Well, it seems like there were several points at which OMH could have ended up rent asunder by shoggoths instead of vice-versa, if the dice had not worked out, but maybe I just am not having a good picture of the shape of the GM's desires.

Yeah, it's hard to say exactly from the story. But they were using Trail of Cthulhu, which means the PCs had skill-specific currency to spend when it was important to succeed.

(If you're familiar with Fate, the Gumshoe system has a mechanic kinda like fate points but with a separate pool for each skill.)

Yes, I know Gumshoe, although I don't think I've ever played it.

So good point.

The only Gumshoe game I've played is Bubblegumshoe.

I think I have that, but have not yet moved the PDF over to my iPad for reading. So many games!

My group's really liking Bubblegumshoe. Evil Hat took the Gumshoe system and gave it teeth by tying the skill currency mechanic to something with narrative weight.

Which is what you would expect from FATE people!

Indeed.

For my group, we've been wanting to play games with more focus on social complexities, but in systems which give equal priority to other solutions we have a hard time staying focused on the interpersonal.

So Bubblegumshoe is better than Fate for us in that regard.

And you gotta love any system where pre-game collaborative prep easily produces a complex community of PCs and NPCs:

The problem my group had with Fate is that we kept lapsing into abstraction, but especially with anything not immediate and physical. We used Fate Core (roughly) for Masks of Nyarlathotep recast as Mass Effect, and that happened a lot; not so much using FAE for a strange fantasy game, but the narrative and the mechanics still never quite came together.

Oh, nice relationship chart!

That looks very promising.

Yeah, Fate's a very powerful toolbox, but it's not much of an engine or a structure; it's a scaffold at best. The group has to bring the vision and coherence on its own.

Yes, well put. The fantasy game was in a setting the same group created by playing Microscope, so we had a more unified vision. The MoN/ME game might have worked better if everyone had played ME ahead of time, instead of just hearing about it and trying to run with it.

Fate's still my group's "default" system, but we're learning better how to recognise what it needs and what it won't work for.

We're going to have to sit down and re-define one of our long-going Fate campaigns because it's no longer clear what we want out of it.

The people I game with seem to keep falling back into D&D, alas. I'm in one 5e campaign and one 13th Age one.

I'd like to try other systems, but everyone has kids and lives and schedules. It's quite vexing, how gamers want to be productive members of society!

Indeed.

My group's stopped trying to have a single continuous campaign we play every time we get together.

Instead we have several episodic campaigns, and we play a lot of one-shots between times.

We actually play more often that way, because a lot of people will come for a casual "Oh, just drop by and play a session when you're able" group, who wouldn't be able to commit to something where their absence would be a problem.

That's probably better-adapted to the realities of grownup life. We do episodic/one-shot when we have people who aren't normally around (like visiting friends who live in the next urban sprawl over) but it doesn't happen that often.

yeah.

I've got a lot of friends whose schedules don't mesh at all, so I just decided to open my house every Saturday night.

I thought that's where my gaming would end up, in particular with playing in a board games cafe.

All my friends know they can come by any Saturday and we'll hang out. Usually the people who show up are RPG folks, so that's kinda our default, but we've been watching a lot of movies lately, and sometimes we play board games or go see a local play.

Man, it sounds so nice to have friends

It has now turned into a campaign with three committed players.

Anaphory, excellent!

GreySage, I am in many cases gaming with people I've known with 25 years, and otherwise at least... 15? Closer to 20. So I'm not really sure how to make friends, I just hang on to the ones I was thrown together with in colelge.

[amused] I went to college almost halfway around the world, so that didn't work out so well for me.

I have been in a new city (and country) for 8 months now, and it took me 6½ to find these three players for something non-D&D.

I only went halfway across the continent, but then I stuck.

Personally I find it easier to make friends than to find gamers on this island, so I convert my friends to tabletop gaming.

But in a lot of places the FLGS is a bit more hopping, or there's G+/Facebook groups, etc.

Bringing new people into the hobby is always good! Around here, my friends seem to be doing that by breeding. The 5e game I'm in has the daughter of two of the other players, and her friend the daughter of another pair of college friends.

Apparently all the teenage girls on that street want to play ninjas. It's kind of disturbing. (Also all the families I know on that street have only girls, which is also kind of strange.)

Ninjas are awesome, kunoichi doubly so. Just ask Chiyome Mochizuki.

No argument there!

(According to legend, Chiyome ran a foster home for dispossessed women, where they paid for their room and board by becoming kunoichi who spied for Shingen Takeda.)

...I may be responsible for having added catgirl ninjas to the FAE fantasy game I mentioned earlier.

We had a ninja einherjar in the Dresden Files Accelerated beta test.

Cool.

@BESW Aren't Einherjar about dying honorably in battle? And ninjas about preferably not dying, and if so then not in battle, and definitely not honorable?

In the Dresden Files setting, einherjar are mighty warriors who Odin raised from the dead to serve him.

And yes, the ninja had a rather complicated backstory and was not entirely satisfied with his situation.

@Apler Hi!

I have survived another work week, so I am out of here. Nice talking to you, everyone!

@BESW one imagines they were doubly effective just for being underestimated for being women

@trogdor Oh, yes. They disguised themselves to plant rumours, spy on secret areas, that sort of thing. But they probably also knew martial arts, since Chiyome's family were part of a ninjutsu school.

I didn't say they did not know those things

XD

[grin]

in point of fact, I bet some of them even knew how to play instuments

because rich/powerful people liked to hire musical performers for parties

and I mean like, possibly even more than today

and that would have opened excellent opportunities for easy spying

hey @nitsua60

@Shalvenay hiya

@nitsua60 what's up?

@Shalvenay Just got back from AL with the high-school kids. Nice to get back--I'd had to step away from that table during the playtest.

Man, though. They're having a lot of fun at the expense of my hp =)

@nitsua60 I take it the playtest is wrapping up now?

@Shalvenay Yup--last session earlier this week, submitted my feedback form yesterday.

A few members of our group will be at Winter Fantasy and hope to chat with WotC staff about it in person.

How's your life this week?

@nitsua60 OK. wishing I could have better luck getting the other 5e DM I'm involved with to actually be able to keep his schedule

@Shalvenay RL or online?

@nitsua60 online

hey there @Emrakul

@Emrakul how're things going?

OK here, having a mildly amusing time playing the innocent elf to an online acquaintance's racist prick human :p

@Emrakul standing around the forge planning an adventure :p

@Emrakul (this is in a NWN RP server)

@Emrakul oh, NeverWinter Nights -- multiplayer CRPG

@Emrakul oh, CRPG is just a shorthand for computer RPGs vs their tabletop cousins

@Emrakul oh. it was one of the first multiplayer computer RPGs, and also notable because it used a variant subset of the D&D 3.0 rules

I'd say it was notable for being a really great game, too.

NWN2: Mask of the Betrayer is one of the best RPGs story/dialogues-wise

Anyone want to check my math?

@UristMcDorf Shame it's also one of the buggiest.

Heading off to bed. If anyone finds a grievous error in the above feel free to fix it. Or delete the post and ping me!

@Miniman Eh, the mechanics are 3.5e based so I tried to ignore the technical stuff anyway. Plus you can't say that when VtM: Bloodlines exists :)

@UristMcDorf We're talking about a game which, on release, was impossible to complete the first quest.

Uh, I completed it alright, on release.

Maybe I got lucky.

Are you sure? They had a patch out on the same day.

It's possible it got bundled into the release because I bought a localised copy

Ah, right. That makes sense.

If you don't mind my asking, where are you from?

Well, either way I didn't encounter many bugs during the game.

Moscow, Russia

@UristMcDorf yeah, I tried to think a bit about even an order-of-magnitude calculation if the attackers could be arrayed in a semisphere, not just a disc... that's what got me tired!

And, of course, I use the terms "semisphere" and "disc" to mean "pyramid" and "square", as is proper in this geometry =)

What, 5e still uses Chebyshev's?

I haven't read that far into it

I thought it was pseudo-euclidian like 3e

PHB has diagonals as always 5 feet, DMG has the "every other diagonal costs 10 feet" rule as a variant.

I want to say the old D&D Next playtest more strongly recommended the latter, but it's been long enough that I don't trust that recollection

@UristMcDorf Actually, 5e uses whatever you'd like. 5' squares with diagonals=5' is one variant presented in the PHB. CTWind's right about the "every other" being hidden in the DMG. I just use a mat to lay things out and a ruler at the table =)

Interesting, thanks for the answer.

Speaking of

Have you encountered any metrics other than the big three and a half (Chebyshev, taxicab, Euclidian, pseudo-Euclidian) in a game where movement isn't abstracted to zones or whatever?

Chebyshev being - distance between A and B equals max of x and y between them (4e uses that); taxicab - distance between A and B equals sum of x and y between them (most grid-based tactical videogames use that); Euclidian/pseudo-Euclidian - distance between A and B equals square root of sum of x squared and y squared (and an approximation of that for the grid).

Hexagon-based metrics!

Main meal today: green (parsley&wild garlic) spaghetti with honey-glazed nuts, beetroot and brussels sprouts.

oooer.

Tonight we played Lovecraftesque again. I think it was even better than the first time.

(I don't really know what to classify it as. It's my first proper meal of the day, in that sense breakfast; it's a bit past lunchtime, in that sense lunch; normally I only cook dinner, in that sense it's dinner, also it's already quite a bit past my normal lunchtime.)

@BESW Is there any continuity?

@Anaphory No, there's advice in the book on doing continuity between sessions, but the default form of the game is unconnected one-shots.

This time we used a scenario I'd made, inspired by films like Event Horizon and TV shows like Thunderbirds Are Go.

Because those go well together, right?

I wouldn't know, my Film fu is weak, and my series fu even more so!

Basically "Haunted spaceship" meets "emergency rescue team."

Oh, lovely.

@BESW so, Event Horizon: The Game and such?

I'm unfamiliar with that one.

Sleep nao though. ttfn

@BESW How and when do you actually decide the game/movie/event for the day?

ttfn!

TTFN!

@BESW Event Horizon's a horror movie about a derelict spaceship I think you recommended to me at some point.

@BESW @doppelgreener Indeed, as he said in his message before I asked what EH is ;)

oh, yes, hahaha

... a message i didn't read, clearly, or i would've not felt it necessary to make a comparison as Event Horizon: The Game

(@BESW there is no official event horizon game that i know of either)

@Anaphory Hexagon-based is just taxicab most of the time (in fact, I haven't seen any other implementation).

But a non-orthogonal taxicab.

Taxicab to me has the very strong connotation that it works on a Cartesian coordinate system.

Fair enough.

I'll probably post a question on how the hell do I convert 4e's blasts to a hex-based system without unbalancing them.

Which is why metrics are on my mind.

@UristMcDorf If I'm recalling my terminology correctly, you're describing 0-norm, 1-norm, and 2-norm. So I can't imagine how you could, in two dimensions, utilize other non-abstract methods....

(Off the top of my head hex just reduces almost-exactly to what you called "pseudo-Euclidean," right?)

The possibilities for metrics are endless actually

d(x,y) = x is a metric for example

Even if it produces a really weird space

But yeah, taxicab hex is a pretty good approximation of pseudo-Euclidian

Which is the primary reason to use hex

(actually I'm probably ignoring a lot of the qualities that make a metric metric)

Looking at, d(A,B) = |xA - xB| is a valid metric

hey there @nitsua60

@UristMcDorf OH YES YOU ARE.

d(x,y) = x is so very much not a metric.

It's been a long day

Bluh

@nitsua60 Chebyshev distance, or maximum norm, is the ∞-norm (Limit for $(\sum |x-y|^p)^(1/p)$). None of the other cases (they exist for all p∊(0,∞] and all dimensions) are useful, except if you want to read one particular interpretation of the 0-norm as “zones” (either you are in the same zone or not)

Okay if d(A,B) returns |xA - xB| UNLESS xA = xB in which case it returns |yA - yB| then I think that works

Though I'm probably just making more of a fool of myself :)

I'm not sure it works for subadditivity but it seems to.

In fact, I can see a metric like that being used in a game - you have lanes which you can switch between and move along. When switching lanes you are free to move to any point on the new lane, but moving on your own lane costs, say, 1 point of movement. Just have it return 1 when xA = xB and yA != yB, and 0 when A = B.

Though in that case subadditivity breaks and it no longer is a metric.

Wait no it doesn't.

I've already forgotten; 4e didn't have cones, right? They just used blasts for those?

Yeah

Everything is circles in 4e

(the Chebyshev's metric circles; those look like squares in "our" space)

(kind of the same with taxicab circle looking like a rhombus in our space)

@Anaphory I was mixing up infinity and zero. (They come suspiciously-close to occupying the same head space in so many parts of my professional life.)

I don't blame you. I just wanted to correct it.

@KorvinStarmast thanks for the compliment. It was kinda fun to put that answer together--I just kept finding more and more ways to attack!

@Anaphory Yes--ty. I was too lazy to pull out my books and remind myself of the three (four?) defining properties of a norm. Don't remind me--I'm going to try to pull them out of my back-brain.

1. symmetric.

2. triangle inequality? d(x,y) >= d(x,z) + d(z,y)

3. non-negative? d(x,y)>=0

4. d(x,x)=0.

Is that it?

#4 should be more like d(x,y)=0 <--> x=y, maybe?

Precisely.

@nitsua60 My only reservation with the answer is the number of initiative divisions (20) and having divided that large number by 20 (or so) to where it can all happen without getting into each other's way. But it is a neat thought experiment.

hey there @KorvinStarmast

@KorvinStarmast it's also a terrifying inspiring mind-boggling mental image: 2592 Tabaxi monks circled around one target all dashing in, jostling each other, curving their spines out of each others' way (feline agility), lunging in to poke with a shortsword... in six seconds.

So, in Chebyshev, π=4? Or is that just in 2D-Chepyshev-space?

@Shalvenay Howdy, I was doing a hit and run. Didn't see your greeting. Hope all is well with you.

@Anaphory Depends on who shows up. Usually we have an idea of who will come, and I've got a game in mind based on that--last night, we had someone Skyping in who wanted to play Lovecraftesque.

If he hadn't been able to join us, we probably would've watched a movie instead because the remaining group doesn't have anything right now that would have really clicked to play and we really like riffing on films.

Do people know what they turn up for if they don't explicitly wish for a thing?

I'll usually mention my plan in the group chat.