TRPG General Chat - 2016-12-20

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12:01 AM

@BESW, I had my second RPG night today (at the Board Games Café again). Somewhat different people, we were 3 in total and played Microscope instead of continuing Firefly. I think you telling me about your Geek Nights helped quite a bit getting myself into the right frame of mind for running this in a good way.

Now off to bed, two more days before I change country for the Christmas period.

@nitsua60 Ja, that looks like something mostly factually answerable in the relevant system.

@Anaphory That sounds like a great success. Congrats. :D

Okay, something about that one earned me a taco.

@BESW Yeah, that sounds about right. Eh, that article isn't light reading, but it's fascinating and one I haven't seen before.

@nitsua60 Just now? HMM.

@SevenSidedDie Of course, I've edited other old things during the day, so that one may have just pushed me over a secret threshold....

@nitsua60 I see you removed a comment. Maybe there's an absolute number that needs to add up? Maybe it's removing a comment in a short window from when a previous comment was removed?

Secret hats are so weird.

12:08 AM

@SevenSidedDie Yeah, a lot going on. Removing comments, commenting on long-inactive post. Ooh, commenting on a closed post?

Editing old things.

Editing without leaving a summary.

@nitsua60 I'm convinced it has to do with comments. Possibly irrationally so. :) Maybe commenting on a closed post, yeah? I don't remember doing that today, but it's possible. This is the trouble with being so active.

@nitsua60 Could be editing without a summary, though that'd be cheesy since it's a high-rep privileged.

cheesy hats are the worst hats

at least in the context of limiting who can get hats

@trogdor I'm somewhat miffed by the What's Up, Doc? and The Neverending Story hats.

I'm actually kinda underwhelmed by the hat selection this year. Minus those two and minus the ones just for doing normal things on a certain day, the rest aren't that exciting.

@SevenSidedDie yeah, those two are pretty exclusionist

and yeah, last year I had at least 3 or so hats that I could get, I did get, and that I was excited to get

this year, I so far only have this one, and there is a possibility I don't try for more

12:24 AM

@SevenSidedDie This comment did not get me a taco, though.

... I'm going to experimentally delete an upvoted comment somewhere. [digs]

I have a minor personal issue with some of the hats that require other people to vote certain ways on what you post and such, but that is wtv compared to needing to actually be someone who has any knowledge of site development for TWO whole hats

@trogdor There are a few easy ones. Search and Philanthropist take a bit of time/effort, but will be easy to get. The vote-on-a-day ones (Bûche, Epiphany, Dreidel) should be easy too.

yeah true

some of them are real easy

@trogdor Yeah. I'm not a code professional, why would I have a Developer Story on Careers? And I'm not a code professional, so why would I use Documentation?

but last year,... I got more than I had the year before

this year I think, at the very least, the opposite will happen

12:27 AM

Though come to think, maybe Documentation has more to offer than just code stuff? Maybe I should take a quick look.

@SevenSidedDie I took a quick look, and yeah it certainly was not enough for me to be some kind of expert, but it was definitely discouraging

Anybody want cute prehistoric animal pins?

4

@BESW d'awwww. :') yes

A while back I collected badges for my schoolbag. Now I have a Penny Arcade set of pins I wouldn't mind adding those to...

@BESW Aw, those are cuter than I anticipated.

I'd totally back for a Dunkleosteus.

12:31 AM

@BESW nice

@SevenSidedDie It's mainly Stack Overflow-oriented, buuuuut....

32

Q: Allow Documentation in other Stack Exchange communities

I'm a Salesforce developer and would love Documentation to be available in other Stack Exchange communities. The reason is salesforce.stackexchange.com a lot of Salesforce developers get help, especially newer ones like myself. The developer forums and documentation on developer.salesforce.com is...

feature-request documentation

Short summary: Potentially, but it's still in beta. Stack Overflow's the experimentation ground.

@doppelgreener If you're in the market for pins... Happy Harpy Hat; Koi Fish; Passive Aggressive; Positivitea...

...Morning Owl; Blossoms of the Winter Bear; Milky Way "You Are Here".

@doppelgreener Ja, I recalled it was something like that. I expect we'll see it branch out in 2–3 years (though probably not to RPG?). Too late for the hat though!

@SevenSidedDie Surely to RPG.SE! How much stuff do you think we could share about nitpicks and issues and fiddly bits and the nature of optimization across D&D?

I'm still not sure what Documentation does.

12:40 AM

@doppelgreener Oh yeah! It's be great for charop. We have a number of questions that are meh here (e.g. What is the Fastest a Character Can Move in One Turn?) that could really benefit from the iterative framework of Docs.

@JohnHowell Hi!

still not something that seems like it is useful for someone such as myself currently, either for getting a hat or otherwise

~~Are you looking for the Space Exploration chat?~~ Nope, I see you're already there.

@BESW It's a big pile of how-tos, sorted by subject. So things like how to write math in LaTeX (which might one day be mature/complete enough to actually be a useful guide for how to format math in our statistics questions).

@SevenSidedDie I can deal with What's Up, Doc? They're trying to push Documentation, and it got my eyes on the site, at least. I was able to make a useful contribution to a minor language, so the world's a better place. The Neverending Story's lame, though. Why not just make it any profile's edits?

Although, I guess not everyone's a programmer, so it is a bit exclusionist.

12:46 AM

oh good people are here

let me just ask this cause this has been getting on my nerves for a while.....so i was looking at the champion of gwyn class and it looks pretty good

@nitsua60 They're really pushing the Dev Story as a thing that is constantly updated. But yeah, not everyone's a programmer. I do like that they tried to balance out the programmer-only hats with “go use SEs outside the big three” hats, but it's still a bit more divisive than any other hatmas I recall.

@Masakan Hello! I love the comma-less ambiguity.

3

=)

problem is how do i explain being a champion of a deity that doesnt exist in a particular campaign

say the forgotten realms?

go on...

thats kinda the question do most dms just hand wave it?

or would this be an issue

gwyn doesnt exist in faerun am i correct?

12:49 AM

@Masakan In my experience most GMs pay little-to-no attention to deities. ("The GM's the only god at this table!")

@SevenSidedDie The Developer Story's contentious even among developers. Stack Exchange is billing it as a whole new way to present yourself, moving beyond the outdated resume format of yesteryear. Some devs respond with "yeah but all I can do with this thing is list where I worked, and when, and what I did. That's just the same as the resume format you're seeking to replace!"

that is a good point

i just wanna make sure the dm has no excuse toscrew me over

Sometimes a GM likes to work it in more, but that's usually at the level of "should discuss this with players, as it'll be a major thematic element."

hmm

@Masakan Always work with your GM first though.

12:50 AM

@Masakan That's... indicative of some other problems, I'd worry.

then maybe instead of champion of gwyn....it would champion of "insert chaotic good deity here"

see the whole idea would be something of a redemption story

you mess up you wanna get back on track

gods like ok ill give you a second shot

dont blow it

@nitsua60 Deities are often a little weird in D&D games. You've got a polytheistic world in which multiple deities demonstrably exist and have domain over various things. There's real-world cultures which do that. How is it handled in D&D? Regularly "my god is the true god and/or I worship and appeal exclusively to this god." How is it handled in real life polytheism? "I favour this god, but I'll pray to whoever's domain this is."

Like, the original purpose of prestige classes was to represent organisations in the world, which is why they were only in the DMG. Some GMs will say a prestige class that is foreign to their world is simply unavailable. Some will say they're all fine, and work with you to refluff the details. Some won't care.

I may be a fan of the Goddess of the Arena, but while I'm cooking, I'm appealing to the God of the Culinary Arts that my food will turn out well, taste good, and not poison anyone.

@SevenSidedDie I think this is another of Masakan's attempts to make a character without a group in mind yet, so he wants it to be able to fit into any group.

12:51 AM

actually

this is more just curiosity

@Masakan Keep the language nicer, please.

yes sir

@Masakan If it's just a curiosity, then there's no GM to worry about. Go wild.

@Masakan Last I knew you did not have a GM yet, and IIRC this is not the first conversation in which you have been trying to ensure a theoretical GM had no excuse or way to screw you over. You don't even know your GM yet. You've seemingly got abused gamer syndrome expecting whoever you meet next to be adversarial and try to screw you over, but you're expending a lot of unnecessary effort over it.

Yeah, like SSD says, just do whatever.

In programming we have this interesting term: premature optimisation. Programs always have weak points which slow everything down. You don't know what those are until you've built the thing and identified the weak points. Premature optimisation is when you're anticipating weak points unnecessarily and investing effort in resolving them. The problem is: that's dead effort, because whatever you were prematurely optimising was demonstrably never close to being a weak point anyway.

@doppelgreener I've written a bit about how D&D pantheons are... weird... because alignment locks deities into uncomplicated relationships.

@doppelgreener This is another way of looking at GM overprepping.

1:04 AM

Think of it like this: you've got a line of ten people who have to review a letter before it can get mailed. You don't know it yet, but 9 of these people each take 1 day to review the letter (it can't be done any faster), and another person is quite slow and takes 10 days.

Premature optimisation: Before we even see how they work, let's train them all to halve their time! (Lots of effort spend on every person. Didn't matter for nine of them. Sort of matters for the slow person, but they only got part of the training attention.) End result: You've got a slightly faster production line, and y…

You are in the first scenario, trying to solve all the problems before you know which ones even exist. It's a complete waste of time that is only useful as self-entertainment. It probably won't even solve whatever problems do arise, there's no guarantee there was even going to be a GM trying to screw you over anyway.

In social terms, as well, by expecting your GM to screw you over, chances are you're going to create an antagonistic relationship with them which puts them into the sort of frame of mind where players vs GMs try to "beat" each other (read: screw each other over). So you may not only be wasting energy, you may also potentially be creating the problem out of nothing.

4

@doppelgreener that example,.... the letter from hell apparently

@trogdor It's a very very important letter. Many of them must be sent.

but it takes an entire day to review (at absolute fastest speeds), and takes 9-10 people doing separate reviews

that is not a letter I ever want to see

@trogdor in truth this scenario is actually orchestrated by satan to frustrate the nine other people who all really, really, really care about efficiency.

@BESW I think this is what originally put me onto noticing it.

@doppelgreener well, I am the 11th person, the guy who cares about efficiency, but not enough to go through with Satan's silly game

or maybe so much I can't even bear to look at the letter, you decide XD

1:14 AM

"Satan's Silly Game" would be a good name for a mobile app that connects you to open wifi networks.

@BESW Yes indeed. Premature optimisation exists in a lot of spheres. It's a problem for things you get to try multiple times and where it's OK if things go wrong, because you can do it multiple times and see where the problems crop up and then fix them -- for things like hiking (where if things go wrong, you're dead) it's just being very thoroughly prepared. :)

@BESW good, just keep turning that into progressively more horrific things

@doppelgreener after just a couple more minutes of thinking about this, there are some horrible existential crisis type stuff built into that

all the people working on the same thing, doing the same thing, because they care about efficiency, are actually all contributing to it being much slower because they all have to see it before it goes through

I don't like Satan's silly game, I really don't

XD

RL: The Russian ambassador to Turkey has just been assassinated.

@doppelgreener Ffff... udge.

oh great

this will end well

1:23 AM

Please tell me his name isn't Ferdinand.

I certainly hope not, but even if it isn't,.....

@SevenSidedDie It was not. The ambassador's name was Andrey Karlov. The shooter was identified as Mevlut Mert Aydintas.

I,.... just realized I am reviewing letters for my job right now, not so much just realized as just connected it to this conversation I guess. (none of them take a day to review though, dodged bullets all over the place)

Russia and Turkey are going to investigate it together, which is positive at least, to see who orchestrated it.

if this had happened a year ago they might be at each other's throats about it

1:29 AM

@doppelgreener International cooperation is good.

@trogdor Yes, reading up, he doesn't appear to be any kind of Ferdinand. Not the first domino.

@SevenSidedDie yeah, thankfully, on some level at least, they have a much better relationship than they did even just a year ago

Not that a first domino is ever known until historians get a crack at any given mess.

@SevenSidedDie now i realise what you meant by that

@doppelgreener yeah,.....

1:31 AM

@doppelgreener You mean cryptic references that probably only make sense in my head aren't immediately obvious to all and sundry without extra info? ^_^

2

@SevenSidedDie to be fair, I got it immediately

so you were not soooo cryptic

However, it is a sign that Turkey is... well, doing exactly what they've been doing. Cracking down on everything, and naturally unable to actually 100% control opposition, and thereby radicalising their own (already decades-divided) population. :(

it's still not good news

Nope.

@SevenSidedDie Unless it's none of that at all, and just someone trying to make it look like something like that. Which is why it's very important to find out what the assassination was actually about.

1:33 AM

but it's possibly not as-bad-news as it could be, or could have been

I also understood the reference, albeit because the reference was reinforced by a fanfic I really like.

@doppelgreener Possibly, but given that they've been unofficially at war with their own eastern provinces for decades, it's probably not material whether it's real or appearance.

I just read the thing in history class,... and literally never forgot it

(There's a scene where a woman finds herself on a well-preserved British manor and she feels like she's been thrown back in time: "In another minute," she thought frantically, "someone's going to come round that corner on a bicycle, and call out 'My Lord - the Archduke Ferdinand's been assassinated at some place called Sarajevo' -")

@SevenSidedDie It's important to know if it might be a neighbouring nation trying to further destabilise Turkey, since it'll equip them to better handle the situation. They could defuse things partly -- people are fantastic at banding together against a common enemy -- or learn more about whatever's going on. That's where I see the value.

1:39 AM

@doppelgreener there is most definitely value in discovering the reasons and the details behind it

I read a pretty detailed book about how WWI might possibly have been stopped if that very thing had been rationally done

rather than allowing a spark to turn into a flame

@doppelgreener They don't really have any neighbours that want to do them harm. Syria was one, but Syria wouldn't assassinate the ambassador of their only real friend. That leaves Syrian rebels or Turkish opposition parties, which for historical reasons are almost the same thing.

Or Iran, but that would be super-odd because they're also a close Russian ally.

well, it was weird to me when Russia and Turkey stopped being,... quite as antagonistic to each other around this year too

weird things happen

I practically expect the reasons/details behind this assassination to be a little weird in one way or another

1:55 AM

@SevenSidedDie There was a context. "Ferdinand" had been mentioned.

@nitsua60 That was the cryptic reference.

Oh, I didn't think "Ferdinand" in the context of assassinations would be cryptic.

Neither did I.

It's the second thing I associate with "Ferdinand" in any context.

@nitsua60 had the word Archduke been mentioned it might've cued me in, but my wartime education has generally glossed over the Archduke's name.

@doppelgreener Fair enough. It's possible that I read about fifteen books on WWI during calendar year 2014.

(I have a really good library that's great about both acquisitions and display/push-notifications. And I walk through it to get to my classroom.)

2:02 AM

@nitsua60 I want your life.

@BESW [lays it on thick...] they also ask me what the due date should be when I renew a book, don't charge late fines, and receive ILL shipments every day.

[starts carving mold for rubber sheep mask]

2:20 AM

@nitsua60 why are they subscribed to plague

[doesn't grok the reference]

@nitsua60 they receive shipments of illness every day

Ahh...
choo?

Btw @Anaphory: your profile pic is much more intimidating these days.

Is there an easy way to query edits I've made? (>cough< @Miniman >cough<)

Specifically, age of post and date of last activity previous to my edit?

nvm--SEDE only updates weekly. Won't help suss out Hatmassery. I mean, Hatmas-ery. Err....

2:42 AM

I wouldn't call it easy, but it's doable.

But yeah, SEDE is only updated Sundays.

Also, dammit SE App - I only installed you to get hats with. Know your place.

3

@LegendaryDude I was starting to craft an answer to this question, but am running up against something: what's hard about actually just using 13th Age's range system with the one tweak: intercept=OA?

It's nearly-identical to what we used in Bane of the Tradeways, and that caused us absolutely no problems. Not even any slow-down.

3:07 AM

Fyi for fellow hat sleuths: no hat for deleting an old question comment with score 7.

3 hours later…

5:59 AM

Bizzare. This is a verbatim duplicate. VtD?

Whuuuut? Now it's spam. VtD

@nitsua60 Cute. Copy a post, fly under the radar for a moment, then edit it in the grace period. But why, what does that even accomplish. Maybe it gets past the First Post queue on big sites like SO, where things move fast?

3 hours later…

9:30 AM

Please turn down the gravity https://t.co/G2jLfRhY27

Tweeted by WorldAndScience on December 18, 2016 at 1:00 AM

user image

1 hour later…

10:45 AM

@nitsua60 That's not the goal. It's just that I haven't got any other hats yet.

11:14 AM

@doppelgreener *punk of almost every type contains themes of creativity as a form of rebellion or revolution. For solarpunk, I think that can/should mean embracing creativity as an act everyone engages with through their everyday tasks.

Not sure exactly how to incorporate that into a game system yet, but I have... ideas.

In Faith Corps, actions are rolled using dice pools drawn from one of your Approaches (how you do things) and one of your Disciplines (what things you do). A solarpunk hack of that system might replace or add a set of pools for different expressions of creativity.

The trick for Solarpunk, I think, is re-framing what creativity is revolutionising.

As an example of the Faith Corps hack idea, you could replace the standard Approaches with approaches like getting flashes of inspiration, modifying existing resources, long-term planning, and short-term planning.

Another set of "creativity profiles" includes seeing potential, noticing detail, connecting parts, using weakness, and simplifying complexity.

11:36 AM

Does “modifying existing resources” include “re-interpreting exisiting data from a different context”, or do you mean that completely materially?

@Anaphory Modifying existing resources is about incremental adjustments.

Looking at something from a different point of view is, in that model, more along the "inspiration" line.

Another set of profiles includes seeing connections, imagining new things, simplifying complexity, exploring complexity, and taking risks.

There's a LOT of different structures, none of them is totally satisfying to me.

And to choose the right creative approaches for a solarpunk game it'd be important to define the role of creativity in the game: what it's rebelling against or revolutionising.

And this is, of course, assuming you'd even want creativity to be so important that it's an element the player thinks about every time they roll an action.

There are other, less overt, ways to weave creativity into a system and setting.

12:00 PM

@BESW how would you say creativity tends to manifest in steampunk and cyberpunk? I can think of experimentation in literature, music and inventions in the first (you know, Victorian pursuits) and in punk culture and music and cyber stuff in the second

Punk, as a non-fictional subculture, contains elements of viewing the dominant culture--its values, its fashions, its resources--as an antagonistic force whose elements can be subverted to one's own ends in defiance of the dominant culture's goals.

Cyberpunk makes that even more literal, as it's about taking the technology which an oppressive regime uses to enforce itself and subverting that technology to rebel against the regime.

Subverting the tools of the dominant paradigm to rebel against that self-same paradigm is an inherently creative act.

It requires innovation, inspiration, perspiration, vision, leadership, risk-taking...

Steampunk is harder to pin down because it's such a diffuse sub-subgenre.

@BESW also generally more inclined to be whimsical and less heavy

I tend to view steampunk as more an aesthetic than an ethos like cyberpunk.

Creativity in steampunk tends to be more... metatextual.

It's about the creator of the work's innovation and inspiration in hacking one era's technology to replicate the effects of a later era's technology.

Like other *punk, it sees the established order as an a la carte assemblage of pieces to re-configure to fit the creator's vision of how the order should be. Just--the creator tends to be the real-life author of the work.

This means there's not as much sense within the story of rebellion or revolution because the established order is not a force to be rebelled against. Revolution, in steampunk, is the industrial revolution.

Not a foe to be fought but a goal to be met--perhaps questioned, but not opposed.

Solarpunk, however, has clear opponents to be fought. A culture of disposability, ecological disasters, dwindling resources, apathetic governments, selfish corporations...

Solarpunk stories can explore how to exploit the resources of those foes (physical resources, but also cultural resources--like the original punk itself) in order to undermine or reverse their effects.

Real-life examples include bootstrapping more sustainable manufacturing processes off of existing unsustainable ones, or using tax laws to manipulate corporate greed to make ecologically sound choices.

12:26 PM

Do you work from an established ethos of Solarpunk that you could point out to me, or are you trying to abstract the ethos from what you perceive in certain groups and media?

Solarpunk is new enough that it hasn't really congealed into something you can point at yet.

These things don't start with a coherent vision, they're labelled as an emergent ethos is slowly identified.

@BESW Sure!

My understanding is that its qualities include optimistic visions of how to move from our present situation into a more sustainable and holistic (in the non-frufru sense of the word) way of living--technologically, culturally, societally, governmentally, ecologically.

Like all science fiction it's often not literally about practical predictions of the future, though: it's about using that lens to explore our current condition.

So, would you mostly label science fiction as solarpunk, or would you also count other ways (popular science books comes to mind in particular) going in that direction?

The original context of this monograph is a solarpunk RPG, which would fall firmly into science fiction. But the broader use of the term does include practical real-life examples, yes.

12:37 PM

Monograph?

I'm being tongue-in-cheek about dominating the chat with my speculations.

Ah.

I thought you meant that, but I wasn't sure. Lack of non-verbal cues.

(Aesthetically solarpunk tends to combine Art Nouveau with arabesques, Islamic geometric architectural details, and various Asian art styles which strike the artist's fancy. There's a definite rejection of modern Western architectural styles.)

1:03 PM

Hundertwasser?

VtR? In current form, strikes me as no more discussion-ey than many table-level questions.

right now no compelling solarpunk stories come to mind about undermining the present order to create a solarpunk world, but i can imagine compelling stories about a solarpunk world full of resources they don't tap but the current (today, now, in real life) would want to tap, which would undermine the new world order.

@nitsua60 I would, if it were that easy. But, we have a wood elf in our game, who has an extra 5' of movement. We have a monk who has an extra 10' of movement. And how do you convert spells of varying ranges easily into a simple close/near/far range, and then, how do you run things like thunderwave, which have a cubic area, or deal with spell radii? It seems more complex than my initial thoughts about it.

It's something I'd like to try out with my table but they're big fans of playing with miniatures (which I can't stand, personally).

@nitsua60 I've edited the "what are some ways/techniques/tricks/tips to do X?"-type title to say "how can I do X?". the former encourages people to say "here's an off-the-cuff idea" (that's ultimately useless on its own) because that's literally what's being requested. the second requests holistic treatment of the subject.

Minis were okay in Pathfinder, where it seems you really need to play on a grid, but I find it troublesome in 5e.

1:16 PM

@doppelgreener There are some things in, I believe, some Charles Stross stories (may have been the beginning of Accelerando?). For example, a main character who abuses copyright law, anonymous micro-corporations owning other micro-corporations and freely giving away ideas, which some corporations don't like.

Does that fit what you would be looking for?

@Anaphory Oooh, it just might. Someone is one of the clear seeds of the solarpunk revolution, and people with a stake in the current state of affairs want him gone and use legal and not-so-legal means to try to make that happen...

I think that fits the story I'm thinking of.

I think something like that is also seeded in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, although it's only a very minor thing there, and my memory of it is hazy because I found it less compelling to read than I thought I would.

@LegendaryDude Well, you're asking for a system specifically less-interested in that level of granularity. You're going to lose some detail. That's inherent in the question, it seems to me....

@doppelgreener Oh--in the title! Thank you--missed that one.

@nitsua60 [notices afterwards nitsua60 already did a corresponding edit in the body]

1:31 PM

@nitsua60 I understand; the issue isn't that I don't want to lose that level of granularity (I'm all for more abstraction--my players, no so much). I simply can't think of a good way to treat those things, so the question asks anyone with experience using both 13th Age and 5e, or even better, actually using the 13th Age range system in 5e, for a solution.

And what problems might come up because of it, and how you creatively solved those problems.

Huh... I just got a secret hat; Where in the World?

my theory: search and pick something out of search.

@LegendaryDude Interesting... so I've used a range-based (bands) system in 5e, though it's not taken from13th-age. Would you be interested in hearing about that experience?

no, wait, i don't think i did that.... <_<

(Gotta run now, won't be back for about 24hrs--ping me if it's of interest.)

1:45 PM

@doppelgreener I think Where in the World? comes from editing your location.

@doppelgreener After I saw you got it, I edited mine. Sure enough, a few minutes later I've got it.

@LegendaryDude nope

Huh. Well, I didn't search for anything in that time...

@LegendaryDude I didn't edit mine!

Yeah, okay, so that idea's out.

I also, in that time... edited my full name, my profile description... um, tracked a new badge, clicked "Go Get It!" on the badge tracker... upvoted some answers...

I got that one, as well, just now.

1:49 PM

Well, that's interesting.

Commonality is that we're all ... here? At the same-ish time. And received it around the same-ish time.

Time might be a thing.

I mean, it's a moon, it might be a “Where in the world are you that you are active at this time of day (/night)?”.

It looks more like a flaming sun?

Interesting. What TZ are you in?

Does it change based on time of day?

Mine definitely looks like a not-physically-possible moon, with stars in front of it, more than 180 degrees between the tips, stars in the moon's shadow, and I'm in Central European Time

(So it's nowhere near night here.)

@Anaphory Interesting!

It's like The Hat all over again haha

Very interesting. Mine looks like a blazing sun.

1:56 PM

Yes, I can see both of yours as a sun.

WEIRD.

Oh yeah I see yours now.

Yes, take a moment to update.

2:32 PM

@Anaphory They say it's a ten-minute update, but Elementary took me a good 30 min....

Edited just location in profile, "Where in the World" two minutes later.

I haven't edited my profile in a month or two.

Maybe it's for people who have a location set at all?

(I'd edited a bunch of other details in my profile last night, kinda because it was out of date, kinda because I was curious if it'd trigger a secret. I even thought "maybe I'll make location a little more specific..." but I didn't!)

Interesting--there are at least a couple of different "Where in the World" images....

(Check out Legendary Dude, nvoigt, and me, for instance)

I've seen only two so far.

Well, the image doesn't appear to be based on geographical location

I'm in New Hampshire, US and nvoigt is in Hanover, Germany, and we have the same image. Meanwhile, I assume @nitsua60 is somewhere within 200 miles of me and has the moon image.

I'm within some 200 miles of Hannover (West, so between you) and have a moon.

2:44 PM

:boggle:

And if @nitsua60 is also on the east coast then it doesn't seem to be time-related, either.

I am.

@LegendaryDude Strange--yours and nvoigt's looked different to me at first.

The next thing I wonder is whether the hat will change between sun and moon at any point.

Because that's a thing I would do.

@Anaphory That's what I was thinking.

But... based on what? It's not geographic/TZ related. At least, not as far as I can tell.

well it's daytime here and i have the sun hat

@doppelgreener daytime here, moon.

Also, don't think it's profile-update related. In Ye Olde Hatte Shoppe they're talking like it's solstice (+/- 12 hrs, as is usual).

2:50 PM

sounds reasonable actually!

Half the world has the shortest night, half the world has the shortest day.

aha!

Maybe it's random, then.

It's still curious how they chose moon/sun. Might be random, might be some pattern.

If it were a pattern, it should be remotely location-based, though.

could just be users have a 50% chance of either, no pattern to it

@Anaphory parity of server-time millisecond when your qualifying activity happened =)

2:52 PM

Yep :)

Or just alternate when awarding. We could never suss out, across sites, what order the hats are awarded in when the cycle goes.

I'd consider that random for most intents and purposes. It would be noticeable only if in a small, early sample, the distribution is surprisingly close to the expected one.

Yeah, it's random for humans at the very least. We have no way of even obtaining a useful sample.

I have to go sleep, but I just changed my location (and then changed it back) and got the hat.

4:03 PM

It might be that you need to have an actual geographical location (meaning it matches the geo-location search in the UI) on your profile? I previously had a non-matching location and updated it to one that matched. If @doppelgreener already had a matching location then perhaps that's the key.

HAAAAAAAAAAAATS

@LegendaryDude mine says Australia

I visited Board Games earlier, looked at a question, cast an answer upvote, and left

theory is: cast a vote on the solstice

yep, just went to GDSE and cast a downvote and got the hat

and the scifi.se one just arrived

potentially you get night for casting a downvote and sun for casting an upvote, because what i did was cast an upvote. however the GDSE downvote didn't give me a moon hat, so if this theory's accurate, it's locked in to my first choice.

@doppelgreener Interesting.

4:52 PM

@doppelgreener That would be consistent with the dual-hat from last year. I can't remember what it was or what its earning conditions were, but whichever one you earned first locked the hat's form across all your sites.

I just got a sun for casting a downvote, so I don't think it is tied to the type of vote you cast

Looks like it has been all-but-confirmed to be random:

1

A: Why are there two different hats for "Where in the World"?

I could explain this to you but it is actually Quantum Mechanics. The hat type is not assigned until someone gets it. Maybe you are interested to read the implementation details?

hello

“I built a hardware RNG for Christmas” (Google cache link since they seem to have DDoSed themself.)

@DForck42 *waves*

@SevenSidedDie hai

so, I'm excited to get to lvl 7 and turn the party's barbarian into a giant ape

5:14 PM

VTC no detail at all

there may be enough detail maybe for a basic answer, maybe, explaining the fundamentals, come to think of it

but it's going to be so sweepingly generic...

5:30 PM

@doppelgreener yeah, def. too broad

@doppelgreener It sounds like there isn't even a system used in his game. How could we provide any sort of useful advice?

"We play an RPG without rules. How can I give advice to my players when they are stuck?" There's nothing wrong if that's how you like to play, but my advice would probably be... make up some rules for how to do that.

hmm

in general the freeform approach is to give them some guidance

but it depends on what you've given them already, the game style, and how they're responding

Yeah. We need to know the basic form of the game--even without rulebooks, there must be some sort of rules (codified or not) that they follow.

@LegendaryDude yup

5:56 PM

@LegendaryDude Eh… I could easily see a [system-agnostic] question being asked about “My players sometimes get stuck. How much should I help them with ideas?” that would be fine (assuming it's otherwise well-written and clear). I don't see a difference there just because they're playing freeform. (The only difference I can imagine is that, in freeform, players may get stuck more, and experience with freeform would help answer.)

But yes, we should be provided with more information about how/when/why players are getting stuck, so we have context for advising, and to know whether we're talking about mystery clues, plan making, roleplaying suggestions, or what.

@SevenSidedDie I agree; my point isn't that we need to know the system as much as it is we need to know why players are getting stuck and what "gates" exist in the gameplay--e.g., how does the game flow? How are players prompted to action, etc.

@LegendaryDude Right, yes! I've dropped a comment on these points, so we'll see if there's any progress.

1 hour later…

7:30 PM

EXCLUSIVE first look! First stills from Rogue One's sequel. https://t.co/AdyW8MtHrR

Tweeted by daisyrdley on December 17, 2016 at 7:10 AM

duuuuuh... Anyone want to answer a "Beginners Guide to Railroading 101" in more detail than "Read the DMG"? -> rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/92000/…

@doppelgreener Fooled me for a second. XD

@LegendaryDude :D

8:17 PM

hello

8:36 PM

@DForck42 hello

@LegendaryDude how goes it?

@DForck42 Not bad. Getting close to punch out.

@LegendaryDude I've got 2 hours left

then a 2 1/2 hour drive to stl

About an hour and 20 here (east coast). I've got friends in the SeaTac area.

9:00 PM

@LegendaryDude I'm flying out to new Hampshire tomorrow

@DForck42 Bundle up. It's the coldest December we've had in recent memory.

@LegendaryDude k

1 hour later…

10:23 PM

I've also earned Where in the World?

@BESW isn't that the super easy one to get?

Apparently so.

10:42 PM

my current theory is it just requires voting on the solstice (today)

@doppelgreener maybe

11:24 PM

I just earned that hat now

seems like voting is the only thing I did

which is cool with me, first secret hat I remember ever getting

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