@BESW my little brother only did that a little, beyond agreeing to go talk to the dragon. He ignored the queen after that, preferring to focus on the dragon and on changing the setting technologically
@BESW meh, he seemed to like it. He did decide that there were phones and cameras and machines and (apparently most importantly) cars, but other than that he seemed to like it. Although he did say “I like rolling dice and there aren’t enough of the funny ones” and “I think the dragon shouldn’t eat humans but it can eat salami sandwiches”.
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@BardicWizard I like the "there aren't enough of the funny ones" about the dice
A long while ago, my table wanted a system to RP as kids having nostalgic LARP adventures after school. Game loop was go to school and extra curriculars during the week days (downtime) and on weekends they're go on "adventures". As the adventure went on, their pretend adventures would slowly turn into real situations that the kids shouldn't be getting involved in: finding missing people in the neighborhood, stopping crimes, fighting an actual alien invasion or something.
Only reason we didn't end up playing it was time, and one of the reasons we didn't share it was because a system where people RP as kids could have been problematic in what we saw as the RPG community at the time.
The idea was that the player handout was suspiciously marked every weapon available as "nonlethal" but eventually, the kids would be going on actual dangerous adventures with real life stakes.
And even that could have been problematic.
But while it was in the works, we were all really hoping to play a game of it.
@Axoren I've seen a lot of people using the No Fascists statement and variations on it, to make very clear that potential abuses of their work are Not Working As Intended. I'm not sure how much I agree with it (I think it's only useful in tandem with built-in protections, otherwise it's just words; and I'm not sanguine about the phrasing), but it's definitely got some traction in indie spaces.
user15026
@BESW I feel like it's like the xyz don't interact things you'd see on tumblr or whatever
user15026
12:36 AM
where it felt like more noise than it actually did anything
I think something like it might be useful as a "No, you're not imagining it, there is a head on this robot" label, but that'd be more for people who want to play with robot heads, than a warning-off of people who'd misuse headless robots.
As it is, it relies too much on the bugbear of Authorial Intent, and since when has RAI stopped anybody from doing anything?
It's not just a really cool innovative way of looking at games, Dee is challenging assumptions and norms about the industry and creators.
And I'm excited about projects like Endgame Sequences too because I think part of making the TRPG hobby both sustainable and approachable, has gotta be normalizing support for people talking about TRPGs in ways that aren't directly feeding into particular game products.
Updated: What's So Cool About Fighting Games by Lucas Valensa. Create your very own fighting game character and go head to head with a friend in this GMless, 2 player, competitive RPG filled with Combos, Special Moves, and Super Attacks.
Arrrgh I started an essay on why the AL player’s guide document and the new racial customization rules aren’t enough and don’t solve the problem of the lack of diversity, and then my dad pointed out that they specifically said this would be a long process
so now I get to scrap it and try to rewrite it to be accurate
I’m glad I learned I was wrong before sending it out into the world though
Which makes me think about how the choice of system can bleed into worldbuilding... I've noticed how much I have leant on D&D lore/stereotypes when making decisions for my world. It's not "what races are in my world?", it's "where do the PHB races fit in my world?" My mid-level BBEG was built around "vengeance paladin (+ multiclass) with a vorpal weapon". etc
So now I'm like... do I take the "easy" path, and use the system that I know my players will accept? Or do I (can I) build my world without system in mind? Or choose a new system & build for that system?
DREAMSCAPES vol. zero: The Thousand Cousins, a system-agnostic setting about DIASPORA ELVES and reclaiming a home and a heritage that has fallen to environmental disaster. By Carly M. Ho.
Basically, all the humanoid races that aren't humans, are diasporic elf-cousins
Orcs, for example, are the decendents of the noble families that lived closest to ground zero of the magical disaster which destroyed the ancient homeland and drove all the elves into diaspora. They have an arrogant attitude toward the other cousins, and believe the best thing for all the cousins is to reunite under the banner of the orc families. They are willing to force this militarily if necessary.
Yeah! All the cousins have their own values and worldviews and cultural focuses. There's the cousins that have most integrated with humans, for example: they're the wealthiest, and all the other cousins are a bit jealous but also think it's kinda gross to be so cozy with humans.
@BESW totes. @Adeptus When I was working on my Bastion setting, I totally went into "so how can I fit in the basic races and primary enemies into this setting", and arrived at some fairly stereotypical roles and locations for elves, humans, dwarves, elementals, and zombies.
I also found a place for primordials and gods because I am as irrationally fascinated by giant monsters as Hulk is.
We also wound up with a lot of bloat and weird corners in the setting from trying to justify stuff that didn't actually serve any purpose but was D&D Stuff so Of Course It Would Be There.
Oh, yes! I had to fill a level 1-to-something progression, which meant I had to have content that filled spaces. I don't clearly remember the specifics, but I know there was a gap somewhere in the early levels and decided "right, okay, over there is this ancient battleground, I'll put a necromancer over there and have that be a threat for the players to deal with." But it was functionally filler episodes—none of that was important for the main plot thread.
I have almost totally forgotten those details given they were completely unimportant and I stopped thinking about them almost as soon as I found out I could play this game in systems that didn't have the concept of level progression and thus didn't require padding to level up the heroes, which was pretty early on.
We tried to tie it all together so stuff felt connected, but that just made stuff needlessly complex and confusing and added more opportunities for coherency failure.
"Oh, we need a place for dwarves in this world, but we don't want to just have a dwarf monoculture so we'll add multiple dwarven societies..." and the next thing you know there's a civil war subplot for no reason except "dwarves exist."
Yeah I honestly don't remember at all what role the undead were actually going to play in the grand scheme of things. They were probably going to march on civilisation.
But that narrative role was already fulfilled by the Elementals, who would also march on civilisation. Less in an invadey way, more in a "we're looking for something specific that we know is around here somewhere, and we're going to turn over and/or level everything in a hundred mile radius if it will help us find it" kind of way.
To be fair, the mechanics of the system you intend to use shape your world because most people have a tendency to look at it from a players perspective, where the rules say "this is what you can do and how you can do it", which then informs you on how/what things can be done
Unlike when your the DM and can just pull stuff out of the aether and say "this works now"
@doppelgreener I think you're misreading it. Obviously we want the players to be able to do things, that's the whole point. That's what the rules system is for. What I'm saying is when people do world building, they tend to let the rules system they use impact how they build the world, because they look at the world and say "this power works like this because the rules say so" instead of "this power works like this because I say so"
But that can come with issues, and the root of the conversation we're now having is poking a bit at dissatisfaction with the way that makes our worlds manifest.
@BESW had that same problem in a world I built (Neverron, basically “the same premise as Eberron but taken in the opposite direction”) where I ended up having to add a bunch of races (tieflings, dwarves, aasimar) for reasons and tried to tie everything together. It ended up a mess.
@NautArch i figure it was sorta just, it could've worked out either way, it worked out this way, it's not precedent-setting in any particular way as to how to handle these questions, we just had a weird situation and handled it OK and we'll handle the next situation fine too
Urrrgh I just want to delete one of my answers. It's not bad, but it's not great, I hate the way I framed it, and it keeps getting Weird But Actually Comments.
I recently got an upvote on another answer explaining that if you want to swing around alchemist's fire, your entire backpack will explode and you will die and so will the rest of the party, which is basically passive aggressive fun-deprivation to fix a hole the game itself left wide open.
Like, I still think the answer is probably "they shouldn't do it," but more because the player is so obviously trying to address some table-level expectation the GM really ought to stop and figure out with them.
and the game shouldn't warrant me providing anti-fun solutions like that to make it operate under the guidelines it set out itself
it's a big game, it can fix its own problems
(it won't but, like, that's the game's own failing, i'm not here to make excuses for it)
@BESW I'm shocked nobody on that page has mentioned abused gamer syndrome; it's at least plausibly relevant
I mean, I don't think it's the full solution—like you say, it's definitely trying to fix something that warrants a conversation, and isn't necessarily at the abused gamer syndrome level—but it's definitely something that would come up in conversations about this nowadays on mainsite, if only to tell the GM "you might be beginning to inflict this on your player".
@BardicWizard Kind of true, but not entirely. Lots of social issues involve "have a conversation about it" as a step, but that would be an inadequate answer on its own. There's what kind of converastion to have, with whom, about what, how to structure and approach it, and possibly more than one conversation about more than one kind of thing.
It's a fair observation though. Many question premises seem to assume that everything must be handled in-game, in-character. Because talking things out and deciding things as players, outside of the in-game logic, is "metagaming" and therefore punishable by eternal damnation
Like, our hobby is fundamentally a hobby of semi-structured conversations. We're just drawing peoples attention: do more of that, but like this for a bit.
(except, like, a lot more paragraphs than that, including validating their hurt, directing them to what to do instead, and showing them how they might have more satisfaction other ways)
@NautArch I remember there was a brief period in our distant history where people were beginning to include humorous images in their answer, because it had a fully observable effect of people going "lol funny picture +1" regardless of the content of the answer and everyone was starting to catch on and do it because the Stack Game told them to do all they could to maximize their upvotes. But, like, you have a good answer there and the image is helping to accentuating the point.
Like, making our answers entertaining is good. It makes for fun reading.
Back then this was a big problem because we were seeing people (and votes) focusing on funny pictures more than answer quality, and using funny pictures for a crutch.
And it was just happening, like, a lot, and wasn't funny anymore. Naturally we responded by executing everyone involved deleting a whole bunch of irrelevant pictures from posts.
Short rant incoming: Why do people even post these low effort questions? It's always "How does this feature work? is it (A) exactly what it says in the feature, (B) almost exactly what it says in the feature, but not quite, or (C) something completely different from what it says in the feature?"
In the recently released preview of the Wild Magic Barbarian that will be in Tasha's Cauldron of Everything (preview here), I noticed the 6th level feature 'Bolstering Magic'. This feature has two applications. One acts as a Bless-type option, the second one reads:
Roll a d3. The creature [you'r...
because I would have probably asked the same question. It looks like the intention is to help, but completely excludes warlocks...which seems weird to me
@NautArch i have heard stories about this including a preschooler having to sit through a video conference on zoom and saying every few minutes "who are you! i don't even know you! i don't care! can i go now??"
honestly that preschooler is all of us i think but they don't know they're not supposed to say it and instead just suffer like the rest of us
I was homeschooled for the first five years, for a variety of reasons. I was very lucky though; I was in a family of teachers with a lot of insight and very mindful praxis.
@RevenantBacon So about that: a lot of our games are hard. Especially D&D. I don't know about you, but if I think back to my first few weeks of learning the game, it was arcane to me. It was a struggle just to ensure my character sheet was correct. Multiple times a session we'd find out I filled out something wrong. When it was time to level up, I only had to change a couple of things but I had loads of questions about it.
I remember asking my fellow players how to handle my dexterity modifier. They showed me how to handle it. I don't know how they knew how to handle it, so I asked and they pointed me to that part of the rulebook. I didn't know how they knew that was the part of the rules, and I don't know how they knew to interpret it that way—it was impenetrable to me and I was sure putting in the effort.
Just managing small parts of my character seemed to involve 20 different rules from 30 different pages.
@Lord_Gareth I find it's very easy, once we've gained understanding of a thing, to forget what it was like to not have that understanding --and even more, to not remember what it was like when we didn't know it was a thing at all.
Now that we understand the game—we're experts at the game, even—all of this stuff is dead simple and straightforward to us. We know the rules. We know where and how to look them up. We know how the mechanisms work. Especially, we know that when we read a given sentence, there probably aren't any surprises waiting for us in rules we haven't learned about on pages we haven't read yet. But it took each of us months to get here and have this sheer confidence with operating the rules.
Now that we're here, it's easy for us to have forgotten that back at the start we barely knew a damn thing and would have needed significant guidance to understand how to handle things and to recognise what does and doesn't apply to various things.
We do have a tendency to get a bit elitist sometimes; it's easy to forget what it was like to be new to the ideas underlying RPGs, and to learn the systems. I'm always happy to see "new blood." Keeps us grounded.
When someone is asking something that seems super straightforward to us... it's straightforward to us because we're the experts. They're brand new to this. They're trying to piece things together still, make sure they've understood how to apply the 10+ rules and subsystems and implicit guidelines that a given feature probably engages in, and make sure there's no surprises they've missed.
A YouTuber I've been watching recently, ColdCrashPictures, likes to talk about the progression of learning from Unconscious Incompetence, to Conscious Incompetence, to Conscious Competence, to Unconscious Competence.
When we achieve unconscious competence with a skill, we can lose our awareness of the work we're doing every time we use it.
In the lexicon of the Ruhi Institute, accompaniment is when two or more people with different backgrounds/skills/experiences/demographics/etc, work together on a task (usually a long-term project) not because it needs so many people (though it may, that's irr🐘) but for the sake of the doing it together. Even with disparity in skill and experience, accompaniment is not mentorship; the collaboration helps all people involved progress further on their own paths of learning and development.
Doing things with people, especially people who do it differently, is just amazing if you're open to it.
At its best, this site can offer brief moments of that.
For example: Adamantine armor is an uncommon generic armor variant. +1 armor is a rare variant. Is there such a thing as +1 adamantine plate armor? What's its rarity?
Does the situation change when one of the item "bases" is a generic variant, but the other isn't? For example, javelin of lightnin...
(In practice, accompaniment also tends to give long-term commitments more consistency and sustainability, so bonus.)
Like, Greener, you remember how we shared GMing roles. That was accompaniment. There wasn't a student/teacher relationship, we all learned from each other, and it helped keep the game going when just one GM would have burned out or ran out of ideas or had other commitments get in the way.
I remember. I also see you proactively finding ways to get us involved in things a GM would normally do all on their own even while you were running, which is good for all kinds of reasons but also seems like it would connect back to this.
@BESW questions that are about “what does X do when combined with Y”/“how to do X in Y game” or other questions that are about the mechanics of games, I think
@doppelgreener that’s true. I was simplifying a bit too far.
@BardicWizard you're not the first to make that observation though! "gee, a lot of our answers are some version of: have a conversation about it" gets noticed a lot lol
On an unrelated note (brought up by a random question in English class), what do people around here usually use as a venue for a play-by-post game? i had an idea
In that case you could try the Say Anything approach of play-by-post. Record your post as a love song, then send John Cusack with a boombox to visit the other players.
@SmokeDetector @nitsua60 it's genuinely impressive to see one of our former piracy sites devolve into literally spam. they even started using sockpuppets.
Light suggestion: let's be careful we don't handle "5e" as synonymous with "D&D 5e" in our questions and answers. I updated that that question's title.
That's both a bad thing for our hobby and a bad thing for our site, we're teaching users wrong while pretending D&D's the only game to care about.
And playing into the toxic perception that D&D's the only game with a 5th edition for that matter
I mean I'd literally be among the first to suggest we could be clearer than maybe just dumping things into tags or that our handling of system information is a bit lackluster, but this isn't about those things :D
A couple of years ago SSD and I had a long conversation about why we handle the sys-ag the way we do and the fact it's sorta overloaded in several different distinct usages, but neither of us have yet posted to meta about it
This solution doesn't actually require "list to me all the things"; the only thing it's really doing is checking "wait, what? is this new? are they crazy? or has this actually done before?" [i feel like i'm taking crazy pills here.gif]
It's interesting how many people know they're playing DnD 5e, given the influx of new players the edition brought and the less-than-minimal edition labeling in the books
> This search gets us the goblin playable race. But this is misleading. DDB took the Monster Lore section on Goblins from Volo's Guide to Monsters and put it on the same page with the goblin playable race information. I recommend against giving your players slaves.
@ThomasMarkov I'd give the players slaves but not the characters. If the players have slaves, think of all of the logistics support ... (who picks up the pizza crusts from the floor, who does clean up after, who brings more chips/drinks ... ) OK, nvm, not that great of a joke ...
You can choose the Combat expertise feat and the Dodge feat. Both of them grant dodge modifiers to Armor Class. Are their Armor Class modifiers stacked?
Waaaaiiittt what about level 3 draconic sorcerer, with another level in barabrian for unarmored defense. (Total level 4 character) Would that make it Base AC=13 + con +dex?
Waaaaiiittt what about level 3 draconic sorcerer, with another level in barbarian for unarmored defense, and another level in monk... (Total level 5 character) Would that make it Base AC=13 + con + dex + wis? And then running a warforged would add +1 to AC, Plus 2 to con, and +1 to int, str, or w...
I personally prefer d3 over d4 a bit. Additional hassle because it's typically rolled with a d6 with mental mapping of the result, but at least it's not a caltrop like d4 is
You can choose the Combat expertise feat and the Dodge feat. Both of them grant dodge modifiers to Armor Class. Are their Armor Class modifiers stacked?
I am looking for an answer referring to the logistics lore-wise and in terms of mechanics in general.
Thanks in advance :)
