly overstating my achievements to date. But, basically, yes!
I don’t actually do much gaming (in fact, in the last couple of years, about zero). When I did, the most fun I had was against my son-in-law in Sicily (we played over the internet). I really did love having a fully painted board, with characterful miniatures and so on. But I don’t play often enough for it to be the reason I paint miniatures.

I’ve a couple of fully-painted Blood Bowl teams (of eleven, not all sixteen). And maybe a couple of “squads”(?) of five or six space marines. A few genestealers. Then a load of random cyberpunk minis and a whole eclectic mix of one-off characters.

I only paint things that catch my interest in the first place (and very often, after one or two of a similar model, I’ll give up and try something else). And quite often, I’ll give my painted minis away.

Or stuff them with electronics. Sometimes both (like this, from a few years ago)

I don’t think there’s a place for Alice anywhere, in any army!
Sometimes I’m quite pleased with the end result. Sometimes I never get there. For me, that’s not why I paint. I do get immense satisfaction from a fully painted miniature. It just happens far less frequently than the number of times I pick up a paintbrush!

 

[sundancer 43743xp 1]

I don’t think there’s a place for Alice anywhere, in any army!

Challenge accepted! I’d say she would work as a Demon for One Page Rules Grim Dark and Fantasy. As Demon or Giant construct in Frostgrave, movie set in 7TV and I’ll you there is some more I can’t think about right now.

[zoidpinhead 12720xp 1]

That Alice diorama is fantastic, and creepy as.  Wonderful stuff.  I could see her in a corner of a Trench Crusade board, giving out some sage advice to the passing pilgrims 😀

[pagan8th 13381xp 1]

Back from my short holiday. Couldn’t do as much walking as usual becases of the Achilles problem and it did ache, but was managable.

Drank too much beer. Ate some hearty meals the breakfast buffet in the hotel was one of the best (perhaps the best) I ever had as everything was cooked perfectly.

Now I need to detox after too many hash browns, eggs, sausages, bacon, mushrooms and slices of friend bread.

But the orange juice was healthy 🙂

Spend zero on gaming.

 

[horati0nosebl0wer 19832xp 1]

With AI there is an amount of laziness and acceptance of distortion that people do take on. With it being a fast amalgamation of the information it had access to it makes good first drafts for anyone willing to refine it.

The downside is that people are truly lazy, or rather lead by those who are more lazy than others, unwilling to put in effort and are rewarded for it. I had a sit down to think and postmodernism came to mind. I also considered how the faculties of our minds are being impacted by a tool to be ever more lazy from the disuse. If you take Maslow then you see the top of the hierarchy chopped off. My head hurt after a while and I went back to hobbying.

Craftsmanship takes time and effort. The “get whatever and call it good” ethos is a difference between the stuff on Putty and Paint versus your FLGS buddy who barely manages a primer coat on their models. The refinement of skill is what most people seem to not really give a damn about because the bar for functionality to achieve result is low. In a way I think that the Golden Buttons are a good way that our community stands against that. The fact we complain about it means we’re also a band of holdout counter to it.

Now, as the new Cool Kids Yet To Be Recognized let’s keep up the good work.

@zoidpinhead “Live naked!”and “Live what you love” comes to mind as a couple of thoughts which make me chuckle in connection with minis. The volume of figures you’re pushing out really is impressive. I’m having enough trouble to keep on the stuff that I say I want to paint.

@limburger Quality food thought going to quality beer (insert Homer Simpson “Mmm beer”) makes me a bit sad. It just means that some things you might need to make yourself. I’ll leave the beer alone, refine my mini painting and just drink someone else’s crafted goodness

@sundancer All the lessons of Munchkin are paying off. Do as you have learned.

@blinky465 I think that the sharing in Sundancer’s game will go as well as when Shay and Gerry showed off their Let’s Play for Thr Doomed.

[limburger 22092xp 0]

It’s kind of crazy how fast ‘AI’ got accepted and turned into the new ‘must have’ feature.
I think it’s because the results it produce are fairly spectacular for the amount of effort you put into it, especially if you’re used to writing code. The problem is that to get any real use out of those prototypes you need to build them from scratch the old fashioned way, which sucks as management got sold on the ‘fast’ part and the temptation is there.

The latest iteration of ‘generated content’ is scarily good (a few minutes of interactive prototype …), but as good as it is the hard limitations are unseen by those who promote it to the non-techy manager folk.

Part of the problem is that most folk don’t see the amount of horse power that is behind all of these things, because the companies in charge give it away for free.

The worst aspect is that folk don’t realise that they’re making themselves even more dependent on infrastructure from 3rd parties without any form of morals or ethics as we’ve seen when these guys complain about having to pay for copyrighted content to use in their machinery … . (and like everything else it looks like they’re getting away with it as well, unlike us mere mortals who got threatened with jail for daring to copy/distribute a single 3 second sample … )

Anyways … I do like exploring what the likes of OLlama can do on a local machine.
However after looking at the kind of money you need to run the more advanced models locally … not so much (10,000$ is practically entry level due to the cost of the GPU’s required).

oh well … hobby time we needs.
The golden buttons are nice, but it once again highlights the amount of talent that is within this community. Talent so far above where I’m at that I doubt I’d ever be good enough. (and it kind of sucks that the same names keep repeating which include a few what I suspect are semi-professional commission painters  … )

[sundancer 43743xp 0]

All the lessons of Munchkin are paying off. Do as you have learned.

I’m not picking up that duck!!1!!

[sundancer 43743xp 1]

It is Friday!

We played Frostgraves “Treasure Phantasmal” scenario last night and it was a bit “meh”. I think it came down to two main problems.

1. Early in the campaing: It was our 4th game and the only NPCs in this scenario are wraiths who can only be hurt/wounded by magic and magic weapons. I was lucky in the earlier games so my two thieves had magic daggers. Including my wizard and his apprentice I had 4 minis that could fight wraiths. My friend had no magical weapons and not a single spell that counted as “magical attack”.
2. Getting treasure of the table is hard! Because the carrier of the treasure needs to make a willpower test on a D20 with a 10+ to actually move where he wants to. If he fails he runs towards the centre.

It was a lot of dice rolling without any real action. Next scenario will be “Ice Storm” which already reads a lot more fun.

[pagan8th 13381xp 2]

“Wraiths… wraiths with things…” [so says Smeagol]

[blinky465 17178xp 0]

@sundancer – why was your game so disappointing?

It’s something I’ve often struggled with, on the odd time I’ve played RPG games but also a lot of tabletop gaming; instead of treating it as “roll dice and tell a story” it becomes more like “here’s the target number you need to hit and if you don’t you’ve failed”.
So many games (even those reviewed on this site) eventually boil down to a “dice off” – lots of calculating threshold numbers, then roll some dice and… success or fail.

Is the disappointment because you had a set goal in mind and you were unable to achieve it because your dice rolls failed you?
I’m curious about the “dice rolling without any action” comment.
Is that the disappointment – a lack of anything actually happening? Or a lack of achieving your goals?
(genuinely interested as I’m looking for a gaming system that avoids the whole “I rolled some dice and all I got was disappointment” feeling that a lot of games these days seem to induce).

 

[sundancer 43743xp 0]

Since I don’t know how well you’re into Frostgrave, here is a quick list:

• There are (usually) 5 treasures on the table. One in the middle and for others “somewhere else”
• Main goal for the players is to grab as many treasures as possible and get them of the field to claim them

So far, so good. The scenario we played had a twist: every time a treasure carrying mini was activated (and tries to move to the edge of the table) the controlling player needs to make a Willpower roll with a D20 and get 10+. If you fail that roll your mini moves directly towards the centre of the board. If it reaches the centre, the treasure is dropped! So every time you try to secure a treasure it’s a “tug of war” against a D20. And most of our tiny fighting men have a Willpower of 0 or even -1 so rolling 11’s and up was mandatory.

And to add to the boredom factor my friends wizard has no spells that work against Wraiths. So those uncontrolled creatures really got nasty quick

[limburger 22092xp 0]

ah .. the joys of randomised scenarios with random properties for random army lists … /s

I’d say that scenario is a recipe for disaster as it relies a bit too much on certain aspects of a warband with no way to mitigate aspects if you fail to match the requirements.

A good DM would have allowed the team to ‘discover’ a minor magic weapon or an ointment that granted temporary magic properties to at least some weapons of both teams.

Either that scenario was designed for characters with a lot of willpower or something was missed.

@blinky465 ‘roll dice / hit target number’ … yeah, that’s how playing RPG’s has been for me since forever.
I like the idea, but somehow I can’t find a way to make the magic work like they do in shows like Critical Role.
Someone once compared it like the difference between porn movies and the actual act.
It always look good on tv, but when you have to do it yourself the results can be kind of dissapointing …

People tend to forget that the cast of Critical Role are professional actors/comedians who excel at improvisation.
We as mere mortals rarely get that creative. Or rather if we could be then we’d ve artists ourselves and not some IT-nerd trying to make rocks obey his command.

[blinky465 17178xp 0]

@limburger – thanks for that. I don’t know what most of you guys look like, and not everybody has a made-up face that I’ve put to their name. But now I can’t unsee that delightful image you put in my mind. Ewwwww.

How can I bleach my brain?

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