TRPG General Chat

12:16 AM

@BESW indeed we shall be. part of the computer waste disposal industry already involves people who basically just scrape gold off the components to reclaim it.

@BESW That's actually areally great idea.

doppelgreener

12:27 AM

@BESW Thanks, I am glad it is not just a weird sense of deja vu that we'd brought this up before.

BESW

@NiekBergman [wave]

Niek Bergman

Hello.

BESW

I'm amused. ICv2 thinks there aren't many RPGs for kids.

The only one they can think of is No Thank You, Evil.

BESW

12:50 AM

Behold, that strange ubiquitous beast, the Kickstarter which doesn't tell you anything. Bonus points for only having one tier and needing a thousand people to pledge at that tier.

trogdor

lol

BESW

And here's a rarer monster, the Kickstarter that is nothing but pictures.

**[Timely RPGery](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nKltjD1HJ954pS3QZZL-E_ckNaKEeedxMKn7XwdFiio/edit?usp=sharing "Click for full source doc; please suggest items to pin!"):**
[Hatmas!](http://meta.rpg.stackexchange.com/q/6615/4398 "The Hattening Approaches. Dec 19");
[Star Trek](http://www.modiphius.com/star-trek.html "Star Trek Adventures RPG 'living playtest' signup");
[UScons](http://casualgamerevolution.com/blog/2016/01/2016-tabletop-gaming-conventions-a-comprehensive-list "List of RPG conventions in the US.");

@nitsua60 You might find the Dragon Drop link interesting.

doppelgreener

1:27 AM

@BESW i want to tell them their kickstarter doesn't actually say anything about what their game is like... but i'm not sure they'd be in a position to understand what i mean.

BESW

Lesson: before writing a Kickstarter, look at how similar successful Kickstarters present themselves.

doppelgreener

@BESW The video gives an explanation of the game mechanics, but, lesson: don't rely on people to watch your video. Also they preview the first three rules pages halfway down the page and I am not impressed by the formatting, and there are lots of issues with it.

They have cool graphics but 0 typography and have not consulted with someone like you.

BESW

...I think I know what default settings they used for their typography.

doppelgreener

Among the (many, pervasive) issues: I have several questions after having read the "Victory" paragraph at the end of page 3.

BESW

And it's not even good default settings. Notice that the spacing between body paragraphs is the same as the spacing between body text and title text?

I'll be kind and assume it's mid-draft text, and their criminal abuse of commas (and bizarre smart quote failures) won't make it into the final product.

But just for the Kickstarter itself...

doppelgreener

1:41 AM

@BESW This is stuff I wouldn't preview.

BESW

Some of the 'type' is difficult to read because of the image it's imposed on. Image text won't wrap to various window configurations. It's unsearchable, forces ridiculous scrolling, it's probably illegible on mobile screens, and there's inadequate explanation for many of the things we're seeing.

A lot of it looks like instead of making Kickstarter material they just screenshot their current drafts and slapped it up without comment.

doppelgreener

I'm restraining myself here, I think I could make a pretty sizeable list out of the major problems.

BESW

Oh yeah.

(When was the last time you saw a professional publication with widow and orphan words?)

doppelgreener

@BESW Where?

BESW

First sentence of the first rules sheet, and both of the first two Kickstarter-specific text images.

doppelgreener

1:48 AM

Biggest lesson: if you have top-notch amazing art, put equal value and effort into the text you put on it. Don't butcher your top-notch art with flow-of-thought writing, don't put a standard sans serif font on your fantasy art (font faces exist to evoke mood!), don't make your text boxes tiny and illegible when you've got oodles of space (revise the art), don't put dark text on dark backgrounds. If you're willing to pay hundreds for an artist, pay hundreds for good copy and layout editing.

BESW

...also, don't use handwriting fonts for mechanical text intended to be quickly referred to during play.

Especially if it's got the same curlicues and line thickness as the graphic flourishes right next to the text.

doppelgreener

@BESW Yeah, use something clear. Coincidentally, Serif fonts close to the Times font face double as both highly legible and evocative of fantasy.

BESW

So much aaaaaaaa.

I mean, I have problems with the Dresden Files Accelerated presentation too. But at least it's legible and follows most of the basic press standards.

The content integrates with the page layout and types of content are differentiated clearly by formatting...

Evil Hat knows how to use tab stops.

doppelgreener

@BESW And paragraphs, and headings, and sectioning things off in general, and example sidebars, and diagrams and example images, and lists and tables where appropriate.

VTC opinion based

nitsua60

@BESW Did find link interesting, not sure I'd pay $5 for a single-session adventure without already knowing it's pretty good. (Nor $15 for 4 of them.)

I recently backed a KS from a producer I like: for something like $30 I'm getting 120 one-page writeups/seeds, both print and pdf, which is more my style.

(Sorry, it's 150, not 120.)

doppelgreener

2:05 AM

@nitsua60 Wow! That's pretty good. And at an economy of 4 adventures per dollar I can see why you'd be averse to a deal of 0.2 adventures per dollar.

nitsua60

@doppelgreener Now, to be fair, I think they're selling completely different things. I assume the Dragon Drop one is full "modules." For which a couple of bucks each isn't a crazy price. It's just not what I'm looking for.

I've always wanted a cookbook that was just photographs of interesting meals with detailed captions. Don't give me recipes to follow (I'm happy to figure those out on my own, 'cause that's half the fun), but please do share your ideas.

The KS I did seems like the RPG version of that.

doppelgreener

@nitsua60 oh, right. [rereads] write-ups and seeds, gotcha.

BESW

@nitsua60 I downloaded the sample adventure.

doppelgreener

@nitsua60 The F.I.O.Y. Cookbook?

BESW

@nitsua60 Is it still active?

I seem to have missed that KS.

nitsua60

2:36 AM

@doppelgreener Just figured that out: "figure it out yourself." Yup. That's the one I want. (Actually, it's the one my dad and I have talked about doing ourselves. Since we're the audience....)

@BESW Gimme a minute to read through it, then do you have 5 minutes to compare notes? (I always love seeing what catches other people's eye when they read the same thing as me.)

BESW

Aight. I just skimmed it very quickly.

nitsua60

@BESW me too.

First thoughts?

BESW

First: child sacrifice and drug trafficking? In my D&D?

nitsua60

Back to the tunnels!

BESW

It seems kinda Serious Business, and also putting them together into a single adventure doesn't seem like a really great combination.

Sorta random.

Second thoughts: Wow, those rails. Choo choo.

nitsua60

2:50 AM

Seriously.

My first thought: "I'm certainly not going to pay any money for this sort of stuff."

BESW

Third: Why is the witch a catwoman?

nitsua60

It seems like they tried to acknowledge that different things might happen, in that "if X then Y," blocks were in there, but... to no effect.

No matter whether you heal the dwarf or not, or if you take an hour chatting with him or finishing your breakfast, the moment you step out of the inn the bandits have just taken the girl =)

@BESW I don't know why, but it's one of the few things I liked.

I'll take the two-para. summary, perhaps the paragraph about the history of Raven Court, and the unique statblock+artwork on one page, please.

BESW

Fourth: Deew finger! 🎵

(Mwa-mwaaaa-mwa.)

nitsua60

Do you expect me to run this module?
No, BESW, I expect you to die.

BESW

**[Timely RPGery](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nKltjD1HJ954pS3QZZL-E_ckNaKEeedxMKn7XwdFiio/edit?usp=sharing "Click for full source doc; please suggest items to pin!"):**
[Hatmas!](http://meta.rpg.stackexchange.com/q/6615/4398 "The Hattening Approaches. Dec 19");
[Star Trek](http://www.modiphius.com/star-trek.html "Star Trek Adventures RPG 'living playtest' signup");
[UScons](http://casualgamerevolution.com/blog/2016/01/2016-tabletop-gaming-conventions-a-comprehensive-list "List of RPG conventions in the US.");

nitsua60

2:59 AM

If anyone's curious, the 150 seeds/ideas KS I was talking about is this one: Limitless Adventures Vol. 1

BESW

The only adventure I've wanted to really map out a delve for in years is the one where the whole dungeon is a set of logical gates such that doors being open or closed are the 1/0 inputs, and doors locking or unlocking are the 1/0 outputs.

(And, of course, you also get devices which function differently or not at all based on the output of some of the gates.)

nitsua60

@BESW You'd... like to play an electron in a circuit?

=)

BESW

[grin] It's inspired by a throw-away line in a very old Doctor Who story, and the theme of the story itself.

The dungeon is a trap, preying on adventurers' curiosity but only wanting the smartest parties to get to the middle and spring the trap.

For a D&D-like setting, it's probably a mind flayer thing.

The dungeon promises some awesome reward if you can get to its centre by solving its puzzles. But it's just a way to grab up all the smartest adventurers.

It'd involve going back and changing earlier door positions in order to access new areas or activate machinery further into the dungeon, and once the PCs got used to having to open/close and lock/unlock all the doors in different configurations, they might not notice that in order to get to the centre and activate the device in the middle... you have to lock yourself in.

Powerdork

5:36 AM

I just learned about the keyboard shortcuts on the site through happenstance.

Miniman

We have keyboard shortcuts?

Powerdork

Hit "G" on a page on the main site.

daze413

^ Ditto?

Miniman

@Powerdork Doesn't seem to be doing anything?

Powerdork

Strange, it gave me this:

Miniman

5:42 AM

Maybe it's a Chrome thing.

daze413

Im using chrome. nothing

Miniman

In-tre-sting.

daze413

meta q: what does pressing G do? haha

Powerdork

What about if you hit "C" on a question page? "A"?

daze413

nothing

Powerdork

5:48 AM

Baffling.

BESW

9:06 AM

**[Timely RPGery](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nKltjD1HJ954pS3QZZL-E_ckNaKEeedxMKn7XwdFiio/edit?usp=sharing "Click for full source doc; please suggest items to pin!"):**
[Hatmas!](http://meta.rpg.stackexchange.com/q/6615/4398 "The Hattening Approaches. Dec 19");
[Star Trek](http://www.modiphius.com/star-trek.html "Star Trek Adventures RPG 'living playtest' signup");
[UScons](http://casualgamerevolution.com/blog/2016/01/2016-tabletop-gaming-conventions-a-comprehensive-list "List of RPG conventions in the US.");

doppelgreener

2:20 PM

@Powerdork @Miniman @daze413 Keyboard settings have to be enabled through your preferences first -- third one down here.

Miniman

Ah, that'd be it.

nitsua60

5:29 PM

chop, chop, MATLAB; DEs ain't going to solve themselves....

hey there @nitsua60

hiya

how're things going?

5:49 PM

Eyup!

nitsua60

@Shalvenay Writing a program to write the program that solves the system. Means I need to be a hundred times more meticulous when writing, because errors are going to be a beast to hunt down.

Shalvenay

@nitsua60 sheesh

Anaphory

@nitsua60 O YAY

nitsua60

(Gotta write a program to write the program, because I'm not writing the program to solve a system of 570 equations by hand.)

Anaphory

Ah.

Reminds me of the times when I tried numerical work on supergravity.

nitsua60

6:11 PM

@Anaphory Probably not too dissimilar, though this is only spring-mass.

Albeit in seven dimensions, with dozens of bodies.

ThreePhaseEel

@nitsua60 how did you get a seven-dimensional spring-mass problem to begin with!?

nitsua60

Overachiever =)

It's actually modeling with known separations in unknown dimensionality; run the simulation for different dimensionalities, and analyze results to try and intelligently decide how many dimensions the underlying data live in.

(I'm guessing that seven is more than are needed to represent the underlying data, so somewhere as we step down the number of dimensions, we'll see qualitative deterioration in results that tell us we've gone too far.)

nitsua60

6:33 PM

(Just running tests on three bodies in four dimensions is making my brain hurt. Makes me sympathize with Meg.)

doppelgreener

8:28 PM

@nitsua60 TDD! :D

nitsua60

@doppelgreener tdd?

doppelgreener

8:49 PM

@nitsua60 test driven development

nitsua60

which is... when you whack your head repeatedly against something small, so that when you start hitting it against something big it doesn't hurt as much?

doppelgreener

Haha

nitsua60

that's ^^ what the inside of my brain currently looks like.

doppelgreener

Come to think of it I don't know if it would be a thing in your programming domain, but it's a practice of writing unit tests for your code as you write it. It makes it harder for bugs to crop up, especially if you need to adjust it — unless you didn't test for the buggy scenario, which is how bugs happen anyway.

Whoa

nitsua60

Oh, definitely. This ^^ is the unit test =)

(Only 4 bodies and three dimensions!)

With randomly-generated input data, rather than the data fed in from another part of the project.

doppelgreener

9:25 PM

Oh nice XD

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