TRPG General Chat - 2019-04-14

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12:09 AM

@V2Blast Thanks for pointing these mistakes.
" Creatures that failed their saving throw can't consume liquids that they were carrying for the duration of the effect. " Here I'm trying to say that creatures that didn't failed the saving throw can still consume... liquids. And just as you say, liquids it's a very broad term indeed. The only liquid that I can imagine someone consuming during a fight are potions, so maybe it would be better if I just say "Creatures that failed their saving throw can't consume potions that they were carrying for the duration of the effect.

12:51 AM

yeah, I don't see why it'd be "the same spell" if they literally count as separate spells in every other sense (e.g. learning spells)

so yeah, should be separate

1:08 AM

hey there @CesarM, welcome to the RPG.SE lair :)

Ello! Taking a look :)

[wave] Hi! you're welcome to lurk or chat as you like. It's the weekend, so the chat's a bit slow.

1:33 AM

@CesarM welcome!

(I can spell, I swear)

So long as you don't spell swears!

S-W-E-A-R-S

I went looking for good wish stories. There's one thing I don't get. Why nobody interprets wishing for a castle resulting in a nearby rocky hill being converted into a vacant castle (probably with no supplies either)? Why always this give the player ownership of a castle far away and actively contested.

@V2Blast lol

2:09 AM

@CesarM Welcome, valued associate!

2:27 AM

hey there @matildalee23, welcome to the RPG.SE lair :)

3:08 AM

hey there @JuneShores, how're things going? :)

Going alright.

Watching some Star Wars.

I found Star Wars much less good after playing Kerbal Space Program. The errors can no longer be ignored.

3:24 AM

@Joshua heheh

for me, it was EVE that ruined it

and in EVE, mostly my experiences as a support pilot

@JuneShores alright here. on a sidenote -- I was able to get that DW campaign started up, but it had to be put on hiatus due to some scheduling issues

user15026

@Joshua Also, when they wish for a castle, it's usually like...furnished and stuff too

The more the wish the more the backfire I guess.

Wishing for a newly conjured castle on some rocky outcropping is probably not going to anger the local monarch. Now if he already doesn't like me that's a different story.

@Joshua or you could use the old excuse that whatever you're doing in there needs to not get interrupted by tornado-propelled telephone poles ;)

I'm pretty sure that's a reference to something but I have no idea what.

:49917937 (it's why my $work has what basically is a bunker inside one of their buildings)

3:31 AM

You live in a tornado area?

@Joshua yes

Ah. Now it makes sense.

There's only one DM trickery I'm going to feel bad about. Just letting the DM believe that most stars should have habitable worlds when he unexpectedly has to add other star systems to the map.

Been down for a week with a really bad cold. Better now.

@Joshua LOL!

@Shalvenay Lol. I just peaked in for a minute. Didn't realize anyone saw me. :)

You see, I've got papers that go into ridiculous detail on the expected number of life-capable planets. It's less than one per universe.

I don't think terraforming's possible in D&D without some pretty heavy wish abuse.

3:41 AM

@Joshua yeah, the margin of error on those estimates is rather large though :P

Unfortunately the way they are computed means the margin of error is only large in one way, to even less likely.

@matildalee23: Hint: it can take some time for the server to notice you've dropped.

@Joshua well that depends, because if you are going to claim ownership of that,... it's his/her land

if you pay them taxes that might be a different story though

[taxes] Which is what I was about to say. It's not like my allegiance has changed because I suddenly have a castle.

Hot RPG Questions

4:18 AM

4

Q: How long does the line of fire that you can create as an action using the Investiture of Flame spell last?

I have always interpreted the Investiture of Flame spell as having a flamethrower effect, similar to Aganazzar's Scorcher, but one of my players pointed out a different interpretation. Here is the relevant segment of the spell: You can use your action to create a line of fire 15 feet long an...

that's fair

4:41 AM

I just bought @jennmartin80's "The Goose of Grillner Grove" and I'm howling with laughter. It's a one-page story-building game about townsfolk plagued by an angry goose. It's pay what you can, I paid $5 and it's worth every penny. https://jennmartin.itch.io/goose-of-grillner-grove

Tweeted by jeeyonshim on April 13, 2019 at 6:52 PM

user15026

@BESW this sounds awesome (and reminds me of my university in the spring when there would be "don't go out this door/down this path/over here because the geese are nesting and they will be very angry" signs everywhere because the geese were all over campus to the point where like you can get Canada Goose stuffies and such with my university:s logo on it.

user15026

(also I like that I naturally assumed it was Canada geese they were referencing out of fear and awe. But regular geese are also alarming when mad)

5:13 AM

Codex - Emerald is now available for FREE on The Gauntlet website! Just head to the link below to get the free issue (plus a shiny new Monsterhearts 2 skin). Please RT! https://www.gauntlet-rpg.com/codex.html

Tweeted by GauntletRPG on April 10, 2019 at 5:00 PM

5:43 AM

@Ash I'm extremely gad there are no geese here

although having more birds is usually a good thing

6:12 AM

We do have some geese, but they're usually pets or something close to it.

There was a goose outside my high school which would menace the busses.

6:43 AM

honk

7:05 AM

@Joshua I'm pretty sure they don't count as errors if Lucas wasn't even trying to go for scientific accuracy. Fantasy isn't just 'bad sci-fi', it's a genre of its own.

@BESW ah fair enough

I have never seen one here

I have seen them in some other places but not here

7:29 AM

@vicky_molokh I like Jemisin's definition of "hard" SF; she sidesteps the "realism" issue entirely which I think is appropriate.

Today's FAR SECTOR q is more of a clarification. I've seen some articles referring to it as hard SF. It is not! Hard SF is *centered* on the science or tech; this'll be a character story. Sure, it's got a Dyson swarm in it, but y'all know me, I'll stick a Dyson swarm in anything.

Tweeted by nkjemisin on April 12, 2019 at 3:56 PM

@BESW That's certainly a useful distinction. Sadly, a bunch of different distinctions get covered by the same two terms, which causes a lot of confusion and inability to convey information both concisely and clearly.

Not that such categories can ever be objectively definable, but as an aesthetic grouping I think "where is the story centered" captures the aesthetic more effectively than any discussion of "accuracy" or "realism."

I think on two axes, it's possible to find stories that fit into each of the four squares (or at least that lean closer towards all four corners).

And I think both distinctions can be useful for describing what kind of stories a reader/player/etc. likes.

@clacksee I'm not distinguishing between hard sf and "soft sf," however one defines that. (Usually it's physics is "hard" because men dominate it but biology is "soft" bc women dominate that.) Just talking about where it's centered.

Tweeted by nkjemisin on April 12, 2019 at 6:09 PM in reply to clacksee

Oh, that's a third axis, one that I personally find less useful, but others may think differently.

7:35 AM

One does not have to create all-encompassing Punnet squares to categorize all stories in order to discuss one particular quality shared amongst some stories.

HOW TO MAKE COOL #TTRPG ZINES WITHOUT BEING GOOD AT DRAWING A Thread (I'm no expert or something at all, but here we go. This is just my opinion, so if I'm wrong at something...yeap, I am a human... a human that can't draw)

Tweeted by guilhermedenovo on April 12, 2019 at 11:38 PM

@BESW Of course one doesn't have to. Still, it's a tool that is at some times useful and at others not so useful.

in The Reading Room, Aug 1 '17 at 5:20, by BESW

With the rare exception of things like solarpunk, genres are defined post facto in recognition of an existing body of work--whether by critical analysts studying the phenomena, or by marketers identifying a new target audience.

Oct 17 '17 at 10:53, by BESW

@Erics So, here's the thing: genre is often treated as a description of content, but it's not. It's a way to categorize audiences.

I think *in practice* it's both (to both quotes):
Genres *start out* as post facto categories, but afterwards you get people thinking 'I want to write a cyberpunk setting' or 'I want to play in a cyberpunk setting I haven't played in before'.

in The Reading Room, Aug 1 '17 at 5:27, by BESW

I think "the existence of a genre is what causes the creation of works of literature" is accurate, inasmuch as many professional authors set out to write with the intent of appealing to a particular known, marketable audience (romance and horror authors are especially known for this). However, in the context of the answer it's perhaps misleading.

Again, creators targeting a genre are targeting an audience.

(With the exception that proves the rule being Hubbard's Battlefield Earth.)

I suppose that can easily be true too. By saying what sort of things I would like to see in a setting's content, I get categorised as audience type A, B or Z.

7:50 AM

(Hubbard was disappointed with every scifi novel he read, and came up with an impossible set of requirements that he thought were necessary for the novel which he wanted to read. He set out to write one himself, and though he failed to meet his own exacting definition he succeeded in writing a novel which pleased him--thus supporting my thesis that genres are about audiences rather than content.)

It's also useful to see how genre is weaponized as a form of affirmation or condemnation:

in The Reading Room, Mar 8 '17 at 9:22, by BESW

Margery Allingham is one of the best murder mystery writers of all time, and during her life was accorded the glowingly high critical praise of "practically not a mystery writer at all."

Or how scifi.se users will bend content-based genre definitions into Gordian knots in order to exclude certain pieces of media simply because they don't want to be associated with the target demographic of that media.

@BESW I still don't see those as mutually contradictory, (reads further down) at least in good-faith applications. The preference for a given type of content is what is often used to categorise an audience.

Maybe it's a matter of me seeing hardness (of the respect-for-science kind) as a slider that can vary, rather than as a 'standalone' genre.

In practice, I see "hardness" of scifi used as rhetorical cudgel to claim one audience's superiority over another, as if most of the people in any given genre-audience don't indulge in other types of fiction with equal glee.

Most claims about the "hardness" of the scifi one consumes are claims about value or virtue of one's entertainment choices.

That's a major reason why I'm big on pushing awareness that genre is shifty and slidey and post-facto.

Oct 30 '14 at 3:53, by BESW

And its conclusion is actually true, though from a different approach: genre is a sorting mechanism for consumers and analysts. It's usually totally divorced from the book's actual content. "Young adult" fiction is a great bald-faced example of how genre is more about the consumer than the product.

Oct 30 '14 at 4:08, by BESW

Seriously, I've read some very upset authors on having no control over the marketing of their books, resulting in books getting totally misrepresented because some tangentially related genre was calculated to sell more that quarter.

I've certainly seen such a weaponized use. But I also think it's helpful for making settings coherent. I currently run two campaigns set in soft settings - one in Eclipse Phase, one in my own homebrew that is *very* soft. But when I was playing, say, the super-hard (except for Mars terraforming) Transhuman Space, finding a soft element would break the coherence and so I would be disappointed to encounter it.
In the case of discussing whether, say, a thing fits into THS, or whether one should worry about a thing in Star Wars, it's a helpful metric.

I've seen Binti get advertised as YA.

It's absolutely useful to consider how loose a given story is going to play with the known limits of human capacity. But that's not a genre.

8:08 AM

I find 'YA' to be a rather non-descriptive term that undermines the usual usefulness of genre for things like, say, 'modern murder mystery' or 'body horror' or 'Greek mythology'.

Genres are useful when they provide some information about the tropes found in the work. When they don't, it becomes better to ask directly.

H*ck, I've taken to just saying "speculative fiction" as a catch-all for scifi, fantasy, Afrofuturism, Africanjujuism, etc.

@BESW I'm fine with hardness not being treated as a genre, especially since it gives no hint of the story type. 'Hard-sci' is at most a setting descriptor, not a story descriptor. OTOH 'murder mystery' does look like a useful story-genre descriptor. I have no idea what YA actually means. I was born in 1984 and found Mortal Engines an amusing popcorn flick, does that make me a young adult?

@vicky_molokh Jemisin gave a definition of hard SF as a story descriptor.

@BESW I'm sorry, I should've specified which of the three (or more?) meanings of hard-sciness I found non-descriptive of stories.

For purposes of finding shared RPG concepts, I'm thinking that the Spark of Fate session zero formula will be more useful than waving vaguely at different genres or examples.

8:14 AM

I've taken a look at Spark a long time ago, I should give it another go some time.

And yeah, part of my point is that YA is just one of the most obvious examples of how "genre" is a slippery marketing term rather than an objective description of content.

@BESW I don't find it useful as a term for describing me as an audience member either, unless someone secretly extended the term 'young adult' beyond 30y.o. ever since the last time I encountered it in use on a conference.

Right. But all genres are audience descriptors--just very bad ones which exploit our learned need to define ourselves by the products we consume.

I think the reality is that for any useful category of description, there will also be not-so-useful terms within the categorisation. 'Murder mystery' is rather useful as a story descriptor, it immediately tells that the story will involve a murder and the investigation thereof, usually with a focus on evidence and witness accounts.

For many decades, "murder mystery" meant that... and also connotations that "romance novel" tends to have now, of amateur writing that appealed to prurient voyeurs and only the most remarkable examples contained any redeeming quality or social relevance.

That's why Allingham was praised as "practically not a mystery writer at all." Because the people writing those reviews liked her books and didn't want to be lumped in with "readers of mysteries."

That's why people on scifi.se will argue that the Transformers cartoons belong on their site but My Little Pony cartoons don't.

It's why some people persist in thinking of comic book enthusiasts as social outcasts despite comic book storytelling being the driving force behind the most successful media products in the world.

8:25 AM

Yes, BadWrongFun-ism exists and is not a good thing. I don't dispute that.

We cannot separate genre from categorizing the audiences who consume it, because that is a primary function of the genre label.

Not incidental.

Genre is an impolite fiction constructed by the distributor and the analyst. It is often a very useful fiction, but genre is neither immutable, nor inherent, nor natural.

8:51 AM

like 70% of my design philosophy is 'the age of dice is ending; people, bodies, and lips are much more interesting randomisers'

Tweeted by magicspacegirl on April 13, 2018 at 8:30 AM

Dungeon Masters, what’s the longest session you’ve ever run? I’ve just finished at 12 hour session. 12 hours of standing up. My mind is broken and my body destroyed. #DnD

Tweeted by seanofthehunt on April 14, 2019 at 1:41 AM

I don't know if anyone here except maybe Trogdor will understand why Janelle Monáe as Captain Scarlet is so brilliant but it is giving me life right now and I had to share.

@BESW If that assessment of the future is true, seems like I'm in for some very rough time, given how much trouble I have understanding people. Dice are so much more understandable, allowing me as a player make mostly-informed choices.

I keep going back to Dog Eat Dog and how it used dice to make a statement by removing their power as a randomization mechanic.

...and how it used personal qualities of the people at the table as a determiner, to similar effect.

2 hours later…

user15026

10:40 AM

@BESW meep. I have only a vague understanding of this but what I have is good and I like this

...I put too much wasabi in my tuna salad tonight. [fans mouth]

@Ash Captain Scarlette, perhaps?

user15026

11:10 AM

I am trying to figure out how I know that's a thing but honestly with my memory I should just let myself know I have a vague knowing of it and keep going :p

Looks at questions about sealing wax and building homes in the side of mountains. I'm starting to think we need a general reference question which asks "How much does stuff cost?"

Where the answer is "Stuff that adds a little flavour costs virtually nothing (so you can get flavour quickly and easily). Stuff that achieves life goals costs a lot (so that you get a sense of achievement when you buy it after slaughtering two dragons and their pet owlbear). Stuff that impacts how effective you are in combat costs a lot (it makes it easier to get more money). The D&D economy is based on game impact and not normal economical principles."

Feb 9 '16 at 3:16, by BESW

Yeah, the D&D "economy" is balanced around usefulness for adventuring, making gold a meta-textual rating of adventuring utility rather than an actual currency.

user15026

@Quentin oh that helps me understand why money math seems extra slippery sideways in D&D

11:27 AM

@Ash Treating D&D gold like a real economy works about as well as treating D&D alignment like real morality or D&D falling like real physics.

9

user15026

@BESW in general it feels like you need to divorce these ideas from their real world counterparts or the wheels fall right off.

Jul 6 '18 at 15:25, by BESW

That's one reason it seems so obvious to me that D&D (all sorts) has a very narrow kind of story it supports telling; those are the bits which remain mostly internally coherent and allow relatively easy suspension of disbelief for the odd bits.

Jul 6 '18 at 15:26, by BESW

The further you go away from the bits of the set that are fully built, the more work the group has to put in to avoid noticing that everything's just painted backdrops and some guy making forest noises.

"C'mon, guys... I worked really hard on those flats!"

I love okapi butts, they're awesome.

> mousepunk is what i’m calling taking on social issues by using mice & other animals to illustrate classes from a bottom-up perspective, yknow like what cyberpunk does when used correctly

@VolumetricSteve similarly or adjacent to mousepunk would be like: Secrets of NIMH, Watership Down, Redwall

Tweeted by cathroon on March 23, 2019 at 9:37 PM in reply to cathroon

MOUSEPUNK.

RAIL MAP online: Historic railways, railroads and tramways (UK and Ireland)

12:20 PM

@BESW I mean, I definitely think that is amazing XD

also I pretty much know why you in particular like it XD

1:05 PM

Afternoon

user15026

@BESW I love this but it also makes me frustrated at how sparse that map would be if you did it here. (I know Canada is huge and all but still)

Hot RPG Questions

1:22 PM

2

Q: Roughly how much would it cost to hire a team of dwarves to build a home in the mountainside?

Since I began D&D I had an idea to try to hire dwarven miners to build it into the cliff side. I am not expecting it to be huge and extravagant, but it needs to be big enough for 4 people, one of whom has a large beast companion. This is just something I would be looking for in the future, but if...

1:47 PM

@IlmariKaronen There's me, quite often!

I don't think I count as particularly interesting for you though :(

(we are IRL and even IRC-friends)

2:09 PM

hey there @Quentin

hey

@Quentin how're things going?

Could be better

@Quentin awww :/ doing alright here, myself

Sup, both of you

Hope your day gets better

2:35 PM

We have election day today

2:58 PM

@kviiri Settled on a candidate yet?

@kviiri We have taxes today.

@Someone_Evil I actually voted a week back, so more than settled :)

@BESW condolences :(

3:17 PM

Sadly a party I don't really like has grown in polling for the past week, they're likely to wind up being second-biggest

@BESW ooooooo that really strikes a chord with me. I've never thought about people as randomisers...

3:37 PM

@Rubiksmoose People are bad at certain kinds of random (something about 7 red hammers), but good at other. I'm guessing anyone who's sat in the GM seat has found their players finding a unpredictable path which throws their planned material out the window

2 hours later…

5:16 PM

Early votes are in, time to start the spectator sports

Actually might do that in Not a Bar

2 hours later…

7:10 PM

sup friends

17

Q: Creating truly alien, intelligent NPC races

How can I make intelligent NPC races that are truly alien? They need to be: Culturally non-human. They need to be stranger than any sort of human culture that already exists. Rational. Behaving completely randomly, or with no logical purpose would be non-human, but not meaningful. Physically...

system-agnostic npc

this question looks very much like a worldbuilding question to me - without a specified system, pretty much all the answers are just uncited idea generation, and virtually none of it seems to be necessarily harnessing RPG expertise (except for Maldrak's answer, which actually gives an example of how to make this NPC race feel alien when they're introduced to PCs)

Makes sense. What's the protocol for this? VTC as off-topic? Take it to meta?

it feels simultaneously opinion-based, too broad, and more suitable for worldbuilding.SE

I'm not sure which, which is part of why I ask here :P

Hot RPG Questions

7

Q: I'm having difficulty getting my players to do stuff in a sandbox campaign

I've been a GM for about three years now. I've been GMing for this group for almost two years next month. I have an issue with motivating my players to take action. It's a sandbox campaign and they're currently going after the BBEG's old lairs to get clues on who he is and how he was defeated b...

pathfinder problem-players sandbox plot-hooks

2 hours later…

8:57 PM

help me brainstorm an archfey warlock patron!

one of my PCs is a warlock and I asked him who his patron was, and he said "what do you suggest?"

my goal: the patron should be mysterious and powerful but _not_ doomful -- if my PC wanted a patron that was out to destroy the world, he would've chosen a Great Old One patron

idea (1): Your patron is an eladrin woman who apparently owes a favor to one of your distant ancestors. She refuses to give her name, and once got very angry when your grandfather offered her a nickname. You refer to her as the Lady in Green. She has a leather-bound book in which you wrote your name at your coming-of-age ceremony, under your mother's name and your grandfather's name. Most of your family are warlocks, though few have much power.

idea (2): Your patron is a very tall willow tree whose grove you blundered into while hunting on Midsummer Night. Its bark is silver; its leaves are a much better shade of green than normal trees have. You ate a fruit from its branches and have had power ever since. You dream of leaves rustling. Sometimes you find seeds in your pockets, and you plant them where you can. Your home, back in Marcenia, is surrounded by willow saplings grown from these trees.

I need a third idea!

Last time I helped someone come up with a fey patron, it was in 4e, and she was the queen of a city that occasionally moves into the mortal plane. She appeared to him in a dream to make the pact, on the night when he had determined to enact a desperate plan that, if successful, would disrupt the balance of the world.

Those are both neat. There's always the idea of an archfey who views the warlock as a pawn for their own secretive ends, which you can decide later

@MikeQ Yeah, this was how we handled it. She gave him power to enact his plan (which she wanted to be successful but didn't tell him that), in exchange for "a favor to be determined later."

Which I used to send them off on a quest about eight levels later, and when they completed it she offered to let him leave her service (re-class into something else).

@DanB Depending on setting, fey societies are usually organized into courts. So maybe the archfey is grooming and/or manipulating the warlock for some political purpose.

Generally I go with feylocks as proxies who can act in ways that the fey are bound by nature and contract not to.

"If I go take care of this problem in the mortal plane myself, my rival fey will have permission to make more problems for me because I broke the treaties first. Hey, mortal... have you ever heard of 'plausible deniability'?"

9:09 PM

@BESW I like this! Thank you!

@BESW Yep, I think that's generalizable to most warlocks, if not some clerics and paladins, depending on the setting's cosmology

Paladins are just warlocks with better PR agents.

@BESW that makes sense ;)

@BESW LOL!

Hot RPG Questions

1

Q: How many spell slots should a Fighter 11/Ranger 9 have?

I've been DM for like 2-3 months and one player who's playing a Fighter (arcane archer) wants to multiclass into Ranger. Arcane Archer is not a spellcaster so assuming he will go Fighter 11/Ranger 9 how many spellslots should he get as 9th lvl Ranger. Should it be 4/3/2 or 4/2 only? I don't know ...

dnd-5e multi-classing

@HotRPGQuestions It had better be a slow day for that Q to go "hot".

@DanB Hags are fey creatures, if you'd like to play with that

9:18 PM

Another fun spin on patrons is that the patron is relatively low-ranking and/or incompetent among their peers, and they're using the warlock to boost their own image

Careful, hags play for keeps.

There is Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, Azathoth, and the other ancients whose names we fear to speak... and then there's Dave, your patron. Nobody fears Dave.

@MikeQ Well now I know what I'm doing next time I'm playing/Dming for a Warlock

@Someone_Evil You can do something similar with clerics and paladins of a lesser deity, like Small Gods

@MikeQ TFW you realise you have been worshipping the god of hangovers...

9:30 PM

@Someone_Evil Sounds like the most useful god to me, assuming he/she helps with them

@V2Blast I don't quite remembering it being like that in the source material unfortunately. Although, yes.

Hot RPG Questions

1

Q: Can I throw a sword that doesn't have the Thrown property at someone?

In earlier editions of D&D, such as 3.5, a character could throw a melee weapon using feats like Throw Anything. In D&D 5th edition, is there any rule, ability, or method which would allow a player character to throw a one-handed melee weapon without the Thrown property, such as a longsword?

dnd-5e weapons throwing-things

@MikeQ Careful, he's a member of the Brotherhood of Guys Named Dave.

10:25 PM

@MikeQ Also now I have "Freddy the Red-Brained Mi-go" stuck in my head. Thanks.

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