TRPG General Chat

12:02 AM

@BESW Going on and on about intricate details makes more sense when the average reader isn't able to just Google what an elephant looks like.

Or do an image search for Tuscan countrysides.

BESW

Ah. I wouldn't call that purple, though.

The phrase "purple prose" implies excess to the point of distraction, melodramatic and unnecessary.

Good descriptive text is engaging and pulls you in, regardless of the level of detail.

> The life of the journalist is poor, nasty, brutish and short. So is his style. You, who are so adept at the lovely polishing of every grave and lucent phrase, will realize the magnitude of the task which confronted me when I found, after spending ten years as a journalist, learning to say exactly what I meant in short sentences, that I must learn, if I was to achieve literature and favourable reviews, to write as though I were not quite sure about what I meant but was jolly well going to say something all the same in sentences as long as possible.

user15026

12:47 AM

Hey, I know that book! :)

BESW

@Ash I still have to show Troggy the movie!

user15026

I still need to watch that myself.

BESW

Remember the Quivering Brethren?

user15026

giggles yes!

Rubiksmoose

@Xirema this gave me a legitimately long and hearty laugh.

BESW

1:01 AM

@Ash And possibly one of the best casting choices I've ever seen: Stephen Fry as Mr. Mybug.

user15026

@BESW oh my gooooosh it's so uncomfortably perfect augh

linksassin

@BESW I think the latest question is a stretch even for your amazing content finding skills. Find me a feat that does this, people on this site disagreed about what it did. No edition or context given.

BESW

Maybe....

7

Q: Does Monkey Grip allow wielding 2 handed weapons in 1 hand?

As typical in D&D a friend and I are having a debate, this time about whether or not Monkey Grip (3.5 complete warrior feat) allows a medium creature to wield a 2-handed medium weapon with one hand. He cites (PH p113): "For instance, a Small greatsword (a two-handed weapon for a Small creatu...

7

Q: What is the benefit of Monkey Grip?

Monkey Grip enables you to wield a larger weapon at the cost of -2 to attack. In the best case, a larger weapon gives you 3.5 extra damage: Greatsword 2d6 -> large Greatsword 3d6. The increase is even lower for smaller weapons. Power Attack gives you more damage increase for -2 to attack, and ...

dnd-3.5e feats weapons optimization

linksassin

I think they mean 'Great Weapon Master' for 5e. But without an edition it's impossible to know.

Though that is certainly a good option.

BESW

Ah, yes, that one seems to be controversial too.

nitsua60

1:15 AM

Hrmm... worth giving them explicit write-access here, if people want to help? (Don't think they're going to get to the 20 rep-barrier at this rate.)

linksassin

@nitsua60 They certainly won't with that question. Your call. I'm sure we could find it in chat though

BESW

I think it's much better to go with "what problem are you facing that you think this is the solution to?"

nitsua60

Here's the thing: if there are people here saying "yeah, I'll help them" then I'm happy to grant access. The 20-rep restriction's purpose is to keep spambots out of chat, and this guy certainly isn't a bot. But if they're going to get in here and hear crickets, there's not much point.

So if someone wants to help him ping me; if not, that's no judgment against anyone.

BESW

@linksassin Since he's talking about more 3.5 stuff apparently, it could be Monkey Grip. Or Leap Attack. Or Piranha Strike, Arcane Strike...

I think any attempt to help in chat is just gonna be shouting random possibilities at 'em.

linksassin

@BESW You're likely right. As usual.

BESW

1:24 AM

I'm... sorry?

trogdor

@BESW oh my God just that clip was hilarious

linksassin

Nothing to be sorry for. It's a positive quality. Just makes the rest of us look bad sometimes :P

trogdor

(like every part, mistaking what he meant, Because I sure as hell did too, and then the hellfire preacher walking in right when he explained what he meant XD)

BESW

In context, you realize that Flora knows exactly what he means and is desperately trying to pretend she doesn't.

trogdor

@BESW oooooh

Understandable

user15026

1:29 AM

Oh, I do need to watch this, especially because I wanna see what they do about the cows

trogdor

That would be an extra uncomfortable situation for sure

BESW

That's why, for example, when he says "Do you know what DH Lawrence said?" she says "I do, actually, yes." It's to try and get him to shut up.

trogdor

Ah

BESW

In the book:

in The Reading Room, Mar 6 '18 at 0:17, by BESW

> "There has been increasing discontent among the male intellectuals for some time at the thought that a woman wrote ‘Wuthering Heights’. I thought one of them would produce something of this kind, sooner or later. Well, I must just avoid him, that’s all."
- Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm, 1932

trogdor

So that's why she cringed so hard when the lady tells him she asked a question about him but or something

BESW

1:31 AM

in The Reading Room, Mar 30 '17 at 0:05, by BESW

(Cold Comfort Farm satirises everything from futurism to rural romanticism to the preponderance of male voices in the literary canon.)

trogdor

Hmm maybe I should read this

And watch that too

BESW

I think I still have a copy you can borrow.

user15026

I really enjoyed it for it's sheer ridiculousness and how well it satirized things

trogdor

I love ridiculous things and satire

At least if I understand the satire anyway

BESW

> And it is only because I have in mind all those thousands of persons not unlike myself, who work in the vulgar and meaningless bustle of offices, shops and homes, and who are not always sure whether a sentence is Literature or whether it is just sheer flapdoodle, that I have adopted the method perfected by the late Herr Baedeker, and firmly marked what I consider the finer passages with one, two or three stars. In such a manner did the good man deal with cathedrals, hotels and paintings by men of genius. There seems no reason why it should not be applied to passages in novels.

(Baedeker invented the star rating system for tourist attractions. That quote is from the introduction where she explains she's going to star the best bits of her own novel.)

trogdor

1:35 AM

XD

BESW

For example:

trogdor

Nice

BESW

> "Hullo," said Flora, getting her blow in first. "I feel sure you must be Reuben. I'm Flora Poste, your cousin, you know. How do you do? I'm so glad to see somebody has come in for tea. Do sit down. Do you take milk?"
***The man's big body, etched menacingly against the bleak light that stabbed in from the low windows, did not move. His thoughts swirled like a beck in spate behind the sodden grey furrows of his face. A woman . . . Blast! Blast! Come to wrest away from him the land whose love fermented in his veins, like slow yeast. [...] Break her. Break. Keep hold and hold fast the land. …

trogdor

What the heck is a beck in spate

BESW

A flooding mountain stream.

trogdor

1:39 AM

Ok then

BESW

"beck" comes from the same root as "brook," and you've probably encountered the idiom "a spate of [nouns]" meaning a large number of things appearing suddenly.

trogdor

Ah yes I have

But the way the phrase is put together didn't allow me to connect those dots

BESW

One of the things the book is satirising is books which fetishise rural life and feature ridiculously bad attempts at accents in the process.

A lot of the dialect is almost impenetrable and that's part of the joke.

The POV character is just as baffled as we are.

trogdor

To be fair, i find a ton of the different English accents very hard to parse

Not in books but actual people talking

BESW

And a good number of the weird words her characters use are just plain made up.

trogdor

1:44 AM

Lol

That sounds both hilarious and confusing

BESW

You can work it out from context when it's important.

trogdor

I do that a lot

It's how I've managed to read some books, and also how I learned a lot of words

BESW

But the ordinary words can be just as confusing; like it may take a while to figure out that it's set in the future with pay video-phones and private airplanes and a whole extra war.

Because they're just tossed in totally casually like of course these things are ordinary for you, dear reader.

trogdor

What do you mean by extra war?

user15026

@BESW that took me a good chunk of the book to figure out

V2Blast

1:51 AM

sounds like an interesting book!

spam/gibberish answer:

-4

A: How do I figure the dice and bonuses for attack rolls and damage rolls?

Uh iosksks moans euejshsjsn orgasm

BESW

> Claud, who had served in the Anglo-Nicaraguan wars of ’46, was at his ease in the comfortable silence in which they sat, and allowed the irony and grief of his natural expression to emerge from beneath the mask of cheerful idiocy with which he usually covered his sallow, charming face. He had seen his friends die in anguish in the wars. For him, the whole of the rest of his life was an amusing game which no man of taste and intelligence could permit himself to take seriously.

Cold Comfort Farm

Cold Comfort Farm is a comic novel by English author Stella Gibbons, published in 1932. It parodies the romanticised, sometimes doom-laden accounts of rural life popular at the time, by writers such as Mary Webb. == Plot summary == Following the death of her parents, the book's heroine, Flora Poste, finds she is possessed "of every art and grace save that of earning her own living". She decides to take advantage of the fact that "no limits are set, either by society or one's own conscience, to the amount one may impose on one's relatives", and settles on visiting her distant relatives at ...

trogdor

@BESW oh you just mean a made up one

V2Blast

Haha, I looked it up already after you mentioned it :P

BESW

And the movie's just as good. Like Princess Bride, the film captures much of the essence of the novel without even trying to encompass the novel's breadth.

trogdor

a princess bride endorsement you say?

XD

BESW

1:59 AM

They're surprisingly similar.

Both are satirical novels who root their success in the gimmick of being keenly aware that they are novels and presenting the author as a character in their own right as part of the satire.

trogdor

Nice

BESW

And then they got movie adaptations which understood that wouldn't work on film, but understood the style of the satire well enough that they found other ways to capture the same atmosphere and feeling.

trogdor

I really do have a weakness for that kind of thing

BESW

So you get something that's very different in the particulars but feels similar.

trogdor

Like I told you before how I loved the thing they did in Dracula

With the notes they left around being literally part of the story

BESW

2:03 AM

Ah, yeah. Cold Comfort Farm isn't epistolary that way, but the author is a solid presence throughout the book even though they don't cut away for asides.

You can feel the author's smug self-satisfaction with a particularly well-turned phrase, and when they outdo themselves they leave a couple asterisks to call our attention to it.

trogdor

@BESW Yeah I think that will hit the same spot in my brain though

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