@RedRiderX It's difficult not to be influenced by D&D, in some manner
I recall back in the late 80s Fanzine scene, at least one 'zine declaring "Guaranteed! no D&D!" ... but their content didn't fall too far from the tree. Same stuff, slightly different rule-set ...
One of the main draws of D&D is "it's what all my friends play". It's difficult for an Alternative to counter that.
@MikeQ There are ... but they are all competing for the same space. And Status Quo tends to win against 'some other thing that no-one has heard of, and needs effort to learn'
(It's not a situation I'm in. Our wider-group is very experimental, will give anything a try. Our regular table of 5 has quite the opposite - one of our Players will NOT play D&D)
@Ash That can keep people locked-in. They've already put the effort in to learn -this- system. Not going through that again! (Even if an alternative is simpler, the perception is hard to change)
@BlackSpike And perhaps one of the things people actually like about D&D is that the system isn't dirt-simple, and trying to sell them tic-tac-toe because "come on, you learned Twilight Imperium, this is much easier" is not a great strategy.
(I firmly believe this is why Pathfinder succeeded.)
@MarkWells I think there is a large split in Types of Players. Some very much enjoy System Mastery, and will gladly jump into more and more complex rule-sets, to show that they can Optimise them. Others are really not interested, and will gladly, after three years of playing the same character, ask "What dice do I roll?".
DC is specifically talking about why the thing you're talking about doesn't work.
He's saying that successfully recommending non-D&D games needs to include identifying what people like about D&D and suggesting games which don't reject those elements.
And then Jamila picks up one of the things he points out is missing from many indie games that DC likes about D&D, and lists indie games which do have that thing.
Trying to think of some kind of Sports analogy. Football (Soccer) is The Big Thing here in UK. It's got tactical play, skill, long-term strategy, luck ... hmmm ... maybe you'd enjoy Snooker!
@MarkWells Twilight Imperium can actually have its subsystems explained as their own games...
(Also, it's great. Fun fact: I've never managed to play it with only people who have played before. New players are great, but it takes an hour or two just to do setup an explanation.)
(Tangent, and Blatant Plug: I'm thinking of what App to write ... do i write something for D&D, or do I look to some Indie Games and see what might give them a signal-boost, make them more accessible, by virtue of having extra support? ... I have to lok at my download numbers ... )
Character is what, your single stat, your name, and maybe some kind of role? I now seem to recall that Honey Heist has a bear type that gives a special ability, but I've never actually played.
L&F does also have a ship, IIRC.
I think it's been more than a year since I've played Lasers and Feelings.
@nitsua60 I wouldn't assume folks in general could comfortably write XML. We're biased to be pretty technical on this site. I'd suggest instead a separate app for editing such files.
@BESW OK, had a (very) quick look at Space Goblins .. .the whole thign is 6 pages, 1/2 of which is Tables? ... Goblins have a couple of Stats and a Trait. Ship shave a couple of Traits. I reckon I could mangle something together
(I'm biased because our old school information software was XML-based and it was super-awesome to be able to dig in there and bang around and make the software purr. Now we're on a locked-down vendor where anything we want requires serious expenditures and a year's go-around... only to see the thing we were screaming about and paying through the nose to develop be announced as the next year's "standard improvement" to the software.)
(We should be taking a cut of all these freaking improvements, not paying for them!)
XML is one of those things where you think you're fully capable of editing it by hand, and then there's a weird structural nitpicky thing the application is expecting from you and you're not sure how to handle it.
> Okay, should I be nesting elements within this higher level element, or just define them as attributes? Is the App smart enough to just treat them both the same? Wait, does it just pick up the free-standing text as the value it needs, or do I need to define a value attribute? Or a sub-element called "value"???
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...
From my own observation, this appears when the system detects a "dialogue" between two users, where each side posts at least four comments, and the other side replies:
That's a little difficult to parse. Ultimately it is up the mod to do whatever they want? 4 or 5 comments seem to be the max before deletion, which is a long way short of the hyperbole "covering the entire screen". I guess as usual there are frustratingly few solid rules >w<;
Yeah, principles are a lot more useful than lists of acceptable/unacceptable actions, because the more we try to make comprehensive do/don't lists the less comprehensive the lists become.
The automatic action is a question not an order. I do not interpret this to mean "you are performing extended dialogue and thus you must move to chat'. If 4 users each post 6 comments collectively, it is unclear to me if the automatic system would even pick it up, let alone a mod would look at it and call it "extended dialogue".
I have read that thread BESW, I report a lot of posts too. But it is up to the mod to decide if they want to act on the report or not, so I don't think that dismissal is valid.
I'm not sure how to say this in a way that doesn't sound snarky but I assumed you were making a point and not just offering up trivia. I'm sure from your perspective my response sounded aggressive then, sorry for that. I misunderstood.
That'd probably fall under constructive criticism, though if I were leaving the comment I'd want to phrase it as "page X seems to contradict Y, can you please [edit] your answer to show how you resolve this?"
Banned? No, of course not. But it'll probably be better off for everybody if it happens in chat where there's not restrictive word limits and there's less of a performative element to the discussion. And the comments will get cleaned up once the post has been modified to reflect whatever usefulness the comments provided.
An outright rude comment will get deleted regardless of technical usefulness. A comment that's just brusque isn't gonna get deleted but it will be of less use because it'll be harder to understand and less likely to be responded to.
Is that so? I personally wouldn't ignore a comment just because it's a little terse, but I guess it's up to everyone to do what they think is a good idea right?
I always try to be as polite as I can even if it feels over the top some times haha
This question exists because of this answer, and a discussion in chat that followed it. I'll get to that later.
This question is about a unique category of answers on Stack Exchange: specious answers.
Specious answers are incorrect and bad, yet look legitimate and good.
By an incorrect/bad ans...
This question, about the fairness of a 7-sided die, troubles me.
It is in my opinion well-thought out and well-formulated. It is asking if a particular die has had any sort of rigorous analysis (physics-based or statistics-based) performed to test its fairness. That is simple, direct, and if s...
Over the past several weeks, moderator comment deletion has been regular and heavy handed. I'm generally good with this (I'm on record as saying I'm far more likely to delete an entire comment stream than a few single comments when it's my job). But it would be good to both evaluate this behavior...
The second one is pretty contradictory to the previous metas too @_@;;;
Oof that third thread, ouch
BESW Oh? How do you know that? I ask because your assumption isn't correct. I have seen gratuitous hiding and deleting of comments and am interested in the specifics because, as the third thread says, this behavior is dangerous.
Is that why you have sent me a half dozen threads to read? Hoping that one will answer some imagined question that you suppose I have?
A simple "there is no number, the mods do what they want and you aren't alone in your concerns" would have sufficed instead of sending me on a wild goose chase for an hour :/
I don't know what your concerns are. You asked about a policy without any explanation of your concern, and then left a post somewhere else about a specific example of something that seems only tangentially related.
Based on years of working with people who follow this pattern of coming into chat with general policy questions and then posting on meta about somehow-related-but-not-exactly-clear-how specific mainsite actions, I'm going to feel safe in assuming there's something here you aren't saying out loud, maybe because you haven't figured out how to yet or maybe because you're not sure what peoples' reactions will be.
In Pathfinder 2e, some classes have access to a focus pool. Each pool has a certain number of focus points, which can be used to cast spells.
I'm playing a champion and intending on making extensive use of focus spells. My focus pool has a maximum value of 3. What is the lowest level that I can ...
I've got a lot of practice helping people communicate their concerns, and I'm pretty good at seeing the gaps in a conversation where something's being danced around. eg, quoting things like "covering the entire screen" that aren't in any of the material we're talking about, that was a flag.
And now on meta you've identified the concern that deleting un-acted-on comments can, in some cases, obscure information which their simple existence would provide--namely, that an answer is controversial.
This is an important and valid concern, but not one that asking about how the site's "move this to chat" code works will create a discussion about.
@BESW Well that's great that you want to preempt me or whatever, and maybe you are very good at what you do. However in this case you have joined some unrelated dots.
I was asking about how many comments is too many because I often see them getting removed.
You linked a thread about comment removal, and I read it all, as I do with everything people link when trying to help me.
That lead me to make an /unrelated/ comment on that meta because it brought up another question (which interestingly you later linked a thread all about that issue!)
Perhaps this pattern of "people who follow this pattern of coming into chat with general policy questions and then posting on meta about somehow-related-but-not-exactly-clear-how specific mainsite actions" is actually the result of "someone asking a general question in chat and then after linking them a thread they make a semi-related comment on that thread which is only semi-related because the thread linked was semi-related"?
"eg, quoting things like "covering the entire screen"" ? -> "if the comment thread takes up a whole Web browser top to bottom, you're definitely there. "
This is a paraphrasing of "the whole web browser top to bottom" (because who browses the web with their browser at half height, not me!), which is in the link that YOU sent me.
"This is an important and valid concern, but not one that asking about how the site's "move this to chat" code works will create a discussion about." well, I just did.
I think you have tried to go full on Sherlock Holmes when there is no deeper meaning. I asked about "move to chat" / deletion because I wanted to know about it. I posted on that other thread because I saw an issue.
Your help is appreciated, but I do feel that you did overstep. I feel like you accused me of being insincere or having some shadowy agenda. I can assure you that I am not playing 4d chess, or even 3d or 2d chess. Hopefully that puts you a little more at ease :/
We clearly have difficulty communicating, because I tried to be very careful not to attribute intent to your vague requests--I said that some people have trouble articulating their core concern, or are concerned about reactions. That's neither insincere nor agenda-laden, nor did I attribute them to you.
"You had a very specific situation in mind but you were asking us general questions." ... " I'm going to feel safe in assuming there's something here you aren't saying out loud"... "I'm pretty good at seeing the gaps in a conversation where something's being danced around. eg, quoting things like "covering the entire screen" that aren't in any of the material we're talking about, that was a flag."
I don't think my requests were vague, it was your overthinking that complicated them.
BESW, I think I will leave chat now. At the moment I am finding it hard to read your comments as sincere and motivated by good intentions. I appreciate that you tried to help though, your links were valuable information in helping me understand the way that comments are generally handled.
I don't think that I've ever read any of BESW's messages as not sincere or motivated by good intentions. His very first comment is by a former mod explaining how and when the RPG.SE mod team (at least at the time) decided to delete comments. I don't know if the frequency of comment deletion has changed at all, but mxy's reasoning in the post largely holds true.
3
As we've said in the past, such decisions are largely a matter of judgment as to whether the comment retains any value at all (if not, it will just be deleted instead of moved to chat) and whether it contains any suggestion for improvement or request for clarification (in which case it can usually just be deleted once acted upon or rejected).
@jgn I'm very sorry I gave you that experience, it's not what I wanted at all. I'll leave you to people who are better at this stuff, and I'll try to improve with other people in the future.
You seem to keep looking for hard and fast rules where lots of gray areas exist. Largely speaking, comments are for two things: suggesting improvements to the question or answer you're commenting on, or asking for clarification about something that is unclear in the question/answer you're commenting on. If the comment is not doing one of those two things, it is liable to get deleted.
As BESW said, we don't sift through posts looking for comments to delete, but if we come across them or someone flags them, we may delete them. If there is potentially worthwhile discussion that is nevertheless not doing one of those two things, or if the suggestion/clarification requires a much more substantial conversation, we are more likely to move the comments to chat.
Personally, if there are 12-15 or more comments below a question/answer (and they're not just suggesting an improvement or requesting a clarification which has already been addressed - in which case they'd just be deleted), I will usually move them to chat to retain the conversation without cluttering the thread. But this is not a general mod policy or a hard rule or anything, just my personal assessment.
I have a second question that has arisen from this meta; how can I suggest that a comment may have problems without violating the "no discussion" rule?
Example: Answer: "A, B, therefore C" Comment 1: "Good answer, very good, but I think Y isn't correct, it should be D, therefore E". What I want ...
Seriously though, in D&D 3.5 there's an excellent if somewhat jankily-implemented set of alternatives in the form of various boons which provide item-like benefits without being items at all.
You can get blessings from beings of power, or benefits from visiting places of power, or bonuses because of affiliations, all kinds of interesting things. 4e did it better, of course.
@Erik We're 5 too. What helped us is that we know that we all go back to our hometown every weekend, so we agreed to set aside our Sunday afternoon for rpg and it's been working well so far
MAHARLIKA by Joaquin Saavedra is a Science-Fantasy RPG where you play as the heroic Maharlika, pilots of the wondrous MEKA (Mekanisadong Sandata). You survive and thrive in Arkipelago, the setting of Maharlika, a setting that is steeped in Filipino themes, Myth, Culture and History. As a Maharlika, you will protect cities, charge into battle against the Outsider Beings, and sail through the violent skies of Arkipelago.
English translation is in the works, and Saavedra has an interesting thread about what they're learning through translation here.
Yeah, my very first full-sized book layout job was trilingual and one of the languages I didn't know at all and it used a symbol set I was unfamiliar with too.
I also sometimes work on layout for a magazine that can have up to five or six languages per issue, some of them with translations and some of them without.
@BESW 5e has borrowed that idea although it appears to be aimed at higher level play.
@BlackSpike Ah, I found the "use once and link dies" app to send you my gmail address. Next time we are on at the same time, I'll give it to you so I can try your app and do some user interface atempts. I use android smart phone.
@jgn Second sentence is correct. We (elected) moderators have a button we can push that is "delete all comments," another that is "move comments to chat," and/or we can individually delete comments. Community moderators can also delete comments without elected mods even knowing it happened via flagging comments. I don't remember the hard-coded rules on how many flags deletes a comment.
From this meta post you can see that a good third of the comment-deletion around RPGSE is done independently by community moderators, rather than by the four of us elected moderators.
(I'd ballpark that the true fraction of "comments deleted by community moderation" is probably much higher--maybe 3/4 or 9/10--when you consider that almost every comment we elected mods land on and think about deleting, we got there because one of you flagged it.)
@Someone_Evil Elected mods are the diamonds, yes. (Rubiksmoose, V2blast, doppelgreener, and me.) I'm loosely using the term "community mods" to refer to all the actions that regular users can take as rep unlocks those actions.
Dear Chatizens: I've been neglectful of the room for the last month or so. I apologize. Like Reese Witherspoon in Sweet Home Alabama, I'm learning my lesson about returning home and embracing the stock from which I spring. I'll do better =)
(Also, it doesn't hurt that I hear McConnagghahuey (sp?) hangs around here a lot.)
@Someone_Evil Yeah, there's probably a better term. "High-rep users," "unelected moderators," both seem a little off in different directions. What can I say--Monday morning?
This is a sentiment that you're not alone in holding. There are also many who feel the exact opposite, that moving a conversation to chat allows it to flourish in a way it wouldn't on the mainpage. I naively assume that some comment-versations would be best served by staying put, that some would be best served by moving to chat, that there's almost no way to know ahead of time which is which, and that we (moderators and users alike) suffer from confirmation bias when evaluating which we've witnessed.
@Someone_Evil Part of my problem is probably that I don't have the privilege levels memorized well enough. I know 10K for seeing deleted content, 20K for analytics, I think? 50 to comment everywhere? But there's a lot of moderation--editing, visible downvotes, reviews, flagging--that comes on line in between those extremes, too.
@Rubiksmoose I'm sure some molecular gastronomists think that solid soup is a good idea. They might even be right--I'm just not going to try it until they send me to space and I have to.
If you've seen what you believe to be "gratuitous hiding and deleting of comments" I encourage you to speak up, please. (Preferably via flags or meta; chat's not really great for serious moderation issues. It doesn't leave an easily-accessed trail to go follow back, it only has such eyes on it as care to drop in to the room, among other reasons.) Either your threshold for gratuitous is not consonant with the wider community's or there's gratuitous deletion going on that we should know about and fix. Either way, someone's got something to learn.
@nitsua60 For shame! But I'd also like to state a mea culpa. I feel like for whatever reason I've been drawing harder lines than I need to and am also learning from my recent actions to be better.
1. no problem. 2. I reference that movie a surprising amount 3. THAT PLOT IS AWFUL. She leaves her deadbeat husband and gets a successful life in the city and then all of a sudden decides to throw it all away for someone who is essentially Matthew McCaughnihay (sp)
@goodguy5 I've come to realize my lore knowledge of D&D isn't great and I'm not super inclined to get that deep into it. But I do have a LOT of lore knowledge about SW and think that trying that may generate some more fun.
3. Yes, like almost all love triangles. "We want there to be dramatic tension." "Let's give her two people to 'be in love with'." "But she'll have to leave one of them." "Okay, make that one a jerk, as it turns out." "Problem solved!" <headscratch>
@NautArch I've a deeper knowledge of Golarion's lore than most of my group. Ended up accidentally spoiling some (a lot of) things. Use your knowledge wisely
@goodguy5 The current SW RPG, IIRC is built off of the Genesis system which I have never played with in person but I love all the actual-plays that use it and the concept of it.
Specifically the rolling mechanism is very very clever.
@goodguy5 I'm very curious to hear how it goes for you!
And if you're a podcast person I have a very entertaining one where they use the system if you are interested. Just note that they are much more RP rather than rules-based so not the best to learn the system. But very fun. And the DM is one of my favorites.
@nitsua60 I have solid soup in my pantry. Bullion cubes. :) Just add water and it's better soup than chewing a cube. (Yes, of course I have done that!)
@Rubiksmoose I've played it and I agree it's very elegant. I've tried incorporating bits of the Genesys mindset into other games and have enjoyed it. (Works well if you're already the sort of person who likes not only to use the information in the number a die lands on, but also the location of the die as it lands, its orientation, its value relative to other dice....)
@Yuuki Well, for 2e there were a couple of worldbuilder guidebooks that laid out how to create a world, from the macro size/shape, down to # of tectonic plates, type of world (desert, volcanic, etc), all the way on down to towns/cities.
And they had tables galore to do it with random dice rolls.
@Erik Nah, the people in this setting have a sort of gestalt hivemind terraforming ability (like Orks) and whenever enough of them gather in one place, they literally carve out riverbeds and mountains through their presence.
@Carcer Yeah, you can, but as a geographer I really resent that approach ;-) also, in my opinion designing the geography to suit the cities is more of a hassle than the other way round.
the "trend" is always unreliable because that just projects the average into the future but the projection it'll come up with later has gotten pretty good these days
@JohnP That was a world building guide, wasn't it? I th ink I have that somewhere, and it was the book that got me interested in reading Robert Jordan's books ... since they thought his first few were good world building.
@KorvinStarmast Yes, it was. I have two copies of that and one of the dungeon builders guide as well.
I have a bunch of 2e stuff I'm going to be selling soon, actually. Lot of the Guide books, dragonlance adventures, sourcebooks. Hate to do it, but times dictate practicality.
@JohnP Hmm... I might be convinced to get myself my son, yeah, my son, some Christmas presents off that list. I wouldn't mind a ping if/when you get things sorted out.
Party of 4 wizards: the Gryffindor who took a Fighter Dedication to better fight his enemies, the Hufflepuff who took a Cleric Dedication to better help his friends, the Ravenclaw who took a Rogue dedication to learn tons of skills and tools, and the Slytherin who took a Sorcerer Dedication for ultimate magical powah
Feel free to switch Ravenclaw/Slytherin if you want the sneks to be backstabbers and the smarties to have more spells