And by "when it's really justified", I just mean "when it's justified at all", in the same way aspects justify anything. Not "when it's really justified" as in "when they can explain at length and really put up a solid case for being able to do this".

yeah

FATE points are a little too imprtant to the game to make the PC's write an essay about it every time they use one

If they can narrate how the aspect influenced the action, it's justified.

Gargh, now I'm down the AD&D rabbit hole for some reason.

The game makes sense until you read it again, and then it doesn't.

And this is different from 3.5 how?

I mean like read any of it, not even try to apply it.

Why does anything work the way it does?

And yet people write essays about the "mad genius" of "You can't even play any of the shiny character classes unless you roll well."

It's really weird and incongruous to my 2013 brain.

There word "mad" is in there.

Yes, yes.

So much of the transition from Basic to Advanced seems to have been... crazytown. Rules that simulate every which thing but also nothing, ever, at all.

Look on it as part of the Grand Experiment of early RPGs.

Nobody had any precedent or theory to work from! They were throwing things at the wall to see what stuck.

It's kinda weird that "early RPGs" is like 20 years, though.

I'm pretty sure we're still in "early RPGs," honestly.

@DarkHorse Hi!

@BESW I kinda agree. But it's because we wasted 30 years of our time on MADNESS!

@AlexP Not wasted at all. Well, okay, toward the end we probably dragged our feet more than we needed to.

But the current state of RPGs needed to have that madness to build on.

@AlexP It's pretty cool to see the way they looked at it though. "You gotta roll up your character's stats. Roll up each one of them! Then look at them, see what you're good at, and pick a good class for them."

"Why would you pick a class first..? Then you could just pick wizard but roll excellent strength and be a dimwit!"

@JonathanHobbs That's the thing. All this stuff makes sense (mostly) in the context of Chainmail or Basic. But then... AD&D.

I mean, building an entire medium effectively from scratch, trying to be its own thing while taking genre cues from other mediums? Must've been quite a time.

@BESW hi

what's RPG?

Roleplaying game.

for example?

Dungeons & Dragons.

D&D's a tabletop or paper-and-pen RPG. There are hundreds of others, though that's the most well known.

I have never heard of this game

sorry

Oh wow.

Where do you live? :O

Mars

:D

@JonathanHobbs That hardly seems relevant.

Well, that would put you a bit out of touch I'd imagine, yeah.

afk a bit

@BESW It does to me. Someone in Tibet probably wouldn't have heard of D&D, for instance, whereas over here most people would've had a hard time not having at least heard of it.

I was asking out of curiousity :)

@BESW Counterpoint: Runequest was published in 1978. It was a rough thing at the time, but AD&D 2nd Edition came out in, like, 1987 and it looks like the work of a madman compared to RQ. (I'm not saying this as someone who loves RQ or anything, mind. Just AD&D is the craziest, motliest flagship a hobby has ever had, ever.)

I had only played counter-strike

@DarkHorse Oh okay!

Well, there's lots of kinds of RPGs - like Final Fantasy, or Disgaea, or Fallout, but this site is about ones played at a physical table rather than about video games.

And the RPG genre spans both video games and tabletop games and other kinds too :)

War Craft is a RPG?

Hm.

World of Warcraft is an MMO RPG.

i.e. massively multiplayer online RPG, i.e. there are a whole lot of people online at once together

okay. I only play it in offline

for dota

Warcraft 1, 2, and 3, which came before that, were RTS games - Real Time Strategy. As opposed to Turn Based Strategy, like Chess, where you can take ages to make up your mind and nothing happens until you have made up your mind.

@JonathanHobbs he means warcraft

without the "World of" in it

@trogdor I noticed, and I was getting to that :) ^

lol

@JonathanHobbs also, personally like chess "because" I can take some time to decide what I do

online games waste too much time

@trogdor it's definitely something to appreciate about it. Disgaea lets me do that too (it is both turn-based strategy and an RPG)

@JonathanHobbs how does that work?

pausing ?

@trogdor no, it's isometric, so you take your time deciding where your characters go and what actions they take. once you've made your decisions, the other side makes their move, then it's your turn again.

so where is the timer?

it's like Final Fantasy Tactics, except FFT makes you do it per-character rather than moving all your characters at once, and I don't like FFT :)

oh

there is no timer

I just read wrong

nvm

oh okay

@DarkHorse The common idea of a tabletop RPG is that a group of people get together and improvise a story about a group of characters. Usually each person plays one character in the story, except for one person who runs the rest of the world. They have rules to help determine whether the characters are successful at what they try to do, often using dice to add a random element to the process.

thought I saw you type "real time" in there somewhere too

Is FFT the abbr of Fast Fourier Transform Algorithm

maybe it was the R and a brain fart

@DarkHorse Final Fantasy Tactics

(There are outlying game systems where some of those things I just said aren't true, but the majority of tabletop RPGs use a system something like that.)

prolly

many Final Fantasy games work that way

as do a lot of RPGs really

but there are some that, for some godawful reason, feel they need to add a time element

and it can work well,... but I have seen it go the other way more often

so you guys are the one who in charge of developing a new RPG game or research of the strategy in games?

@DarkHorse This is mostly a website for people who play the games.

yeah,.. most of us don't actually make games

at least not for a living

Although because it's an improvisational medium for a group of people at a table, the rules don't have to be followed precisely--so most people who play the games also (to a greater or lesser extent) modify them to better fit that group's desired experience.

So we're interested in the theories and strategies of gameplay AND game design, and we like looking into the history of the medium as well.

... And sometimes we need to come here and say: "This part of the rules isn't clear. What do they mean?"

@JonathanHobbs "Sometimes"? That's half what we do.

Well, half of what the site does, but each individual only has to come here sometimes with those questions.

Fair enough.

Something video games give players the luxury of never having to worry about: ambiguous rules. Except when they need to read to understand how an ability works, e.g. you might have to read a guide about your hero's mechanics in DotA.

Yeah. Because tabletop RPGs don't have a computer to resolve actions, the participants are the final arbiters of action outcomes, using the rules of the system they've chosen as much or as little as they like.

This is one of the great strengths and joys of TTRPGs: a character can try just about anything and the group can figure out how to resolve it.

Unlike a computer-based game, which is limited to the actions it's been programmed to know how to deal with.

Get it @AlexP

[hides under a pile of tokens] The monk thread is back, people.

lol

I just protected it.

that way it won't get bumped by a 1 rep user again...that's not to say higher rep users won't necro it, but it's got several very good answers already (at least where very good is defined as long)

I actually liked the new answer

I'm gonna play an armored monk. Because who cares about Wis to AC when I already play a Scout that never skirmishes.

@waxeagle Good call. I keep forgetting that's a thing.

(I think it's a thing I can do, now!)

@BESW yeah it's a 10k priv I think

I pretty much do it whenever a 1 rep user necros an old thread. If you're going to necro spend some time here and figure out what we're about. It's not that I want to discourage it, but I want to make sure people know what they're doing before bring up old stuff

I wish there was a word other than 'forum' for what SE is not.

@BESW "Q&A site"

SE is not a Q&A site?

Ok those are four words

It's not? O.o

Pretty sure SE is a Q&A site.

I'm looking for another way to describe what it's not.

oh, for what it's -not-

@BESW reddit

it's not reddit

[snort]

It's not a meeting site, It's not a social network, It's not a lots of things.

What is, really?

I don't really know what reddit is for

@Zachiel there was a whole thread called "what stackoverflow is not" on meta.so. it got deleted because it was incredibly unproductive

@Zachiel afaict, celebrities making fools of themselves in very public manners

@BESW it's not "everything else"

(see John Rocker/Jose Canseco AMAs)

(for some value of celebrity)

Is reddit some sort of... social network / blog then? I mean, I know Reddit. I've been there. But I can't categorize it, mostly because I didn't care to know.

I think category descriptions on the Internet stopped being useful when "social media" became a category.

@BESW yeah

twitter and facebook, both social media, both very different kinds of sites

(I like twitter a lot better lately than facebook)

I find all of them a little creepy.

I've always been a good old-fashioned IM/small chatroom kind of guy.

I use FB to coordinate my RP group

I find it really useful

@Zachiel same here

It would be awesome if the whole group cared to be on FB or to actually read their messages, buried in a pile of spam from their unwise subscriptions.

So I astually have to use skype to coordinate with a guy and then tell the others on FB what he said.

@Zachiel do y'all have a group set up?

that helps a ton, although groups are less useful now that you can't autosub to posts

I have a group for my D&D group (including ex-players), one with all the players of my geographical zone, another one for convention organization.

@Zachiel gotcha

@BESW site for discussions

it's not whatever you wanted it to be we exist solely to crush your hopes and dreams

yes excellent

splendid

IIRC SE servers are powered by the tears of noobs driven off by "this is not a forum" comments

If we could hook them up to treadmills as they flee, the world's power challenges might be seriously mitigated.

I must at this point insist that the two of you read Dresden Codak's Dark Science, page one and page two. :)

Hello.

@Aaron Hi!

How goes everyone's day?

Also I was going to ask a question. It is a simple question that I figured would have been asked already but can't find it. Does anyone else know of a question on 'How damage resistance works'

What system/edition?

Dnd 3.5

I think it effects the attack role not the damage role but am not sure.

Roll*

Like, energy resistance?

Yes. I think there is damage resistance as well or are they the same thing?

Can you give a specific example, please?

Damage/energy resistance 10 to fire. A fireball is cast at a being with that resistance.

Resistance to energy.

Every time you take fire damage, you reduce the damage taken by the number associated with your fire resistance.

Ah. So it effects the damage. So if the fireball did 11 damage only 1 damage would be delt.

It has no effect on the attack roll at all, just the amount of damage of the specific type that is dealt by a successful attack.

"Energy" is a subset of damage types: fire, cold, acid, etc.

Thanks. I still might make a question and answer it. Is that something that is allowed or encouraged?

There's also 'damage reduction,' which is similar but kind of inverted.

Of course it is! Go ahead.

Ah. I must have got them mixed up and that is where I got Damage resistance from.

If you see "DR 10/slashing," that means that all physical damage (not energy damage) is reduced by 10 unless it's dealt by a slashing weapon.

That is, slashing weapons ignore DR x/slashing.

Hmm.

Interesting.

Damage reduction.

It's a confusing enough issue that a good solid "how does this work?" question and answer would be welcome.

If you feel like you can answer it as well as ask, go for it!

Ok.

I think I will let it sit as a question before answering it to get multiple explanations.

Posted one question. Have to wait 5 min to post the second.

@KRyan has very good answers.

@BESW Are you a mod or just highly active on the site?

I am not a mod, although I'm regularly mistaken for one.

I could understand why lol.

The line between mods and citizens is drawn differently here than on other sites.

Citizens, especially as you get higher reputation, gain access to features that other sites would reserve for mods. The idea is that citizens are not just people who use the site, but people who make the site what it is.

So we're encouraged to understand the site's rules and goals, and not only work for them ourselves but to help others do the same--and in part, citizens also define the site's rules and goals, through the meta page questions.

You can look at the privileges that reputation grants you here.

In fact, it looks like you just blasted through enough rep to hit 100 and 125 rep privileges.

Yea. Took me a few days to get to 100 rep and then things slowed down because there have not been many 3.5 dnd questions I knew the answer to.

btw when you hit 200 you get 100 rep free everywhere :)

How so?

@Aaron they call it the "association bonus" basically if you have accounts on more than one site, and get one of them to 200, you automatically get 100 a rep bonus on every SE site.

basically lets you vote and comment anywhere on SE

Don't worry too much about rep gain. The harder you try to "farm" it, the slower it'll likely come because your contributions won't be as sincere and so will lack quality.

@Waxeagle Interesting. That would be useful. I had a perfect comment for SharePoint SE the other day but not enough rep :(

Just participate in the site as you see fit, and the rep will flow.

@BESW this

the only place I haven't found this to be true is on SO

Yea I only worried about rep when it was restricting my access but now that I have what I need I don't really care much about it.

but partly that's because I can only answer easy somewhat bad questions

SO?

Some people send a lot of time fiddling with tag wikis, making them better. That's pretty cool.

@Aaron stackoverflow

Amusingly, my most common contribution to the site--commenting and editing to help improve posts, and workshopping them in chat--is mostly repless.

Ah. Stackoverflow is where I started and then I realized there were the other SE like this one and SharePoint. Finding the SharePoint one was kindof a big deal for me as I am a SharePoint admin.

@Aaron cool :)

Does anyone know someone who can draw swords?

Hmm. Is there a SO for RolePlay writing? I know there is a Writing.SO but is there a more specific one?

No, and I'm sad to say writing.se might not be very kind to such questions.

Depending on the nature of the question, it might be appropriate here.

Yea I kinda got that feeling when I was there last time. Most people look down on RPing but some of the best writing I have ever read was in Roleplays I was watching or participating in.

Try session-summaries and see if the kind of questions under that tag might be useful to you, or are the kind of thing your question could fit into.

The general impression I got of writing.se is that the most visible of its citizens are more interested in Having Opinions than in Helping Solve Problems.

@waxeagle What do we do if we think a username is potentially offensive?

@BESW flag one of their posts

mods can force a username change if it's required

(they can also force an avatar change too)

What is the name?

I'd rather not say, at least not in main chat, until I'm more confident that it's intended the way I'm inclined to read it.

@Aaron no need to bring it in here tbh.

No point bugging a mod or making a stink until I've thought it over.

tbh?

@Aaron "to be honest"

Ah. First thing I thought of was To Be Heard but I figured that was not it.

Terrible Biting Horror.

@MadMAxJr that works to. :P

tres bien homme?

(AKA "Bill and Ted Learn French.")

rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/27887/… This question may need some guidance. New user.

On it.

What else should I say?

I'm going to edit it to ask how he can find them, rather than specifically for websites, to avoid linkrot. Right?

Oh, wait. His comment clarifies.

Still don't really understand what he's actually asking for

@Aaron thank you

He's looking for a place in his area that runs one-shot adventures he can join.

@BESW were you here the other day when I asked the same thing? if not, I wonder if we noticed the same name...

@KRyan Mebbeh!

> Do the answers to this question help you, or do you feel that answers to that question could help you? If so, that's awesome! If not, then edit your question to show us how it's asking something distinctly different from that one, so we can be helpful to your particular issue.

I'm gonna give that as a comment for this guy.

@BESW it's a good one

I generally do like to give users a head's up that we might put a question on hold if we're not sure how it's different from an old one

Go for it.

I'm not The Voice of RPG.SE.

which question though?

oh, found it

neever mind

oh, you didn't vote-to-close as a duplicate?

Not yet.

@KRyan that's my vtc as POB

(but I'm going to cast one of those on any question that's "help me find website that does X")

there's quite a few of those that have been asked and answered without incident (that I've noticed, anyway)

also, the linked question... received answers that are appropriate but seems to be asking something different

Tough. The criteria for duplicate (which it's not being VTC'd as, BTW) is "does this other question get the same kind of answer?"

if it answers the question as much as mxy argues differently, it can be closed as a dupe "this question has answers here

@waxeagle huh? not parsing that sentence

@BESW fair enough

@KRyan (that's because it's syntactically suicidal).

I'm also unclear on how mxy got into this

I think he's saying that @waxeagle agrees with my "duplicate question" criteria but mxy doesn't.

what I was trying to say is that the dupe close reason is "this question has answers here:link"

ah

the text in the vtc option indicates that both question and answer must match

though I tend to agree that focusing on the answers is best

Since that's kind of the point of the site....

what I actually think we should do is edit the question to match the answers if the answers are all along the same lines and one has been accepted

but I don't think that's actually how the policy works and I can see problems with it

That would raise some hackles.

@BESW yeah, those are the problems I see

I've taken to trying to convince the question-asker to do so, since he's clearly allowed to

Especially as I know many times an answer is accepted as "best" because the asker feels pressure to accept SOMETHING even though none of them really address his concern spot-on.

though I do have a problem when someone edits a question that has a lot of answers, or answers with a lot of votes, if it changes those answers from good ansers to off-topic answers

@BESW yes, I agree that that is a general and more significant problem

Until you can rassle that problem into submission, don't go looking for new ones.

fair enough

'cause the policy you're suggesting floating would exacerbate the larger issue.

wasn't truly meant as a suggestion

just a sort of "I wish we could just make sure that the questions and answers match so we wouldn't have this conundrum"

The way to do that is to encourage more conscientious answering, and faster VTC on immature questions.

hmm

well, take the question you linked to

most of the answers don't really address the question as a returning player

and just answer the question of how to start or find groups

the consensus there seems to be that the fact that he's a returning player doesn't especially matter

Mhm.

but then it's weird to say the question of how a returning player finds groups is a duplicate of how a new player finds groups, when both questions went to pains to explain those situations

both this question and the older one specify the distinction, it's the answers that think of both questions as the same

you know, looking at this

it seems to me that both questions are duplicates, at least by their answers, of "Where do I find other RPG players?"

How are either of those questions not about a "returning player"? Granted, the answers are largely ignoring it.

ok, one guy talks about how he played years ago and is concerned about remembering the rules and how to find games and sort out all the new stuff, while the other is a guy who's played 3 times, presumably quite recently

Fair enough.

I do notice that this is another example of someone trying to expand the question beyond the scope of his situation purely out of fear of closure.

yeah

but would you not vote to close it as too localized if he specified where he lived?

and wanted answers only about that area?

he's right that that question isn't a good fit

Aye.

But he's moved from one close reason to two.

or three, if we agree that "find me websites that do X" is POB

or four, since lists themselves are off-topic

And in the process obsfucated what he really wants, so it's harder to help him drill down to a useful non-close-worthy question.

So instead of "That's a bit too localized, here's how we can modify the question to fit the site and your needs," we have to wade through "What are you really after, dude?"

mm

oh and goody, now we have another downvote-in-lieu-of-close-vote

Which is likely to drive him away, when all he was trying to do was meet the site guidelines in the first place.

though honestly it might be downvote-worthy anyway because it is so unclear

can we get him enough rep to join the chat?

He's got 50+ on another SE.

oh, cool

can we @ him or does it not work if he hasn't been in chat before?

Gotta have been in chat recently enough that a person can tab-complete your @ name.

I know there are some rules about @'ing from chat for people who have never been or something like that

what? I'm pretty sure that's not right

cuz I'm pretty sure you can only tab-complete people currently in the room

That's what I've been told. Mods can get around it, including @-ing people who don't even have a chat account yet.

I can tab-complete MadMAxJr and I'm reasonably sure he's not here.

Unless my UI is messed up (which it often is).

he is here, yes

Ah.

I've got some funky page-refresh issues, I think.

ANYWAY.

I've never seen a tab-complete option for anyone not currently in the room and have typed-out @'s to people I couldn't tab-complete

We've got a Mod right here, which makes the issue moot for now.

well he hasn't said anything for a while

@waxeagle [poke]

wazzat?

You're up, KR.

who do you need summoned?

Flotolk probably could use to chat about his question

He's got 51 rep on SO.

it's probably going to get closed and it's probably going to get closed specifically because he tried (poorly) to make it not-too-localized

@flotolk I summon thee! (Kryan and BESW would love to chat about your question)

which seems disheartening and frustrating

Thank you, @waxeagle, O Conjurer Of The UnPresent.

heh, thanks indeed

@BESW do my best :)

(Not to be confused with the Conjurer of the UnPleasant; he's rarely thanked.)

heh

[disclaimer: I had no particular individual, associated with SE or not, in mind when making the above statement.]

yes, for once I am here.

@BESW heh, it actually sounded like the title a friend and sometime DM of mine would gladly wear

My activity on this site mainly fluctuates with "Is someone in my party disputing how a rule works?" and "I have no idea how this encounter in the book works, I better ask a question."

@MadMAxJr I don't know what my browser keeps doing.

@KRyan True. "Conjurer of the Unpleasant" would be a great flavor name for one of those pretentious systems that needs to come up with its own title for the GM.

@BESW he does agree that there is a dearth of gratitude for his works

...Whereas the "Conjurer of the Unpeasant" would probably be Karl Marx.

heh, hello Pony

@BESW hahaha

@Metool /)

and "Conjuror of the En Passant" plays a very strange game of chess

En Passant. Isn't that the rule for a pawn doing a sideways capture on rank 5?

Sounds about right.

@MadMAxJr It's a rule to prevent one pawn from letting another pawn "walk past" it.

@MadMAxJr it's basically that a pawn can't pass another pawn by using the two-square-first-move thing

@BESW (\

Wark.

Wahrk?

... That is a huge buffer since last time I was on. I'm not going to read it. Anything super-special?

a number of conjurers

@AlexP Your last message is too far back; please use the transcript instead

@AlexP I gave up months ago reading the backscroll in this room. Too many aussies and pac islanders hang out here :)

I resemble that complaint.

hehe

Tonight in Tweets to Campaign By, a classic stagecoach robbery.

heh, just another way say "too much happens while I'm sleeping"

It's generally not said anywhere that cheating is against the rules.

@Metool Doesn't say dogs can't play basketball, either.

@Metool it doesn't need to be since cheating is defined as breaking the rules (with intent to gain an unfair advantage); if you're cheating you are by definition breaking some rule

And as we all know, the first rule of Tautology Club is the first rule of Tautology Club.

heh, that's one of my favorites

...one of your favorite whats?

xkcds

Ah.

The time has come and gone for me to sleep, and I'm catching up to it.

Good luck with the locations question, guys, and don't do anything I would flag.

@BESW FDSA I was just going to.

Lunchbreak here

@Metool FDSA?

First letters my fingers could reach.

aha

heh

and you roll your fingers outward; iiiinteresting