So I was wondering what happens to the rep I spent on a bounty, if no one answered the bounty? After this 24 hour grace period is up do I get my bounty returned?
The exception is when a moderator refunds it, and they'll do so only if there's a good reason. Normally that's when someone's bountied an off-topic question, so they have to close/lock/delete it, and they'll refund the bounty in the process. I've had a bounty refunded after I asked people on Meta Stack Overflow how I can resolve an issue I was having, then I realised I'd goofed up and it wasn't an issue to begin with.
especially on the question i bountied. It is about online virtual table top programs, that thing can get outdated over time when new programs are developed
@MC_Hambone Well, theoretically yes, but generally it's recommended to just award the bounty to the most helpful answer because it's not going to go anywhere any other way.
STORY TIME WITH HAMBONE: Tonight my players cornered the leader of a death cult faction in service of Vecna. They killed his henchmen and minions, and to the end the encounter they used a blinding spell, an attack to knock him prone and then tied him up for questioning. they had a few good intimidate rolls and got some leads out of him (like he wasnt acting on his own and that he was hired anonymously)
the group however, failed the intimidate roll when asked what secret he was trying to get out of Vecna (even though his summoning rituals failed). Instead of answering the Cultist leader said "You will never know and I shall be free soon!" He proceeds to cast burning hands in order to burn the ropes binding his hands
cue nat 1, crit miss
Instead of burning the ropes he set his entire robe on fire, and during the time it took for the dwarf with stubby legs to run back to the main sewer tunnel to get water, the Cultist burned alive
I didn't think it through but in retrospect He probably thought burning to death and not betraying his masters Identity or PLans was a better fate than disobeying orders
and the gods in 4e, while they have little power as per the setting in D&D, i have been running a custom worl d and the gods arent as neutered
Well the Cultist was indeed contacting Vecna to barter for a secret, the man that hired him to do so Is not however Vecna, the master he was referring to was the (possibly) mortal man that hired him
I guess I can spill the beans here cine the player in my group that frequents the site never comes in to chat
The story that I am leading into is one that cirles around an altered version of Tiamat
and the "Boss Guy" that hired this cultist is trying to find out the secret to ressurecting the long dead god of chaos, Tiamat.
Tiamat was killed by a group of adventurers 100s of years ago and when they killed the god, their weapons and implements were imbued with the power to resurrect Tiamat (the gear would be consumed in the process). Once the party and the Big Bad guy find this out I intend it to be a race to the finish to see how can find the artifacts first and seal the fate of the world for better or worse
@BESW Pitamat?
in the books Tiamat is chaotic but she is more greedy than in favor of rampant chaos if I remember correctly. Every one in my group wants to fight a big bad dragon and I liked the idea of a 5 headed dragon as part of the campaign ending fight scene
so I chose Tiamat and altered the lore so that she is more hell bent on rampant destruction and chaos.
Just, um, be careful there. Because players are amazingly good at destroying all your plans.
They may ignore the cues available to find the weapons, they may do something you didn't expect with one (like sell it to a merchant), they may go off and do something different, or they might just decide killing the Big Bad guy is the more efficient method to saving the world, and then they can go find the weapons at their leisure.
And, y'know, they're players, so they will almost certainly do none of those things and find a far more inventive way to break the plans.
One of my friends ran a single D&D session for us once: he started us in a town, in a bar with a dodgy-looking fellow nearby. He expected we'd talk to that guy, head out to the mountains, run into a girl along the way and talk to her (probably taking her with us), then dive into the dungeon and kill stuff.
Instead we decided this guy was suspicious and we ought to keep an eye on him, talked to every single other person available in the town, went to all the buildings to ask around about things (everyone none-too-subtly hinting you should go to the mountains), and eventually left without ever speaking to the dodgy guy.
When we met the girl beside a rock in the middle of nowhere, we planned an ambush just in case (what's she doing out here?) and then spoke to her and relaxed and took her with us.
Then the monsters in the cave were all skeleton minions. He expected it to be a tough fight, they crumbled into dust without laying a finger on us.
... he decided to take the campaign back to the drawing board and hasn't run a session since unfortunately!
@AlexP that is true ;) though this is for programming purposes
I feel like my pacing is off, or I don't know where to take the players next sometimes.
When I asked them about what they'd like to do or what kind of campaign they'd like to run in Fate, and asked them about going back to the island, the conversation went "yeah, we could do that" -> "eh, we could miss it" -> "let's find something else to do"
I am not super sure on what I did or didn't do or if it was simply due to two of them not being super interested in fantasy stuff.
Then again, between the group, I have two who want no magic, one who wants lots of magic and one who's happy either way, and I have one who likes sci-fi, one who likes fantasy, one who likes modern and one who's happy either way.
so that could've tilted the discussion of what to do away from the island and I'm not sure.
First and foremost: while the GM has a responsibility to run a game that's fun for the players, if the GM isn't enthusiastic about the game it doesn't matter if the players like it or not.
A game the GM isn't eager to run will be a lackluster game.
Second: players that are used to systems where the kind of setting and story are pre-determined (by system and/or by GM) may LIKE the idea of getting to define that stuff themselves, but may be at a loss for how to do it.
And further--they might not actually want to.
Trogdor likes giving most of the worldbuilding choices over to me.
I ask him stuff like "tell me three things you want to see, do, or meet in the game," and then I build a setting and story where those are likely.
Now, as for the pacing stuff, that's separate from identifying the kind of setting/story you're going to run.
It's hard for me to be really explicit because it's a gut-level intuition thing for me most of the time.
But one basic concept is the cycle of crisis and victory: bad thing happens--good thing comes out of it--which leads to the next bad thing.
Fate mechanises this a little bit: crises grant Fate points which are then spent on future victories.
But what it doesn't do is create the sense of flow, because Fate points are divorced from the things that grant them.
It's kind of funny, but my sense of narrative flow comes in almost equal measure from my study of the history of the Bahá'í Faith, and my reading of series like the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew.
This is why I suggest Lady Blackbird, by the way: its system has "this leads to that" baked into it at a fundamental level.
In Lady Blackbird, each character has "keys," which are things your character is likely to do: look for her lover, give orders, help someone who is in trouble.
When you "hit your key" (take action to reunite with your lover, come up with a plan and give orders to make it happen, help someone out), you can gain XP or increase your reserve pool of dice.
If hitting your key puts you in danger, you get double the XP or dice.
You spend 5 XP to gain new traits (things you're good at doing, adding dice to your roll to do them) or expand existing ones, gain a new key, or learn a secret (kind of like a stunt in Fate).
But... if you ever "buy off your key," rejecting that course of action and removing the key from your character sheet, you get the immediate effect of spending 10 XP on traits, keys, or secrets.
So if you abandon your quest for your lover, or you ignore a request for help, or acknowledge someone else as the leader, you can choose to buy off your key, losing that part of your character in exchange for getting two new things about them.
It's totally narrative-first, fictional-position-centric character advancement.
And for our purposes, it defines crisis and victory in very easy-to-see ways.
In Fate, the GM and players have to take responsibility for that continuity without explicit mechanical support.
BTW, @JonathanHobbs, I'm glad you took the initiative to VTC that question; I was looking at the answers and wondering how to clean them up.
WHAT. After a walloping 23 hr operation, woman has entirely new 3D PRINTED CRANIUM. http://www.dvice.com/2014-3-27/womans-entire-cranium-replaced-3d-printed-skullcap @dvice http://t.co/OReB8puz2T
Okay, one more tweet as I catch up with my backlog.
Ursula Vernon threatens violence with blunt fish re: body politics.
The lovely @UrsulaV, grousing about stupidity in a distinctly Ursula way ;) http://ursulavernon.tumblr.com/post/81139489822/weirdlyshaped-mcmandie-you-dont-need-to
> When you’re the GM, don’t try to plan what will happen. Instead, ask questions—lots and lots and make them pointed toward the things you’re interested in. > "Does anything break when you do this crazy maneuver?” > “The fire probably spreads out of control doesn’t it?” > “That sounds like a bold plan. What’s the first step?” > Part of the job of the GM is listening to what the players say, catching it, turning it around and looking at it, and seeing if there’s anything else to be done with it.
After many years with a GM who was very firm in driving things forward and dropping the plot on us, we've switched it up with a new GM who really wants to react to what we, the players, initiate.
But we're so used to the regular dynamics that we just sort of sit there.
We go do minor stuff but haven't really been active in pushing our own agendas and stories yet.
There are a couple of other problems as well. Different players have very different playing styles.
This is an Ars Magica game, in Medieval Europe. But after our recent shake-up, we decided we want to focus more on adventure than on intrigue.
So me and another player built adventure-focused characters. But another player is very burn the books
So while some of us are biting the hooks, he's... well... he burned down the monastery where we were trying to investigate what appeared to be plague-ridden vampire monks.
Totally reasonable in his point of view - they were vampires, and this was the least dangerous way to dispose of them. But.... you know. Burn the books.
The book-burner is the original and primary GM of the game over the years. He's also a former history student and a very widely read amateur historian. As well as an eternal pessimist. His vision of the middle ages is much bleaker than ours, so he finds it hard to get behind the "wild adventure!" style of play.
I think mostly the issue is that he builds sensible characters who would rather nuke vampires from orbit rather than face danger themselves, or who refuses to even talk with the Church Inquisitor we met along the way because he could see absolutely nothing good coming out of that contact, and a lot of potential bad.
Which ended up being a bummer for the player who was trying hard to play that inquisitor.
He was the first person to import White Wolf games to Israel, back in the 90's, when all you could find here was D&D, because he wanted people to see that the hobby moved beyond the dungeoncrawling.
@AlexP I'm not entirely sure yet. Don't know the character well enough.
Just to clarify a bit, he's not necessarily a wet blanket that turns a fun session into a dreary history lecture.
But there are some differences in expectations and playing styles.
But on happier notes, plane tickets were purchased last night, and I'm heading off to Worldcon in London in August. Whoo!
It's a classic list question to which there are multiple fitting answers and no one right answer, added to the fact that a list of links is just an invitation to link rot and answers that turn useless in time.
And I don't think the answers are good enough for a historical lock.
@InbarRose hey there! (just stepped away from the screen to make a salad, or else I wouldda replied faster... didnt notice your message til i sat back down)
I have a big apartment in downtown Tel-Aviv where I host games all the time. Last night I hosted a Werewolf: The Forsaken game. We met early to all have a big hearty breakfast together, and then played for 9 hours.
@lisardggY ohhhh, yea I think I noticed something about that as I was skimming what I missed while playing Warcraft :D
I had a player like this guy who burned down the monastary
although it was more minor annoyances
nothing like burning down a monastary
still, at first I allowed it, and after a few sessions I saw it wearing on other players so I started providing character damagin consequences
he really liked to kick doors in and he hated magic users (in character) and our rogue was getting annoyed that he never got to unlock a door because the fighter would run in a kick it open
and the mage was worried that if he used his magic overtly the fighter would kill him (he would use a bow and shoot flaming arrows instead)
so i quickly introduced a NPC mage to the party and the fighter did indeed attack him, little did he know this NPC was like lvl 6 and the fighter was level 2, the NPC handed him his ass and told him to behave himself.
I then started making more doors trapped, or oddly weak, more than once he got his foot trapped in a door and missed rounds of combat trying to free himself and many times doors exploded in fire traps
He eventually calmed down and became a team player when he realized being a jacka** wasn't in his best interests.... eventually that character was written out and now he plays a very team player wizard :D
so thats a long winded way of suggesting maybe showing this guy some repercussions for doing things that make the other player and characters angry
The might have worked out in the end, but essentially you took away the game that player originally wanted to play. He wanted to be a jackass fighter who runs head first and hates mages. And you basically let him make that character - when it turned out that character didn't work - then you said "no" Which is a bit like a betrayal.
Regardless of being the storyteller - every participant is bound by a social contract. You all need to agree on this before a game. If part of that means changing the way you play the game in order to meet everyone elses standards... that is another story...
But I doubt that was the case.
If I am invited to a game of Werewolf: The Forsaken for instance, I assume I am going to probably be a Werewolf who is big and powerful and kicks the crap out of everything,.
I don't expect to join a game where we are spiritual guides to yuppies who drink too much starbucks.
i tried to explain it as quickly as possible... but i never said he couldn't do that stuff, and I didn't make every door or wizard slap up side the head
I am glad everything worked out - but tricking a player like that is, I feel, a betrayal.
In my opinion its best to talk about the problem openly and plainly. Ask the player to change, or that you will not be able to play because of conflicting styles.
I merely showed him there are repercussions for his actions... in fact the NPC wizard came into play after the fighter murdered a man in a tavern for lighting a candle with magic
the players talked to him and he ignored them, I mentioned it to him once too and he just said "that's what this character does" i told him he should really make an effor tot work with the party and he said "no"
Learn as you go I guess. His in ability to work with people I felt some non lethal and some times funny things would help him realize that other people are part of the game
Listen - things worked out in the end - that's fine.
But personally I think it's horrible to do that to a player. Intentionally screw with his gaming and introduce elements specifically to cause him to switch his game up and make a new character...
I can try open discourse again if the game takes a turn with players feeling bad about a character, but I dont really like saying" NO You can't play him"
He is one player, there are more of you - No one is better than anyone else in this case. But imagine if the players playing the Star Wars characters decided one of them wanted to be a Bounty Hunter.... It just doesn't work.
I see your point though and I will likely be more diplomatic in the future. but when the player is acting like a complete ass hat, I don't see the problem of making his life a bit more difficult
so what do you do when you talk to the player and they flat out refuse to be a team player?
and you cant ask them to stop playing because they are friends with evryone else and it would destroy the group?
I know I could have talked to him more, but i really got the feeling he was not going to ever work with the other players, he would always do what ever he wanted no matter how upset everyone else got
not saying what I did was right, just saying that it was something I tried in a difficult situation
The problem here is that his character is suited to the game - as it was played for the past several years. We're trying to shift the focus, but there's a lot of inertia.
He's certainly amenable, but I'm not sure he really likes playing high-adventure, so we're trying to find some middle ground.
you also might want to talk to him about something that is boarder line metagaming. He knows alot about that time in history and that is tainting his perception of the game.... maybe if the GM tells him that that doesnt apply to this game universe?
But Ars Magica is a campaign well suited for switching characters, so if it comes to that...
That's exactly the current thread of discussion.
We're all for changing the mindset. But we've been doing it for so long (he's been the primary GM for this campaign since 199-fucking-6) that it's hard to change, even when you're actively trying.
I created my own universe for our current D&D game, and I have to constantly remind one of our new players that what he thinks he knows about D&D wont apply
@MC_Hambone Are those differences ad-hoc, as in things are just different because you have cool ideas, or is there some overarching theme to the new campaign world, like "exotic sword'n'sorcery" instead of "heroic chivalry", something that will allow the players to adopt a mindset that fits in with the setting?
You can buy into heroic chivalry, but the worldisnt necessarily forcing that on people... and i am not sure what you mean about exotic sword and sorcery
If you have a specific style explicitly defined - can be a subgenre or even just a vague feel ("like Elric", f'rinstance), then the players will have an easier time leaving the D&D mindset behind.
the reason my game isnt always going to line with D&D specifically though is because I created it for a comic book i am writing, and I had to tweak some things to allow for the D&D rules (because at the time it was the only system I knew)
Even with the basic D&D settings, playing in Dragonlance will, by default, encourage the players to fall into the Great War between Good and Evil mindset, since that's a defining trope of the setting, as seen in the books. You can play other styles, of course, but when you tell people "We're playing in Dragonlance", the epic struggle is always there, shading their initial perceptions.
So if you say "This world is inspired, in style and theme, to Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and Grey Mouser stories", for instance), you're establishing a very different expectation.
some how I feel like this conversation suddenly became about my game... :P i was originally just giving an example about players assuming too much in the world trying to empathize with Lisard :P
A detective story set in a modern world evolved from magic.
The problem with applying it to my game is that we still want to keep a link to history - both to real European history and to our own campaign's extensive history - because 18 years of history is a fantastic resource we want to preserve.
@InbarRose i like medival RPGs, the stem of the confusion comes from my Comic world being "athiest" ie it lacks gods completely... so I just adopted the D&D pantheon and I change what gods over see if I like what they can do or what they are, but not what they govern (liek Tiamat is a cool monster and I want them to fight her, but i dont jive on the whole greed thing)
(or at least i would like it if they end up fighting a 5 headed evil dragon god.... not that they ever will if they dont stumble across plot hooks, reject them or otherwise thwart things)
@lisardggY I'd suggest getting an explicit list of character motivations down. Make ever player define what their characters want and value. It makes it a lot easier to figure out what's going on at the big-picture level and how to get into situations that draw in other PCs. It also makes it obvious if some characters just have no reason to interact with others.
@BESW The problem is that we're used to be surrounded by dangling hooks at all times and bite what we want, whereas the current GM wants us to cast our own nets, if you'll pardon the terrible mangling of the metaphor.
I'll also head out. Need to buy curry powder and find something to do with all these carrots. Don't ask.
I'm at a loss for what to do right now with my app - my HTML structure, Knockout's hierarchical data binding and jQuery UI's dragging functionality is fighting with me over something.
@JonathanHobbs Yup. I know people who call it Shower Programming. Leave your workstation, go home, do something else, take a shower, and wham! - the solution suddenly pops up in your head.
