@waxeagle I figure the mods are aware of the close votes, and so if they wanted to shut it down or say "no, this is definitely an official nominations thread" they will do so.
Also, my concerns originate from this: if I was someone nominating for this, I would want to know that we're definitely using this method before I go writing a huge nomination post selling myself. I'd want to know the effort is worthwhile. The fact there isn't or wasn't significant consensus, nor any conclusive decision, would leave me worried about whether the nominations thread was legit, whether it's worth my time, or whether not doing anything would mean I'd lose out.
That conclusive decision that we're definitely doing a poll and that's how we should collect our nominations provides a lot of security, and it's missing.
Also, I half expected we might have some discussion over what exactly nominations should look like. Are there basic criteria to meet first? Is there information people should share in their nominations? The fact it was opened so soon meant we didn't even have a chance to iron that out first, or leave room for total silence on the matter providing an indication we don't need anything.
@JonathanHobbs Might be worth dropping a line of Brian's post or a comment on the main question, or a flag asking for an endorsement. I get why you'd find it too soon or why someone might not want to put the effort in.
If you've got a question about what a nomination should look like, ask it...but I figure it's fairly self explanatory what kinds of things you should say (then again, I've written a couple of election noms already)
(and if you're looking for a clean reset of votes for the election noms, let me know, and I'll delete and repost mine)
Case in point: a thread opened up only 24 hours after the meta post because there was no objection at that point. People finally formulate their objection two days later.
I'm toying with the idea of a Storium game rooted in the ethos and mythos of Dylanesque Americana.
What might such a campaign or setting be called? I feel that if I can nail down an evocative name for the thing, it'll help me get my thoughts more orderly.
@BESW Blowin' in the Wind is pretty popular in Italy because it got covered. I'm hearing the original beat cover (I'm more familiar with the Italian text being sang over the original arrangement) and boy, the horror.
@BESW Eh, I don't necessarily know that that's the case these days - I'd say at this point, he's best known for his public image as a deliberately incomprehensible crank (Both for better and worse.)
I'm experimenting with it as a way to play RPGs with people who--because of location or schedules--I can't otherwise play with.
The basic conceit is that player characters are defined by stacks of cards which describe their strengths, weaknesses, and goals.
The narrator uses freeform text to describe a scene, and presents mechanical challenges which must be met by the characters; they do this by playing their cards against the challenges and using free-form narration to further the story, inspired by those cards.
The kind of cards played against the challenge determines the outcome; if the outcome is Strong or Weak, the last player to put a card in gets control of the narration for the outcome. If neither Strong nor Weak cards were a majority, the narrator describes the outcome.
Because it's a kind of play-by-post mechanic, players don't have to be all online at the same time; you can play when you have time and then others will see it and be able to add their moves at their convenience.
Because narrative control is very loose and it's difficult to establish a solidly pre-determined setting, I think that a game using cards inspired by Dylan songs and characters would work well. It'd be kind of surreal.
If you'd like to get a closer look at Storium, I can send you an invite. I don't really have room for new players in my current stories, but you can decline my invitation to the story and still use it to set up a free player account which lets you see all the site's public games and join any which are open-invitation.
And if I ever do get the Dylan thing going, it'd be nice to have you in on it.
@BESW I don't have a huge amount of time to check it out right now, but definitely ping me with an invite if/when you do your Dylan's America thing - sounds interesting!
I do it to try to be more welcoming and not just assume people are totally out of line with their posts if I can't see how it's relephant, but I also find a small amount of glee in asking people to edit that kind of post to "be more clear" about how they're answering the question.
I mean, if they can, I will be honestly pleased and impressed.
Hmm... New Roll20 Character Sheets are actually pretty nice.
I do wish that the spells/talents fields for the 13th Age one provided a little more room to write though. Still, that's pretty clearly fixable by someone willing to put in the time, so I'd expect it to happen.
@waxeagle BESW's approach is pretty amazing, I highly recommend it. It works well when people are attempting to be malicious, too: they get so confused and befuddled by people taking them totally legitimately and responding compassionately and helpfully that the fuse totally goes out of their attempts to troll. It's splendid to watch in action, though I've only seen it once.
@TryHardNinja There's someone who might be pretending to be you on Stack Exchange. http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/11?m=15613030#15613030 I presume it isn't you, but is it?
Hi all. I'm Jin, and I'll be working on the designs for the Stack Exchange sites as they graduate from the beta phase. Each site will have its own unique theme that will reflect its topic. However, all sites will share quite a bit of common elements so they feel like they're part of the Stack Exc...
As you can see the new design just went live. Which means this site has been officially launched! Congratulations! Thank you for your valuable design feedback.
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I'm rummaging through Dylan for phrases that could inspire cards.
Nature: Cowboy Angel Strength: A voice without restraint Weakness: Lonesome, without family or friend Subplot: Search for souls that have already been sold
(Though the worst I've heard recently was "People keep suggesting shooting criminals into the sun, but I'm convinced all that will lead to is a lot of con-fusion.")
> While we are not ready to announce anything at this time, I do want to share with you some of our goals.
That's... entirely meaningless. "You wanted X, we wanted to give you X, and our goal was the give you X. Of course, our legal department made us do Y, but still, we really wanted to".
(I'm just being mean, I know. We don't know anything yet)
> Hopefully, that's enough information to make our intentions clear. As with both the playtest of the fifth edition and the other projects we've worked on over the past few years, we're taking our time to make sure we get things right.
I'm not clear on what it is I'm supposed to absorb to make whatever it was clear
Mearls' column actually said absolutely nothing about licensing. It said that the DMG will have content for creating homebrew stuff, yes, but nothing really about licensing. The only thing hinting at it is in the end of the fifth paragraph:
> Basic D&D is [...] enough to create adventures for use at your table, but not for material that you want to share broadly.
I get they intend to release a product with information about developing your own stuff, but the article started off saying this:
> As we gear up for previews of the upcoming D&D products, I wanted to take a moment to address a common question we receive about the Open Gaming License and what it means for the future of D&D.
I'm not even sure what the question was.
@lisardggY and yeah, it mentioned absolutely nothing about OGL.
Well, what he was saying, basically, is "We won't release our licensing details before the DMG is published, so hang tight".
So the timeline, according to Mearls, is September: PHB and Basic are released. Players learn the rules. November: DMG and upcoming licensing terms are released. People start creating content, but not publishing it yet. Between November and "Early 2015": People tweak their content using the R&D team's experience and tips. Early 2015: Licensing goes into effect, 3rd party content goes live.
> Basic D&D is aimed at new players or people who aren't looking for a lot of mechanical complexity or depth. It's enough to create adventures for use at your table, but not for material that you want to share broadly. For that reason, we don't want to launch anything at least until the Dungeon Master's Guide has been released in November.
that's frustrating to pick apart
they actually did not say anything at all
they just said what wasn't the case, and left a big area of implication, and committed themselves to absolutely nothing
@lisardggY yes, my mental image for how this was put together was that it was given to the legal team, put through a shredder, and reassembled and handed back
@lisardggY "You may not tell them what they can do. You may tell them what they can't do, and you can tell them what we won't do, and you can tell them what we won't not maybe do, and you can tell them what we haven't yet announced we might do."
but really, that licensing thing is a work of art as far as not saying anything or committing to anything at all goes, and answering the question only implicitly whilst saying absolutely nothing about it or what the question even is
It reminds me of SCP-055: it's an object that nobody can actually describe in positive terms, because nobody can remember any details about it. However, they can remember what it isn't, so presuming you can actually sustain a conversation about an object that actively scrubs itself from your memory, you can describe it thoroughly in terms of what it isn't.
(It might not be an object. They haven't said whether it isn't alive or nonliving.)
@BESW I agree. There was an underlying sentiment that destroying entire civilizations and engineering large-scale bio-weaponry is fine, but she was a woman, so she did it because of feels.
A surreal exploration of Bob Dylan's America, where metaphors are literal and the literal is metaphor. Cards would be drawn from his songs.
For example:
Nature: Cowboy Angel Weakness: Lonesome, without family or friend Strength: A voice without restraint Subplot: Search for souls that have already been sold
It's the feels that are important. You don't have to use his songs to make your own cards. If I'm successful in conveying the ethos of the piece, you should be able to fit your own stuff into it.
I think the idea is neat. I know a few of his songs, none of them by heart or anything... and I can sort of get the idea... But the whole concept of a "Dylan" america is foreign to me.
If you are a Witch, there is a major Hex called ‘Cook People’ which is a great way of getting bonuses for cooking 'good' food. Any Paladins in the group may object, so do your cooking while they're asleep.
Cook People (Su): The witch can create fabulous spells by cooking an
intelligent huma...
Realistically: men would be just as prone to that. Men, at least in Australian culture, are very prone to developing a one-track mind about something. Marks, job success, a girl, etc. Give them ultimate power and a girl they can develop a one-track mind over, and it could've easily just been a guy. I had a friend commit suicide over his high school grades because he evaluated his worth too heavily on them.
My objection is that the Anon is making it sound like it's the fact it's a woman is relevant to why it was a bad series of campaigns.
He calls the motivation "trivial," and harps on the fact that it was a woman.
Hence why I then listed four well-received and epically badass male villains who went to extreme lengths for the same reasons and aren't ridiculed for their motives.
@BESW I only notice that like... once, at the beginning, 'because someone had to hit on the elf chick.' I don't notice the harping on it being a woman, just on it being absurd. In fact I find the absurdity the DM cooked up pretty hilarious.
Right. I'm picking that up, but in this case, I'm picking it up because it's a woman causing this much shit. It's kinda unavoidable given the circumstance.
I have a friend who, when DMing, often has his grand villains working behind the scenes orchestrating worldwide chaos and strife over long periods of time (read: decades and centuries), usually on ideological grounds.
Well. One day. One day. You will be running a game. A new face will show up. It will be someone you knew from that game. You will say hi. And then, you will make a Lich tear through the dimensions into the middle of the session you're running.
> High Concept: The Prince the Worlds Forgot > Trouble: Everyone I loved is dust > Centuries of practice with the arcane > Puppet master > Skilled pottery thrower
There we go.
I can't remember his actual name...
(He used the dust of his disintegrated enemies for clay to make pots and plates and ashtrays.)
Humans are just sand, but elves make a finely ground powder.
Dwarves are gravel, but if you wait a couple days it turns to mud.
@JonathanHobbs He was really quite happy just being by himself, practicing archery and making pots and raising the souls of the damned (for puppet shows).
@BESW Because then the adventurers would have to find something better to do, and one of them would be at a bar one night to overhear someone saying "Y'hear my cousin's uncle's great-aunt's daughter's niece's nephew says there's some lich feller in the western isles."
Unfortunately, somebody else started meddling and a third faction formed: a coalition of humans and elves working to end the war in a truce.
So the Prince the World Forgot arranged for some spies to infiltrate the coalition and assassinate their leader in a way that would schism the elves and humans again.
....but the spy/assassins who got picked turned out to be the party.
but theres been little to no communication from the mods here about the 5e release and very low participation in terms of answers on my discussion questions. We're running out of time to get things in order.
@JoshuaAslanSmith this. lack of mod com in general is perplexing
There needs to be a statement on why they are closing it. Or at least acknowledging Hobb's point. I don't have an issue with the closure and I understand Hobb's point, but communication needs to be better.
@Magician There was a big to-do and some bad information shared around the forums yesterday, my guess is that he wanted to muddy the waters further clarify some things about what has and hasn't been anounced
@waxeagle well the nom question was closed by regular users mostly though brian cast a stone as well, so yeah I guess I would have liked brian to say something in that case since it was sorta his idea (he probably agreed with johnhobbs that we were jumping the gun)
@JoshuaAslanSmith there was a big debate in the WOTC forums over whether Wizards had said or even implied that there would be no 5e OGL. Mearls responded briefly on twitter that they'd said nothing of the sort
then they put out an article the same day saying that nothing about licensing had been released and that they'll be mum on it until a bit after the DMG drops (with sufficient reasoning to satisfy me)
If you are a Witch, there is a major Hex called ‘Cook People’ which is a great way of getting bonuses for cooking 'good' food. Any Paladins in the group may object, so do your cooking while they're asleep.
Cook People (Su): The witch can create fabulous spells by cooking an
intelligent huma...
