jack

No-one enjoyed Aunt Vera? I loved writing that.

I had a further thought about some of the things I've tried to read. That quantum "things" ie. probability waves only exhibit recognisably non-classical probabilities when they line up perfectly, in order to have the bits with otherwise-non-detectable opposite signs cancel out. Which only really happens if they were generated together in the first place.

And if some of that state is elsewhere, because one of the particles/waves has interacted with something else, it doesn't do quantum things (you don't get interference bands). But if it interacts with something else, but you're able to re-interact those particles so they both go back to what they were before then it would work. But if it interacts with LOTS of particles, that state is spread across all of them and basically never recoverable.

That means, a deterministic "what happens is based on the physical state of the particles/waves that are there" view coincides with a weird philosophical "you get interference if you 'could' know in principle"... But I'm really not sure. That seems to make *some* of the dodgy-sounding explanations fit, but not all of them. Anyone able to explain better than that?

Every so often I hear someone talking about modelling traffic jams as waves travelling in a queue of cars. After some thought, I came to some tentative conclusions, without having actually tried any modelling or anything.

Imagine a long long stream of cars along a somewhat congested motorway without much overtaking.

The first observation is, whatever you do, you can't really affect the car in front as long as you're driving legally/safely. And whatever you do, you don't end up significantly behind them: if there's any sort of traffic, the average speed is much under the fastest speed you could drive in an empty road, so you can always catch up with them. So whatever you do, *you* will reach your final turnoff shortly after the car in front.

However, over a long run of cars, it seems plausible (I haven't double-checked the maths) that cars driving at 30mph have a greater throughput than ones alternating 60mph and 0mph, mostly due to needing more than twice the distance between at 60 than at 30. That means that if traffic is dense, there's a natural tendency for small disruptions to sometimes get magnified, when each car reacts a little slowly to the car in front, and hence makes a slightly larger correction. Whereas if you go a bit slower and give yourself a bit of extra space when the traffic in front of you starts of but you suspect it's more stop-start, hopefully the traffic behind you will experience *less* disruption.

I'm not sure, does that sound right?

Since I started work in bar hill (about 3 months now, eek!) I've been going to the gym here twice a week.

I think I have very slowly started to improve again. I have a long way to go to regain my previous best. I'm not sure if the improvement is due to more reliable running with treadmill, or due to doing weights more strenuously as well.

The paradox of improvement seems to apply to many other parts of my life as well. I'm not happy unless there's something I'm working towards. If I'm failing I'm not *happy*, but if I have *no* pressure, I'm listless in a different way.

I have been slowly learning how to vary the amount I intend to do each day. Some days that's "get changed, reply to emails, go to bed" and sometimes it's quite a bit, but if there's some connection between what I intend and what I do, I feel a lot better, regardless of the actual amount.

I still find it very hard to fit things in though. Ideally I could do things like housework in the edges and gaps, 5min here and there, but it doesn't usually happen as well as it might. Every so often I try to set good habits, and things improve a certain amount, but still short of what would be better.

Abi got me into Clickie Zoo (Tironium Tech/Idle Tycoon). A while back I completed the main series of achievements. There's a few achievements for specific things which I haven't bothered to fill out.

But I spent a while fascinated by how big I could get the numbers.

The top level gives 1 gem every 15 seconds (gems are premium currency used to buy various permanent upgrades). I don't think there's any way of increasing that. I've upgraded most of the permanent upgrades as much as I can.

The passive income seems really small compared to what I get elsewhere, even with all of the in-game and permanent upgrades I can easily get. So I could throw more resources into it, but I don't *think* it's going to exceed other ways of making money.

For a long time, breeding animals was the best way of making money. My previous high water mark involved breeding the top animal and selling it to expand its enclosure so I could breed it more, and using temporary boosts to increase its breeding rate, and "fill a random enclosure" until I got lucky and it was the top one.

But now I upgraded the "animal sell price" permanent improvement to where it's more than the buy price, and after getting the net gain for a single round trip to about 10% of the sell price, just spending a few seconds clicking "sell buy sell buy" gets more income than waiting for animals to breed.

Unfortunately, with the top animal, you can only buy/sell in units of 100,000 which is much more than I got any other way, but when you get more money than that, the rate you gain money is limited by the amount you can buy at once, not the amount of money you have. (Although, expanding the enclosure size to >100,000 is really quite expensive too).

Right now the best actions available seem to be:

1. Just waiting for the 1 gem every 15 seconds income, and ploughing it into some permanent upgrades (whose price steadily gets more expensive).
2. Buy/sell trading the best animal to accumulate more cash.
3. Using buy/sell to build up a new zoo and sell it for gems. (This gets gems faster because you're not limited by the size of the enclosure so much when you can keep moving on to the next animal. The gems you get are logaraithmic in zoo size, so building up a small zoo repeatedly is about as good as one big zoo.)

And the goals I wondered if I'd reach are:

1. Go up from 1 Nonillion dollars to see if the game has an abbreviation for 1 decillion (or in fact, see how far it goes before running out if it were possible).
2. Increase birth rate to 100% and see if it crashes/goes infinite. Unfortunately, it seems like even if the birth rate is 100x what it starts at, that might not be that lucrative compared to sell/buy, when I originally hoped that would be the most lucrative thing.

However, I'm not sure there's any good way to reach those than what I'm doing, and getting there that way would be a grind-fest of months, so I'm thinking I will shortly declare myself officially done with the game :)

ETA: Oh yes, you can also trade animals for gems, but only once every two hours, I don't think that's enough to make a difference.

Mostly first-level combat. Again, a medly of stuff I've stumbled into, please do suggest things.

Delegate whatever you easily can. Get someone else to track initiative order so you don't have to! And look things up if possible, when you want to check an official rule.

Keeping my session notes in tabs in notepad++ on a smartphone works surprisingly well. I can keep a relevant section easily visible, but not very visible to anyone else, needs little table space. And I can google for official stats for monsters if I need ("it's a... panther. OK, just one sec. Ok, 7 damage.").

If I track damage *done* to each NPC/monster on scratch paper, that allows everyone to know what's going on if they happen to be able to see, and establish incontrovertibly that I'm not fudging things that have already happened. However, it doesn't let people know precisely how many hitpoints are *left* which players should not know precisely (approximately how many is often obvious from the description). And if I do want to fudge a little, I can, eg. if the combat is dragging I can pretend a monster had one less hp than I originally intended, or shuffle around combined hitpoints between a crowd of mooks to keep things slightly simpler. I don't think I did last session, but I like to have the option if it would be useful.

As important to an NPC/monster as stats is their tactics: are they a predator who only attacks if they sense an easy meal? a thug who's used to winning every fight and will come in swinging but not know how to handle a combat that isn't going their way? an experienced soldier or adventurer who knows tactics, when to use cover, which enemies to target first, how to work together to gang up, etc. Don't always default to "attack until dead" or "attack inefficiently so the PCs don't all die", decide what's appropriate, and then roll with that whether they win or lose.

Likewise, do they unload with their most powerful attack first, if they're expecting a real fight? Or do they husband resources, assuming they may have many combats today and only falling back on their most powerful abilities when events start to go sour?

I don't usually have a mechanical meaning for "under half hitpoints" ("Bloodied" in 4e and 5e dnd parlance). But it's a useful metric for "does the monster switch tactics now", whether that's activating a new ability (whether they already "had" it but weren't using it), or going into a killing rage, or turning to flee.

Likewise, judge if and when opponents are likely to flee. If they *can* flee most opponents won't fight to the death, but some will. I generally eyeball this, if the fight is clearly going their way or not combined with how committed they are. A well-timed skill check can swing it though. I don't have specific mechanics for a number of hitpoints though, I assume NPCs can judge the tactical shit-hit-fan-ness as well as PCs.

Recap

GM: ...and thank you for recapping last session.
GM: 1xp and 1gp to everyone for remembering (a) they were tracking the mutineers (b) to try to get the Plot Artifacts of Ancient and Mysterious Power before them.
GM: Not really.
GM: OK, are we all set? Have we all stocked up on quarterstaffs?
GM: And 10" poles? Or not, seriously, how does anyone carry those things??
GM: And forked sticks?
GM: This is a very useful forest.
GM: Anything else?
Princess: I still have the mysterious figurines I latched onto last session, right?
Princess: They're going to be important, right?
GM: I can neither confirm nor deny.
Kitty: We could talk to the toad-seals! Maybe they'd help.
Players: Can kitty talk to other animals?
GM: Duh. That's obviously much more interesting.
Players: But...
Players: In the last session, we trampled their eggs, roasted a bunch of them, and took their meat for provisions.
Animal-loving princess: Sorry!
Players: They may not want to talk to us.
GM: Yes, that.
GM: It's always worth asking. But also, they're in a different place where you're not.
Kitty: We could talk to the goats!
Players: But they're also not here.
Players: And also, see, killed, roasted, provisions.
Players: :(
GM: I'm sorry. Keep trying! You can absolutely talk to animals and it's absolutely relevant.
GM: It's just the first um all the things you tried happened not to work specifically. But it's still good!
GM: When I *planned* this island, I didn't expect the animals to be *able* to talk (I did plan for them to be dealt with by non combat if you approached it right).
GM: I'm working on it, ok?
Players: Anything else?
GM: Oh right yes, perception checks. Everyone add roll d20 and add your perception.
GM: Kitty, add, um, +5. Smell is good.
GM: Anyway, the general gist is that you remember to watch out for the menacing pair of eyes the foraging parties reported in the forest.
GM: It's tailing you, obviously.
Kitty: Is it a cat?
GM: I can neither confirm nor deny it being retconned into the obviously narratively appropriate species.
Party: We could... split up. To um, see if we can get close enough to it.
GM: Or you could not do that.
Party: Ok, *sigh*. If it's not attacking as a group, we'll just press on.
GM: Good call.

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How to adjudicate when the GM and player have diverging expectations?

Someone has to act as arbiter, and by default that's the GM, but when the GM decides, what should they decide?

I have no one answer, but a few principles.

If it doesn't matter much, get it out of the way quickly, and defer any discussion about the rules till later.

If the player had a particular expectation, try not to undermine them. I think this is one of the most important things to try to deal with in the moment.

If the player misunderstood an explanation and tried to jump across a 100" wide chasm not a 10" wide chasm, you may need to clarify some other things, but at a minimum, you probably want to say, "you'll just fall to your death, do you want to do something else?" not "are you sure?" "uh, yeah, why?" "ok, you fall to your death".

That applies whether you have someone who knows what the official rules say and was relying on it. If they've set up a shot that depends on the cover rules working the way the rules say and you've never previously altered, it sucks for them to have that yanked out from under them if you improv something instead. Or whether you have a new player who doesn't know what's covered mechanically or not, and tries to do something dramatic like swinging on a chandelier that in-rules doesn't provide any combat advantage. In both cases, the player shouldn't have a hissy fit, but also in both cases, it's your job to do the best you can in the spur of the moment to allow the player's action or give a good substitute. FWIW, I would allow the first player their interpretation of the rules that once, and if it kills an important NPC, I never rely on an important NPC surviving. And for the second player I'd do something like, "make a dex check, if you succeed, attack with a modest bonus (or choose to knock the enemy back)". That fits the sort of action they wanted.

If it's a one-off, it probably doesn't matter much. If it's going to come up repeatedly (eg. rules for hiding), get past the immediate problem, and then review the situation later. Check what the rules really say. Decide if you'd prefer those, or some modification. Check with the player if they have a sensible request, and if so, consider if it makes sense. Then make a decision, make it clear and stick to it.

If you're not sure which rule to go with? Look for easy to adjudicate (if it doesn't matter, you can always go with what's in the book). Look for fun -- the beginner is right, random stunts should TOTALLY be in lots of combat, and it's a flaw in the rules they're not. Look for ones that avoid breaking a tone you're evoking. Look for which way your players would prefer.

Part of this is just, how to make good rulings in the heat of a moment whichever side you come down on.

Part of it is, where do you draw the line between "what happens because of common sense" and "what happens because what it says in the rules". There's a gulf of people's expectations. Both in terms of tone (is this action adventure where heroes do things humans MIGHT be able to do? Or more like an epic norse legend, where great heroes wrestle sea-serpents?) and in terms of pedantry (do you expect the GM to allow an unconscious villain to have their throat slit? or rely on the weapon rules on how much damage that deals?). There's an amount you can stretch to accommodate different players, but only so far: beyond that, you just have to accept you want to play different things.

It's important to figure out if that's happening or not. You can totally have a tone that has character drama all over the place, *and* swashbuckling *and* fart jokes (see: all of Shakespeare). But if 4/5 players want wall-to-wall drama and one wants fart jokes, it may well not work. And the same in reverse.

Likewise, you can easily have some characters who chose well-optimised powers for their class, and some who chose whatever felt cool, and as long as there's not a big difference in power, it's fine. But if some characters want to hand wave away combat to get to the character interaction, and the other characters want to use the class abilities they just levelled up into, it's a stretch to keep both happy. Sometimes you can, sometimes you can't.

But that's often the underlying dynamic when players react in very different ways, they're focussing on different parts of the adventure, and you want to give both what they want, but avoid what you give one player obviating what the other player wants. Eg. if conversation is always pointless when combat happens, people who want to learn about NPCs are screwed. If you let one character do things because they're cool, but everyone else sticks to the rules, the other players are eclipsed. Can you do both, or not?

A long time ago, there was a DnD module tomb of horrors, and every so often since there's been some controversy about it.

AIUI, it was the equivalent of playing a computer game on iron-man difficulty, with no saves, only one life, etc. It was designed for experienced players who wanted a really deadly challenge, often at conventions where there might be an audience.

The general features are (a) there's a lot of challenges that involve player decisions, not specific skills, whether the characters are appropriately really really careful about everything they do. (b) when something goes wrong, it's usually very deadly.

That meant, if you expected "fair" to mean "forgiving", it's really really not -- if you're the slightest bit incautious, you'll likely all die immediately. But if you expected "fair" to mean, "your death stem directly from your decisions" then it is more so than most adventures[1].

But if you don't know that, there is a lot of ire between people who loved it, people who think this is "the one true way" of how a session should be, and people who tried it and became incredibly resentful. It's good that the far end of a bell curve exists when that's something some people want to find, even if *most* modules should be somewhere left of it.

I did once play with a GM who played a few sessions of it inbetween campaigns. I liked the idea, although I usually like roleplaying with more story.

[1] There are some flaws where it might not be completely fair, or ambiguous descriptions, etc, but less than most modules at the time iirc.

Last post, I decided that what's "really there" for fundamental particles is typically a quantum thing, specifically, a probability wave of possible values a particle can have which appears to collapse into one particular place only when its interacted with.

However, this "collapse" sounds very suspicious. If two different particles emitted from the same particle decay (or something?) are known to have opposite spins, but not what those are, do you get all the usual wavelike behaviour, can each self-interfere, etc? Yes, of course. And yet, when you finally measure them, lo, the spins are still conveniently opposite.

Something that looks like collapsing to a single answer seems to happen, because when we measure them, we always do get a single answer. But that's not an event. If you measure one, does a spooky force reach out across the room to force the other to collapse at the same time? Does it collapse the value you measure, but still allow other properties of the particle to continue being multiple? That looks awfully like what happens, but it should seem wrong to start with, even before you ask "if you measure one particle, does the other know to wait until you interact with it, but store the answer you're going to find until then" and "if you measure them both a long way apart, does the collapse rush faster than the speed of light (aka backwards in time) to make sure both answers agree with each other?"

Any theory involving particles "knowing" or "waiting" or "choosing" depending on how you measure them sounds very unlike physics.

And yet, the particles go on behaving like probability waves until you measure them, and if they came from a shared source, then when you measure them, they DO agree. Just as if this spooky shit was happening. What might be going on?

Hypothesis 1

Whenever one particle collapses, a spooky force travels faster than the speed of light to the other particle, and then hangs around telling it what value it will have when it's finally measured.

This *works*, but hopefully you can see why it doesn't seem correct.

Hypothesis 2

Just like hypothesis 1, but we try to avoid thinking about it. This is not really satisfying, but it works and is a pragmatic default for many physicists. (Sort of Copenhagen interpretation?)

Hypothesis 3

Even while a particle is still smeared out across a probability of many potential positions/values, it has a hidden property which tells it how it's *going* to collapse when something interacts with it. Like, not necessarily "hidden", but basically some sort of determinism.

This is roughly Hidden variables interpretation (right?)

This would be fairly satisfactory except that it turns out it's impossible.

This is not very mysterious or controversial, but involves more simple probability than I can manage to wade through. Look up the EPR paradox or the Bell inequality. The idea is, you choose something like polarisation angle that could be measured at many different angles. You randomly choose to measure at different angles for two particles known to have opposite polarisation. There are various correlations between the probabilities when you measure the two particles at an angle to each other (the detectors neither parallel nor orthogonal). You can prove that no possible hidden value would make all those correlations true at once, but QM does and that's what's actually observed.

I can't really prove this to myself, let alone anyone else, but AFAIK no reputable physicists doubt that it's correct, only maybe what it means, so I'm willing to accept it as true.

There are still edge cases, like, people argue whether the experiments have ABSOLUTELY DEFINITELY proved this spooky collapse effect would have to go faster than the speed of light, rather than going at a possible speed (but depending what exact moment sets it off, etc). But I don't find any of that very persuasive. A spooky collapse effect which is triggered by measuring a particle and goes at the speed of light or below, while not ABSOLUTELY DEFINITELY ruled out, doesn't sound at all likely. I don't think anyone seriously expects that if they make the distance apart in those measurements a bit bigger, they'll suddenly get difference results: that's not how you expect physics to happen.

Hypothesis 4

Those weird quantum probability waves don't only exist for tiny particles, they happen just the same for everything including macroscopic objects, humans, etc, but you can't observe the effects except for tiny things (because to see interference you need something isolated from other particles, and you need to be able to detect its wavelength, which is way too small for anything bigger than a molecule).

I'm still working on understanding *why*, if that's true, it produces the effects we see. But most physicists, even ones who don't like this line of reasoning, seem to agree that it *would*.

This makes everything above non-mysterious. How does the collapse effect move around? It doesn't. Every "collapse" is just another probability thing of a scientist (and all the other macroscopic stuff) interacting with a particle and becoming two never-interacting possible scientists, one observing A, one observing B. We know both happen. We know, when we measure things light-hours apart and then compare notes, that we will be comparing notes with the version of the other scientist who observed the opposite polarisation to what we saw, while our shadow twin will be comparing notes with the other scientist's shadow twin.

The multiple non-interacting versions of the macroscopic world are called "many worlds" or "parallel universes" which admittedly makes them sound very implausible.

It seems like, this leaves some things to ponder, but resolves a very large part of the things people find mysterious. And yet, many physicists really don't like it. I need to read the bits of Scott Aaron's book about different interpretations[1], because I trust him to know more about this than me and he doesn't seem convinced.

Footnote [1]

The hypotheses above are called interpretations. I don't know if my ones exactly map onto the real ones. The name is because they all predict the same results, and yet seem quite different.

You can argue, "they're the same", but I don't quite agree. See for instance space outside our light cone -- we have no way of observing it, so the hypotheses "it's got physics just like ours but with different stuff there" and "it's all purple unicorns" are both possible, and yet, the first one seems a lot more like actual reality.

In both cases, it sort of doesn't matter, but you can imagine (a) which answer is most plausible, most useful, easiest to work with, or least ridiculous (b) if we're wrong and there IS some difference, which one would actually be found to be the one that exists.

I had all the feelings.

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