TRPG General Chat - 2015-02-08

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12:15 AM

@BESW awesome about the art sojourn. My company sells art supplies, maybe I can get a donation for you

Oh, I'm not Ursula Vernon, nor am I lucky enough to be one of her friends. I'm just passing on the Kickstarter, since I know several people her enjoy her work.

12:38 AM

D&D 3.5 What is the rules on being trained in Spell Casting/Sword-Mens-ship/Etc. For I want the party to find a orphan who had been abandoned when his home town was radied. I want the kid to the no combat knowlege and be trained by the PC's

12:56 AM

Morning! I am returned from my exile.

No one realised I was gone for a week, did they :D

@Magician No but I was wondering about your conspicuous absence!

New Zealand! Which I spelled as "New Zeland" on at least one customs form.

1:16 AM

what game/edition was that Clerics and Firearms question from btw?

The second iteration of it was tagged gurps-4e, iron-kingdoms, and indie-rpg.

The first was tagged only iron-kingdoms.

...all of those at once?

Yes.

user image

Is it gone? I kinda want to look at the unholy abomination.

Both of them are deleted.

First, second.

It's just asking for a list of settings/systems where cleric classes are proficient with firearms, and it's tagged with the ones the querent thinks might qualify.

The really great bit is that the duplicate post was made --and then deleted by Brian-- ten minutes before the querent self-deleted his first post.

Adventures In Time And Posting.

1:26 AM

haha :P

only reason I asked is because my 3.5e cleric has a pair of flintlock pistols on her she got off an orc pirate in a dungeon :P

I have a question that likely belongs on worldbuilding.SE, if anywhere. It concerns underwater people and waste disposal. But other questions on their frontpage seem a tad more high-brow than "where does a merman poo?"

@Magician -- look at what happens to fish waste IRL. :P

That's presumably a bad way to live in an open underwater city.

"Mersewage"?

A Question Of Urban Aquatic Sanitation

Fancy!

1:36 AM

Merpoo and You

Clerics & Firearms are back!

finally -- a sane question -- and JAS is on the ball with an answer!

Mmm. But it's still posting a new question instead of improving the existing one, so Brian's right to delete it.

Could maybe use some more explanation, but that's his prerogative.

@BESW -- I think he thinks on hold is locked -- perhaps deleting the first try at the question and letting the third, functional try stand is better?

(i.e. he doesn't understand editing, but is trying to get to a workable question)

Brian left a comment on the second question:

rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/56437/…

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Brusque, but not unclear.

1:49 AM

I get what Brian's trying to say -- but it's not helpful for someone who doesn't know that editing is a thing.

Aye. Like I said, some more explanation might be in order.

But none of us can do a thing about that. Deleted questions are uncommentable.

@Shalvenay they know that editing is a thing, on account of having done editing to improve their very first question already.

oh -- they have edited their question before? o.O

yes.

they are just being equally unclear and vague or overbroad every single time

user image

1:51 AM

'unclear' and 'vague' do warrant each being said there

2:13 AM

0

Q: Urban Aquatic Sanitation

In a fantasy world (a D&D setting, basically), how would an open underwater town populated by an assortment of mer-people deal with waste disposal? A few details: the town in question is a part of a larger above-ground settlement. They mainly trade fish for tools and other surface products. The d...

underwater urban

Research! For the novel! That no one reads!

@Magician This is a great question.

hrm -- so on 2e per-round inits -- if a monster is summoned in the course of a round, does it get to roll init in that round?

@Shalvenay you may wish to ask that as a main-site question

2:32 AM

done

I love every single thing about this and only wish it was also a magic realist novel. Lost Typeface Found In Thames http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-31188255

Tweeted by sydneypadua on February 7, 2015 at 3:31 PM

Modern digital version for sale.

[absolutely geeks out]

2:52 AM

@Kaz_king I was hoping my answer to your question would be useful

you can ignore the fight between Hell and the Abyss, but you have to figure out what is special about pit fiends; by default most of their power comes from being in charge of things in Hell, not their own stats

@KRyan Since he doesn't know anything about the lore except what he can glean between the lines in the SRD, it's kinda difficult to talk about that sort of thing usefully.

@Committingtoachallenge Hi!

Committing to a challenge

@BESW Hi, how are you?

Not bad, considering. What brings you to RPG.SE chat?

Committing to a challenge

@BESW I thought I would just read some different chat pages out of curiosity. See what sort of people hang out here :). I spend most of my time at the mathematics chat.

@BESW eh; it does if you want to use the default stuff, but if you throw it out you can make up your own. You just have to either put balors on top of Hell, or you have to figure out what about pit fiends makes up for their weaker stats

2:57 AM

@Committingtoachallenge I see you're in a lot of chats!

Committing to a challenge

@BESW Just this one time :P

@KRyan Aye, but things like the notion that the default cosmos does give them power beyond mechanical stats is a necessary foundation for that conversation.

@Committingtoachallenge is this the challenge?

@BESW oh sure; that's why I tried to include that in my answer

Committing to a challenge

@BESW 2.9k of my 3.2k messages are on MSE

@KRyan The challenge is doing a heap of math textbooks to completion in two years, probably sounds boring here :P

@Committingtoachallenge Fair enough. Well, you're welcome to hang out. This chat is mostly focused on tabletop role-playing games, like Dungeons and Dragons, Fate, and World of Darkness, but we go far off-topic pretty often.

2:59 AM

@Committingtoachallenge certainly does sound like a challenge! is that writing or reading/learning?

...and haven't actually discussed World of Darkness in a long while, unless it was last week and I've missed it.

Committing to a challenge

@BESW So does Math haha. I have played D&D before, but none of the others

@BESW moderators are asleep, post ponies?

(If a non-RPG topic is getting in the way of RPG talk, or is making people uncomfortable, we move it to the Not A Bar.)

@BESW is Not A Bar used for anything but the one thing?

Committing to a challenge

3:00 AM

@BESW I have played numerous other board games and card games recently, but the names of most escape me, munchkins(?), (something) asylum, (some rule/unrule game)

user image

Committing to a challenge

@KRyan Reading/learning, doing all proofs and exercises, skipping nothing. It's 6500 pages and I am well behind so far :S

@BESW ...so should that be moved to Not A Bar? I certainly find it discomforting :P

@Committingtoachallenge fun!

(actually doesn't sound fun at all)

Committing to a challenge

@KRyan xD, the math group appreciate it

proofs bore me to tears; I'm glad that things have been proven, but I don't care to know how, much less do so myself

3:02 AM

@KRyan "The one thing"?

(said another way, I'm an engineer)

@BESW site politics

@KRyan Nah. It's a venting point for all sorts of things.

Committing to a challenge

@KRyan I plan to go into research, so it will be my job (hopefully) :P. I have done the first year and a half of an electrical engineering major, before swapping to Math and now I am 3rd year math

@BESW huh. I suppose there's just the one thing that I vent about

Spoilery discussions about recent films and TV shows, religious/philosophical conversations, stuff that would be fine here except other people want to talk about RPGs...

3:03 AM

@Committingtoachallenge mm, EE was my major, though I haven't done any of it aside from programming in a while, and probably never will again

...someone is playing It Wasn't Me very loudly nearby.

3:25 AM

also...why don't we see Brian in chat any longer?

@KRyan Not a bar is main chat's pressure release valve

@doppelgreener hah

@Shalvenay that is a good question, considering it is well over a year since he started work intense enough he had to leave chat

...and now there's ice cream truck music.

@doppelgreener There are other factors, some of them to do with social engineering.

He may also fear my ability to mind meld with him across thousands of miles.

@doppelgreener -- hrm, interesting.

3:36 AM

@BESW yes, your hive mind would become much stronger if it escaped the containment of Guam

3

which, now that I think about it, brings a concerning undertone to Miniman's earlier message

Jan 29 at 4:16, by Miniman

@BESW I'm reasonably sure you personally represent the majority of this chat.

[dons anti-mind-meld headgear]

3:49 AM

@doppelgreener My tinfoil hat never comes off. (Except at work.)

@ElFin Hi! You'll need at least 20 rep on any one Stack Exchange site before you can type in chat rooms, but you're welcome to hang out until then. You'll need to edit your original question (rather than re-asking it). Consider taking the tour and looking at the help for a sense of how the Stack Exchange is different from a regular forum.

There are thousands of RPGs out there, and more settings. If you can edit in more specifics about your particular situation so that we can suggest only those settings/systems which will actually be useful, that'd be a good start. The Stack Exchange is about leveraging expert experience to help solve specific problems, and questions which ask for open-ended lists and brainstorming discussions are better served on normal forums.

The more you can tell us about the specific challenge you're facing, the more we can help by finding the right solution to that challenge.

You may also find this question, about the history of cleric weapons in D&D, to be interesting/useful.

Once you've got the question narrowed down so that answers can be voted on usefully based on the criteria you present, the question will get re-opened.

4:23 AM

or alternately

the problem is that you can ask "is there a system where I can do {thing}?" and the answer will probably be "yes" and there are dozens of systems where you can do that or where being able to do that is a big core assumption of the system or what it was made for explicitly

you've deleted your original question unfortunately which means we can't really leave you any feedback or guidance on what to do with it, whilst it remains deleted

(you can undelete it)

5 hours later…

8:57 AM

Tonight's dinner is pumpkin garlic knots with crumbled vegan sausage mixed into the dough. It's kind of an upscale hot dog roll.

9:28 AM

hm

sounds yummy actually

It was! Served with applesauce for dipping or as a sauce.

hm... damn, now I'm sorta hungry... but my stomach is pretty full - appetite but no motivation to get up and make anything :D

Also hi.

hi

been a while :)

What's new?

9:31 AM

not much

stopped GMing for a long time

just recently ran another We Be Goblins game

then I finally got to be a player in one! :)

that was fun

and now we're doing the Jade Regent - so I guess I'm finally going beyond the whole Goblin business

and as a player too, I'm excited

Sweet.

My group is getting a lot more GM-y too; almost everyone's run at least one session.

I spent all December as a player.

right on :) it's nice for a change

Although I must say having a pregen for We Be Gobs really helped me as a player cause it reduced my options

now I have that same drama that I had last time I was a player (where I built that first level human child rogue who thought he was a paladin -- was really fun to play for the few sessions that it lasted)

One nice thing about having the whole group willing to GM: last night one of the players said "Hey, I think we should learn more how to focus on [X kind of play style/attitude]." So I said, "Great! Can you run us through a session designed for that?"

I'm not sure what to put in for X in that sentence

In this case, it has to do with investing in failure:

19

Q: "Investing in Failure" in Fate

There's one passage of the Fate Core book / SRD that I'm having trouble getting my head around. The worst, worst thing you can do is have a failed roll that means nothing happens—no new knowledge, no new course of action to take, and no change in the situation. That is totally boring, and it ...

9:50 AM

hm,cool

definitively cool!

Heh.

"Don't make failing at rolls boring. That just teaches players to resist failure in all ways, which will break other failure-related mechanics." - Actually this looks like it might be inviting to play a character that's really good at failing... I could see that being fun

failing for comedic effect for example... but I guess that's not quite the point they're trying to make. failing for story development... hm

I still haven't actually played FATE

"Some of the players tend to look for narrative solutions in the rules they have, instead of looking for rules supporting their narrative." - I don't always do this, but it does happen

It very much depends on the system.

D&D 4e, for example, is all about discovering how to use the rules to solve the problem.

While Fate is instead about figuring out how the rules can describe your solution, rather than how the rules create your solution.

And some systems--for better or worse--are invested in boring failure.

@BESW That's true, I guess in Pathfinder working like that sometimes works best to avoid dissappointment of coming up with the narrative first and then being unable to make the rules work with that...

Most D&D-like conflict mechanics have binary on/off rolls (you hit and deal damage, or you don't hit and do no damage), and conflict outcomes are about seeing who can accumulate a bigger pile of non-boring dice results first.

10:02 AM

I guess, except for critical failures

those are non-boring

You may have seen our own @Magician's goblin dice article.

Critical failure allows some failure to be non-boring, but it's still part of the "your roll does something, or it doesn't" dichotomy. In games like Fate and Lady Blackbird and *World, every roll will have an effect on the story. In games like Pathfinder, a large number of rolls have no effect except that you lost an opportunity to have an effect.

@BESW reading this right now - thanks for the link

@BESW yeah - though through having limited times to attempt things it does have an effect if you cumulatively roll bad - just watching this series: youtube.com/… - and in the last week they had a lot of interesting development based on being in way over their head and rolling less than amazingly

And if you're invested in an attrition-based game, that's fine.

Goblin dice aren't inherently bad.

Unfortunately, when they're used in non-attrition scenarios (like most skill rolls in d20 System games), they become a poor choice of mechanic.

And frankly, I don't like attrition-based systems anymore: I prefer games where we don't have to wait for things to happen.

In the systems I use now, I can cover a month's worth of D&D story in a single night.

And a lot of that is because we don't have to wait for the dice to accumulate effects.

I guess I'd have to see that

or experience it

Part of it is a more effective set of zooming mechanics.

10:10 AM

zooming is chaning the scope?

In Pathfinder, there's only really one "level" of combat: turn by turn, round by round.

so you're saying if the players are way over powered for example, you could just describe an entire encounter much faster

(over powered relative to that particular encounter)

In Fate, you can go through a whole swarm of zombie mooks with a single roll if the narrative doesn't care about dwelling on the blow-by-blow and you want to get to the cool thing on the other side.

so you still roll... what happens on a failure?

....but if fighting through the swarm of zombies is interesting and dramatic, you can spend more rolls on it, draw it out, and make it consume more resources.

@Julix Either you succeed at cost (it takes more time than you have to spend, or you get bitten, or you lose your gun...) or you fail and have to find some different way to reach your goal.

Failure, in this case, is not "You have to try the same thing again."

10:14 AM

right, you couldn't even do the same thing, right?

It's "Well, there are too many zombies to get through the front door. Have you tried the sewers?"

Or "Well, you might have been able to get through the zombies... if the nemesis hadn't just taken off in a blimp while you were looking for a way in. Grab that glider and give chase!"

Failure forces the situation to change so there's a new action you can take.

Investing in failure is when a player looks for ways to fail interestingly, even when he thinks he could have succeeded.

@BESW could you elaborate on that?

"I could probably force my way through that swarm of zombies and confront my nemesis now... but I think it'd be more interesting if the zombies hold me back long enough for him to get away in his blimp."

I just imagined the same thing in D&D

I mean Pathfinder

so there's all those undead

and then one party member (who's nemesis it is) thinks that to himself

but since it's all about winning I can easily imagine if he did anything while fighting the undead to slow down the getting through, then he'd attract some kind of anger from at least some types of players

Stories are interesting because of the problems characters face. In D&D-like systems, it's the responsibility of the GM to present problems, and the players are given tools to solve them. In Fate-like systems, the players are also given tools to create problems for their characters, and are rewarded for doing so.

10:20 AM

but in your example it wasn't the character's fault for delaying - the player changed the power of the undead in a way, right?

The GM and the players, in Fate, share the responsibility and privilege of creating obstacles to overcome.

@Julix Right, that's the thing: Fate players are given some level of agency on the world of the game, outside the direct agency of their characters' ability to interact with the world.

Players spend Fate points when they want the world to help solve their problems, and they gain Fate points when the world puts problems in their path.

@BESW Rewarded... that's sort of what I meant with the Pathfinder version of that encounter - if you wanted to (with agency over the character only) you could still cause delay or failure or what not --- but it would be going against what you're supposed to do

"supposed"

Right. It's a totally different kind of game, where player agency is mostly limited to what their characters can do to change the world.

@BESW Does that make it more simulationist? - In that in the real world you can only change what you do as well, not what the world does

I don't think that's a useful set of terminology to use in this context.

10:26 AM

@BESW In the real world you can't slow down or speed up time too easily, and you influence only your choices not your environment - however is the real world really the best mechanic for telling amazing stories? -- I mean the round by round is just a mechanic to make it doable - real time wouldn't work with having rolls and action descriptions and what not... --- but it does seem to try simulating life in a fantasy setting rather than just tell dramatic stories

Simulationism has nothing to do with realism; it's about adhering to a certain vision of rule-enforced cause and effect within a chosen realm --not necessarily the real world-- so that meta effects like "genre" themes emerge without deliberate action.

But no, giving players agency beyond that of their characters doesn't change the realism of the setting.

The GM already had that power to make the world do things.

Spreading that power to change the game world amongst everyone at the table in real life doesn't change anything about the realism of the game world which is being changed.

Giving players some of the GM's authority doesn't make their characters any more or less able to influence the game world. It only changes what the players can do.

well from the character's perspective, yes... but from the player's perspective couldn't it take away some immersion? -- By which I mean that feeling of actually being the character while in a tense situation, deciding what to do next... on the other hand this isn't LARP...

Immersion is a different subject from realism or simulation. And yes, if your goal is a game experience in which the line between player and character is blurred, then expanding player agency beyond character agency could be troublesome.

(Except in the case of A Penny For My Thoughts, interestingly, which is all ABOUT messing with player/character agency paradigms to create an immersive experience.)

A Penny For My Thoughts works to achieve immersion without the cause-and-effect rules of simulationism, and its connection to realism is... tenuous at best, given that it's got a Mythos option for play.

huh evilhat.com/home/a-penny-for-my-thoughts - strange, but interesting

It's one of those games, like Microscope, which really challenges a lot of our fundamental notions about what RPGs are and whether certain elements of the RPG experience are connected or not.

10:42 AM

I really don't know why I'm so focused on Pathfinder... sunk cost fallacy? operant conditioning (having had too much fun)? haha -- anyway I'm developing two characters (as options using either one or the other) right now, and I'm having difficulty with some sections of the background story

I stuck with D&D 3.5 and 4e for a lot longer than I probably should have, for no particular reason.

Can you try leaving bits of the background blank, and fill them in as you go?

yeah, not with that GM - he's like me

he wants explanations for all strange things

Fairy Touched is a feat that's essential to either character

They're oracles that are lame and have the life mystery

Aw. It's a great 'trick' for making sure your character is connected to the story and invested in the things the GM wants you to care about: just wait until you run into something important, and then say you have a history connected to it.

We've got to figure out the connection to the important NPCs beforehand too

One player posted his character background sofar, and it's amazing

really well developed round character, love it

motivated me to do mine well - but being motivated doesn't quite do it on it's own... somehow being creative isn't always easy. :D

One is a gnome who is recovering from Bleaching (depression for Gnomes, caused by lack of excitement) pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Bleaching - the other would be a helpful halfling ex-slave who's obsessed with being helpful to those important to him and fearful of losing these people

I got a good grip on how to get the Gnome to have interacted with Fey - but I'm having a block for how a then halfling slave got in touch with them and why

and for both I'm unsure when/how the oracle thing kicked in -- and certainly why - though that's okay, cause the characters wouldn't know why either... but they should know when/how

My default would be to pick some suitably enigmatic power--a mysterious god, a capricious fairy queen--and have them visit the PC in a dream, bless them with power, and refuse to explain anything.

10:53 AM

dream is awesome! the deity is desna who's totally known for dreams

didn't think of making a connection between the fey thing and the dream thing

Visions bequeathing power are traditional.

or accompanying the change anyway

I'm going for an Oradin, so the life mystery is for the life link revelation - later they will become paladins (mechanically mainly for swift self healing, amazing saves)

I'm thinking the halfling could have witnessed much suffering and wished he could take it on himself

to protect those he cares for

he begged for some way to make that happen... - if the fey answered his call, why? and why did they curse him too?

11:10 AM

Do you have to have an answer for that?

Can they just be... fey?

I guess

but I'm not familiar enough with the pathfinder setting

I think the First World is a different plane

Fairy queens never give straight answers to anything, regardless of setting.

Didn't mean my character would have to know

but why was his begging heard and many other's wasn't?

The halfling grew up in a rural hamlet by relatives of his parents before becoming a slave

He was useful, or he said the right words, or he's the great-great-grandson of a woman who gave a fairy a drink of water?

Maybe he's Pure of Heart or Destined for Great Things.

so it could be next to one of the more mysterious enchanted forests (before humans came and enslaved the halfling community here and used the woods for resources as much was safe?

11:15 AM

...or somebody did it on a dare.

haha

that's awesome

There's a comic book where Death and Dream are in a bar and hear a guy bragging that the secret to immortality is just deciding not to die.

so a sprite on a dare went into his house (when he was still a small kid) - and the cat attacked the sprite -- and the kid saved the sprite from the cat? -- later he was plagued by a tooth fairy and the sprite came to help - so they became friends-ish, but are even.

@BESW does it continue, or is that it?

Dream dares Death to make him immortal, just for sheer lolz, and so she does--but she makes Dream promise to visit him every hundred years and ask if he still wants to live.

So every hundred years Dream and the immortal man meet in the same bar in London and have a beer and a chat.

Thus far, he still wants to live forever.

(The comic is Neil Gaiman's The Sandman series, for the record.)

ah, so it's a full comic series ?

11:23 AM

Yeah, but this bit is just one little piece.

fair enough :)

Dream is the main character, and each set of stories is about him, or people influenced by him.

awesome, just realized that the feat is actually called Fey Foundling, and the fluff just says "You were found in the wilds as a child." - So I guess the Fey stuff can conceivably happen in the background...

Dear 12 Monkeys: I thought Arrow's time jumping was confusing and boring. Please don't give me a lower bar. Also, was that a CGI day-for-night shot? Classy.

11:41 AM

Morning folks

hi there

[wave]

Got a text this AM from a roommate asking if I am 'ok down there (downstairs)' but I was in bed, so I can't wait to see what the cat did downstairs

outsch... :-S

12:01 PM

So I gave one of my PCs the option to join the (maybe?) insane demon cult. Can't wait to see how the cult reacts when they find out he said no.

Heh.

hahaha

The cult tried to kill them previously. Many times. It was something of a peace offer.

Also, I got a couple of really good answers for my insanity questions. Far, far better than I even expected.

One of the PCs in my campaign is currently pretending to be a double agent for a cult that he joined and left thirty years ago, but he's actually spying on the cult for the people the cult thinks he's helping them spy on, except that he's also got secret mental conditioning (left over from the last time he was with them) which lets the cult control him anyway, but maybe they won't ever have to use it because he's kinda thinking about actually joining them instead of just pretending...

I look forward to seeing this blow up.

Hah!

I wish I was a better GM... I find I'm good at creating complex schemes, worlds and characters but bad at presenting them to my PCs so they would catch up to the cooler stuff.

12:06 PM

I'm learning that it's much easier and more fun to hand the reigns over to the players for a lot of this stuff.

This whole complex mess is the result of talking with the player out of character to set things up and then running it in-game to see how it falls out.

Yeah. That's what the GM is supposed to do in AW too. I'm doing my best to steer the game that way.

I should encourage my players to do cool stuff more. They depend too much on my "permission to act".

The cult was invented by another player, and the double agent's player decided to attach it to his vague backstory, and another player threw in some other plot that the cult could tie into very easily...

For example one of my characters has a workshop, but they haven't used it at all because I haven't really found out a way to encourage them to.

Try setting up a session about the workshop?

That's the plan! One of the NPCs might have a need for something that only the PC can make...

The last session's main theme was Maelstrom, that ties in fairly well with the workshop because it can have stuff like "an assortment of stuff that works as a psychic antenna".

12:30 PM

Let's see what they noted down on their charsheet about their shop.

D'oh, they've also got the "beginning of session" move Bonefeel... but I can't remember if we ever actually rolled that. I guess I should remind them all to actually use those.

12:59 PM

> Interplanar Visions (mystic "hardware")
Function: See anything, anywhere
Flaw: Can't hide your scrying eyes
Benefits (2): You can use Notice to find anything, anywhere, and you always automatically succeed unless it's mystically hidden (but you can roll Overcome to find mystically hidden things even if you normally couldn't succeed at all).

that looks like something I might use on my dream-mage concept

depending on what routes I take with that

Inspired by LEGO: Marvel Superheroes: Maximum Overload, in which Loki uses a scrying portal to spy on Earth. Then Hulk notices the portal floating in the sky and jumps up to punch it, giving Loki an inter-dimensional black eye.

lol

He shouts "Loki! You can't hide your scrying eyes!" as he does so. Naturally.

1:19 PM

ok

strangely coherent for The Hulk to say

Eh, it seems to be the more with-it version of the Hulk; the one that has Bruce's mind stuck permanently in Hulk's body.

I am just not used to that

personally I find it more plausible, considering his powers and how he uses/activates them, that he sort of loses some IQ points while utilizing them

depending how mad he is

I do realize that Bruce Banner is an extremely intelligent person, or at least in a way that allowed him to be just smart enough to make the mistake of irradiating himself and thinking it was a good idea

but to me, The Hulk has always been just the guy who smashes stuff

with that intelligent mind sitting in the back and adding some amount of insight

not completely stupid per se, but devoting some of his mind to maintaining his powers even when he would probably rather go back to his normal form

I'm hosting a one-off RPG evening for our student org again. This time I'm going over-the-top with youth culture stereotypes.

1:43 PM

I was thinking of giving the players some hidden and random bonuses or traits. Like a secret objective for each

6 hours later…

7:36 PM

1

Q: What are the rules on training NPCs?

In D&D 3.5 what are the rules on being trained in Spell Casting/Sword-Mens-ship/Etc. For I want the party to find a orphan who had been abandoned when his home town was raided. I want the kid to the no combat knowledge and have to be trained by the PC's.

1 hour later…

8:47 PM

o/ @Emrakul

9:42 PM

o/ @BESW

Hey.

so, I keep re-reading the GitP piece on "throw caution to the wind" -- and it keeps striking me as odd, because it seems to me like it's possible to be too aggressive for good RP just as easily as it's possible to be too cautious for good RP

Naturally. That's what his bard story is about.

I can see where the bard story comes in when it comes to moral aggression

but problem-solving aggression isn't covered by it

i.e. instead of tripping the traps in the dungeon from the samurai story, incinerating them by sending a fireball down the hall

Yeah, I suspect that's outside the author's experience.

9:47 PM

me too

another example would be someone seeing a bar-brawl break out and dropping several immobilizing/incapacitating spells straight away

ending the brawl before it really has a chance to do anything

Hello!

o/

10:06 PM

Science Fantasy canon: Elves are those humans who long ago upgraded themselves to technologically superior and biologically immortal biological/cyborg bodies, with enhanced senses, expansive room for crystal clear memory, etc. Centuries later after civilization's return to more wild roots, the humans have forgotten what once was and the elves are a remarkable and separate race to them.

(Probably suitable for or already a thing in Numenera?)

Hmm. If this gets incorporated into our game, I'd want to tweak it a bit. "Humans were awesome and then forgot how to be awesome" is a bit of a problem theme.

Much more palatable as "This handful of humans wandered off and discovered new ways to be awesome but didn't share with anyone."

However, that being said, I do like the visuals and the potential for plot.

And it could easily tie into something I've got lined up.

10:38 PM

That's a fine approach. :) I didn't imagine it being a case of humans losing how to do this - them forgetting is more a matter of they don't recall the elves were once human.

Rather I didn't fill in that blank. That is a good way to fill it. (Stories with a major story element of lost tech are sometimes problematic.)

@BESW I like this too.

Actually, I don't have to change much of anything about my current plans in order for this to be the reasonable result of a brainstorming session to explain events.

\o/

11:00 PM

(Naturally, something like cyborg elves had to have happened a heckuva long time ago in order to be forgotten so utterly. It'd probably make sense to tie it to some extant myth of advanced humanity, like Atlantis.)

@BESW My thoughts exactly.

I'd like to find something from a less Westernised tradition, if possible, but the point holds.

11:23 PM

Maybe I'll draw on Shambhala.

I don't mind if it's something from Western stuff. After all, that's the stuff we're reasonably familiar with and understand the themes of.

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