OMG. Kickstarter for physical printing of two great contemporary African speculative fiction comic series.

I would love to contribute to that

@eimyr My wife is. She's working on... I think her 3rd novella?

Today's entry in "system-agnostic".

@trogdor You can piggyback on my backing, just let me know what you want.

mk

Oops, somehow failed to link.

kickstarter.com/projects/averyalder/monsterhearts-2

250% on the first day, so not in desperate need of help - just thought people would like to know

oh, speaking of, could someone star this message i left about it?

thank you, anonymous star-givers :)

I've noticed a specific type of plot hole recently and I'm curious if there's a word for it: in Bleach's early TV episodes, the protagonist Ichigo demonstrates he can very keenly sense which direction a particular spirit is in. A dozen episodes later, he and other characters remark on the fact he's completely oblivious to sensing spiritual energy, because he never noticed multiple people around him possessed strange spiritual energy or a phenomenal quantity of it.

It's a revision of his character which benefits the immediate plot and helps set up far-off story points, but is otherwise contradictory to something established previously about him.

TV Tropes might have a word for that: basically it's the common phenomenon that early in a show they'll establish something which later on becomes an obstacle to storytelling so they just dump it.

@doppelgreener hehehe

@doppelgreener "Anonymous Star-Givers" would be a good name for a band.

@doppelgreener Often it actually comes of using the pilot as the first episode, when revisions have been made between shooting the pilot and shooting the rest of the series.

Yeah, it's not exactly a bad thing... the person's forming their story and then realises "oh, shoot, that thing was a good idea at the time but doesn't work now". Probably best they drop it!

Like how Yu-gi-oh started off being nothing to do with card games, just some... super messed up stories about kids over-obsessed with games and high stakes.

and then MYSTERIOUS EGYPTIAN MAGIC HAPPENED and everything went topsy-turvy and now we have a card game anime.

Ah, Early Installment Weirdness.

@BESW That's it! Thank you.

D&D 5e: The Pumpkin King, developed by StoneStrix of the Monster-a-Day reddit in 2015. Making the rounds again for Halloween this year.

@doppelgreener dat aint the pumpkin king yo

XD

Heya @doppelgreener

Well, heya everyone, really.

@doppelgreener In fairness, from memory everything he sensed was Hollows, which seem to be super easy to sense.

Like, even people with no reiatsu at all can sense them.

@Miniman In the episode(s) featuring the bird in a cage, he detected where the bird was by sensing its spirit amid all the spiritual energy noise nearby. Rukia was like "there's no way he can do it!" and he did.

@doppelgreener Huh, never mind then :)

Long time since I watched.

so for at least one arc, Ichigo was a prodigy in detecting spiritual energy -- then suddenly had no idea how to do it when Ishida Uryu showed up.

@Miniman i've been rewatching it just recently.

i found it on netflix, but i might opt to just read the manga instead.

Reading is always quicker than watching.

On the other hand, I tend to miss colour and music, plus I always find action sequences harder to follow in manga than anime.

Luckily, there's no Bleach after the first series :P

(If that is so, how comes I'm still reading it?)

@Zachiel oh, also, hi!

@Miniman in no small part thanks to the Bleach anime's filler-y-ness :D

@doppelgreener Anime will always run faster than manga, and this often means fillers. Like that godawful ninja mailmen episode in Naruto.

@Zachiel sure, but compare Bleach doing a 20-episode first season with battles that could be done in one episode or half an episode instead stretched across two, to One Punch Man which had a 12-episode no-filler first season which then went on hiatus until the second season could be ready.

@doppelgreener Or Naruto, which was literally more than 50% filler episodes without even considering the stretching of actual canonical events.

@Miniman and sometimes they were quite fun to watch, and sometimes it was Mecha-Naruto

@eimyr How can I put this...I really shouldn't discuss that series in this chat. Or anywhere, really, but this is one place I'd rather not be banned from.

Also, it's about to be 2am and I need to go sleep.

@Miniman rest well!

@doppelgreener that's why I said often

@Zachiel i get it, but what i was getting at is there's no reason why it has to be fillery

other than to get a whole 20 episodes' worth of air time rather than 10, i guess

right

What do you people think would be the most practical way to ask if someone here wants to be part of a fourthcore play by forum?

@Zachiel do you particularly want to ping specific people, or is it a general invitation?

@doppelgreener general invitation at survey stage.

@Zachiel post a message advertising for players and I'll star it; i've also been interested in the idea of using Meta for community event organisation -- including game organisation -- since Thales made their meta Q:

might be worthwhile having a games ad Q that collects answers which are games ads

at least, eventually, with the nearer term just being "post a question under this tag which we'll make up now"

I don't know, I don't think the proliferation of many game organization questions would be good for meta.

On the other hands, I'm surely more ok with asking the people here in chat than going to other sites.

@Zachiel "many" in the early stages could be "two" or something. i figure if/when it becomes too much, we go for the "one question, many answers" approach.

I will try with a... wossname...

one of that things you write to present an idea to other people

whatever

I will write a tentative invite, and I'll wait for some of you to comment and help me refine it before having a final version starred.

> Hello. I'm trying to see how much interest there is in a play-by-forum game of Fourthcore - mainly with people from this chat. Fourthcore is a D&D 4e game where the usual expectance of survivable encounters that wear resources is substituted with beatable, but unfair encounters. It is an adventure design philosophy that emphasizes a stripped-down, delve-centric D&D experience, de-emphasizes reliance upon die rolls and encourages player ingeniuty.

How is it?

what's "stripped-down" mean here?

it could mean a lot of things, and here it sounds like it operates on a lighter subset of the rules or content.

> Who'd like to play a D&D 4e Fourthcore game by forum? Please ping me with expressions of interest. Fourthcore's a design philosophy for dangerous adventures: it focuses on delving into dungeons, de-emphasizes dice rolls, and instead encourages player ingenuity in solving potentially lethal problems.

In that draft I'm trying to maximize information packed into the first couple of dozen words, which are the ones that will actually show up in the sidebar. So, away goes all the stuff that's not incredibly vital, in goes with the very important instruction of what to do. Everything that's less important gets pushed further out -- people whose interest is piqued will click the link to the message to read the rest.

i estimate it'll be snipped around the words "design philosophy"

That 12-words thing that I didn't consider is interesting. I might also link "Fourthcore" to a wider description of the game, which I'm currently searching for.

@Zachiel that'd work too!

it's somewhere more like 20 words, roughly

Who'd like to play a D&D 4e Fourthcore game by forum? Please ping me with expressions of interest.

@doppelgreener here we go, and thanks Joshua Aslan Smith for the link.

For those who read me here, long story short is that a friend of mine that lives abroad wants to play a D&D game by forum and I'd like it to be Crucible of the Gods, which of course I expect you not to read.

@Zachiel This is so widely and explicitly far away from what I consider my playstyle (Seeker/Socialiser with no traces of Survivor/Conqueror/Achiever) that it comes out on the other side and my exploration tendency says “but, but, but I'm curious to try!”

(Though don't tak this as a sign of specific interest just yet.)

In torchbearer, part of the challenge is that even if an encounter (incl. traps etc) does not kill you, it will tear on your resources. It's up to the players to decide when they've had enough and want to camp, return to town before going in again or even give up completely. Is that a thing in fourthcore?

1 more delete vote needed - VLQ one-sentence answer with no grounding, that's several months old, has never been revised, and the user never returned.

@Marlond Hi!

Hello. First time chatting.

Does anything in particular bring you to chat?

You're welcome to participate or lurk as you like. This chat is pretty far-ranging in its subjects, so long as it doesn't get in the way of RPG-specific conversations or stop being nice.

I'm browsing the list of chat rooms. This is one of the mud active ones. I just need to figure out what I'm trying to accomplish by all this. Procrastinating.

Heh, fair enough.

Most folks on this chat, I've found, are here during their locale's business hours.

Haha. I did find the rug stack exchange while browsing on my lunch break. I found the name of a really old rpg book that was killing me thanks to SE.

I actually never found the rug stack exchange. But I have been to the rpg SE.