@BESW I've been strongly considering opening a meta request that we handle system-agnostic like we handled rules-as-written.
is there a clear reason why this is system agnostic? describe it. are you explicitly saying you're trying to solve this in context of a particular system? tag it as such, and system agnostic is probably not the tag for you. have you explained neither and your question has no system tag and is maybe using the sys-ag tag? probably clarify what's going on re: system here.
With a lot of fighting over how to enforce simple rules everyone broadly agrees on, and eventually banning them as more toxic to the community than their benefit to the site could possibly compensate for?
No, skipping to the end bit where we decided rules as written was used as a tag if the question made it clear the tag should exist, and not using it otherwise.
There's two problematic sys-ag usage circumstances: "I'm sure my situation that only really appears in this game system is totally generic, so I'll use the sys-ag tag" (and the person may or may not be specifying their game system) and "I'm using a game system but I don't want you to provide the kinds of answers I expect I'll get, so I'm going to demand system agnostic answers instead."
I went away to get a midnight snack and realised the second case is basically meta tagging. You're not tagging to describe the question, you're tagging to describe the kinds of answers you expect people to provide you, which isn't what tags are for.
i presume it's something to do with the fate gremlin. "answers for this system in this situation are categorically unhelpful and i want to avoid those kinds of answers."
@BESW quite a bit -- someone who's used to FGI for social scenes is going to consider social-scene questions much more system-agnostic than someone who leans heavily on AGM for their social resolutions
Wizards has released Plane Shift: Kaladesh, a free D&D 5e sourcebook for playing in its Magic: the Gathering plane of Kaladesh, also introduced by this Polygon article.
@Shalvenay True, both. I'd love some Chrome extension that skips the Long Rambling Intrologue^{TM}and redacts the various profanity/insults. The 60% that'd be left is pure gold, man!
do we have any idea when Bankuei deleted his STack account btw? (I'm wondering if him leaving for good was fallout from the [rules-as-written] dustup, or some other matter altogether)
@nitsua60 It happened in the context of wounds that were present at the time, which I've seen active effort from SSD and Mxyzplk in overcoming. To avoid bringing up old stuff I would prefer to avoid explaining in public, but I can on Discord tomorrow sometime.
ah. currently poking at some worldbuilding -- debating whether I want to do something more fractal-based or something more noise-based as the basis for the map for the world I'm working on, trying to figure out what size my heightmap grid should be for good imports into a GIS system such as QGIS, and also pondering what base geodesy my world should use, to avoid disasters such as Golarion apparently being flat :P
also, I'm now tempted to look up an old xkcd about map projections and wonder what would happen if the world were shaped that way
I haven't re-read it in years, but Giant in the Playground had a good series on world building, including approximating land forms by starting with continental plates to approximate mountain ranges
Jasper McChesney off the Universe Factory points out a way to do terrain gen using noise + cellular automata for erosion that looks interesting, but I'm not sure how well it scales to fine details (like trying to spit out a 1m resolution DEM that way)
@JoelHarmon yeah -- I'm looking for something a bit less large-scale though (want to stick to a decent-sized island for now so that I don't have head-exploding amounts of mapping to do)
@doppelgreener I certainly respect not wanting to talk about it publicly. I don't even know tha ti need a private briefing. (I'd made a note that I wasn't looking for an explanation here, but I hit ENTER ~1 sec. after @Shalv posted a comment about it, and I didn't want it to come across as intending to shut him up/down.) It was just a strange time to discover this thing called "meta."
@JoelHarmon part of why that gets weird is the different ways that oceanic and continental crusts behave. They're different kinds of rock, so when you flip everything you see land-masses that don't quite pass the smell-test--since we've so little experience with the topography of oceanic crust.
Hello again chat. D&D 5 question for anyone who's interested. Do you think a hag is too sneaky of a villain for a group of first time players? I like the way it fills into the fluff for the adventure, but am worried about that much outright deception to players who are pretty new to the hobby.
A "traditional" D&D playstyle that tries to keep player knowledge and character knowledge as close to identical as possible, might not be a good fit for what you describe.
and yeah -- I'd want the players in the loop for such a sneaky/crafty NPC being involved. this is a good opportunity to introduce them to how playmodes can change within the context of a single system and table
@Reibello basically -- it's the shift from simply playing their character to being actively involved in deceiving their own character -- you're giving them mindshare when it comes to how your hag operates
@JoelHarmon it depends on how broadly you want to expose them to the RPG landscape
it could be a very useful building-block experience for them as they move out into the wider world of TTRPGs (vs. having them get culture-shocked the first time they meet a game where conspiring against one's character is an integral part of play)
I threw a VtC unclear, as there are factual errors in the post that (IMO) will affect answers. OP indicates in comments he'll clean it up later--when possible. Other eyes?
Narrate short scenes the characters aren't there for, like "A warty old woman, sopping wet and covered with pondscum, slips behind a tree before the party comes around the bend in the road. When she steps out in front of Amateria the Insouciant, it is as a comely young man."
Then everyone at the table can go "oooh" as Amateria is flattered by the young man and persuaded to help him with some simple task, and they aren't impatient at the seemingly unimportant story.
I agree with BESW. Intrigue works for audiences because of dramatic irony. The audience knows things that the main characters don't. However, in a game where the players only know things that their PCs observe in the game, the obfuscation results in confusion.
Amateria's player can make choices which push the situation toward dramatic tension, and not punch a hole in the game by ignoring the young man because her player didn't know you were offering something cool.
@nitsua60 It says that you can prevent the body from dying by restoring the brain within 1 round, but can you come up with any way to actually restore the brain?
@Miniman yeah, divine intervention's the only other thing I can think of. (I mean the clerical class ability, not just some hand-wavey GM-fiat version of "divine intervention".)
@Reibello doing some worldbuilding -- debating between more fractally-based stuff and more ramps+Perlin-noisy stuff for the base of my terrain gen approach
Also, everyone already knows it, but the intellect devourer is so messed up. It's CR 2, and it does stuff that requires 7th-level spells (13th-level characters) to fix.
I dunno - the group I run a game for is never really challenged by anything, so lately I've just been randomly throwing things at them to see what happens.
@Shalvenay I found a couple of map generators yesterday, that you may find interesting/useful: planet map generator (downloadable & web interface) and fantasy map generator (open-source & web)
@Adeptus part of the thing is I'm looking for something that's a heightmap (i.e. readily projectable to a Digital Elevation Model) and not a full-fledged map
@Reibello which also reminds me, I should answer your question with my now somewhat better formulated reasoning; you can defend "a location" that's about as big as your melee weapon reach
These generate height variations, but not as a separate component. Both have the source code, so you may be able to hack something (depending on your programming ability & familiarity with the languages used)
@Shalvenay The first one's generating 3D points; since he gives you the C source it shouldn't be too hard--said like a true hack--to rewrite the output functions to get you your DEM data the way you want it.
> The "-H" option produces a heightfield instead of a bitmap file. Each point on the map is printed as an integer in the range (approximately) -1.2*10^6 to 1.2*10^6, representing the altitude at that point.
hrm...I'd still need to run a hydrology simulation on this, basically -- and there's also the issue of getting the kind of resolution I want (running out of precision could be a concern here) -- the good news with something built for planets is that it works well with WGS-84 tho :P
Yeah, it doesn't seem to be terribly suited to your use-case.
Have I asked you why you're sold on generating the terrain data rather than, say, appropriating some from ETOPO or the like?
A single tile--IIRC they're 30 degrees of longitude by 15 degrees of latittude--would give you more land-mass than a twenty-year campaign could exhaust.
@Adeptus -- your second link is quite interesting -- but it's not at all clear how I'd get something DEM-like (vs drawn-map-like) out of the thing
(to be clear, I'd also want the generated hydrology, but as a separate layer -- that way, it'd be far easier to vectorize once in QGIS)
also, the erosion model is quite aggressive and assumes a uniform rainfall and erodibility (which is reasonable, but something I'd probably want to adjust some if possible)
so, apparently, the reason we've been having such big issues with the elemental evil campaign is cause our dm doesn't follow how the temples are built
instead of doing one fight at a time, he's having different parts of the temple come fight us at once. so, what was supposed to be 4-5 encounters ends up as 1
Having 5 encounters worth of people all charge you sounds pretty brutal. Is the rest of the temple just empty after that? Or do you even get to explore them?
Ouch. That kind of sucks. So you end up front loading a 2+ hour fight and then spend the rest of your session getting a loot checklist/story bits before hobbling off for resurrections, rest, and the next temple?
@Adam No worries--I just came out of a conversation with a friend of the player, like 30 seconds previous, and was probably dragging that into here for no good reason.
Sorry I made you feel like a jerk when you were the one reading the conversation normally =|
@nitsua60 No need to lash yourself with a noodle! Ordinarily I would've agreed with you, but I was feeling particularly jovial today and was just trying to play around a bit. I shouldve just stuck to my guns and kept it to myself.
@Adam No--this is generally a jovial room, so you shouldn't feel you need to restrain. My bad, all around. (I've been in four counseling meetings with these kids in the last day, so it's re-surfaced as a matter of persistent attention after a few weeks of quiescence.)
> We reject the notion that the Chilean flag, although it is a nice flag, can in any way compare to of be substituted for the official state flag of Texas.
@DForck42 (I misread the conversation) Sometimes a GM will combine encounters for the sake of time, although 4-5 seems a bit much. Is that definitely the GM's intent, or are they just not preventing that from occurring?
while two of the encounters we fought I could reasonably see happening, having the vrock come and attack us AND and umber hulk at the same time AND ghouls...
i think his logic is that he doesn't want running this module to take two years
and he also wanted us to level for sure last night (overkill 9000)
@Carcosa: my opinion on your question (that I won't post as an answer since it is only an opinion) is that Charisma means "innate power" in Pathfinder, as does "spontaneous magic", so there is no reason to make a prepared caster on charisma.
That reminds of a one shot I ran where I had a PC get paralyzed by a carrion crawler and was out of the whole fight. I expected things to be super easy for them for that encounter, but they kept failing the save and it ended up taking twice as long as I expected
@DForck42 I know that feeling pretty well too. My current party is very much single target focused. I have faith in you guys! And as long as you are having fun with it, trying to figure out how to overcome the onslaught can be pretty amusing.
I only ever fought one mimic and it was the traditional chest one. We had to clean out some giant plague rats from a barkeep's cellar. There was a chest that we were tempted to loot, but we were nice and told him about it. He seemed confused and went to check on it and was promptly eaten.
It swallowed him mostly whole though, so we were able to kill the mimic, get him out of its corpse, and then revive him. He owes us a life debt now, so free drinks and lodging for the rest of time :)
While poking around on my profile page I noticed that the "folded" versions of rep events don't contain the proper number of individual events once unfolded. It looks like the methods used to filter the events by time isn't uniform.
folded - 5 and 4 events, respectively:
unfolded - 9 duplicate...
Indeed. I know what you mean. I feel the same way. We can talk at length about trade-offs, but perhaps not so effectively on the main site. I'm afraid however that many of these almost good enough questions get lost in the ether because people don't earn rep in chat.
To a regular site user it's obvious what is wrong with the question but because it's so ingrained into my behavior I have a hard time articulating to newer users how those questions can be improved to be on-topic Good Subjective.
Oh, yes: it's certainly not great. But it does add something, I think, in that it suggests a different type of computer-mediated roleplaying that no other answer mentions, and the experience that many VI players are there. I don't really know where MUDs stand vis-a-vis "our" RPGs vs. CRPG, but I'd kinda like to see that bit of information out there.
@doppelgreener Yeah--that's a wonderfully detailed writeup. I would hope that it inspires anyone in her situation to give it a go, with that narrative and obviously-enjoyable (or, at least, workable) experience to shoot for.
Yeah--I'm not sure I'd want to see oodles of MUD-answers peppering the site, but perhaps in this one instance it's worth turning a... [rephrasing] ...it's worth letting it ride.
@nitsua60 There are a great many MUDs which would not be remotely accessible; many of them were created before there were even accessibility standards. So, "have you tried MUDs?" doesn't really help at all.
But the "I've met many VI players online through these" would seem to argue that at least some aren't hampered.
Like I say: not at all my forte, but it seemed an interesting point with experience backing it up, unlike the many well-meaning but (to my eye) unfounded "this shouldn't be a problem" answers.
@nitsua60 Sure! Yes, definitely. But the post provides zero guidance on actually getting on board, such as specifying which MUDs are accessible, and whether those VI people are (effectively) blind or simply have very, very poor vision & need to squint and use high contrast mode.
"Alright, discord group: for this 5e one-shot your characters are all set. On the first night of the journey they all share a common dream, in which they are represented by strange white symbols on a black screen. Please turn your browser to foo-MUD.com, where we'll play out the rest of this session."
While poking around on my profile page I noticed that the "folded" versions of rep events don't contain the proper number of individual events once unfolded. It looks like the methods used to filter the events by time isn't uniform.
folded - 5 and 4 events, respectively:
unfolded - 9 duplicate...
