@BESW Any number of devices from old sci-fi movies were actually real; when not being filmed they're in back lots powering the whole thing? I.e. studio execs climb up on Frankenstein's table to get rejuvenated at night, Gort (from The Day the Earth Stood Still) on a hamster wheel, &c.
(I don't remember your time-frame--these may still be in the future of your story?)
@trogdor sorry, unclear: I meant I wondered if you'd gotten to the 50's yet. I.e. which era of sci-fi films' props might be available for my cockamamie scheme =)
Is this long-discarded treasure question one of those we should VtC/migrate as off-topic because history-experts would better answer it than RPG-experts?
@nitsua60 Yeah, 2013. Chateau Marmont is still one of the hotels for elites who want a private anti-paparazzi place to be super weird without everyone knowing immediately.
We recently implemented a change to protected questions based on the suggestion by Robert with a few modifications. 15k users will still be able to protect but in order to do so the question must have at least one answer by a new user aka a user with < 10 rep on the site (which is the required r...
The change is implemented in part to stop people from banning low-rep users from participating in the site before there's actually a problem the ban might solve.
Oooh. Bah, I'm doing too many things at once and mis-read that number.
I had been dropping protection on spells questions had keywords the spammers liked ("attraction", for example), and that both had an accepted answer and had been inactive for at least a week.
I understand the motivations behind the change, but the vast majority of our spam bots are so targeted on spells that I feel like some judicious protection would block more spam than genuine new users.
You're probably right, in which case it's a call whether there's more value in reducing the effort the site has to spend on spam or maintaining the accessibility of the site to new users.
Personally, given how Johnny-on-the-spot we are about hammering spam, I'm not very concerned about it.
I think that tag is what they're targeting; the spam we get is almost always of the "Dr. Manu cast a love spell and saved my marriage, you should contact Dr. Manu at fakepsychic@gmail.com to rekindle the passion in your marriage right away!" variety. I'm 99% sure that it's generated by bots who pick us as a likely target precisely because they see the word "spells" given prominence in those posts.
> [...] please, don't spend too much time considering ad-hoc filters to try to keep certain things out; they quickly learn and just work around it - it ends up just being a waste of time and resources. (source)
In the browser chat interface, to the left of the [all rooms] and [site rooms] buttons, you can control if it pings you never / when mentioned / in the visible room / in all rooms.
The "Force Training" feat reads:
You add force power suite equal to 1 + Your Wisdom Modifier (Minimum 1)
Does this mean that 1 + 1 is the minimum, or that 1 is the minimum you can achieve from this feat (ie, if your Wisdom modifier is negative you still get at least +1)?
I used to leave myself logged in when someone ganked me in WoW just to waste their time (camping the body they thought might rez) while I read a book XD
@ObliviousSage I have a friend who does this, especially as an invader. They'd also camp out in Black Knight armor in various spots on the map - or in the place of the real black knight, having just killed it - and just stand there, watching the player, until the player decided to challenge them.
Both the blue guy and the red guy are different types of "invaders". I don't know what makes the blue ones blue, since I didn't play Dark Souls 2 that far, but the red ones are other standard invaders.
They might just be attacking each other because, hey, they can, and they want a fight. :D
Oh!! The blue one's a member of the Blue Sentinels, who can join players who are being invaded by someone else in order to defend them. If they defeat the invader, they get good stuff.
There are various PVP factions in the Dark Souls game, and each of them has a reward for a slightly different activity. One just has you invade and defeat people. Another is effectively a bounty hunter guild - exact vengeance on those who've invaded others. Another is the exact opposite - go out there and co-op with people. This one says "join people who are invaded, defeat their invader."
you would think they would endeavor to make it less confusing,... then again it is a game (series) that prides itself on being hard, and also mysterious
still, most people don't like artificial difficulty
so I would have thought something like that would be more easily cleared up
but I also suspect that maybe if you actually played it, it could turn out to actually be pretty simple
@trogdor ah, it doesn't really matter: if there's a glowing person in the world, they're out to kill you, unless you summoned them, which is the case for blue sentinels and co-op partners (who glow gold).
@trogdor there are summon markers that players can put down that will show up in the same location in other peoples' worlds. when another player finds it, they can use it to summon the person who put it there for co-op play. they stay there for A Very Long Time or until they die.
Co-op runs between friends are done by using that over and over.
though to be fair,... they could have done it in a much simpler and more convenient way,.. not that it matters much to me simply because it isn't my kind of game
I mean, it's most prominent features are that it has tons of combat (which is fine) it's really hard (still fine but I don't want something that is TOO hard) and that people can invade you, which I hear is something some people need just to keep it interesting
I could turn off invaders,.. but that almost seems like turning off half the game or something
no need to spend any money on that thank you very much XD
i've actually played all the recent games in the series without online connectivity, and i'm fine, i'm not missing anything. i'll probably seek out online play for new game+, probably because i'll actually be seeking out PVP.
@trogdor "some people need it just to keep it interesting" isn't the way i'd put it - the people who don't find the base game interesting wouldn't even be playing it. rather, there's a point at which PVP becomes very fun.
for a few reasons: (a) it makes you want to avoid death, which is good. (b) you'll still have plenty of consumables which GIVE you souls, which don't get lost on death. (c) as someone who dies A LOT, i promise you'll still work out with more than you need anyway.
and ended with a huge pile of food/minerals that I never needed to use XD
heck, in Starcraft Broodwar, I would routinely play free for all matches against the strongest computers so that I could let most of them fight each other while I took as many bases as I could while still fighting off challengers and fortifying all said bases
it would usually end with the last computer standing sending waves at me until it died of having nothing left to build more units with
whereas if I tried that against a human 9 times out of 10 I got Zerg rushed to death
the other 1 time out of 10 I won,.. but the other guy probably had as little fun as I had during the Zerg rush scenario
computers seemed more humane for all parties concerned
@doppelgreener I'm pretty good at the ideas behind maths, but as soon as I get into specifics my brain starts doing an impression of Jason Ralph's eyebrows.
(Seriously, kudos to whoever cast him in The Magicians. I've never seen someone who can look like a puppy that just got kicked but you think whoever kicked it was probably justified, and that's exactly what Quentin Coldwater's actor needed to be able to do.)
There's a pattern of lawmakers proposing extreme laws which they know won't actually be enforceable, in order to appeal to their extremist constituencies. The laws die before they're passed, or get repealed, but the politician can point to it as a reason to vote for them in the next campaign.
@doppelgreener They're Senators, though, so their positions are voted on by the whole state. They can't depend on the extremism that would assist a Representative in a gerrymandered area. They're losing more voters then they would gain.
Scheming isn't antithetical to ignorance or stupidity; they're often partners.
(I'm fond of RPG campaigns with big powerful enemies whose elaborate schemes would work a lot better if they didn't have a ridiculous blind spot about something.)
(There was a time when I'd pick one to three items on the Evil Overlord List for my D&D villains to actively eschew.)
@BESW There's a story a friend told me about involving a guy whose country was at war, whose scheme was to crash the whole worldwide economy. Everyone would suffer from it, but his own country would come out on top in the end in economics and warfare. ... Except when he put that plan into motion and successfully crashed the world's economy, countries put aside their differences and worked together to restore it. And he was just like: "... Oh. Well. Okay then. That's good too I suppose."
Role playing related topics are sometimes such, that taken out of context, or read by someone who doesn't understand the context, would seem... quaint, and not necessarily in a positive way.
Rather than worry about stuff like this, I'd prefer my account here to not be publicly linked with the re...
@Polyducks Ran Surgadores with my own group tonight, and 3 is definitely the minimum I'd recommend playing with.
Meanwhile in our main campaign, we've shot William Shatner in the leg and comforted him by telling him about watching TOS on VHS.
@nitsua60 Thank you for this idea. Hollywood is being powered from a soundstage made up as an amalgam of all the different Enterprise engine rooms, staffed by D-list actors in various era uniforms and overseen by William Shatner (who is doing it mostly so that Patrick Stewart doesn't get to).
So, naturally, a psychic being is mind-controlling Shatner and all the redshirts to try and make the engines stop.
@WrongOnTheInternet I read this as asking the ants to clean up, but to be polite about the timing. I had an amusing mental image of @BESW's game wrapping up, then he goes to the back yard with a little sugar dropper laying out a trail for the ants. "Alright, workers, time to get to work."
@eimyr @doomedMind @BESW @Nitsua60 I'm running 'Gods of this Universe', the nomic supplement I created today. It's _so_ pithy and enjoyable. We're having a talk about the fish-mortals we've created right now.
They were all born of the mother of fish... and then all ate her :(
Or rather, it's not been removed yet, but it will be
Let me get you a copy of the rules
@Anaphory On their turn, a player can:
1) Make a new mutable rule 2) Destroy a mutable rule 2) Make a mutable rule immutable 4) Make an immutable rule mutable 5) Take an action in the universe
On someone else's turn, a player can: 1) Contest an action in the universe. 2) Ask an action in the universe to be explored in more depth.
If an action is contested, the player(s) that win the contest gain a point. To settle a contest, players take sides in 'for' or 'against' and roll a d6. The sum of those 'for' and 'against' rules determine the outcome. The highest wins.
@Anaphory 2. A rule made immutable cannot be made mutable again. 3. The star of Irna cannot die. 4. All planes that exist or will exist obey the laws of physics. 5. Magic may bend the law of physics. 6. No god may harm another god directly or indirectly. 7. The second planet does not obey the laws of physics (see rule 5). 8. Nothing other than the gods may enter or affect the Sanctuary of the gods. 9. Gods may not destroy any peoples of Planet Prime. 10. Lexius may no longer mute rules. 11. Nobody may mute rules.
Most of the rules are petty squabble about the rules or stating facts about the universe which would be very odd to change. But #8 essentially states something that is not an immutable truth about the universe, but something that is quite in the universe.
People have different interests. People have different ideas what's cool, so your last line will add some player conflict. People like to protect what they created, so giving them the power of creating something might naturally lead to that.
And if you like the trickster part, definitely start with the opposite of a GM, and have one player who cannot do anything (or only less) about the Rules but is equal to the other players otherwise, and see where that leads!
My thought was, both of you have to use your turns to make the end of the game with you winning happen, which gives Lexius the chance to act all-out in-universe to one-up you. But due to an asymmetry in rules and actions (you can contest actions, but not rules), that does not work.
@Polyducks What kept you from “Rule 15: The god that makes rule 15 gets 20 points.”?
My DM insta-killed me with a max damage crit, which was him doubling the value of the dice rather than doubling the dice themselves. I accepted this, but requested in the future he roll double the dice since it's more swingy when you double the damage. He rolled again for me, to my surprise, and the total was greater. Yay dice!
The "Force Training" feat reads:
You add force power suite equal to 1 + Your Wisdom Modifier (Minimum 1)
Does this mean that 1 + 1 is the minimum, or that 1 is the minimum you can achieve from this feat (ie, if your Wisdom modifier is negative you still get at least +1)?
