My players kind of have a habit of, "If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, WE MUST KILL IT!"  Recently they came across a small goblin camp and one of them (who speaks goblin) verbally bluffed the goblins into thinking he was their leader coming back from a meeting or some such business. "Brilliant," I thought, "let's see where they take this"... Into an ambush it turned out. Or in another example they learned of an enemy supply caravan heading from one town to another in a couple of days, so they ambushed it the road, rather than thinking of another option.  Now I have no problem with this whatsoever, I'm still new to DMing, not yet great at the role-play side of things in any case, running a published campaign, am running things more or less by the book, which my players don't seem to mind, and the caravan combat at least is in the book.  I guess what I'm getting at is; How do I encourage players to think outside the combat box and how do I, as the DM, give them other options without blatantly saying something like "maybe they don't want to fight"?  To hopefully make things a little more clear and to give another example, of which the PCs haven't actually come across yet. Say the PCs are camping in the forest and whoever's on watch hears wolves howling and getting closer, whether they wake the others up or not my lead in woud be something like;     Eventually there's a rustling in the bushes nearby and you see pairs of glowing red eyes that seem to watch your movement. After a minute or two a pack of wolves stalk out from behind the bushes and into the light of your camp fire, their eyes set with ravenous hunger and their jaws dipping with saliva.   How can I open up the possibility that if the PCs offer up some of their own food supplies than the wolves would be complacent and either back off or stick around for the night in the warmth of the fire and help protect the PCs? Not looking for answers specifically relating to that scenario but hopefully you get the idea.
Most RPGs teach you that casual violence is the best solution to all your in-game problems. This is so well established a part of the vast majority of RPGs that there are entire satire RPGs like Greg Costikyan's  and John Tynes'  dedicated to showcasing the issue. Even now that the '80's anti-RPG hysteria is past, you see more sober critiques of endemic violence in RPGs in places like . In most RPGs, PCs become inured to murder and other antisocial activities very quickly, and enter the depths of depravity that wouldn't be appropriate in the worst parts of the world. Armed robbery, mass murder, and genocide become routine parts of an adventurer's day, something only stick-in-the-mud characters with the most extremely stated ethics object to. , even though it is not properly applied to just any conflict, is a PC's friend and they generally escalate any conflict in that direction. The sophistication of the gamer mindset towards introspection on this issue can be demonstrated in that the most meaningful question usually debated about in-game violence is some variant on &quot;but should we kill the noncombatant children&quot; or &quot;can we just murder people out of hand as long as they're from a typically evil race?&quot; In the real world, we generally a priori regard anyone having to have this discussion as a monster already. (P.S. The &quot;wipe out a given evil race&quot; thing isn't the point of this question; it is only mentioned to indicate that it's only &quot;that far&quot; that usually causes ethical handwringing from players, when that is a really quite extreme case and we should be uncomfortable with casual violence a lot sooner. ) What I'd like to have is a more realistic in-game treatment of conflict.  People getting wounded and giving up, taking and ransoming of prisoners, not always escalating a fistfight to weapons, not always escalating weapon combat to killing, etc.  Heck, as I write this, I'm watching an episode of Adventure Time with my daughter and the protagonists snuck in and rescued a princess kidnapped by the Ice King and then exit right next to his sleeping form. I thought, &quot;If this were D&amp;D they'd all be carefully coordinating a coup de grace to kill him in his sleep on the grounds that he inconvenienced them.&quot;  The problem isn't limited to D&amp;D of course, sci-fi PCs are happy to neutron bomb planets for convenience too, for example. I'm not part of the &quot;D&amp;D is Satanic&quot; crowd obviously, but I frankly do have compunctions about continually playing in games where the taught behavior is uncomfortably equivalent to the worst examples of human behavior we see on the nightly news. How can I give my PCs a newfound respect for human life?
I'm doing some exercises on Apostol's calculus, on the floor function. Now, he doesn't give an explicit definition of $[x]$, so I'm going with this one:     DEFINITION Given  $x\in \Bbb R$, the integer part of $x$ is the unique $z\in \Bbb Z$ such that $$z\leq x &lt; z+1$$ and we denote it by $[x]$.   Now he asks to prove some basic things about it, such as: if $n\in \Bbb Z$, then $[x+n]=[x]+n$  So I proved it like this: Let $z=[x+n]$ and $z'=[x]$. Then we have that  $$z\leq x+n&lt;z+1$$  $$z'\leq x&lt;z'+1$$  Then $$z'+n\leq x+n&lt;z'+n+1$$  But since $z'$ is an integer, so is $z'+n$. Since $z$ is unique, it must be that $z'+n=z$.  However, this doesn't seem to get me anywhere to prove that  $$\left[ {2x} \right] = \left[ x \right] + \left[ {x + \frac{1}{2}} \right]$$  in and in general that   $$\left[ {nx} \right] = \sum\limits_{k = 0}^{n - 1} {\left[ {x + \frac{k}{n}} \right]} $$  Obviously one could do an informal proof thinking about "the carries", but that's not the idea, let alone how tedious it would be. Maybe there is some easier or clearer characterization of $[x]$ in terms of $x$ to work this out.  Another property is $$[-x]=\begin{cases}-[x]\text{ ; if }x\in \Bbb Z \cr-[x]-1 \text{ ; otherwise}\end{cases}$$  I argue: if $x\in\Bbb Z$, it is clear $[x]=x$. Then $-[x]=-x$, and $-[x]\in \Bbb Z$ so $[-[x]]=-[x]=[-x]$. For the other, I guess one could say:  $$n \leqslant x &lt; n + 1 \Rightarrow  - n - 1 &lt; x \leqslant -n$$  and since $x$ is not an integer, this should be the same as $$ - n - 1 \leqslant -x &lt; -n$$  $$ - n - 1 \leqslant -x &lt; (-n-1)+1$$  So $[-x]=-[x]-1$ Q: Will there be, or have there been, any “late blooming” students in the school who come into their magic potential as adults, rather than as children? By the way, I loved meeting you, and hearing you speak, when you came to Anderson's in Naperville. I can hardly wait until you tour again. JKR: Ahhh! I loved the event at Anderson’s. It was one of my favorites. That is completely true. No, is the answer. In my books, magic almost always shows itself in a person before age 11; however, there is a character who does manage in desperate circumstances to do magic quite late in life, but that is very rare in the world I am writing about. (src: )  Who was JKR referring to in “there is a character”? Clearly, it not a student; so the most obvious guess of &quot;Neville Longbottom&quot; is wrong – both due to “no” answer regarding the question itself, and the fact that Neville bloomed in his 6th/7th year, well before you can legitimately term “quite late in life”. setting up apache2 webserver -- differences between behaviour within my intranet and outside Is there a word for someone that always has to be right? The person gets angry if they are not. Which singular names ending in “s” form possessives with only a bare apostrophe? Many questions already ask about this topic ( , , etc.) and their answers vary, but they always give exceptions to the apostrophe-s rule, for example:      6.24 The general rule for the possessive of nouns covers most proper nouns, including most names ending in sibilants."   Examples they give include Kansas’s, Ross’s land, and Jones’s reputation. Exceptions include Jesus’  and Moses’.  Which names does this apply to?  Is the Aeneas’  form correct, or is it Aeneas’s instead? "When I grow up, I am going to be a doctor"- Is it correct? When I grow up, I am going to be a doctor.   Is this sentence correct? Personally I think my growing up will happen in future and "I am going to be a doctor" sounds like it is going to happen in next month! But the sentence clearly indicates the speaker is a child. So according to me, "I am going to be a doctor" should be replaced by "I will be a doctor". So I think a more clear sentence would be     When I will grow up, I will be a doctor.   Is my concept correct here? What exactly do the colors in htop status bars mean? Replace strings in a file based on a list of strings and a list of corresponding replacements Help finding the limit of $\lim_{n \to \infty}\prod_{k=1}^{n}\left(1+\frac{1}{n}f\left(\frac{k}{n}\right)\right)$. String vs. StringBuilder I understand the difference between String and StringBuilder (StringBuilder being mutable) but is there a large performance difference between the two?   The program I’m working on has a lot of case driven string appends (500+). Is using StringBuilder a better choice? Compile error with \href ToC and \apacite I would like to edit my document but I have a compile error somewhere between the \href and the apacite but can't locate it. I've tried blocking out code and taking out references, with varying results.  \documentclass[a4paper,12pt]{article} \usepackage[english]{babel} \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}  % TOC, Citations, Refereneces, and Appendicies \usepackage{apacite} % \cite{ref1,ref2} %Warning - unsupported tocstyle code \usepackage[tocindentauto]{tocstyle}     \renewcommand{\thesection}{\Roman{section}}      \renewcommand{\thesubsection}{\arabic{subsection}.}     \renewcommand{\thesubsubsection}{\roman{subsubsection}.} %\usepackage{hyperref} %\urlstyle{same} %\hypersetup{ %   colorlinks=true, %   urlcolor=cyan, %   linkcolor=blue, %   citecolor=green, %   filecolor=magenta, %   pdftitle={Sharelatex Example}, %   pdfpagemode=FullScreen, %} \usepackage[toc,page]{appendix}  \begin{document}    ...to be installed \cite{church13,hershkowits97}. \bibliographystyle{apacite} \bibliography{bibliography} \end{document}   Here are the bibliography.bib entries then  @ARTICLE{church13,    author       = {K.H. Church and H. Tsang and R. Rodrigiguez and P. Defembaugh and R. Rumpf},    year         = 2013,    title        = {Printed circuit structures, the evolution of printed circuit boards},    journal      = {Circuit Insight},    volume       = {},    number       = {},    pages        = {},    howpublished = {},     url          = {http://www.808multimedia.com/winnt/kernel.htm}, }  @ARTICLE{hershkowits97,    author       = {N. Hershkowits and R.A. Breun},    year         = {1997},    title        = {Diagnostics for plasma processing (etch plasmas) (invited)},    journal      = {Review of Scientific Instrumentation},    volume       = {68},    number       = {1},    pages        = {880--885},    howpublished = {}, } Extract all string from a java project How should a bot earn enough reputation to perform the actions necessary for that bot? We all know it: bots that chat. There are also bots that flag, or perform other actions. And usually we like them for doing that, like . So every now and then, a new bot is created, and usually you would ask a question using that bot or suggest enough edits to get the reputation necessary for that bot to operate. Instead of suggesting 100 edits, Undo has found a more efficient way, namely by . Now someone could frown on this action or not, actually it is the least intrusive way to get the bot the reputation necessary (I guess no one really likes a bot to suggest 100 edits just for the sake of earning enough reputation). The question is: is this actually the best way? Was this action allowed or should we look away because it is Smokey? Should we maybe have a special bot user status which derives the privileges from its master user? Anything else you want to share on this? Related: Limit $\lim\limits_{x\to0}{\frac{\ln{(e+x)}-e^x}{\cos^2{x} -e^x}}$ I want to prove that if we have a commutative integral domain $D$ with field of fractions $F\neq D$ then $F$ is not finitely generated as a $D$-module. (In this question it may be the case that $1\not\in D$.)    My original plan was to localize at a maximal ideal and then use Nakayama's lemma but as we don't have a $1$ our localization may not be local (in fact we need not have maximal ideals).  So I'm a bit lost as to where to go?  Thanks for any help. Is it better in C++ to pass by value or pass by constant reference?  I am wondering which is better practice.  I realize that pass by constant reference should provide for better performance in the program because you are not making a copy of the variable. Unit testing code which has logic around the CreatedDate An example of the problem would be trying to test a trigger on a case which will fire on update, and look for time differences between when a case was created and now. Ideally in the unit tests I want to create a case with a CreatedDate in the past. The problem here is that CreatedDate is an audit field and not writeable[1]. Is there a standard work around to this problem?  [1] I know you can get audit fields turned on to be writeable temporarily when doing data migration. This is not a viable solution for every time you want to get your code coverage up for deployment. Collective term for data sizes (bytes, kilobytes, megabytes etc.) As you will probably work out from my profile, I'm a software developer. This is sort of a software development question, but I think this is more suited to English language too.  Feel free to migrate if you think the question does not belong here.  Say I want to refer to the data size, or capacity of something:   A floppy disk can hold 1.44 megabytes of data. My flash drive can hold 16 gigabytes of data. My internet connection can operate at a maximum of 50 gigabits per second I have just managed to compress a file from 1 megabyte to just 200 kilobytes.   How do I collectively refer to these units of data size/capacity? Escape character in LaTeX I need to output the below text but since \ is a special character, I cannot:  [RegularExpression(@"\d+")]   Also sometimes I need use dollar sign $ as well but it seems to be a special char, too.  What is the way to escape those in LaTeX?  UPDATE:  I used \verb as suggested but I am unable to run commands inside it. Also, in the output the font and the opacity of the text is different than the default one:  \verb|[RegularExpression(\newline @"\d+")]| File sync error (AUTH_FAILED)