Okay, I've got to ask for help workshopping words on a sensitive (not US politics!) topic, but I've not followed the current thinking about NAB vs. Here There Be Dragons. Which would be the Good Place to ask people to come give a hand?
I read somewhere that spells like Darkness and Silence, where the effect of the spell spreads from a point I choose within range, can be cast on the surface of a moveable item. But after extensive googling, I couldn't find confirmation on it anymore. These are the relevant parts of the spell desc...
April Kit Walsh wrote a twitter thread about how "writing an RPG has been really educational in terms of how other people approach RPG texts." Ajey Pandey responds that "Reading an RPG can be an interesting insight into how its writer or writers run their games."
The story is that our DM had an NPC who essentially "joined our party" but was actually an enemy rogue. In the middle of combat, the NPC ran up and attacked a party member, which the DM deemed as a surprise attack and allowed him to get sneak attack. The goal was basically to one shot a low-level...
I am just DMing "Shadowdale - The Scouring of the Land" and would like to incorporate a caravan delivering arms to the dalesfolk. I figured 500 suits of leather armor, 500 large wooden shields, 500 shortspears and 2000 javelins would do. This amounts to roughly 20,000 lb. of weight. A heavy horse...
Is there a (monster creation) rule that allows a higher level spell to be cast using a lower level? I ask because I came across the "Shadow Fey Enchantress" (Kobold Press "Tome of Beasts", pages 170-172), as it states:
Spellcasting. The shadow fey is a 10th-level spellcaster. Her spellcasting ab...
@Ash Oh, hmm. After the first three episodes, I kinda like where this is going. Not saying anything that isn't obvious from the trailer, but S3 seems to be heading towards the direction of "Starfleet helping people resolve the crisis of the week" while having an engaging story line related to their temporal isolation and the state of 3000's Federation
I like the juxtaposition of tech being more advanced but warp being harder. Progress isn't always linear
I'm a bit disappointed that they're going with "crapsack future." They've already done trashy alternate universes and talked about why Starfleet was actually kind of a dystopia itself. A really interesting choice would've been to have the future be Pretty Good, Actually, without Starfleet, and the main characters have to deal with the fact that last season's sacrifice was good for... everyone but them, as they're now adrift in a world that doesn't need them.
Instead we get more "this particular crew is the savior of the universe. Again." and it's starting to feel both boring and contrived.
I dare Star Trek to explore a future without the Federation that's actually BETTER for lack of it.
Also, remember which existing Star Trek was about feeling obsolete? Only the best, most acclaimed film in the whole franchise. And which Star Trek is considered the most morally nuanced and compelling? Only the series which dared to point out the problems with the Federation's politics.
So it's not like it'd be too much of a risky leap for the show to go that direction, there's very solid precedent.
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan had, as a major theme, Kirk feeling old and obsolete: this is represented most clearly by the eyeglasses. (This comes back in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country where the theme is much more overt and less deftly handled.)
And the series Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is widely considered to be the most morally nuanced of the Star Trek shows. This is in large part due to its choice to portray the failings of the Federation in preventing genocidal tyranny, and its subsequent failures in effectively supporting reconstruction.
(An earlier conversation in this room touches on DS9's depiction of the Federation's fear of genetic engineering and how that fear resulted in criminalizing innocent people.)
@AncientSwordRage I regret not having watched all of DS9 in order. I would guess I've seen 90%+ of the episodes, but none more recently than 10 years ago.
Also, I should rewatch, and then catch up with Farscape... Oh and then read the novels and comics, and the movie.... Then read the novels and comics for Firefly
@AncientSwordRage Ooh, B5. On one hand, I'd think it's worth watching. On the other, it's one of those settings that you only see its coolness once you know it more, but that takes watching about halfway through. So getting into it seems harder, and less impressive than once you're familiar with the whole thing. And that's 4+1 seasons.
(Another major thing B5 struggled with, was that its main characters were much more boring and flat than its secondary characters. By the end I was pretty much just watching it for Londo, G'Kar, and Bester.)
@AncientSwordRage These two, OTOH, I didn't really get hooked onto. I watched Farscape on and off when it was on TV, but while it had an interesting villain, it just failed to convey the same kind of grandeur as B5. And Firefly I did watch in an attempt to figure out what's so great about it, but ultimately had to just shrug once more after finishing it.
In a way, I think Farscape occupies a sort of Planet-of-the-Day kind of spot as Lex, but is neither serious like B5 and some Treks, nor anywhere near as wild as Lex.
And Firefly seems to be considered the flagship of the Space Western genre for some reason, but to my eyes seems to lose to Defiance (the video series with a semi-xenoformed Terra) and Gunman Chronicles (the game based on HL1's engine). And maybe comparable in terms of æsthetic niceness to BraveStarr (which I liked as a kid but which I don't really remember by now). And now there's Outer Worlds which seems to fill the right æsthetic niche despite not fitting in terms of other setting parameters.
@vicky_molokh-unsilenceMonica It would have been if it had lasted more than one season. (Rumor was goin' round that Joss played Traveller while in college and you can see a lot of stuff that looks like a Traveller adventure ... and the design of the ship is quite similar to one of the old Traveller standard deck plans)
@vicky_molokh-unsilenceMonica One of the best "Westerns" in space was the movie Outland. Starred Sean Connery. It was more or less a remake of High Noon in an outer space context: mining on an asteroid or a small planet, I think.
@KorvinStarmast Oh yeah, I had that recommended to me years ago when I admitted my interest in the Space Western æsthetic. I found it okay but not groundbreaking to my eyes.
@vicky_molokh-unsilenceMonica It was close to ground breaking when it came out. The Space / Western fusion wasn't a thing at that point in time.
@vicky_molokh-unsilenceMonica One of my favorite things that came true from that movie is the golf driving range that Peter Boyle's character was playing with. That's a real thing now.
@BESW Having thought about it, I kinda both agree and disagree. My disagreement is mainly regarding the future being crapsack ā it seems to me things are not too bad after the Burn despite the decay of the Federation. Certainly not utopic, but there doesn't seem to be any major wars, tyrannic empires or similar, nor even mob-rule anarchy. The majority of the future characters we've met so far point towards the post-Burn society still retaining the basic ideals of the past.
@AncientSwordRage I don't even know what that is. Outland came out in 1981. Westerns are a Hollywood thing. Cowby bebop: is that a Hollywood thing? No idea when it even started.
I already thought about this when I watched the episodes, but with the future actually being a more nuanced one, not strictly a good one or a bad one, and with most of the people the protagonists find there being kinda okay... why do they insist on connecting with the Federation? Why not just join anyone who shares the basic appreciation for life, well-being and science?
@AncientSwordRage Star Wars was a Space Western, quite explicitly (critics called it boring and unoriginal because it was just recycling Western tropes). So was the original 1978 Battlestar Galactica, and Blake's 7 from the same year. Roddenberry's pitch for Star Trek was the trope namer for "wagon train to the stars."
@vicky_molokh-unsilenceMonica It's where they originated, but Sergio certainly took them in a new direction in the 60's with his Spaghetti Westerns, filmed in Spain.
For all they know, the remnants of the Federation post-Burn might as well be the equivalent of a Russian emigré who still wears a Tsarist uniform in the 1960's or something
@NautArch Door is locked. The character is in a room. The hallway outside of the room is where the spikes were hammered home to wedge the door more tightly closed.
Please keep this room free of any discussion concerning the United States elections and events around them. Feel free to discuss politics in Here There Be Dragons. Be excellent toward each other in all rooms, as usual!
@vicky_molokh-unsilenceMonica Well, that's a pretty big hedge to focus on "current" example. And given the niche popularity of Firefly, I'm not sure that's true anyway.
@vicky_molokh-unsilenceMonica I think Naut's on to something. There was a strong geek/Libertarian correlation at the time that it came out that struck a chord. Not sure if that's still a thing. (But you do see a slice of that in Season Three of Breaking Bad with the character / chemist Gale)
@ThomasMarkov Well... Apparently Stack has its own answer for how long to wait after a systemless question is asked before asking it yourself. I guess 8 days (the ceremony question got deleted by the Community Bot)
@ThomasMarkov Well because of closure, lack of upvoted, lack of positive answers, and lack of edits
@ThomasMarkov So yours was that there's really no reason to use ceremony as gentle repose lasts nearly as long, takes less time to cast, and grants more benefits? And that casting both at the same time provides no additional time?
@Medix2 The only plus for ceremony here is that it's a lower level spell and has other modes (so cheaper to learn/prepare). The 25 gp is a bit steep for that usually
Characters are on a grid where every square is 5 ft.
The spell says:
A line of strong wind 60 feet long and 10 feet wide blasts from you in
a direction you choose for the spellās duration.
How do I center a 10ft line on a character that's on a grid made out of 5ft squares?
Here's my lovely update on my order for Tasha's Cauldron of Everything *Hello, We're encountering a delay in shipping your order. We'll make every effort to get the delayed item to you as soon as possible. We apologize for the inconvenience*
From what I understand, when a god kills another god he gets their portfolio.
Wouldn't this mean that when Cyric killed Mystra he should have just gotten her portfolio over magic, spells, and the Weave?
@HeyICanChan Just a thought about this answer which I recently came across:
If I am reading this quote correctly: "[s]tances are considered maneuvers for the purpose of fulfilling prerequisites for learning higher-level maneuvers, or qualifying for prestige classes or feats" doesn't the phrase higher level specifically preclude this stance from fulfilling its own requirements, since it can only be used as a prerequisite for a stance of a higher level (ie. 4 or above since it is level 3)?
Having submitted my thesis for grading (cause for celebration), I've spent the afternoon doing a clean-up of my research code for publication ā and much to my surprise, I've enjoyed doing it
In the occultist description under implents it says
At 1st level, an occultist learns to use two implement schools. At 2nd
level and every 4 occultist levels thereafter, the occultist learns to
use one additional implement school, to a maximum of seven schools at
18th level. Each implement schoo...
@Carcer re: optimization. At one point in my research code, I have to solve several instances of a variation of an NP-hard problem called the set hitting problem. The classic version of the problem is that given some sets (usually intersecting heavily), one attempts to find (or determine the minimality of) a collection of items such that every set is represented in the collection by at least one item.
The premise is that there was a wizard that sort of lost the plot after discovering that a particular side effect of "shortcuts in magic" was smokeable. The magic of his alternate-plane hideout was "leaking", causing unsavoury effects in the material plane.
I forget the wording, but the toilet is like a bag of holding, and so is the hideout. So to destroy it all, were going to put the toilet in the hideout
My first implementation was a naive backtracking DFS. The first optimization was that I identified sets of size 1 and assigned them first to prevent "dumb mistakes" on the algorithm's part. The second optimization was that I made it recursive such that if one "singleton" rendered other sets "singletons", they'd also be singleton optimized (and same for them, until I had only non-singletons).
Finally, I also sorted the remaining non-singleton sets in ascending order by the number of objects. By this point, I had substantially improved perf over what I had started with ā it actually performed quite well save for a few pathological cases (approx. 1 per 5000-10000 problem instances) which I solved by hand.
Then I got fed up with solving them by hand and tried one more trick
I replaced the entire backtracking search code with a CNFSAT construction and... with one, simple, SAT solver call? It worked. Blazingly fast. No more pathological cases (or at least, different and much less pathological ones).
So yeah, the toilet is an extradimensional space, and so is his hideout. So to stop all the "unsavoury magic" from leaking, we're going to put the toilet in the hideout (currently its luke an outhouse)
@kviiri sounds cool! I have similarly experienced discovering that my initial approach was garbage and there was a much more elegant and performant way to do the same thing, though in less interesting contexts than yours
@kviiri this makes my "im refactoring someone else's code and have just realised that I need to restructure the database" seem a lot less impactful. Lol
@Carcer yes. As a matter of fact I could do with one of these
@Carcer It's a weird torrent of emotions, right? Being kinda attached to the polished garbage, and the other solution isn't.... well, one doesn't always know whether it'll work
@kviiri I don't know if this was specifically the case for you but there is a real joy in writing some code that does something complicated and having it work correctly first try
(I've been a programming tutor volunteer for about ten years at the univ now)
It creates fun contrasts, eg. my previous SO used to do a lot of scientific computing of the more physical variation (I do weird algo theory stuff dealing with abstract entities) and she always asked me to help debug her C, because I'm pretty good at seeing errors in code
...while she is much better at writing code from scratch