If we assume Edison will probably only ever swap out a - die for the d6, then the minimum bonus he could get is +2, the same as if he'd used the Fate point for a regular invoke.
you can only use it once per scene (though that should probably be session), you need to invoke one of your own aspects to use it, and the D6 itself is still random, you aren't gonna get a 5 or a 6 every time
If we assume Edison will probably only ever swap out a - die for the d6, then the minimum effect he could get is +2; same as on a regular invoke. The average effect will be +4 or +5 to the roll, and it could go up to +8.
@trogdor I find it hilarious. I read the short story last night of Thomas Edison summoning Rasputin's ghost to assassinate Tesla and Atomic Robo. He seems like he's a cheater, or he plays dirty. It's fantastic for him.
this does one potentially awesome thing that has to be tied to one of your character aspects and activated with one of your fate points
@BESW if one of your players wants to use it, you might suggest the tweak of "useable once per session"
at that point, it takes up a stunt slot, can only be used once every session, needs to be tied to one of your own aspects,and needs a fate point to activate.
an average bonus to your roll of +4 or 5 seems reasonable to me
a +3 or lower is what it's just sometimes gonna cost you for your use of resources to have said stunt, and a +6 or higher is your payoff.
A new situation for me - my answer on a question has more upvotes than a better answer. It's almost as annoying as when you're being outscored by a crappy answer.
They’re just way too polarizing. People naturally gravitate in discussion to one of the poles and try to embody it, which makes them defensive of everything else.
Plus people constantly strawman and no-true-scotsman the threefold poles. Plus they’re incomplete. Plus historically LOTS of trolls and insensitive louts have stirred things up.
@BraddSzonye ...that's kinda like complaining that astronomy doesn't have a theory for why dogs turn around three times before they lie down. GNS isn't a tool for explaining why you play, but for talking about how you play.
GNS has a lot of problems inherent to it as a model, but it's telling that all your reasons why it's not useful are about the community's interaction with it, rather than about the model itself.
Even with such a flawed tool, it's the toxic community dialogue which bubbles to the top as the problem.
Given how important social contracts and the Same Page Tool are to how we play, I think it’s tough to argue that Social concerns aren’t a huge part of how we play.
Because why we play does inform how we play.
In practice though, the Social gamers never got representation or advocacy, because the serious Social gamers didn’t like to argue. ;)
Also, I don’t draw fine distinctions between GNS Theory and RGFA Threefold theory, because in practice nobody ever did, and everyone who tried to just started flamewars.
The original tool it was based on was primarily used the same way the Same Page Tool is now, to highlight certain common metagame needs in play, and to foster respect for the people whose needs were different from yours.
Because at the time they were seen as being inherently contradictory.
But in practice, it just got people arguing at each other, and a bunch of people saying “but of course you can make these things all work out together, if only you’d just [strawman]”
They had strong, intuitive ideas about causality and organic development.
It wasn’t simulation at all, just nobody could come up with a better name.
Although Fidelity or Organic would be a good start.
They’re the same sort of people who get all worked up about continuity and logic in the SF/F community.
And in-world logic and such.
And their play style is more about channeling their mental models of their characters, than taking any sort of player or authorial agency.
They’re the sort of people who might say “Sorry, I did that because my character is an asshole” and mean it instead of just using it as an excuse for bad behavior.
@doppelgreener That’s important to most RGFA Simulationists, although they’re only a crude approximation of the mental models they use to determine fidelity.
They’re the sort of folks who might think through, “What would really happen here?” and get upset if the rules or the other players’ actions don’t match those expectations.
They’re also the sort of folks for whom “genre convention” needs to be synonymous with “law of physics” or it overloads their willing suspension of disbelief.
I guess that’s another way to look at it: RGFA Simulationists are people who care a LOT about willing suspension of belief, and have a fairly low tolerance for fourth-wall stuff, and have a hard time getting back into the game once it’s broken.
@trogdor Looking at the Invention rules and thinking about all the effects a solar-voyage spacecraft must need, I'm not sure that even with Tesladyne Aerospace's bonuses you'll be able to even tie on the invention roll.
One interesting thing that came out of the GNS discussion: It occurs to me that Apocalypse World and Fiasco are both spiritual successors to Paranoia, but in like totally opposite directions.
@Lord_Gareth I had a thought (don't know why it took so long)... My wife is an artist & author, if you're looking for either for your RPG project. She's done articles & art for a RPG magazine; medieval reproduction art for a fencing manual; and various other stuff. If you're interested, I can give you a link to her page?
The Mythbusters technique
When players fail the first attempt at a skill check, give them a choice:
Try a different approach, or
Tell you how far they’re willing to go to make this approach work.
In the latter case, don’t roll the dice again. Just determine whether the approach is feasible w...
@BraddSzonye I'm reminded of Cthulhu Dark's approach to re-rolls: "Sure, you can re-roll that. But only if you're willing to risk your sanity to succeed!"
I've started to taking to naming my stories, even for no other purpose than record keeping. However I've been thinking about sharing the names of the stories with the players.
If you do it do before or after completion?
If you're running a "multi track" game does that affect when you reveal?...
@Grubermensch it seems to me they could be (they don't necessarily have common meaning), and in any case the person tagged it wanting answers within the scope of a particular system
the answer will be different for fate, where the attitude is "yes tell them everything," or for cthulhu dark where the attitude is "not if it tells them anything they don't know immediately", or roll for shoes where the answer could be "what? you give your games names?"
i think that given the way roll for shoes games go, any attempt to name them before the fact is going to go astray
"The Mystery of the Red Gloves", in which the players encounter a murder at their hotel, trail a guy to NASA, discover he's a rocket scientist, demand he send them to space, and then they go beat up aliens
Given that
the vast majority of people want this feature,
CommonMark, which we eventually hope to use, supports it, so it would come eventually anyway,
the impact should be minimal since most Markdown lists start with 1.,
even where this isn't the case, nothing will change until the post is edi...
hooray \o/
you can now start a numbered list at a number other than '1'
which is useful if you want to stick something in the middle of the list
I'm thinking I'll set our first volume in 2012, for two reasons: first, I want to avoid the recent canon with the upheaval of Tesladyne. Second, I think that since something unknown is on a collision course for the Sun, we should have it set to happen in December 2012.
That way we can have setting pressures like Distracting apocalyptic nonsense.
Exactly. Spiders are creepy with eight legs - imagine them with 12!
Also, that question reminds me of the sort of questions Dragon magazine used to get in the early 90's, and publish once a year, anonymously, in their April issue.
@BESW One of the best thing about candied ginger is that I know that if I bring a bag of it anywhere, I get it all to myself. Practically nobody else likes it.
I got a question for y'all: next week I'll be joining a live recording of an RPG podcast, meaning me and a friend will have about 30 roleplayers sitting in the audience. We'll have about 45 minutes for open questions, but then we want to do something else with them, and were looking for ideas.
@lisardggY That's less true here. Ginger chews are sold alongside the candy at grocery stores, and one of the health food stores always has two whole racks of two-pound bags of dried, sugared ginger.
It's a bit too many people to do a sort of improvised Quiet Year/Microscope style game.
And also we have an agenda, or a theme, we would like to get through somehow, it being "The players, not only the GM, have the power and the responsibility to affect the game"
We thought of maybe doing a hands-in-the-air poll about attitudes towards gaming, but we're not sure it will work well.
Suppose the universe contained a species of planet sized turtles1 that can travers at least interstellar space. How can I explain (without invoking magic) that these turtles are not spherical?
If this is not possible within the laws of physics as they are, what can be changed minimally about the...
I have a problem. I need to know if there is a possibility to use gold to improve my character without buying magic items or using a wish. Actually I know that there is at least one combination of spells that would work, and I am wondering if there is any other alternative.
I have asked a questi...
Personally I thought it was a very Classic Who thing: They took a scifi trope that's been done to death (the trolley problem), and put it in such a ridiculous, grandiose, over-the-top context that it couldn't afford to be embarrassed by itself.
Whether they did it well or not, they did it BIG and without apology or flinch.
Again, I didn't mind the central premise, I'm really annoyed by execution. Characters are barely introduced and then killed or put at risk so quickly I really couldn't care less about their fate. Things happen without build-up, so when conflict arises, it feels out of context and forced.
In short, I feel like I'm not watching an episode of a TV show, but having someone explain to me, scene by scene, what's going on. Without any emotional involvement or drama.
Also, while I appreciate the attempt to make a less-lovable Doctor, he just comes out as abusive. And a bit thick.
It's like they want to avoid all the romantic overtones of previous Doctor-companion pairings, so they make him be extra annoying and insulting towards Clara.
Smartass nerdy nephew who keeps trying to prove he's street.
Adric was created for the same reason they're having the Doctor be mean to Clara: the Doctor's relationship with his companions was getting too sexualised (Tom Baker actually slept with one of the actresses).
So they cast a nerdy-looking young man to travel with the Doctor and the female companion(s) for a while, someone the Doctor could interact with without having any sexual tension at all.
@lisardggY Yeah, Adric was a math genius and a bit of a young Turk on his planet, but what he really wanted was to join his older brother's gang. They refused because he was too naive and too clumsy for a life of crime.
So he went off with the Doctor, not least to prove to himself that he could be competent and action-y. He usually wound up in the role of Damsel in Distress as a result.
Tegan was an Australian airline stewardess who wound up being kind of a Den Mother to the whole group. She complained about their adventures, but really exciting travel was the reason she became a stewardess in the first place, and so she loved the TARDIS stuff.
And Nyssa was a scientist/princess from a psychic utopia who was adopted by the Doctor after his adventures got her father permanently possessed by the Master.
She was the serious/brainy one, and sometimes vied with Adric for social cluelessness, but her personal tragedy was channeled into energy to help others.
Yeah Im always between Nyssa, Tegan, and Adric or Nyssa, tegan, and Turlough as my favorite companion comp. Turlough was a dude who was actively working against the doctor for that season's antagonist. He joined the group as a spy and embedded agent, but eventually came to dig the doctor and had a change of heart. He still was kind of a morally gray person though and his naked self interest was a great stumbling block in many stories.
the doctor sort of took him under his wing to shepard his moral development
As much as I love Ace, she was a bad model to base all of New Who's companion dynamic off of.
(A single plucky young female companion whose adventures with the Doctor form a story arc about the companion and frequently visit important times and places in her life to do so.)
Series One Rose is basically Ace 2.0, and then it went off the tracks because RTD had... something.... but the basic model of "single female companion around whom our adventures revolve, and whose character progress is the focus of our series arcs" remains.
I have a problem. I need to know if there is a possibility to use gold to improve my character without buying magic items or using a wish. Actually I know that there is at least one combination of spells that would work, and I am wondering if there is any other alternative.
I have asked a questi...
Clarification of Flaming Sphere spell mechanics
Question text:
Regarding Flaming Sphere:
The sphere does damage when it occupies the same space as a creature. When I move it into a creature's space to attack, the sphere stops moving for the round. If the creature and sphere don't move,...
worked well, I've got my mob business up and running =D All talky skills as a rogue... even traded the detect traps/sense traps/disable trap skill lines for "status"
there are a lot of questions that will never have best answers either because the user got what they wanted and got out (and could care less about SE's systems) or because they dont like any of the answers which is an acceptable use of best
@aaron accepted answers are the "best" answer as defined by that user
which can be frustrating (this happened at lot with 4e) when someone has a question in a system/tag that they arent playing true to form and then they accept a best answer that only reinforces their playstyle
This sort of thing happens mostly on various D&D questions
4e specifically though
As much as 5e got banned from main chat for a few months, 4e has and always will probably be the largest point of contention on this site
This guy has 121 rep. Looks like he came from another stack cause he only has 20 rep from here. Not sure where the 1 came from(Probably the base 1) I know you can get cross site notifications so he should get on if I comment on the question.
While I don't share the feeling of "4e stole my hobby away", I do understand why people feel that way. 4e was a very strong break in style and gameplay. I've known people to get similarly upset when a band they like releases an album completely different to their previous style.
And I've heard, and can understand, similar complaints that this is a different band, or a different game, that uses the previous name to keep the fanbase/userbase.
The Mythbusters technique
When players fail the first attempt at a skill check, give them a choice:
Try a different approach, or
Tell you how far they’re willing to go to make this approach work.
In the latter case, don’t roll the dice again. Just determine whether the approach is feasible w...
I've started to taking to naming my stories, even for no other purpose than record keeping. However I've been thinking about sharing the names of the stories with the players.
If you do it do before or after completion?
If you're running a "multi track" game does that affect when you reveal?...
Clarification of Flaming Sphere spell mechanics
Question text:
Regarding Flaming Sphere:
The sphere does damage when it occupies the same space as a creature. When I move it into a creature's space to attack, the sphere stops moving for the round. If the creature and sphere don't move,...
