@doppelgreener The ultimately crowdsourced game. ;)

@Joshua I once used buckshot on a mosquito. It worked.

@KorvinStarmast for sure: core design by a moderately sized team (i.e. the size that other RPGs usually get designed in full by), additional design by dozens of other designers per product (i.e. "wrote out dozens of spells for us", etc), then final revisions made by the players

@doppelgreener still not as wide open as the original. And that wasn't as wide open As Blackmoor.

But it suffices.

right, i imagine it's much more constrained than the 3.5e era

Not sure how much you like Math, but this has made me laugh since about 1968

@doppelgreener IMO 2e and 3.X were inflicted by bloat. That bloat came from the 1e/Dragon Magazine "and this month, here's the next great idea someone had" era.

@KorvinStarmast 100% definitely

especially in 3e's case, marked by its crash

5e has learned good lessons from 3e

I am beginning to appreciate what 4e tried to do. 5e is a nice synergy of all of that stuff from before. IMO. YMMV

I almost bought a castles and crusades PHB at the second hand books today. Instead, I bought 1 die RPG Pirates and Dragons. :)

@doppelgreener have you played any Once Dice RPG games?

I haven't

I may try this with Mike nd troggy and shal. Looks fun.

4e did a lot of good things, and many of its better ideas made it through to 5e (but not some of its best)

@doppelgreener I am not all that big on the "balance" mania. I like the sense of fear that "not that balanced" tosses into the table experience.

But that's my old school experience talking.

He who fights and runs away lives to fight another day

There's a difference between "unbalanced" versus "asymmetric", and I suspect most people confuse them

@KorvinStarmast Eh. To some degree, things have to be balanced to have any sort of organized play system, and to encourage diversity in builds.

well let's put balance aside, just 4e's notion that "every type of class should be able to contribute powerfully at any point in the game"

@V2Blast That's CRPG and MMORPG speaking. ;)

But on an individual table level, e.g. with homebrew, the only real thing that matters is whether it's "balanced" for the table and whether the people enjoy it

@KorvinStarmast wat

I am keenly aware of how CRPG imbalance can make a game less fun

the pre- and post-4e design paradigm was "spellcasters are supposed to be able to contribute less than anyone else at low levels, and then more than anyone else at mid-to-high levels"

@doppelgreener that's why I never liked seeing those Crawford Tweets

@KorvinStarmast ...fear? I suppose "oh god I hope this is an actual class I picked and not a joke that doesn't come up to somebody else's class feature" is a KIND of fear...

@Glazius That's a meta fear, not a character fear

he has no one double checking him, or able to say "no sorry you are wrong, that doesn't work"

@trogdor I found a new game called "Pirates and dragons" ... might be good for our next Nitsless saturday

did you want to run it?

@KorvinStarmast But it's the fear you get when you're not balanced.

@trogdor I can't do it tonight, I just got home, but it looks fun and simple.

@KorvinStarmast oh I meant next time, I didn't expect you were already ready today

@Glazius I appreciate what you are saying, but we didn't have that problem for about a decade into the hobby. Now, it's an issue because people believe it's an isue.

@trogdor I would love to.

cool

@trogdor The whole book is 125 pages, and I can set up a r20 game for it... but I need to "grok" it first

no yeah I get it

@Glazius Tunnels and trolls wasn't balanced either, but it was still fun.

I didn't run my first GSS game the first day I heard of it XD

i'm off for the night, goodnight y'all :D

@trogdor It has pirates in it. I am a sucker for pirate stuff. So I have to have this game. 5 bucks. yay me

@doppelgreener nite

@doppelgreener good night

@KorvinStarmast Yes, people believe they should have a chance to play the game and not sit down while someone who's better than them in every way does everything instead.

@Glazius With that attitude, board games might be your thing.

Balance in a board game is a very needful thing.

@KorvinStarmast Or, RPGs can be his thing too

And I never ran into that problem ... shrugs

Doesn't mean it didn't exist or that nobody thought it was a problem.

@V2Blast We are really lucky, nowadays, that we have so very many choices. Fortunate indeed.

@KorvinStarmast Heh. Look at this guy, doesn't think board games are unbalanced too.

so we can play and have fun, or we can kvetch about what isn't fun.

@Glazius Don't say something that isn't true. Really a bad idea. If you play DDay by AH, you can see an unbalanced game that gets even more unbalanced with all of the optional rules.

@Glazius Monopoly... The unbalance is sort of the point :P

@V2Blast It isn't unbalanced, we all start at go.

:)

:thinking:

Chess is lightly unbalanced, eh?

@KorvinStarmast Okay, who are you actually seeing type these words at you? Because I get the feeling you aren't just talking to me.

That's why grand master tournaments have more than one game.

@Glazius We don't seem to be having an actual conversation, so maybe I'll just raise my glass to you and wish you all the best. Good night.

@V2Blast Yeah, Monopoly is a demonstration of how some people luck into owning the right property and slowly grind down everybody else.

@Glazius Have you ever been lucky enough to see a kid's face when they first realize Candyland is entirely chance-based?

@BESW Yes, it's critical to its deep existential themes. existentialcomics.com/comic/58

That's a good one.

Aaand now I'm surfing through various lay-philosophy sites trying to find anything with a reasonable deep dive into non-colonial American philosophies. This one, for example, is conspicuously lacking anything on the topic.

Existential Comics does the occasional Muslim or African philosopher.

@Glazius oh my god that is beautiful

@Ash I was reading a couple of the existential comics and was reminded how many Western philosophers have foundational knowledge propositions which make absolutely no sense outside their own narrow cultural boundaries.

[rummages]

I mean, that's what I feel about a lot of Greek Philosophy

to be fair though, it feels like a lot of those guys were trolling each other on purpose

so there is that

The establishing premise of this comic, in the very first panel, would be laughed at confusedly by every Indigenous American philosophy I'm aware of--first because of the idea that God has abandoned us, and then at the idea that God would be the source of life guidance anyway.

Because they tend to take guidance from careful observation of their environment and their interaction with it, seeing each animal, pattern, and experience as a potential source of instruction on what we are and how we should be.

And, yes, you recalled correctly.

:P

lol

making a pun with your own name is A-list stupid pun material

I approve

I do it whenever possible

lol

same

@nitsua60 I found a free guidebook and now I understand about a half of the game's jargon

Ugh man

Some card games

Like blackjack even, I still don't even understand blackjack

And people act like it's so simple

@trogdor It's like Pazaak, only with non-sci-fi cards and without the minuses, IIRC.

@trogdor More seriously, I don't know it, at least don't remember all the rules if I ever did, but maybe it's possible to dissect them together for better understanding?

@vicky_molokh yes it helps that I totally know what Pazaak is :P

and I mean, it's probably not my game anyway?

there's a lot of bluffing and reading the other people at the table

I am not great at either of those things

Huh, never thought of that one as being about people skills. I always understood it to be almost pure math, probabilistics and memorisation.

Maybe I was misinformed!

@trogdor That's...not really a thing in blackjack.

ah maybe I am getting that mixed up with another one?

In most card games, generally, but not so much in blackjack.

At a guess, you're probably thinking of poker.

oh that yeah

It's the other "big"card game, and it's generally considered the one that's most about those skills.

to be fair I don't really understand the rules of that one either

but I suppose that illustrates my point anyway

card game rules are not my forte

Well, understanding the rules of "poker" isn't really a thing anyway. There are a crazy number of variants and they all have different rules.

then how the hell do people manage to play it?

@trogdor But in answer to your original point, I was raised on card games, but some of them...I mean, bridge. The gameplay is just your basic trick-taking game, but the bidding and scoring are so monstrously complicated that you need a PhD to understand it.

@trogdor They pick a variant, and make sure everyone playing knows how.

ah

fair enough I guess

I'm contemplating how far I could/should go to answer this question, should it be reopened: rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/143289/…

I think I could potentially answer it with an "exhaustive" list of 3.5 squirrels. But it would involve acquiring pdfs for every 3.5 book, performing a word search for "squirrel" across all said pdfs and combing through the results to see find any monster that has the word "squirrel" in its description. All the steps are possible as far as I can tell, but I'm hesitant for several reasons

There's also the "squirrel-like" quality which is unsearchable.

If there's a Dire Riding Marmot, does that count?

Or a chipmunk

but I think most squirrel-adjacent creatures would have the word "squirrel" somewere in their description

Or be described as like something which is, itself, squirrel-like.

Chipmunks are, in my language, literally "ground squirrel".

And what's squirrel-like, anyway?

Woodchucks and prairie dogs are in the squirrel family, and beavers and dormice are closely related.

Fun fact: a language organization concerning itself with naming animals suggested renaming them into what could be translated as chipdales

How about a Jurassic squirrel?

(it hasn't seen wide adoption)

Does Squirrel Girl count?

I think she does, I mean, most humans do.

grin

Some languages, like Swahili, don't have that ambiguity --- Swahili has a separate verb tense for "generally true" statements, separate from present tense! Kinda neat

well, I'm not to concerned about the amount of keywords to search for. If the "squirrel" search is computationally reasonable, then so will be a "chipmonk" search. I guess I'm mostly posting here for input on #4.

erm, yeah, sorry about derailing your ponderings

It looks to me like the question got a bit out of control through edits trying to make it topical.

@HeyICanChan any input?

@kviiri This reminded me of a joke or 'joke' from . . . I think it was Lojban or Loglan: 'How many people does it take to change a broken light bulb?' 'First you must figure out what kind of bulb emits broken light, and what do you want to change it into.' Human languages are hilariously imprecise in terms of their sentence/word structure indicating actual meaning and relationships between concepts used.

@BESW Related to above, it took me about a dozen pop-culture references to the Count Dracula in Sesame Street (it's Sesame Street isn't it?) before I understood the pun

Yes it is.

Though, it's also possibly a deep dive into vampire lore.

That is, there's the superficial "Dracula is often given the title Count and here's a vampire named Count von Count who counts things" level.

But there's also a tradition that vampires have arithmomania: a compulsion to count seeds, knots, and other large collections of similar objects.

Given his sometimes frantic and seemingly out-of-control counting, Count von Count may also have arithmomania--though whether it's a reference to the lore or a coincidental recurrence I don't know.

King of Kings is an ancient title, given to a king who reigns over other, lesser kings. Since von means "of", Count von Count'd be the Count of Counts --- maybe they're the one vampire to rule them all.

@vicky_molokh At least context usually makes the intent clear :)

@kviiri To slide rule them all, perhaps.

@BESW Oh my

@kviiri Maybe usually. There have been times I had to shuffle English sentences because it lacks the case endings to make things more precise.

Aye

There's also this little charmer which I didn't even realise is a real thing until being shown one, again largely because English weirds language by verbing substantive nouns. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence

My language has cases (although I don't think they're as comprehensive as those in Ukrainian) but the flexible word ordering in sentences allows for very ambiguous outcomes

(But it's OK, my language has other weirdness.)

(Like turning a shotgun into a towel by changing its gender.)

And now I'm reminded of Grace Lee's video essay "David Lynch: The Treachery of Langauge".

The lack of gender in pronouns is a constant pain for people translating police procedurals, detective novels and such. You know the classic "And just how do you know the killer was a he?" thing... it can get quite awkward

@vicky_molokh Is there any good explanation for this?

Like, how did that come to be

Рушник (masculine) = towel; рушниця (feminine) = longarm/shotgun. The two words look like they're just two genders of one term, but they're not.

@kviiri I'd guess they're false cognates.

They're two totally separate objects that happen to be morphologically similar.

For a more true example, there's Russian crow (feminine) versus raven (masculine), which surely are *non-*false cognates.

So you can say 'A crow and a raven were taking a dead cat apart. He snacked on the eyes and she got the cat's tongue.' And it's actually clear who of the two got what.

@kviiri Hah, that must be tricky. I sometimes have difficulty tracking pronouns in conversations with people whose primary language is from the Philippines, because many of those languages don't have gendered pronouns and the result in English is often just swapping back and forth mid-sentence.

@vicky_molokh Aye, I think this is one of the usual "justifications" for gendered pronouns, it makes easy to have sentences with two actors while being clear which is which... as long as they have different grammatical genders.

It certainly adds clarity of indication if the language doesn't try to tie genders to social castes. Spoken languages tend to lack the positional-'hanging' pronouns that sign languages and gesture languages (sometimes? often?) have.

hey @Shalvenay and @Glazius I'm stuck on a train and can't make it to today's game :(

My language's chief weirdness is how you can imbue practically endless amount of semantical nuance into a single word by being liberal with agglutination.

Ah, that's a shame.

Agglutination is great. East Slavics are very flexive and it's . . . not good.

I remember seeing the Tatar case system, and count, and other stuff, and almost all of it looked very agglutinative and I was 'Finally, someone did cases right!'.

Suffices can introduce information like uncertainty, certainty, having an action performed (instead of performing it oneself), pretending to perform an action, ownership, performing an action casually... and they can be mished and mashed together to create horribly difficult-to-parse words

Although naturally most people stick to quite low numbers, because they get into tongue twister territory fairly quick

@vicky_molokh I think Swahili is the language that did grammatical gender right :)

@kviiri How's that?

@ACuriousMind ouch :/ how'd that happen?

Although I'm not really skilled enough at it yet to really provide very solid reasonings... the basic idea is that there's a large set of classes (as opposed to 2 or 3, there's around 15) each having a reasonably well-defined semantic role. Knowing a word, you can change its class to create new words whose meaning is predictable based on the original word.

Eg. mtoto means child, m- is the prefix indicating that we're dealing with the class of humans. Changing it to kitoto yields "baby", because "ki-" indicates objects and small things. utoto means "childhood", because "u-" indicates abstractions.

So for each word you learn, you actually get something like fifteen words. Although many of them are just plural forms of the others, and of course not every one of them is actually in use --- people'd probably understand the word "ukata" which'd be something like "knifehood" but I doubt it really means anything.

@Shalvenay well, I should have been home about an hour ago but the first train I was on was already delayed and now we're apparently waiting for some emergency in front of us to be moved off the rails :P

@kviiri Of course it does! Here's an illustration of the practical application of the concept. youtube.com/watch?v=WWl8EbNN8NM

@kviiri Sounds useful. No idea whether it's overengineered (people seem to often run into problems when learning languages with more than a half-dozen cases, or Japanese/Chinese object-type endings for numbers, or other highly numerous variations).

@kviiri You might like the Yup'ik language family, too. It's an affixally polysynthetic agglutinative language.

That is, you can use multiple suffixes on a root form to create meanings which might take a whole sentence to communicate in a language like English.

The first part of the word is always the root, but the rest can be re-ordered to further change meaning.

[Wohoo, people talking about linguistics!]

(I've read a few pages of a friend-of-a-friend's thesis-in-progress about Yup'ik developmental psychology; they've got language for details of social and mental development that English barely even admits exist.)

@Anaphory Yeah, diving into this topic and not getting blank stares was a pleasant surprise.

@vicky_molokh It is Lojban, and it plays with the fact that it is left-binding, so ((broken light) bulb) instead of (broken (light bulb)) by default, and the fact predicates have a fixed number of arguments, so ‘change’ should have 3.

It probably 'helps' that English gives fewer clues about whether a verb is transitive.

… or even a verb.

@Anaphory [wave] I did a bit of summary/coda at the end of the chat last night. Hope it was helpful!

@Anaphory That too, but I mean even once you know it's a verb.

@BESW Reading up on it now

@BESW Oh, cool! Thank you, it was!

Yey!

Glad I could be of service. [grin] Let me know how it goes, if you can.

@BESW A classic example from Finnish is "Juoksentelisinkohan?" which roughly means "I wonder if I should run around aimlessly?" From the root "juosta" + "-ella" indicating casual/habitual + "-isi" indicating conditional + "-n" indicating first person, singular + "-ko" indicating yes/no question + "-han" indicating some variety of certainty or uncertainty or ... err, I honestly don't know and the meaning'd be pretty much the same without :)

Space indicators in Yup'ik are interesting

@vicky_molokh I like languages with explicit valency marking and valency modification, both in conlangs (Latejami) and in real languages (a colleague of mine is working on Abui [ID], it has some cool stuff in that domain)

@Anaphory Urrrgh I once had a teacher who had bought into "don't end a sentence with a preposition" but never really thought about it carefully. Marked me down for ending a sentence with "shut up."

@BESW So sorry you had to endure that :( it's a rule I love to hate, and that's all the love it gets from me.

@kviiri Cool.

@BESW I have a friend who teaches German as second languages. We have regular mock-fights over prescriptivist vs. descriptivist grammar. Although I think he would know better than (a) to subscribe to something equivalent of ‘no prepositon at the end of a sentence’ and (b) to have that confusion.

(For those not immediately getting why that's so awful--even if you think it's wrong to end an English sentence with a preposition, the word "up" in "shut up" is part of the transitive verb "to shut up," and not a preposition in that context.)

@BESW Oooh! Haha

@kviiri Yeah, not a good look, and I brought it up because of how ambiguously English can use its words and structures.

That ambiguity can be beautiful when used deliberately, but there's so many places where it can require great skill and practice to achieve basic clarity.

(See also the way the poet Rumi created deliberate ambiguity by using gender-neutral pronouns but applying terms and phrases that were traditionally but not exclusively associated with particular genders, in ways that were not traditional.)

@BESW Ooh

That sounds fascinating

I don't know Persian except in tiny fragments, so I can't appreciate the nuance of the original text? But I've read about it.

Here's an article about translating Rumi.

@BESW As usual, the German solution works nicely: "the verb isn't 'to shut up,' it's 'to upshut.'"

@nitsua60 Except that we then withit upend that we actually in some grammatical contexts those kinds of verbs apart split.

I feel like you're just begging me to quote Twain.

So I will:

> The Germans have an inhuman way of cutting up their verbs. Now a verb has a hard time enough of it in this world when it's all together. It's downright inhuman to split it up. But that's just what those Germans do. They take part of a verb and put it down here, like a stake, and they take the other part of it and put it away over yonder like another stake, and between these two limits they just shovel in German.

@nitsua60 Until I read the quote, I didn't know that's what I was doing, but I was definitely doing exactly that.

hey there @CaptainBohemian

@Shalvenay hi

Hello

@nitsua60 Which gets us to upgeshuttin as a bit of fake German for the shut up verb phrase

hey there @nitsua60

@Shalvenay hey-ooh

@nitsua60 how're things going?

@Shalvenay Okay--just about to get dinner in the oven for me and the kids, Mrs. nitsua is on her way back from the hospital where her dad's been moved out of the ICU after 6 weeks. So, good signs!

@nitsua60 cool! will you be on for a bit after dinner's in the oven? (want to ping you on Discord again)

It'll have to be after the kids are in bed.

@nitsua60 OK

[record scratch]

hey thar @Helwar

hey ho

hola amigos

Hafa adai

Konas ata tu?

doing alright here

Good salutations fine chatizens

Well met, dragon-man.

Hehehe

I ran my first convention games of D&D and Fiasco last week. Fiasco went great (had this wacky playset where the concept is "everyone is a different version of Batman").

D&D not bad, but I think next time I'd limit to fewer players.

Lol

"everyone is Batman"