TRPG General Chat

9:42 AM

Good morning, folks! o/

BESW

He said, bright-tailed and bushy-eyed.

Half of me is like that, half of me feels the way people look in “I haven't had my coffee yet” mode.

BESW

yes

that one on the right

For those not aware: the folks at Charcoal HQ who run Smoke Detector are largely behind crushing the deluges of spam we've been getting for a couple of months. If you'd like to get involved and help crush spam across the network you can drop by and observe for a while, then ask for privileges once you're figuring things out to help give Smoke Detector feedback & training.

3

10:40 AM

We've had several spam posts every day for weeks now, and they've mostly been removed within minutes if not seconds, entirely thanks to volunteers participating in evaluating captured spam.

trogdor

11:06 AM

lol

@doppelgreener also wow yeah thats pretty dang cool

Q: Can a machine be taught to flag spam automatically?

it is!

more info on what they do:

382

TL;DR: We did it, so... yes. What is this? Charcoal is the organization behind the SmokeDetector bot and other nice things. This bot scans new posts across the entire network for spam posts and reports them to various chatrooms where people can act on them. If a post has been created or edite...

The Oracle

2:40 PM

2

Q: Do we need a [jungle] tag?

A user created jungle for this question Are there published rules for navigating and travelling through jungles? and the one previously asked by the user. I removed it because jungle is not a topic that one can be an RPG expert in and the tag does nothing to enhance searchability (since searchin...

discussion tags

3:02 PM

Howdy everyone.

Well howdy to you too, pardner

My buddy reached maximum GM frustration this weekend when 4 out of 5 players bailed last minute

And by "last minute", I mean "20 minutes after the start time that everyone agreed on"

Ouch! that really sucks.

3:18 PM

We eventually got one of the others to show up, but we struggled due to having no spellcasters, so we turned up our Shenanigans setting up to 11 to make things more fun for the GM.

Oh wow, we usually have a majority rule where we don't usually play if we don't have at least half the players

Its good the DM and you all got to go ahead with it at least. And it is good you had fun.

@Rubiksmoose I have a similar policy - I'll run my games with at minimum (n/2)+1 players in attendance

@MikeQ We've done it a couple of times in special circumstances. Usually because we had content that invlolved only a subset of the players and we were able to do it perfectly without the rest. Or it was a RP-heavy session and we could focus more on specific character interactions.

Adam

@MikeQ I had the same thing happen to me once in college. My girlfriend's physics friends started playing d&d and there were too many people for one guy to handle, so I drove over to run a game for the rest. Second session, 4 of the 6 people bailed to go watch Deadpool on a whim instead without telling me.

And they never showed up again and I never saw or heard from any of those 4 ever again.

@Adam I mean that seems like a very Deadpool thing to do. But that is just rude lol

Adam

3:35 PM

It was. I was equal parts livid and heartbroken. Though one of the two players who did show up called three of the guys he plays with and they ended up joining for what effectively became a one-shot. They were really nice and let me and the other player join their game. We played for a few months, but then kind of just fell apart when people moved for work and such.

@Adam :( Alas. Such things happen far too often.

3:49 PM

It also depends on the game being played. D&D and its offshoots generally assume that the players have the main roles covered - frontliner, skillmonkey, spellcaster, bandaid - and it's almost impossible for a single character to cover all roles

Q: How can I optimize Chicken Infested?

What we need: Frontliner, Skillmonkey, Spellcaster, Bandaid. What your players actually rolled: Sammoflange Deflector, Undead Chicken Infested Horde Manager, Bard that is bad at Bard things, and Healer that uses so many obscure splatbooks we just /assume/ it works.

'Chicken Infested' was one of the best questions/answers on the site.

23

I'm soon going to be a guest player in a Pathfinder game where silliness is the theme. (The party has been drawn into the Demiplane of Dinosaurs, which is reportedly a lot like Ravenloft, except with less gothic horror and more dinosaurs.) It's hard to match the Chicken Infested flaw for sheer si...

pathfinder character-creation optimization

I mean, we were two martial-only characters, and we spent around 1-2 hours dealing with an issue that could have been solved instantly by cantrips

And as we all know, muggle characters are at a huge disadvantage in systems where magic is effectively currency

@MikeQ I may be mistaken, but I thought most martial characters can trip things pretty well actually.

Got my hands on The Black Cube, Monte Cook's feverdream that contains 'Invisible Sun'. still reading up on the rules. Seems promising for those who enjoy narrative driven gameplay.

It's got table props in the box!

@Maximillian ooo packed-in table props!

3:57 PM

A good deal are paper items like business cards for mystical places, a menu for an otherworldly resturant, flyers, a label for a wine bottle, and some sheets of blank letterhead for an important organization.

I really like things like that though.

HellSaint

4:17 PM

@V2Blast A lil confused: The ToA's death curse wasn't some kind of "temporary effect/event" that already ended, though? :P

Colin Gross

5:22 PM

@HellSaint media.wizards.com/2017/dnd/downloads/ToAPrimerv1.pdf

Ended January 2018

HellSaint

Yeap, as I thought lol

7:25 PM

First sesh of 7th Sea done and... well, I'm a bit insecure about GMing it

@kviiri Please elaborate! Are these the usual GM butterflies, or do you Have a Bad Feeling About This ?

From what I understand, you've been preparing this 7th Sea game for a while now, it would be disappointing if it went kaput at the start

@MikeQ GM butterflies, with a healthy dose of "I don't get this system and I don't think my players do either"

@kviiri oh no! Just the normal rules struggles or something deeper?

Did people have fun?

It's not unsalvageable, I'm just a bit lost here :/ I get stuck so often thinking how to run the game and it doesn't really help that most of the players are ratjer clueless about the rules too

@MikeQ yeah, but everyone expected more

RPGs are like pizza

7:31 PM

Generally speaking, it's primarily important that everyone understand each other's expectations, and secondary that everyone understand the system rules

@kviiri Because they're cheesy?

Like, one player wanted to convince a minor crime baron to help her pro bono by recounting a tale to the crime lord and insisted it's a roll. I couldn't really see it as a Risk with sensible consequences and opportunities...

@MikeQ Even when they're bad, they're pretty good

Maybe it's a Risk because the crime lord could get bored/offended by the tale, and their disposition worsens toward the character?

Yeah but it doesn't feel very tangible

Brb, SO wants a game of Hanabi

Well, ok. While they're out, maybe I could get some assistance from the ambient folks here

Some of my players are more accustomed to traditional D&D/PF playstyles, and I'm trying to explain to them why I dislike alignment, but I struggle to articulate it properly

They're taking the stance of "It's part of the system, therefore it's not problematic"

7:48 PM

So far I've got:
1. It's inconsistently defined (supernatural or philosophical? actions or intents? etc.)
2. It restricts character choice arbitrarily (in-game actions, character builds, etc.)
3. It simplifies most NPCs into "Kill" or "Don't kill" categories, which means less interesting roleplay and decision making
4. Something something racism

5. It results in apparent paradoxes(contradictions?) (i.e. summoning a puppy to die in a trap is okay, but raising zombies to do your laundry is "evil")

It's a black and white system of morality which is helpful to younger and/or newer players to RPGs and something of a hindrance to veteran/creative/imaginative/grey morality players.

Also parts of the magic and ability system sort of require it to be in place for some flavors of DND/PF

@Maximillian I've considered a compromise position, where alignment is exclusively a magical effect and not philosophical... but that may make things even more complicated

That will make paladins extremely complicated, yes.

I play it at my table as it is a guideline and semi-flexible. I'll still pause and advise the paladin that while the orcs he fought are evil, pursuing the women and children in the name of good and god under the defense of 'I am lawful good' is not enough justification.

The system expects somewhat cookie-cutter good and evil in order to function and there's still some good stories to be had while leaving alignment in place.

@Maximillian The problem mainly arises (for me, at least) when I introduce NPCs who are "evil aligned" but not antagonistic. It confuses the heck out of my veteran players.

Lawful and Neutral Evil are great at that role.

That is a case where morality comes up against law. The character may be evil by various means of detection, but have they actually performed any kind of evil/law breaking that can be proven?

Q: Should I be asking clarification on terms?

7:56 PM

@Maximillian It varies. Some NPCs are nonmalicious but have various devil pacts. Others are "lawful evil" leaders who are fair and have their people's interest in mind, but are 200% willing to torture potential enemies.

The Oracle

0

Recently, in quite a few Adventurers League questions, we are getting comments asking the poster to spell out common AL terms, such as HC, T2 and adventure names like ToA. Most recent example here - Can a PC that played only part of ToA be resurrected in a later adventure?, but not the only situa...

discussion

I'm not sure I buy your point 4 regarding alignment being racist without further context. The rest are legit issues that are things that should have somewhat simple resolutions or workarounds with your play group.

@Maximillian It's been mentioned earlier in the chat, tl;dr it's an issue that some races are defined as inherently good/evil

In Pathfinder there's a whole nation that sold out to devils but they still function as a society and middle government down to the people are not all demonic and evil.

Ah, the stamps in the monster books. Got it

@Maximillian Ah okay, you're familiar with the lore. That nation is significant in my game, and a lot of NPCs are from there. If that helps with context.

7:58 PM

I forget the name of it. You deal with one of their factions in The Emerald Spire Superdungeon.

Cheliax. I know this offhand because their name pops up in almost all of my campaign notes.

Hellknights, that's the group.

Hellknights are an extreme legion, often lawful evil, and the city they've occupied reflects it well. There was a bandit problem. They slaughtered them and crucified the bodies to trees around the woods. there is no more bandit problem. The town had slavery, but they imposed rules on how slaves are to be treated fairly, cared for, and ways to buy out of their servitude.

Your adventurers in that module have to either deal with them or avoid the city in favor of the resistance.

Getting adventuring paperwork with the Hellknights lets you freely come and go from town, but you have a tax of something like 20% of all value brought back from the dungeon.

I'm running a heavily modified version of Skull and Shackles, the pirate adventure path. Very cool concept, very terrible campaign writing and quest design.

I have that adventure path but I've never used it.

I've unsuccessfully done Rise of the Runelords three times. Always falls apart around module 3.

S&S has the timeless Paizo problem where the designers can't seem to agree what their product is, so it very awkwardly shifts between "open sea piracy" to "political intrigue" to "dungeon grind" to "clunky chess-like naval combat", and the go-to transition between arcs is "Pirate lord ABC told you to do it"

8:02 PM

Alignment can be used as a tool if you set the example of what it means at the table and that law still exists in parallel to morality.

Well Golarion has a whole has that problem. It's trying to be everything so anybody can say "that's what I want right there." about a part of it.

I have the collected edition of The Crimson Court and I'm kind of afraid to ever try it because the system isn't really geared for political intrigue, despite a splatbook trying to make it viable.

But back to the topic of alignment, you may cause more problems gutting it than finding ways to work with it.

Kind of a problem integral to D&D, though 5E sort of tossed it out? At least that's what I understand.

But the different interpretations means friction between me, my veteran PF players, and my non-veteran players

As GM you get to set the standards and what they mean. As written it doesn't really work with multiple interpretations. /characters/ are welcome to dispute morality, but ultimately the table needs a single definition for the mechanics to work from.

Yes, reality doesn't work that way, but DND/PF is an approximation, not a simulation.

8:53 PM

@MikeQ thanks for your support, I'm a bit tired but I'll be back tomorrow

Q: Blacklist bare [#-edition] tags

9:25 PM

@kviiri I'm sorry it went poorly and that I couldn't particiapte more in the discussion, but I will say this: every time I've DMed it has seemed to go worse to me than it did for the players. So until you ask them and get honest feedback you shouldn't take it as fact that you did a bad job here. And even then, we do all have those rough sessions. :)

The Oracle

9:42 PM

1

Q: Syn 5e to dnd-5e?

We have a 5e tag again, that's distinct from dnd-5e. Should we synonymize it or just wait for it to be cleaned up again? (pretty sure I've removed this tag to let it die before...)

discussion tags

3

D&D editions sometimes colloquially go by their edition number alone, and people sometimes enter just the edition for a tag. We've had to burninate the 5e tag a few times. I'd like the following regex pattern to get blacklisted in tags: ^\d-?(e|ed|edition)$ This ought to blacklist any tag tha...

feature-request tags blacklist-request

Zachiel

10:07 PM

@Maximillian I'm trying to start it. Why does it fall apart?

Is it logistical problems and the player group falling apart every time at that point, or is it something tied to the adventure?

The adventure was fine. First two times the group had conflicting wants/needs. One player looking to exploit every grey area rule had basically reduced any combat to two rounds of effort with little to no challenge. Another expected me to house rule things that 'didn't make sense' to them, such as 'Explosives should only have to hit touch AC since it's concussive force' and other attempts to inject 'realism'.

The third one ended when I had to get rid of my now ex.

The first two groups had players become a lot more concerned with themselves and not the overall efforts of the group.

It got to increasing levels of not-fun attempting to appease everyone.

Zachiel

Well, that's great to know but not that great to know in that other sense.

About the adventure, is it balanced around 4 characters with a 15-pts point buy?

I'm probably going to have 6 players and I don't know how to manage it.