Here’s one study Pennsylvania University https://web.sas.upenn.edu/pcssm/commentary/public-disapproval-of-disruptive-climate-change-protests/

Do with it what you will.

Mmmmm… SoakCenter.

I am really dumb. The link you shared doesn’t show any table like you describe, and no links to the other “parts” out of 13. Can you help me figure this out? The part I can see is pretty helpful!

This is really helpful! Thank you so much for your time writing this all out!

This is some solid advice, thank you!

If single-point-of-engagement is a sign of a badly-written adventure, do you have any suggestions on how you might rework some of these encounters if you were writing your own adventure?

I have tried having the NPCs directly approach the player characters, but even that tends to feel like the players are just going through the motions. They know this must be important so they play along but I feel like it just turns into me giving info dump after info dump as each NPC appears, and it feels so contrived.

Thank you. Yeah, this is usually how I would approach it if it were a more open sandboxy gsme like my last campaign.

In this case however, the whole adventure doesn’t hinge on this one conversation, but rather the adventure book assumes the players have hit certain story beats in a certain order and plans the narrstive accordingly. If they ignore the couple, then they miss out on receiving their quest to find their daughter or whatever, and arriving at the wolf den the body of the mangled girl has no meaning. If they don’t talk to the paintbrush goblin, they don’t learn about the pixies causing trouble for the goblin clan. Sometimes its critical to the main plot. Sometimes its just a side bonus reward or just a roleplaying opportunity to learn lore or information. The way the book lays it out it states explicitly: players must encounter these 3 points in order so the final encounter of this chapter makes sense.

Unfortunately asking the players what they want to do next session results in “we want to do what the book says to see what happens in the story!” And that tracks with our session 0. They want a linear story.

But I can only have my players walk past so many burned out villages before it gets awkward and I just say “look, guys you’re supposed to go in and investigate.”

I just have no idea how to balance this “on-rails” approach with actually inviting player intersction. Am I just describing scenery or am I hinting they should interact? Is this NPC plot-critical or just setting up some world building? When do the players know they got what they needed from the conversation or if this is just a random guy trying to sell them stuff?

Is it available right now? What do they call this feature so I can search for it?

Yeah, we’ve had a few moments like this. For example, I warned him “these are the King’s personal gardens. Your character is pretty sure he will be caught and imprisoned if you start digging up whole plants in plain sight of the guards escorting you.” He was all for taking that risk, because “what if those blue flowers are MAGICAL?”. So the other players characters decided to physically restrain him to keep him until they got safely into the castle.

Yeah, hes a surprisingly good player, getting really into the roleplay and trying to find creative solutions. He even has his own PHB he bought with his own money when he was 5.

I’ll talk to him about lumping some of his crafting into a downtime period to try keeping the distraction down to a less distracting level. I like that idea, a lot.

Yeah, hes a surprisingly good player, getting really into the roleplay and trying to find creative solutions. He even has his own PHB he bought with his own money when he was 5.

I’ll talk to him about moving his crafting into a downtime period to try keeping the distraction down to a less distracting level.

Ollie’s parents are unfortunately not joining us. Ollie is just the friend of the kid (let’s say AJ) whose parents started the campaign with me. I agree with you, if it were just me and Ollie and his parents that would be different. (Edited the original post for clarity)

However this case all three adults (both parents and a third adult) and the other kid (AJ) are becoming visibly more annoyed in each session, as the campaign was going smoothly until Ollie joined in a couple weeks ago. The three adults have gone as far as (in-game) tying him up so he can’t grab things and (out of game) asking me if there’s a way to handle this in the game because now that he’s in, they feel bad kicking him out, but the game is no longer fun for AJ in particular who really just wants to explore the story. Hence my post.

How much “lower carbon” is the soybean biofuel compared to standard Diesel petroleum?

The problem is they aren’t comparing apples to apples. They asked each version of GPT a different pool of questions. (Edited my post to make this clear).

Once you ask them the same questions, it becomes clear that ChatGPT isn’t getting worse at math, because it has been terrible all along.

My understanding is this claim is basically entirely false. The tests done by these researchers had some glaring errors that when corrected, show gpt-4 is getting slightly better at math, if anything. See this video that describes some of the issues: https://youtu.be/YSokS2ivf7U

TL;DR The researchers gave new GPT questions from two different pools. It’s no surprise they got worse answers.

Bro gaming is social life.