New Master Post

Thought I'd redo my old master post. Last one got massive and unwiedly.

Pronouns are he/him. I'm a 28 year old electrical engineer that works in a classified site. Used to be a Mormon. Got better. Married. Writes as a hobby.

Here are tags for searching through my works. Just click the correspondong tag at the bottom, and you'll find more of what you're looking for.

Babylon-Lore Life stories, anecdotes, etc.

Babylon-Fiction Uncategorized fictional works. Separate from HFY genre.

Babylon-HFY My HFY collection. The genre was my start to writing, and it is really quite extensive. Mini-summaries here.

Babylon-TopPick Self curated for high quality. If you just like my writing and want an overview of the best of the best, click here.

Babylon-Shitpost Some stuff is also just shitposts. I don't judge.

Babylon's 6 D&D Tips

I DM’d D&D for ten years. I started in middle school, and I kept it up until my sophomore year of college. This is my mini-guide for what the game is, what it isn’t, and how to play it well. So. From the top.

Tip 1: Don't make your main storyline time dependent. 

D&D is an amazing open-world experience. You can pick at any detail. Nothing is a non-interactable part of the scenery. If there’s a sewer manhole, you can lift it up and climb down. If there’s a house, you can look inside and rob it. If there’s an NPC that you meet at the market, you can follow them home and see their whole life. Their parents, or their partner, their trade - all of it. It will be made up on the fly by some sort of reasonably skilled improv speaker, but it will also exist after that. That’s how the world is built. That’s the secret sauce that makes D&D beautiful.

If your plotline is too urgent, it kills those opportunities. The worst example of this that I have isn’t even from D&D, but FO4. The game is clearly built around exploration and adventure. The plot is built around rescuing your kidnapped baby. There’s a lot of tension between those goals. The plot does not work with the game mechanics, and it's really, really, jarring.

Be wary of doing that. It's surprisingly easy.

Tip 2: Don't set up giant, epic, fantasy battles between multiple armies. 

D&D is not a very good epic-battle simulator. There are games that have streamlined combat mechanics to allow for whole armies to fight, but D&D is very detail oriented, and trying to control too many people at once makes combat slow to a crawl. That very creative DM who can tell you every detail of an NPC’s life is also just not very good at multitasking. 

If you really, really want to - fine. But you should be ignoring standard mechanics when you do so. Move to a “cinematic mode” and just go by vibes. And generally, take a moment to “get” the game before modifying it. If the kind of plot you really want is urgent, and involves epic scale armies, maybe look into different RPG systems. D&D specializes in exploration and small, focused parties. Using it for things outside of that is kind of like hitting nails with a wrench. 

Tip 3: Don't prepare your plot like it's a book. Kill your lore codex. 

D&D is a collaborative storytelling adventure. That's the secret sauce. Writing out codexes and trying to crystallize the world before you start playing ruins the collaborative element. It’s genuinely better if you build as you go. It lets your players give input. And it saves you a lot of time. Why bother trying to write up who the Mayor of Snoresville is if there’s a good chance your party never even talks to him?  

(I would also apply this to writing in general. If you want to write all of your world's lore before starting your book, you'll never start your book. And you'll go crazy. Fear the lore codex.)

Tip 4: Prepare your combats and your NPCS rigorously, but generically. 

This ties in to Tip 3. If you spend a lot of time preparing the lore of the Bandit Leader of Redgrove, things like his family history, or his trauma, or his deep-down character motivations, and then the party never goes to Redgrove, it all goes to waste. D&D evolves rapidly and chaotically, so building things in a modular, reusable way really pays off. 

So. I tend to have two big pools for my NPC work. One is a character sheet pool. I keep it small and focused. I can generalize most melee classes ahead of time, so I can have an Archer, a Brawler, a Tank, and some Generalist Infantry. That’s like, 80% of your martial enemies, done. Spellcasters are a bigger pain in the ass, but a few pre-mades thrown into a campaign pays off if you know your themes. If you’re dealing with a death cult, make some death clerics. A dragon will probably have sorcerer acolytes. 

My second pool is a pool of character mannerisms. Some should absolutely be practiced ahead of time. Figure out what mannerisms make your villain really pop. And if the party skips that villain, just move those mannerisms to some new guy down the line and you’ll still be fine. Nothing wasted. A lot of the mannerisms are going to be picked with no heads up when the party does something weird, like following a random merchant around for a few days just to see how they live. You can get through almost all of those extremely well with just variations on the 4 humors, the 3 socioeconomic classes, and regional dialects.

Tip 5: Give your players permission to inject themselves into the world. 

It is common for people to over-formalize the rules and responsibilities of “being a player” vs. “being a DM.” I think the most common way to phrase it is something like “The Players are in charge of their characters and their backstories, the DM is responsible for the worlds and its NPCs, and both need to stay in their lanes.”

It’s isn't just better to mix it, it's necessary.

Failing to share these roles forces the world to exist in a crystallized state before the campaign even starts - at least if you want to integrate backstories into the plot. Groups that fail to do this can often feel like the characters were born the day the campaign began, and did nothing interesting beforehand. 

So, for DMs: Don’t be afraid of trying to inject NPCs and details of this world into your player's past. Imagine that your party rogue goes into a town and finds a fence for selling some stolen trinkets. Maybe, have the fence recognize the rogue. “Gods of fire, it’s McClellan. I haven’t thought about you since the candy-rat incident. You took a real beating making sure I got away that day. Glad to finally have a chance to pay you back!” 

Now, the rogue still has a choice here. They can say something like “Ah, this guy is mistaking me for someone else, but I can roll with it to get a better deal.” It’s their character, and their choice. But they can also go, hey, I do know this guy. I was apparently part of something called “The candy-rat incident.” I can decide how I know this guy, and where, and for how long, and what that incident was. That’s not less control - that’s more! 

And for players: Don’t be afraid of injecting your past into the world. Maybe you’re a fighter in a wartorn setting and you run into a group of deserters robbing refugees by the roadside. The DM has clearly planned this as some vindication, some enemies you get to thrash without feeling bad. But you have different plans. You take your helmet off, and you look the deserter’s leader in the face, and you say “Jack, you saved my life back on Stone Ridge. You were a good man once. You could be one again. Ride with us.” 

Now that's powerful stuff. Do you even know what Stone Ridge is? Hell no. Are you gonna? Hell yeah. And what you just did was way better than the DMs plan of bonking bad guys to feel good. You changed the writing of the world, commandeered an NPC, and made the whole encounter far more interesting.  

Tip 6: Ignore all portrayals of D&D in the media. 

The best players that I get are people with no experience with D&D of any kind. The second best are those that are willing to drop their preconceptions at the door and just play. The worst are people that have seen D&D portrayed somewhere and are insistent on imitating the portrayal. The exact nature of the failure varies - at worst, they’ve seen some kind of tongue-in-cheek parody, like order of the stick, and then hyperfocused on all the worst parodied aspects as the whole point of the game. D&D is not about outsmarting the mechanics (which is trivially easy, and largely pointless - it just makes your own storytelling less fun), nor is about turning everything into shallow tropes about Horny Bards and Dumb Fighters and Insufferable Paladins. At best, they’ll have seen some kind of ultra-cinematic example of D&D played on a podcast, where the DM has a theatre degree and ever party member is a professional actor. Those people are nice, but they often have unrealistic expectations.

maybe a book idea in here or something i dunno

When South Africa requested that its nuclear weapons be disarmed, the response from the rest of the world was disbelief. The technology for isotopic separation was closely monitored, and South Africa had been very carefully blocked from obtaining it. No vendor would sell them centrifuges, nor anything necessary for gaseous diffusion, nor anything for the other half dozen novel ways of separating isotopes. 

But that didn't matter, because South Africa had simply invented an entirely new way of making a bomb.

It was a little more expensive than the centrifuge method, but actually cheaper than standard diffusion techniques. They'd run a stream of uraneous gas over an airfoil and apparently, there was a low pressure region that excelled in trapping the lighter isotopes. Pulled the U235 right out. No one else had considered the technology for it, and frankly, even attempting to ban it would have been difficult. Making a wing just isn't that hard. It seemed almost like a philosophical question right up until inspectors were shown the bombs. Then it was real. Then the world really believed. 

The weapons were handed off to be voluntarily disarmed, and the rest of the world asked South Africa to please, pretty please, keep their technique secret. 

And thankfully, they have. 

---

I don't understand the mechanics of LIS, but I think that's the point. Their research was classified once it became clear that their technique was at least an order of magnitude cheaper than standard isotope separation techniques. All I know is that it involves Australians and lasers. 

Their work wasn't a huge breakthrough because fuel price has never been what held nuclear energy back - but it was interesting for other reasons. They remain, in theory, the cheapest method of isotope refinement.

---

There are more novel isotope separation techniques than just these two. But they work for my point. 

I think it's just going to get cheaper and easier to build nukes. Worse, the invasion of Ukraine has made two points absolutely crystal clear. 

First: If you have nuclear weapons, never, ever give them up. 

Second: If you don't have nuclear weapons, get them. You won't be safe until you do.

I actually see this as the start of a new wave of colonialism. We already determine if a country is first, second, or third world by who their nuclear allies are. Eventually, statehood itself will be determined by the presence of a nuclear arsenal. Anyone who has some gets a seat at the negotiation table. Anyone who doesn't is up for grabs.

Yoink.  

But even this is just one point in the journey towards nuclear proliferation. 

The worst is yet to come. 

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Imagine that you live in a newly conquered satellite of the Neo-Russian Empire. No outside country is coming to save you. Their cities are just targets for nuclear bombs. They have far too much to lose by playing stupid games - so they don't. The peace between states is terrifying, but strong. 

But the peace between conquered peoples and their conquerors is not. 

How easy does it have to be, for one group to get a nuclear bomb? Would it be money? Would it be connections? Would it be their own internal skill sets? At what point do the fragments of some conquered nation cobble together a nuclear weapon? 

A nuclear bomb detonates in St. Petersberg. A resistance group/terror cell immediately takes credit. What does Russia do? How does it retaliate? It only takes one bomb to destroy a city. Millions of lives. Trillions of dollars. All gone. One bomb. And no enemy city to fire back on. 

Nuclear weapons do not favor states. States can be retaliated against at scale. Nuclear weapons favor anarchists and terrorists and revolutionaries - small groups that can hide safely inside their foes. And once that rubicon is crossed, something new happens: Society's fundamental benefit is suddenly gone. There is no more strength in numbers. For the first time in human history, it is more dangerous to be near people than it is to be alone. 

And what is an empire, if not millions of people, huddled close? 

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I don't know what will happen after that. 

Maybe the world burns and everyone dies. Maybe states just fall apart, and people retreat to small communities, to live in anxious peace. Maybe it all turns into a feudal hell, where warlords wander in groups too large for passerby to defeat easily, but too small to be worth nuking.

Can you imagine that kind of perpetual fear? Keeping your group large enough to defend itself, but small enough to not be a target? That feeling of always being watched? Fermi imagined the Dark Forest as a solution to why we don't find aliens - maybe they're too busy hiding from us. But what if it happens sooner than that? What if the reason we don't find aliens is because they're hiding from themselves? What if every species winds up like this - sitting in the ashes of their once great cities, remembering how much easier it is to destroy than it is to build? What if that's just what Life always winds up doing?

I don't know. But I think about it a lot. 

my wife asked me what the english call football, and my brain short circuited so hard i said "footbollocks."

my problem has never been knowledge. but its a kind thought.

I started writing fiction, which developed my sense of plot and pacing. But I didnt' really feel like I found my writing voice until I started doing my anecdotes, and then I liked the voice that came out when I was doing those, so I tried combining it with my fiction, or even trying to take real anecdotes and tell them in ways that made them feel like fiction, and the results of those experiments are kind of weird.

Anyway, this is a very long way of saying thank you for being my guinea pig. Writing on the internet helps me figure out and hone all sorts of fun writing tricks.