@trogdor It's a KoL reference. The only way to defeat The Guy Made Of Bees (leader of The Bees in the Bees Hate You path) is by smashing the antique hand mirror.
7 years bad luck is a small price to pay to stop The Bees.
@trogdor In part, the other part is to see if you can be of assistance, and to find the source ... a lot of clues need to be left lying around. At the beginning, it is almost background noise.
@BESW Went on a search and rescue mission once around the great dismal swamp. Ended in tears ... :(
@trogdor I had a number of adventures some years ago that were tied to songs that I tended to play a lot during our D&D sessions. I referred to them in an answer here
So I wrote up some pitches for my punchspace summer group and, feeling like the field needed a little more variety, threw the 1e Dragonlance modules on the list, too. They, of course, are running strongly in the lead. I'm kinda digging it =)
@trogdor I read the Annotated Chronicles a couple of years back. It was interesting to read the annotations--descriptions of things that happened in sessions, what sorts of things were complete surprises, &c.--but ugh, the writing in the actual text. It was hard to plow back through.
I feel like Just the Annotations would have been an interesting ten-page article.
@nitsua60 So instead of making them a special case (1000β Rep, with β for 'ban') they just set them to 1 rep because they now have the same privileges as a 1-rep user?
What was the issue with Dale M, if it's not a secret? I missed what happened with the Loot question, which is where I noticed his answer was tagged with something special I never saw before.
@Axoren More here, and probably a lot linked from that.
@Axoren In general we don't discuss suspensions, for a number of reasons:
Mostly, the user isn't able to participate in that discussion (because of the suspension), so it's not advised to talk about their judged-poor behavior without their being able to defend/present themselves.
@Axoren The thing you saw tagged is a "post notice" which don't come out very often. They get put on a post when it's locked, or when we lock comments because of bickering, or (this is probably the most-often one) when we feel like a "[citation needed]" sticker's needed.
My favorite ones were about some sort of rebel Draconians, if only because not only were they made from dragon eggs, but they happened not to be that same goddang adventuring party yet again
On one recent answer I saw the following box-text at the bottom:
Nothing about it appears in the post's source.
Why is it there?
Who put it there?
Is a post that outright states "this is how I would rule" really on notice for deletion?
I've never seen this notice anywhere else--should I be f...
One D&D city, two D&D books. Out this fall, these Waterdeep books tour life above and below the city’s streets. Each book stands on its own yet can be used with the other: “Dragon Heist” (levels 1–5 in the city) and “Dungeon of the Mad Mage” (levels 5–20 in Undermountain). #DnD
@BESW If nothing else, there's an Undermountain campaign in my head that I really want to run at some point, and this might give me a layout that I can just stick bits on.
@JoelHarmon Oh, I've been doing it for 5 years, and I'm only just starting to get a grasp on the upper-level of software engineering. There is still a lot I don't know.
I started out on Delphi (in school), then got bumped up to C# lol. Bit of a step up haha.
I daresay that my skills are definitely brushing past the fundamentals of the language. I unfortunately just don't have the time to focus on that though
@bruglesco I'd say C and C++ will likely be marketable skills for the foreseeable future, if you like OS and driver development. C# will likely be marketable for quite some time, if you like Microsoft.
Mind you, all of those languages will change significantly in even the next 5-10 years. Just look at how C has changed in the last 30 or so.
Agreed, C#/.NET is extremely marketable, but the standards change every 5 seconds so it's often hard to keep up while maintaining sensible practices in one's software design
You should focus on something you like. I'm confident that good skills in any of those can make you a good living, so you're fortunate enough to have the freedom to choose something you like.
C & C++ are more basic, as in they're give you more fundamental control over your program. C# assumes a lot. It's smoother, but only because you give up a lot of that control.
It's more flexible than C++, plus it comes with a lot of the complex data structures built-in, so you can skip stuff like array/vector search methods and garbage collection
You sure can use bitwise operators in C#, but it'll also auto-box your integers and wrap your for loops in a few method calls to set up and run an iterator. You sure can use template metaprogramming and (dumb) macros in C++, but it's trivial to do pointer manipulation.
Well I do like the low level stuff with C++ but as a beginner Im not really utilizing it much or effectively. On the other hand if I walk away from it I won't learn that stuff either.
Sorry for hijacking the RPG chat with programming talk
Off hand, I'd say there are more gamers than programmers. However, games are designed (generally) to self-teach how to play the game, so there aren't that many questions. Programming is a free-form tool to do anything possible on a computer, so there are more questions.
He cannot run a normal turn, I didnt mean to mess up that last comment. We're playing over chat, because we live too far apart to run a in house game, and i say it his character's turn, and he just starts throwing numbers at me. He refuses to declare an action until which time i ask him what he did.
Making an assumption here, that particular example would be that he's doing something (like an attack for example). Probably to carry on from what he was doing the last turn?
but i dont know if he moved, i dont know if he drew a new weapon, i dont know if he's trying to jump and then attack, i feel like the first step in a turn is to declare your action so that the DM can tell you if it is acceptable correct?
So perhaps it's just a matter of addressing that. By simply stating "I attack again" or "I continue casting my spell", then rolling. That's all that needs to happen.
Yes. So, what I'm saying is that "declaring your action" is not exactly anything to do with your "turn". Explain to them that when they do that; roll and declare hit/damage, means nothing when you don't know what that action is for.
@Ben Thats what i tried to do, by explaining how everything works, i probably used the wrong verbage saying thats how a turn worked, but otherwise i explained what all i'm looking to get out of what he's doing
Yeah, something like Lady Blackbird or Fate or Cthulhu Dark or Roll For Shoes, or to a lesser extent an Apocalypse World Engine game like Dungeon World. Systems where the mechanics don't mean anything at all on their own, they only gain meaning in the context of the narrative descriptions around them.
In D&D-like systems, "22 to hit" and "19 AC" and "7 acid damage" mean something independent of the story happening around them; you can, if you want, jump from mechanic to mechanic without pausing to check back in with the story, because the mechanics flow together regardless of the surrounding narrative.
It's on the players and the GM to interpret the mechanics into story as they see fit, to whatever extent they feel is appropriate.
But in Lady Blackbird there's no way to know what to roll unless you describe not just what you want to accomplish, but how you're doing it and which elements of your character are being brought to bear on the task.
And in Roll For Shoes you can't know what new skills you might gain without describing what happened--not just success or failure, but the form the success or failure took.
Heck, maybe Wushu would be a good extreme example to use: your effectiveness in that system is directly and unambigously tied to the detail and evocativeness of your descriptions of the action.
Ok. I might have to look into those.. @MikeQ I'm having issues with a Player that doesnt communicate what his PC's doing in game, and starts rolling dice instead of declaring an action.
Communication issue, probably? Remind the player that your mystical DM powers don't enable you to read minds, and so the numbers alone don't mean anything.
"What do you do?" is not the same as "What does your character want to do." It's subtle but can be important.
"It's your turn. The owlbear tossed Hank into the river and ran away. Dawn is trying to pull Hank out, but there's still a ninja lurking nearby. What does your character want to do?"
@Thatguy In the long term, being too pushy or heavyhanded in hints may make players feel like they have less freedom to experiment and play the way they want to. Such as
> "Ok, it's your turn. Do you attack the goblin?" "Well I had this really cool and creative plan, but you mentioned the goblin so maybe that's the "right" decision to make... Oh well..."
@Thatguy Well, from what you'd said my assumption was that he was playing a class that meant that he would always be doing the same thing every turn. Like, for a level <5 fighter, every turn is 2 numbers - an attack roll, and a damage roll. That being the case, people tend to summarise more and more until they're just stating those 2 numbers.
Well, in any RPG I've played where a character has only really had one option every round of combat, their player has found shorter and shorter ways to take their turn. As a wizard, I would normally guess that, as he levels and has more spells, this would sort itself out as his turns become less and less of doing the same thing every turn.
However, if the problem isn't that he has so few spells, and instead isn't using them at all, more spells probably won't change that.
Aside from the excellent advice offered by Ben and BESW, I'd recommend maybe examining the difficulty of your combats. For a wizard to be staying in melee and not using any spells suggests that he hasn't felt particularly challenged.
Of course, he might just be lazy/disengaged. But it's a potential cause, anyway.
@trogdor My first ever D&D character was a Sorcerer/Ranger in 3.0. Just 1 level in ranger. Why? I watched too much anime and I was trying to replicate it somewhat (Slayers, where sorcerers wield swords!). It was very ill advised, and I blame my DM for letting me do that bullshit :P
@kviiri I haven't looked too much into Kenseis... I like monks because I like unarmed combat as a concept... Kenseis focus on weapons so it goes against the grain here :P
and far be it from me to say that was not a fun game, just that, even if it was, if I was sticking around I would still cast spells, that was the whole point of my class choice
@trogdor Yeah, my bastard Sorcerer/Ranger ended up casting spells all the time. Another quirk it had, I had made replacements of all the spells, so everything I did dealt cold damage. I wanted a "thematic" sorcerer....
@kviiri I know but... I want a weaponless character! Also, the best option is a staff and there is no reason not to have one, so we already have that problem :(
I didn't remember that because well, as a kensei, I all but stopped using my staff at level 3 in favor of a longsword
I currently have kensei weapons longbow, longsword and dart. Dart has proven to be a quite versatile one, with the increasing martial arts die I can already deal ok damage with them.
The basic idea is that you get more monk weapons, plus some extra abilities you can use with the kensei weapons.
I think the former is, to be honest, more significant than the latter.
A misconception my party seems to have is that a kensei monk is an unstoppable killing machine with their weapon of choice, better at using it than a Fighter or a Paladin. It's not really true, because while monk has Extra Attack, the kensei has Agile parry feature that encourages them to make at least one unarmed strike as a part of their Attack action.
So overall, I use my sword slightly less than our paladin uses hers
Kensei monks actually have a reason to use more unarmed strikes than usual- they can opt to use an unarmed strike instead of a weapon attack for one of their Attack action attacks, and they get +2 AC for doing so.
You still have to be *holding* a weapon (the flavor is you're opting to punch/kick/etc. to keep your weapon free for a parry), but on their turn they do have an incentive to do one more unarmed strike/one fewer weapon attack than other monks.
@CTWind Yep, exactly. And none of their abilities really scale with the power of the weapon they're using (another thing I've been trying to teach my party who seems to think Omar the Monk is the supreme swordmaster of our party)
Basically Kensei's thing is that you can use the Monk cool stuff but use better than usual weapons, plus some extra tricks to use with those weapons.
Huh, RAW, does the benefit of Agile Parry stack if you have extra attack and do multiple unarmed strikes? I guess it probably falls under the 'the same effect multiple times from a feature with the same name doesn't stack' rule.
Nope, it doesn't. I don't have my XgtE handy but IIRC it's worded something like "if you make at least one unarmed strike as a part of your Attack action while wielding a Kensei weapon, you gain +2 AC until the beginning of your next turn".
Also, same name point is good too.
Agile parry is a cool feature because it doesn't need to be a melee weapon that's being wielded. A ranged monk wielding a longbow can just land punches and kicks on enemies while using the bow to parry.
> If you make an unarmed strike as part of the Attack action on your turn and are holding a kensei weapon, you can use it to defend yourself if it is a melee weapon. You gain a +2 bonus to AC until the start of your next turn, while the weapon is in your hand and you aren’t incapacitated.
I have the Players Handbook (5e), I have been using the other books "with a patch in the eye", if you get what I mean, but now that I have some disposable income I'd like to buy some of them (one at a time!)
I dunno if getting XgtE, Monster Manual, or DM book.... Also, Mordenkainen Tome of Foes is out? is that a glorified monster manual 2?
One of my players has the 3 main books (in spanish though, and I have more than one group so it solves just half the cases)
On one recent answer I saw the following box-text at the bottom:
Nothing about it appears in the post's source.
Why is it there?
Who put it there?
Is a post that outright states "this is how I would rule" really on notice for deletion?
I've never seen this notice anywhere else--should I be f...
