Seeker of Carcosa

Sorry but that knife screams “mall ninja.”

Depends on your frame of reference. When traversing the surface of a globe, your described concept of a straight line isn’t intuitive.

I agree on a personal level. FOSS software is much more convenient for my usecase of writing papers/typsetting notes, some automation, writing a program that works for me, and browsing/videos.

On the level of someone working in academia, it can be incredibly inconvenient if not outright impossible to implement. I can manage if I come across a bug in some FOSS software in my personal usage. An enterprise encountering an error with some utility whose support forum is a discord server: completely unacceptable. The entire printing service being offline because CUPS is temperamental: completely unacceptable.

Enterprises are the core customers of these inconvenient pieces of software with subscription based models.

Pad thai isn’t even that spicy. Who’s ordering a super spicy pad thai?

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.

It’s not a necessary tool for all fields. I don’t know your area but mathematics journals have vastly different style guides and citation standards. The best way to handle this is to export a bibtex citation which is just a list of metadata tags, then plug in the journal’s style header before compiling your TeX.

That’s because mathematicians use log for the natural logarithm. Log base 10 would be log_10

The thing I’d be more concerned with is establishing unreal expectations around sex based on overproduced porn. Like, it’s not a normal expectation to fold someone into a pretzel and jackhammer their ass for 30 minutes.

Do you keep restarting or wiping on fights? There simply isn’t 120 hours of content in a single playthrough of act I.

There are just so many quests in the Lower City, and they’re all great.

The good old Narcissist’s Tankie’s Prayer:

That didn’t happen,

And if it did, it wasn’t that bad,

And if it was, that’s not a big deal,

And if it is, that’s not my fault,

And if it was, that’s Western propaganda,

And if it isn’t, you deserved it.

“Depression is a myth; tidy your room. Also, I’ve been clinically depressed for my whole adult life and I shamble from one crisis to another.”

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.

The Witcher 2, though it’s more of an exploit.

If you get the sword from the Lady of the Lake in the previous game, you start the prologue of TW2 with two silver swords, one being the Lady of the Lake sword. Unequip the Lady of the Lake sword so you don’t lose it to the dragon.

You now have a mid-tier silver sword that is good for half the game. You also don’t need to find a new silver sword at the start of the game.

The 19 that is face up is the check after modifiers are added. Your unmodified roll is 9 and you have a +10 modifier

York isn’t in the Americas. It’s also a former Viking settlement, Jorvik. A millenium later and I’m in the same place, following the same diet of meat and bread.

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.