In some questions, it appears people ask a question to get other people to tell them they are correct, or are heavily biased in favour of answers that say that their idea works. For instance, this question follows this pattern.
The process (to my imagination) goes like this:
Guy: Wow it woul...
Lets see, it has Mad Merc - Top secret adventure, bards: examining the AD&D class, shroom colfel and gem vars in the bestiary. NNeither of those, but the publish block says Vol VI, No 6.
@Shalvenay Good. Going through a couple of tubs I got for evidently a steal at a garage sale. Boxed sets from AD&D time, tons of sealed Forgotten realms/dragonlance modules...
Original boxed Birthright set, Ravenloft Masque Red Death, Dragonlance Time of the Dragon boxed, original Dark Sun boxed set, and Dragonlance modules DL 1-15 complete set. All mint/near mint.
@JohnP Nah--if you can get actual cash for it, it'll probably go to someone who'd put it to decent use.
If it were redbox, I might make an offer.
(Because I can't justify spending the $100 you find those for just to have the nostalgic tangible when I've already paid $10 for the pdf and printed it into a binder.)
@JohnP I'd suggest monetizing that whole bundle, I have 3/4 original Dragonlance modules in wrappers, but # 1 I unwrapped. Pretty sure I can cash in one day, but I have to get off my backside and do it
@KorvinStarmast I'm working on the inventory. It's mostly dragonlance and forgotten realms, but a few oddities and some original AD&D modules. I estimate 6-800 depending on the demand when I list.
@Joshua Well, only two people actually died soon after the accidents (one after each). The other ~ten affected people survived for decades before the lingering complications of the radiation exposure got to them, if at all
Notably, both of the two who died within a month of their respective accidents caused their respective accidents, and got their radiation doses while preventing the accidents from becoming way worse.
[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Bad keyword in body, blacklisted website in body, body starts with title and ends in url, pattern-matching product name in body, pattern-matching website in body, +1 more (491): The components wishes to be taken orally after by dempjuger on rpg.SE (@doppelgreener)
@Joshua resurrection spells all include the wording "If its soul is free and willing" - you can't double res someone, the soul can only be in one place
I've also just updated part of the question to be less about what the farmer would do and more about what options D&D 5e gives to allow an animal to have regeneration. Which he chooses is left for the story, but my intent is more about what options he has and how they'd work.
loads of people gave their own suggestion, ranging from "polymorph him" and "teleport the food straight to his mouth" to "cut off his lips and regenerate them" (which happened to partially give me inspiration for the question).
I strongly suspect if you want something that makes sense you'd need to homebrew a cheap way to give something regeneration.
the cost of rings of regeneration would be prohibitive... someone with the ability to cast regenerate themselves can make much more money in different ways if they're inclined to try and profit from their spellcasting
and I'm not sure if there are any other ways to grant regeneration in the published rules.
It'd be a city that's not only willing to believe a single farmer can make enough meat on such a small farm, they also have to believe he's capable of slaughtering and butchering enough meat to supply the city.
...and it's a city that's willing to trust a major part of its food supply to a mysterious source that doesn't allow inspections and can't provide evidence its amazing productivity is sustainable.
I don't know what that means in this context. Does your game have corruption effects that make city officials forget everything they know about how to keep from getting eaten by the poor?
I guess it depends on whether or not the population actually knows the source
if it's all being imported down from "some farms off that way", it's on the people directly in the supply chain who necessarily know it's all actually coming from one source
I'm not talking about the population knowing the source. I'm talking about basic city infrastructure standards like officials knowing that if the city's food imports suddenly stop they're gonna be at the top of the New Edibles list.
And thus making it a very high priority to have food coming from multiple sources that they inspect for reliability.
Even if they're okay with feeding the citizens Cash Cow Meat, they won't be okay with all the meat coming from one farm and they won't be okay with that farm refusing inspections.
Do you want plague and famine? Because that's how you get plague and famine.
A single point of failure that refuses city oversight is gonna be a hard pass.
And even if it's somehow allowed to be set up, EVERYBODY is going to notice that something fishy is going on, and it's not just gonna be "That's odd." It's going to be "We need to make that city the target of coordinated espionage and raids to find out the secret to their food supply."
Put it this way: in Britain, all those moors and rolling hillsides used to be forest. The flat open plains are man-made; the forests were cleared and something like 90% of England's arable land was in crop rotations for most of the island's human history.
Also: if Cash Cow farms are actually profitable, that means spellcasters aren't using create food and water to feed the poor (in which case the farmland isn't going to be as extensive as in real-life).
(And anyway, it'd be more profitable to use all that gold on magical plant growth rather than magical animal growth.)
HOWEVER. If you're attached to the idea of a Cash Cow, there are circumstances where it'd be more feasible but it'd probably be a much smaller scale.
An Underdark farmer, for example, might use regeneration to supply unscrupulous clients with exotic surface meats.
because the peasants are going to eat poultry or beef or mutton or whatever, but the nobility is dining on various choice bits of exotic meats: Llama, giraffe, lion, chimera, beholder,...
Though I'm not sure how you'd manage to harvest meat from the latter two without risking your life or the life of the beholder
yeah, I think so too. it's definitely chaotic. Maybe, MAYBE neutral if the city has famine and the guy is doing it because he thinks it's the only way to save it
@Carcer Could be that nothing would grow in an area beyond a small area that supports some kind of toxic grass that's just perfect for some kind of animal that has edible meat
and the rest of the area is filled with some rare resource, so you put a prison camp there, have prisoners get the resource and feed them with the meat of the animal
@BESW Can a magic user that rested with food created by CFAW cast spells though?
(a) because it's boring food (b) because spellcasters tend to rise to the tops of hierachies (c) because it's a third-level spell which in most situations might be put to better use (d) because it'd cause mass unemployment (e) because it's D&D and HAS NEVER CARED ABOUT PRACTICAL INFRASTRUCTURAL CONCERNS EVER because everything is balanced toward adventuring.
free food and water is crazy if you think about it. You immediately remove the need for 90% of your population to be farmers. when that happened on our planet, we developed civilization
I wouldn't say "suffers." Fiction that's overly concerned about realism tends to be really bad at doing anything else, like telling a story or having a point.
I find it weird though that 5th level clerics and paladins would be rare. Is there an official source or guideline on how many of a given class you'd find in a world?
Yeah. I think the bulk of the suffering comes from the fact that people somehow expect DnD in particular to be designed as a sort of a "world simulator" when it's actually a game with a relatively narrow focus.
Modern pop culture has largely replaced analysis and criticism of fiction with dinging off tropes and loopholes as if that somehow shows an understanding of what's important about storytelling.
Essentially, they said "the US has X% military, applied to our fictional population, that means so many people are military and the rest are commoners with no real skill
The thing with high fantasy is, the author can explain pretty much anything with magic. This gives them a lot of liberty to design a world that matches a very particular vision without having to worry about whether it makes sense, in some internal consistency sense.
Except, in most settings, high-level magic very clearly isn't super-rare because it's more fun and exciting to adventure in cool magical setpieces.
(And, let's be honest, in many cases because the designers and GMs think high-magic NPCs are the best way to keep players from running amok and abusing the power they'd have if high magic was really super rare.)
So when thinking about a fantasy world, you can assume nothing is really there just because the world needs it in some sense --- people could be fed with magic if the author so wanted, for instance. A realistic world needs farmers, a high fantasy world doesn't.
@kviiri It's easier for both worldbuilder and audience if a speculative setting assumes it's like the real world except where explicitly stated otherwise, though.
And course the author appeal might root to some more tangible reason outside the work, eg. having farmers contributes to evoking a pastoral feeling that is appealing to many. And I personally believe Rowling included the Law of Elemental Transformation or whatever it was that you can't create food ex nihilo to not make the wizards seem like huge jerks for allowing muggles to suffer famine. So I'd argue it's more productive to sometimes look outside the work to understand it.
Basically, the Thermian argument (named for the aliens in Galaxy Quest who don't understand fiction and think all TV shows are documentaries) is defending a criticism about how a piece of media interacts with the real world, with a justification that it makes sense within the media's fictional reality.
The Thermian argument is saying that stories are made and enjoyed by people in the real world, and thus 'it makes sense in the story" is not a legitimate defense against criticism for how the story interacts with the real world.
I think I'd express the concept as "Just because something makes sense in context doesn't mean you can't be criticised for creating it; you created the context where that thing makes sense"
The Thermian argument is a fallacious defense against criticism of a work of fiction based on the false principle that the fictional world is somehow an objective reality that the creator is just representing fairly.
An example we've touched upon a few times here is that fantasy universes often feature fantastic races or cultures that are not-at-all too flattering caricatures of real world human cultures, ranging from affectionate yet misguided to intentionally vitriolic portrayals
Or, consider "My Guy Syndrome" as it relates to, say, paladins.
If a 3.5 paladin fails to chastise and rectify a fellow PC's conduct, the lore allows the GM to revoke the paladin's powers. Therefore both the GM and the paladin's player can justify reducing other players' fun and otherwise harmless roleplaying because that's just how the world/game works.
yeah, "You're being creepy and disruptive" "But it's how my character would behave!" is a classic Thermian defense because it absolves the player of responsibility for their choices about how their character behaves.
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"Fictional worlds aren't real and are eternally mutable by creators." In RPGs, the creators include the people at the table.
"In the world outside the diegesis, in our world, only the implications and impact of that fiction actually matter."
(While this seems completely counter to Bartes and Foucault, I think that their end effects actually complement each other to a large degree. They're all about centering the impact of the text on its audience as the most important quality to be analysed or criticised.)
@user10814784 Hi! You'll need 20+ rep to type in chat, but you're welcome to hang out until then.
@Xirema I actually think this might not be true or at least not true for classes now: twitter.com/JeremyECrawford/status/778331573699477504 @KorvinStarmast if you ever come accross the source of this again I'd be very interested in reading it. Regarding classes being balanced for multiclassing
@Rubiksmoose yeah, not sure what "tuned" versus "balanced" means, but it looks like at this point there is a dedicated effort to addressing that. If I ever trip over that ref, I'll let you know.
@JohnP A local micro brew has been including coffee base in some of its porters and stouts. I was in one in Utah some months ago that had an ale (or was it a lager) with a coffee base and it was quite good. (Angry Goat, if you are ever in Ogden)
@kviiri Tends to happen from time to time, both positively and negatively. For example, Mitsubishi had to change the name of their Pajero SUV line in Spanish countries because it loosely translated to Wanker
@Nzall There is a story, perhaps an urban legend, that the Chevy Nova had to be renamed for the Mexican market since "no va" can mean "no go" or "it doesn't go" ... but I have also heard that this is not actually the case.
Btw, when someone complains that "video games are too afraid about offending people nowadays" for being inclusive or whatever, gently remind them that the Final Fantasy series had almost all religious references cut in English translation in fear it'd upset people.
Can't have "Holy" attacks.
(they stopped doing that around Fifth generation consoles I think?)
@kviiri It would upset people. Especially in America. Americans have a long history of people being upset about stuff because of "muh religion". My mother got a strongly worded letter from her godly sister about my playing AD&D as a child. I wish she'd kept the letter for me. I think I would find it entertaining these days.
Most offensive things are either out of ignorance ("we didn't know it was offensive") or out of deliberate shock intent ("we want to offend people"). I've found that the only things that are successfully offensive are those that go overboard on being offensive while actually making it not be the goal. The videogame Hatred just wanted to offend, while South Park just uses offense as their style of comedy
@ColinGross Yeah I don't doubt that. Just sayin' this because I'm seeing a lot of people pretending video game self-censorship is a new and alarming trend when it's been around for decades
South Park is actually improved by the offense, and it would be hard for it to have been as successful without the offense. Meanwhile, Hatred had just the offensive stuff, and after a while that just becomes desensitising and normal
@kviiri Who knows these days. The evangelicals in America whole heartedly support a twice divorced man who has had multiple sex scandals as president. Which seems out of step with their hardline religious beliefs about marriage and sex.
@ColinGross Americans are actually weird in that respect: you can do the most horrendous things in GTA San Andreas with anyone you want, but it didn't get threatened with an AO rating until the sex minigame surfaced
@ColinGross I had someone tell me that "snopes has been known to spread misinformation" after I posted a link, and I didn't know how to respond. I thought about sending them another snopes link on the subject, but that seemed counterproductive.
I suppose with the current political climate being what it is, yea I guess that factual representations of facts are seen as "liberal propaganda", which is terrifying.
this chat room has a pretty obvious liberal bias when we are in collective agreement about the problematic nature of orcs and other tropes of fantasy, let's be fair
I work for a small Belgian company of 5 employees including the boss, and we develop an automated build and deploy application. Essentially Jenkins, but at least 10 years older
Outside the US, the Democrats vs Republicans power struggle looks like two right-wing parties of different degrees vying for power. I guess I might seem more pronouncedly Left here than in my own society.
@kviiri To be fair, Gandalf just kinda walked into that bug. Ended up with a pretty interesting race condition. Didn't totally get out of that runtime error unscathed though.
@Nzall Dwarves seem like the industrious type that would use Java and continue with an aging automated build and deployment system.
If the hammer still works, continue hammering with it.
@ColinGross What I mean by "10 years older" is that our tool was created WAY before Jenkins was a thing, and we've been developing and improving it ever since
Essentially, because we have full control over our own UI, we don't have the issue that Jenkins has where you need to use an array of plugins of varying quality to do basic stuff
Like, we might not support all of the source control systems or build script tools or what have you that Jenkins has plugins for, but the ones we do support have a uniform UI and are easy to use
@ColinGross Yeah, and while we do have the option to develop your own plugins (we call them phases), they're mainly for extra steps during builds and deploys
For example, if you want a reusable way to import data into your database that you can use in multiple projects
@Nzall Most domestic plugs are just two phase. Three phase plugs are really meant for those big power draw uses. I've only seen them in data centers and a mechanic shop.
@Nzall I usually like a very strong base of data to build anything on. People might deride things being carved in stone, but it makes for a great foundation. Worked for the Romans.
@ColinGross Not far from Pozzuoli where you can visit the Flavian amphitheater is a place called Cuma/Cumae. That was a Greek-era city that also had some impressive buildings, a few of which remain. It's also where the Sibyl hung out.
@JohnP Sounds interesting. If you wish to check out our product and see if you might be able to do something with it, you can find it here: ikanalm.com
@JohnP How very Machiavellian. I hope he never discovers your intrigues. Maybe you'd have been better cut out for espionage. Years long cons take some serious skill to run.
