Probably someone went on a comment-flagging binge. I do it every week or two; I go through a page or three of my own comment list to cull the stuff that doesn't need to stick around, and when I see a comment or thread that's not mine which could also go, I flag it for mod attention.
(It's rare for mods to go on comment hunts of their own accord, instead waiting for us to call things to their attention.)
@pet I just answered this question; my conclusion is identical to the other answer provided, but I support it with a rules quote while the other answer claims there is no rule for the situation.
I'd be open to the notion that I should instead edit my citation into their answer.
Fair enough. Of the comments that are gone, there is only one I would keep around if i had your level of commitment to self cleaning
Pointing out the that L5R Not Shiba optimising thing is literally the only non dnd (/d20) optimisation question. (It probably is too chatty but it is so interesting)
I'm not sure if we should be doing some encouragement to get more nondnd optimising on the site or not. On the one hand, more nondnd the better. On the other hand one of the great beuties other systems is that people don't spend hours optimising there characters.
While we have had contests to fill in our less-used system tags, I think it'd be unnatural to try to influence the kind of question being asked about a certain system.
(Since SE is about asking questions which rise from real problems, and apparently optimisation in doctor-who-aitas isn't a problem people are actually facing.)
So--a wider spread of systems being well-represented on the site would be lovely, but we should attract more people who play that system in order to have a larger pool of actual experience to draw questions from.
If that leads to more non-d20 optimisation, awesome.
I have extensive list of hidden tags (more or less everything dnd derived.). It is amazing how much my enjoyment of the site improved once i set them to hide. I think I could pick the date by looking at my rep and see when it started increasing more raplidy. There are so many questions i don't see, and so many tags only have a few questions.
@wraith808 For my Cthulhu game, I used Dear Esther bgm for most of it, switched to the Alien soundtrack when the first player character started acting totally insane, and kept that on for the rest of the session.
On the note of self answering questions, as per my (unexpectedly technical) chatting yesterday, am a fair way into creating a nWoD GMC Angel Generator webapp. Is it reasonable for me to post a question asking for one, and self answer? (Or is that getting too close to advertising). It was/is a real problem i faced that i think others will face in the future. (and I make no revenue let along profit, from my website)
I have issues with this question: http://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/35842/from-the-god-machine-chronicles-what-do-the-different-intensity-stun-guns-do?rq=1
It is about nWoD God Machine Chronicles, but it tagged with both nwod and nwod GMC. Its answer refers to oWoD (ie cWoD) Mage and to nWoD core (which may or may not be relevant, depended on which page it is). I will deal with this later maybe i have to run. Bye all
@BESW and anyone else who plays Fate, I could use a consult. The character creation Phase Trio didn't quite work for us both times we've tried it.
It was a struggle to bring in a second and third character into the first adventure, and to then get a good aspect out of that. It all felt forced, and we ended up with neither strong bonds between characters nor the right aspects. So there's clearly something we're not getting.
Okay, so yes. This is hard. I've only run it with two or three players and that helps, but it does get forced and in my experience it confined the players a bit too much.
Yeah. After the game creation session, we'd be discussing character details, and something incidental would come up, a small idea which casts the character in a new light, and everyone agrees we'd like to hear more about that. And then we realize that's precisely what should be made into an aspect.
Probably my favorite bit from the game creation session, just a note on the margins and may not even make it into the game proper: Wizard Detective: Delusions of Romantic Tension (with one of PCs).
Honestly though I'm moving away from systems with even the crunch of Fate.
I dunno if I'll cycle back around to it if I get a group that can commit to long-form games again, but for now I'm enjoying systems that have one or two mechanics to cover everything.
I find some crunchiness fun in its own right. We'll be resuming the 13th Age game once we've played a few sessions of our superheroic Fate, and I'm very much looking forward to that.
If all goes well, we'll alternate between the two.
They started out finding the campsite of Professor Travers' group, the guy they were looking for. It was bloody and gory and ransacked, with enormous footprints leading to a cave and regular footprints leading to a monastery.
After examining the site, one guy stayed to set up their camp, one guy went to look in the cave, and two went to follow the regular footprints.
At the monastery the two were ushered inside and told it was very dangerous to travel in such small numbers, because of the attacks.
Meanwhile, the guy in the cave discovered a strange pile of metallic spheres, and.... in the dark corner of the room, his flashlight fell on a tall, wide-shouldered being with dark fur and no features except eyes!
[roll for Insanity: increase Insanity by one] He screamed and ran for the exit, only to see a boulder being pushed in front to block the cave up and trap him inside!
He managed to dash out past the boulder just before it was rolled into place, where he was confronted by another yeti which had been pushing the boulder.
Simultaneously the guy who'd been setting up camp ran up having heard the screams, and he rolled Insanity at the sight of the yeti.
They clung to each other, screaming, then ran back past camp to the monastery as fast as they could go.
Travers: "They *looked* like yetis, but they weren't." PC: "How do you know they weren't yetis?" Travers: "Because yetis are gentle and timid creatures."
I gave a demon PC a power "Ubiquitous" meme, which allows him to make a phase universally known (not beleived, just known). (Start of session after use: one area/subculture knows it, session after that country/whole culture knows it, session after that world knows it, session after that everyone has forgotten about it except the original targets.)
His first use of it was to create the meme: "Old homeless guys can tell the future."
Fate version: Whenever you attack someone with this blade, you may forfeit all harm and boosts to give them a -1 to all social rolls. This accumulates.
It seems like it is almost definately 3.5 to me (Clearics don't summon in 4e, and any questions about pathfinder, 5e or adnd, would be clearly labelled. and noone plays 3.0)
Or, it might even be D&D 4e, and there are no Summon Monster spells, and they're confused about why they can't find these cleric spells they've heard about.
I'm trying to work out the consiquences. Some things I can envision is drunk layabouts tormenting old homeless guys to tell the future. Guy steal hat, "Ha, you didn't see that coming. I thought old homeless dudes could tell the future"
In unrelated news: I have now run 2 sessions of Cross system games. It is looking like this is going to be a annual tradition for me. One with wizards from L5R, dnd 4e, Mistborn and nWoD (last year) the second with assassins from L5R, nWoD Heros, Dark Hesesy and Zorcerer of Zo (this year) I don't remember what I used to run the NPCs last time, but this time I used what i am calling the D12 Master System. Which is sometimes rolled as a dicepool (Success on 10-12), sometimes rolled as a d% (Success on >100%)
these systems are compatable and should be played together :-P
@JonathanHobbs Oh, another interesting thing about my CD game last night: one of the players appeared to go mad before she actually did.
She hit Insanity 5 when she figured out what the plan was and hatched a solution to stop it, which appeared to involve cutting off another PC's arm.
He'd been holding one of the metallic spheres and it had oozed goo and webbing until it attached itself to his hand; she thought it was trying to possess him.
So she grabbed someone's knife and wrestled him to the ground, trying to cut through the goop to get the sphere while shouting "Hold still! I'm trying to save you, and the world!"
While the other two Investigators just sort of watched, very confused.
She failed to cut it out, so plunged her hands into the ooze and pulled it away.... and as she stood there holding the thing she was convinced was the channel for a terrible power to gain a new body, she went utterly mad.
But, ah, nobody could really tell the difference at that point.
and learned about what the daleks and a few other things used to be like, including Leela's background - the Sevateem and the Tesh, and what they used to be!
Oh, I remove the Doctor Who-specific stuff and just leave the general horror plot, then throw the Investigators at it instead of the Doctor.
Because honestly, most Doctor Who plots ARE straight-up cosmic horror for anyone who isn't informed about the bigger picture.
For example, a lot of the aliens the Doctor encounters are functionally Elder Gods to the average human; it's only because he knows about them that he can defeat them--or even understand them.
A human trying to fathom the Silents, or the Weeping Angels, would be hard put to work out much about them.
Yeah, I ran that risk but at least I knew you wouldn't have seen the episode.
Which is why I wouldn't use the Weeping Angels in a Cthulhu Dark game: they're part of pop culture now so the players would know what's up even while their characters didn't.
But Sutekh, or Fenric, or the Fendahl--unless you've actually seen the episode I can take that concept and make a game around it that keeps the player in the dark.
@JonathanHobbs So, if we're doing this, pick one: science fiction horror (like spaceship or remote colony stuff--Alien, Event Horizon, the like) or traditional Mythos horror (early 1900s Lovecraftian stuff).
@trogdor It's this "if you fail" bit that's the challenge; even if we deem it out of professional and human capacity so you only roll the Insanity die, you get two rolls to my one.
It's the traditional term for Mythos RPG characters, probably because the reason they're PCs is that they're the idiots who (at least at first) run toward the Weird Stuff to find out what's going on, otherwise they wouldn't be part of the story.
Often it starts with something apparently innocent--a lost explorer, the journal of a weird uncle, a couple artists in different places making similar designs.
But what makes them Investigators is that they poke it with a stick.
They neither say "How boring" and walk away, nor "Too weird for me" and leave quickly.
Not until it's too late and they're well embroiled.
That's one reason the Keeper (Mythos GM) keeps tricks up his sleeve.
While the possibility of sudden death was very real last night, if Tex had gotten sealed in the cave with the yeti he would have discovered that it was motionless, as if taxidermied.
(I never said it moved; I only described what it looked like and suggested you should roll Insanity.)
One of the things a good Keeper does (and I'm not a good Keeper yet, but I'm trying) is to never offer value judgements or an excess of information. Don't say a thing is scary, just describe scary attributes.
Players feel things more viscerally when they come to the conclusions themselves.
For example, the Great Intelligence told Kiera that it wished to be enfleshed, and that the spheres were its prosthetics. She came to the conclusion that it was using the spheres to take a human body as its own all by herself.
(And she was wrong, but it was close enough to the truth that her insight allowed the Investigators to stop the GI's plan.)
@trogdor oh right, yeah - got ahead of myself. :) too much invested to leave or too insane - gotcha. And the dead part happens much later after they simply can't drop it.
@JonathanHobbs When the failure die is rolled--and it has to be called for by someone or it's not--then the PC's roll has to meet or beat the failure die or the PC fails.
and the story just being over isn't as fun as watching the at-least-one-person running around and flailing, however ineffectual said person or people are
@JonathanHobbs So, failure is just failure, while success comes in degrees, and either way if you're risking insanity you can fail to hold it together and come one step closer to going "incurably insane."
Mythos here, Mythos on tv screen, Mythos in our heads. Because when Brian and me watch tv series, we invariably end up picking a system for it. And now we've started on True Detective. And now we have the beginnings of an incredibly bleak system.
Immediately upon gaining her 6 and terminal point of Insanity, Kiera plunged the sphere attaching itself to her hands into a furnace, going blind and losing the use of her hands, but destroying the sphere. I allowed her to reduce her Insanity by 5 by virtue of having "suppressed Mythos knowledge" in a truly drastic fashion so quickly, but she was mostly useless for the rest of the session.
yeah, our first PC to hit 6 insanity got the orb off of me, and all 3 of the other PC's burned a couple orbs and also the glass pyramid while my character rocked on the floor gibering into his recorder
The metaphor we eventually came up with, and that can perhaps be expanded into other genres, is entropy (I like the concept, what). Each stage of investigation has a certain amount of entropy obscuring it. You can't destroy entropy, you can't fight entropy, you can only move it around. To advance in the investigation, characters have to take on its entropy into their lives.
It can be physical harm, it can be stress, it can be fraying relationships or broken things. Each scene is all about transferring entropy from someone (or something) onto someone (something) else.
This is all still very raw.
But the way I'm seeing it right now, entropy rarely if ever goes away. Sometimes, sometimes, it can be diminished by love (of someone or something), but even that puts the object of love in danger. Marriage can break. Your favorite song can become meaningless sounds. You have moved entropy onto them.
So PCs would talk to witnesses, and take some of the entropy of the Mythos mystery onto themselves. Or onto witnesses, but they're likely already suffering from more than enough. As the mystery entropy is diminished, clues appear, and then an answer which leads to the mystery's next stage.
PCs engage in dramatic scenes to move entropy around to allow them to solve the mystery. Because there's too much for any one person to handle. And even when they move the entropy out there, even if they get bandaged up in the hospital, it's still not gone, it's just been offloaded to the hospital, or the city, or civilization.
Don't have any actual mechanics yet, and maybe this won't ever coalesce. But I really like the metaphor. And if entropy is replaced with pain, this could easily be noir.
And perhaps replacing it with evil would make for fantasy.
y'know it occurs to me upon you talking about this Entropy Shifting mechanic
suppose the world is full of bad entropy
you could shift all of that entropy into... elsewhere, creating proportionate tremendous discord.
The world experiences an existential threat: alien invasion from another region of the galaxy or another plane or dimension. But, humanity finally gets its act together, unites in a benevolent global civilisation and develops peace and advancement - and fights against the existential threat.
In Doctor Who, there's a whole planet of mathematicians performing a kind of reality-altering calculation which can only be performed by a living mind (no computers can withstand its reality-changing power enough to contain it) in order to siphon entropy into pocket universes; without their work, the universe would have succumbed to heat death already.
In Asimov, humans and a race in another universe with different physical laws developed the ability to exchange particles with each other and use the difference in physics to create clean energy--but each universe's laws were slowly becoming more like the other's, and that caused problems.
@JonathanHobbs Or you have an artist who goes through hell but leaves behind transcendent artwork (that can take on some Entropy without being diminished?)
Had another small round of rumination. The amount of Entropy/Pain/Evil (should it just be called Stress for the general sense?) is tracked by the GM at the chosen scope. It's a town or a family or a planet. On its own, it can reduce Entropy though positive, creative endeavors (by how much depends on the sliding scale of bleakness).
On a personal level I do believe that material sacrifice begets spiritual power, which the system could be exploring. But that example is a different thing entirely.
And I wouldn't want to force my philosophies on your game.
I can't say this is my personal philosophy, but it's an approach that I'm currently exploring.
As an impetus for the game, there's a source of Stress, a Conduit, something that's making everything worse. It's doing so steadily, though not necessarily in a linear time. 10 Stress inflicted every plot "tick", 1 Stress regained. Everything's degrading, and will keep degrading until the Conduit is fixed.
The Conduit can be an eldritch god or a new drug on the streets or a necromancer in the tower. The more Stress gets pumped into a locale by a Conduit, the worse off it is, until eventually it is utterly ruined. There's no last-second saves. There's a progressive degradation of everything that's good.
There can be several Conduits, creating Stress at different rates, influencing the world differently.
So there's a giant track of Entropy, which both triggers events and serves as their outcome. And PCs can offload their Entropy onto it. They can get patched up in a hospital, they can go out into town and burn money, they can trash their place. All of this will simply move their Entropy onto the general track, but may allow them to function.
@BESW It'll happen, though: if everyone can offload entropy onto each other, and the PCs and world can exchange entropy both ways, it'll tend to equalise as everyone shoves as much entropy onto everyone else as they can get away with.
or just fluctuate near enough to be equalised on average.
The Sixth Doctor wears awfully garish clothing, like a clown threw up on another clown. They are displeasing to everyone around him, mildly distressing sometimes. It's revealed that those patterns and colours are especially distressing to a particularly warlike alien race which, if left unchecked, would enslave and slaughter the galaxy.
So he pops in every few centuries and throws their civilisation into chaos just by walking down the streets of every major city for a few hours.
Though what does happen if someone dies or gets placed into one? If they have family and friends, some of their Entropy passes to them. What if they don't? Is that the way to reduce the Entropy of the world, to die? Cause that's not a very good outcome of the mechanic, not what I'd like to see.
Take a note from the chaos demons of the Chalion books:
A demon cannot exist on its own in the material world; it needs a living host. But its very presence will eventually kill the host--to cancer if nothing else--because they're beings of pure chaos.
When a creature dies, its soul goes to the gods. The demon, rightly fearing the gods' power to return it to its place outside the universe, jumps away at the moment of death and lands in a nearby living creature.
However, a soul which is strong-willed and truly content to die can grasp the struggling demon and carry it to the gods.
Again I think of Doctor Who: the Ninth Doctor regenerated with a smile, reassuring his companion that it was okay and everything would turn out alright. The Tenth Doctor whinged about not wanting to go, and in the process he trashed the TARDIS and cut ties to everyone he'd met in the previous five seasons.
The Eleventh Doctor wasn't happy about going, but he transferred the entropy to his enemies in a very violent, physical fashion.
It seems like a New Who thing that the Doctor treats his regeneration as if he's dying. The Old Whos whose regenerations I'm aware of had their regenerations treated as thoroughly unremarkable by those around them (3rd -> 4th) or, though I can't remember the specific cases, I get the gist the others related to it more like their personality is going to change.
Two was very unhappy about it, but that was because it was being forced on him as a punishment.
One was like "oh, dear. I seem to be wearing a bit thin. brb."
Five had a rough time of it and almost died for realsies, but he was okay even with that because he'd sacrificed himself to save his companion and that was cool. (Again, points off Ten for whinging about exactly that.)
Six's actor didn't come back to film the regeneration, so he got a bump on the head and that was that.
Seven's death and regeneration were especially undignified, but we'll plead extenuating circumstances (it was in The Movie). Eight's regeneration was just shown last year, and it was all stoic and stuff, accepted as necessary even though the conditions of it were unpleasant.
Warth was casual, more like One. Nine's was--dramatic, but he was more concerned about not freaking out his companion than anything else.
@JonathanHobbs A seven-minute flashback episode released on the web shortly before the 50th Anniversary Special aired, to show how the Warth Doctor came to be.
John Hurt. Technically he's called the War Doctor, but I like poking fun at the "not-really-a-Doctor" conceit they had to use to shoehorn him into the lineup.
The Eighth Doctor (Paul McGann from The Movie and a lot of really great audio stories) died during the Last Great Time War, but a splinter group of Gallifreyans who were more magical than sciencey revived him temporarily and offered to kick-start his regeneration.
He wouldn't have any control over it, but they would, so they offered to make him anyone he wanted to be: a healer, a general, a diplomat...
And he, despairing at last, decided that the universe no longer needed a Doctor; it needed a Soldier.
It was that person (later called the War Doctor) who ended the Last Great Time War by destroying both Daleks and Time Lords utterly, wiping them from the time stream.
Because of that deed, for three regenerations afterward he didn't count that regeneration as part of his lineage because he had not acted as a Doctor.
After the events of the 50th Anniversary Special, the most recent version of the Doctor remembers that event differently and has a different opinion of the War Doctor, but it was still a dark time for him.
Yeah. So, the 50th created a new alternate timeline that had apparently retroactively creeped in somewhere, and resolved it to align with the way the series had been handling it (apparently, unless it became slightly different)
That's true. They retconned the time war into something else. Then they retconned the way it was into a new retcon that it was maybe all along.
our previous idea of the time war -> nope it's not like that actually, also everyone dies -> nope it's not like that actually, but now everyone's saved
(And Gallifrey was burning when they used the Master to try to escape whatever Time-Locked pocket they were in, and it wasn't when the Doctors put them in that pocket in the 50th...)
So--yeah. The Last Great Time War appears to only be wibbly-wobbly when viewed from outside it, which is bizarre. It's a freaking Time War.
In it, there is a point a bunch of people time travel, including a guy who handles some very socially disgruntled people as his profession (Kratos, Wolverine, Goku, basically all the big tough guys from anything who solve problems by fighting things)
Without his guidance, they start doing... really crazy shit
One of the people is continuously reminded: do not think about time travel.
(Because hopefully if you don't, all the crazy shit un-happens and things return to as they should be)
but then she thinks about time travel. whilst time travelling. and bad things happen.
