Sure, but even then it doesn’t make a lot of sense that all the different ways that Warlock patrons can present themselves, that they all are great about giving people raw damage potential as a cornerstone of their pact, regardless of how you flavor it.

“Child pure of heart and innocent of mind. You have caught my attentions, a Unicorn who wants nothing but to live and peace, and to see the joy and love of the innocent as yourself. For your purity of spirit, I shall grant a boon of this magic gun.”

If anything, they’ve made a move to ensure that the contract-artists who manually draw their art won’t be replaced by AI artists. They just happened to do that move after one of their contract artists did so without their explicit permission.

Yeah this is clickbait.

The secret is to not work from what you’d like to do, but to work backwards from what your players want to do.

Seriously, throw out all the prep you have that isn’t landing, and just ask your players what kinds of things they want to do. Then, make stories inspired by the actions or accomplishments they want to undertake.

… This does require that your players have some idea of what they want to do, though. If you have checked out or uninvested players, there’s essentially nothing you can do I’m afraid.

So now I will soapbox to the players reading this: Your job is to be invested in the game. If you don’t put energy into being invested, you’re not fulfilling your side of the arrangement at the table.

You are sublimating the value of a person’s lived experiences into an algorithm. The act of someone learning a joy of art, and then applying that themselves with the sum total of their experiences and influences is an inner truth to that person’s agency and sapience.

I’m not exactly disagreeing that there isn’t a parallel here, but I want you to acknowledge that you are saying that someone’s love of art is as valuable as an algorithm that has no understanding of what it is doing. That’s a terrible dystopia that you’re petitioning for.

Huh, well I had an incorrect conclusion.

I went to find the original artwork, and I found this picture.

https://imgur.com/8EiAOD9

I had not seen the bottom left picture yet, I had only seen everything else, which lead me to conclude that the artist did a few sketches to imply that he had more intermediary works that he did.

I retract my prior comment!

I don’t think those advancements were categorically good, or were the morally correct things to occur. I won’t go through them all, but just because something has happened, doesn’t mean it was inevitable, or that it was a good thing to have happened and the world is better for it.

But putting that aside, the clearest difference that I see between those advancements and Machine Learning (A subset of Artificial Intelligence research), is that Machine Learning always takes datasets to train the system. As a result, the Machine Learning Generation truly isn’t coming up with something new, it is just repackaging the work of other people. This is further morally fraught, as you have made a system with the aim to make the work of people irrelevant, while using their own work to do so without their consent.

And as to your proposition that artists shouldn’t have to make money to live, I agree wholeheartedly. But this technology isn’t going to lead to that future. It is currently being used by people with means to make more money by cutting out the people who would have to be paid to make creative works. Machine Learning already did this with language translators.

When Google Translate was getting somewhat good in the early 2000’s, many companies fired their foreign language translators. What they discovered quickly is that the technology wasn’t quite there yet, so they had to hire them back. But by and large, they didn’t hire them back as translators, but as editors, who would clean up the bad translations from Machine Learning language translation software. We’re currently on the same trajectory with this technology for a wide swath of creatives.

This is bad for right now, the foreseeable future. I do not foresee a future where we are freed from needing to exchange a majority our waking-lives for money, and this technology will only perpetuate that reality.

That all sounds really dramatic and escalating

And yes I do believe you’re being rather dramatic by implying that I’m a luddite who doesn’t want technology to work at all. I want technology to work for people, not the other way around. I want the Jetsons future, where people work a minority of their lives, not the majority, where we can focus on quality of life over vainglorious pursuits that ultimately benefit the idle rich. The trajectory of this technology will ultimately only benefit those who don’t need to work to live.

Also, I think it’s patently dishonest for the artist to imply that their sketches (which are not in the same pose as the original concept art made by another artist) was used in the AI generation. The end result clearly used the other artist’s work as a basis for the image generation. It seems obvious to me that Ilya profited from other artists’ work, and tried to pass it off as his own with some half-baked deceptions.

I was in error with this comment! I am leaving it up as an abject lesson. See the below linked set of pictures that gives more or less proof that Ilya Shipkin did use his own artwork for AI processing.

https://imgur.com/8EiAOD9

It’s all machine learning, which means any tools you use are trained against datasets. These datasets include art that were not authorized by the artist, but were used by unintended applications of ‘fair use’ IP laws. Machine learning ALWAYS makes use of datasets. That’s unavoidable. This is where the big problem comes in, and how it’s vastly different to photoshop.

Photoshop was a software developer’s attempt to create digital tools for artists to use digital capabilities. They didn’t develop Photoshop with artist’s work, and certainly without the artist’s permission as part of the computer code.

Artists should be able to make a living with their art.

The fact that anyone in the world is able to do that is great, and we should be allowing for inroad for more people to enter into creative careers, not endorsing technology that aims to make them obsolete while profiting from their efforts.

I had taken the artist’s statement that the art is being reworked as evidence of the art being pulled, and at least future published books not containing them.

https://twitter.com/i_shkipin/status/1687829743268442112

I should have waited until the actual statement (linked below), as it’s clear that the artist was making something of a lie of omission above, as I believe he purposefully wanted readers to believe that the art was changing in the books, not that he would redo the art to… essentially no promised effect. Maybe he was lying to himself with the hope that he could get another go at?

https://twitter.com/DnDBeyond/status/1687969469170094083

I’ve updated the title of this post to reflect the info from the official WotC statement on the issue. I’m glad they won’t be allowing AI “augmented” submissions from their artists going forward, but I would only be truly happy with a statement that they will be taking the massive inconvenience of making sure that the art is revised for future publications at a minimum (I think a recall would be asking a lot tbh).

I don’t think you picked up that I playtested both, though.

The monks played okay, if rather awkward in my playtests of the rules. They should do more damage, but they were all suitably impactful in a fashion that this dance bard cannot replicate with the ribbon features it has been given.

The bard was just a bard with what is effectively a free melee attack cantrip that doesn’t scale with their casting stat. They do not step on the monk’s toes, because they were too busy casting shatter, fireball, and other uses of their magic action.

It’s flavorful and fun, but the impact of the dance bard is not on their level 3 features. It’s their level 6 features that give the class a tonne of impact.

Because I have playtested monks, and their ability to control and knock enemies around while punching more often and for more damage while being quicker than the dance bard.

The dance bard in my playtest was awkward, and did less single target damage than the monks in my other playtest. It also was not able to attack and disengage for free, giving it much less of a skirmishing feeling.

A bard without any subclass features is a strong and versatile character. With the dance bard subclass, the bard is actually playing suboptimally, and does not outperform the monk in my playtest.

All I’m really hearing here is that casters are overtuned, and monks don’t have a well defined niche.

I agree with both. The Dance Bard is the least of their issue. Most of all because the Dance Bard would be LESS effective than another, more caster focused Bard.

IMO it really, truly does not invalidate the Monk.

1. Their unarmed strike isn’t any better than Shocking Grasp.
2. Their AC is better with Medium Armor Proficiency and a shield.

If they got multiple attacks per turn, and a way to use them while also weaving in and out of enemy reach range without catching attacks of opportunities, then they would invalidate the monk.

That’s a fne thought, I was just wondering if there was a way to explicitly link hunter’s mark to the other various spells that improves how they should interact.

I could even see something like being able to move your hunter’s mark to a target you hit with any of the other strike/arrow/shot spells.

I think the changes to the Paladin smites do present a neat way to change hunter’s mark for the better, as there are a tremendous number of other attack-rider spells that should be able to be looped in to the typical ranger round, in addition to hunter’s mark.

In my own playtest with the ranger, I was absolutely floored with how much damage it can do, so I hesitate to make damage output even easier. It’s not a bad idea to have rangers be the absolute Kings of ranged damage, but only if we’re okay with them having a strictly ranged damage dealer class identity.

However to your point, I think making each attack-rider spell into some permutation of hunter’s mark is the way to go. Perhaps hunter’s mark should be something that is automatically applied if you use any of the primal shots, but only for rangers (or maybe a particular ranger subclass)?

Hunter’s Mark damage scales every other spell level, so it goes to 2d6 at level 9 if you use your highest spell slot at the time. No point in casting at 2nd level at all.

Ah whoops I goofed on the scaling of hunter’s mark! In my defense I was juggling a lot of new mechanics and the ranger was a last minute addition to one of my playtests.

But looking at the general numbers, one fewer d6 per turn would have been a drop in the bucket to the damage they were outputting. It was sincerely surprising on how impressive they were, I expected them to perform worse based on my first impressions of reading the class. Actually playtesting revealed that they are in no way nerfed.

I promise you, “Don’t group up when you fight things with breath weapons” is not a strategy unique to Rangers. That’s just something kind of busted with ranged builds in general.

That’s kind of my point, that Ranged builds having guaranteed high damage is an issue because there are so many perks, like ease of safe positioning. I think Rangers are doing great damage, and that might be a problem.

I’m honestly not as sold on the idea that resources are a balancing consideration, all told. Or at the very least they aren’t as big of a consideration as many people presume. But perhaps you’re right and rogues are fine, at the very least I don’t think rogue players will generally notice that they are doing less damage due to how clutch they can be with their cunning strikes.

As to Hunter’s Mark damage, it’s higher damage at level 5, when you miss once. Which means that the damage floor is higher in general starting at level 2 spellslots (character level 5), and the damage ceiling is lower only if you are able to make 3 attacks. At level 3 spellslots (character level 9) and onward, it’s simply the same or higher damage, excluding gimmicky action surge builds.

As to when it is useful to upcast, it’s useful in any fight that you think is serious. The biggest problem is that the rest of the spellcasting toolkit is sitting there, doing very little for the most part (standout exception is Conjure Barrage which is fantastically powerful and fun).

edit: Oh and to answer this…

If the Ranger was optimized for being fast, and the Rogue was constantly tripping the enemies, why are you surprised it was hard to hit the Ranger?

These were two different playtests, with different classes. The ranger and the rogue weren’t in the same playtest group, so this wasn’t the result of complementary kits. It’s mostly a consequence of the the enemies having only average movement speeds, and the counters being somewhat melee heavy.

But even in the encounter where I had 60 flight speed dragon wyrmlings, the situation constantly played out that this ranger was never grouped up with the rest of the party, so I couldn’t hit them in the breath attacks. This amount of safety is a bit problematic with their higher damage output, IMO.