@BESW Then the minotaur almost kills Irontooth "by himself" because of ferocity and a mix of lay on hands, healing words and a natural 20 on a save vs. death, while beang the "nearest enemy" during the whole second half of the fight.
@Zachiel Good example: Lay on Hands and Healing Word require healing surges to function, as does the natural-20-on-death-saving-throw gimmick, which means Heroic Tier non-PCs can only use one of those a day even if they have access to them... which they generally don't. (NPCs don't get death saving throws, for one.)
I'll have to find the time to review it myself as well, of course.
But I'm finding that working within the existing poison system would require me to savage the save DCs to the point where players wouldn't be able to make the saves, simply because all the options to increase those DCs work that way.
So homebrew is going to need to be my recourse unless I can do some hardcore refluffing.
Yar, I hear ya. It's a system that's too simple to be very interesting, but requires very careful balance if you're going to let the players get anywhere near it.
Eh, I don't have too much of a problem with permitting players access to poison rules.
Mostly because you can drop 2d10 con damage into a potion and use Sudden Maximize to make it a 20 con damage freaking potion that ignores immunity to poison
So at that point I'm not worried about non-combat uses of poison
And in-combat uses can almost certainly be done better by spells and the like, even if I fix poison
@BrianBallsun-Stanton "happy" whatever time it was when the mailman woke me up.
@BESW XD
I need help for D&D 3.5, possibly fast. What can a caster do to know the name of someone who killed a man while nobody was watching? I assume the man didn't saw what hit him.
If a GM is giving the party funds for disposables and the party hoards them for non-consumable goods, the GM will stop giving funds for disposables so the party doesn't get ahead of the power curve.
we gain money on a daily basis based on our current level in that game. The only consumables I'd spend are those that grant me survivability. Someone says "I gain an average of 3000gp per day, I can spend 200gp on magic tattoos" but I guess they've not counted how many gps they're wasting each year
@BESW Refresh. Ideally, ctrl+F5, which does a hard refresh, which involves clearing everything in cache relevant to that page and redownloading everything.
@Zachiel Internet Explorer and Firefox do that. Chrome, uh... sometimes will and sometimes won't do that. I am not sure if Chrome ever does a hard refresh unless it feels like it.
@BESW I do that too. I picked Chrome because of reasons I have now forgotten. I think I was beginning to get significant performance issues in Firefox.
@BrianBallsun-Stanton The first money I ever made professionally was a Powerpoint presentation for the local mall, designed to convince companies to put their stories in the place.
I was 15, and hired because the mall's in-house designer was making something the general manager thought was unacceptable.
@BESW I am not so sure. MS Office doesn't encourage poor choices, but it does shovel a number of useful features on the user which some people find incredibly inventive ways to abuse.
I am reminded of a C++ quote... "If C gives you enough rope to hang yourself, then C++ gives you enough rope to bind and gag your neighborhood, rig the sails on a small ship, and still have enough rope to hang yourself from the yardarm"
@JonathanHobbs Mm, no. MS Office puts options that should rarely be used at the same level of access as options that should be available for all users at all times.
Bear in mind that the versions that introduced the ribbon menus based their menus on two phillsophies: 1) (Almost) every feature should be available on a ribbon menu somewhere. No more trawling through menus and submenus. 2) The size and placement of a button is based entirely on which features are used the most often, and which are used together. In the modern MS Paint, Paste is a very large icon whilst copy and cut are only small ones, because people paste far more often than they copy. So, naturally, every option is available at an equal level. That was the idea. And if they are prominen…
@JonathanHobbs Yeeeeah, and in my experience teaching MS Word? The ribbon is designed for a very very specific imaginary person who doesn't actually exist.
The closer your use of the program is to the Imaginary User's, the easier to program is for you: I've met people for whom the program is miraculous to the point of mind-reading.
@JonathanHobbs I honestly don't see how that helps.
@BESW It doesn't. It's not supposed to. I'm just saying: the options people could misuse are on a level of access equal to the rest of the options because that was the point. Very few things are buried anywhere.
And as a teacher of the program I have major issues with the fact that it is calibrated for the lowest common denominator user and what is hidden? Is how to recalibrate it for progressional contexts.
Even if the whole thing weren't such a bugbear of trying to please everyone by pleasing no one, it is inefficient and unintuitive.
I have taught US veterans trying to open tattoo parlors, guys who want to help their wives catalogue the garden, and the entire Guam Supreme Court from judges to security guards. MS Word is an offense to the very idea that programming can put agency in the hands of the user.
@JonathanHobbs No, I'm talking about a program that doesn't do things behind the user's back. A program that doesn't make disabling its invasive defaults a matter of trial and error, but hides behind the claim that "You can change those options, so it's not a problem that they're the default."
A program that doesn't try to fix its fundamental GUI flaws by providing a tiny place for you to put the buttons you want to use that they've buried beneath four sublayers because it "makes sense."
@BESW Ah. Then I am lost on what that stuff is, though the idea of being able to tweak MS Word's menu layout to suit a particular environment is appealing (and something I never knew you could do).
And, in a perfect world, a program that doesn't try to hide its File menu in a cute graphic or as another tab that DOES SOMETHING TOTALLY DIFFERENT to the brand-new tab system it just forced you to learn.
@JonathanHobbs Anything after they killed Clippy. Clippy was a monster and yet another demon at the feet of MS Bob, but when they killed him his ghost infected the system and now the whole program is corrupted by his stench.
@Zachiel Clippy is the poster child for impolite programming. He was activated by default, and chose when he would come and go. He placed enormous blocks in front of what you were trying to work on, randomly animated to distract you from your task, and was rarely helpful even when actually trying to be.
That is elitist at best, and coming from a program that was intended to be used by the lowest common denominator of computer owner it is downright insulting.
@Zachiel It's not like that at all. That's a one-time unobstrusive pop that tells you right there on it how to get rid of it and isn't blocking anything important or distracting you while it's there.
Now MS Word has killed Clippy, but random boxes of buttons still pop up and obscure what you're trying to work on. An entire layer of options and features is hidden behind an icon that looks like it's part of the GUI art.
If you highlight text in Word and then place your cursor on the text, a miniature version of the text editing ribbon fades into view ON TOP OF YOUR TEXT.
Every class I teach, I show it to them at the beginning of the class. Halfway through I show them how to turn it off. Every class sighs with relief.
I have little but disgust for either of those menu design choices. The first hides a crucial part of the GUI as non-interactive art. The second disguises it as an entirely different type of page element.
The second wins the contest for my repulsion, however, because it also covers up the entire work surface.
@JonathanHobbs Not a point. You're doomed to find it sooner or later since it isn't on the other menus (in 2010 at least. 2007 assumes one is familiar with the whole "click on the program icon to open a menu that was in every windows since... win 95 I think)
@Zachiel [hollow laugh] And yet that assumption is idiotic because they spend the entire rest of the MS Office experience pounding it into your head that they HATE MENUS and replaced them with Tabs on the Ribbon.
Imaginary User: Make new document, place text in the document, format text, place objects, format pages. Real User: Make new document, **format pages...**
@JonathanHobbs As an experiment I find it fascinating. As the official GUI choice of an international professional standard I find it inexplicable.
@JonathanHobbs Well, when I sit down to write something professionally *or for a school assignment, back in the day) the first thing I do is make sure it's got the right margins, the paper's the right size, etc. And from my experience teaching most people are the same way.
But that's actually a minor point. Earlier versions of Word let you put the buttons you wanted on the front of the GUI and keep the options you didn't need as often in menus or off-screen. The buttons on the GUI were always there, a click away.
@BESW You can do that before placing anything at all in the document. There is nothing stopping your real user from doing his thing. Open the document, format the pages.
Now even if you know exactly where the option you want is, it is only a click away if you're already on the right tab.
Which you're not, because only the Imaginary User uses the options in the order they're presented and tabs keep appearing and disappearing and changing your selection can change which tab you're in.
@BESW You are ranting about stuff I find useful. Like options being grouped logically by tabs. :( I am finding it hard to see why you could be annoyed by this, or assert that the user must be imaginary.
@BESW That is definitely something to be recovered from that era of design.
@BESW I suppose so. I am also a person who has been using computers since he was a kid, and has learned to see things the way the program's designer intended them to be seen (or something like that).
@BESW Maybe it's more like this: there are a lot of people who never pay anyone to teach them basic usage of MS Office. You just see a tremendous number of people who need to be taught, and all the problems they have that leave them needing to be taught. There are people who have a total cognitive dissonance with MS Word's design, and you see those people. The rest of the users never walk through your doors.
Largely, MS Word's interface may have succeeded in the intended way, but a lot of people fail to grasp it.
(but not necessarily the majority: just effectively a loud minority, because you don't hear from people who had no trouble learning it unless it comes up, but you hear about people having to learn it all the time)
@JonathanHobbs Two years ago the entire 450-body staff of an institution upgraded to MS Word and maybe ten of them could fathom it enough to use it efficiently in their jobs.
So is that indicative it failed in its design overall, or failed to account for users from prior versions of Word who had to unlearn what they'd learned?
@JonathanHobbs Well, either way I think it speaks to an astonishingly poor model for a program intended to be universally used by everyone from casual home users to multi-billion-dollar international corporations.
(Which is in itself a ridiculous task to assign a single program, but come on. They could've done better than that.)
@JonathanHobbs I do think the design is fundamentally flawed in many places.
Part of the problem is that it has failed to specialize. It's not even a word processing program anymore.
It's become a sprawling mass of choices irrelephant to the main thrust of its purpose (photo editing software. in a word processor. really?), trying to be everything for everyone.
And when it became clear the existing GUI was trembling under that load, they threw the baby out with the bathwater and committed to an inefficient (if nothing else, Tabs on the Ribbon is a movement-economy nightmare) new system that is really no less labyrinthine than the old. It just showcases the addons better.
I mean seriously. How long is it going to take someone to self-teach that the teensy little icon in the corner of some of the tab sections is clickable? And sometimes that icon produces a dropdown menu and sometimes it creates a whole new floating box of options.
It is at best no better a system than what they threw out, and at the cost of asking their entire userbase to learn a totally new GUI.
@BESW And to this: yes, they can. But you are expecting an unrealistic amount from them if you expect them to get it immediately without experimenting and failing first. They can do better, and they will, but you are going to have to put up with the fact that to get there requires experimentation, and that involves failing several times before succeeding.
@JonathanHobbs I have not had the honor of using the newest system, because all my professional upgraded to one of the two monstrosities, spent oodles of money on me teaching them how to use them, and it's now a sunk cost.
They experimented plenty in testing, naturally, and then produced something pretty good and unleashed it on the world and found out the other ways in which it failed. Etc, repeat.
@JonathanHobbs I have no problem with that idea. I do think MANY of the failures they did manage to ship should never have gotten past a basic spit-test.
on its pages several game designers tried to analyze games and game design. They asked themselves why certain D&D games worked adn certain groups exploded
amongst other things they ...sorta... discovered that one of the big problems in game design is the sentence "this game lets you make the experience you want"
which could be true if every player was on the same agenda
but they usually aren't, because the game manual is telling each of them, separately, that they're gonna get the experience they want to achieve, whatever it is
post-forgite games usually tell the player what the game is about. Dogs in the Vineyard is about making moral choices and dealing with the consequences
D&D is... well, your master is surely able to put that in a game
So you're saying that I'm showing a Forgite mentality in saying that a single word processing program shouldn't be expected to meet the needs of the entire world.
but the D&D manual itself is not doing anything to make that possible. You can run a game about politics but the manual just provides you HP and to hit bonuses
We had a very confusing GNS discussion when I first wandered into this chat. I kept using GNS definitions and everyone else kept using they they thought the words meant.
@SimonGill "Takes over" is unlikely, but "gains a tremendous amount of ground" is possible. It's more likely people will just keep using 7 until Windows 9 comes out, like how people just kept using 2000 or XP when Vista came out. Displeasure with a new OS comes with people simply not moving, if that's anything to go by.
@BESW I will advise you to consider Windows 8 with caution on the basis it is incompatible with some older games (and by older, I mean older than Windows 8)
@SimonGill My first MacBook dual-booted into Kubuntu, and I ran Kubuntu on my desktop for the last year of college after my Windows drive burnt up, but that's about the extent of my experience in that area.
The UI in 8 isn't that big a problem for me. The start menu is strange at first but it's something to get used to. The touch elements aren't a problem on a desktop.
I have a slight preference for the Mac OS, it rarely prevents me from using programs I actually want to use, and I justify the price hike as a professional expense.
@JonathanHobbs In GNS, an 'effective' system would probably be said to encourage one particular experience.
@BESW I would advise you to consider any future Mac version with caution on the basis they are going to bring out a Mac App Store and make the Mac a closed system.
And Gamism, Narrativism, and Simulationism aren't really.... agendas. They're descriptions of goals and play attitudes that can be mixed in varying proportions.
So for example Agon could be defined as "a gamist game". But you never know what the players come up with at the table, so it's entirely possible a simulationist experience arises. The experience being the one most relevant thing the players play that game for.
@Zachiel The terms are all kinda fuzzy, which is one reason GNS turned into TBM, but.... A gamist RPG allows for satisfying clear predefined goals that something is trying to prevent you from achieving.
and agon is of course best suited for people who like to have gamist experiences, because it has rules that makes it easy to get that kind of experiences. Reward cycles that encourages it
Narrativism is more interested in motivation and character, making internal character conflict and inter-character conflict the forces that drive the game.
@BESW A couple of months ago, Apple was very strongly considering making the App Store the only way to obtain programs. Consider an iPhone: you can't just drop a program onto the iPhone and run it, you have to get it from the App Store. Same principle.
Actually I'd specifically heard they'd decided on doing so
And simulationist games are primarily interested in providing the most realistic experience of a given model, be it physics, magic, a particular time or place, or what-have-you. They're usually recognizable by having multiple intricate subsystems and fiddly bits to account for anything that might possibly happen.
@JonathanHobbs I shall have to look into this.
D&D 3.5 was very much a simulationist-gamist system, which made concessions for narrativism but never considered that aspect a major concern.
It's an attempt to create a space and vocabulary for discussing games that's more all-encompassing and less inclined to promote stereotypes and limited thinking than GNS.
It starts at the Social Contract and works in from there in a Venn-Diagram kind of way.
ie, all RPGs take place within a social contract.
@JonathanHobbs I'm not tracking down anything yet definitive, mostly a bit of months-old panic. And I've got my 10.6 install disks. I can rollback.
We had an interesting discussion about TBM diagram on our italian community. Ron Edwards itself helped us understanding it and our TBM expert, Moreno Roncucci, is helping him with the wikia
@BrianBallsun-Stanton I personally doubt any universal model can describe RPGs without being so noncommittal as to be useless or so complex as to be same.
@SimonGill Hopefully the card in question was slipped into an incinerator. It would be disastrous for Mac and everyone forced to use Mac (i.e. people using Adobe software)
I know the App Store and OS X are doing weird things with permissions and who can sandbox where. All I'm finding is panicky speculation on that wavelength.
@jonathanhobbs however, no TBM knowledge is required to enjoy playing a game. But maybe it's useful in game design, game analisys and maybe game choice (even if it's too generic to be that useful. Post-forgite games are really more different from each other than D&D, Cyberpunk or Vampires could ever be)
@Zachiel Roger Ebert is one of the oldest and most well-respected film critics of our time. He's a man of very strong opinions who is often willing to stir up trouble if he thinks the discussion that comes out of it will be productive.
Several years ago he had cancer which rendered him unable to speak, and he began doing written reviews and blogging on the Internet. One of his blog essays made the claim that video games are not art, and if they ever could be art it will not be for many many decades.
