(btw, hi all I'm back from being busy and/or sick... my 3rd bout of cold/flu symptoms was apparently Influenza A, though by the time I found this out, I was mostly better)
Don't know. At the time it was written, they were considering being part of Federation, but rejected it. So really, the Constitution should have been amended back then, but for whatever reason it wasn't. These days, many of their original reasons for not being part of Australia no longer apply, but of course now there's a couple centuries of national identity...
@Adeptus It's also got that strange construction of "The Commonwealth will be such parts of [list of places incl. NZ] as are part of the Commonwealth."
@nitsua60 Actually, although I've memorized shortcuts for most common Pasifika macrons, the ā isn't easily available on a Mac keyboard so I just copy-paste that one.
@BESW I don't know about Waitangi Day, but I know Australia Day is divisive. Mostly because it's held on the anniversary of European settlement. Some indigenous people now call it "Invasion Day" or "Survival Day". So, there is some pressure to change the date, but also resistance because "it's always been on this date"
@nitsua60 If I were ever to get a job involving extensive use of te reo Māori, I'd add Māori to my computer's default languages and then I'd get a keyboard shortcut mapped for it. But as is, my English default works for most of the languages I commonly use in my work.
(I have to do that for Ōlelo Hawaiʻi, too; the ʻokina isn't easy to find a shortcut for.)
It's not the exact same thing, but this meta talks about this sort of thing a bit.
In general, more specific questions are better questions, and their answers are more useful to the person who asked them.
@fectin I'd even recommend going more specific - if you know what class/race/level you're going to be, it'll prevent answers suggesting stuff you can't actually use for some reason.
"Oh, there's an item that converts Turn Undead uses into caster level boosts? Well that would be great if I was a Cleric and not a Wizard..."
So, fundamentally, Mage Slayer is a reaction that you take "when a creature casts a spell".
That already suggests that it happens after the spell is cast, since, if the creature is still in the middle of casting, then it hasn't cast a spell yet.
Then, as well, there's the reaction rules that say that reactions happen after their triggers unless otherwise specified.
Counterspell, on the other hand, is a reaction you take "when you see a creature within 60 feet of you casting a spell".
Present tense, casting. Then, too, the next thing it says is "You attempt to interrupt a creature in the process of casting a spell." I'd argue that that counts as the "otherwise specified" that the reaction rules mention.
And, in your comment, you mentioned that the difference was probably unintentional, but in the tweet I linked Crawford specifically said that the Mage Slayer attack happens after the spell.
Comments/objections/vehement disparagement of me on a personal level?
@Adeptus If you're trying to come up with something good in the third category, I'd recommend going after lifestyle rather than appearance, it's a far more sensitive area :)
Looking at the "ready" triggers, they can be momentary things - one example given is "when the cultist steps on the trapdoor" - probably interrupting their movement. I'm looking at reactions with that same logic - when [perceivable event], [do thing]
(And it sort of goes without saying that Mage Slayer should go while they're in the process of casting, and should probably at least force a concentration check to cast the spell)
(when I say "perceivable event", I mean any momentary event not a discrete action - ie, "step on trapdoor" not "finish moving"; "start casting" not "finish casting")
So with a readied attack, you should be able to hit a mage mid-cast, an archer mid-draw, etc, if that was your specified trigger. (But looking at reaction vs ready, there may be some distinction)
Readied actions are supposed to use "perceivable events" - in other words, they have to be in-character things. But all the reactions have mechanical, game-system triggers.
As some politicians with reason to discredit others have pointed out, every politician ticked a box on a form that said they had no allegiance to another nation.
Whether every politician took the time to read said form I leave to your imagination.
if you are running for office and signing stuff the whole way through the entry process without reading it,........ I think I can safely assign some of the blame for when it blows up in your face to your decision,.... not to read it
@trogdor Unfortunately, it's highly unlikely that the, frankly, ludicrous salary, and even more ludicrous expenses, our politicians receive will be returned, despite them now legally owing it.
that isn't his fault, but if this has happened to multiple people, I gotta assume they don't all have moms who just sign them up for dual citizenship randomly without mentioning it
@trogdor Sadly, their salaries and expense accounts aren't even the costliest part of it. The pension that they get having been a politician, regardless of how long, adds up to far more money in the long run.
@Miniman "In July 2017, Greens Senator Scott Ludlam resigned after discovering he still retained New Zealand citizenship from his birth in New Zealand. Ludlam had settled in Australia with his family aged eight, and had previously assumed he lost his New Zealand citizenship when he naturalised as an Australian citizen in his mid-teens." - source
you would think for resigning, or being impeached, especially due to,... breaking a law however slightly strange that law is, would get you a reduction in that
I mean, I get it if Australia doesn't want people in office to have ties to other countries, but I don't know if dual citizenship is the thing they should hang that kind of thing on?
@trogdor Ah, sorry, I didn't mean to connect that with the above - with their position not legally valid, as far as I know, the politicians resigning because of the clause won't receive any benefits going forward.
@trogdor Even there, someone holding political office while also owing allegiance to another country can be... problematic. Security clearance is a nightmare, and being involved in policy decisions can lead to issues of conflicting loyalties.
And it's simple enough to say "Well, Canada's ok" or "you've got dual-citizenship, but only because you were born there and you've never gone back, so that's fine", but where do you draw the line?
but drawing it at "well you were born there and never went back" doesn't seem right to me at all
@Miniman yeah, I struggle with that kind of thinking sometimes
like speed limits, not that I think they are wrong everywhere here, but I seriously suspect some of them were decided in the 60's or something and then never reviewed
@trogdor Yeah, preaching to the choir here :) One of our most important and busy roads here was limited to 40 instead of 90 for a full week after all roadwork had been completed.
@Baskakov_Dmitriy Also from a different location where I gave a very intensive and partly stressful course and where I had no internet connection. Which kept me from being here for a while.
@Anaphory He replied and promised he'd look into it. No concrete results so far (that would've been quite a stretch from anyone!) but knowing the issue is being handled is a serious relief.
@Anaphory I think the official statement is "don't start worrying before 7 August" but I asked the Finnish RPG Facebook group and everyone's had their books for like a month and a half... so I think I had just cause :P
@kviiri We have a mix of closed and open questions of that kind.
It's honestly pretty difficult to guess how the site will react.
"Is X over/under powered" tends to do a bit better, if only because so many Xs are so drastically overpowered that it's obvious to everyone what the answer is.
Well, in that case I'll start by probing the chat: my level 6 bard found a homebrewed item that allows him to concentrate on two spells at the same time.
Upon taking damage, a single concentration check is made and both spells fail if the concentration breaks.
The item was given as a response to my perpetual whining that I would like to do more buffing and debuffing, which just doesn't work that well in 5e because of the concentration mechanics.
I can do some very specific things that would normally require two party members, but I don't think that's an issue in itself.
I mean, I could do things like stack Haste on my friends and Slow on my enemies for a hilarious kiting exercise, but that's something I could already do by sharing the burden with my wizard friend.
After asking this question (Functionally, how does Power Word Kill work?), it was suggested to me in the comments that I may instead want to ask how Power Word Kill compares to other level 9 spells.
I wanted to know if questions of this type are:
a) On-topic - while I am tempted to say yes, sin...
It came out to, um, 4x(4d4+4)-1 fireballs of about 24d6 each, Reflex half damage per. Oh, and make 'em nonlethal sonic balls so they don't damage the infrastructure.
Portfolio of Holding, the far more obscure cousin of the Bag of Holding, does little to reduce its contents' weight, but does provide a reasonably good expected long-term revenue for them.
@kviiri hmmm, I wonder... can you glue lots of dimensional holes onto the pages of a Folio book (12 x 17.5 inches / 307 x 445 mm) and then make it a "catalogue of wares"?
@nwp Oh comeon, you take a catalogue of wares (see above) up and just empty it - the damage of falling, medium sized boulders should accumulate high enough, and since falling time is not factored in, you will likely smash everybody!
@Adeptus That's... probably not quite true. The constitutional term is "natural born citizen" which, problematically, is not strictly defined either in statute* or in case law. Some argue that "natural born citizen" should be read as "citizen by dint of their birth," or "citizen at the time of their birth." The edge-case has to do with children born to US citizens while abroad who, as long as the parents attest to desire their child's citizenship, are citizens at birth by statute...
rather than "naturally."
This almost certainly would have become settled law in 2008 had John McCain won the election, as he was born in a naval facility in Panama (proper) while his parents were living in the Canal Zone. (IIRC.) That's because (a) it would have gone all the way to the Supreme Court and (b) IMO they would have ruled 9-0 to state that a citizen at birth by the 1790 Naturalization Act qualifies as a "natural born citizen."
@nitsua60 general stack question: if someone has answer that you think is mostly right, is it worth discussing with them to make a change or is better just to submit your own answer?
If for no other reason than they would not have allowed themselves to come to the conclusion that a person who suffered torture as a POW, served in Congress for decades, and then won the national election, could not be the President.
@NautArch I usually drop a "+1 already, but I think xyz could use abc improvement" comment; if they agree, great! If not, come back in a day or two to craft your own.
* - even more frustratingly, there's an attempt to work on "natural born citizen" in statute, but it's not settled whether that applies or whether it'd fall to the Supremacy clause.
@nitsua60 I think I'd rather give them a chance first. The rest o the answer is topnotch and I don'tw ant to reinvent the wheel or copypasta it with the single change I'd like to make.
@nitsua60 50 years from now we'll see a court case over whether kids developed in medical artificial wombs count constitutionally as "natural born citizens".
(I am half joking and all serious with that. Someone's going to try to do that.)
@doppelgreener 500 years from now we'll see a court case whether functional but disembodied brains developed in artificial wombs as spares count constitutionally as "citizens"
@eimyr That one will draw on court precedent that will be set 250 years from now determining whether artificial intelligences with equivalent capacities to human can count as citizens.
@doppelgreener I think that one's actually settled, to the extent that the phrase "natural born citizen" is settled anyway. A while back the Dept. of State and the Customs and Immigration Service rewrote the definition of child to stop requiring a genetic relationship and to only require legal parent-status not precluded by someone else's biological+legal claim in the jurisdiction where the thing is happening.
IOW I can go to Nepal and have a Nepalese woman gestate the embryo of an egg donor and a sperm donor, receive the child at birth, and be it's parent for all purposes of US law--including ligitimation and tramsmission of citizenship--as long as the donors and the gestational mother have all renounced their legal rights in Nepal.
@nwp I remember reading an analysis once about the US civil war. It took the stance that losing the war was basically apocalyptic for the south, in the sense that their entire way of life was pretty much shattered all at once.
@godskook I think it was something like: when you think of an apocalypse, you think of the end of the world. The end times. Flames, and anarchy and all that. But an apocalyptic event doesn't necessarily have to mean the end of our existence. It then went on to demonstrate the point using the civil war as an example
@Adam I mean....ok, they might have a point, in as much as it was a harsh situation to be in. About 1 in 30 Confederate citizens died in that war. Otoh, its not like it does much for my sympathies. Which again, leaves me wondering, what's the thrusting point, i.e., the reaction they want me to have, for what the author is saying?
@godskook It's not making any point about the south one way or the other. It isn't trying to make you sympathize with them or with the union. It was just a piece about how, from a certain point of view, an apocalyptic event doesn't necessarily mean the end of all things. An event which immediately ends a certain way of life, or that begins a new era could also be considered apocalyptic.
And it used the US Civil War to demonstrate what that might look like.
The discovery of fire, the manufacture of steel, firearms, or the creation of the internet could all, in some way, be considered apocalyptic.
Seems like the sort of thing that needs to be written and read by people who've not experienced apocalypse. I doubt my neighbors, the Schagticoke Tribal Nation, need anyone to tell them that apocalypses don't require meteor-strikes.
@Adam I just gotta question the author's choice of example. The Civil War, while brutal, was not, afaik, notably brutal relative to other conflicts which could be picked. World War 1 would've, as far as I can tell, been both a far more apt example(a more brutal war) and far less controversial as an example.
@godskook The overall brutality of the choice of conflict as well as the moral stance on each side was irrelevant in the analysis. It wasn't about "How sad it was for the south that everything changed" it was "Everything changed, so to them it was an apocalypse" WWI was also apocalyptic, but not because it was bloodier. Either make fine examples.
@kviiri Also a very good example of an apocalyptic event.
@Adam was just about to type something similar. Apocalyptic isn't a descriptor of the events leading up to it - it's a descriptor for what happened after it.
Some time ago, maybe a ear, maybe two, someone on this chat pointed out to me that high fantasy often has post-apocalyptic elements (quite possibly because of borrowing from the fall of Rome).
"We have these irreplaceable magical artifacts left by the great mages or gods of the past" is hardly different from "We have this salvaged tech from the early 2000's. How did they ever build these things?"
Scroll Scribe Prequisite: being able to write down spells First you have to prepare the scroll. For every level of the spell the process takes 2 hours and consumes 25 gp worth of fine inks and materials. After that you need to cast the spell into the prepared scroll, which is successful only if you pass an Intelligence(Arcana) check with a DC 10 + the level of the spell. Failure on the test ruins the scroll.
@Szega I don't know your party, but I'd be slightly worried about some more min-maxy players taking a several week holiday to forge hundreds of spell scrolls.
@Szega Take a look at the downtime unearthed arcana. It gives some guidance on magic item crafting. BIggets thing is that the cost/time to carft is much bigger.
@Szega It probably wouldn't, and you might have to hammer some narrative into making it work for your players, but I'd recommend at least having a hard or soft cap on the amount of spells currently extant as your scrolls.
@NautArch You mean the existing ones? Like you could make scrolls using usual magical crafting rules, but it'd take 10 days just to make one L1 scroll?
@Adam Well, they can craft 70gp-worth? What's that get someone? IME it just takes one player who likes the "away from table" game to start throwing things out there--that'll get the others to see the fun and table-utility.
I never found downtime rules interesting enough, so we usually just say something like "you spend two to three months recovering from your previous adventures. A lovely holiday!" and maybe some extra RP fodder like "how does Tuikku the Thief pass the time when off-duty?"
@nitsua60 For scrolls, they had enough time for one person to craft 3 cantrip/1st level scrolls, since magic items are 25gp per day. And if the casters had worked together, they could've pumped out 2 level 2 scrolls. At least that's what I did.
One of the players asked "If I can craft scrolls, can I craft magic items instead?" I told him that the methods for making these items was lost to time, so he would need to find a magical formula for them somewhere in the world before that. He spent his downtime researching where a formula might be, so I can't exactly be mad at him for that.
Of course, he was miffed when the first lead he took went cold, but he'll just have to accept it isn't that easy to unearth the lost secrets of a bygone era.
@nitsua60 Timing-wise, E6 is a 3.5 construct. No idea if 3.0 played an unusually high role in it other than as the precursor to 3.5. As @doppelgreener notes, its about 4 years too young for there to be much question on the subject, given how ubiquitous 3.5 adoption was.
@nitsua60 Maybe? But Unearthed Arcana isn't official, either. Using their direction on how to approach a specific feat is what I was recommending. Or use the DMG guidance (but if the DMG has guidance on this, why the need to include it in downtime and make it different?)
How Long could an "Eternal" Fire last?
At some point there is a fire very spiritually important to a certain people - so important that they build a city around it, and begin developing an empire with one of their main motivations being to provide fuel to the fire. They believe that if it burns...
Basically: Volcanic caldera, poisonous lake, toxic fumes emanate from the lake so nothing can survive near the volcano, poisonous rivers leading away from the lake kills things far away from the volcano. Humans and dwarves come in, find out the hard way that the toxic fumes are flammable, and thereafter keep the surface of the lake burning to cleanse the fumes. The ash produced is considered holy and gets used in a water filtration system that also cleans the river water.
So everyone gets clean water and clean air and everyone's happy. Especially the elves whose land this is, and whose forest is being harvested for the wood. Except the humans and dwarves were historically only offered living in this area as temporary refuge, and the young generation of elves wants to drive them out by force, because they cannot accept on principle that these people have overstayed their welcome and are harvesting an elven forest.
It's an unstable situation and I wanted to send the players in there to be the wrecking ball of plans & schemes players always are.
Importantly though they could choose whose plans & schemes to wreck, and how, and make their own as well.
There's a watchtower built at the top of the caldera where you can look out over the lake and watch fire streak across its surface as new pockets of gas catch alight.
@MikeQ That's why I liked that worldbuilding question. The dude talked about using enormous woodburning kilns, and I realised, hey, I never actually thought about what would happen when it rains.
(Snow wouldn't be a concern, but rain and heavy wind would be.)
The best options that come to mind are: 1. a semi-enclosed structure, resulting in a "fire temple", or 2. wizards set up enchantments to block off natural effects
Depends on the depth of the caldera, the ammount of gas getting out... and if they manage to place a clay dome over the caldera, funneling the gas to one place to get a self sustained burn
I still like the kiln building idea, maybe something like... To protect the fires, the dwarves created a massive engineering marvel in the caldera: a behemoth of ritual chambers, maintenance walkways, and tunnels for managing heat and water flow. The resulting structure is considered a "holy temple" at the center of this city. Now the GM has a plot-relevant set piece that can also serve as a possible dungeon.
Family was watching Smurfs Lost Village this weekend and I see the Joe Manganiello was one of the voices. Wife says "oh, that's Sofia Vergara's husband". I follow with "yes, and he's really into D&D. Kind of their entertainment poster child for the developers right now." Wife responds, "Really? Maybe I need to think about this some more..."
@NautArch The google cards on my phone tell me that D&D is supposedly having some kind of renaissance with all the high profile players and successful streams.
@NautArch Afaik, he's NEVER stopped doing things with D&D. And by "doing things" I mean playing D&D privately. No idea how much D&D-stuff he does within his career.
@NautArch No, but apparently all Drizzt clones are :P
Think about it, in Pitch Black, Riddick is a "misunderstood" outsider from a "clearly evil class of people" being constantly judged by everyone else not by what he is but by prejudice. And then he saves the day. Also, something something angst.
After asking this question (Functionally, how does Power Word Kill work?), it was suggested to me in the comments that I may instead want to ask how Power Word Kill compares to other level 9 spells.
I wanted to know if questions of this type are:
a) On-topic - while I am tempted to say yes, sin...
