@nitsua60 lets hope you aren't totally crispyfried by the end of the month!

@BESW I have a Bad Dad for your list if you're running low:

Hmm, yes.

Denethor II, Steward of Gondor, the guy who told his son Faramir to his face he'd rather Faramir had died instead of Boromir.

Also, famously went insane and would have doomed his city (had someone else not been in charge) so instead lit himself on fire and fell off a city-cliff.

At least according to the movies. They might've taken some liberties there, as they did with other storytelling.

Also tried to light his son on fire.

@Miniman Oh yeah. Trying to light your son on fire is pretty high up there on the scale of Bad Dad Things To Do.

Am I a horrible person if I want to put the Darth Vader hat on this picture of Denethor?

@BESW LOL! Slightly but that's a fantastic idea.

Also, I assume by your up-now-liness that we probably won't have you for Geek Night.

@BESW oh. yeah i lost track of time doing chores and I've been on a horrid sleep schedule recently.

I'll head to bed now and see if I can get up early. It'll help reset my schedule.

Does anyone else get freaked out when they get a bunch of votes on old answers?

@doppelgreener Hope things get better for you!

@Miniman I can't say I have that experience, but I do want to know where it came from. Sometimes I have no idea.

@Miniman will do once I can get a reset sleep in. just slept an awful lot at the beginning of the week a couple of times in a row because of the last bit of an illness, and that kicked my schedule out a few hours. i'll try to make that reset sleep be now.

ttfn!

I assume it's just someone being like "Wow, this Miniman guy is amazing! I wanna go read more of his stuff and upvote it!" :P

Cya!

@Miniman I've gotten a bunch of that recently--I assume it's that ^^ possibly magnified by what looks like a bit of a new-member influx.

@Miniman I usually get them in tag-related waves.

So it's "This guy's looking at Fate posts and upvoting what's helpful, and I happen to have a lot of Fate answers so it looks like he's going around upvoting me."

@doppelgreener I think it is still fair game even if he is at all different in the books

@BESW I saw Gehn in his cage thing (the bigger one, he was gone when I got to the smaller one) but the game also crashed a little after that

Aw.

Yeah, in the novels he was a lot cooler of a dude right up until he decided to burn both himself and Faramir alive.

(Grr, just re-read the linked meta post, and Shog9 sniped me with the last line.)

@trogdor If you want to come by early, even if Raycia isn't, and we can poke Riven and maybe play more on my computer, feel free.

mk

I might poke it a bit before coming over too

just to see if one or two simple ideas I have for fixing it might work

pretty sure VtC, but broad/POB/unclear might be up for debate.

@nitsua60 Querent appears to have confused "tell us more about your situation" with "tell us what kind of answerrs you'd accept."

@BESW well, I sorta did open the door to that.

That'll larn ya.

And I was just thinking, earlier this evening, how much the construction "here's my question, and here's the longer list of criteria that make an answer good in my eyes" annoys me. See also.

"Here's my X/Y problem. No frame challenges, please."

@BESW The problem is, by the time I'd written the comment and voted to close I already had Greenwood's "Ecology of the Basilisk" article from an 80's Dragon open.

@BESW lolfigsl

Hmm... four of the last four questions to come to the site I've either dupe-hammered, VtC'ed (successfully), or downvoted. Perhaps I should move on to a different amusement for the night.

Later, all =)

@nitsua60 I thought we had a dupe for that one. Cya!

ttfn

@Miniman Yeah, it took me a bit to find, before I realized I needed to search on "rogue," not "thief."

Auf wiedersehen =)

@nitsua60 Ah, a rouge question.

Alright, Bob Ross has given me my new signoff: "On behalf of the entire Stack, let me wish you happy gaming, and God bless, my friend. [twinkle twinkle]."

In other news, Bob got a little meta in this painting. It's like he heard this comment. Because he turned to the camera with a sly smile--yes, sly!--and said:

"now it's time for your bravery test. Load up that old 2-inch brush with titanium white, and I just want you to whoosh..."

@quartata, @LearnHowToBeTransparent Hi!

Don't worry, friends, it's not always Bob Ross quotes in here. (Sometimes we talk Mr. Rogers, too.)

I might get to run my Christmas-themed inspectres game tonight!

@BESW Cool! Just read the tag-wiki. What's the five-line rundown? What sort of prep, does play consist mostly of scene-work, etc.?

No prep except "Who's the client and what do they claim the problem is?"

Play is scene-work structured into a "get the job, do the research/do the prep, confront the ghost, clean up" repeating 2 and 3 until you've reached a target number of successes or until you give up as a bad job because you're using more resources than you'll gain for a successful end.

(It's a game about a startup company, so resource pools deplete company resources and are re-stocked by finishing jobs. Progression is getting more resources than you expended, so your company improves. If you go into the red, you may become bankrupt.)

Fun. Is this part of a sporadic "campaign," or a one-off?

For this session, it's a one-off to see if we like the system.

The system's most famous for its narrative control mechanics: successes give the player control, failures give the GM control, but also players can have their characters do a reality-show style "confessional" mid-scene in order to establish facts about the past, the future, or other characters.

If you establish a new fact about another PC during a confessional, the group gets extra resources if the player embraces it and roleplays accordingly; otherwise it's just your character spouting off.

@BESW "I'm not here to make friends, I'm just here to sequester the most ghosts."

@BESW That's pretty fun =)

Right. Or "At that point we didn't know the ghost was just a cranky guy in a bedsheet, but we learned soon enough."

Or "Valerie's flirting with the superintendent, but that's nothing new--she'll flirt with anything that wears pants."

@BESW "I couldn't believe it when Spangler kept trying to trap the guy."

"I was worried about John. He tries to hide it, but we all know he's terrified of spiders."

@LegendaryDude I think I see what you mean by having Disadvantage on attacks. Maybe you mean if someone had no proficiency in the armor they were wearing.

Hello everyone!

Greetings!

@BESW Sounds useful, like how nowadays if I'm providing critique of someone's work off-the-cuff (I don't get to take a day to write a careful report, etc) I should act as if they're within earshot.

There's a time I was explaining the problem with some terribly problematic code and halfway through the conversation it dawned on me I was speaking to its author.

@nitsua60 You might want to reread the Monster Manual entry on basilisks...

@daze413 Do you get disadvantage on attacks if you're not proficient in your armor? I guess if you have disadv on DEX and STR checks then you would. Honestly though I have no where the thought in that comment came from. I haven't played 5e in about a month due to scheduling and holidays so maybe I'm just a bit rusty. First session back is tonight and we have a guest so I'm excited.

@LegendaryDude You'd get disadvantage on any ability check, saving throw, and attack rolls that involve Str or Dex, yes. Aw man, that sounds fun. My current game group is "dying", with 2 players going to stop playing later this year on the count of their bar exams.

@daze413 ah. will they be back once they have joined the bar?

Hey guys.

Any Dungeons & Dragons fans out there?

@Miniman Whoa... that's a change I hadn't noticed. Thanks. (I assume you're talking about eating stone?)

@nitsua60 Ayup.

[edits]

@Eugene why do you ask? :p

@Miniman 'kay, updated with thanks. What do you think now?

I mean, I know you want to include as much as possible, but a flat contradiction might not be the way to go.

@nitsua60 I think you're going to confuse people by saying that they both can and can't eat stone.

@Miniman That's not a crazy point to make. It made a lot more sense to simply augment 5e MM info with 1e Ecology article when I'd not noticed the part of 5e contradicted by 1e. [rethinks post from ground up]

@Miniman do you think this is clearer?

@nitsua60 Looks good to me!

Cool--thanks again for the catch =)

Although I think, personally, that the idea of turning things into stone and eating them, then having your digestive juices convert the stone back to organic matter is really cool.

It also works great for a reptile, since it means they can conveniently store food.

@Miniman externally, you mean?

@nitsua60 Yep!

@Miniman This is cool. Unfortunately, I also find the idea of basilisk-as-komodo dragon who just really doesn't want to be bothered pretty cool =)

I suppose either way you still get the cool scene with Drizzt and the mock-alisk in Blindgenstone.

@nitsua60 I liked the Drizzt books when I was younger (and Exile was the best), but they've lost their appeal for me.

@Miniman Yeah, the first 6/9/11-or-so really are a different beast than however-many it's been since, say, Spine of the World. (I've lost track of what he's written and have probably only read about half of the post-2000 books.)

@nitsua60 Me too - and there's a few I know I've read but barely remember anything about, which is a bad sign for me.

@Miniman I did have a long drive ahead of me one time this summer and realized, an hour in, that I'd not brought my mp3 player. The next gas station I stopped at had $5 audiobook CDs, and I saw a Salvatore one and grabbed it. Apparently Jarlaxle and Artemis were ruling a minor barony/kingdom somewhere I've never heard of, coming into constant conflict with the LG paladin-cum-king neighbor and his obviously-a-retired-L18-party (monk, druid, wizard, bard) friends.

I don't think I finished it, bailing out one of the many times Artemis was making the king second-guess his right-of-rule.

@nitsua60 Ah, those ones I remember - that offshoot was a lot more fun than the main series.

Gotta head out--8-hour session today!

@nitsua60 It's 3am here, so I should really go to bed - cya!

@Shalvenay I'm trying to understand how to calculate the probability of getting required damage by throwing specified dies known amount of times

though minimal required damage win e.g. 10 and spell is 10d6-10

So what is the probability of gathering required damage

@Eugene ah. I'll let our resident math teacher take care of that one for you :) although it sounds better suited as a mainsite question. @nitsua60 ^^

Because in case of required damage of 8 and spell like 1d4+4 it is quite simple, 1 time, 4 sides and modifier 4 -> 1/4 = 0.250000

@Eugene I'm no good at figuring those things out mathematically but I'm pretty decent at anydice, so here's this

anydice.com/program/a4fc

just replace Y: 10d6-10 with your supposed dice+/-mod

Y: 1d4+4 for example

oh

I left the loop in there

it's not needed

@LegendaryDude output 10d6-10 seems to produce the same data, yeah

@doppelgreener There I go complicating things :P

(though the loop version produces more interesting graph results ;D)

This is actually what I was trying to produce anydice.com/program/a4fe

it outputs the odds of hitting a number in a range, starting at 6 ( the lowest guaranteed result on 10d6-10) up to 50 (double the average output)

anydice.com/program/a4ff

Improved version that tells you what damage each output is targeting

@LegendaryDude The table/transposed view is probably the most human-friendly way to read that data: anydice.com/program/a4ff/table/transposed. First dataset: chance of a 0 (i.e. chance of failure); second dataset: chance of 1 (i.e. chance of success against the target number)

oh yeah, definitely. I didn't realize the link generation included the specific view

@LegendaryDude It does not. I added that manually. It's documented in Documentation -> Introduction in the very last section:

or doesn't it? yeah, okay I see the URL now

it's a bit of an obscure feature I wish was more forwardly presented. It's great.

including advantage/disadvantage

it would be great if there was a pivot table output or something more tabular

@LegendaryDude but this calculates probability and shows end result, right?

@Eugene, it calculates your odds of hitting at least the target number with 0 being miss and 1 being hit

0 is your odds of missing in the transposed table view, 1 is hitting

Hmm. Don't know if it is what I'm looking for.

It matches exactly what you specified with your 1d4+4 example, no?

1 time, 4 sides and modifier 4 -> 1/4 = 0.250000 chance of hitting an 8

anydice.com/program/a505/table/transposed shows that

Okay.

    Y: 1d4
    MOD: 4
    output Y

that's only going to output 1d4

you need to tell it to output Y+MOD

Ou. Okay.

And without the loop you're not going to get the odds of each number you could hit

you're just going to get distributed output odds

not a "to hit" odd

anydice.com/program/a506

Y: 1d4+4
MIN: 1
MAX: 8
loop X over {MIN..MAX} {
output Y >= X named "To Hit [X]"

}

yes, so the one you just linked only gives you the odds of hitting a single number, not hitting the number or greater (which is how to hit works)

it's not an "at least" value, it's the odds of getting exactly a number

Okay

And how does one calculate probability of at least? Through loop?

the odds of getting exatly 28 are 7.15 on 10d6 - 6, but the odds of getting "at least" 28 are 39.21

Y: 10d6-6
output Y

Like for example I' trying to figure out, how the probability for my last link can be 0.998520

if you want to keep it simple, use that and the "at least" view

How to calculate it on paper so to say.

That's what I meant earlier. I can't tell you how to arrive at that mathematically; I only took one stats class in college. But I can write an anydice script that will do it for you (which I have)

I probably could but it would take me time

more time than I'm willing to spend; but if you post it as a question (definitely on-topic) our resident math experts will more than likely answer you by the end of day (looking at you @nitsua60)

anyway, I'm off. I have some errands to do and then a bunch of prep for tonight's 5e game.

Each time I revisit probability I'm basically having to re-learn it, but there's good tutorials on the 'net available.

@LegendaryDude I see. Thank you. Will try to post a bit later.

Has anyone written a good treatment on some kind of... "avoiding treading on toes" effect in RPGs? I'm noticing from time to time I enter in games where I or others are cautious and unwilling to dictate how things will go in a significant manner, and I'm wondering if there's an article that can give me vocabulary and concepts to handle that situation.

I tend to freeze up a bit when I have the opportunity to narrate something that could change a scene dramatically, send things off their rails, and so on. It could be fun and I'm confident I'd be acting in the interest of the group and the game, but I've got no idea if it's what others would want, so then I pause and leave things to others. I feel it'd be more satisfying in hindsight if I went ahead and did the thing, but I don't.

I think other friends I've played with have experienced similar.

@BESW On the topic of A/N/N and other things in libraries:

I managed to (re-)play quite a few things over the last two weeks which I had wanted to play, because I spent the time with some amazing people.

Played a very non-violent game of Dog eat Dog – Is it normal that the game ends after three scenes, or did I miss some bit of the rules?

a game of Monsterhearts, which suffered from lack of system knowledge but showed glimpses of being very interesting

It can end that way, if everything swings right.

And non-violent DED games are great.

I once played a game where the crucial scene was whether or not an Occupier would accept a gift he didn't want.

It did not very much feel like we had a crucial scene, because it was over so quickly.

(Just take the fruit you think is icky and ditch it when you turn the corner, dude.)

That game had less than two full turns around the table with four participants.

Can't remember exactly how many scenes.

@BESW You chose that picture! Brilliant. :D

It's the game that made me write Colonypunk, because the swiftness of the token redistribution reflected a dynamic cross-cultural imbalance that the players understood instinctively but the mechanics didn't examine.

We had one full turn of 3 scenes with three participants. One native did not act inferior and was not surprised to gain a gift from the colonial power (“The Oberlanders are not required to give any gifts” was our second rule.), so he lost his three tokens very quickly.

Must dash, ttfn

tt!

@Shalvenay I think so, yeah, they're 2 of my regulars; playing 2 of my on-going games

@Eugene You around? I got the Bat probability-signal.

@nitsua60 I am here. I am sorry, was not able to post the question yet.