“…the Holy Roman Empire.” (Quickly and quietly) “It’s actually Germany, but don’t worry about it”

Edit: to be clear, I was quoting Bill Wurtz

…I’m out of the loop, are sorcerers somehow less effective in social and/or combat encounters with specifically blue and bronze dragons?

“Oh, no, those powers require being the kid in that situation…”

Yeah, you could easily reflavor component-requiring Animal Friendship as “just feeding the animal and somehow flawlessly avoiding harm”, just to make it ambiguous whether this is actually magic or just mundane.

I haven’t actually seen this being used, but since Hypnotic Pattern in DND5E can require a stick of incense as a component if you’re using spell components, I imagined someone casting that by twirling a thurible (incense burner on a chain) above their head, and somehow physically throwing the scent into the targeted area, and then a (mostly) harmless explosion of colorful, sparkly gas charms any affected targets through sheer fascination.

Yeah, I think there’s a vast difference between what we have now (ChatGPT and whatnot), vs the theoretical possibility of an AGI (artificial general intelligence), or even an AI based entirely off of human neural patterns. Mind you, brain uploading sounds hard, so maybe I’d see a completely synthetic AGI as more likely.

But if we were ever to develop an AGI, we’d better start giving those things humanesque rights fast.

The first sentence made me think “alright, Kingdom of Loathing”, but I don’t know if goblins in that universe imprint on people.

Come to think of it, there may have been one character in West of Loathing that popped, respawned, and had no memory loss at all, so never mind.

And in IRL taxonomy, they’re more closely related to animals than plants, but probably diverged long before sponges came about, let alone other animals.

Worldbuilding idea for a challenging campaign: give every fully-sentient humanoid character, commoners included, a bite attack that powerful. That aughta put the kibosh on any murderhobo behavior for a time.

Plus, human bites can carry a lot of bacteria and whatnot, so arguably some of that damage should be poison or necrosis damage.