TRPG General Chat - 2014-12-16 (page 1 of 2)

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12:02 AM

@Dorian sir that is highly disrespectful to abominations, they're not nearly as bad as aberrations

@doppelgreener I'm toying with a PC concept that has a similar "Student of the human condition" theme to Stellata. What kind of profession might such a person choose in order to get close to a lot of people and be able to find out nosy personal things about 'em?

@doppelgreener What about Divergents?

oh god i need to never open the aberration list again. i just found a monster type i would rather forget exists.

Do tell!

no!

12:04 AM

It can’t be that bad!

it's the corpse orgy‌. there is worse. it does not get much worse.

Its touch AC is only 9.

You could touch it!

@doppelgreener Where does the malevolent zombie god baby fall on the spectrum?

wow thats amazing

@BESW Team psychologist. Company counselor. (Both of these would be extremely important in Amaterasu.)

@BESW the "worse" bit.

@BraddSzonye Thank you for this information but I will be too busy moving in the opposite direction at maximum speed.

12:06 AM

The fact that it’s an Aberration rather than Undead is interesting.

@doppelgreener ...And the sapient tumour that mind-controls you until it bursts out of your body and attacks your friends?

The day I play under a GM who introduces those things to the game is the day I roll a new character with The Game Changer for a build.

Makes it sort of a Bodysnatchers sort of thing.

Conjoined bodysnatchers.

@BESW I haven't heard about that one, but let's keep it at this level of ignorance.

@doppelgreener It's the reason Brian's worldbuilding project is called the Cystarchy.

12:08 AM

@BESW Also: HR, nosy janitor, anyone who hangs around people a lot (a maintenance worker?) and is very talkative and friendly.

@doppelgreener that thing is broken

@doppelgreener Bartender?

the amulet

Beautician?

@BraddSzonye That too!

12:09 AM

@BraddSzonye And it "resembles an ooze in nature," as well.

Surely Amaterasu would have an internal bar or somesuch, or outsource such a facility to somewhere easy to reach. They do, after all, act as the home for people like Stellata and Doctor Light. It can't be just a workplace.

@doppelgreener True, but that doesn't lend the PC to fieldwork.

Hrm.

@BESW Team psychologist then.

Action psychologist.

Team hairdresser!

That could be... hilarious. Since my concept is that he's not Action at all.

12:11 AM

user image

(source: Advanced Dungeons and Discourse)

(context for the 'what?': Tiny Carl Jung is an old guy and very confused about this game and doesn't know what's going on)

So is it bad that when you suggest you need a character type more mobile than a bartender, my first thought goes to “mobile bartender”?

4

@BraddSzonye no it's perfect

this is atomic robo after all

Aha!

Valet?

Well, Atomic Robo / Hellboy / X-Files / Warehouse 13 mashup.

@BESW sure, but atomic robo seems to actually be our best rule of thumb for what works extraordinarily well in this game.

12:14 AM

@doppelgreener I'm re-visiting the Elder Son concept from a different perspective: he knows what he is, and is actively trying to reject it.

I am sadly ignorant of most of that, except for WH13.

Taking away most of the Weird Time Stuff and just going with "extradimensional perception" and the ability to project hallucinations.

Modes: Telepath (with Hallucinations), Bartender (Reporter without Stealth), Banter.

I'll tinker with it a bit.

Okay!

I'm still going to use Jessie for this coming session, though.

[hat update]

Whoa, that was quick.

Ooh, Warm Welcome.

12:37 AM

Had to update my profile picture so that hats would fit!

They didn't fit after you adjusted them?

Nope.

Oh wait, you can adjust them?

You can adjust them.

There's a Show Controls checkbox.

Oh! Never noticed that.

Needed to update my picture anyway, had no beard or glasses.

Aha, much better!

@BESW i'm looking forward to it. :)

12:39 AM

All that really remains for Jessie is finding her voice.

@BESW Like, literally her voice?

yeah.

Voice have been harder for me since after college.

In college I had extended periods every day walking around campus alone, and could experiment aloud with accents, dialects, phrasings.

I don't have an equivalent of that anymore.

One shortcut I'm taking more these days is finding a voice from a TV show or a film that I can mimic.

I'm an awful mimic so it doesn't usually sound like the actor, but it gives me a touchstone.

1:03 AM

@BESW "I'm an awful mimic" Ah HA! I knew it! A mimic pretending to be an SE user so you can eat us all!

4

@BESW Reuben suggested a possibility: Asuka from Evangelion

are you just looking for a way for her to sound, or a personality to channel as well?

@Miniman y-yes. that is him. he is the one doing that. absolutely. nobody else.

@doppelgreener Sound first, but personality often follows.

@doppelgreener I seem to remember a conversation in which it was revealed that you were a fragment of BESW's consciousness.

1:26 AM

@BESW I actually don't picture her as having any particular accent. If anything, just your usual one or a transatlantic accent or something!

@doppelgreener How would you fix the formatting if Akashic Mysteries is, in fact, the subsystem I mentioned?

@Metool if it is, i could propose an edit and show you.

Certainly.

@doppelgreener Mmm, but it's also a matter of delivery and vocabulary.

Does she speak staccato? Does she use big words or galactic slang? Does she swear?

Ah, okay.

1:28 AM

[face/palm] This awesome MLP fanart has comments which basically boil down to "That's not European archery and thus it is wrong, because that's the only kind of archery ever."

(Which is triply ridiculous because--while I give massive props to the artist for research and accuracy--I'm not sure how reasonable it is for ponies to have archery practices at all like ours. He's using a thumb ring, and... um. This pony has fingers. Arguments are being invalidated.)

@BESW "But ponies don't have thumbs!"

I can only assume Lyra went mad and created a new breed of genetically modified handponies.

@BESW I can imagine her saying 'shit!' when it's really warranted, like when she just totally stuffed them up due to her time gun malfunctioning or something. I don't think she would swear much - regardless of this being your PC. What is speaking staccato?

Speaking in short bursts.

@BESW That creature appears to have gryphon heritage.

1:34 AM

@doppelgreener thefreedictionary.com/staccato

@Metool But it also appears to not be quite a gryphon. [shrug]

@BESW for realsy though, Asuka has some behaviour I imagine as fitting this girl pretty well. She's intensely energetic and self-confident and will happily show off how awesome she is.

I'm mostly just bemused by the ignorantly self-assured eurocentricity of the comments.

(In fact, being shown up at all is massively confronting for her.)

@Adeptus yeah, the definition didn't clear it up for me much ;P

@doppelgreener Got some source material for me?

@doppelgreener If she spoke staccato, she'd use short phrases delivered abruptly.

1:37 AM

@BESW Rebuild of Evangelion 1.0 and 2.0 (2.0 is the one featuring Asuka, but 1.0 is the one that explains The Things) -- tomorrow I could dig out youtube videos if you'd prefer.

@BESW I wasn't aware of any archery style that involved drawing past the bow. Now I am.

@BESW Given her storytelling capacity I am fairly sure she is the kind of person who just flows when she talks.

@Adeptus Yes, but I hope you didn't assume it was wrong or that the artist pulled the concept out of thin air.

"Interesting piece of armor for holding the arrow in place, not even I would have thought of it."

@BESW Given that I was introduced to the picture via your comment, I went in with the assumption that it was using a not-widely-known-to-europeans archery style ;)

[grin]

The comments aren't "Hey, I haven't seen that before," but rather "Hey, that's not something anyone does."

Since both the thumb ring and the siper are commonly used in some of the most famous archery traditions ever, that's a special kind of selective knowledge.

[shrug] More things on heaven and earth.

@doppelgreener Mebbee yeah.

1:48 AM

maybe i haven't heard staccato style but i can't imagine a natural storyteller having it

@Adeptus [sees art.] So the siper is a piece of equipment resting on the rist, and by drawing past the bow, you mean drawing to the point the arrow is no longer resting against the bowgrip?

(or if it doesn't rest against the bowgrip... whatever it rests against)

@doppelgreener yes

Yup! It's used to draw arrows further back than normal, or to draw shorter arrows than would normally fit in the bow.

@BESW neat!

which i presume can also allow them to fire farther

It's most commonly used for cases where distance is more important than accuracy or power.

But historically, there's speculation that sipers and similar devices were used to give an advantage in battle by making it easier for the siper-users to re-use their enemies' arrows, but harder for the enemies to re-use the siper-users' arrows.

4

@BESW ha, i get it. so they'd use shorter arrows the enemies without sipers couldn't possibly fire?

but for longer arrows, the siper users would still be fine?

1:58 AM

Yup.

Ingenius!

(Oh, and one of the main reasons a siper helps with distance isn't that you can draw the bow back further; it's that shorter arrows weigh less.)

2:16 AM

@BESW ooo, that would help too. But impact accuracy.

Also penetration.

[annoyed]

A guy just came into a question for a game he has no experience in and questioned something from his experience from a similar-but-different system.

He has -2 inclination to pick up any experience for the first system, but also -3 inclination to ignore its tag.

Link?

If you can see deleted comments, here.

(I know the guy from another chat and asked him about it.)

Ah, I cannot.

That's an elected privilege.

2:22 AM

<him> gah, Pathfinder's popularity is so grating
<me> Feel free to ignore the tag.
<him> I think I can reasonably justify a statement that the site would be worse off if I did

I actually worry about how this impacts his mental health.

Well, you shouldn't generally ignore tags. It's pretty rare that a correctly-tagged question can be well-answered by an answer that ignores them.

2:42 AM

0

Q: Do touch spells deserve a tag?

So I noticed when I was writing an answer to this question that we have a lot of questions about “touch attacks,” which are used for certain magic abilities in D&D that require touching the target. I imagine other systems could easily have analogous options. It seems to be a confusing topic, and ...

discussion tags

TIL 5e magic item crafting for common potions is brutal

@waxeagle Thanks for that, I didn't want to add another answer to that question. I hadn't done the maths - crafting at double the price of buying just seems weird and wrong.

@Miniman yeah, if I was going to use these rules in my campaign (I'm not, at least not right this second), I'd rule that you get 1d4 potions out of it.

(maybe even 1d3+1)

@waxeagle I'd probably go with crafting coming out at half the cost, but that's all mixed up in downtime rules, so it'll be a pain to work out.

So, I feel pretty confident in saying that Fascinating and Fascinating, Ma'am are for upvoting 1 question and 1 answer. I don't know which is which, though.

2:50 AM

@Miniman well, crafting accounts for downtime day payments (both magic and mundane crafting cover your CoL), mundane crafting doesn't cost and contributes 5gp per day to the value of what you're crafting. Magic item crafting you pay 25gp towards the crafting cost which is set in a table.

Earlier, I went on Server Fault and upvoted 1 question, and 1 answer to that question, and got bot hats.

and the way I'm doing downtime in my campaign is that it's a currency, which you make a payment with when you spend it.

@waxeagle That's AL rules, right?

@Miniman yep

@waxeagle Ah, so changing the crafting cost of a potion to 25gp would cover it quite nicely.

2:54 AM

@Miniman aye, it would take 1 day to brew

quartering the crafting cost would leave you with 25/125/1250/...

that seems reasonable

like i said, alternatively, you could allow multiple potions to be brewed at once

1/5/50 days

@waxeagle Btw, no hats?

@Miniman just haven't put one on yet :)

@BESW -- re the MLP fanart you linked earlier -- *facepalm* because when I think archery, I'm actually more apt to model an archer character on Asiatic archery than European, either that or they'll be a crossbowman

(the European longbow tradition is nowhere near as versatile in small-scale combat as the Asiatic (Mongol, for ex.) shortbow traditions are)

Aye.

in other words -- adapting to the environment of skirmishing party combat (especially when mounts come into play) and dungeon crawls vs. large-scale pitched battles is going to skew you away from longbows...

3:06 AM

@DuckTapeAl Nope, it's more complicated than that. I've upvoted a bunch of each, and don't have Fascinating, Ma'am

165

Q: Winter Bash 2014 Secret Hats

So far, I've unlocked one of the secret hats. I'm wondering what other secret hats are out there and how to earn them.

discussion winterbash-2014 secret-hats

@doppelgreener Remember our Bad Movie stunts? Where were those?

@BESW Fate room

Ah, got 'em:

Bad movie stunts

Oct 10 at 4:16, 2 days total – 46 messages, 5 users, 2 stars

Bookmarked Oct 27 at 11:18 by doppelgreener

:D

3:16 AM

I'm thinking Jessie might want to think about 'em.

were we filming at once per scene?

some version of shoddy costume, but in the form of equipment malfunctions

corpse troll with different flavour? (i love this one) sounds like a girl quick with wise cracks would be able to do something along these lines

I dunno that I like were we filming

it's literally a stunt to take player agency away from another player

i guess so, it'd be more fun to have a stunt like...

Were we filming?: You can be compelled to have something you said out-of-character at the table to have actually been said by your character.

but i don't think that needs a stunt exactly!

because it's already the case.

3:39 AM

that has a similar problem, I think

if whoever is being compelled just doesn't feel like that being something their character said, it isn't cool

if they are good with it, you are right, you don't need a stunt for that

3:50 AM

@trogdor no, i mean, the stunt gives you permission to be compelled. but there is already that permission. the corrolary to that is that players can just outright decline poor compels.

"i'm gonna compel you to say that in character." "no." [no fate points change hands]

mm

it works for jessie specifically because she is the kind of person to say the wrong thing at the wrong time. so she has permission.

yeah

this is all fine

4:09 AM

so really it's not a compel to say "you said that in character," but to say "that would be a great thing for jessie to blurt out inappropriately"

yeah I suppose so

I just added this guy to the list of PC ideas for our game:

user image

@BESW Game, you say.

Griffin mage?

heheh

4:22 AM

@trogdor Armour, so probably some sort of battlemage.

I assumed that much

Also, he has hooves, so a hippogriff rather than a gryphon.

I mostly assumed the name based off of what fandom this has been spawned from

though I may have gotten that wrong either way

at any rate, I was simply curious.

@trogdor I'm also curious! (I'm just a bit pedantic at times, sorry.)

no problem

4:34 AM

[imagination trails off, somehow remembers the adventure time episode with Shoko and the guy who keeps pronouncing 'amulet' as 'omelet']

@doppelgreener I once had a player who pronounced "runes" and "ruins" the same way.

@BESW roons?

rooiens

@trogdor roo-ee-ens?

roon-ins XD

4:48 AM

roon..ins?

People sometimes say ruin more like roin or roon around where I live. Ruined is roint or roon't (or ruint). However, I haven't heard enough people say rune to have any idea about that one.

@doppelgreener ronins?

@Pixie i'm suddenly tempted to have a character who has an apparently magical interpretation of english pronunciation

@doppelgreener I beg to differ, considering the abominations I've seen, aberrations are significantly better.

"someone get the roon!" "the what?" "the roon." "how's that spelled?" "c-a-r, roon, how hard is this? y'all need to open your ears"

2

> Sir Warwick Harrow: Whom do you represent?
Mal: Represent isn't exactly the...
Sir Warwick Harrow: Don't waste my time.
Mal: Fellow called Badger.
Sir Warwick Harrow: I know him, and I think he's a psychotic lowlife.
Mal: And I think calling him that is an insult to the psychotic lowlife community.

3

4:53 AM

@doppelgreener I'm going to interrogate the buffet table

@Adeptus excuse me whilst i just sit here smiling remembering this scene and Kaylee proposing doing that.

Ursula Vernon's D&D party:

user image

@doppelgreener I need to re-watch the whole series sometime. I got given the Blurays last year, and I don't think I've even opened them yet (already had the DVDs)

@doppelgreener "There's glory for you!"

5:16 AM

....Ooh, I'd forgotten all about JLB-8.

@doppelgreener You might want to go look at some old Gaelic spellings and pronunciations for that character. It'll give you some nice material to work with.

@Adeptus a mutual friend of my housemate and i started watching through the series, and we got halfway through by the time she had to leave for europe. she is presently missing our movie nights and firefly.

@Dorian what do you mean? :o like, pronunciations pre-great vowel shift?

Aye

:D

my only concern would be being able to keep it up!

but yes! a gaelic character would be fitting

Goidhealach

That sounds like "gay-lick"

like holy hell.

(old scottish gaelic of the "gaelic")

5:23 AM

is this for real, or something like the invented word 'goti' which theoretically gets pronounced 'fish'?

Goidelic languages

The Goidelic or Gaelic languages (Irish: teangacha Gaelacha, Scottish Gaelic: cànanan Goidhealach, Manx: çhengaghyn Gaelgagh) are one of the two branches of the Insular Celtic languages (sometimes called "Q-Celtic"), the other consisting of the Brittonic languages ("P-Celtic"). Goidelic languages historically formed a dialect continuum stretching from Ireland through the Isle of Man to Scotland. There are three modern Goidelic languages: Irish (Gaeilge), Scottish Gaelic (Gàidhlig) and Manx (Gaelg), the last of which died out in the 20th century but has since been revived to some degree. =...

@Dorian WHAT

HOW DOES THAT HAPPEN

OR WORK

Gaelic hates you that's why.

okay that would explain it

The premise of Gaelic (seen with hindsight) is "Oh, you like to sound things out as you read them? Isn't that cute... TRY TO SOUND THIS OUT!"

5:25 AM

0

Q: Feedback on first 5e campaign - what to look out for or change

I'm designing my first campaign, having run only the Lost Mines of Phandelver module so far, and wanted some feedback. I have concepts for what should be the first few sessions and I'm going to try my hand at a player-lead world and keeping the world moving according to their reactions. Here's th...

dnd-5e dungeons-and-dragons

VTC

@Dorian Doing that on purpose is a major plot point for the original Battlefield Earth novel.

Gaelic languages are like the only language group that are that friggen convoluted.

Even newer gaelic is tame compared to old gaelic most of the time. Alot of newer gaelic was converted or simplified, but the farther back you go the more friggen confusing it gets.

It'd be funny as hell if say someone from the future decided to go back into the past and teach them to do it that way, just to screw with everyone trying to sound it out lol

@BESW because then someone gets caught by it?

@doppelgreener They've deliberately obscured all their scientific records to protect their technology. Among other things, their equations are all designed as anagram ciphers that are only solvable using insider knowledge of their home planet's architecture and culture.

Basically their language and math are designed to be as non-intuitive as possible.

I don't know how to react to this.

My gut vibe says VTC, but I'm not sure there's anything really wrong with it.

5:41 AM

Opinion based

I'd VTC myself but I can't.

Wow, I just realised that the Redshirt hat is encouraging people to downvote bad material off the front page.

@doppelgreener Yeah, it's a peculiar one.

Sometimes faster than it gets closed.

Which is weird for us but it's gonna be extraordinary for sites like SO.

I genuinely believe that particular hat is a clever social experiment by the SE team.

"Hey, what effect does it have on quality if we create incentive for people to do this?" "What incentive should we give them? Rep would be dumb, badges seem like a bad idea." "Let's make a hat when Winterbash comes around."

@BESW Ouch, that sounds like it'd be terrible to work with.

@doppelgreener The whole point of the race, thematically, is that they're super messed-up by the philosophies of their ruling class.

@doppelgreener Well, downvotes on bad content don't harm quality. The reason I don't tend to downvote whenever I VTC is because I'd often really like for it to become a good question, or think it could become a really good question with a bit of work.

5:46 AM

@Miniman That's kind of a trap, though: you vote on what the post is, not what it could be, and change your vote later if it changes.

@BESW yes this ^

Hmm...

So I'm making a Jaebrin Arcane Swordsage Face type of character

Male or Female?

Only Jaebrin art I can find below

@BESW Following that is going to lead to many new users being crushed under a ton of downvotes. Which may not be a problem, but has certainly been perceived as one in the past.

user image

to use an extreme example: if a question is a frothing all-caps rant making unseemly insinuations various peoples' mothers' promiscuity and other personal matters, and has a good question in the middle somewhere, downvote it for being a rant. if you can, propose an edit. if you can edit quickly yourself, you can skip the first step, but only because you make it inconsequential.

5:49 AM

@Miniman Aye, I often refrain from downvoting questions from new users as harshly. But I don't upvote them if they don't deserve it.

@Miniman this is a separate factor: it tends to be the case users make a judgement call along the lines of: "yes, -3 is bad enough for this, I don't need to downvote it further". But that's not a matter of voting based on what it could be, that's just deciding the message is already clear.

@Dorian i recommend yes one of these.

@doppelgreener Which one? :P

@Dorian apples and oranges

:(

just pick what you want

5:51 AM

Can't decide

@Dorian If you want a picture for your sheet, and the only picture you can find is male, you may have answered your own question.

@Miniman I'm going to request /tg/ to make me a pic :P

the gender of your character should not matter too much

@Dorian Sounds like a job for a d2

d2

obviously, it might make a difference how you play them though

5:52 AM

It doesn't... but it does kind of approach the personality I might design for them.

@Miniman we don't have one

Apparently, we don't have those.

d4: 1-2 = male, 3-4 = female

d4

4

female.

5:52 AM

lol

let him roll it at least

nope

the dice of fate have spoken

XD

@doppelgreener That wasn't a Fate dice silly.

This is frequently how my boyfriend and I make decisions.

TYPICAL TREASURE
Jaebrins love fine clothing, jewelry, and
gems. Although they carry money, they
love to hoodwink others out of necessities
such as provisions. Jaebrins
have standard treasure for their
Challenge Rating.

5:54 AM

Coinflips or dice rollers are lifesavers for the indecisive. :v

Well... at least it fits lol

SHOES~!

Hmm... Now I need to figure out an outfit.

pretty sure there are plenty of materialistic guys too

As an example: I started designing Jessie with a male in mind, but only because the franchise characters I was basing her off of were male. It wasn't until I started thinking about the casually sexist attitudes associated with the character's meme that I decided a gender flip would be good, as part of the general "playing with tropes" theme I was going for.

@trogdor There are, it was a joke

user image

someone lost their miniature hat

who lost their miniature hat?

5:56 AM

what now?

look over on the left

Females are harder to shop for...

there's just a little warm welcome hat someone must have left behind. did anyone lose a hat?

@doppelgreener No, hat! Come back! I'm sorry!

@doppelgreener the hell,....

5:57 AM

@BESW [returns lost hat]

[pins hat to head]

O.O

I just realized, this thing doesn't have private messaging.

@Dorian is that a fashion thing? females are super easy to shop for when they're females that don't care much for super fashionable outfits, e.g. the kind of girl who wears a t-shirt and jeans and calls it good enough (i.e. rather a lot of girls)

@doppelgreener Jaebrins are not like that though

@Dorian you could just pick a male then :P

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