lol

as long as no one minds that we didn't finish the game it's all good

XD

It was a decent stopping point: we'd trashed the Hand of Sorrow's computers (good dramatic scene) and knew that next we were going to rescue the captain (obvious starting momentum if we play again)

yep

"Ever tried rebooting a spaceship before?"

it's a steampunk sorta spaceship

so rebooting it will require,... extensive repairs

we did a lot more physical trashing of it than "hacking"

@trogdor ah XD

@Shalvenay Even better, they were gear-and-piston-and-punchcard computers. Kale and Natasha used lightning and sonic spells to melt and shatter components while Naomi just grabbed an error signpost that said "WRONG!" and started hitting things.

hahahaha

bad case o' the slagged modules xD

it was great

Once some timing belts snapped, it started smashing itself.

(still remember the time in EVE I burned out the prop mod on my Loki in a PvP fight because I got too busy ramming things)

@BESW you were asking for it when you made a signpost that said "WRONG" XD

@trogdor It was a dieselpunk computer! I had to throw in Babbage's most excellent invention ever!

yes well you still asked for it XP

(Charles Babbage, who invented but never built the world's first computer in the mid 1800s, to be powered by steam, also invented a mechanism by which an error in the code would set off a loud bell and pop up a placard that said "WRONG!" in the part of the machine that encountered the error.)

@BESW that'd be more helpful than what computers do nowadays half of the time

shakes fist at sloppy typed languages muddling on through obviously bogus code and producing nonsense results

lol

mostly telling you exactly where the error is is pretty helpful

(source, with citation)

I mean, some other things about it seem like they would be less convenient for sure

The "loud and continuous bell" might be annoying.

@BESW true

@BESW it's also quite the assumption on his part that it will always work properly, to be sure

he might have assumed proper maintenance at all times for example

a fair mistaken assumption when he had not made it yet

did you guys all play together?

well some of us have, but it depends who you mean

@BESW and I have been part of the same group for years

June, Miniman and the two of us all had a game of Lady Blackbird just a couple days ago

and Shalv and I are going to be in a game together but have not technically started session one yet

we did have session 0 yesterday though

(session 0 is character and setting creation and not any actual playing of the game yet)

(just in case you didn't know the term)

Troggy and I are meatspace friends, and we've had more than a half-dozen folks from RPG.SE join our real-life group, specifically, using voice chats. More broadly, RPG.SE users sometimes play games in these chat rooms, using the built-in dicebot, or use this space to organize games on Discord or Roll20 or what-have-you.

@RafaelSantos not as a singular group, no. I was in a group with BESW and a few other chatizens before (where I got my first cracks at DW and Do: POTFT)

and as Troggy mentioned, him and I will be together for the chatizen ToA game that session 0'ed last night

timezones do make pan-Stack games very hard, though

Yeah, June has to get up at 4am to join us for her playtests.

mm

hey there @nitsua60

@Shalvenay hiya

@nitsua60 how're things going?

I'm dragging--slowly coasting into the end of this weekend's duties. It took me forever to 'unwind' last night after all that noise and thumping and strobe-lights, and I've been running running running all day today.

But I'm excited about chatizen ToA. I'll have handouts prepped... hmm... maybe I'll do that now, while I'm supervising a study hall.

@nitsua60 I am also excited, I hope you didn't have too much trouble yesterday

yeah, I'm pretty stoked for the first session as well

@nitsua60 -- did you catch what trog and korv's plans for having their chars get to/be in Chult were?

@Shalvenay No--at certain points I was only catching ~1/3 of what was said =\

@nitsua60 ah

Korv's char is taking a boat down, and I'll let @trogdor describe what he's got cooked up for his character since he's here to do so :) if you don't mind?

welp, I was thinking that as a paladin, my character will have been called to be there for a few years already, and found a gang of bandits when he arrived

and ended up teaching a bunch of people in the area how to fight with farmers tools and whatnot

Sounds good. I'll use that--both of those--when making up the handouts =)

so that he isn't technically native to Chult but he is already there when we start

coolio

@Shalvenay what is your character?

@RafaelSantos my character's the local among the bunch XD

I think it is a decent mix honestly

if you're asking more along the lines of party composition though: we have Trog's dragonborn paladin, Korv's human ranger, and my tabaxi cleric

one person just getting there now, one non native with experience there and somewhere else, and one person who has lived there their whole life

aye :)

tabaxi... are those the D&D khajiits?

No, khajiits are Skyrim's tabaxi =P

i see... tabaxi has wares! hahaha

it's the same basic theme though

fully felinized humanoids vs the more nekojin style of catpeople

there is only one cat people in my heart... the thundercats!

@RafaelSantos ho-ooooooh!

lol

i don't remember, but are Dragonborns on 5th edition still other races resurrect by Bahamut as Dragonborns, or are they a full "reproductive" race?

On that note, I chaperoned a group heading to the local animal shelter and found myself staring, for two hours, at an adorable cat that I really wanted to get for my younger daughter. But... an eighth body in the house? Can't do it, little buddy.

@RafaelSantos fully fertile/reproductive AIUI although my reading's limited

points @nitsua60 at Rafael's question

points rafael at a relevant mainsite question

although talk about cruelty -- boiling dragonborn eggs that failed candling?

or maybe the DM read Dragonlance and was foreshadowing Drakonians

in the end they could't find a consensus on the topic of Dragonborn reproduction, only that they came from eggs! =)

@RafaelSantos You might like Masters of Umdaar. It's a Fate Accelerated setting/mod in the style of Thundercats, He-Man, etc. One of our characters was Llyan, Lord of the Stormcats.

We later modified his mechanics to better fit an Atomic Robo campaign.

@BESW Tks, but i can't really play with anthropomorphic animals, the Furries totally killed that for me... and i have played as a Argonian in all Elder Scrolls and as a Kobolds in a lot of RPGs...

(The first version is still a little more powerful --higher numbers, more stunts-- than a usual Umdaar character, because he was playing alongside Atomic Robo characters.)

@RafaelSantos ah. I do like good takes on draconic or lizardfolk races myself

@Shalvenay me too...

has a Dragonborn Paladin/slated-to-become-Warlock kicking around from an old campaign

@RafaelSantos other than tabaxi/khajiit style catfolk, the other furry thing I have played...would be the gnoll monk/priestess I did up in a 1e campaign. (LN, worshipped St. Cuthbert)

trust me -- gnolls are well outside the normal lines circumscribing "furry". XD

...I'd love to run a campaign with Vernon's take on hyena-folk.

@BESW oh? mind telling me about that? :D

Age of Skeletons?

(response: "we usually date them by cultural artifacts found in the same strata")

@Shalvenay From Digger. Based on spotted hyenas. Matriarchal society in which women are hunters and leaders. Roughly stone-age technology, highly structured society based on bloodlines, prestige, and face, places great value on names and spoken oaths.

First-born usually die (again, spotted hyenas), so surviving first-born are considered sacred and expected to become artists or visionaries.

So, last weekend was my scheduled D&D game. 2 of my players couldn't come due to illness, so I ran a side quest with the new player joining and the 2 other players. We rescheduled to this weekend (just gone)... but the new player injured herself and couldn't come... so it was mostly tying up loose ends from the just-finished adventure, and info-gathering for the upcoming adventure. And a random encounter (that took me way too long to look up) so they could fight something.

@BESW Fun Fact: Female spotted hyenas have a clitoris that is larger than the male penis, and the famelas are the Alpha!

@RafaelSantos As I said, based on spotted hyenas.

i was writing that before i saw your msg hahahaha

...I need to read Black Dogs.

The People are in that, too, apparently.

Vernon got a degree in anthropology before becoming an illustrator and then an author, so her work--especially her early stuff--has a lot of deep dives into the sorts of cultural details one doesn't usually see in fantasy.

Like how absolutely mortified Grim Eyes is when she finds out Digger hangs out with someone whose name was eaten.

@BESW yeah -- I usually don't do stone-age tech for campaigns but sort of following that culture into the Iron Age would be pretty cool indeed :D

The part of the world that Digger broke into is a bit of a mush, technology-wise.

@BESW ah, interesting

Speaking of names... we're playing Tunnels & Trolls next weekend. GM suggested we roll up multiple characters. One of mine is a minotaur warrior. I took a long time deciding on a Spanish name with lots of bull references... then found out that minotaurs can't speak Common by default (and he isn't smart enough to learn). So I went for a simple fallback name. Angus.

@Adeptus :P

@Adeptus speaking of minotaurs, did I tell you about the mino-maze I did up a while back?

(The Spanish name was Salvador Guillermo Miura Fernandez, if anyone wants to pick all the references out...)

@Shalvenay Not that I remember

The Veiled Monks are well into advanced bookbinding techniques, though probably not familiar with the printing press; while The People don't do much with worked metal at all but seem quite proficient with stonework. But one gets the sense the whole area is off the beaten path and relies on occasional very brave tradespeople to bring it news and advances from elsewhere.

There's a farming village which obviously uses metal ploughs and has Balkan mythology as recent as the early 1900s.

@Adeptus basically, the conceit is that some nasty fey critters have set up shop in a maze that was built by elves, but is now kept up by a local minotauress. (live-in groundskeeper ;) These fey have basically trapped the minotauress in her own home and are trying to do nasty things to the townsfolk and pin the ---tail---blame on the minotaur

Cool

it also gave me a chance to play with the fractal-maze stuff nitsua60 suggested in a RPG.SE answer re: mazes without maps

@trogdor does your character have a second name? If not I'll probably make up my own "___ of the insertsomethinghere" for the header of your handout =)

no second name that I have thought of

go nuts

"Gonuts" sounds good =D

Gonuts are doughnuts made with coffee.

...I assume.

hahaha

@trogdor have you decided which color of dragon is in your lineage?

d10

(source)

Spews hallucinogenic drugs?

d10

wow! this chat rolls dice?? Oo

d20

@nitsua60 I believe it was copper

@trogdor cool

hey, maybe you guys can brainstorm an idea i had, lets say the whole world is trapped in a 24hrs time loop, and everyone is aware of it, let's say it begins ad 6am, if you were awake at the time you reboot at what you were doing, if you were sleeping you would awoke the same hour, unless other rebooted woke you up early...

what would you guys thing it would be the consequences?

it would end, movies, games, series, some music and anything that relies on time and continuity... long distance travel...

@trogdor Copper is an interesting choice, any particular reason?

hey miniman! o/

@RafaelSantos Hi!

are you bored at work too? ahahahaha

@Miniman because I want to have a dragonborn nature focused paladin barfing acid at stuff pretty much XD

@RafaelSantos More than a little, yeah.

@trogdor Hard to argue with that :P

@trogdor the fly approves your idea cdn1us.denofgeek.com/sites/denofgeekus/files/styles/…

@RafaelSantos I'm not quite wrapping my head around it. Groundhog's Day works because Phil is aware of what's happened on previous iterations of Feb 2, but the rest of humanity isn't aware of the "reboot." If everyone's aware... they're all remembering time pass? What is rebooted? Our locations? Our physiology? Nature? Is it always February 18? If I break my leg do I reboot whole and uninjured? If I die do I reawaken on reboot?

yes to all those questions!

@nitsua60 got a FR deity question for you btw: what's the closest of the Faerun deities to St. Cuthbert from the Greyhawk pantheon?

@nitsua60 Basically this question.

no more recording, continuity, death, birth (unless it was borne in the loop), pregnancy, hunger... how would they account for jail time? and crimes? would people work? how humanity would react to infinity

I don't think movies end. I think they follow the same arc they did in real life. At first we'll just have a camera on Olivier's stage performance of King Lear, broadcasting to the world. They'll perform it every day and such fraction of humanity that wants to see Lear will tune in. If they get bored of performing Lear, they move on to Sophocles.

@nitsua60 nice one! live theater!

Groups of technicians and directors and actors will figure out the secret of making more- and more-complicated films in a 22-hour window, and every day at 4am many will tune to which of the movies made today we feel like watching. Those will continue to improve in quality and depth.

@Shalvenay According to this discussion, maybe Helm or Tyr

Ditto music. The Academy of St. Martin in the Fields still has all its sheet music, and they don't even have to reshelve! Their repertoire grows beyond belief as musicians realize they can hone their craft without even having to take time to bathe or eat, as the "reboot" (and perhaps a can of Soylent) takes care of all of it.

Many professions, in fact, would follow this path, no? With no need to go grocery shopping, mow the lawn, take out the trash, file TPS reports, you can specialize beyone what's ever been conceived.

That's just for the professions people feel like doing, though, as nobody needs to work for a living.

We all do what we say we'd want to: spend more time with family and friends. But our kids never grow up, never stop needing to have diapers changed, never learn to close drawers.

@Adeptus yeah...oh, that'd be hilarious even

... or Torm

I think my FR knowledge is at least two apocalypses ago

sees Gnoll praying to Tyr "What in the Nines is going on?!" head explodes

Crime goes one of two ways: either the most minor of crimes become immediately-punishable by death (because it'd be complete anarchy otherwise and, c'mon, death's not that big a punishment anymore) or it's complete anarchy. I mean, who wants to be a cop when every offender has nothing to fear from death?

I would assume a societal breakdown that lasts at least many-centurys-worth of this repeated day. The history of humanity is not one of us adapting well--or calmly--to even gradual changes in outside pressures.

@nitsua60 tks for your thoughts, your first insights were way more optimistic then mine! but in the end i would also assume a total breakdown in chaos!

I for one welcome our new infinity time overlords

@trogdor (same as the old ones)

The real reasons society sticks together still exist: social bonds. Pride, shame, love, reciprocity, they all carry over in this scenario.

=D

@nitsua60 frarfg huooag peltelmet

Massive changes, yes, a chaotic adjustment period, yes. But the foundation holds.

@BESW I agree that we'd get there. But the finding of the "new normal" is not a process that we've proven adept at handling with grace and empathy =\

I think at first there would be chaos

and then later we would figure a system out

It entrenches a lot of inequity =(

true

nothing will change long term except the people

alllll the people will still have to change

but why will money matter anymore?

there is nothing permanent to buy or sell

and the money will also just go back to the origional owners too

@trogdor I'm not thinking about money. I'm thinking about the poor sod who lives through a typhoon every day for eternity.

@nitsua60 yes but I am trying to make a different point

but fair enough

money is itself a basis of inequality

but that guy will be forever screwed yeah

And the fact that I have a way to contact my distant friends and family, or participate in world government, that billions don't.

@nitsua60 or the one who is lost in the sea, falling for his death...

(This keyboard, the phone next to me.)

I have no answer to that though like

Many marriages dissolve within the first N years--now let's force those people to wake up next to each other every day for N more years. 10 times N years. 100 times N years....

how could we possibly fix problems like that when everything resets every day?

@trogdor how could we fix medium problems, lets say you are a doctor and reboot every day while performing surgery, would you still finish it everyday?

I would say yes now, but the problem is I can't test that

@trogdor Now I'm starting to think about diffusion equations... for any given commodity--communications technology, safety, happiness, access to education, a good pile of books on the nightstand--how do we equilibrate across a globe when there's only hours to affect that equilibration?

@nitsua60 it isn't just that though, you have to keep doing it every day

that is exhausting

How does Sisyphus do it? He learns to love the task.

fair enough but

then also how do you decide what to give people?

though I guess you have the time

Well, I gotta start my own reboot. Night, all! I expect this problem solved by the time "I've Got You, Babe" plays again.

that is just unreasonable

:P

I guess my question is--why are we exploring this scenario? What themes are we hoping to dig into, what motifs will be visited, what kind of story is this being used to tell?

:42933059

Arrival (the original short story, not the film) has a related concept.

(The big problem with the film is that the scriptwriter misunderstood the short story's themes, disagreed with what he THOUGHT they were, and re-wrote the ending to match his ideas without significantly changing the setup--so the film is building toward a different idea than the one it finishes with.)

Silver Lining: I'll finally be able to get through my "watch later" lists! That's it--I'm in. Sign me up =)

@nitsua60 lol

I'm one of those sucker that if would know the future would try not to do it just to prove that the future is not fixed!

Yeah, Arrival's original themes were about the challenge of living balanced between different cultural epistemologies.

Which, fair enough, folks who haven't actually experienced or studied that concept are probably going to have a hard time understanding it because they're looking at it through the lens of just one epistemology.

@BESW and for why are we exploring this, is more of a thought exercise, themes and motifs would vary according to the character focused, the one falling would be one, the one lost in the sea other, the woman always on labor another, and on and on...

Without a universal truth underlying the conceit, the story truth you explore will be shaky. It's impossible to create a setting --even a setting that's trying to be the unaltered real world-- which doesn't comment on reality and posit a universal truth.

For example, you've already established with your conceit that the personal identity, the individual consciousness, is not physical--at least, not purely physical.

The simple idea that humans would remember their experiences despite a physical reset of those experiences posits a truth which some people in the real world would disagree with, others would agree with, and which if proven true or false so dramatically would have a massive impact on peoples' actions in your story.

(This is why I stopped participating in Worldbuilding; their insistence that the story is irrelevant to the worldbuilding meant all my experience with worldbuilding was unwanted, and the kinds of questions I wanted to ask were meaningless to most of the users.)

@BESW what do you mean with "their insistence that the story is irrelevant to the worldbuilding"? that seems crazy for me, background and "world physics rules" (fantastic or not) are important!

They tend to focus on making a world that's internally consistent with regards to physical logic, but they aren't very interested in designing worlds to support the themes or concepts of the story, to push certain kinds of storytelling, or to posit universal truths.

Their work is very diegetic.

They approach it as making a world and then finding a story to tell in it, rather than making a story and a world in which to tell it.

wow really?

that seems so backwards

It's the Tolkien model: start with some setting details (he made languages), backfill a setting to justify the details, then find a story that fits the setting you've made.

But, as we've seen, that tends to mean you forget the plot partway through your novel and was eloquent about your setting for a few chapters instead, or that you shoehorn in unnecessary side stories just because you like 'em even if they actively confuse your themes.

yeah I hated his books honestly

for once i liked the movie(s) better than the book(s)

There's no one right way to build a story and a world to tell it in (obviously Tolkien's method produced something that works for some people), but worldbuilding.se didn't seem set up to accommodate more than just the one and it's not one that works for me.

i dislike the black and white morality on Tolkien more than i dislike his description on every leaf...

oh I hated his descriptions

he was way too into doing those

I think I actually stopped on the second book

and not too far into it either

Compare the Broken Earth trilogy, which started with a question about how a person could reach a particular emotional state, and a vision of a particular scene, and built a complex world out from those foundational materials.

i read once that Tolkien criticize Lewis for putting "too much of this faith" on his writing, but what is he doing if not putting his beliefs on his job too...

Or the Ancillary trilogy which DID begin as pure worldbuilding exercises--but the detail the world was built around was a person.

We always infuse our beliefs into our work. It's the nature of creativity. We can't help it, there's no such thing as a neutral act of creation.

yeaaahh

I don't doubt that

I just read a book where the author was trying to pose a question without answering it (which I like a lot in some books!) but didn't seem to be aware that she was really answering it too.

the one with the generation ship with the clones?

Yeah.

And I've got no problem with folks writing things I don't agree with; if I only read books whose themes I agreed with, I'd be a lot more boring and bigoted and I wouldn't read much of anything at all.

@BESW what was the book and the question?

(I once ran into someone who thought I disliked His Dark Materials because I'm a person of faith. No, I disliked His Dark Materials because it's a really bad series that squandered great potential on thoughtless vitriol.)

@RafaelSantos Noumenon. It asks whether our personalities, talents, and other elements of identity, are primarily genetic, through the conceit of a generation ship in which every generation is composed of new clones of the original volunteers.

@BESW I actually liked that series, but I didn't understand most of what was being pushed philosophically

and I was very young when I read it

It's not a bad book. I really liked the AI character, and it had some very good ideas. Just--didn't seem aware of all the ideas it had.

I did have to look it up to realize it was the one you were talking about though XD, its the Golden Compass and all that right?

oh, i liked that question, as a psychologist i had endless debates on that topic! hahaha

I think Ann Leckie did a much better job tackling "are we our bodies?" in the Ancillary books.

@trogdor Aye.

ok yeah

I did like those books at the time

but I was literally unaware of the themes he was going for with them

and the ending made me feel something, even if it was not what he was going for entirely

and it certainly didn't convert me into cynical atheism XD

I would even go so far as to say a lot of people didn't get all of what he was saying

I suppose? It was hard for me to miss "God's a doddering fool, religion's a hoax perpetrated by an imposter, Original Sin is actually free will, and our new godless Garden of Eden is founded on underage sex."

looking back though, I do wish those books were more,... optimistic

@BESW not everyone reads the subtext

...that wasn't subtext.

I mean,.... they made movies out of this that missed the point for sure

the point he was trying to make I mean

or at least I think they did

Literally they showed a dementia-addled God carried around on a stretcher who turned out to just be the leader of a ponzi scheme called the Church, they called out Dust as the physical manifestation of free will which the Church considered evidence of Original Sin...

you made those book sounds much more interesting then armored fighting bears....

I rest my case

:P

I am not trying to say the guy wasn't messed up but,... I can't imagine there was absolutely no one who missed that stuff like I did

The first book was great. After that it got... well, the vitriolic nonsense about extrapolating the legitimate problems with the Catholic Church into a tirade against all forms of organized deity worship wouldn't have been a deal-breaker for me. It's that all those things got in the way of the storytelling so the characters became flat cut-outs of their former selves who only did things because the plot's agenda needed them to.

and I wasn't in they habit of analyzing that stuff yet when I read those books

And he squandered the "infinite worlds means infinite possibility" thing by making things actually random and meaningless which is.... no, just no, that's not the point you're trying to make and if it's not tied to your thesis then it's just bad writing.

Diegetic randomness is not a reason for the writer to be random.

all fair criticisms

@BESW no man sky development team would like to have a chat with you hahahahaha

again, my argument is not that the Author was a swell guy, it's that not everyone caught everything he was saying

however obvious it looks to you

@RafaelSantos It's arguably tied to their thesis.

...though what that thesis is, is increasingly unclear.

I personally thought it was a very simple point

and I don't speak for everyone, plenty of people saw that stuff, like you

but I am reasonably sure some people had it fly right over their heads, like me

even if the only reason was that they were also all too young to know some of the stuff he was talking about

and or naive enough to not think he was making commentary on real life stuff

which he was doing yes

I don't disagree on that point

he didn't literally write, "hey kids I am talking about the for real Catholic Church because I hatesses them"

maybe it's because how much we can see and understand is limited by our "cultural capital", that's why some things only "click" year latter...

possibly

lie this joke files.shandymedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/23153243/…

I mean, I don't remember my exact age but as I said

children will take sometime to understand hahahaha

I was pretty young when I read those books

I will say that even I thought the ending was messed up on many levels

I just didn't have anything to connect it to

I definitely liked the first book best

the books could certainly have been made better by the author not getting caught up in all the myriad negative messages that were put into them

damn, not related, i'm just shocked to learn that Chadwick Boseman is 42 years old, i thought he was only close to his 30's...

I,... also thought he was a little younger than that

hey @trogdor, do you play pathfinder?

I don't

I have heard of it for sure but never been in a game of it or even read any of the material for it

my best understanding of it is only from other people talking about it

and that is probably biased to some degree on either their part or mine

likely both

i only started playing last year, while it is a d&d 3.5 spin-off, i like that they release a lot of material on their world and not only +classes +feat +spell....

it almost reminds me of AD&D campaign settings and the good old boxes!

well, the fact that it is very much like 3.5 in many respects is not a point in the positive category for me

I liked 4th edition a lot better

whaaaaaaaat!!!!

i'm shocked

hahahahaha

I get that not a lot of people did, but I really liked 4th edition

i had a friend who also liked it!

cool

always good to hear that someone liked it

i played with him, it was a cool group of people, but i never really get pass the system!

was it too complicated or was it just alien to you after 3.5?

it was to MMO like for me!

tank healer support, encounter, dailies...

ah

I personally liked that stuff

@RafaelSantos Quick question: did/do you play MMOs?

yes!

but my favorite thing was that it bucked class inequality that 3.5 had in spades

i played old republic and wow!

@RafaelSantos Fair enough. "Too much like an MMO" is a frequent complaint, and it never made much sense to me, is all. The similarities are quite superficial, imo.

@Magician I think it's reasonable to be turned off by that and then never end up delving deep enough to see why or how it could be wrong

I just get upset when people say they literally hate it without having given it a chance

but that isn't the case here

i played, a lot, hahahaha, as a Dwarf Warden! =D

and too much like an MMO is a common complaint, but I don't see that as a problem if it really made you dislike it

i just never like the edition

that is all fair yeah

you don't have to have liked it at all

Absolutely. 4e isn't for everyone - no game is, really.

yes true

but, i think they got the better ideas of 4th edition, and use it on the 5th

and i really like the 5th

Doesn't it still have encounter and daily abilities?