Rolemaster last night: I botched my "Were the sheep killed by a werewolf? 'cus they obviously were!" Roll ( minus 80, on a 1-100 scale. 100+ for a proper success). I am convinced that sheep will naturally attack each other, self-culling to thin their herd, and nothing untoward has happened.
The obvious "far-too-large wolf tracks" are overlapping sheep-hoof-prints.
The severed sheep-head stuck in a tree, 20' up, I am struggling to fit into my theory, but sheep have been known to stand on each other, to make "pyramids". perfectly normal behaviour.
Although we have met a werewolf, and we heard a odd wolf-howl last night, and we have heard rumours of a wolf-man in this area ... but yeah, circus-sheep attacking each other. That's what it was! :D
user15026
12:19 AM
That feels like the most logical explanation, for sure
I do like Rolemaster, if frustrating at times, for it's roll-up and roll-down rules! I also rolled 217 (on a 1-100) (plus skill 35) for a Local Culture "Where might this small shard of Stained Glass come from?"
It is clearly from the Tabernacle of Saint Sarah, 5 miles from here, south-west. Third window from the left. Part of the frieze showing her performing the Miracle of the Crows. See that yellow bit? Crow's beak.
You think "Nat20" is good ... wait until your 1-100 roll comes out over 400! :D
(If you roll 01-05, you roll again and subtract. If you roll 96-00, roll again and add. Rinse, repeat)
According to the D&D 5e Monster Manual, regarding destroying a phylactery, it says:
Destroying a lich's phylactery is no easy task and often requires a special ritual, item, or weapon. Every phylactery is unique, and discovering the key to its destruction is a quest in and of itself.
--...
Pretty much I have the background part of character creation (acolyte), both parents dead, father to some monster and mother during birth. marked by a goddess, served in her temple, and motivations are at least partially to serve said goddess. And yes it's D&D 5e
If its a specific campaign, with important details, you need to link the character's backstory into the Setting. Hard to give detail advice without knowing the setting, but a system we use is: Good, Bad, Ugly. Name 3 people your PC knows. One is friendly, helpful (Good). One is hostile, a rival or enemy (Bad) and the other is "complicated". (Ugly).
@Adeptus Nice. I'll check it out. I doubt we'll "go professional". Still working on basic questions, like what size rings to use, what metal is good (saw a decent deal on Mild Steel, but not sure if that's a good idea). etc. Once we've got the costume we want, we might expand :)
If your character has this conviction towards this goddess and what she stands for, you have a good starting point for a pillar of what your character is
I suppose this is a good time to pimp my Android Apps? Pitched as "Inspirational", in that they are Random lists you can be inspired by, they include lots of random words, categorised, and formatted! There is a Random Character App, which includes some (vague) motivations, and such, along with other things
@Adeptus Light is good :) we'll stick with metal, rather than plastic.
<Blatant Plug> If you like Random Words, and you like Creating PC Back Story, maybe you'll like "Mad Dwarf Inspirational Apps" https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=Mad+Dwarf+Productions
We went to NZ last year. Visited Weta Workshop, who did all the costumes & props for LOTR. Most of their chainmail was made of sliced up plastic pipe - it looks completely rubbish up close! I think they used metal for the closeups.
@Adeptus oh cool! Would love to see Weta! Yeah, i heard a lot was plastic. A lesson I learnt from painting wargaming miniatures: it doesn't have to look good up-close! It has to look good on the table, 4-6 feet away! :)
But also, they put huge amount of details into the "signature pieces", that most people would never notice
OK. It's a cool system (that our group does not get along with). Each PC has a bunch of "Aspects", that define who they are. Short sentences, that can be used for Bonuses and Penalties in play. Like "Devoted to The Goddess <namehere>", or "Raised in the City of <BigCity>" (insert campaign-relevant details)
If you can "bullet-point" a few things about your PC, it can give a good guide as to who they are
true, but broadening the concept: I found one way to 'produce' Aspects was to write a bit of prose, describing the PC. Then pick a few sentences, and call them Aspects! For @Himitsu_no_Yami 's circumstance, I'm suggesting the opposite! :) Try to define a few pithy, short Aspects, and then write a background (big stack of prose) around them :)
Having trawled a few Author forums, the main advice seems to be "Just Write!" . Type out a load of stuff. Whatever. Get something written. You can then change things.
My problem is writing anything approaching good, original stuff ... I can sit and type until the cows come home. But then I look at it, and think "that's a load of derivative, uninspired tosh" ... I then embrace that, and steal ideas from anything I can find! mix'n'match ! My current PC's background can be summarised as: Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves - Road to Damascus - People's Front of Judea
My previous (Exalted) PC was: Boy Named Sue - Masque of the Red Death - Drunken Master
Even my current PC is a reprise of a previous PC! Last one was Exuberant Healer (takes on others wounds). Always looking for new and interesting conditions! Current is grumpy! "Call that a wound? pffft"
I am a fairly new DM. I am playing with a group I have tried to DM and have played with as a PC. There is one person in that group that plays as a PC that says no, AKA he is the opposite of a murder hobo.
When faced with a decision or a turning point in the story he will say no to most of the p...
Old school RPer coming back after long gaming hiatus and new to D&D 5e. Liking what I see, and happy to be rid of THAC0, lol.
As I'm reading, it seems feats are a little different now and fewer and further between when leveling, so I'm guessing they're more valuable than they used to be. Going...
I think my favorite healer in any campaign was the one that shouted about your wounds like a drill sergeant that didn't get his morning coffee. "CALL THAT A STAB WOUND YOU'RE PATHETIC. RUB SOME DIRT IN IT AND WALK IT OFF."
I have a wizard casting Lightning bolt at a flying mount (Griffon), hoping to hit both the mount and its rider. The DM has determined that I have hit the mount, but we have the question of if this also hits the rider as well?
How does Lightning Bolt work when targeting both a mount and the ride...
Not a metallurgist, nor an expert on metalworking, but aluminium is more difficult to work with because it work-hardens fairly quickly, whereas steels (especially mild ones) can be much more forgiving
Wire Diameter, The ring’s size is described by their inner diameter. I recommend the wire to be 1/6 or 1/7 of the rings inner diameter. The wire is usually offered in sizes of 1.0mm, 1.2mm and 1.4mm. With 1.0mm wire you can build 6mm or 7mm rings. With 1.2mm wire you can build 8mm and 9mm rings. And with 1.4mm wire you can build 10mm and 11mm rings
The Cambion monster in the MM p.36 has the trait Fiendish Bleesing:
Fiendish Blessing The AC of the cambion includes its Charisma bonus.
Would it be unbalanced to offer my player's tiefling paladin a reskinned version as a racial feat (Feat as in instead of ASI)?
Reskinned:
Fiendish Bl...
Update on my bus strike - the union and the region are meeting today to resume talking. I am hoping we can reach an agreement soon. I don't know if we will but maybe we can make a good start so I and many others can have transit again.
user15026
I saw we, but I'm not actually part of any of it, short of riding the bus every day.
Why on earth would those people be valuable, they only provide the necessary work of providing essential transportation of people needed to keep the county moving. /s
All they do all day is sit in a chair and turn some knobs and levers, anyone could do that! If they wanted good pay they should get a real job. /s (side rant: the "get a real job" response is terrible; it acknowledges that of course this job is important and someone needs to do it, but says that whoever does it doesn't deserve a living wage for doing it.)
i get the impression more people in my generation (milennials basically) have either done food service work or have close friends that did, than people in older generations
and we have a better understanding of what a nightmare those jobs can be
well, everything is certainly romanticized as being "better back then" but I would bet that food service has always been crappy. The fact that minimum wage hasn't adequately increased to make jobs like that livable anymore is what makes them particularly rough these days
It used to be viable to work a summer job and pay for a year of schooling
but then government-backed student loans came along
and just like insurance companies, schools realized they could milk the crap out of the government, so they did
I didn't even get a cost of living increase this year
honestly, i didn't give anyone a raise this year, but i've always given a pretty decent raise over the past years. THey numbers just couldn't support it and we pay well above minimum wage.
@G.Moylan I'm a fan of insisting people "get a haircut and get a job" while they're in a meeting with me and obviously have both. I find this especially useful after mentions of "millennials" or "lazy users"
@NautArch A response to that might be that you then can't afford the people that you have. If the employees can't be fairly compensated because you're paying too much otherwise, there's an issue in budget priorities, presumably.
I know it's more complex than that, and it's easy to complain without being constructive. I think I'm just salty because I know my company makes enough to manage a miniscule raise and I'm already underpaid
@NautArch usually the issue is the concentration of finance flow at the top
i.e. the company overall has enough money going out to employee paychecks that it can pay everyone a living wage and then some, but the allocation of pay is instead divvied up such that the folks at the top get an extraordinarily large share to the extent that other peoples' shares have to give way beyond reason
@doppelgreener Yeah, this is generally my sense. When employers say "I'd have to let people go to pay you better!", that's generally a false choice, designed to protect the profits of the bosses.
but I personally prefer to make the argument that the state should provide a basic income to everyone to accommodate the cost of living because that would be trivially affordable under a progressive tax regime
then it becomes impossible for an employer to pay you too little to live on
@GcL I just use regular bread, fold along the diagonal and it fits pretty fine. Saves money, uses less carbs, and is a great use for the ankles of the loaf.
I'm still paying myself less than I earned years ago before running my own company. Yes, I make more than the folks at the lowest level, but I really do try and make it so that everyone can live while working for me.
@DavidCoffron I know of places that have done small-scale experiments involving a limited subset of their population, but nothing widespread and long-term
and it doesn't really work unless you can get everyone to buy into it, it's kind of about changing the value of the relationship between employers and employees
@Carcer That's one of the criticisms I've seen for the trials of UBI. If not everyone is receiving it, you don't see the reaction from employers (or whether there would be one in practice)
On one hand, a truly universal bonus sidesteps the worst of the tall poppy objections to it. On the other, I don't think it's proof against discouraging quality work. E.g. if I were receiving a kilobuck for doing nothing, odds are high that I would quickly ditch productive work and would dedicate my newly freed five workdays to hobbies, which would only be incidentally productive (or not at all).
UBI isn't meant to be enough support your luxrious lifestyle
it's basic living expenses
you still have to work to be able to live well
as automation increasingly reduces the amount of actual work required from humans, as well, I think we are ultimately going to get to a state where there isn't necessarily anything productive for every given person
@Carcer Right, but that could see many people working only part time and just settling for lower living expenses
I'm unsure whether American society (where I am) could subsist on 3- or 4-day workweeks (or shorter workdays), since many jobs require overtime as a result of high labor standards
I get that. But it creates a big motivational entry hurdle. It's a choice between, say, 0 and 10 units of work done, but only a move from 10 to 20, or, depending on exactly how much UBI is being proposed, from 10 to 11 units of reward.
@vicky_molokh In American politics (what I'm familiar with), it is typically around $1,000/month from what I've seen, but different circles give different numbers.
@vicky_molokh Right. If I, personally, got $1000/month I would try to work half as much (presently I work 40 hours a week). If all of my coworkers did likewise, the business I work for could not persist with the current number of employees.
@Carcer This is the big underrated point about UBI: As productivity increases, the amount of necessary work each individual human needs to do gets a lot lower, to the point where if our labor is only organized around necessary work (like it still is) then people are going to become jobless and homeless through no fault of their own.
(Is a big reason why we're going to need UBI in some form, even if we don't otherwise reorganize society around Socialist ideals)
@Xirema Interestingly, the productivity is still increasing (as in the number of goods and services provided), so really what is happening is the money that these extra goods and services make are being siphoned to particular parts of society.
@Carcer I've never found a lack of work to be done. Automating stuff usually just frees up people to do more important work... like interacting with other people.
@KorvinStarmast Oh, yeah, I definitely don't think it didn't exist. And I find I can get along a bit better with people who've worked service jobs lol.
So I am glad yet not glad you've experienced some of the pain :P
I've done a bit of those too and they're good jobs.
@GcL One great example of that is bank tellers. When ATMs and computerized transactions happened the job of the bank tellers just became more about customer service and sales
I think my favorite question is usually, "If you didn't have to work on these spreadsheets, what do you think you could get done around here?"
@DavidCoffron Yeah. That's usually the kind of answer I get. Something along the lines of helping people not gum up the works in the first place instead of turning cranks to fix stuff.
Was this question closed because it was about realism/verisimiltude? Or some other reason(s)?
Is it possible to wield a 'greatsword'?
Not that it's a great question, or isn't easily answerable by searching the web for the many articles and videos that discuss the general subject.
It's marked ...
When you check your notifications, they can come up the wrong color. This is brand new, and it depends on the site. This is on ELU:
Whereas this is on MSE (or SO):
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It’s also been reported to happen from a cell phone, where some links are red and othe...
@Carcer That's the dream. Hopefully. I've yet to run into that. I think the big problem now is moving or training people. Having an automated system cover most of what used to occupy someone's time is great only if there's a plan or mechanism that allows them to transition to something new. People are valuable, but really difficult to move around.
True. More un-spirational. I think dungeons should have those posters in them. "Don't worry. You're not the first adventuring party to fail" or "Fleeing is always an option. Tell your friends."
So to the people who helped me last night, thank you and we've got something worked out for my character with some help from both the DM and the author of the book i'm pulling the character from
@Xirema The joke, of course, is that the "dismantling of the order of a sovereign city" references a single event, where the monk freed a prisoner who was about to be executed in an extremely inhumane way by a corrupt judiciary, and my character's response was "I, too, enjoy breaking the law"
I'm playing a fire genasi but both of my parents were human. I was marked from birth by a goddess of fire. The DM added this part: The people feared you when you were cast aflame, killing your mother in labor. It's as if fate played some sick joke on you. It wasn't until you were a few years old when you first saw her [the goddess] in your dreams.
@Himitsu_no_Yami I, for one, like less mother murder. That just doesn't sound like fun. It's like the children our fantasy settings always seem to end up okay... even if the players have to literally divert an entire river into an oncoming army to make it so.
@Himitsu_no_Yami Plenty of other sick jokes that don't involve that. Like cute ones... like a baby that hiccups little bursts of fire. It's cute until the drapes are on fire. Then it's a real problem and protection from elements becomes a necessity.
@Himitsu_no_Yami I mean it's fine, dying in labour is a thing that happens and I don't think a story that has that but in a magical way is inherently bad
I just reckon that character might have some grievances to discuss with the ol' godly benefactor
"how was i supposed to know you'd be premature? with all of these half-elves, half-orcs, and half-whatevers running around, guessing the gestation period's a toss of a coin to your witcher"
@goodguy5 "Hello. We have received and appreciate your prayers. Unfortunately Ares isn't in right now on account of being stabbed to death. Please try again at a better time."
I have a Life Cleric who would like to help the party "Big Guns" be more effective in combat, but do so in a way that (hopefully) doesn't increase my healing load.
The Sanctuary spell forces enemies to make a Wisdom save in order to attack me, unless I end the spell by
“If the warded creatu...
I would like to roll for the random Chaos Bolt (first level spell) damage type, which is variable.
In play, I have to roll 1d8 and as a result I get the damage type of the spell:
I guess it should be something like:
&{template:default} {{name=Damage Type}}
{{[[1d8]]|acid|cold|fire|force|lig...
According to the D&D 5e Monster Manual, regarding destroying a phylactery, it says:
Destroying a lich's phylactery is no easy task and often requires a special ritual, item, or weapon. Every phylactery is unique, and discovering the key to its destruction is a quest in and of itself.
--...
Old school RPer coming back after long gaming hiatus and new to D&D 5e. Liking what I see, and happy to be rid of THAC0, lol.
As I'm reading, it seems feats are a little different now and fewer and further between when leveling, so I'm guessing they're more valuable than they used to be. Going...
I have a wizard casting Lightning bolt at a flying mount (Griffon), hoping to hit both the mount and its rider. The DM has determined that I have hit the mount, but we have the question of if this also hits the rider as well?
How does Lightning Bolt work when targeting both a mount and the ride...
The Cambion monster in the MM p.36 has the trait Fiendish Bleesing:
Fiendish Blessing The AC of the cambion includes its Charisma bonus.
Would it be unbalanced to offer my player's tiefling paladin a reskinned version as a racial feat (Feat as in instead of ASI)?
Reskinned:
Fiendish Bl...
Was this question closed because it was about realism/verisimiltude? Or some other reason(s)?
Is it possible to wield a 'greatsword'?
Not that it's a great question, or isn't easily answerable by searching the web for the many articles and videos that discuss the general subject.
It's marked ...
When you check your notifications, they can come up the wrong color. This is brand new, and it depends on the site. This is on ELU:
Whereas this is on MSE (or SO):
and this is on Mi Yodeya:
It’s also been reported to happen from a cell phone, where some links are red and othe...
I have a Life Cleric who would like to help the party "Big Guns" be more effective in combat, but do so in a way that (hopefully) doesn't increase my healing load.
The Sanctuary spell forces enemies to make a Wisdom save in order to attack me, unless I end the spell by
“If the warded creatu...
I would like to roll for the random Chaos Bolt (first level spell) damage type, which is variable.
In play, I have to roll 1d8 and as a result I get the damage type of the spell:
I guess it should be something like:
&{template:default} {{name=Damage Type}}
{{[[1d8]]|acid|cold|fire|force|lig...
