@nitsua60 Mixed results but mostly on the positive side! A long weekend may help, and further experiments next week should give a larger effect size from which to draw conclusions.
Hmm. The Sage Advice in the first half of this podcast might clear up a bunch of 5e questions relating to targeting. dnd.wizards.com/articles/features/…
Lots of commentary on twinned spell, what's considered a target, etc.
@MikeQ There's nothing as formal as that. However, if I were interested in running a game and having some stackizens play I'd probably drop a line here and ask BESW (room owner) to "pin" it. (The top three (currently) messages on the star-board are pinned and won't move from those locations until BESW un-pins them.)
Another route would be to post an "ad" in meta, though I'm not sure the reception that would get. (I mean, you'd probably get players, but you'd probably also get yelled at for using meta incorrectly. And maybe it'd get closed/deleted before you got players.)
@BESW Maybe--I got some interesting things that first day or two, but nothing really after that. OTOH, I'm still just in brainstorming mode; any more thoughts/suggestions that came my way could be useful. Maybe next week?
@trogdor Because most room owners aren't nearly so active as I am, and the primary purpose of the star bar is to show folks what's happened recently in chat.
@SevenSidedDie Dammit, I did not read Vattu, instead I went past the first few pages of Saga and found it readable and now it's half three in the morning and I planned to work tomorrow.
@trogdor Partly because that thing, in all the fight and war and stuff, seems to be about hope.
I think aloe-goodbye will be left to another time, because I really like "You're looking through a keyhole and see the man you came to kill on the other side. Who is he and why have you come to kill him?" as first question to my players.
my pinnacle so far: she is comforted by holding things, so she holds my thumb in one hand, my pinky in the other, and I use the other three fingers to keep the bottle stabilized. My other arm is holding her up, as I walk around talking to my wife.
I was thinking about parent-dexterity last night: I was lying with my daughter, who's currently croupy, and folded a blanket with my feet to pass up to my hands and prop up her head/chest a bit more.
@JoelHarmon oh, it wasn't so much a question as a weird, almost stalker-level bit of parent-sharing. (I'd not slept much the night before--with same croupy daughter--and awoke with the urgent thought "I wonder if Joel's had to deal with croup yet?!")
@trogdor Just that I, like I assume most parents do, sometimes wonder "what would life be like without them?" But I'll never not have them. Which made me think of how long I put off ever buying a car, and how I'll probably never go back to not having one.
@nitsua60 but dishwashers on cars? I don't think I want one of those, and that isn't me saying I don't want kids, it's me saying I don't want a dishwasher on a car,......
@nitsua60 My colleague has 3 too. And after his stories I think that it will be perfect number for me. Sometime in future. But for now I'm working on stable basis for family.
So I'll share anyway: my older daughter had croup last weekend and got really worked up around 2am on Saturday night. So I bundled her up and took her out on the back porch, as one does. And I was sitting there in 15-deg. air, looking up at the stars, with a 40-lb sack of "I love you" and "I'm so miserable" on my lap, thinking back to eight years ago (probably to the month) doing the same thing for the first time with my oldest. Back then we lived in a 3rd-floor walk-up, so my wife and I were trudging up and down the stairs with a wheezing baby, delirious for lack of sleep.
@RollingFeles Number is weird, in my experience. Before my first was born, I was convinced four was the number for us. After my second was born, I was convinced one was our number. Then, after all the trouble it was getting to three, I'm just happy they're all healthy and (usually) happy.
@nitsua60 my parents were only trying for one more kid after me, as they say it, and they joke about how I tricked them into thinking it was easy, plus they had twins instead of the one kid they expected XD
@trogdor There's a great bit Louis CK does about twins. Basically, that the word is a sham and that we should replace it with "two f----ing babies." As in, don't say "awww, how adorable, you've got twins," or "oh, it must be tough having twins." Say it right.
I mean, Joel's only got two arms. How do you expect him to type with twins [redacted]?
@nitsua60 readiness here is more about foundation for a life without general problems and thoughts like: "damn, where we have to live" or "damn, I wish we had a car", or "damn, I don't have money for anything". I'm sure there will be hardships and challenges for me. I just don't want my children to remember their childhood as "our family struggled through hardships".
@RollingFeles Yeah, I certainly know what you mean. I'm just remembering all the times in month 8 people asked me if we were ready. "pshhh-no! But it doesn't matter!" was generally my answer. We were prepared, we were capable, but we were not ready.
We had no idea what was coming down the pike, nor how we would handle it.
it's definitely to the point that not being in a place in your life where it would be in any way responsible/possible to have kids, and relating that to not being ready, is a step of a differnce to "not being ready/prepared for it"
@nitsua60 the rabbit hole is not having kids, the rabbit hole is a bottomless pit
I would rather a teacher and father of three not fling himself into a bottomless pit, please
On the same vein of the question about dndtools. Realmhelps.net too have complete description of non-OGL item.
This time the scope of use is way smaller, we have only 39 istances where the site is used, in both questions(15) and answers(24).
@Anaphory there are several thread at r/DungeonWorld and I saw some sites with Dungeon Starters(PDF with a bunch of start questions, custom moves, location moves, monster/npc descriptions for masters to start right away with some interesting premise).
On a related to this chat note and since I'm trying to familiarise myself with combat encounters that aren't just life-or-death, have you guys played Descent 2e or Imperial Assault? They excel at that kind of thing.
@trogdor The whole thing starts with a childbirth, drawn in quite some detail, a firefight, and some war fugitives. The war and the fugitives remain, but it's about how this child of two enemy ex-combattants-gone-somewhat-pacifist grows up.
And how its very existence poses a threat to the two societies that are very much formed by the war, through the positive message it brings.
There's still a lot of gore and pain and dying, so it won't grow to be my favourite, but getting past the first few pages and getting used to it made it readable.
Saga is too much “War is BAD!” for that. I mean, there are streaks without it. The stuff during space flight is just marvellous. But even there, Hazel's baby sitter is a constant visual reminder of the war going on outside.
I sorta prefer stories set in worlds/universes where I would actually like it if I visited them
even if not for too long XD
it isn't so much the concept that I would be in danger, in the hypothetical scenario for me, upon visiting a story place, I would be safe, but watching a ton of people die every once in a while would certainly be a downer in the extreme
@nitsua60 So far we've avoided croup, but there has been plenty of times where she refused to sleep. So I have spend many hours with a baby/toddler on me slowly drifting off into the sandy realms of sleep
Hmm. I'm worried about how much hints and handholding I should do for players completely new to RPGs and I don't know if it's a good question for SE - might be too broad or subjective.
By handholding I mean explicitly suggesting what actions they may take to overcome a challenge, for example.
Yeah, that's gonna need a lot of 'reading the room.'
My advice is, tell them exactly what you just said: that you're not sure how much you should be suggesting actions for them. And then ask them to help you make an environment where they're comfortable asking for help.
Heh, I've read plenty of stuff that suggests as much. It's difficult to get into the right mindset, however, especially considering the start of the game is still a bit away. I just want to prepare everything now to have the opportunity to revise later.
I've had similar challenges, both with getting group buy-in to try new systems and with getting people to feel comfortable GMing anything at all.
My solution was a long-game process of changing the "landscape" of how people at the table viewed their role in the game. I didn't set out to delibera...
(it's also difficult because in our country's the RPG scene is only now coming to the realisation that this is how things should be done; I'm in a very old-fashioned game right now, too, so it influences me)
I was a pretty dictatorial GM at first, in large part because I started GMing specifically so that I'd be able to leverage that in-game role into out-of-game social influence to control the environment.
Reversing that to instead invite other people into the sphere of influence took a long time.
I mean, there were definitely other factors. I was declaiming a monologue from Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead to some friends when one of them decided I'd make a great GM. I was given the books and about a month to prep over break while he gathered a group for me.
Then I embraced it in part because it gave me tools to create a social space apart from my friends' friends who could only socialise in ways I wasn't comfortable being around.
Being the GM meant that even if we were at someone else's house I could enforce a set of expected behaviours.
I still do that, creating safe, calm environments for my friends to socialise, but I've learned to do it without conflating it with the role of GM.
@Magician Binge-reading your blog a bit, stumbled upon a link to something called Horizon which I'm interested in, but the link's broken now. Do you know where I can find it? The main site is just one post.
Basically, GM declared that when the counter reached a certain number, something bad would happen. The vampire lord would wake up, cultists would finish the ritual, whatever. And incremented the counter whenever PCs would rest, or when other conditions would be met.
Any blog that discusses game design (both the mechanical perspective and the social/whatever to call it one) is useful to me, what with me being an aspiring game designer. This one's one of the better ones though.
Oh, and @Magician in regards to the consequences of combat and all that - have you seen/played Descent 2e or Imperial Assault? They're boardgame basically built around the principle - you have a big campaign, each combat is a tactical challenge for both the Overlord and the heroes, and winning/losing a combat means some changes to future combats, but never actual death except for the final scenario (obviously).
I came close once but we missed a rule and didn't realize there was a turn limit or something like that, so I got right outside the door to the security codes or whatever (this was a mission where the heroes were defending) and the mission ended
I would have played it more aggressively
And won
But because of whatever the restriction was and our misunderstanding of it I missed my chance
It was a perfect fit for my style. I was always a greedy bastard before, but in this case? The class gave me benefits for being greedy! Now I could steal all the loot and leave my friends to die without feeling bad about it :)
It is a binary state, yes, but at least on first glance I'm more likely to think a game is balanced if I had a fighting chance until the end than if it was decided mid-game.
It could be a freak occurence, sure. But it's not like I have a larger sample to analyse.
@UristMcDorf That's fair, and you make a good point. The last time I played as Dracula, they had me cornered in Italy and it came down to only a few health left before the end of week 3.
I think the best part of that game is playing as Dracula and listening to the hunters try to figure out what cities you've been to and what direction you're traveling in.
@DForck42 Sick kid, up half the night, trying to remind myself through headache how precious those times are. (It's funny what's on an eight year-old's mind at 2am.)
My fiancee and I do as well, though she wants to have kids later and I want them earlier. At least we settled on an amount and names (if all goes according to plan, anyway).
Bluh. A bit of a bad topic for me because she really wants to leave Russia and I really don't. And we definitely won't have kids before we settle on a place and country.
Being the, for a lack of better word, secretary of one of the officers I had access to a PC and smuggled in some vidya. Then I'd stay up till like four hours before I had to wake up.
That's considering that I require more sleep than the average person to function normally.
There was some research done that supposedly found a genetic mutation that allows people to have a shorter sleep cycle, with those people found to only need 6 hours of sleep to function normally
I am fairly certain I fall into that group
Because whether I get 6, 8 or 10 hours of sleep I feel generally the same level of awareness throughout the day
There're a lot of people like that. It can also be a result of a behaviour change from what I understand - you can condition yourself to be fine with just 6h of sleep.
Modern lifestyle having a lot of influence on that.
Well, LD, it might be the other way around and you've just forgotten what it feels like to be fully awake, and the extra hours of sleep not helping to alleviate the long-term problem :D
On the same vein of the question about dndtools. Realmhelps.net too have complete description of non-OGL item.
This time the scope of use is way smaller, we have only 39 istances where the site is used, in both questions(15) and answers(24).
