No problem!

Latest quote from the table: "Let's use the ol 'Good Cop, Chaotic Cop' routine"

Followed up by "$&@#, are any of us good?"

I had a similar one where one player came up against the Raven Queen (playing ToA). They asked "what happens now?"

So I said "say 'Polly want a cracker?' then punch her in the mouth"

Not insulting at all

What the heck is going on

@kviiri Did you read the title? It explains everything.

lol

@Ben One of my favorite incarnations of this meme

I also like this Biblically inspired one i.redd.it/wjgjgfcmrjm01.png

@kviiri Based on the subsequent edit, someone's playing silly buggers to get a rise out of the community. Now it's been deleted, I give it a 30% chance there'll be a meta about overzealous moderation.

@BESW I thought so straight away, given that the user had legit posts in SO (so they know how the site works) and the wonky use of formatting. But I saw you other people keeping your cool and not dropping the assumption of good faith, so I decided to be patient myself too

I don't see the edit though. Maybe that's for the best?

Keeping our cool isn't for the benefit of the user; it's good practice for us and models expected behavior for the rest of the community, making other users less fearful of disproportionate retaliation for mistakes.

also better for our blood pressure

Hmm. There's a certain potential for the Stack community to manifest an inafa' maolek epistemology, which was one of the reasons I was first attracted to the site. Unfortunately it's doomed to remain potential due to many factors, some of which were discussed here yesterday.

(inafa' maolek in the broadest possible sense of making choices based on the benefit of the group rather than the good of individuals)

(This is ostensibly the philosophy behind the wisdom of crowds dynamic, but it manifests as impersonal disregard for the individual rather than recognizing the individual as part of the group which benefits.)

There's a disconnect between the individual as contributor and the individual as benefactor.

The sobriety society failed to clear out the Alko x)

Can't help feeling a bit of schadenfreude

couldn't afford it?

@Carcer Apparently the bottleneck at the cash registers was the main obstacle

I'm a bit amused and pleasantly surprised that my current company takes after work activities seriously

Me proposing to run RPGs at the office for people interested is an initiative :P

As in "excellent initiative!"

@KorvinStarmast sorry about last night--fell asleep putting the girls down =\

@kviiri Office D&D? What's the CR for TPS report?

@kviiri I hope that pun was intended :)

@Anaphory . . . yes

@kviiri I just sent of my grant application to colleagues for feedback. Maybe I do have a chance to crawl some dungeon before Thursday. The question is: will I be able to stop?

@Anaphory DCSS offers you ample natural points to stop at in the form of character deaths, yes

Although my experience is that the game tends to flow better for me whenever there's something else that needs to be done x)

@kviiri That is what I thought. I hope I manage to find a good death in about half an hour to an hour, because then the temptation to restart will be minimal, but it's also not too long to be zoned in.

@Anaphory If you run into Sigmund early, you might die quite fast :>

Sigmund is one of the nastier unique monsters of the early levels because he has a nasty bag of tricks - he can turn invisible, use his scythe to reach attack, and cast spells to confuse or slow you. Usually avoiding him is the best strategy unless you've got a particularly good counter in mind

Mephitic cloud (which is a L3 spell, found in the starter books of Wizards and Poison Mages) causes confusion and is thus ideal for disabling him :>

And if you don't meet him in D:2 (which is the earliest he can spawn) you may have enough XP under your belt to kill him anyway

@kviiri Wohoo, bunch of gnolls on L2.

@Anaphory They're dangerous :> are you playing with tiles or ASCII?

This was tiles on underhound.eu

The reason I ask is, I'd recommend being very careful about gnolls with reaching weapons. With tiles on you don't have to e'x'amine them to see their weapons, because they're drawn on the sprite.

Yes, they did have spears, I was about to ask how to deal with that.

Spears aren't exactly dangerous apart from having reach, but tridents and especially halberds deal really nasty damage.

@Anaphory Depends a bit - what species and background are you playing?

In this case, hill ork fighter.

Ok, hm. I think you should be able to generally take them on if you fight them in a place where they can't all hit you at once

And if you've got full hp, too.

Ah, so two at a time should be fine if I don't run away like a coward and get hit a few times while running.

Yeah :> the reaching weapons do offer you a bit of a silver lining though, in that the gnolls won't close in to you when you're frantically reaching for the stairs to retreat

(most monsters can follow you up the stairs if they want - but sometimes they opt not to)

Only if they're adjacent though

Definitely looks like a game worth coming back to casually.

A bit of practice and you'll start reaching some milestones :) the first big one is the Ecumenical Temple, a "branch" (although it's only one level) with no monsters but plenty of altars to various gods.

I played a little DCSS ages ago

Most gods are guaranteed to appear either in the Ecumenical Temple or early in the dungeon.

never got that far into it

The three gods who aren't guaranteed to appear in the Temple or early in the Dungeon are Beogh (who only permits Hill Orc followers anyway - you can convert if you meet Orc Priests), Lugonu (whose altars are plentiful in the Abyss, since it's their domain) and Jiyva (who isn't really the most beginner-friendly god anyway)

@V2Blast It's a very rewarding game once you get into it - I do admit that it's not always as newbie-friendly as it should be (mainly because it's not always obvious how one could've survived lots of early mishaps with gnolls, Grinder, Sigmund, snakes...)

I've actually scheduled some time with an old NetHack fan to teach her to play DCSS :>

I think generally spellcasting-heavy characters are easier to get started, but even those vary a lot - they tend to have some ways of dispatching small numbers of foes fast or escaping with their life, but powerful ranged attackers like centaurs can be really frustrating to face early on.

"Haha, powerful ranged you say? Let me throw icicle at you!" --The last words of so many viable Ice Elementalists, right before missing both attacks :)

Such randomness becomes less pronounced as the character accrues levels and diversifies their strengths though

@nitsua60 No worries, I did the same with my kids many times. :)

@MikeQ Short answer, no. See PHB and DMG sections on DC