“Whoa, whoa, whoa! It was a fertility. Festival! It is my job to offer prayers as the fertility rituals are being performed, and now you want to condemn me for it? When I was some distance from the entire event? Are we then to assume that every famine our village suffered before I arrived was due to you drinking in the local tavern, Ser Idiot? I can understand this is a difficult time for you, but don’t let your grief blind you! I will overlook this baseless accusation this once, but only once.”

If your only defence for a thing is “it’s not technically against the fire code”, then it’s a fire hazard. Like, if I say “I technically didn’t steal your watch”, then you would say “give me back my watch”.

“I would like to apologise for my actions during the recent spring fertility festival. While I hope we can agree that the virgins stumbling and falling into the bonfire was nobody’s fault, I should have taken greater actions to save them. Indeed, it was far too soon for me to open my arms to the flames, offer their pure souls to the quint-coloured mother and beg her eternal blessing. It was an inappropriate time for funerary rites. I hope you can forgive me.”

“Yes, I worship the majestic mother, bringer of life, she who brings all colours into the world. No, I don’t feel inclined to tell you her name.”

You keep asking this question, we keep saying no, and then you ask it again with LESS money on offer. You don’t get how haggling works, and you definitely don’t get how asklemmy questions work.

For me, it’s just math. The odds of things getting better if I try may be low, but the odds if I don’t are even lower. I’ll take the higher odds every time.

For you, have you considered spite? Live the best life you can to prove wrong everyone who tried to stop you, and do as much good in the world as you can so those trying to do evil have to try just that little bit harder. It only takes one good hit to ruin a superior opponent’s perfect game, and you can only get that hit if you keep playing.

If you kill a PC with a recreation of the Boromir death scene, you might be able to hit all three at once!

And we played the first thing that came to our heads
Just so happened to be
The best song in the world
It was the best song in the world

They were being kind and assuming there was a miscommunication.

It’s not the anger that’s cowardly, it’s the refusal to try. It’s taking any other path, so long as you don’t have to risk your own stupid pride. Have the humility to accept you might not make the right call, but the courage to actually make it for yourself.

This adventure comes from a time when modules were a toolbox. One of the most popular modules from the era had a plot of “there’s a bunch of monsters in some nearby caves, and they don’t all like each other”. Tunnels were blocked by debris, allowing the DM to connect it to another dungeon they wanna try. You might come back to the same dungeon a second time, and the contents of the room will change. A module is a starting point, but the DM continues the story from there.

If you don’t know how to prep that, then the empty room is a boon. If you do, then the empty room isn’t an issue. If you don’t want to prep a campaign like that, then maybe this style of module isn’t for you in the first place.

I wasn’t a good DM either. But then I learned. I threw encounters at the players I thought might be fun, and I missed the mark almost every single time. But my players had fun, so I don’t see the problem in getting those encounters wrong. And every failure taught me so much more than every success.

If you fail, but you keep it fun and learn for the future, what have you lost? Only your pride.

But some monsters are strong against certain builds and weak against others. Some monsters are stronger in certain environment and entirely nullified by others. Some monsters are stronger given certain allies and weaker when alone.

If you could devise a system to assign monster complexity based on every scenario you can imagine that monster being part of, then either that’s an astonishingly small number of scenarios or an absurdly complex calculation to force on anyone.

This is a room. After seeing dozens of rooms with monsters and furniture, you are given a room with nothing in it and told to fill it yourself. You know the general sort of thing that goes in the room, so all that’s left is to decide precisely what. Everything before the room has been given to you, and everything after will be given as well. You just need to come up with one room.

You can have a paid product full of things to put into that room and not learn a damn thing about actually preparing rooms like that. You can memorise every entry on a multiplication table and still not know how to actually multiply two numbers. The most valuable teacher is experience, which is why you have to actually figure out what the gaps in the number sequence are.

So you can try. You can come up with a few monsters you think would be fun, and would fit into that room. You add a bookshelf and a table for flavour, and to make the fight a little bit more interesting. It could go well or it could go wrong, but you learn either way.

Or you can rage against the system that dared tell you to figure out a single room by yourself; dared to tell you to put your pride on the line and risk making a mistake.

The second one sounds cowardly to me.

I think it’s mostly cowardice, personally. People don’t want to risk putting their own choices into a game based entirely on choices, just in case they aren’t as good. It’s better to use someone else’s decisions than risk your own pride.

Then you have ignorance. A lot of people don’t know how to fill the gaps, and WotC has never bothered teaching them how. Any rules they did get are rules of thumb and aren’t something to use without thought (like CR), so people complain for reason 1 again.

That’s bollocks. Whoever claimed that people used to draw dicks to ward off evil was talking out of their ass to make a dick pic seem classier. They were just embarrassed that their submission in an archeological journal was so similar to what they carved into their desk in school, and I’m damn certain the school desk isn’t protected from evil either.

I find it funny that you directly quoted wikipedia to write that (exact wording from the paradox article, I checked), but ignored the sentence immediately before it (…or a statement that runs contrary to one’s expectation). Also, the linked articles at the bottom include the unexpected hanging page. Maybe read the entire wiki page before citing it?

Also, in case wikipedia suddenly isn’t enough, here’s an article on wolfram to back me up: https://mathworld.wolfram.com/UnexpectedHangingParadox.html

My dude. The paradox doesn’t change based on whether or not the judge knows the truth, or even if the man dies.

The truth is the man was made not to expect a thing by his own logic proving he would always expect a thing. The paradox is based on his own prediction being wrong because of his prediction. In this instance, his prediction was what his emotions would be.

A horse walks into a bar, and the barman says “why the long face?” I haven’t said how they remove the horse from the bar, so does that mean I didn’t tell a joke? Or does horse removal not actually matter to the joke?

You have understood nothing.

Neither statement can be true OR false. If statement A is true, statement B is true, which means statement A is false. To simplify, if statement A is true, statement A is false.

“This statement is false” can be neither true nor false. That is the most basic paradox there is.

I don’t think you’ve quite clocked it. It’s not that one of the statements has to be wrong, because that’s just a point in the cycle. If A is wrong, then B is right, which means A is right, which means B is wrong, which means A is wrong and the cycle begins anew.

They aren’t wrong, they’re contradictory. There is no logical way to parse the two statements together. That’s what a paradox is.

Cannot be properly defined? “Expecting it” means “regarding it likely to happen”, according to the dictionary. He regarded it as impossible to happen, so he was not expecting it. His own logic disproving the event (him being surprised) allowed the event to happen (he was surprised).

Why does the paradox suffer if he lies about the solution? The paradox has already played out, and anything after that is just set dressing.

Just off the top of my head, maybe the judge has a camera set to gauge his reaction to the knock on the door? Or maybe he goes into denial and tries to explain his logic, thus proving the paradox? Or maybe the judge doesn’t actually care as much as he said, but trusts the logic to hold out and make for a funny story?