@LegendaryDude I actually upvoted it. Not because I agree that SSD is a nazi--rather, he seems to be one of the nicest two or three people I've ever met online--but because the user was sorta doing the right thing. And I wanted to comment that my upvote shouldn't be taken as an endorsement of negative judgment on @SevenSidedDie, but bit my tongue as well.

@JoshuaAslanSmith Yeah, citing one's educational attainment around here seems more likely to get one laughed out of the room than anything. (Not because we don't respect education, just because I assume the median educational level is much higher than anyone citing their college degree would assume.)

Also because we tend to get a lot of false appeals to authority.

@nitsua60 That, and anyone can claim a PhD in roleplayology and we've no idea. (Secret admission: I am secretly Tim Kask.)

@nitsua60 Surprisingly (or unsurprisingly) most users here are like, way smart. I assume it has to do with site proximity to SO, ServerFault, Math.SE, Stats.SE, DBA.SE, et al.

Granted it's usually "I've been GMing one system for thirty years so I'm best qualified to hold forth on totally different systems," but it smells the same.

Mods are polarising. Mods are either angels or devils, rarely anything in between. Standing in the human space between takes some efforts. :)

@LegendaryDude Someone once commented to me, when I suggested a different interpretation of a particularly math-ey post, [paraphrasing here] "dude, shutup! I've got a bachelor's in math and have taken education classes." What a tool.

@SevenSidedDie So it sounds like you should buy this guy a puppy and kick me in the shins =)

@nitsua60 Or kick a puppy and buy someone some shins?

@BESW shin some puppies and buy a kick?

so I'm thinking of modifying the alignment system a bit for my custom world

@DForck42 If you can shin a puppy, then you can bark a puppy, and this amuses me.

@DForck42 Doo eeeet. Alignment is ripe for hacking, and (IMNSHO) was always meant to be setting-specific anyway.

@SevenSidedDie So long as you don't disembark a puppy. That sounds really evil.

@DForck42 Is there a puppies/shins axis?

@SevenSidedDie basically what I'm thinking is that you fit somewhere on two axis, one axis is good and evil, the other Lawful and Chaotic

there are 4 major 8 major tick marks along each axis

@DForck42 [squint] Which alignment system are we hacking?

@BESW dnd

On one end you are likely to flip off a box of kittens, on the other you're likely to take the box home and cuddle the kittens?

@LegendaryDude Oh, no, that's the kittens/bird axis.

@BESW hah!

@BESW They would just make puppy eyes to get back aboard anyway:

the further you are into one part of the axis, the less wiggle room there is on the others

so if you are full on good, there's no wiggle room to prefer lawful or chaotic (you're NG)

@DForck42 Ah, so a diamond or circle instead of a square.

@DForck42 Ah, interesting. What's the purpose, though? The problem with alignment has always been twofold: one, it's not clear what G/E/L/C mean practically speaking, and two, they keep forgetting what game effect they want the mechanic to create.

@DForck42 Being that chaotic and lawful require some form of dispassion on some level?

@SevenSidedDie My sympathies for the sharp tongued moderation issue pointed at you. That one apparently generated enough views for it to trend and Google to add that to my daily feed of things I read.

@SevenSidedDie You're Internet Famous!

@LegendaryDude yes

@SevenSidedDie exactly

@BESW I plan on clearly defining what being good, evil, lawful, and chaotic mean in the world

Moderation is a thankless yet necessary job. -_-

Early D&D seemed to mostly be using the alignment axis as a way to let PCs slaughter sapient beings while still being heroic.

@MadMAxJr Wow, really! The meta post, you mean? Hah. How does that even register with Google, I wonder. It's not really the side of the site that's interesting.

It was a way to quickly sort things into black and white issues.

the tl; dr for now is: good - put others first, evil - put yourself first, lawful - rules and laws MUST be followed, chaotic - go with what seems the correct action/do what YOU want

@DForck42 I don't think D&D works very well with subjective definitions of alignments so good on you for defining them, at least not in earlier editions. 5e leaves a lot of room for interpretation because you aren't severly punished for being non-lawful good

Later on it was used as a roleplay guide, a map of interreality political factions, a way to balance powerful class features...

@SevenSidedDie Android mobile devices have a google app. It keeps track of your browsing and what is trending on those sites that you browse. So it feeds me comics and news issues it thinks are relevant to me, based on how much activity they get on those sites. That meta post apparently popped the threshold for 'hey this is hot over on rpg meta!'

@LegendaryDude yeah. basically I want to make it more concrete meaning

but the way I'm doing it, if you're, say, a 1 in lawful, you'll TEND to prefer lawful, but you aren't ALWAYS lawful

So, how does clearly defining the alignments change your game?

a 4 in lawful would mean you ALWAYS follow the law, no matter what

What play experience are you looking to enable/alter?

Alignment does a few things like help a DM avoid a Paladin suddenly decide to burn orphanages down.

Alignment used right is a tool. I find it helpful with newer RPG players. What you want to avoid is ending up with alignment feeling like a cage or a trap.

@DForck42 Does that mean you force it on the player, or does that mean that if they stray you adjust their alignment accordingly?

@BESW more to help players make more informative decisions on how their character interacts with the world

One way of handling alignment that I thought was kind of cool was to do it behind the screen. Keep your player's alignment secret but track every action that shifts it.

@LegendaryDude it'll be a player choice, but if it's noticibly off I'd inform them how they're playing vs what they said the character is. it's up to them

Rise of the Runelords requires the DM keep track of the players sins, for use very late in the campaign. :D

Yes

now, the alignment IS important because the gods in this world are rather hands-on, and the alignment of a player will determine which gods take interest in them

Yes itdoes

With unfortunately very little payoff

Almost not worth it

Part of alignment should instill the idea that there are consequences for acting too far out of your behavior. If you intend to change your behavior, you can over time. Alignment changing shouldn't be a lightswitch or else you'll get Paladins pleading temporary chaotic evil made me do it.

@MadMAxJr Aha, that makes more sense.

@MadMAxJr exactly

@LegendaryDude I think the 1e DMG advises that method. But alignment is much more concrete in AD&D than in later editions.

I actually have a bard going through that right now, he's slowly switching over to evil, or at least more neutral

Evil bards? Oh no, legends, myths, and stories full of plot holes and grammatical errors. D:

The best fallen paladin story I have is not related to alignment. His cleric friend died and he made a deal with a Pit Fiend who granted a wish to resurrect the cleric in exchange for freedom. Of course, his deity was not too happy about that, no matter how noble the deed.

@MadMAxJr The Phantom Menace

I also thought it was funny they wasted a Wish on resurrection at that level.

There's a good example. Alignment should help drive a plot. Even if alignment doesn't always make sense. Moral/ethical conflict can be done very well if handled by a group mature enough for the issues that cause the conflict.

Alignment should also help establish general expectations quickly. Detect Evil isn't a free pass to start murdering targets. But it should give you an idea of what you can expect from them.

That said, Alignment isn't appropriate for every game/story.

Like, for example, VtM.

If it's being used primarily as a roleplay aid... alignment is kind of a blunt tool for a delicate job.

Though I'm a proponent of concrete, metaphysical alignment of the who-do-you-work-for-in-the-godswar type of early D&D, for roleplaying-centric alignment I really appreciate Dungeon World's take on it: choose an alignment, you get a "do this specific thing in a session? get a benny". It promotes a pattern of actions without getting into ethical debates.

I would agree, for groups with experience playing RPGs.

When I was doing some public games for a store, alignment was helpful with people new to RPGs or simply new to d20.

@SevenSidedDie Did you see my BGS/Shadowcraft mashup mechanic for patron magic?

@BESW Rather, yes.

@SevenSidedDie I really love the way DW does a lot of things. I wish it didn't require so much mental effort to run, haha. I GMed it once and after about 2 hours I was completely wiped out mentally.

@BESW No, link me up?

I still need to find a good example play of Fate. I really want to run it but I still don't fully grasp the mechanics in action.

@MadMAxJr What format do you prefer? Video, podcast, text?

@LegendaryDude I hear you. It's potentially exhausting. On the balance though, I always hear amazement at how much it feels like happened each session, even when they're only 2 hours long. So I try to worry less about length and wearing myself out now. :D And, I'm getting more practiced at it.

I was trying to find a decent youtube, but I wasn't really thrilled with the first couple finds. That said I only put about ten minutes into it. I need some good examples of how and when rolls come into play, what is and isn't a proper use of an aspect, and at least one start to end combat.

Have you looked at the G+ circles for Fate? They tend to have nice links to that sort of thing.

Every month or so Fred Hicks and/or the Evil Hat twitter feed link to one.

I obliterated my G+ account recently, so I have not seen that. :/

I'm also thinking the alignment of the character, and the measure of their deeds, will determine which plane they go to when they die

Whichever plane has the best tavern to find afterlife adventures in.

I've also got 3 pantheons: the alignment gods, the race gods, and the dragons. in the history of the world there have been 2 wars between the gods and dragons

To be fair, dragons can be jerks.

@MadMAxJr yup

I've been trying to find minis for red, green, blue, and white ancient dragons

haven't had a lot of luck

@MadMAxJr Wat.

I didn't order the dragon. Did you order the dragon?

lol!

@BESW Bubblegumshoe is one of those games I have almost no experience with, and I've never heard of Shadowcraft. How do they link up in this context?

Time to commute. Stay safe, stay sane.

@MadMAxJr byeeeee

Shadowcraft is a Fate game where you always succeed at casting magic; if you fail your roll, you succeed at cost by taking a consequence that changes your body to acquire qualities of the source of your magic. Too many consequences at once and you become an NPC merged with the source of your magic permanently.

You can only remove those consequences by spending time doing things which remind you who you are.

In Bubblegumshoe, you're teens who have basic teen skills, but can access unusual (specialised or adult) skills through your relationships with others. Each relationship has a pool of points you can spend from to gain access to the skill, or to get your friend/relative to do something useful for you.

@BESW Ah, I see the alignment connection. You become more like your patron then.

You can only regain those points by doing things to reinforce your relationship.

You become more like your patron, or in the BGS sense you get consequences which imply a falling out with your patron.

Either works depending on the context of your action.

And either way, it's very much a "who do you work for?" kind of thing.

I'm working on how to make it less unwieldy in pantheons that don't demand exclusive devotion to a single god (eg, any real-world pantheon).

Hoping to make it work for our Magical Ancient Egypt game.

@BESW Don't forget, though, how close to wargaming they were. I always try to keep in mind that ODD alignment isn't just useful in that it told players who they could kill, but that it actually told them there were some who shouldn't get the axe =)

@BESW That sounds like a fun experiment/project.

Plus, I like the Holger Carlsen books, so the Law-Chaos axis as being organizational/social, rather than personal, just makes so much (more) sense to me.

I've yet to find my Goldilocks magic system, so I'm always intrigued by new ones. but I am also warming to the idea that I don't have one, just a variety of different tastes for different settings and purposes.

[slaps self on wrist]

That'd be "For whom do you work," thank you very much.

@BESW No, like in the old joke, it'd be "whom do you work for, [expletive]?"

(There we go.)

Oh, English, your cute little case system is so a Dora bowl. ^_^

@nitsua60 [amused]

OMG, I'm just finished catching up on the day's edits and comments (such as have not been deleted.) Wow.

There is an impressive degree of doubling down in that meta post.

OTOH, seeing someone (JoshuaAslan, perhaps) say earlier in chat that this sort of thing used to happen once a month makes me feel good; I'd have said that this sort of thing happens every three months or so, which means we must be making progress, right?

(Or just getting a worse-and-worse reputation among GitPers and redditers?)

does this site have a bad rep on GitP? I thought it just had, like, no rep there

Folks who come from RPG forums which value open-ended speculation and have a confrontational culture, often get severe culture shock coming here.

Reddit-typers have often also drunk the freeze peach kool-aid.

@A_S00 I don't have a strong sense of that--but I do have the impression, and can't point to wherefrom I derive it.

@BESW yeah, GitP also has a very narrow view of what the hobby consists of -- they're a specialist community in D&D 3.x optimization, while we deal with pretty much everything under the sun

Yeah. When a GitPer tries to answer a social problem with a mechanical solution and gets pushback, they tend to go back to GitP and say we don't know what we're doing / complain about moderation / etc.

But it's no slight I mean to any other community. Any structure that persists will end up self-selecting for people who value that structure and its product. So movingto a different structure with some of the same superficial qualities is like to create culture shock. (I can barely even participate in other Stacks!)

@nitsua60 yeah, even between Stacks it can take some adjusting. Worldbuilding is far more freewheeling in some ways that we are here, and DIY has its own sort of looseness

@Shalvenay While I agree that WB is more lax in moderation, it's very very narrow in the epistemologies it considers valid.

WB.SE has no real equivalent to RPG.SE commitment to embracing diverse playstyles.

@BESW yeah, I will agree there. WB.SE does tend towards a very...analytical view of the world

@BESW hm...I see that kind of answer on GitP all the time, but usually I also see it immediately getting shouted down, even over there.

Like, the most obvious example is an OP that says "I want to prove my DM wrong about something, help me build an overpowered character to do so," followed by 50% replies trying to build an overpowered character, and 50% of replies saying "this sounds like it will only end in tears, have you considered talking to your DM?"

@A_S00 I think that Stack feedback can be more...visceral

on a traditional forum, each side is treating the other side as noise in a thread like that

@Shalvenay like, getting edited/downvoted/VtC'ed feels worse than getting argued with? I could see that

It's kinda funny/sad to see WB trying to solve social worldbuilding problems with the physical sciences.

@Shalvenay Yeah, any time I see a big reaction to a single downvote, I think "hmm... something here is not really working well."

@Shalvenay Except, part of the downvote thing is that you can't argue back.

@Shalvenay That's an interesting observation. I don't forum enough to judge for myself, but it certainly explains plenty of what I've seen.

It's not "treating the other side as noise," it's "being able to shout back at the other side if you want." Hence "confrontational culture."

whereas, in Stackland, downvotes carry a lot more weight

@BESW that too, to some degree

Downvotes carry weight because we can't challenge them or dismiss them in a visible way.

@BESW Also, they're red.

They sit there as a visible judgement which all can see, but which we can't respond to. Someone is Wrong On the Internet and we can't tell them so!

yeah -- and they also carry immediate impact to a reader, especially in significant quantities

@BESW And that makes me see red.

I wonder if the (outsized) impact (to a forum-accustomed immigrant) of the downvote comes from the idea not that one is being disagreed with, but that one is being dismissed?

a partisan reader has a much easier time skipping a few posts inline in a forum thread than dredging a downvote-piled answer out from the bottom of a Stack question

Possibly. What do downvotes mean on reddit?

@BESW YOU HAVE VIOLATED THE CONSENSUS. ASSUME THE CORRECTION-RECEPTION POSITION.

where is this meta thread btw?

@Shalvenay Which one?

the one referred to there

It appears to have been deleted. This was undoubtedly justified from a best-practices perspective, but is sad from a rubbernecking perspective

@A_S00 ah

@Shalvenay Just go to meta and look for the, frankly, shocking question title.

Its title was something like "SevenSidedDie, I have a problem with your moderation," and its contents were about what you'd think.

@A_S00 Doesn't look deleted to me, it's the newest question on my list.

@A_S00 yeah. I can't see it on meta/

oh, there we go

It has not been deleted, but neither will you find it in the Active Questions queue because of its downvotes.

Okay, on a dfferent topic: I've got a joke I don't understand. So...

aaahhhh that explains it

You gotta go for Newest Questions.

I think there's some reference I'm not getting?

No, it's just a really bad pun.

(I'm great neither with history nor geography.)

Well, "pun" is a strong word.

It's wordplay.

where do your arms go?

\facepalm

yeah it's pretty bad

Where do I sent in my resignation letter?

The joke opens with the assumption one is talking about military might. The punchline clarifies that it was never about military might, but about basic clothing practices.

If "sleevies" also had a double meaning, it'd be a pun.

But it's just garden-path wordplay.

Questions with a score of -8 or lower on Meta do not show up on its front page. On main site, that threshold is -4 or lower. They aren't filtered out on any other question list, such as any of the lists you get to by clicking the "questions" button.

yeah -- I think the OP really doesn't understand the distributed-moderation/collective-resource nature of a Stack

@Shalvenay As several individuals are pointing out, he doesn't really understand it and he's refusing community advice around it.

And at this point we've spent far too much time and effort on someone who doesn't want either.

@Shalvenay I've got to admit, if there were a way to flag an edit I might have done so while I was playing catch-up. At a certain point it just started to feel like vandalism, and I wanted to scream "this isn't your stuff!" So I stepped away and watched Bob Ross with my daughters.

In other news, Bob Ross is still amazing.

it actually makes me wonder "what is this guy thinking?!"

That he understands what's going on. It's very common, we all fall prey to it.

yeah -- his model of the world is that of a confrontational-yet-lightly-moderated, basically append-only forum

If we know what's going on (especially if the narrative is attractive, like being the persecuted righteous), we have no push to examine it further.

I regularly have to remind myself that some people are happy playing antagonistic GM-vs-player RPGs.

It baffles me, but I have to believe that I just don't understand it rather than believing that I'm right and they're wrong.

This morning I had the experience of trying to explain Bob Ross to a colleague from South America. I did not do the man the legend justice. "He was a white guy with a wispy brown afro! And he was friends with squirrels! And he'd have this great painting going and suddenly it'd be all 'let's just take the knife and load it up with black...' and you're all 'nooooo, Bob, what are you doing?' and then seven minutes later it's even more beautiful."

It didn't really come across

and thus he assumes that any sort of sustained moderation action involving one person's postings is a) the work of a single moderator

@BESW Are you putting a fine point on it there? As in specifically player-vs-GM as opposed to PCs-vs-NPCs?

@nitsua60 Yes.

not half-a-dozen or more community members flagging, voting, and reviewing in addition to moderator actions

There's a playstyle where the GM tries to make the hardest challenges he can within the rules of the system, and the players try to overcome those challenges as efficiently as possible within the rules of the system.

@BESW Yeah. It's a very different model. Done well I do think it can lead to a lot of interesting scenarios, and some real fun. But it's sure fraught with traps.

and b) a sign of personal intent

hence his assumption of the position of the 'persecuted righteous"

It makes me happy that there is a cutout image of Bob Ross and his impressive afro available.

@doppelgreener ...but it's a gif.

@BESW yeah -- I'd call it a "challenge-response" playstyle myself. even then, though, the DM is more of a challenge-generator than a true adversary\

@BESW And then there's the playstyle "I'm the only kid on the block with the books and I made the dungeon, so if you and your dinky little fourth-grade friends want to find out where the hoopodoopo is you have to play with me," and it goes downhill from there. (Also, this totally isn't my older brother I'm talking about.)

as the DM isn't engaging the players in the moral domain (unless he's intending to run them off from the table)

Challenge-response doesn't have to be antagonistic. I do challenge-response play and it's collaborative. We all win if the PCs win.

What I'm describing is antagonistic where either the GM or the players win, but not both.

Anyway, I must dash. ttfn

@BESW I'd say it's more "either the GM-controlled side wins or the PC party wins" -- the problems come when the GM and players are actually engaging in that aforementioned moral-domain warfare, if you will

@BESW That is OK!

(unless it's animated. doesn't look animated to me.)

But then again I also like 3.5 PvP, which is by any reasonable measure terrible.

yeah -- D&D 3.5e is not balanced to be an antagonistic game