TRPG General Chat - 2016-12-05

« first day (2258 days earlier) ← previous day next day → last day (2691 days later) »

12:24 AM

2

Q: Are Omnibus answers problematic?

I have noticed, in my time on all the Stacks, but RPG.SE especially, a tendency for some users to collect all the answers already given for a question, and post them as one big omnibus answer. These answers usually don't add much, if anything, new. They usually just collect the wisdom, or bad i...

discussion answers

12:36 AM

@Heda [wave] If you can find a question or two you can reasonably answer, you'll pass the 20+ rep requirement for chat pretty easily.

1:15 AM

I just had a horrifying realisation. I don't have a gold badge lined up for hatmas this year!

lol

neither do I

course, I never bothered to try for any gold medal except fanatic, and briefly one involving voting enough times on stuff

still, it would have been great to have one lined up and then delay it till I could get a hat

but a lot of gold badges require a lot of input from other people :/

@Miniman actually, I don't believe I do either

I am sure I can manage other hats

1:43 AM

There will be hats aplenty, of course.

Just that I've gotten the gold badge hat 2 years in a row, so I'm a little sad about missing it this year.

1:57 AM

well, last time you got like, the most hats on this whole SE

I am having trouble feeling sorry for you on a hat based matter

XD

@trogdor Srsly, it's not even winter where @Miniman lives. Why does he need to hog all the hats?

=D

well, it's not winter here either

but we still like hats

@trogdor but you don't hoard them =)

lol

@nitsua60 well fair enough, but he isn't taking them from other people, he is just serving as a shining example to the rest of us of how many hats we will never have because we don't work hard enough :P

@Miniman OTOH, you've just prompted me to check and see I"m only 76 edits away from copy editor. Maybe I'll snag that gold one this year =)

2:11 AM

@trogdor I'm pretty sure SSD beat me in the end :P

@Miniman There's no shame in that. 'e's got more vertices upon which to perch hats.

@nitsua60 Hmmm...36 rep caps till Legendary. So all I have to do is cap every day from now until the end of hatmas - easy pickings!

@Miniman oh, dear. I haven't thought about Legendary in forever. I stared at that progress bar for Epic for, like, four months.

Throw 140 flags and grab Marshal...

@Miniman he may have, I base it off of relatively early memory, so it's obviously fallible

Also, don't gain any rep, 'cause I'm nervously watching you in my rear-view vis-a-vis the yearly rep league. 800 is not much of a lead to have on you =)

2:18 AM

@trogdor I mean, it's pretty impressive that you remember in the first place!

(At this rate, only 37 years until I pass miniman in all-time rep!)

2:37 AM

@nitsua60 fyi affect was not a typo here, it is a normal verb form for "have an effect". (As opposed to the verb form of "effect", which more or less means "bring about, enact".)

Total rep isn't worth worrying about - you're wrecking me on quality quotient.

@doppelgreener jeezy-creezy, are you kidding. I'm pretty good with effect (n.), effect (v.), and affect (n.), but there's an affect (v.) hanging around out there!? That's it, I'm switching to Esperanto, a Dvorak keyboard, and only programming in Lojban.

[ragequits all widely-used communication protocols]

Once @miniman retires from D&D to other, less confusing games which have not many questions, @nitsua60 will have the D&D 6e playing field open to surpass him in rep.

I suspect nitsua will make that change first anyway.

@nitsua60 the only noun "affect" I can find is the psychology sense, is that the one?

I think of affect being the action form of effect.

2:43 AM

Also, the verb "effect" is pretty obscure.

It is.

@doppelgreener jes. (That's Esperanto for "yes")

Mostly used in policy making.

wow! Google translate havas Esperanton en sia datumbazo
[wow! Google translate has Esperanto in its database]

@Miniman well, its reading, my memory is better for things I have read

it just turns out to work like that

2:46 AM

@nitsua60 At one point they had Chicken, so that shouldn't be that surprising.

kio estas Kokido?
[what is Chicken?]

@nitsua60 uzi kodo morse dum vi estas en ĝi

@doppelgreener yeah, I was flashing back to that, too =)

@trogdor As is mine, but I remember the scoreboard a year later because I was ~~checking it obsessively~~ ~~emotionally invested in it~~ interested, so I'm surprised other people remember.

well I was reading it to check my own status rather often enough

2:50 AM

@Miniman oh, other people are ~~unreasonably competitive~~ ~~irrationally jealous~~ interested, too =)

I was interested in the information, and so because I was interested and reading it, it stuck in my head

@nitsua60 Yeah, don't think I'm not keeping track of you keeping track of the rep leaderboards :P

@Miniman I'm not sure 0.06% separation is room-enough for the two of us =)

personally, I was surprised when I learned that not everyone reads enough, or is interested enough in reading, to remember things they have read anywhere past rather short term timelines

sad confessions: I didn't have to look up that number... =|

2:52 AM

like in my history class, or when even my father asked me how the hell I remembered specific details from a book I had read a month earlier

It's possible that other people, by not remembering details from books and games from multiple years ago, use their available memory for more important things than us nerds :P

@Miniman "more important things" ????????

I don't follow

Well, I'm just suggesting it as a possibility.

@Miniman that is fair, I think everyone's memories work in slightly different ways, some of us, such as ourselves, just remember things better when we have read them

other people are more inclined, maybe, to remember someones name

I have serious trouble with peoples names when I first meet them

@Miniman the notion is something to wrap my head around but it's worth considering theoretically I guess

2:56 AM

faces are actually really easy to remember, but names for some reason have a hard time being matched up

Like, yanno, if I'd never read LotR, maybe I'd have been able to learn how to not get bored at social functions with people I don't really like.

@Miniman I think you literally need a magic spell to accomplish that

@trogdor I have that trouble and made an exercise out of it to memorise the name of everybody who services me at shops I visit more than once

@Miniman [has mental image of Miniman boring the snot out of people he doesn't like at social functions until they finally wander off, all the while thinking to self 'thank God I read this stuff so I could bore them away!"]

@doppelgreener that is a useful exercise to be sure

2:58 AM

(not all at once — when they service me I'll ask their name if they're not wearing a badge, so it's just one person at a time)

It's increased my ability to remember names, I think

Not a huge amount but a useful amount

@trogdor I think my biggest memory-weakness is sequencing/placing in time. I can remember a conversation or an event but have absolutely no idea whether it happened a week ago, a month ago, a year ago? Without obvious touchstones (like it was a conversation about my infant son, which would time-localize it) I'm just lost. I think my memory-unit doesn't have a timestamp function.

@nitsua60 if all else fails, tell them about the gear wars

@nitsua60 I have less trouble with time than that, to be sure

course, as a consequence, sometimes when a story I like is missplacing the concept of chronological time too much or too often,.... it annoys me way too much

its the main reason I dropped the Culture Series

@trogdor Culture Series?

My main problem with memory is recalling faces. I can recognise them perfectly well, but recalling them when I'm not looking at them just doesn't work for me.

3:03 AM

the third book decided it was fun to give the main character multiple flashbacks

The Culture series is a science fiction series written by Scottish author Iain M. Banks. The stories center on the Culture, a utopian, post-scarcity space socialist society of humanoids, aliens, and very advanced artificial intelligences living in semi-anarchist habitats spread across the Milky Way galaxy. The main theme of the novels is the dilemmas that an idealistic hyperpower faces in dealing with civilizations that do not share its ideals, and whose behavior it sometimes finds repulsive. In some of the stories, action takes place mainly in non-Culture environments, and the leading characters...

hmm....

it is a sci fi series of books

I reaaaaaaaally liked the first book

the second was still ok, still good but not as good,.... and the third one triggered particular parts of my unique brain into madness

and none of that involved the book having anything in it that should trigger someone into madness, to be clear

it was probably only me who had the particular reaction

I dunno, books that jump around in time can be incredibly confusing just in general.

yeah

that is definitely part of it

Also, anything by Diana Wynne Jones.

3:07 AM

if you ask @BESW, he will mention how I have objected to watching shows out of order with him

at least some times

@Miniman I liked Dark Lord of Dirkholm, but I have not read much else by her

also, fantasy books tend to get some slack from me,... mostly

@trogdor They're generally good, but they almost invariably end in a sudden plot twist that's meant to tie everything together, but isn't nearly as easy to understand for the audience as it was for the author.

ah

the twist at the end of Derkholm was a little heavy handed, to be sure, not necessarily handled as well as it could have been, but it didn't ruin the book for me

Oh, it's not a deal breaker - like I said, they're still good books. Just, they usually leave me feeling confused.

I only read that one book

and the twist itself was rather well explained when it happened

in fact, there were literally characters who you could say were only there to explain it,... which in itself might be considered a bit of an issue

I read that one a long time ago - I'll have to borrow it from my sister.

3:15 AM

yeah, I don't want to just drop that one in here in case someone is planning to read it XD

but, even though it really wasn't some kind of mystery novel or anything, the biggest complaint I would have with the book was similar to a complaint I would have with a bad mystery novel, the ending basically just has things wrap up in a way that Jones herself didn't bother to drop enough actual clues or hints about

so it is not by any means surprising to hear that she might have an issue with that kind of things in her other books

4:08 AM

VTC off-topic (video game) or shopping, not sure which.

well, also extremely low on useful information

it seems a lot more like a statement than an actual question

4:35 AM

Plus, what does he mean by "3D fighting game" and "boardgame"? All the D&D Videogames I know of are top down RPGs

I'm not saying that I'm looking at a full layout draft of Dresden Files Accelerated but I'm not saying I'm NOT, either. @EvilHatOfficial

Tweeted by jeditigger on December 4, 2016 at 4:48 AM

@Miniman maybe he is talking about tabletop?

it is odd though, I give you that in full

he is certainly not clearly saying everything he means

5:05 AM

@Miniman There are (were?) first-person 3d D&D games, (Eye of the Beholder, Dungeon Hack, SSI's "gold box" series). There are also D&D console-action-RPGs (eg Chronicles of Mystara), and MMOs (D&D Online, Neverwinter)

Gah. Thanks for reminding me about Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance.

Also, apropos of not quite nothing: I hate Twitter, but it's a really useful resource sometimes.

I still don't have a Twitter account

some things have tempted me to get one, but nothing has gone all the way towards that point

IE, mostly some people who know some of the things I like have linked stuff from Twitter that I really liked, but I am fully aware that those are isolated cases, they generally are not enough to convince me despite most degrees of awesomeness

Oh, I don't have a twitter account. I just read stuff other people post.

I wasn't assuming one way or the other

but I certainly don't have one either, though I have been half tempted on occasions

I assume that you need an account to follow stuff

I suppose I could be mistaken, but either way I don't know that I need another time sink in my life

I have an account, but I only use it occasionally.

5:18 AM

I know myself too well

I would open that every day to check stuff

so either I would be lost in there for some undetermined amount of time, or I would eventually be driven to burn that account to the ground eventually

To be more specific, the context for my wild accusations of usefulness was stuff like this.

Public, archived conversations that are useful to people other than the participants.

well, as with most things, there is almost certainly an actual usefulness to Twitter, but it is no doubt also inundated with useless-but-possibly-entertaining things

the entertainment is, of course, negotiable

5:33 AM

BONG BONG BONG BONG BONG

Tweeted by big_ben_clock on December 5, 2016 at 5:08 AM

yep

sooo useful, mmhmmm

I mean, it does look like it has one practical application, but do you really need to look at Twitter just to figure out what time it is over in Big Ben's timezone? (cause you could just,...... look it up)

5:51 AM

user image

I set multiple clocks in Windows, so I can look up world times with a click. (I picked central US because it gives me a sort of "average" time for the US)

ah

well, that certainly doesn't refute my point at any rate

also, I didn't even know you could do that

so TIL that

Yeah, as soon as I get home I'm gonna get me some of that.

6:09 AM

Pretty sure Windows 7 lets you do it too - I'm on 10 now at work

On OS X you can set any number of clocks on the Dashboard and/or Notification pane, until you run out of room.

2 hours later…

8:16 AM

> I'd rather use yours. You get +3 instead of +2 when invoking other peoples' things for your own use.

> I licked it, now it's mine. Whenever you invoke someone else's aspect, they loose one free invocation from it.

9

Heheheh.

8:42 AM

lol

@Magician that is just the best

4 hours later…

12:41 PM

For those who want a gold badge during Winterbash: You get 40 question votes per day and the Electorate gold badge requires you make 600 question votes (and have at least 25% of your votes on questions). At maximum question votes per day, 0–600 takes 15 days, which will give you a Gold badge during Winterbash (and a lot of people a lot of points).

On that ^^ note, I'll say that I pushed hard for that one last year and it's not just gaming for hats: I think I learned a lot by reading that much of the site in such a condensed time.

(The intent, of course, was just gaming for hats--the effect, a positive one IMO.)

@nitsua60 It's almost impossible for me to cast that many votes and not wind up editing at least 300 things.

I think last year I was too new/timid to do so.

My badger tracker has run out of gold badgers for me to track.

Gotta run--snow ain't shoveling itself =)

12:47 PM

@doppelgreener I went for that last time,... but I gave up when I realized 600 votes overall was not gonna get me there (derp, it is only question votes that count for it XD)

@doppelgreener I already have that badge :P

But I don't have all possible gold badgers, not by a long shot.

and I'm basically nowhere near any other gold badger (on RPG that is)

@Shalvenay You don't have to get it on this site if you just want the gold badge hat (should there be one) anywhere at all.

@nitsua60 A wizard could fix that, and probably invent some new horrific type of elemental as a side effect. (The self-shovelling snow elemental?)

@doppelgreener that is an interesting thing actually

12:59 PM

@doppelgreener Salt mephit, steam mephit, ice mephit.

I am reminded of the flavour text for the Ensoul Artifact magic card (which turns an artifact into a fairly big creature): Too often, some self-described genius comes up with a "labor-saving device" that ends up creating far more work.

This is also a pretty good description of the industrial revolution.

@BESW Oh yeah? :D

If we're counting things like steam trains in there, I could see that...

@doppelgreener A lot of very self-satisfied geniuses invented labour-saving devices, the environmental, economic, and social fallout of which we're still failing to clean up.

1:18 PM

@BESW That's fair, yeah.

"Look, I've invented the motor car! It moves us around faster. Don't breathe in that gas, it's toxic." "Have you considered what will happen if there's an awful lot of these making this gas all the time?" "What, like, a thousand of them?"

lol

Peppered moth evolution

The evolution of the peppered moth is an evolutionary instance of colour variation in the moth population as a consequence of the Industrial Revolution. The concept refers to an increase in the number of dark-coloured moths due to industrial pollution, and a reciprocal decrease in the population in a clean environment. Hence, the phenomenon is called industrial melanism. It is the first recorded and experimented case of Charles Darwin's natural selection in action, and remains as a classic example in the teaching of evolution. Sewall Wright described it as "the clearest case in which a conspicuous...

Spam! Spam in the dungeon! Flag as spam so it can get auto-deleted.

BAM.

Less than two minutes.

I'm impressed.

7 hours later…

8:09 PM

what would be the mechanical effects of the hiv virus?

hello

8:30 PM

@AbrahamRay automatically failed saves against all diseases, I guess.

8:58 PM

Or effectively auto-fail. -10? -15?

9:11 PM

If, as suggested by your previous questions, this is D&D 5e, check if a roll of 20 is an automatic save (in 3.5e it was)

Ah right, disadvantage.

10:03 PM

ohla

10:16 PM

how do I make an image in an answer post a clickable link?

@nitsua60 do you want it to go to the image itself, or to a different link?

@DForck42 sorry: to a different link

(image of anydice results, click to get to the anydice program)

[![blah][2]][1]

[1]: http://google.com
[2]: https://i.stack.imgur.com/VND98.png

@nitsua60 that should work

yes it does--thanks!

@nitsua60 :-D

10:38 PM

Defend Mars and bring glory to the Union of Materialist Republics in RED PLANET by @jessnevins!… https://twitter.com/i/web/status/805888133845790720

Tweeted by EvilHatOfficial on December 5, 2016 at 9:34 PM

10:58 PM

@DForck42 I've not seen you around. When'd you join? During my absence?

11:09 PM

@Powerdork I don't recall seeing him around during that time period (or even before it honestly)

I think I probably miss new users a lot of the time though

what with possible timezone differences and my propensity to pay more attention to people I have seen more

fun fact, there is an example website specifically set aside to be used for examples in code:

He's been around for five and a half years and has been in and out of chat ever since. Just not a super regular chatter.

fair enough

example.com, or alternately .org or some other TLDs.

@doppelgreener yeah, I know. Programming.SE sometimes reminds me to use it.

11:14 PM

@Zachiel [HISSSSS] USE IT [HISSSSSSS, SNAKE TONGUE FLICKERS, PUPIL SLITS NARROW]

lol

campaign idea: that Weird Fruits setting, but investigating a cornspiracy.

lol

corny

« first day (2258 days earlier) ← previous day next day → last day (2691 days later) »

Transcript for

Dec '165

TRPG General Chat

Main chat room for tabletop role-playing games. Anyone can ask...

dice pen-and-paper roleplaying

join this room
about this room

00:00

06:00

12:00

18:00

all times are UTC

site design / logo © 2024 Stack Exchange Inc; legal

mobile