TRPG General Chat

12:14 AM

5

Q: Is it possible to move between the worlds of the Material Plane by travelling through the Border Ethereal?

The 'Creating a Multiverse' chapter of the DMG tells us surprisingly little about the Material Plane. There are a list of Known Worlds of the Material Plane (p. 68), and the introduction to The Planes (p. 43) specifies that 'the worlds of D&D exist within the Material Plane'. Since: All the worl...

linksassin

2:06 AM

@Akixkisu Likely because it is actually written by a human, is reasonably long and didn't contain and specifically banned keywords. Smoke Detector is good at picking up computer generated text or specific styles of posts. That particular post didn't quite fall into that basket.

Shalvenay

hey there btw @linksassin

linksassin

@Shalvenay G'day how you doing?

Shalvenay

@linksassin alright here, as for you?

linksassin

2:21 AM

Not too bad. Bit tired after a few early starts in a row. But otherwise no complaints

Shalvenay

@linksassin posted a Q on Finance.SE, actually, re: home construction and the whole notion of "overimproving" a lot

nitsua60

Dan Carlin's latest podcast is interviewing Malcolm Gladwell. It's like a WWII lay-history overload!!!

linksassin

@Shalvenay Interesting question. Though I'm not sure if you will get an answer that is overly helpful.

Shalvenay

@linksassin yeah, it's an awkward situation to be in because my thoughts on construction are far enough off from the norm that they don't neatly fit into any of the boxes people use either for traditional building or most "alternative" construction techniques

hey @KorvinStarmast, how're things going?

and @nitsua60 for that matter

KorvinStarmast

Doing OK, you?

Shalvenay

2:37 AM

@KorvinStarmast alright here, probing at the housing market and trying to get my head wrapped around some of the odder corners of housing finance a bit better

KorvinStarmast

read all the fine print, pitfalls a plenty

Shalvenay

@KorvinStarmast yeah, got a money.SE question up about how to avoid one of the less-well-known but rather annoying ones

KorvinStarmast

While the Missus and I want to down size (kids grown up) I really do not want to go through that again.

nitsua60

@Shalvenay Pretty good, thanks. You?

Shalvenay

@nitsua60 alright here :) although wound up writing a money.SE Q trying to wrap my head around one of the odder corners of housing finance...overimprovement

A. B.

2:53 AM

What is that dragon thing? Can't find the original message.

Sounds funny.

BESW

Dealing with Dragons by Patricia C. Wrede, first book in the "Enchanted Forest Chronicles" series.

Back when Fate Accelerated was in beta-testing I used it to run some sessions set in the Enchanted Forest. You can find them marked "EF" in the Fate Chat and Game Room conversation tab.

nitsua60

@Shalvenay That's... quite a wall of text, there. Good luck. (Both with the Q and the property-hunt.)

Shalvenay

@linksassin yeah, so far the answers haven't engaged with the quantitative meat and potatoes of the question -- I suppose I could boil it down to a generic "why don't people build mansions in disinvested areas?" but that'd give me nothing useful in terms of advice on location given my constraints

because I suspect the generic advice would be to "follow the herd and build in suburbia", something I cannot follow due to transit access constraints

linksassin

@Shalvenay The answer to that is simple: Status. Homes are a status symbol, the area you live in and the size of your house are a reflection of "success" in a consumerist society. People want the house of their dreams in the area they desire, even if it makes better financial and town-planning sense to do something else.

nitsua60

A nugget of wisdom I came across a while back that may or may not have any applicability in the situation--I can't tell. The rules aren't there for the benefit of you, the prospective homeowner. They're there for the current homeowners.

Shalvenay

3:03 AM

@linksassin yeah, whereas while I have lots of things I'm picky about, I don't need to live in some super status symbol neighborhood

@nitsua60 that's very true re: much of zoning and land use in general

@linksassin (I pretty much grew up in "the 'hood", basically an inner-city neighborhood that was on the border between a heavily disinvested area and a more stable urban corridor. in fact, there's a lot for sale in that neighborhood right now that I could afford to buy cash-offer, but it'd be very hard to do any of what I wanted with it without serious overimprovement concerns)

BESW

I'm always amused by discussions of housing value and location and such, because it's completely unlike anything I've ever known here.

nitsua60

I don't know the term "overimprovement." What is this?

Shalvenay

@nitsua60 it's a real-estate term of art for building something on a lot that's essentially too much for its surroundings, financially speaking.

BESW

@nitsua60 Building something too fancy around a bunch of not-fancy things.

It's one of the things that is just, normal, here.

Shalvenay

@BESW yeah -- it can be applied to an out-of-context intensity as well, but that's definitely one of the clearer examples

the basic issue with an overimproved lot is you won't be able to get what you want for it because there will be no market for it

(it's much less common to run into it with intensity in most areas due to the way land-use laws are setup though)

nitsua60

3:14 AM

@Shalvenay Yeah, but what's the financial concern?

Shalvenay

@nitsua60 not being able to get market value when the time comes to sell because nobody wants to buy it, or nobody who's interested can afford what you're selling it for for that matter (the proverbial "white elephant")

nitsua60

Gotcha--a down-the-road concern.

BESW

here's an example: this house

Was built a few years ago, and literally six feet away on the left side is this apartment:

Shalvenay

I'd call that a bit more of a misinvestment, and in some ways an under improvement of the lot its on given its spectacularly bad street interface (yikes) in a dense urban context

(the house, that is)

BESW

The apartment is low-rent housing for large families of workers, many of them on temporary visas. The house is trying to attract military families with cash to burn in the form of government-subsidized housing vouchers.

Shalvenay

3:18 AM

that lot's way better off as say 2 maybe 3 townhouses with a small setback and alley-access parking in the rear?

@BESW yeah, talk about some market distorting factors at play

BESW

Both of them are near the end of a poorly-maintained single-lane road just wide enough for a car to pull over to let the other one through, with three other low-income apartments, some local family homes, and... a relatively well-maintained condominium at the end of the road, run mostly by insular religious types.

This is totally normal here, because we aren't laid out in ways which allow the rich to enclave themselves.

A. B.

Yeah, there could be some advantages to a place that's never heard of town planning.

wonders what "street interface" means.

Shalvenay

@A.B. basically, how a building relates to the street it's on

BESW

@A.B. I think Shalv is referring to the fact that the house in the picture has a gate that directly borders the road, so that there's no room for pedestrians and your car is blocking the traffic while you open and close the gate.

Shalvenay

@BESW that's a big chunk of it, there's also the giant fat garage door in front + wide driveway further inhibiting pedestrians

BESW

3:24 AM

Which is especially marked because it's a single-lane road with several apartments with large families, meaning that the road is often filled with young kids playing.

Shalvenay

@A.B. some buildings are really nice in this regard, places that you want to hang out by, window-shop a bit, that sort of thing. others are just awful -- big blank walls, lots of parking in front, stuff that makes you want to GTFO

@BESW yeah, very much a street, not a road

some street repair and sidewalk work, as well as a bit of ground-floor commercial space (little bays, 500-odd ft2 I'm sure is enough), and that could be the start of something :)

BESW

A. B.

Ah, I see. I couldn't see that the gate opened directly onto the street (puzzled to know how you could tell). Yeah, that is a silly design.

Shalvenay

@BESW yeah, I see lots of wasted opportunity in that photo

BESW

The pink-roofed L-shape is the house; the building in the bottom right corner is the apartment. There are no sidewalks.

(This is my neighborhood, though my house isn't in the shot.)

And yes, there's a second smaller house in the same style behind the first one, with a long inconvenient driveway alongside the first one.

Shalvenay

3:29 AM

@BESW flag lots...

BESW

The empty grass north of the two pink-roofed houses, is the lawn of the family home just north of the smaller pink-roofed house, which backs immediately onto the frontmost of another two-building apartment.

(small house, big yard is a relatively common local configuration, as the yard is used for both socialization and farming)

@Shalvenay Yeah, the same developer got that one lot of land and squeezed two military-bait houses onto it.

@Shalvenay Gosh, wait 'til you see what's across the highway where the military claimed the land for officer's housing after the war.

Shalvenay

@BESW sounds like they went hogwild with typical Suburban Experiment development

BESW

You might think that.

Shalvenay

instead of doing something sane, like neatly gridironed townhouses

(with room for ground floor commercial even! shock horror!)

@BESW what did they do?

BESW

Shalvenay

3:40 AM

yeah, Suburban Experiment gone hogwild

BESW

And here, have some context.

Guess where the military started grabbing land.

Shalvenay

yup, you can see the transition between development models plain as day

BESW

The cluster of houses on the cliff just to the west of the military grass, are some of the most expensive homes on the island.

Shalvenay

@BESW yeah, unsurprisingly so -- that's the kind of area you'd expect to build up and build up hard

BESW

The place where you turn off the main road to get to them, is a store that sells reasonably priced cheaply-made furniture, electric gadgets, and household items.

Across the street is a strip mall with stores that cater to nearby low-income apartments whose occupants can only shop within walking distance.

Just out of shot on the west edge of the map, is one of the tallest non-hotel buildings on the island, which marks the start of the heart of the capital.

Shalvenay

3:47 AM

@BESW how well does that development front the street its on, or is there a big sea of parking in the way?

BESW

[dips into street view]

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BESW

Let's move this to the NAB, maybe?

Not a bar, but plays one on TV

I'm not a place to unwind after work, but I play one on TV.

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BESW

4:40 AM

Sun's Ransom art is almost done, I can't wait. [bouncy]

BESW

5:17 AM

Kickstarter: Ironsworn: Starforged by Tomkin Press. The sci-fi evolution of the award-winning tabletop roleplaying game. Supports solo, co-op, and guided play!

AncientSwordRage

9:14 AM

@BESW I remember you mentioning that one

Thomas Markov

12:39 PM

@Medix2 I am officially coining the phrase Duplicate Anthology to describe your meta questions that present a plethora of possible duplicates.

The trouble with it is that you have to compare each question to all the others, and if there are dupes, determining a canonical question for them.

Medix2

1:03 PM

It's probably better than asking about every single possible pair separately

And some of this just comes down to "If feature A is worded identically to feature B, is a question asking about feature A a duplicate of a question asking about feature B?"

And the answer is... people don't agree XD

AncientSwordRage

@Akixkisu is it sr or SR as an accornym?

nitsua60

1:20 PM

@NautArch this may interest you:

@qazwsx I think that's a fair question. I think the link in the chain that's missing between the question "how do I deal with instant solution spells..." and your answer's "glyph..." is the implicit step "you should make it (sometimes?) risky for the PCs, and here's how...." It seems to me like that's what this answer assumes, but which is not... spelled out.<rimshot> — nitsua60 1 min ago

(Then again, maybe it won't. RIP, Judy Blume.)

@BESW is Charleston pretty walkable? I'm going to be there for a day or two next month. I've got one particular time/place I'd like to be (a church's evening service) and otherwise just a bunch of time to kill/explore. (I'm meeting a friend sailing up from the Caribbean, so timing's a bit indeterminate.) So I'm wondering whether to grab a hotel somewhere central and plan to walk around a bunch, Ubering out to the church-thing, vs. getting a cheaper hotel further out and a car.
(I'd prefer the first option, *if* Charleston's the sort of place where one could get a lot out of two days on foot.)

BESW

Gosh, I haven't been walking in Charleston for seventeen years.

Medix2

In South Carolina?

BESW

It had very walkable areas if you were okay with the heat--but I was there mid-summer.

But I'm not a reliable source of modern info on this, alas.