TRPG General Chat

Jesus I regret looking at the guy who can hear font sizes

I don't like looking at shouty angry crazy

"Hears font sizes" is a lousy superpower anyway.

I'm much happier considering the ecosystem of Helvetiphonts.

1:25 AM

Lol

I also don't like the narrative where it is OK to harang over people complaining about something they care to change positively.... Especially since most times I see or hear it it is like that guy, I wanna complain about people complaining about things.... I seems so hypocritical

It* but I guess I works too because I am complaining about people complaining about complaining :P

1:51 AM

Does a (probably long) sequence involving parallel casters exist that can reliably cancel out the 33% chance of being unable to cast wish again due to wish stress?

@Joshua what system?

Yes, to within desired reliability.

and hey there @nitsua60

hiya

how're things going?

1:52 AM

Okay--grading. Kids are generally doing well, so that's good. But I'd rather be sleeping.

@nitsua60 ah, grading -- the only thing worse than doing homework.

I think that rule only exists in D&D in the first place. I also think that given reliability >= 66% I could extrapolate it all the way to zero.

@Joshua well, there are like a zillion and two TTRPGs out there

so wish probably got monkeyed with quite a bit by the various OSR games out there as well as by Wizards when they took over the D&D franchise

ah got it

What always bugged me about that world was you have 9th level spells why are you still at medieval tech level? (I think you don't even need wish to abuse to bootstrap near future tech.)

Q: Managing a Medieval Low Orbit Ion Cannon

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Sometimes I hate my players. My table is currently composed of five diabolically inventive players. They come from a mixed IT/Engineering background, so more often than not, I have to deal with some really weird solutions that they create for the problems I present them. This is one of those c...

and obliquely related...

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Q: Given powerful low-level Clerical healing, how can sick, crippled or otherwise unhealthy people exist?

In my attempt to make a more harsh, uncaring setting, I’ve hit a stumbling block in terms of the ease with which even low level Clerics can treat the poor and the sick: A 1st-level Cleric can bring most commoners back from the brink of death (Cure Wounds), Detect Poison and Disease, and Create ...

dnd-5e cleric world-building healing

1:59 AM

@Joshua some of the folks on GitP I believe went hogwild with that actually and developed what basically is a system of magic dedicated to worldbuilding work

I can't recall what it was called tho

Are you talking about the tippyverse?

giantitp.com/forums/…

Well would you say that attempting star travel is a good enough reason to become a lich from a chaotic good wizard?

@Joshua Do you mean, like, personal interstellar travel? (I.e. no need for a ship if you need neither food nor air?)

Well I think I'll still need a ship but no resources to consume anymore. I'll happily maneuver it with fly spells.

@nitsua60 don't believe it's the Tippyverse per se

2:02 AM

Somebody's gotta cross once for greater teleport to possibly work beyond the moon.

@Joshua Sure--you need a circle-setter =)

Well the idea is a lich can make the attempt and try again if he fails.

The whole bit about consuming others' souls to feed the phylactery doesn't give the "good" part of your CG lich a bit of a twinge?

2:20 AM

D&D 3.5 had the archlich, a Good-aligned caster who embraced undeath in order to continue a worthy cause.

So wait, this whole wish thing is there like a worldwide diminishing returns on wishes in some or all versions of D&D?

[shrug] It's news to me.

Sounds like a 5e thing.

Ok , and I mean I could be misinterpreting exactly what it is

That is just what it sounded like

2:54 AM

Dang it, tweeted the wrong file the first time. Here it is again! Warlock-turned-fighter Moorwen Frostmoon and her dragon Chalarook!

Tweeted by mooncalfe1 on October 16, 2017 at 4:17 PM

Adeptus

4:24 AM

@doppelgreener My wife used to live in Queensland. One day at work, after moving to SA, she looks outside and the sky is greenish. Says to coworkers, "Oh no, it's going to hail! There's nowhere to park undercover, I don't have anything to protect the car, it's going to get trashed!" They look at her funny a moment, then go "...oh yeah, you're from Queensland. How big is hail there, usually?" She was expecting fist-sized. We usually get 5mm sized.

Good Lord fist sized hail no thanks XD

@Adeptus we have you beat over here on the hail front. tennis-ball-sized hail is not unknown where I live.

sometimes even softball-sized

4:40 AM

PALADIN: Dear lord, forgive me, it has been..uh...ten minutes since my last confession, actually, I'm a Paladin. #DnD

Tweeted by UrsulaV on October 17, 2017 at 2:12 AM

6:16 AM

It just fully hit me. Since the RPG I am making is entirely about roleplaying artists.
The character sheet is going to need to be a truly excellent work of art

What kind of art?

Like actual fine art.
Constructionism I think

'cause a clean, clear design that efficiently communicates its content and makes it easy to use during play is a thing of true beauty to me.

But then, I'm a graphic designer with a fine art background.

Indeed, for a normal game that is what I would be wanting.

Do you mean Constructivism?

6:18 AM

Errh yes.

I think so

Russian futurism, art-for-social-purpose?

Yes, I think so yes.

In particular it is a game about playing Anartists from the SCP universe.

And the core Anartist fiction in that universe is AWCY, which is heavily influenced by I think Dadaism? (Its actually been a while since I read the stories, I think I need to bush up on my art knowledge, then reread them)

That's... a strange mashup.

Is it?
How so?

I'm not very familiar with SCP, but Anartism is weird already and I'm not sure the SCP folks really get Dadaism.

6:25 AM

I'm pretty sure they don't. I'm also pretty sure I don't

As a game, it so far seems to be coming together. (I'm not vacumn chambering it).
You play artists,
you go around making Art (that are SCPs).
You regain you mana stat (Inspiration) by being inspire by things you see, and especially by putting on exhibitions.
You do this while dealing with the fact that you are being hunted by the foundation and probably a number of other people.
(There is a heat and wanted level system involved, I think I discussed that last time I was on)

is there no danger that your art kills you?

trogdor: There is a HUGE danger your art will kill you

ok

because you didn't mention that part, and it seemed like that would definitely be part of the problem

Not too much of a problem, I mean you control what art you make

I'd be tempted to use a DRYH-like mechanic for the art.

6:33 AM

Right now the art is based largely on a very very compacted set of uses similar to Mage the Awakening

I'm not sure I am happy with the current rules in that area, but I have determined not to mess with them until after a playtest

I wonder if I can get away with cheap tricks that make the character sheet feel artistic.
Like have it be black background, with white text, printed on card.
and give all the players white-out markers to write on it with.

I think I might end-up commissioning the character-sheets.

Hmm. A really evocative design would give the elements a sense of independence or rebellion--that the parts of the character sheet aren't happy with their roles, or are about to get up and leave.

Also, check out the Eyebleed Edition of Misspent Youth.

It's got a cut-up-art sensibility in line with some Dadaist artists, and a mimeographed aesthetic evocative of underground zines.

I'd definitely look at underground zines for inspiration.

[has been reading about underground magazines for a possible upcoming campaign]

thanks for that. (also the artistic stylings alone make me want to playing before i've read more than a paragraph of the rules)

Finding the image/text expression of a client's vague sense of theme is kinda what I do.

6:50 AM

Its very unfortunate that color printing is so expensive.
My working draft is like 50 pages long, with red headings.
It is as artistic as I can get with my skills and staying inside googledocs (Eventually I will ave to export it, and recreate it in InDesign, but this at least gives me enough of the feels to keep writing).
Printing it out will cost an unreasonable amount.

But I think without the bold colors, it won't get the feels I want at all.

Designed... in... Google Docs...

For co-authoring something, you can't really beat google docs

That's reasonable... but...

I mean it has huge flaws (simply by being a word processor rather than desktop publisher.)
But until I have content complete,
a word processor is better.

I once had to design an anthology in MS Word. It was a nightmare.

Yeah, work on the text in a word processor, absolutely.

6:56 AM

Yeah, it is text and tables only right now.

And, to be fair, it's not as bad as the client who sent me mockup pages for a book... as PowerPoint files...

I found out people make their conference posters in powerpoint all the time.
(I use LaTeX)
I was terrified.

Posters.

In PowerPoint.

Yep, A0 posters. 1 slide

A: Software to use for creating posters for academic conferences?

6:59 AM

25

Powerpoint. There are hundreds of PowerPoint poster templates available online, many of them are good, and it is one of the standard formats people accept — and can be exported to PDF for easy post-conference distribution.

I would strongly advise against a white-on-black color scheme for the document.

You mean for in-print, or also on computer?

Both, but especially for print.

I'll take that into consideration, once I am content complete.

Mmm. I'm used to having deadlines that mean I'm still getting content long after I've had to begin--and possibly commit to--the design.

7:08 AM

Where as all I am after here is something that makes me, as a writer, feel like I am making something for Edgy Artist, who don't care about the System, Maan.

(Also, the more you look at a design the more normal it feels and the harder it is to change it later.)

That is true,

I try to compose in plaintext.

And I often design with lipsum.

I find it hard to keep motivation if the work doesn't look right.

But you make good points

Yeah, visuals are important and it's a fallacy to try and totally separate medium from message.

But it's very rare that both progress at equal paces.

7:16 AM

Related "Fallacy" separating mechanics from fluff

The Medium is the Massage.

7:29 AM

...Anartism also seems odd because it's been closely tied to commercial interests.

I have no problem with art as a commercial medium, but anartism feels like it's pretending to be something it's not--but not doing very well. Maybe I just don't understand it, but I somehow doubt it.

Mechanically, I am hitting players where it hurts for having money,

right in the mana-stat

You loose inspiration (mana) at a rate that is proportional to how much money you have.
(actually its expodentially linked to your wealth level, but your wealth level is expodentially linked to the amount of money you have.)

But in general one can't expect too much consistency from SCP fiction.
It is large group collaborative fiction.

And its only reviewed via large crowd of non-experts

Its good enough, I think, for me to get a fun game that is strongly inspired by it.

9:11 AM

[sigh] Yet again, the free open source software is superior to the paid proprietary software.

lol

Anne Aunyme

9:38 AM

@BESW is that a bad thing?

It's a bit disappointing since I have the paid program.

After a long time wrestling with it, I wound up finding, installing, and learning an open-source equivalent.

10:28 AM

Are there any questions that delineate the different genre tones of RPGs? By which I mean "high fantasy" vs "low fantasy" vs "grimdark" vs ... are there others?

I think there are others depending on what kind of setting you are using

if you diverge from fantasy into say, sci fi, you could get steampunk or solarpunk

or dystopian future

@trogdor You would put steampunk as a subset of sci fi? Interesting.

it seems like it would depend on what you are looking for

@ACuriousMind well, it is dependant on what technology people are using

and typically it actually does have like, things we never made with steam power

could we do those things with non-steam power? sure I guess, but it's still science fiction

and steampunk is speculative what-if fiction, or is that defn. of sf declassé?

um, as a genre tone I think it is speculative what if stuff

as in "what if we never stopped using Steam power?"

mind you, I am not some kind of expert on it

10:37 AM

what i'm looking for is content to better understand what is meant by grimdark, low-fantasy. Right now I'm using those terms in a hand-wavey manner, without much insight into what that translates into in game terms. (eg. in D&D 2e)

@trogdor I understand why one might reason that way, but it just would never have occurred to me that steampunk is technically sci fi - I really just found your assessment interesting, wasn't saying I think it's wrong.

@ACuriousMind oh I didn't take it that way at all, I just figured you would want me to explain why I immediately thought of it that way

Alright then :)

@Erics ah ok well as I understand it, low fantasy is fantasy with magic in it, but not very powerful magic

high fantasy is more like, everyone important is using magic left and right

and grim dark is,.... everything is pretty dang horrible and scary

so like, if you have watched Game of Thrones,... at least the first few seasons were low fantasy

at this point it has kinda transitioned into high fantasy

without detailing why because major spoilers

Grimdark is,.... sorta what people have been doing with Batman movies for a while now

I think that would be a good example anyway

yep, i'm mostly up to speed on the tropes in general media terms .. but as applied to game mechanics etc .. is where i'm falling a bit short

10:41 AM

hmmm

so maybe specific RPG examples, I see

Yeah, "grimdark, low-fantasy" would mean a world in which magic is either very rare or not very powerful (or both) which also is generally portrayed as rather bleak and hopeless (what TVTropes calls Crapsack World). Grimdark and low-fantasy are kinda orthogonal descriptors.

Like, other than descriptive tone and motivations of those involved in an encounter/dungeon ... how might a dungeon evidence as being grimdark?

that is a good question

I think the only mechanical implication of the setting being grimdark will generally be that encounters are rather deadly, and PCs are not expected to live in general.

A good question for chat .. prolly too open ended / opinion based for the Q&A ;-)

10:43 AM

I mean, I would imagine it would be really dirty, and have evidence of prior use

More mooks for the slaughter too?

yeah it might not be too empty either

having random NPC's around to get dragged off as soon as the players see the place would be a possible thing

The Big Bad Protagonist is more a High Fantasy thing. Heroic clashings. Tuckers Kobolds would be grimdark or maybe low-fantasy?

Ooh .. red-shirt hirelings and henchmen

Tuckers Kobolds,.... would strike me as low fantasy, I don't know if they would be grimdark though

The village chieftain sends his youngest son with the party to act as a guide. In scene 2 he gets eated. As a plot point.

Tuckers Gnomes would be grimdark.

10:47 AM

@trogdor I don't think the kobolds belong to either descriptor clearly. Even in a ludicrously high fantasy world, not everyone has to use high-powered magic

@ACuriousMind that is fair actually

I just don't know how ludicrously competent they would be anymore at that point

Sure, at some point, the ease by which the players could obtain magic artillery support would probably trivialize them

or how important they would be even

@Erics So, here's the thing: genre is often treated as a description of content, but it's not. It's a way to categorize audiences.

3

go on

10:54 AM

Genre is basically a flag for "If you like these things, you might also like this thing."

Any given work will fall into several different genres because different groups of people will want to read it for different reasons.

And those groups will change over time--meaning that the genre a work is categorized as will change also.

(This is, by the way, one of the reasons people get really upset about genre: it's not describing what they like, it's describing them. And if you define yourself by what you like, then--for example--shifts in audience demographics become a challenge to your own identity.)

So, if we talk about steampunk... well, most people like steampunk for the visual aesthetic, not for the themes it often explores.

ah

So it's really hard to describe the steampunk genre except as an aesthetic, because that's the important signifier for describing the audience uses "steampunk" to find things they like.

said themes would be .. optimism vs dystopia, tinkering & mcgyverism vs pandoras box?
but as you say: more the aesthetic than the themes

Well, [thing]punk is derived from cyberpunk, which is derived from punk punk, an actual real-life subculture movement about taking what's around you and using it to create your own identity in defiance of what the materials were originally intended for--and the "materials" you co-opt might be physical, or cultural.

2

Punk was a revolutionary subculture, about defying the existing order to recreate yourself with its pieces.

Cyberpunk took this very literally, and began as stories about using the tools of the existing regime (the technology which kept corporations in power) to defy or dismantle that same regime.

Steampunk... well, it's a very colonial kind of story. Most steampunk isn't interested in defying the existing power structures.

Instead, steampunk's usurpation of existing materials to its own ends is metatextual: it's about applying modern standards (technological and social) to elements (material and cultural) of 19th century Western society.

That's steampunk, theme-wise: seeing how cleverly the author can impose modern concepts onto Victorian materials.

cool

11:08 AM

This, ah. Makes it a rather difficult genre to translate into collaborative play.

Not impossible by any means! But tricksy, because if the "point" of steampunk is to revel in creative anachronisms, then either the players are simply exploring an existing world to admire the cool setting or the players must engage in the creation of anachronisms themselves.

So, grimdark. Low-fantasy. urrrgh. These terms are nearly meaningless.

Roughly speaking I'd expect a grimdark low fantasy RPG to be cynical and brutal. It's dirty and corrupt. Hope is costly, friends are hard to find, and violence is common.

Magic, like all other power in the setting, tends to be in the hands of the oppressor. However, sufficient physical violence can overcome even the most powerful magic.

Soap may not have been invented yet.

@BESW It has been invented, but the process of soap-making spawns numerous horrors from beyond, so none but the most callous and powerful people use it

This explains why the only clean person in the land is the evil emperor's comely daughter.