Everything is quiet. There is no traffic, no updates on social media (that I have seen), and even the dog next door that is constantly whining at the fence has stopped.
@MikeQ In re death and its social effects, this thread may be of interest to you ... a bit of brain storming on your point two in the widowed question.
The PCs are in some sort of haunted house/dungeon, populated by various undead. But not all are hostile. Some are up to their daily un-lives, acting as if everything is normal. What sort of non-combat challenges could this result in?
Or actually, perhaps a poltergeist, or a ghost or something thinks it's still alive (having relapses of its previous life) and its sanity needs to be restored
"We go upstairs." "Two poltergeists are trying to move a piano but can't agree on whether it's going up or down the stairs. You'll have to help them figure it out before you can pass."
@MikeQ The relapse thing would probably be a good one then. Triggering thought processes to try and restore its mind. Like, it's scared of all the "monsters" around, and perhaps even scared of itself. The party are all alive, so that can open up some degree of stability (because it thinks that it is still alive too)
So even that is not exactly a puzzle, per se, but it does require triggering certain thought processes, to lead back to a logical conclusion
Not much to expand on. The party tries to go upstairs, but the stairway is blocked by a piano. The ghosts of two furniture movers are arguing about if they're supposed to be moving the piano upstairs or downstairs, and until they settle the argument the party won't be able to get past them.
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I'm wondering if it's the right call to move a comment to chat if extended discussion breaks out AFTER it, but the comment itself was presenting a conflict with a given answer?
@Axoren One of the reasons not to misuse comments is that good comments get caught in the cross-fire when mods come in to clean up, because mod tools aren't very precise for this kind of thing.
But the rest of the comments aren't trying to improve the answer.
They're challenging the answer, and that's not what comments are for. If there's a better/different solution, the proper channel is to write that answer as an answer.
Saying "This is wrong because" is still "This is wrong." It's an invitation to argument, not a suggestion for improvement: as you can see in this case, where the answer didn't get edited to be better, it just got a string of comments arguing about it.
Fair enough. At the very least, since that comment, the poster made some mention to the counter-argument in his post which originally said something along the lines of this is the only way to interpret it.
When I receive that kind of comment, it's just a stick in the eye: "Hey, I don't like what you wrote. Thought you ought to know." You can downvote for that.
As a personal rule of thumb for myself, if I can't include the phrase fragment "please [edit] your post to" in a comment, I try to re-examine what I'm saying and whether it should be a comment (or needs to be said at all anywhere).
Interpretation is one thing, and fact is another. For example, if one person says that "It works this way", and it is a commonly known fact that this is wrong, then that's one thing, and is likely able to be summed up in a downvote, with a possible explanation as to why. If it's something that can interpreted one way or another, that's a different story, and probably again, shouldn't be argued in the comments.
There are dozens of discussions about comments explaining downvotes, all across the Stack Exchange. Some Stacks like them, but the official Stack Overlord policy is that if a downvote explanation isn't actionable then it's not useful.
@Axoren So, your original concern about a comment being moved to chat has its answer: the comment was seen and the user addressed it, so the comment filled its function and doesn't need to be preserved further.
The site's focus is on questions and answers. Comments in the Stack exchange exist to support questions and answers. Useful information in comments should be moved to posts where they can be searched for.
But if the comment itself is a question, and it's answered by another comment, then yeah what @BESW said is more applicable. The site goal is to build a repository of questions and answers, and we don't have a system for searching for specific comments
Under no circumstances is it useful to keep that in the comments, because the point of the Stack is to become a searchable, sortable repository of solutions for future users with similar problems.
@BESW Is it proper to edit someone else's answer for things other than resolving minor issues? I didn't think you could change the answer's core content like that.
Usually just "their link's broken" or "they misspelled something."
The reason not to change an answer's core content is not because it's not yours, but because it messes with the voting--votes stop being for the solution they were voting for, so the quality sorting messes up.
But improving an answer without changing its core content--by adding information and examples, clarifying confusing parts, that sort of thing--is totally fine.
> Edits are expected to be substantial and to leave the post better than you found it. Common reasons for edits include: - To fix grammar and spelling mistakes - To clarify the meaning of the post (without changing that meaning) - To include additional information only found in comments, so all of the information relevant to the post is contained in one place - To correct minor mistakes or add updates as the post ages - To add related resources or hyperlinks
An example of a post that is wrong. This is not an interpretation thing, the answer is wrong. However, I have not edited the answer to reflect this, rather I have commented to point out the mistake.
This is the exception to the rule - because this example is binary.
I think at this point though I might have to bow out. I'm confusing myself, and am lagging behind a little bit due to distractions.
But broadly speaking, if it's not going to lead to an action, a comment should get re-examined to be sure it's still a good comment in the Stack Exchange context.
It's not bad. You could've instead edited in a parenthetic at the end of that paragraph saying something like (These are not Paladin spells so you'll have to put in some work in order to have access to them).
Part of what makes the Stack work is that it's full of "parties who might never agree with one another, but who share the common goal of building informative Q&A communities." Truth emerges from the respectful clash of differing opinions.
@Ben "Lead Blades is not a valid spell for Unsanctioned Knowledge" does not seem like a good answer to "What spells should I pick for Unsanctioned Knowledge?"
@Axoren Obviously. Lol. I mean post an answer that provides a solution based on your interpretation. That is of course if it is different enough to the existing answers
This is the context/interpretation thing that I was trying to get at earlier. It just often feels really inappropriate to make an answer to cover an important topic relating to an answer and the reader who will be reading the answer.
@Ben In this case, the existing answer is broadly correct but has a small part which needs elaboration or removal, but could be elaborated or removed without changing the rest of the answer at all.
And yes, it's inappropriate to make an answer that refers to another answer--not least because the original answer might disappear for an unrelated reason. Every answer should stand on its own as a solution to the question.
Yeah. I'm designing a macro that uses selected, target, and query variables, and I think I'm running into an order of operations problem.
The intended effect of the macro is, you select a token on the board and press the "attack" macro button to have the selected token make an attack.
It prompts you for your target (click on the target's token on the board) and the defense being targeted (from a drop-down menu; that's the ROLL QUERY).
Then it checks your selected token's inventory for its weapon stats and spits out a &{template:dnd4epower} box in chat that tells you the name of the weapon and who made the attack, who the attack is against, what was rolled, what the target defense was, what the target defense value was, and what the damage is.
I've got two problems. One is that I can figure out how to call the inventory description slot; I've got the code for that but it just throws error messages.
The other is that I can't figure out how to... I'm not sure the terminology.
I want it to ask the user "AC/Fort/Ref/Will?" in a dropdown box. I can get it to do that.
But then I want to use that info to print in the chat "21 AC."
I can get that one dropdown box to print "21" (the target's AC value) or "AC" (the text value chosen) but I can't get it to do both with one drop-down.
I figure there's gotta be a way to call the query result inside an attribute call but I can't figure out how.
So I guess my question is, how can I make this work:
Part of this includes being able to easily add the on-hit effects of those attacks and customize them per NPC without additional macros.
The most obvious solution was to call the inventory description slot.
(All he should have to do is fill in the ability/defense stats and weapon info and BAM magical character automation.)
Well then, I've just got one last pipe dream for this macro, which is figuring out how to use this save code to turn the attack red or green if it hits or misses:
@BESW I'm running Eyes of the Stone Thief again. The party has picked up a spirit of mischief, currently bound to a stone. They promised to find it a new home, but plan to dump it in nearest sea. Sunken Sea, to be exact. The one with Swordapus. This can only go right.
No.
As described here in the official 5e (basic) rules:
If the d20 roll for an attack is a 20, the attack hits regardless of any modifiers or the target’s AC. This is called a critical hit, which is explained later in this chapter.
(a) You have opened the Jeremey Crawford Can Of Worms, consume at your own peril. (b) "regardless of any modifiers"
(c) From a design point of view, having expanded critical features also increase hit chance is a deeply flawed choice in a bounded system, devaluing other options that increase only hit or damage.
This is what the rolls for such a character would look like. https://i.imgur.com/Kveu4qT.png
Greens are Critical hits, Normals are normal hits that were close and probably still hit, Reds indicate that the roll was less than 15.
It's absolutely beautiful.
Superior Critical at Level 15 is something I'm gonna check out now.
Nearly 40% chance to crit every turn.
So, the difference between 3rd level Champion and 15th level champion, is 12ish% chance to auto-hit.
That's 12 levels of Rogue, so I think it's better to just stay as a Rogue for 17 levels once you've gotten 3rd level Champion
Since the damage of the weapon and the attack bonus of the character don't really matter, this could literally be on any Champion 3/X
So, a Champion 3/Rogue X under the effects of Haste is expected to get 3 attacks in, each with a 25% chance to crit. That's nearly 100% (roughly 98%) chance to crit each turn.
Don't remember formal notation anymore, but. 0.75 chance of one attack NOT resulting in a crit. 0.75^3 = 0.42ish chance of no attacks resulting in a crit.
The chance of getting one success in one trial is 25%, so the chance of not succeeding is 75%. The chance of getting at least one crit is the complement of the chance of failing every chance to hit, so it's 1 - (75%)^5.
Wolfram alpha is pretty amazing, I double checked my numbers with "25% success chance, 3 trials, chances of at least one success?" and it understood me.
60% chance to not only hit, but CRIT at least once a round is extraordinary.
Especially regardless of stats
There are times when it fails in it's similarity matching algorithm and it gives you something either completely different ("You want to know the capital of Guam?") or it fails to identify the proper techniques for simplifying and evaluating a query.
Okay, so going Arcane Trickster Rogue to have advantage isn't very useful as the familiar can be consistently killed when used in this way.
Champion 3/Barbarian 2/Rogue 15, though losing 2 levels to get Reckless Attack means not taking 2 turns in the first round of combat as a Thief, so I don't really know what archtype works best for this combination
DnD 4e has a rule where a natural 20 is only a crit if the attack would've hit anyway. But that wouldn't be a relevant rule in 5e, because the Ac scaling is wildly different.
Some site users have noticed old comments being deleted. This is correct - site comments are meant to be a mostly temporary means of improving questions and answers. Here's an explanation of the process we use.
Argumentative comments or extended discussion comment threads hijacking an entire q...
No.
As described here in the official 5e (basic) rules:
If the d20 roll for an attack is a 20, the attack hits regardless of any modifiers or the target’s AC. This is called a critical hit, which is explained later in this chapter.
