Dragonborns vs Tieflings
My son’s favorite activity since he started high school a few months ago is his afterschool board game club, and his favorite game is a Dungeons and Dragons campaign they play at the club. I sometimes get to hear of funny and heroic acts or complex strategies when he returns home late at night. Although the story telling is engaging, I don’t understand much of the subtle character details, their personalities, and abilities. It turns out, until two weeks ago I couldn’t even tell an Orc from a Goblin most of the time (Orcs are bigger, and Goblins are sometimes green…) or a Dragonborn from a Tiefling; I didn’t even know what a Tiefling was.
The weekend after the second fastai lecture, I became good at telling Tieflings apart from other races. Dragonborns, at advanced levels, can get wings and start to look a lot like Dragons, but, they are much smaller, they stand on two legs, they wear human-like clothes and use weapons in a human way; Dragons on the other hand are huge and very wise, think of the dragon in the Hobbit. To make things more complicated, Halflings still really look like Humans to me, but they tend to be merry and small, though reasonably easy to tell apart from Dwarfs. Since all of these creatures were invented by creative minds, their exact characteristics differ a lot more in the wild than the characteristics of well-defined cat or dog breeds, so the weekend project became an adventure involving data collection, hacking minor tools (sha1sum, FileDeleter mods), and help from my expert son. Here is a neural net that is better than I am at telling the D&D character race from an image:
https://dungeons-and-dragons-race.now.sh
My vacation pictures suggest I’m a Halfling, but my son managed to change his expression enough to pass as a dragon!