Trivial solutions are often ones that don’t provide any useful insights to explore. Not that they’re not part of the solution space, or valid solutions, just that for the purposes of the lecture or paper which is likely to glean some deeper insights, that they are not worth explaining.

Often these are things like something moving with 0 velocity, you can trivially show conservation of momentum for example, or if a system is in equilibrium there are technically dynamics but there’s not much about the rules of those dynamics that are illustrated in that system.

Naive in mathematics is usually a solution or attempt at a a solution that is the obvious one. Often times it’s in the context of the naive solution being a slow or laborious baseline that can be contrasted with a more clever solution.

I don’t even hide it. I keep iterating back and forth between running TTRPG games and writing short stories. I do think I’ve started to hit something more satisfying with using a looser system (plug for https://lemmy.world/c/owboybeboprpg devoted to a fairly dead TTRPG that I probably only like because I haven’t done enough research into more popular TTRPG systems)

For me, it was this cycle where I would just get kind of exhausted at the writing process, outlining, writing, editing, and then feeling a bit dejected when its never quite as good as you remembered, then when I DMed tabletop games, it felt like I wanted more control to ideate high level visions for the narrative. They both scratch different itches in the creative process, and sometimes its nice to just switch up the itch.

I find there’s generally 3 major skills outside of general group facilitation you exercise as a DM, world building, character design, and game design.

World building is designing the setting conflict and story, character design is making interesting NPCs and role playing them, game design is making interesting combat and skill based encounters.

Most DMs are only good at one or two of these. If your DM is new, they likely are still figuring out what they are good at and enjoy doing and what they’re bad at.

Ideally combat is well narrated, but if your DM is not a strong character builder, maybe there’s not a great understanding of the motivation of the combatants. If they aren’t great at world design maybe they don’t fully understand all of the alternative ways an encounter can be resolved.

They also are probably just figuring out how the basic rules work in general in which case give them some time and maybe suggest things like, can I roll animal handling to try and ride the moth? Or are there any tribal or religious insignia on the Morlocks I can use to try and parlay with them?

This moves some of the heavy lifting off of the DM who may be swamped with bookkeeping. I find often times players also don’t realize they also need to be familiar with the rules and how their character works and just rely on the DM to know everything out which isn’t often the case when everyone is new.

The Cowboy Bebop TTRPG seemed easier to setup, less involved character creation, and works nicely for one shots.

The rules are not very well written imo, not a lot of support for DMs, so I had to kind of lean on my past experience, and there wasn’t really any guidance on how to use the clocks so one session was great, the other just slogged because I think I messed up the pacing since it was a lot fewer players.

Its also somewhat predicated on most people being familiar with the aesthetic of the show cowboy bebop.

I like DnD more as a video game, in BG3. A while ago, I started exploring more narratively centered systems, like Fate, or even the new Cowboy Bebop TTRPG, for actual role playing.

I use ChatGPT for name generation, and you can start seeing the name table it has squirreled away after a certain point. I wonder if you ran several sessions with it, if you’d start seeing a lot of the same plot points and characters showing up?

I had a great roleplaying moment when I gave the party the chance to surrender when it looked like they might get TPK’d. This is a criminally underrated option that results in some really flavorful gameplay.