TRPG General Chat

I'll update the link later today. Right now I'm about to phone the third party blocker my bank uses and try to get them to let me pay Kickstarter for Fate More.

(Yes, my bank has hired a third party to choose which websites I can't use my card on.)

Lord_Gareth

Oof

BESW

They seem to hate crowdfunding: Kickstarter and Patreon are both blocked.

afk steaming

Magician

3:35 AM

@Lord_Gareth Nice!

Adeptus

@Lord_Gareth Aisling's chainmail looks great

(I realise complimenting the art, when you're the author, doesn't mean much. But it's easier to get an immediate impression of - I can't glance at your words and go "Great story")

Lord_Gareth

@Adeptus I deeply love the artist's style. He also did the Psionics Augmented: Wilder artwork. When the bossman asked who I wanted to do the cover he was my first and only thought.

Esp. since the original artwork for Aisling still makes me kinda sad

And don't worry man, I asked for the guy specifically to get good art

It's nice to have my good taste validated .

BESW

....Hey, that wasn't completely painful. But I'm seriously going to go to other banks and say "DO YOU DO THIS?"

Anyway, grats @Lord_Gareth! I'll put together a new link block now.

Lord_Gareth

Thank you!

BESW

**Cool RPG stuff:** [Bundle of Holding](http://bundleofholding.com "buy RPGs cheap in bulk, support charities & indie designers!");
[Mourners: Scum of Shatterdown](https://imgur.com/gallery/qsrCH "a fantasy novel by our own @Lord_Gareth!");
[7th Sea 2nd Ed](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/johnwickpresents/7th-sea-second-edition "Revised rules, revised Nations, updated for the 21st Century");
[Apocalypse World 2nd Ed](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/226674021/apocalypse-world-2nd-edition "streamlined Hx, a whole new set of battle moves, a threat map instead of fronts");

So, apparently my bank uses a service which automatically blocks transactions with companies that are "at risk" for fraud or failure--which in practice seems to mean "not a multibillion international behemoth."

They will lift the block for an individual user, but they then won't allow the user to challenge any transactions with that company.

Adeptus

3:54 AM

@Lord_Gareth Well then, mission accomplished!

BESW

...And the service they use has no Internet presence I can find.

The only thing that comes up on my Googles is a Chrome addon that makes it harder to tag-surf on twitter.

Lord_Gareth

I am massively excited. And nervous. One might describe it as nervoucited.

BESW

Lord_Gareth

Yes, thank you

BESW

I'm gonna share it in the writers.se chat too, because book.

Lord_Gareth

4:07 AM

Ooh, I can drop by there.

But please do

BESW

@Lord_Gareth Maybe also SF&F?

I don't go there anymore, myself.

Lord_Gareth

@BESW I'm less familiar with that one and don't have a presence or history there.

Adeptus

4:28 AM

I'll drop a mention in Mos Eisley

Lord_Gareth

Thank you my friend.

The Oracle

5:00 AM

0

Q: How Do I login if I haven't confirmed my email?

I know this isn't an RPG question, but I need to know right now. I made an account on a computer where gmail is blocked and I can't log in. the tag is irrelavant

discussion

doppelgreener

5:51 AM

GARAGLKJASGLKJ

i am much frustrate at our programming envrionment

but just as i wrote that out, i realised i may have a thing that'll actually work

oh man.

so, we don't have proper tooling on a lot of PCs, because security means we can't set up and download and share the proper tools for doing our jobs. this is bad. replace "our job" with "emergency ward" and "tools" with "surgical and healthcare equipment", and pretend everything was set up so not everyone had access to all the right equipment, and those who had it couldn't share it, and it was very hard to acquire it if you didn't have it, and so on.

so i've been working on a compiled javascript file for a while that really should be generated from several other files. i can't version this javascript file effectively. i just overwrote my local copy with the wrong version, and could not get back my original copy.

because there are no backups anywhere along the line for this file because of how fudged up the environment is around it.

... except in a different testing server we were testing on last week.

Miniman

@doppelgreener Ah, the joys of a Friday afternoon.

doppelgreener

@Miniman I have a report due before I go home and I have a 4:30 to ~5-5:30pm (who knows?) meeting.

and I have a family dinner I'm not going to be late for.

I could, but I won't, say so many swear words about the vice pressure I've been put under. "Hey, take care of both these things. urgently. today. i want them done monday. i have delegated someone else to hound you about the first thing getting done. but, also, i am going to hound you personally about the second thing getting done."

did i say one report? i meant two reports.

[returns to reports]

Miniman

@doppelgreener Good luck.

doppelgreener

@Miniman The person who wants them is probably not going to be getting them. They can wait to Monday morning.

Oh, good, I managed to message them. They're getting them Monday and they're okay with that. I need to have a word with them about pressuring me to do things urgently they don't need done so urgently.

70

Q: How to objectively counter "You are the first one to complain about that."?

I've been facing this situation for some time where our office's management keep choosing the cheapest option whenever they have to pay for anything related to our work environment or company travels. For example, We are a small subsidiary in Africa and several employees travel to our company h...

professionalism management communication employer-relations unprofessional-behavior

Hm.

(Unrelated.)

trogdor

6:40 AM

@BESW hee

BESW

9:26 AM

Tonight's dinner was very simple except for all the chopping: potatoes, onions, bell peppers, and Veja-Links, all diced and sautéed together with garlic, ginger, and Tabasco.

trogdor

mmm

you are the only person I know who puts enough effort into the vegetarian stuff XD

for me to like it I mean

BESW

Heh. It's honestly not much effort at all--especially compared to cooking meat. Just takes a mental shift out of the meat-making mindset.

If I had more time to cook, then I'd get into fancy stuff.

Ask Lovecraft suggests a logical extension of the Living Will.

Toshinou Kyouko

10:38 AM

I have my fortnightly d&d session today

trying to think of how to incorporate valentines into the game as a player

maybe I'll give an offering of cookies to the gods (the DM)

any other fun ideas?

trogdor

maybe a session about someone using love potions with unintended consequences?

unless you don't want to do a whole big thing about it XD

eimyr

@ToshinouKyouko who is your character?

@ToshinouKyouko I assume you are not the DM?

Toshinou Kyouko

@eimyr I'm a druid halfling

not the DM unfortunately

I just wanna have an excuse for biscuits

i had a fling with some dryads, maybe that could come in useful

eimyr

@ToshinouKyouko And you alignment is?

Toshinou Kyouko

@eimyr neutral good

eimyr

10:44 AM

Great!

Toshinou Kyouko

my housemate is the dm so I can also collab with him

eimyr

How about you need to have a heart-themed party in the woods to repay the nature for humanity/halflingity destructive desires?

BESW

How much session hijacking do you want to do?

eimyr

You would need to carve out a heart of a sinner against nature from each offending race...

BESW

Recruit the party to get a lost krenshar reunited with its mate.

Toshinou Kyouko

10:46 AM

@BESW well, my DM already has a session planned - I just want to introduce the opportunity for sweets

@eimyr eep

eimyr

Blood is sweet.

BESW

There's always the Kandyman.

Toshinou Kyouko

ahaha

Fondant Surprise

BESW

> Impolite guests get to feel the back of my candy hand!

^ Actual line in the story.

Toshinou Kyouko

:D

I havent' watched much dr who

trogdor

10:54 AM

@BESW oh my god why didn't I think of this XD

BESW

@trogdor Because "Valentine's Day" isn't quite synonymous with "execution by Fondant Surprise"?

2

trogdor

lol

but the Kandyman is a pretty great idea all the same

he sort of fits in a wonky way around Valentines Day

BESW

The Happiness Patrol would be a great Valentine theme, I suppose.

trogdor

yeah

and I mean, this is still a game session, we don't actually want it to turn into a dating sim

unless the group in question wants that, I don't care if they do, that's fine

but I am guessing they don't want that

Toshinou Kyouko

nah, we have couples that are not couple in game so i dont want anything to be awkward

actually, the couples' characters hate each other :v

our gnome keeps rolling bad and ruining the drow's plans

BESW

11:02 AM

@trogdor Heh. Someone recently asked me for help figuring out how to help a player have fun with his new bard. I waxed eloquent about how bards are "feels conjurers" and advisors and wield unusual political power in the regions they travel. Then he said "Have you read this book my player says he's inspired by?" and I go look it up.

trogdor

lol

do you recognize that book? is there a particular thing that makes it really relevant?

BESW

I went and looked it up on TV Tropes.

> Denna, Fela, Mola, Devi, Penthe, Vashet, Felurian, and various side characters all show some degree of romantic or sexual interest in him. While some of these interactions are more significant that others, the books make it clear that Kvothe is very popular with women, even at fifteen.

> Has the skills of singing, acting, playing the lute, woodcraft, law, Sympathy, begging, thieving, and seduction.

trogdor

lol

very much bard

Toshinou Kyouko

haha

trogdor

I would suggest a heart shaped box of chocolates because tradition, but that would be expensive and very likely send the wrong signal XD

so cookies are probably a good idea XD

BESW

11:10 AM

Hmm. I guess I could make my cranberry ginger lemonade with extra red tea.

eimyr

11:38 AM

@BESW Hey, do you know who is the biggest Dungeon World badass around the chat?

BESW

Hmm.

SSD and JoshuaAslanSmith, I think?

Okeefe and Gomad too, but they're less regulars.

(Well, Okeefe lurks a lot and hardly says a thing.)

eimyr

Cool. Thanks.

BESW

For a chat regular who's vocal about DW and seems to know what he's talking about, JoshuaAslanSmith is your guy.

eimyr

Do you know Dungeon World to levels required for a competent GMing?

BESW

I know next to nothing about DW, to the point that whenever it's mentioned I have to remind myself it's not an Apocalypse World Engine game.

(Get it?)

I have run two sessions of a different AWE game (Monster of the Week) but I don't know how much that would help with being able to run DW.

I'm under the impression DW is one of the fiddliest AWE implementations.

eimyr

11:48 AM

(It's not?)

BESW

(It is. I get it mixed up with Savage Worlds.)

eimyr

(Then I don't get it)

Anyway, I had a look at the contents under OGL online.

BESW

(Never mind. My jokes aren't very good when I'm coming off an adrenaline spike.)

eimyr

And my perception of it weirds me out completely.

BESW

Are you familiar with anything run by the AWE?

eimyr

11:50 AM

Because it feels as if I could understand and run a game in one afternoon.

Nope.

BESW

Okay, that'll do it.

AWE is a weird little game. It's... give me a minute and I'll brb.

eimyr

Sure.

AWE was the one that introduce the idea of Moves, right?

It's not that I want to learn the game in chat.

BESW

I've only run two sessions in AWE and I don't think I did them right, but it did help me figure out what seems to be going on with the engine.

eimyr

It's just my perception of extreme ease at which I absorb game ideas weirds me out and I don't know if I'm doing it right.

BESW

From the GM perspective it's an explicit manifesto of GM style: a collection of Dos and Don'ts for GMs codified into loose actions triggered by narrative events.

eimyr

11:53 AM

E.g. when reading Mage, you are supposed to scratch your head like a madman and throw your book at random objects in anger, then two days later you look inside your fridge and it all clicks.

When reading Pathfinder I feel tempted to reference other parts of the book 99,9% of the time and then I go into wiki-like frenzy of reading random book parts until it makes sense again.

BESW

From the player perspective AWE is an explicit manifesto of genre: a collection of tropes and themes describing the sort of characters and situations the game's genre is associated with, which you get to choose semi-a-la-cart.

eimyr

With DW I read two paragraphs and I think "Oh, I know everything there is to know about the issue presented in the next 3 pages, I could skip them! Let's not though" And then I discover I was right and I could have skipped it to return when I need specific detail.

Should I see a doctor?

BESW

I haven't read DW so I can't speak to the presentation.

But... it's quite possible you've got it cold.

eimyr

Idiom Explanation request.

BESW

"Got it cold" means you understood it well the first time.

eimyr

11:57 AM

Maybe it just fits well with my own gaming predispositions.

I NEED TO PLAY IT.

I really feel that with DW I could play D&D without the hassle of playing D&D.

BESW

@eimyr Exactly. As a GM, AWE is a philosophical statement about how a GM should behave in relation to the story and the players. If this is a new philosophy to you, it's revolutionary and mind-blowing. But if you were doing that anyway--it seems almost pointlessly obvious and you keep looking for the actual game.

I sat down with AWE expecting to be blown away, based on what folks kept telling me about how it radically altered their understanding of RPGs.

I came away going "Okay, so it's basically free-form for me but my players get to have pre-made fiddly bits to choose from for their characters."

eimyr

"you keep looking for the actual game." - precisely what happened. I've been reading it and wondering where is the game bit? And then I realised the mechanics are unimportant and should be abstracted, therefore it makes little difference which abstraction system is underneath the manifesto.

@BESW Sounds like something you would say.

BESW

It fit my existing GMing style so well that the system basically vanished and at the end of the day... sure, my players seemed to like it so I may run it again some time, but I'd rather use an engine that helps me do something I wouldn't be doing anyway on my own.

eimyr

I found DW as a piece of writing that gives names and definitions to things I've been doing and then makes it easier for me to do them adequately.

BESW

It sounds like you understand DW.

eimyr

12:01 PM

Like a handy organiser.

Or flashcards.

BESW

Honestly for me it got in the way a little.

I kept thinking "I want to do X now but first I need to check if it's on the approve list of things for this situation." And it almost always was.

So I could've just been free-forming it and the game would've run better.

eimyr

Yeah.

I like it, because I can think "I want to do X, so I quickly check what mechanical abstraction I use to make it fair game." Boom, done.

Instead of trawling through my own imperfect mental representation of mechanical engine of insert-game-titleto make an arbitrary judgment.

BESW

I do that with Fate: One of 4 actions, pick a skill, done. And Fate has a point economy which helps me do something I'd struggle with on my own: embroiling players in hard narrative decisions and controlling cycles of crisis and victory.

eimyr

The elegance of Move system in modelling narrative-to-gameplay transition is something I deeply appreciate.

BESW

Indeed. I do admire the way an AWE game can control the entire tenor of play by carefully chosen moves.

eimyr

12:05 PM

Fate was a difficult one for me. Completely changed my paradigm of gaming.

BESW

I suspect that for many, Fate and AWE can fill a similar role and it just depends which system they run into first.

eimyr

It introduced mechanical abstraction to player-choice layer and introduced post-roll bargaining as central to storybuilding. I couldn't get why that works in the first place.

Well, I don't see ^^theabove^^ in DW as much.

BESW

True. Through the post-roll bargaining did come into play in my sessions.

eimyr

Not in mine. I was raised in success - partial success - marginal success - failure - botch paradigm of World of Darkness.

Therefore I was never binary to begin with but success at a cost was at the same time omnipresent and taboo.

Omnipresent - as partial and marginal successes are exactly that and taboo, because you can't turn a failure into a victory if you want a lethal crapsack world feel.

BESW

I get where you're coming from, yeah.

eimyr

12:12 PM

WoD taught me that players should have a certain feeling of powerlessness in the face of fate and the risk involved with rolling the dice is integral to the experience.

BESW

(Though I'd argue that it's quite easy to make "turning a failure into a victory" work in that kind of world theme--you've just gotta make the cost really hurt.)

eimyr

Fate taught me it's optional.

I agree, you can do this, but it also feels like you deliver much more powerful ludonarrative if the mechanical risk is mostly on the players, and pre-roll risk-vs-cost bargaining fits better than post-roll cost-of-success vs cost-of-failure bargaining.

Basically Fate asks "Which do you prefer?" while WoD asks "How much will you wager?"

BESW

(In a novel I recently read, which is aggressively dismal and cynical about its protagonist's ability to properly win at anything, he destroyed all zombies, everywhere, forever, by shattering a powerful talisman. The loss of the talisman was bad, but compared to "no zombies ever again" it seemed cheap. In the sequel, the talisman's true nature was revealed as a glyph from the gate of Heaven which could be used to save all of reality from impending destruction... if we still had it.)

eimyr

(Is it a major spoiler? I hope it wasn't from Dresden...)

BESW

Not Dresden.

Last I checked, Dresden's cosmology isn't very big on "Heaven."

eimyr

12:17 PM

I haven't read it yet. I only know the blurbs. But I intend to!

Now, in that light, what did DW teach me? Hmmm...

Maybe that I can have a D&D-like experience of picking stuff from a list without having to deal with all those pesky mechanics?

Esp. that stuffs come with their own mechanical explanation inline.

BESW

To stop worrying and love the narrative.

eimyr

Nihil novi in that

Oh! I just had a revelation.

DW feels like a CCG to me.

You have a number of moves and each says what it does right there in the description.

You only have to remember a few central rules and you're fine.

It's like... sailing vs canoeing. In D&D there are all those ropes and sails that gets tangled when you're not paying attention. In DW everyone brings their own paddle.

3

BESW

Except that usually in a CCG you say "I'm going to play this card" and if you don't play a card you can't do anything; while in DW you say "I'm going to do this thing" and the GM tells you if you have to play a card to do it.

eimyr

BTW, I'm going to have lunch, ttfn

BESW

ttfn

eimyr

12:24 PM

thanks for the conversation, really interesting

BESW

I should go to bed, meself.

Ditto!

...trying to decide what book to read next.

eimyr

Can't help with that I'm afraid.

Unless you never heard of Hyperion Cantos.

BESW

I've got a massive "pile" of ebooks sitting on my phone.

Picking one is the problem.

I think I've narrowed it down to Lagoon or 14.

Oh, well. Long day, bed early. Tomorrow night I hope to get to play Aquila Grove-Daughter!

trogdor

12:45 PM

looking forward to it

I could still wing something if the Aussies have something come up

I don't have anything big prepped, but I am a little more ready and willing than I would have been last week

but if Greener can GM that's cool too

mxyzplk

Hey all! We have a pretty large influx of new site users right now, please help guide them in the ways of RPG.SE. The biggest issues I see are Be Nice, Good Subjective Bad Subjective, comment discussion, and confusion over RAW/RAI/similar terms.

For Good Subjective, especially on these gm techniques questions, you can link them blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-subjective

For comment discussion/deletion, you can link them meta.rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/1174/…

For Be Nice, of course, meta.stackexchange.com/help/be-nice

For those tossing around RAI, we generally think that's a "trap" term, see meta.rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/3690/… (unless you really do get designer statements)

I'd like to thank @nitsua60 and @PremierBromanov for doing a good job reinforcing these on rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/74457/…

nitsua60

3:29 PM

@mxyzplk Thanks. Only parroting the excellent quidance I've been given on many occasions. All credit to those who handled me with kid-gloves when I first got here.