Absolutely and it has done so for over a decade. Not LLMs of course, those are not suitable for the job but there are lots of specialized AI models for medical applications.

My day job is software development for ophthalmology (eye medicine) and people are developing models that can, for example, detect cataracts in an OCT scan long before they become a problem. Grading those by hand is usually pretty hard.

I think that could be a good fit for groups who play TTRPGs mostly for the mechanics or the interactions between player characters. It keeps the action flowing and makes it easy to adapt to the players’ wishes.

The cost is that it opens up the risk for plot holes and makes the setting less dense. With every blank that you fill in, you need to make sure that it doesn’t contradict things that have already been established and that it won’t cause problems further down the line. If you’ve already designed a cool mountain fortress for your BBEG and suddenly it needs to be deep in a swampy forest, you’ll probably have to redesign it from the ground up or else it will feel very out of place. Foreshadowing also gets a lot harder and basically every plot line boils down to “somehow, nobody ever noticed this threat/opportunity until the point the heroes showed up”. That’s absolutely fine for a more spontaneous format but if you want a long campaign that leads to an epic climax, it usually feels a lot cooler if the players can look back and see that they had been working towards that goal since day one even if they hadn’t known back then. That’s a lot harder when you as a GM don’t know enough of the details to hint at them.

Of course, at a smaller scale, this is something that most GMs do. If the plot requires the party to talk to a certain NPC to get vital information and the party absolutely refuses to interact with them, the relevant information must come from somewhere else. Maybe a different NPC, maybe they find a note, maybe something entirely different. But at least for the way I structure my campaigns, that’s more of an exception to fix problems rather than something I leave vague on purpose.

As for other prep methods, I’m working on a short essay on how I design crime/detective modules. I’ll link it here once it’s done.

Overall: go for it, experiment with it, see how it works for you and let us know. There is no wrong way to be a GM as long as your goal is to build something that’s fun for everyone at the table. Even if you don’t reach that goal on the first try.

I only found out about E.V.O. way later, probably around 2005 when a friend made a web game that combined its evolution theme with gameplay similar to Legend of the Green Dragon. I still wonder why E.V.O. wasn’t more popular. It’s an amazing game, I still occasionally play it on my Analogue Pocket.

I would say Age of Empires 2 which was where I first used the name that I still have on here, over 25 years later. Its amazing editor also resonated with my urge to create my own games without requiring programming knowledge that I just didn’t have at 11 years old. I went on to create custom content for Warcraft III, Neverwinter Nights and Morrowind, eventually studied computer science and joined some indie gamedev communities where I made a lot of friends, some of whom I still meet in person once or twice a year. I never became a full time game developer but I worked on some stuff part time in the mid 2000s and still do it as a hobby.

My question was specifically about “the general non-technical population”. Do you expect my mom to even remotely understand what different servers are and why talking to me is securely encrypted but talking to her friends group isn’t? The point about secure software is that it needs to be secure by default or else, entry level users will manage to accidentally send their stuff in plain text and not even notice.

For nerds like us, I agree that Matrix is probably a good choice. For someone who needed to be told that “the internet” isn’t the blue “e” on their desktop… not so much. I’d rather send carrier pigeons than explain Matrix to my family.

What would you recommend as an alternative for the general non-technical population?

Campaign outline

Prologue: Arrival at the great river

After some dangerous event, the player characters are snatched from their home worlds/planes. They wake up in a seemingly endless dark hallway that eventually brings them to a bright portal that leads to the desert. So far, they don’t know about the long night, so they should probably look for shelter before sunrise.

Yes, this is pretty much the classic isekai trope you see in manga and anime. While it might be a bit overdone but I want the characters to be just as new to this world as the players are so I’m sticking with it for now.

Act 1: Enslaved

After a long march through the desert and some small challenges, the player characters arrive at the building site of Shuramud’s new temple. At the edge of the workers’ camp, the will be apprehended by two sun elementals. Without any explanations they are stripped of their weapons and get assigned to a tent. They have a few hours to get to know the other workers before their first shift starts.

For now, they should get the impression that they died and are now stuck in some kind of purgatory where Shuramud is an oppressive god of death who has doomed them to eternal hard work.

After a while, the other workers urge them to steal their weapons back and organize a revolution against the guards. While this revolution will eventually fail, the player characters will learn more and more about what is actually going on in this world and that the sunset tower that is being built here is part of a plan to end the eternal night.

Act 2: In the service of the sun god

Once the player characters have had some time to get used to their new environment, learn the language and customs of the locals and find out that the Shuramud cult is not evil but just desperate, they slowly gain the guards’ and priests’ trust. They are offered some freedoms if they agree to help the cult’s cause.

For now, they are tasked with protecting the workers from monsteres, to steal supplies from a nearby village occupied by Iwaspat’s troops or to acquire an artifact that’s needed for the new temple from an old ruin. As soon as they have proven their loyalty and competence, they can start to prepare for a journey along the great river. Disguised as merchants, they will scout the realm and build up resistance cells.

Acts 3 to n-3: An arduous journey

This part is very much a work in progress. I don’t even know how many acts this will be in total, so I won’t go into detail for now. The player characters visit several important locations in the realm to learn more about the world, make new allies, sabotage the Iwaspat cult and gather resources. They find out that the leaders of Iwaspat’s cult want to install one of their own as the new high priest of Shuramud to eventually unite both ruling dynasties (more about that in an upcoming politics post)

Act n-2: The fire ritual

By now, the Iwaspat cult knows about the sunset tower construction site and is gathering its troops for an attack. Even with the new allies that the player characters found, the Shuramud cult’s defenses probably won’t hold. There is one last thing that might save them though. In rare cases, when someone whose life was dedicated to Shuramud dies, their soul will turn into winged fire elemental. The player characters have to help develop a ritual that lets believers sacrifice themselves to trigger this transformation on purpose.

Act n-1: Siege at the sunset tower

While the newly created soul birds face the attackers head on, the player characters need to fight their way along the flank to eliminate an enemy general.

Act n: Dawn

The sunset tower is safe for now and construction is almost complete but at the same time, Iwaspat’s follower now know what’s coming for them. It’s time to infiltrate the capital and depose the false Shuramud high priest. By now, they should have realized that eradicating the Iwaspat wouldn’t be a good idea. They will need to find a way to create a true balance, the world sees its first moonrise and a sunrise will soon follow.

I’m not sure about the details of this balance yet. The title of high priest for both gods gets passed by a combination of inheritance and divine trial. I’ll go into more details in a post about politics and government but maybe there will be someone who unites both bloodlines and act as a tie breaker when the high priests of Shuramud and Iwaspat can’t agree. That would fit the moon symbolism pretty well.

It would probably be harder with rotating GMs, but it’s doable.

Maybe keep shared notes, either in a wiki or on paper. When someone needs a certain type of NPC, they can pick one that fits from the notes and add something to it.

Posting it here again so you get a notification: I opened one at !DMWorkshop@ttrpg.network

Alright, I opened a new community at !DMWorkshop@ttrpg.network and posted at least a rough outline with more to come. Come on over.

At least one of my players is on Lemmy and even somewhat active in this community (say hi if you read this).

You know what, maybe I’ll open just a DM workshop community on here and put in the effort to post what I have so far. Currently, my notes are fully in German and structured in a way that’s not easy to put in a linear thread but I’ll try.

This is part of my biggest problem with my current project. I desperately need someone to talk about the history and gods of this world (both for personal validation and for brainstorming) but it will still be a while until I can bring it to the table and talking to my players now would spoil some major plot points.

Wenn es doch nur 12 Wochen wären. Die Vermieterin verzieht sich regelmäßig von Juni bis Oktober in ihr Sommerhaus in Spanien. Wenn währenddessen irgendwas ist, muss ich halt schauen, wen ich erreiche.

Aber die Grünen wollen uns alles verbieten, ja?

Is this one of those AMAs that get some activity and then disappear as permanently deleted?

Ich glaube, es wäre mal generell eine gute Idee, Politiker in jedem Interview zu fragen, was sie glauben, was bestimmte Berufsgruppen so an Geld zur Verfügung haben und wieviel davon für Miete, Strom, Heizung, Lebensmittel, etc. drauf geht. Würde vermuten, dass da eine Menge Unsinn rauskommen würde und zwar bei allen Parteien.

Möglichkeit wäre ja erstmal kein Zwang. Wer es nicht möchte, könnte den entsprechenden Eintrag auf “keine Angabe” lassen und wäre nicht von einer cis-Person unterscheidbar.

Ich kenne durchaus ein paar Leute, die ziemlich genervt davon sind, dass sie jeden Arzt wieder einzeln dran erinnern müssen, dass bei ihnen eventuell Dinge zu beachten sind, die weder aus dem, was in der Karte eingetragen ist, noch aus einem handelsüblichen Anamnesebogen ersichtlich sind. Bei einer davon hat es eine Zeit lang ziemlich fiese Dysphorie ausgelöst, dass sie wirklich regelmäßig daran erinnert wurde, dass sie auf gar keinen Fall schwanger werden soll, wenn sie ein bestimmtes Medikament nimmt. Könnte man zwar auch als Kompliment auffassen, dass ihr Passing sehr gut ist, aber sie hat im Gespräch immer wieder geäußert, dass sie sich wünschen würde, dass das für Ärzte, auch welche, bei denen sie zum ersten Mal ist, leicht einsehbar ist.

Aber ich kann natürlich auch nur wiedergeben, was mein Freundeskreis mir so schildert. Persönlich bin ich ja nicht betroffen.

Ich drücke die Daumen, dass es sich für dich dann auch wirklich erledigt hat. Ich kenne eine Person, die im Personalausweis den Geschlechtseintrag von weiblich auf divers geändert hat. In der neuen elektronischen Gesundheitskarte ist plötzlich männlich eingetragen, was halt irgendwie noch falscher ist, als den Eintrag auf weiblich zu belassen.

Außerdem wundere ich mich ja, dass die eGK keine Möglichkeit hat, das aktuelle und das bei der Geburt zugewiesene Geschlecht getrennt abzulegen (zumindest hatte sie das nicht, als ich das letzte Mal beruflich Code geschrieben habe, der sowas ausliest). Ärzte sind immerhin so ziemlich die einzigen Personen, für die sowas relevant sein kann. Also nicht nur für Hormontherapie an sich, sondern auch was die Nebenwirkungen mancher Medikamente angeht. Und natürlich, um Transfrauen nicht andauernd zu sagen “Das dürfen Sie aber nur nehmen, wenn Sie nicht schwanger sind.”

There is one effect that I’ve seen described in an article a while ago that seems plausible:

Every dating app user base tends to separate itself into one group that’s relatively popular and one that is less popular. For this post, let’s assume women are the popular group but on some apps it could be the other way round or an entirely different split when you consider non-heteronormative matches. The problem is that this effect causes a feedback loop. Women get a lot of matches so they get more and more selective and give out fewer and fewer likes. This causes men to get fewer matches so they give out more and more likes so they don’t miss the few potential matches they might get. Which in turn causes women to get flooded even more and so on. In the extreme case, women can assume that almost every time they swipe right on someone, this will lead to a match while men need to swipe right dozens or even hundreds of times and include people who don’t really match what they are looking for until they get a match.

There is no easy way to fully solve this but making incoming likes visible might at least reduce the fear of missing a potential match if you don’t swipe on everyone who’s even remotely interesting. Of course this is the number one feature that dating apps try to monetize.

Selbst wenn man man eine Klobrille vorfindet, die nicht so versifft ist, dass man mit viel Beinmuskulatur irgendwie versuchen muss, möglichst nah dran zu kommen, ohne sie zu berühren, klebt man ja nicht dran fest.