TRPG General Chat

Shalvenay

12:30 AM

hey there @Quentin @Yuuki @NautArch

Mike Q

Oh look it's @Shalvenay the Shalvenator

Shalvenay

hey there @MikeQ, how're things going?

NautArch

@MikeQ @Shalvenay the shalvenatrix

Shalvenay

hahahaha

Mike Q

Pretty okay. I finished writing the remaining story of my campaign, and I'm very happy with the result. Not so happy with the game where I'm a player.

Ah @NautArch that's much better than mine

NautArch

12:41 AM

@MikeQ i thought we were doing a rob schneider thing :)

Shalvenay

@MikeQ -- you down for a minotaur labryinth with a twist tonight? (D&D 5e, either 5th or 7th level chars depending on how many folks we can rustle up)

Mike Q

Rob Schneider learns that being a tabletop gamer is harder than it seems! See Rob Schneider in "The Shalvenay", coming to a theater near you.

@Shalvenay Huh? Are you asking me to join your game?

Shalvenay

@MikeQ yeah :) it's a one-shot/short-form thing

Mike Q

Ah. I'm flattered but sadly I have a few too many non-tabletop obligations to take care of. I just like to pop in here sometimes to let off steam and get idea feedback.

Shalvenay

@MikeQ ah, darn

Mike Q

12:47 AM

Also I lack a microphone. So there's that :P

Shalvenay

@MikeQ that is not an issue, actually

Mike Q

What do you use? Roll20?

Shalvenay

@MikeQ roll20, Discord chat, or just The Back Room here on Stack-chat

hey there @Miniman

Miniman

@Shalvenay Hey!

Shalvenay

how're things going?

Miniman

12:57 AM

Same old, same old. You?

Shalvenay

alright here, wondering if you want to whip up a 5th or 7th level D&D 5e char and join me for a minotaur-maze with a twist :) (oneshot game, IOW)

you still about @NautArch?

NautArch

@Shalvenay i is

Shalvenay

well, how about having a 7th level at your disposal as well? we can try running it with 2 7th levels instead of 3 5th levels...

NautArch

@Shalvenay building him now, i'll just have him spec'd out for either

Shalvenay

@NautArch okiedokie, cool

Mike Q

1:02 AM

Well, I suppose if it's just a one-shot... So where do I need to go?

Shalvenay

@MikeQ depends on what @NautArch wants to do

@NautArch -- where do you think we should play? The Back Room? roll20? Discord?

NautArch

never done roll20 or discord. i set up a discord account, so can use that; but don't have a roll20 login.

Shalvenay

@NautArch ah. @MikeQ -- are you on Discord?

Mike Q

I thought discord doesn't use logins, am I wrong

Shalvenay

@MikeQ I thought you needed an account

let me get the back room unfrozen

Mike Q

1:12 AM

Ok, set up discord, now where do I go

Shalvenay

@MikeQ ah, let me get you an invite link then

@MikeQ @NautArch discord.gg/Hpv7Vd

so, which one of you is HexCharacter? :)

Mike Q

Me. I'm figuring out the controls, will change to a nickname if able

Trish

I feel bad that I voted a question to close as opinion based... and then did write a pretty long answer that is arguably my opinion but founded on some of the basics of roleplaying: communication is key...

Mike Q

@Shalvenay What do we use to manage character sheets?

Shalvenay

@MikeQ tool-of-your-choice provided it can export to PDF

some of the players I know have had good luck with Orcpub

and hey there @Trish

and hey as well @Ash

nitsua60

1:22 AM

@Trish It's a weird position. I know I've occasionally straddled that line between VtC and write-an-answer. I don't think I've ever done both....

10

Q: Best character(s) to complement Elf ranger in a duet Lost Mine of Phandelver

(Note: this question comes by suggestion from my previous question) I am starting to DM the Lost Mine of Phandelver campaign for my girlfriend. She wants to make a Wood elf ranger. She is quite inexperienced so I plan to make one DMPC to help her, but I am wondering what kind of character would ...

That's one where I'd thought to close-vote, but then thought about (what I think is) the real answer and went ahead to write. Others disagree, though!

Trish

Thing is, I voted first, thought about it, then came up with an answer that just grew... over the last hour or such, and the question was still open when I posted it.

nitsua60

So timeout's passed to retract the vote, making a trivial edit to unlock your vote would be abusive (and I use the term very lightly), so you're in the position of crossing your fingers to hope that it doesn't end up closed so we all see your duplicity?
Perhaps worth a comment, then? "I originally close-voted thinking $reasons_1. But $reasons_2 occurred to me, so not only do I think it should remain open, I went ahead and answered."
Then rest easy =)

Trish

comment seems the best way

BESW

2:45 AM

Alone in the empty house I asked, "Is anyone there?" A whisper from the darkness: "If I said 'no,' would it comfort you?" #TwoLineGhostStory

Tweeted by realbadger on October 21, 2017 at 1:04 PM

doppelgreener

3:02 AM

Since the titular question's facially ludicrous, I wish it read something like "do teleportation spells conserve momentum from before to after the obvious infinite violation of momentum conservation inherent in instantaneous magical travel." But maybe I'm the only one going cross-eyed when I read it. — nitsua60 ♦ 3 hours ago

@nitsua60 Headcanon: teleport spells move you at infinite speed toward a point. Poorly done teleport spells forget to slow you down to sub-infinite speeds afterwards.

@nitsua60 Honestly I've done that a couple of times in the past when I've really wanted to revise my voting. Could count the number of times I've done it ever on one hand, but did it.

Erics

6:43 AM

Could a West Marches format work for a situtation of a stable & regular party of players? Certainly the competitive camaraderie and vicarious knowledge sharing aspects would be missing, but what about the rest?

Zachiel

8:03 AM

@BESW Well, that ~~looks~~ hears like a sensible, friendly ghost.

@doppelgreener I wanna star the original, where is it?

Erics

its a comment on a question, i think

Zachiel

8:17 AM

@Erics I'm stupid, there's a link to it clicking on the usual N hours ago.

Erics

8:28 AM

A shopping list question, so here not there: any recommendations of people that will do map-drawing for hire?

I'm particularly interested in a person (human, gnome, sentient slime mold) that can take a bunch of notes and form up a map based on them (and especially ask the difficult questions when contradictions or assumptions are exposed). So, not software or online-tool for me to do it myself.

BESW

8:44 AM

I know Jonathan Roberts does piecework for various publishers.

Erics

9:48 AM

@BESW I like his maps

Trish

11:20 AM

wow, managed to answer a question "how loud is combat, will it alert guards through a door, 20 feet down the hallway, through a curtain and 10 feet into the room?" with "Here's the physics... and... nope. it would make less noise than rustling leaves."

Erics

@Trish neat!

Trish

Goofed the math a little, fixing that... forgot a logarythm

or... nope, it is correct.

Erics

("logarithm", btw)

BESW

This is a logarhythm.

Ki Khanga Stream Play Session

►

Trish

11:43 AM

ahw, screw it, it is ln(x) or log(x) :P

not in that formula, but generally speaking :P

Erics

:P

kviiri

I try to use lb when using binary logarithms in particular

Erics

The maths makes sense too, if you compare to the loud noises you'd find in a restaurant kitchen but are generally not heard by the diners. And that's without the long corridor and muffling curtains and two sets of doors.

BESW

...I'm pretty sure most restaurants have some version of the green baize door.

And stone corridors tend to echo a heckuva lot unless they're lined with tapestries AND carpets.

Erics

11:58 AM

Filling in some gaps in background lore in my campaign. "The ThisThat Devotees are a religious sect that believe their two patron saints came together and formed a more perfect union ("You complete me"). There's a breakaway group, known as the ThatThis Heretics - they believe the two saints were already perfect before their union and by joining together they became a greater and more powerful force."

Thus, one sect believes 2x2=4, while the other sect believes 2+2=4. You can understand then that wars were had, monks burned at the stake, cats and dogs living together, the walls of the 53rd …

Trish

12:25 PM

@kviiri \$log_2(x)\$ is sooo rare... I encounter ln(x) = \$log_e(x)\$ and log(x) = \$log_10(x)\$ all the time...

Erics

rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/108720/… ... is about fudging die rolls

Trish

@BESW Actually I did assume totally open space as the very first simplification to even use the formula described - the result only holds true for the order of magnitude for the most part, as written in the disclaimer. And the order of magnitude is about "hearing threshhold to 10 times louder" while a normal conversation is about "10 000 times to 1 000 000 times louder than hearing threshhold"

Erics

but it reminded me of a recent play session I still have 2nd thoughts about.

BESW

@Trish You should definitely re-read your answer for unstated assumptions of knowledge on the part of the reader.

Trish

doing that

BESW

12:31 PM

Several of the things you just said don't appear to be in your answer.

Erics

We have a regular thurs nite session but for this session he asked for new PCs to be rolled up. Get there, and it's a deus ex "you are all compelled to compete in the guild tourney" which consisted of 10 puzzle rooms. Use our wits, and some slight knowledge about some spells (which were handed to us on scrolls), but otherwise level or class abilities were moot.

Fun was had, but it wasn't fitting with the premise of the regular session. Fun would be had if he had simply put on a DVD of some comedy show. Fun would be had if he spent the 3 hours demonstrating card tricks.

But those are not what we were there for. So .. time for a chat with the DM?

BESW

12:46 PM

Yeah, seems reasonable.

I'd probably ask him what his goal was for the session.

Erics

"fun" probably. The goal is fine, but the premise/promise wasnt matched. My understanding is the session night is for an ongoing campaign with developing PCs. Not a generic games night.

BESW

@Trish Using "orders of magnitude" as a justification for sloppy estimates is fine when you're comparing one-or-three-digit numbers to five-or-seven-digit numbers. But without giving us that 10k+ baseline for normal conversation, it looks like you're comparing 7 with 13 and saying they're orders of magnitude apart--which is technically true but also disingenuous.

Trish

I recalculate the whole stuff using the correct column: the pressure, not the pressure level...

120 dB/20 Pa actually should be around 85 dB before taking into account losses from door and curtain.

BESW

(And really, alephzero's comment is also just plain common sense. Restaurants carefully engineer their kitchens to not leak into the dining room. Unless the fight is in the servants' quarters and the guards are in a high-quality courtier part of the castle, that comparison is not a useful check.)

(See: green baize doors.)

...And if a wolf's howl clocks in at about 100dB and can carry six miles (so says Google), then I'm going to question where we're getting the notion that a conversation is three or more orders of magnitude louder than a wolf howling down the hall.

The new math looks better, but I'm still skeptical about your conclusion: you're basically saying that I can't hear if the TV is on in a crowded room.

And here's where the order of magnitude thing becomes a dodge: if your conclusion is that it's about 55dB-ish, that's an order of magnitude which contains both a light breeze in the forest and a high-traffic road.

The scale being used escalates fast enough within the orders of magnitude we're talking about that "it's a two-digit number" is effectively useless for practical purposes.

Trish

1:15 PM

@BESW recalculated. base level comes out at "audible, but maybe drowned out in a lively room"

BESW

@Trish It's a normal conversation at one meter from the hearer. If I can't hear the person three feet away from me, that's not a lively room. It's a dance club.

Goblins can be rowdy, yes. But these goblins are actively on the lookout for trouble.

Trish

a lively mess hall has an ambient noise of ca 70 dB

BESW

They may be on break, but they aren't having a party.

Trish

true, but I didn't account for the doors in the calculation. The noise could be drained out, but it could also be not enough to muffle death sounds or particular loud noises like a barbarian raging.

@besw do you agree with the re-calculated stuff?

doppelgreener

@BESW I did some sleuthing for a dice set, and while explaining how I found them I felt like I needed a fedora hat and cigarette and a parlour to do a parlour scene in.

Also, searches for old hat styles can get interesting:

(the Carlsbad hat seems like it never quite caught on and I don't think it's aged well)

Trish

1:43 PM

@doppelgreener how do we do tables in the code?

eh, spreadsheetS?

doppelgreener

@Trish One sec

7

A: MathJax (\$\LaTeX\$ in posts) is live!

A number of posts would benefit from MathJax's tables, if not its mathematics. The array environment can do tables quite well. (Thanks nitsua60 for finding this!) Here's an example. Note that because we are \begining an environment, we don't need to have the surrounding $$s. \begin{array}{r|lll...

@Trish Here you go.

There's a more detailed explanation of Mathjax arrays on Mathematics:

130

A: MathJax basic tutorial and quick reference

Arrays It is often easier to read tables formatted in MathJax rather than plain text or a fixed width font. Arrays and tables are created with the array environment. Just after \begin{array} the format of each column should be listed, use c for a center aligned column, r for right aligned, l for...

nitsua60

2:12 PM

@doppelgreener I can't swear I haven't, but I can't remember doing it. That first year of mine, a year ago... those were heady days =)

@Erics How good do you want them? Are you looking for publication-quality, or just "better than I could do"?

Erics

@nitsua60 the latter

nitsua60

I ask because between the tutorials/examples BESW lined above and this book I, with zero artistic talent whatsoever, ramped up from zero to "better than I could do" pretty quickly.

(I don't have any examples here--they live in my office--or I'd post a pic.)

Point being: if it's the end-product you want an afternoon spent giving it a whirl may pay off more than you'd imagine.

And if it's the critical second eye that's most important, it may not take much to get a friend who's interested up to that speed, either.

(And I mean in no way to downplay the awesome work that many professional fantasy cartographers and illustrators do. Just pointing out that I was surprised how quickly a complete hack could make some progress toward "recognizable as an interesting map" levels of ability.)

@Trish I'm going to make an edit to that table, but it's just to show you something rather than telling... hold with me a minute.

Trish

not yet!

@nitsua60 now edit as much as you need... had to fix something prior.

nitsua60

okay. Gotcha =)

Trish

2:28 PM

problem is, there are lots of unknows which I have no properties for. like the hallway: it could amplify sound, or just distort it or deafen it depending on architecture. Or the curtain: what is it made from? how thick is it? So the simple solution for a physicist is "Ignore what you don't know, gain an order of magnitude or estimation"

Erics

@nitsua60 good point =)

nitsua60

@Trish made a second copy of the table. The original's way wide, IMO, and there's an example of ways one might suck it in. If nothing else, moving (Pa) to the column header(s) and out of the entries will save both space and typing.

Trish

then it must he /Pa to be scientific or [Pa]

nitsua60

Doesn't matter to me. I'm just pointing out that the table's very wide, but wanted to give you a pointer on a way one might compress it a bit rather than just leave you hanging. Proceed as you like.

Trish

table is still wide, but not as wide now...

but good pointer

nitsua60

2:47 PM

[5e] there's some feature, somewhere, that's worded in a way that it effectively allows the character to "react" on everyone else's turn. But I can't remember what/where it is. Ringing any bells?

Shalvenay

4:08 PM

hey there @GreySage

The Oracle

4:28 PM

1

Q: Can we do a mass update on old wizards links?

The link structure in the wizards site has changed. It has gone from http://dnd.wizards.com/go/we/20060327a too http://archive.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/we/20060327a There are dozens of broken links in our site right now. Can we get someone at the StackExchange team to cast Databas...

discussion support hyperlinks dungeons-and-dragons

Shalvenay

4:41 PM

hey there @RollingFeles

Miniman

9:13 PM

@nitsua60 Tunnel Fighter, from the Underdark UA.

Or Defender's Blade, from the Knight in the Fighter UA.

Shalvenay

9:33 PM

hey there @JuneShores

JuneShores

Hay.

BESW

Hey @d20pfsrd care to explain this? Because that's not a good look for you. https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=1562903627122716&id=100002092806299

Tweeted by siobhanbjorknas on October 21, 2017 at 2:21 AM

Shalvenay

@JuneShores how're things going?

JuneShores

9:50 PM

Doing alright.

Job interview tomorrow.

BESW

Yey!

Shalvenay

ah, nice

trogdor

10:03 PM

hope that goes well then

JuneShores

10:15 PM

Thanks. I think I'm a shoe in for the job. I have relevant experience, I know what to say, etc.

doppelgreener

@JuneShores \\\\\\\\o/////////////

[vibrating with excitement]

Good luck. :)

Shalvenay

10:33 PM

hey there @Ash :)

trogdor

@JuneShores that is good, I always get nervous when I have to speak to someone in that way

user15026

Heya

trogdor

I don't like playing up what I can do even if it is in an honest way

Shalvenay

@Ash how're things going over there? still busy as ever?

user15026

@Shalvenay yep. I might get time to breathe in November? Maybe?

Shalvenay

10:35 PM

@Ash that'd be nice :) perhaps we could even look at scheduling a shortform game for then?

user15026

@Shalvenay if I can find time! I will let you know!

Shalvenay

@Ash cool

Miniman

@doppelgreener Could this be reopened? (And possibly made an FAQ?) I think it has better answers than the dupe target, and it's an issue that just never goes away.

Shalvenay

@Miniman VtROed

Miniman

@Shalvenay You know, I didn't even think of that? No idea where my head's at.

Shalvenay

10:42 PM

@Miniman maybe it got lost in a teleportation glitch that happened when wild magic tried to teleport you to the astral plane while you were on the astral plane?

Miniman

@Shalvenay Nice.

Shalvenay

@Miniman yeah, that happened to a fellow PC in the current(well, sorta current) RL campaign I'm in

hello there @Erics

doppelgreener

11:10 PM

@Miniman I'm about to sleep, I've raised a flag to check back on it when I have more brainpower available

Shalvenay

ah

doppelgreener

Thanks for bringing that up