TRPG General Chat

1:39 AM

Early on in my time with the Stack, someone described it to me as a Grand Experiment not only in gathering and sorting quality content, but also (though secondarily) a Grand Experiment to teach people clear, effective communication skills.

nitsua60

1:50 AM

@Shalvenay IMO, never. One Good Thing is that we're always getting new users. Which means there are always people who need to learn the norms, and learn the experience(s) from which those norms are derived, and perhaps challenge those norms. (All those things in some order.) New people bubbling up and saying "hey, what's up with this!?" seems, to me, a sign of site health.

BESW

It also helps keep us from getting too content with The Way Things Are.

Shalvenay

@nitsua60 that is a point

nitsua60

@Shalvenay I think at one point I used the metaphor of supervising the playground at recess. "When will the kids learn to stop hanging upside-down on the monkey bars!?" has a simple answer: never. Because there's always new kids.

(It's like how my students never get any better at math. Oh, I mean individually they do, but year after year... because it's always new kids. Twenty years from now I'll still be trying to get my geometry kids to understand cross-sections!)

3 days to new group. We still don't have a meeting location... =/

Adeptus

2:15 AM

@nitsua60 "I've been teaching you this for 20 years! Every time I think you've got it, we go off on vacation, and when we come back you've forgotten everything!" :P

nitsua60

@Adeptus Basically =)

Miniman

@nitsua60 I mean, there's always the intertubeswebface.

It's not ideal, but generally you can find something that works for everyone.

nitsua60

It's a very common mindset-flip that young teachers need to make somewhere around year 3-5 of their careers. Because in those first few years you do see your students getting better: you're improving enough as a teacher that you do see year-over-year improvements "in your students." But that dies down pretty quickly (IME), so you get this existential crisis to deal with.

"What am I doing here? Year after year, it's not getting any better!"

Focus on the kids, Luke.

@Miniman Ugh, no way. I mean, we all live within 5 min. of each other. (It's an in-town group.) We've got to find a meat-place.

BESW

A meat-plaice meet-place?

Or you could game at the aquarium and it'd be a meet-plaice meat-place.

Adeptus

A butcher? A steakhouse?

nitsua60

2:23 AM

@BESW Hmm... tempting, but nearest aquarium's 90 min. away =(

@Adeptus 45 min. away on both counts...

Art gallery. An art gallery may have to do. We've got a dozen of those. (That's right: 12 art galleries, but neither a butcher nor a steakhouse.)

BESW

I once heard of a DFRPG campaign that the group set in their own city, and they'd game as close as possible to whichever location was most prominent for that particular session.

nitsua60

noice =)

Shalvenay

in the meantime, I'm banging my head against a proverbial wall wondering what's taking electrical equipment manufacturers so long to make electrical panels with more than 42 spaces in them

(the NEC and UL 67 both had a 42 circuit limit, but that was lifted a decade+ ago)

BESW

Do YOU want to spend your life making books for very small audiences? Consider RPG publishing! #askmehow #onsecondthought #dontaskmehow

Tweeted by fredhicks on June 27, 2017 at 2:21 AM

2

Joel Harmon

2:38 AM

@nitsua60 Library?

@BESW We once did a Mage campaign in our city. We bounced around it waaaayyy too much to do a "nearest public location" thing, but it's a cool idea.

BESW

@JoelHarmon I've got a friend who wants to run a zombie campaign set in near-future Guam, and he plans to take photos of locations and manipulate them to be more apocalyptic, as references for the game.

Joel Harmon

In fact, during that (year long) game I had to go on a business trip and couldn't make, it. So, conveniently, my character did, too. I started getting text messages from them, culminating in a phone call, while I was IMing the DM for clarification.

BESW

Heh.

Joel Harmon

@BESW I have a friend who likes to run a zombie-based game. It features the players themselves as characters, and starts with the DM dying some kind of horrible, zombie-related death.

BESW

Heh.

Joel Harmon

2:43 AM

You get things like "ok, I have XYZ tools in the garage, and some hammers in the basement. We can grab a broom as a holdover until then. Go!"

BESW

I'm not a big fan of zombie games, nor am I fan of "play yourself!" games. That would not be up my alley.

Joel Harmon

that one is also amenable to friends texting during the game

Also, we concluded quickly that actually statting up your friends will likely lead to.. disagreements. So he uses a Jenga-based system instead.

BESW

Dread?

nitsua60

@JoelHarmon Public library closes at 5pm. School library could work, as could our super-nice conference room, or our subterranean conference room. Basically, it's a question of "where do we want to be when security walks by and ogles us playing D&D?"

Joel Harmon

@BESW That sounds like it might be it.

BESW

2:59 AM

@nitsua60 When I played D&D in the university's music room, the security guard laughed at us for playing 3.5 instead of 2e.

Adeptus

@nitsua60 Subterranean. Putting the Dungeons in Dungeons & Dragons.

nitsua60

@BESW Have that guard send me their resume =)

BESW

4:51 AM

"What this person did was awesome. I hear they were marked by Fate. Is that so?" "Definitely!" Fate said. "I mark everyone, just in case."

Tweeted by MicroSFF on June 26, 2017 at 5:43 PM

Artistic Impression: The Surface of TRAPPIST-1f

Adeptus

@BESW "I gave them a C-. They need to try harder."

Magician

...it says something that my first reaction to "marked" wasn't "graded", but "-2 to attacks against other creatures".

BESW

@Magician Yeah, my initial thought was "That's an interesting multisystem hack."

Mike Q

5:24 AM

@BESW [waive]

BESW

6:03 AM

Well plaid.

BESW

6:25 AM

[sigh] Every time I back a Kickstarter, I have to explain to my bank how they can lift the block so my charge doesn't get declined.

Adeptus

Does KS take paypal?

BESW

Yeah, but I have other problems with PayPal.

Adeptus

mmm ok

BESW

7:51 AM

Hey, look, an RPG Kickstarter that describes its design goals.

2

Quentin

8:09 AM

@BESW Ick. I pay for most of my Kickstarter stuff using a prepaid credit card — admittedly that's because most of my Kickstarter stuff is in a foreign currency and the card does FX at better rates than my bank — might that be an option for you to avoid that hassle?

BESW

@Quentin Prepaid credit cards are... weird... out here.

Guam's a kind of regional no-man's-land and anything tied to geographical tags, postal addresses, phone numbers--tends to go haywire.

Quentin

:(

trogdor

it's too bad because otherwise that would be a pretty nice option

BESW

I looked into it a few years ago and it seemed... unclear... whether and how it would work. At the very least it looked like I'd need to tie it to a mainland address and phone number instead of my own.

Anne Aunyme

8:25 AM

Because of a sequence of unfortunate events, our group of last night now have to do the equivalent of half an adventure day with only one PC (in Pathfinder), who just drank her last potion.

I have no idea how we will manage to do that

doppelgreener

@AnneAunyme with a great deal of care

Anne Aunyme

There is a time constraint too

or it wouldn't be funny

and the module is supposed to be for 4 players

doppelgreener

@BESW added to the pin \o/

The Oracle

10:05 AM

3

Q: How to ask a question when you don't know the english name and references of a spell?

I have a question about a spell in Deadland Reloaded. But I'm french and every book I have about it are in french. I have hard time find the english translation of many point. Making it hard to ask about. I actually have a question about a skill that allow a mad scientist to craft one object onc...

BESW

10:57 AM

Ki Khanga has begun mailing books.

trogdor

12:00 PM

@BESW nice

Quentin

12:28 PM

I have a sudden urge to sulk about Alas Vegas :)

BESW

1:03 PM

Hmm?

ShadowKras

1:29 PM

@AnneAunyme what module is it?

@BESW i gave up on calling my bank because of kickstarters....

BESW

Oh, I walk in and look at 'em.

ShadowKras

Here i can't do that, because they will simply write down the phone of the credit card provider and ask me to call them, as they have no power on what they declined or not.

So after like, 5 or 6 failed kickstarter backings, i gave up, i now wait for stuff to be available elsewhere so i can buy them.

BESW

Yeah, my bank has a third-party security vendor for online card transactions, with whom they will not let me speak. So it's all a game of (literal) telephone.

NautArch

1:45 PM

@ShadowKras The credit card company should be able to tell you WHY something is declined. I process cards daily and see at least some information on my side as a business (address mismatch, invalid #, etc.). Some say "please call your card issuer" and have to direct my customers to do that and let us know.

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