TRPG General Chat

1:41 AM

Amazing site dedicated to maps and images of the site of an ancient city: virtualani.org

2

@AnneAunyme Is that Labyrinth, Labyrinth, Labyrinth, or Labyrinth?

Example ↑ from that site.

@SevenSidedDie - Sorry for not responding to your message earlier, life's been kinda [vague and exaggerated hand gestures] lately and I kinda had to pick and choose my spoon expense

I do appreciate it. I have tried to express those sentiments before

But CERTAIN PARTIES dismissed the history of abuse of power, abuse of people, derision, and shame on a consistent basis and, y'know, why bother engaging like an adult if the other person with all the power isn't going to bother.

@Lord_Gareth No problem, there are all kinds of understandable reasons for taking some time.

@Lord_Gareth Take the higher ground / be the better man / [insert cliche saying here]...

1:55 AM

@Adeptus I am well past the point where I derive the slightest satisfaction from knowing I was the bigger person in a debate.

Standards of courtesy are not difficult and I take it as a personal insult when I start there and the other party decides to take basic decency as weakness.

In less salty news just had my three-year anniversary at work on the heels of a highly positive performance review & a recent promotion

Would feel better if we weren't understaffed to the point of frickin' parody

But still feels good

@Lord_Gareth That's great!

@Lord_Gareth That… not so great. That can cause all kinds of subtle knock-on problems…

Subtle is not a word I would use to describe the issue at this point

'Extended and malicious neglect' might be more appropriate

@Lord_Gareth I guess I'd say they start subtle, and snowball.

The trouble starts with the subtle warping.

2:17 AM

Man this blueberry ale is aggressively blueberry

Kinda makes me wonder how fruity ancient drinks are/would have been

Like, Roman wine and the like

@Lord_Gareth Like, pretty fruity, man.

@Miniman Oh?

@Lord_Gareth That was meant to be a joke, but based on my quick Googling, they did a lot of experimentation and techniques to change the flavour of wine.

@Miniman Really? Neat. Any succinct links on that?

@SevenSidedDie Wiki not a bad place to start, at least.

2:23 AM

Also, I gotta say

@Lord_Gareth I usually find that beers don't go aggressive enough on their promises of fruit flavours for my taste. But then I remind myself that, yeah, that must be just someone else's taste.

The Megas put more nuance into Dr. Wily as a villain in three songs than most forms of media put into a villain over an entire book/show/game

@SevenSidedDie It probably helps that this is a cider rather than a beer in the sense most folks think of it.

@Miniman ty. A new WP article I didn't know about / know to look for.

You want something that's not hoppy

@SevenSidedDie As a ginger beer aficionado, this is definitely something I struggle with. "Vaguely ginger flavoured beer" is fairly common.

2:24 AM

@Lord_Gareth So it's a blueberry cider rather than an ale with a bunch of blueberries dumped in to finish?

@Miniman And soo disappointing.

@SevenSidedDie Correct. And, mind you, I'm not attempting to denigrate the legitimacy of the latter

Monty Python: What have the romans ever done for us?

@SevenSidedDie obligatory:

But I am definitely in the camp that dislikes the astringent taste of many beers

And hops are a big part of my poor reaction to them

In a related story I love sours

@Lord_Gareth Yeah, subtle fruit is probably just what they were going for sometimes.

@SevenSidedDie Aye. I've mostly stopped experimenting with different ginger beers since I've found one I really like.

(Alcoholic ginger beers, I mean.)

2:26 AM

@Lord_Gareth I'm not a huge fan of hops either. At least, I've learned, North American hops. The west coast style is unfortunately really hop dominant, and largely using the Three Cs that I just don't like.

@SevenSidedDie You might like sours and radlers

@Miniman Oh, do share. I like Phillips' ginger beer, but more gingery I can always do with.

Sours are sharp beers usually defined by low or no hops and a lingering tingle on the tongue

The one I usually have, by Dogfish Head, is made with lime, black limes, and sea salt

@Lord_Gareth I do like radlers, but oddly sours tend to put me off. I keep trying them, but I've yet to find one that does it for me. But then I don't much like sour flavours in other things either, so maybe it's me.

That might be it, aye

2:27 AM

@Lord_Gareth Were you still around when I started making Pink Rangers?

@Lord_Gareth Hm, though I might make an exception for lime and salt. That sounds like a nice draft.

@SevenSidedDie Brookvale Union, but I think it's Auspecific

I love the kind of sour flavor that makes you fall to the ground and pray for death to escape the hell you've put yourself in

But I also like more mild sours for when I'm in public and can't be caught speaking in tongues and bleeding from the eyes

@Miniman Ah, probably. Beer is so nationally-bound still.

@SevenSidedDie "Seaquench Ale" by Dogfish Head. The brand in general comes with my unreserved endorsement

2:28 AM

@Lord_Gareth On that tangent, does anyone else find that real sour lollies are slowly dying out?

With the obvious caveat that if you, say, hate IPAs and then buy one from them you are gonna get what you deserve out of that affair

@Lord_Gareth We get some Dogfish Head up here sometimes. I'll have to look for it.

@Miniman Find your closest Family Video, buy some Toxic Waste from them and then get back to me on that

@BESW I was not

@Lord_Gareth I'm not sure that was ever a thing here, but I wasn't trying to suggest that there aren't any really sour lollies around, anyway. Just that there seems to be less varieties all the time.

@Lord_Gareth A few of my beer-loving friends are big fans of sours. They'd be right there with you on that.

2:31 AM

@Miniman Sour flavors are a niche market. They can be difficult to find in quality because most folks rightly do not voluntarily put themselves through agony for fun

@Lord_Gareth It's non-alcoholic, obviously, but: cranberry juice (not punch), red zinger tea, ginger salabat (basically strong ginger tea with red pepper), calamansi juice, and seltzer water. Add brown sugar to taste if your guests are wimps.

Much like you can't just walk into Walmart and get the kind of hot sauce you have to sign a waiver for

It's not profitable for Walmart to stock sauce that can harm or kill you

@Lord_Gareth XD Fair call

(I wish I was kidding and I'm not)

@BESW Ginger salabat why have I never heard of this or invented it. That sounds amazing.

2:32 AM

@BESW What is a salabat and what is calamansi juice

@SevenSidedDie I meant like, in general. I eat lemons raw.

Salabat is a Philippine thing. Lots of different family recipes, but the basic concept is boiling ginger root into a tea with honey/lemon/pepper to taste.

@Lord_Gareth My daughter too. She gets all my lemons.

hey there @nitsua60

Calamansi is a puckery sour fruit that's basically a lime/kumquat cross.

@BESW That sounds not far off my existing ginger tea recipe, except add red pepper. This is going to happen.

2:33 AM

@Shalvenay hiya

@Lord_Gareth then again, capsaicin is not the only way to make food spicy. I'm a big fan of allyl isothiocyanate myself ;)

how're things going?

I use Ludy's Instant salabat powder for all my ginger needs--drinks, cooking, baking.

@Shalvenay I'm listening to the Wily songs from The Megas and marveling at the fact that this indie band wrote a better villain than A. Capcom and B. most people in television

Fresh ginger is better, obviously, but eh. Work.

Thinking about it, it's not the really hardcore sour stuff that I'm seeing disappear, but the, I guess, mid-level. Sour Skittles are gone (technically not, but they changed them to not be sour), sour worms of all brands have stopped being sour, and so on. It's lucky Sour Patch Kids became a thing when they did.

2:35 AM

@Lord_Gareth You'd probably like calamansi.

The classic Warheads still have a punch

Though their other stuff is less sour

But calamansi punch and drinks are waaay too sweet.

@Miniman That's interesting. Up here sour candies are still really popular, and they're not hard to find at all.

@BESW It sounds glorious

(I make my Kool-Aid without sugar, just packet + water. I do not tell house guests this)

(It's more fun to watch them discover it firsthand)

@Lord_Gareth heheh...villainy is hard.

2:37 AM

@Shalvenay Well I mean, listen to this: youtube.com/watch?v=fqIJqFap6gU

@Lord_Gareth it is wrong that I chuckled at that

@Lord_Gareth I think I'd like it. then again, I'm the person who has to cut his fountain lemonades with water as they're too sticky-syrupy for me to drink neat

Which is Wily at the first Megaman game

@SevenSidedDie It's almost like my constant low-level petty maliciousness is some kind of personal problem in my life or something >.>

*waves* @NautArch

hey there @NautArch

2:37 AM

@Lord_Gareth Apparently Westerners use it as an ornamental? [shakes head sadly]

@BESW Wait, is it that weird bumpy fruit that repels spiders

Around here people will make friends with you because you have a calamansi tree in your yard.

@Lord_Gareth why would you want to do that?!

(repelling spiders that is)

@Lord_Gareth I don't think so. It looks more like a half-sized lime that turns yellow and then bright orange as it ripens.

Definitely not then

The one I'm thinking of is like, fist-and-a-half sized

2:40 AM

You set it on a tray or something and as it ripens it repels spiders

@Lord_Gareth o.O I didn't know spiders were sensitive to ethylene :P

@Shalvenay This is like third-hand unresearched info from a friend who had them in all corners of his house, I don't even know the thing's name

Do not take this as gospel

@Shalvenay Nah, they actually just hate trays. Like Jeff Vader.

heh.

2:41 AM

It's one of those fruits where you look at it and go "aw, so cute, I'm going to need to squeeze SO MANY for a glass of juice." And then you realise that you'll probably be able to get away with a 1:3 ratio and still drive away your wimpier guests unless you dump in all the sugar.

I wouldn't want to drive the spiders off anyway -- I actually prefer having spiders around to a fair few other sorts of bugs

Agreed. So long as they aren't the "I WILL KILL YOU" spiders, the only "pest" I'd prefer to have is a gecko.

@Shalvenay So at the point of "What Have You Done" Wily honestly believes that he and Light have created mankind's successor and they have a moral obligation to cede the world to sapient machines. Further, he's anguished and enraged at the death of the sons he helped create and galled at what he sees as Light's hypocrisy in using Megaman to destroy them

And then two albums later we meet Wily here: youtube.com/watch?v=OO8To_XZsFE

Having seen both the destruction his sins have wrought and the pain he created trying to right one of his wrongs in repairing Protoman

@Lord_Gareth Whoa. I never realised Megaman involved such deep philosophical issues. I just wanted to shoot things with bubbles, sawblades and leaves.

@Miniman You need some The Megas in your life

2:45 AM

@Lord_Gareth When I'm at home and can click youtube links, I'll get some :)

@Miniman I'll do you one better, their stuff is available free-and-legal on Bandcamp

They take the stance that if it's good and you like it, you'll buy it

@Lord_Gareth yeah -- it's amazing how much stuff lurks in obscurity these days

@Miniman themegas.bandcamp.com <-Caveat: if you listen to History Repeating, listen to Blue, THEN Red

Their albums have narratives

You will get it ass-backwards if you listen to it outta order

I could probably bamboozle the local rock stations with even the most relatively-well-known of my music requests

@Shalvenay Tell me, how much do you need an antagonist song about a man whose purpose was stolen from him, confronting the one who received everything the antagonist was meant to have?

2:48 AM

@Lord_Gareth hrm, I actually will be swinging in a rather different direction here musically

Well fine then refuse my villain song nerdery

I'll just be over here

>.>

Wintergatan - Marble Machine (music instrument using 2000 marbles)

Oh man that song is AMAZING

xD yes -- I could just see it being the work of a crazy gnome bard too :D

(The Megas also did a cover of Sunglasses At Night for some reason)

(and it is way more legit than that song deserves)

2:51 AM

@Lord_Gareth I'm pretty sure Ponyphonic wrote one of those for Princess Luna.

@BESW Have the one for Protoman youtube.com/watch?v=oWaKqtXFLPc

@Miniman Does Vader hate all trays, or just the wet ones ? (note: some swearing)

@BESW Also link me yours

The Moon Rises (Original)

(I know nothing about Megaman.)

@BESW that's fine, the song explains 100% of the relationship dynamic between Proto and Mega. There's a second song where they're dueling and then a third one by Proto at the conclusion of the album but that's the plot arc, as it were

Rather than the exposition

If that maketh the senseth

(I also know very little and most of what I learned was from reading Maverick Hunter Quest and listening to History Repeating)

2:56 AM

...huh. Since I last listened to The Moon Rises and Lullaby for a Princess there's been more polished, produced versions released.

That is a nice song

Follow-up, from Celestia:

Lullaby for a Princess

3:10 AM

@Shalvenay I love that, like a good German, his Bs are labeled "H" =)

Q: How do I privately ping someone?

heheh

@nitsua60 got some time to talk dungeon layout btw, or not now?

The Oracle

0

I recently received a couple of relatively large bounties from fellow members of this Stack, and I've not known how to thank them for their generosity. I know we don't have a private message feature here. Meanwhile, leaving comments on the answer I gave doesn't seem to be the way to do it, either...

support

@Shalvenay Should get to bed. Tomorrow evening'll be better.

@nitsua60 ah

btw: for all you physics folk: youtube.com/watch?v=0DmzxUM-9v0w (@nitsua60 @ACuriousMind)

@Shalvenay I love his shirt in that video

3:21 AM

@JoelHarmon yeah -- I should get one of those :D

how're things going btw?

pretty good

@Shalvenay how about you?

alright here, been doing some work on a dungeon actually

something combat heavier than the last one I put together

the canal one?

ah yeah, the canal one

I'm still trying to figure out how many clusters the upper level should consist of and what they should look like

my current votes are 9 for the former, and each of them resembling a different one of the basic 5-room dungeon forms from the Gnome Stew piece that was linked here a few days ago

Character sketch: "Lady Knight."

3:32 AM

wb @Lord_Gareth

as to the canal-crypt -- the concerns I have are "9 is likely too many clusters" and "is 5 rooms per cluster too many, not enough, or just about right for its intended usage?"

on a more global note: "how accessible should the crypt be for visitation?" and "should the canal system also include walking paths, or just a way of catching the boats?"

@BESW she definitely looks like she means business. Princess Jherala approves. :)

The players spent 90% of our 2-ish hour session in freefall through the skies of Coruscant. Good times.

Tweeted by fredhicks on May 17, 2017 at 3:36 AM

Been there, run that.

oh hey there @Ash

4:26 AM

@Miniman Maybe even parts-of-Aus-specific... I did a quick Google for it, found that Dan Murphys has it on their website, but not in any store near me (which probably means not in the state)

@Adeptus :(

@Adeptus Do you have Grill'd there?

5:17 AM

@Miniman Looks like we have a few, yeah. None really close by, though

@Adeptus Well, if you ever find yourself near one and looking for a burger, I heartily recommend them - and every one of them I've been to (which actually covers a few states, though not yours) has had Brookvale Union.

I'll keep that in mind

I'm ashamed to admit that I've never visited SA, NT, or WA.

@Miniman I've never been to WA, NT, or Tas

(though I have been to 3 countries in Europe, 2 states of USA, 1 province of Canada, 2? pacific islands, and Japan)

The only overseas travel I've done was NZ.

5:27 AM

haven't been there yet. We're planning to in a year or two

I'd definitely recommend it, although the Cadbury tour is no longer a thing (so really, what's the point?).

We're planning on doing LOTR & steampunk stuff

Ah, nice. We were going to do LOTR, but got delayed and had to cut it.

6:14 AM

@Adeptus That'd make a cool crossover.

@kviiri "Even the hottest of steam-powered lasers cannot melt the ring, Frodo."

Steamband is probably the best Angband variant I ever played. Not just because of thematic reasons, but it got the steam-fantasy-silliness mixture just right.

@kviiri Mordor isn't volcanic, it's heavily industrialised. The Ents get mad when Saruman cuts down the forests to fuel his steam engines. The ringwraiths are clockwork/steampowered cyborgs. Gandalf is a quirky genius inventor.

@Adeptus I mean, at least half of that is already true in LotR canon.

@Miniman Ents, kind of. Mordor?

6:23 AM

@Adeptus Nah, Gandalf. Is a quirky genius inventor (of fireworks).

@Adeptus Reminds me of Kirill Yeskov's “The Last Ringbearer”

@Adeptus The only way to destroy the One Ring is to crush it in the massive gears of Machine Doom?

@Miniman You'd recommend NZ for the Cadbury tour? Come on, there is so much better chocolate elsewhere in the world, who would want to go to NZ?

6:54 AM

@Anaphory 1) NZ has plenty else to recommend it. 2) Aus/NZ Cadbury is apparently different to British Cadbury, so while there is plenty of better chocolate in the world it's probably better than you think it is. 3) I got to see 1 tonne of melted chocolate dropped 3 stories, and it was awesome.

@Miniman 1) I know, I have been there (including in Cadbury's), I was just taking you on your sentiment that “Cadbury tour is no longer a thing (so really, what's the point [of visiting NZ]?)”

2) Hm, it didn't convince me.

@Anaphory Ah, sorry, that bit was meant as a joke.

I took it as such, so was my reply.

Sorry.

I was thinking about how to make that clear, but couldn't knit it easily into my second sentence.

Ah, tone on the internet continues to plague us. Sorry, it's been a long and moderately awful day.

I guess I have one of these just starting.

7:10 AM

I have just had one with the promise of two more this week and then five more the next after a weekend XD

Anne Aunyme

7:21 AM

@Adeptus It's this one (page in French)

@BESW none of them, see above

7:43 AM

Anybody got a favourite site for cell phone stat breakdowns?

7:53 AM

@TheRavenQueen [wave]

8:45 AM

@Shalvenay Being a theorist, that might as well be about an entirely different field for all I understand about such circuits ;)

9:10 AM

@ACuriousMind Which part of the theory?

@Anaphory Mostly high energy quantum field theory with forays into string theory

"Speculative particle physics", if you like

(It's me speculating, not the particles)

@ACuriousMind The closest I have come to that was trying to start a PhD in numerical methods for approximate symmetry breaking in supergravity, and I can't even remember which flavour of SUGRA we were trying to work with, much less having any understanding how that particular bit of representation theory connects to anything actually physical.

The sad thing is that supersymmetric theories are quite beautiful but to my knowledge we have yet to find a single one experimentally (CERN didn't find any definite hints of supersymmetry so far).

9:31 AM

Finding Higgs felt (for me as someone who doesn't really know what the currently interesting open questions are, even though I know enough HEP physicists around me and should just ask them) a bit like the universe had given up throwing weird random stuff at us to see what we would make of this new and unexpected discrepancy between theory and experiment.

Yeah, particle physics has been rather boring lately

The universe giving up after we figured out the particle zoo from mid-last century is a nice picture, though ;)

9:55 AM

@BESW If you mean as in specifications, I'd suggest gsmarena. Eg their page for a oneplus three

Thank you.

I will be picking your brain on cell phones later today.

@BESW For people who have a hard time figuring out what's "normal" or "standard" on the market, I suggest GSMarena - solely because of their compare feature. Oneplus 3 vs Moto G5 Plus It shows you whether the phone you want is above, below or within average for a given feature.

@eimyr Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to know much about one of the phones available to me.

That happens.

But Greener's site doesn't even know the phone exists.

10:07 AM

gsmarena has more accurate records

as in, it's aware of different regional specs

what's the phone then?

Figo Atrium 5.5

Neither of them seem to know about my current Sky 3.5.

This one?

Yeah.

@BESW Not to be pushy, but I've just got a phone last month - I got Moto G5 Plus and it's been the best performing phone I've ever had, and I used to have Samsung S4 at launch. Reviews seem to agree that it's the best in its price class. I wouldn't go for Moto G5 (without the Plus bit) as it's quite mediocre.

not sure if it fits your pricetag and requirements

My options are very limited.

10:11 AM

is it because of your carrier?

Aye.

uhoh

SmokeDetector

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] URL in title, bad keyword in body, bad keyword in title, pattern-matching website in body, pattern-matching website in title: t-rexmuscleadvice.com/endurance-test-x/ by goprgaby ann on rpg.SE

They've got a small case of phones for the "plan" we're using, and if we get a phone anywhere else they'll blame that and not lift a finger to help when anything goes wrong.

And more than half the phones in the case are Samsung, which leaves them out.

I see. That's not very helpful

You are against Samsung on moral, performance or price grounds?

10:14 AM

Performance.

For me it's price, but I share the sentiment.

@BESW Do they have a de-facto monopoly for your customer type?

Not quite, but close.

@Anaphory If so, it's through commercial carrier deals and not hardware superiority. Unless the type is "Samsung fanboy"

@eimyr He means if there are other viable service providers in the area for what I need.

10:18 AM

Yep.

Oh.

And I assumed there might not be, because the market might not support it.

Roughly speaking our options are "doesn't work much but has good customer service" and "usually works but if it fails God help you."

I'm unfortunately not surprised.

@BESW One criteria you'll want to look for is make sure the phone runs Android 6+. Typically Android handsets get updated to the next major version (maybe), and get maintenance for ~2 years, and then left alone, so if Figo's nice you'll get Android 7.0 when that becomes a thing. The motivation for this is security: Android currently has a security update mechanism that isn't very good, so those updates are how you get recent security patches.

10:22 AM

And our useage is so low that pre-paid cards are significantly cheaper than any plan, which limits our phone options through the provider.

@doppelgreener As an Android 2 user still, it's also really annoying if the official way to eg. get train tickets on your phone depends is an app. Which will soon be incompatible with ancient Android versions. *grumble*

My current phone is 4.2.2.

@Anaphory As an Android 2 user your Android is probably a Virusdroid. (There's lots of passive exploits available you won't notice. Get a new phone. I am sorry.)

Security is a major reason I'm looking to upgrade.

@doppelgreener I've been thinking about it, but not taken any action yet. You might just have finally given me enough push to actually have a look. (How do the passive exploits work?)

10:34 AM

Deluxe RPG "Handbrain" Screen. A deluxe Game Chief screen designed for half-sheet paper drop-ins you can make or print for any tabletop RPG.

So this is probably too open-ended for a proper question site, but how would you guys handle this in DnD 5e: there is a hobgoblin legion's encampment. My players are about to attack, deal as much damage as they can, and then get out. There are a few hundred hobgoblins there, so prolonged combat wouldn't end well or be even reasonably doable with normal combat mechanics.

@Anaphory There's wifi signal exploits that let a hacker within wifi range exploit some bugs in the phone's wifi software to start making it execute arbitrary code of their choosing. There are things like apps with no permissions able to break into the operating system.

The PCs will be rewarded based on the damage they inflict, so they have an incentive to stay as long as they can, but I want the situation to keep escalating until they have to back off.

@kviiri Do you want something that resembles combat there?

There's also basic remote code execution flaws in the browser platform (much of which is provided by the OS, and used by third party browser apps): the simple idea that a malicious webpage (such as, say, any advertisement, potentially) can exploit flaws in the browser engine to execute arbitrary code on the device via the browser app or even the operating system.

10:38 AM

@eimyr Yup. But I can't rely on just the normal combat engine because of the sheer massive amount of foes (not initially, but as they get alerted the hobgoblins probably will zoom into the site of action). Also, the part where the players retreat is probably best done without the combat rules (because it is rather poor for chases)

@kviiri Why are you assuming the players will be fighting them all?

I think I'd start with what their plan is.

If their plan is to barge in through the front door and try to fight as many as possible, Rocks Fall.

Phone software is usually kept in a sandbox -- the things it has control over are limited, and the software is virtually wholly unaware of anything at all outside the sandbox. It has no idea about other apps, other files, etc, other than its own. The holy grail of phone app hacking, or browser hacking, is breaking out of the sandbox -- gaining full awareness and/or control over the system. Sometimes there's multiple levels of sandboxes.

@eimyr It's not really their choice to make. If they go into the hobgoblin encampment and the hobgoblins get alerted, that's what happens eventually.

@doppelgreener Privilege escalation, okay. Not like I ever succeeded installing many apps. Browser bugs, yes, I probably should have expected those. Wifi signal explots? That's nasty.

What happens between the initial contact and that moment is what I worry about.

10:40 AM

@Anaphory That is all kinds of nasty, yeah.

If they went for something smarter, like sneak in and sabotage the water supply or whatever, then you can make a series of skill checks related to sneaking, larceny etc.. Succes would mean you only alert nearby goblins, failure is the camp alerted.

Ok, cool, you know about privilege escalation. The situation is that there's a number of privilege escalation bugs in older Android versions, and a number of networking bugs, and older phones simply never received patches for any of them.

@eimyr Of course, should they go for stealthy kills and sabotage, it's a different story, but I need to have a plan for the case where they manage to raise hell.

The idea is not to have a binary decision between "fight all the goblins" and "be unseen".

Oh, the point is that they will manage to raise hell.

either through a skill failure or anything else.

as soon as that happens you consider the horde of goblins as a super deadly swarm, and AFAIR dnd 5e treats swarms as puzzles

make it a puzzle to find an escape route where "just fighting" goes nowhere

Don't even bother rolling for regular combat

No, the point is that they probably will, and that's the part where I feel the need to think it through beforehand. So far I've been thinking of extended combat (the hobgoblins periodically get reinforcements), and upon player retreat a series of skill checks to see whether they manage to evade cavalry (or is it luperly or what if they ride dire wolves?) chasing them.

10:44 AM

@kviiri lookie here rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/58542/…

@eimyr This is what I like!

@Anaphory Btw, on top of that, for a very long time (until just recently, maybe?) Android 2 thru 4 (i.e. very insecure versions) were the overwhelming majority of Android phones, and even phones in operation full stop. So, hackers have every reason to try to exploit those phones: they're everywhere and they're easily hacked.

@doppelgreener Yep, that makes very much sense.

it seems like Android 2.0 and 3.0 usage has finally become fairly low recently (like single digit %), which is a relief, but Android 4 is still very popular (>30%) and vulnerable.

@kviiri did you find the answer at all useful?

10:49 AM

Thankfully Android recognised the problem a couple of years ago -- there was a major exploit (Heartbleed maybe?) and they were noticing that pretty much no phones actually got any patches for it in any respectable amount of time. They've been working on it in something called Project Treble.

Dungeons & Dragons: Satanic Panic | Retro Report | The New York Times

@eimyr Yes, thanks

RollingFeles

11:56 AM

Last year video. But it's interesting nontheless.

ShadowKras

@kviiri for your encampment assault, i would design something similar to lair encounters, and every turn (or every other turn) make some kind of attack or action against the players, which represents the other hobgoblins interfering in the fight, like archers volley or cavalry charging at them. Then, design a combat with around 10 hobgoblins at a time, that would get refilled after a certain time (like 2d6 rounds, another 1d10 hobgoblins join the skirmish).

I feel really lucky to live in a country where the popular perception of RPGs is neither that players are Satanists nor that they're all introverted geeks.

ShadowKras

Depending on how well they handle it, they could be overwhelmed and be forced to retreat, or actually overwhelm the defenders and affect their morale, so they would probably be forced to raise camp and retreat instead.

@ShadowKras That sounds workable too.

Hobgoblins, lose morale? They're aching for Acheron!

Actually, IIRC Volo's Guide to Monsters has something on goblinoids. Maybe they have something regarding things like this.

12:28 PM

I once ran a 4e scene where the goal was to make it from one side of the map to the other, through regular incremental waves of enemies coming from various directions.

huh, which session was that?

It was something like, each successive round: one minion, two minions, three minions, one standard, start over with one minion.

@trogdor Escorting the King of Samrajya out of the city while it was under siege by Bael Turath.

oh

[digs up encounter notes]

I seem to recall that

I did not necessarily recognize a pattern like that though