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00:13
@JonathanHobbs, @C.Ross [wave]
@BESW hey :-)
it's been a busy time
What've you been up to?
@BESW a couple games at the FLGS, and trying to learn a new tech for work
anyone here program gui in java
i need help
@Chrislast I have a little, but you know there are better sites for that :-)?
oh, and Timber and Stone and writing a save editor for that
00:17
i just need to know why the hell it is buggy
when i run it once its shows my gui
when i run it again
it shows something diff
@Chrislast which GUI? Swing? AWT? JavaFX?
both swing and AWT
hmmm
you're probably doing it wrong
post on SO
what is SO
@Chrislast :-O
00:19
ha ok
00:37
@Chrislast you probably don't need to use both.
that's like if someone was building a car and put a car engine in and then a motorcycle engine too
@JonathanHobbs What are you, some kind of mad scientist who doesn't believe in redundant systems?
@BESW redundant systems sometimes good, code duplication always bad - cave man programmer
I think Cave Man Programmer would be an excellent subject for a series of short videos, or an AMA tumblr.
@BESW My apologies. Sort of half-thinking when it was posted: school's killer this term.
No harm done. I was just confuzzled.
00:46
:)
I might get a few of my in-laws to play The Sunless Citadel tomorrow. They haven't gamed in two, maybe three decades
Cool.
0
Q: Synonimise [ironkingdoms] to [iron-kingdoms]

Jonathan HobbsThis is pretty small, but a recent question created the ironkingdoms tag. Normally we put a hyphen for the space in a tag's name, so it should be iron-kingdoms. I would make this change myself but I can't! I get this error message whilst trying to change the tag on the question: So, here I am...

@JonathanHobbs woo
@JonathanHobbs When's your next campaign session, do you know?
@BESW I do not! Maybe next weekend or the one after.
Or we'll talk about our setting outside of any formal session.
01:40
Hey everybody.
@JonathanHobbs Which campaign is this? Fate?
@AlexP hey
@C.Ross Hi!
@AlexP Yeah, he's got his group moving from 4e to Fate.
Is this the one-shot that became way more than a one-shot? :D
Kinda?
01:43
(I'm having trouble remembering who was doing what.)
It's the "pirates and cannibals" one-shot, which is now looking like it'll get fleshed out and concluded and maybe some of those characters will turn out to be part of the 4e campaign too.
(Their plan is to continue the 4e campaign, but in Fate.)
Metool had the one-on-one Pony Legend game. BESW and Trogdor have the one-on-one Fate werecat of Bast game. Who had the introducing-my-group-to-Fate cult-city one-shot?
Emrakul.
Ah, that's right.
And Kyle had the "Downton Abbey manor house intrigue session, with vampires."
01:47
@BESW Which emerged from the planning session by surprise! :D
Yes!
Rather like my Clown & Mime vs Hitman session.
Your what?
Very first time we ever played Fate.
Our D&D session had ended early, so I offered to run a Fate encounter so we could see what it's like.
"Okay, Ben, your character is described by his high concept. To get you started, I'll give you an adjective and you provide the noun."
Gunslinging _____
...Clown.
So naturally the other guy had to have a Martial Mime.
And because it's classic, they started out in a bar. But it was a rough roadside bar with a noisy jukebox.
And then a hitman walked in the door, gunning for the clown.
2
(Because I'm a firm believer in Chandler's Law.)
> Undoubtedly the stories about them [hard-boiled detectives] had a fantastic element. Such things happened, but not so rapidly, nor to so close-knit a group of people, nor within so narrow a frame of logic. This was inevitable because the demand was for constant action; if you stopped to think you were lost. When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand. - Raymond Chandler
02:02
@BESW I was going to make a joke about the Friends character but I realized I'd have to, like, do research to make it any good. Mehhhh.
@AlexP And I wouldn't have gotten it anyway.
@BESW Ditto. :D
02:32
It's always interesting to hear "his husband" in a game.
Shouldn't be. Is.
It's also interesting to hear the BBEG say "It's not just an elemental damage type."
@Metool What does that mean?
02:49
@BESW <--- @AlexP This is exactly the case
We'll run the pirates & cannibals sorta-one-shot until we're satisfied we want to move on, and know what we want to move on to. We'll probably do the campaign I had planned for 4e, but focused on the fun parts because I require no padding in order to level them up - and I'll craft parts of the setting with them.
A couple of them want the world to largely still be unknown to them, so it won't be a world where every part was largely collaborated on - a good helping of it will be my own work.
@AlexP Referring to slag generated by the mining operations on the planet. It has a curious property of making any following damage roughly double in effectiveness.
I have yet to know exactly what else it does, being still in the story mission it involves.
@JonathanHobbs Alternative: leave it blank until they get there, and then build it together.
Or a combination of the two. "Okay, so this lake is filled with islands, with waterfalls with no apparent source, and caves that are bigger than the islands they're in. Who lives here?"
I do want to leave things blank to be filled in later. Two of them like surprises though (naturally there would be some anyway!). One of them however isn't totally satisfied with the idea of having his level of control over things in the world.
i.e. creating stuff too
He feels like it's too much control, but that's something we'll work on. It's possibly in part because I needed their help creating stuff whilst I was GMing, because all of us are learning, and thus reached out and had their hand in stuff I maybe should have done myself.
But it's definitely also just a part of the D&D -> Fate transition
in part he will need to become comfortable with that :)
@BESW I'll probably combine it. Some things won't be a blank slate, but they will be a picture the players can fill in.
He can always choose to be less involved with the bits he's not comfortable with.
03:08
That is true yes
I was considering maybe that for some areas I should take, say, 2 of the players aside and work on it with them
Hrm.
outside the game, not during it, and only for areas where some of the players want to work on them AND the other players would rather be surprised by it
Could work.
I'd be careful not to do it too often, and to never let it replace whole-group brainstorming.
Yeah, same
I don't want that to be The Way We Do It
Especially at first: you want to model the process at the table, so even those who aren't participating can learn it.
03:15
That's true
Handsome Jack is someone you can really hate.
Hah, finally someone else who feels the way I do about Captain Jack Harkness.
(Yes, yes, I know, Borderlands.)
@mxyzplk one of the last players I ran through the citadel tried to get the white dragon as a pet, too.
Today I bring you:
Glaucus atlanticus (commonly known as the sea swallow, blue angel, blue glaucus, blue dragon, blue sea slug and blue ocean slug) is a species of small-sized blue sea slug, a pelagic aeolid nudibranch, a marine gastropod mollusk in the family Glaucidae. It is closely related to Glaucilla marginata, which is sometimes included in Glaucus. This sea slugs feeds on other pelagic creatures including the venomous cnidarian, the Portuguese Man o' War. Because the sea slug stores stinging nematocysts from the cnidarian within its own tissues, a human picking up the sea slug may receive a very ...
Oh, those guys!
@JonathanHobbs I left you a present.
03:31
@BESW :D!
I hope it's helpful.
It is.
Aaaaaaaat the moment I can picture myself using a combination of these
Yeah, one of the cool things about Fate is that you don't have to commit to one conceit for everyone all the time.
One guy could use stunts, one guy could use a potions extra....
@BESW Yours, possible invocations of the item (trogdor's), lessons from IgneusJotunn's (his stunt approach could be a part of the items themselves), and the contest of wilful items from wraith808.
Lots of great options.
03:41
@JonathanHobbs That is beautiful.
@AlexP It is so beautiful.
I love the smell of second-hand nematocysts in the morning.
@BESW That is because you live on a weird island in the middle of the ocean, surrounded by tropical plants and bizarre sea beasts.
Which is kinda awesome, actually.
But the rest of us get to enjoy the modern convenience of mail.
@BESW If it's anything you might want to work with, I was talking to trogdor after his answer and brought up the idea that in his method, potions would be an aspect you get a few free invocations of. Buy 5 potions = get one potion aspect with 5 free invocations.
We only get Man-o-War when the currents are just right.
@JonathanHobbs Oh, cool.
@AlexP At least we don't have anything particularly lethal on land. All our really nasty stuff is in the water.
You guys have snakes and spiders and things that just casually kill ya for stepping outside.
03:48
Enh, Virginia is pretty much devoid of nasty wildlife. Except for how we had West Nile a few years back.
Maybe some lyme disease.
But there's no, like, killer snakes or coyotes or anything.
No bats, either, anymore. :(
Of course, the instant you step into the tidal zone, all bets are off. Stonefish, cone snails, sea snakes, fire coral, lionfish...
@AlexP We've got an endangered fruit bat.
It used to be a delicacy, but eating it is less common now because it's been blamed for a mysterious local disease.
All of the bats on the east coast have pretty much died within the last decade:
White-nose syndrome (WNS) is a poorly understood disease associated with the deaths of at least 5.7 million to 6.7 million North American bats. The condition, named for a distinctive fungal growth around the muzzles and on the wings of hibernating bats, was first identified in a cave in Schoharie County, New York in February 2006. It has rapidly spread, and as of 2013, the condition had been found in over 115 caves and mines ranging mostly throughout the Northeastern U.S. and as far south as Alabama and west to Missouri and into four Canadian provinces. According to laboratory research i...
That's awful!
@BESW I have never been in an area with stonefish and the like. But I'd be deathly afraid of them. Just the whole idea freaks me out so much.
Join the club.
We've got more species than all the Hawaiian islands combined, and a decent number of them will casually kill or maim you, or at least give you a really bad day.
Even upside down jellyfish will give you a lovely rash.
(On the other hand, getting stabbed by a sea urchin can sometimes cause even the most stubborn of warts to give up and go away. Um. Results may vary.)
03:57
@LitheOhm Yeah I basically promised to take Leadership as soon as I could. I was an elfy type beach ranger... He became my combo animal companion/cohort. Not great for killing because he matured really slowly but since he was smart and flew the utility was high.
@mxyzplk beach ranger?
@LitheOhm He's got a floppy hat and a metal detector.
nice. I'm all for more dragons in the game, especially in the party. Pseudodragon familiars are pretty cool too
haha, nice
The druid at the end of that adventure was a lot of fun to role-play. A party of five people, all of them giving me that "you're freaking crazy" stare before they eradicated him
So, I was discussing our one-on-one game with a (very clever indie game-designer) friend of mine today, and he pointed out something hilarious -- the one-on-one BW game I play with my wife is totally following the structure of the "monomyth":
(Though we're only at the threshold part right now, in terms of the big scheme of things.)
[groan] I have... issues... with the monomyth.
04:10
@BESW Oh, it's crap! But the similarities are still amusing.
Part of the reason it's "crap" is that it's so vague it can be applied to all manner of unrelated stories without actually saying anything meaningful about them.
@BESW And like 75% of the elements are optional modules.
So basically every story is the same story if you don't count most of the parts of it.
Aye.
"There's a main character, and he goes and does stuff he didn't expect to do, and people help him or try to stop him, and he learns something and goes home."
Other people have kinda cleaned it up into, like, that diagram.
We did accidentally have one adventure that covered 90% of that diagram. In terms of where the elements are introduced and the like.
My big issue with the monomyth is that it could have been useful!
04:16
@BESW That's my big issue with, like, half of everything.
If it hadn't tried to claim universality, it wouldn't have had to genericize itself into irrelephance.
As "one kind of mythic structure," it could have claimed firm ground and held to its statements.
But it had to go all wishy-washy and hand-wavy in order to Feel Important about itself by being universal.
He had to go all Chomsky with it and claim that this was the foundational ur-thing of all human narrative thought.
Which is so.... stereotypically Western Privilege that it hurts.
@LitheOhm Yeah there was an actual terrain that was that... "Coastal" I think
Gotta run, kid's sleepover called off on account of sickness
@mxyzplk That's pretty cool. Not enough games/settings pay attention to coastal areas.
@mxyzplk ttfn, hope it's not too bad!
04:23
@mxyzplk Good luck.
04:36
[blink] I love Wikipedia talk pages.
The WNS talk page has a lovely debate over the reliability of government sources and whether the role of humans in spreading WNS is exaggerated or fabricated.
@BESW Last I checked it was pretty certain it was brought over by cavers.
(I have yet to find anything more amazing than the wiki Talk for felt, though.)
Felt!
04:54
@AlexP I know, right?
Can't say I'm surprised, really
The guy's got a rambling flow that reminds me of the Pride and Prejudice Amazon reviews the McTabby collected.
> All the women wear flouncy, bouncy dresses with huge flowered hats that Scarlet O'Hara might have worn in GONE WITH THE WIND.
I usually can't get past "exfoliated" without taking a laughing-until-I-wheeze break.
> It is generally considered a pretty, romantic book - like a swan on a lake. But much like the swan, it's what happening underneath that's important.
2
:D
05:00
Go ahead, reviewer, tell us how you really feel.
I think that's supposed to be a compliment.
If you like this, you might also enjoy her Summary Executions, which are collections of excerpts from Harry Potter fanfic summaries. They start here.
I love how nobody yet has actually named the correct dates or time period.
Ctrl+F Regency on that page: 0 hits. But it's "late 17th century" and "early Victorian" :D
(I don't even like Jane Austen, by the way. Neither does my wife.)
Heh.
I recently had to explain to someone that I could appreciate the value and skill in a work without actually wanting to partake in it.
You're right, though. Now that I'm done reading all I can think about is "exfoliated."
05:06
Also primogeniture, surely.
@BESW Well, you know, the 17th-century Victorians had a lot of problems because of Salic law.
Fair enough!
Also sumptuary laws limiting flouncy dresses to the gentry. Peasants all had to wear codpieces instead.
Also nobody could write good back then, which is why this book is written bad. It's not even a cool book, like about wizards.
Her movies were good, though!
So, just for the hell of it, I looked up reviews for my favorite book. They are surprisingly not bad. But still...
05:19
Every now and then you run into a flotilla of reviews that are obviously the result of some enterprising middle-school teacher who had her class write Amazon reviews of the book they read in class.
> One or two of the stories made a passing attempt at uplifting the future of humans, but mostly these are, to me, the writings of a deeply depressed person. I found it no surprise to learn that Ms Sheldon died at her own hand after killing her husband, probably as a suicide pact.
(It was a suicide "pact." They were 80-ish years old and in declining health. That is... not what depression looks like.)
Hmm. Actually, I have a guess as to what happened there.
We always bring our own context to the work, and I've seen in the past how works dealing with suicide in particular are almost impossible to read objectively.
Suicide is very prevalent here, and I know at least one teacher who revised her curriculum because of it--not that it was upsetting the students, but because any work with suicide in it was read as being entirely about the suicide.
(Richard Cory comes to mind.)
The stories themselves aren't about suicide, though. The author just killed herself (and her husband).
And that's enough, quite honestly.
It's very tempting (especially for people new to literary analysis) to learn something about the author's life and then see it in everything they've written.
For example, Greenblatt believes Shakespeare was secretly Catholic--and so he sees Catholic symbolism and metaphor everywhere in the plays.
Yeah, it's more fun to play Da Vinci Code with literature than to, like, just sit there and read a thing and not have a grand wild theory of how it's all part of a giant magic puzzle.
05:28
When you think that Titus Andronicus is about the Holy Eucharist and the Miracle of Transubstantiation, you've gone too far.
(FWIW, I think the people who try to write their books as some kind of giant grand puzzle end up producing trash, pretty much always.)
Aye.
Although Graeme Base's The Eleventh Hour worked out pretty well.
But that was the whole point, right out in the open, no other purpose to the thing.
Hmm, the best book featuring suicide I've ever read... I think it was Forever Peace. Forever Peace overall has some problems, mostly with creating a compelling ending, but the suicide attempt in the book is well done. Because it just creeps up out of nowhere, sorta. The main character is depressed. At some point that just leaks over into suicide. IIRC there's a bit of a precipitating crisis but mostly it's just "being alone with your thoughts for a while longer than usual."
("About" is not the right word there.)
(The Eleventh Hour was a grandly illustrated children's book about a crime at a dinner party, and ended without a solution. The solution was embedded in clues in the pictures, from codes and ciphers to mathematical puzzles and visual hints.)
@BESW Well, that's just an actual puzzle. As opposed to a puzzle of THEMES and SAYING THINGS. ;)
05:34
Yeah.
Themes and concepts are best left to develop naturally unless you're a real pro.
Okay, I need a better example than Terry Goodkind, but... Terry Goodkind ::wince::
CS Lewis?
@BESW I kinda like him as a guy, mostly (from what little I know of him), but I find his books dull as dishwater.
Also Lewis is kinda funny as Tolkien's more outgoing friend.
Largely because so much of them are meaningless unless you know what he's referring to.
@AlexP The Inklings are so cute.
05:52
So, I have one major complaint about OSR: I get that a lot of OD&D stuff works better if you play exactly like Gary did. I really do! But, in my view, very little of the rules actually encourage that structure effectively. People would swap their characters between adventures all the time? Seems like it would be nice to have some support for that in the text. (I know that might be seen as contrary to the OSR ethos.)
Okay, maybe two major complaints. The second is LotFP, because horror artwork in the style of a Cannibal Corpse cover is just embarrassing. For everyone involved.
afkish
Going to bed.
Bye!
ttfn
 
8 hours later…
13:29
So, finished the first session of the Werecat in Egypt campaign with @trogdor.
His character, Ajani, started off with a set of challenge rolls to determine how he did in the priest training. He did pretty well at learning history, dogma, and rituals (although he did forget one ritual), and got a pretty good sense of the internal workings and politics of the temple, but failed to find a good place in it.
Specifically, he's still facing a lot of antagonism because he's a man in an all-woman priesthood. The priestess in charge of duty assignments is especially angry at his rising through the ranks without working for it (and his werecat hates her, so the hair on the back of his neck bristles whenever she's near).
So after his training, Ajani's first assignment was an awful one: to sneak into the Valley of Horus and bring back the body of a sacred falcon.
He spends the day researching, and trying (and failing) to bless his weapons, and scoping the temple out.
At night, as a werecat, he sneaks into the temple, past all the guards, magnificently. But climbing a tree in the valley behind the temple, he accidentally strikes sparks with his claws on a piton in the tree, getting attention from the guards. He quickly grabs a sleeping falcon, crushes its windpipe in his teeth, and flees through the temple while the guards are still searching the valley.
The ritual he forgot, however, is the one to quiet the soul of a dead animal, so the falcons all made a massive ruckus and the temple of Horus knows someone made off with a bird.
He left the falcon's body at the doorstep of his head priestess, and that's where we finished the session.
13:54
The gameplay was a little stilted, and I forgot to invoke against him much at all, but we had fun and his failures were made interesting--the antagonistic Assigner of Duties is a great plot hook.
14:54
@BESW Good complication with reincorporation!
Reincorporation?
Including a detail established previously.
Ah, yeah.
And the antagonistic Assigner of Duties was a combination of two failed challenge checks.
He failed to successfully deal with the antagonism of the priestesses, and the complication was that he personally disliked one of them.
(Actually it was a tie, so that's the success with minor complication.)
Then he tied again on successfully integrating himself into the political structure, so someone above him was going to actively oppose him.
We rolled them into one person.
Good choice.
There wasn't a lot of immersive conversational-type RP; Trogdor and I generally tend not to do that when it's just the two of us, though we both enjoy it with others.
15:01
We do a lot of our one-on-one play at kind of a slightly removed not-all-the-deets level, too.
And we're still not totally comfortable with the working-together-to-figure-out-what's-going-on thing.
I tend to ask too many questions instead of just getting on with it, I think.
@BESW Yeah, it pays to remember that the GM is still the boss of the world.
Part of it is that I didn't have anything prepared, and part of it is that I really like Trogdor's ideas.
I think you can do a lot just by pushing failures and playing up the NPCs.
First session you're just trying to establish people fo rhim to care about, though.
Yeah.
I... need to remember to invoke.
15:04
Players can self-invoke also, right?
Self-compelling is the thing.
I'm not sure if self-invoking is a thing at all...
So, you can also just latch onto that and dial up the consequences.
It should be, I guess.
@BESW Also, this part is adorable. I really like cat-Ajani.
I also need to set difficulties higher.
@AlexP hee, yeah, that was my idea.
Trogdor approved heartily.
We've determined that not only does he get a free 1/session form change, he gets to choose his form at the start of any session that isn't a direct continuation of the previous one.
15:11
That makes sense.
We're also thinking that if he ever gets bonus consequences in were form, they'll "stick" in were form: he'll have to spend the appropriate time as a cat for them to wear off.
I guess that depends on the specific consequence, right?
I'm currently speculating on whether we need to divide the Lore skill into one for history/dogma and one for rituals. We used Lore a lot more than I'd anticipated. Gonna wait a couple more sessions to see.
@AlexP Physical ones.
Basically, the were body "keeps" damage that only it could soak.
I think that could work, but don't make it invisible in your other form. Maybe you don't have a big nasty wound in your side anymore, but it still hurts like you do?
Could do.
15:14
On a narrative level.
The idea is that because he has a totally different set of skills, he could have a Physique in were form that grants consequence slots he doesn't have the Physique for as a human.
He's already got more physical stress boxes as a cat.
Oh, and Ajani has no idea why he was sent to kill a falcon of Horus. Nobody's telling him squat about the conflict between the temples.
He tried to find out by researching in the temple library, but it's a recent event so he found nada.
Sounds like he needs to find a sympathetic priestess.
Yup.
He failed his chances to have one initially, so we'll have to work on that.
Give him a priestess in crisis who he can help out to earn her friendship?
Seems reasonable, but I'll have to tune it so it's not a "woman in peril, the only man must save her!" thing.
In an amusing inversion of stereotypes, Ajani finds himself in the position of having to prove that he's as capable as any woman of being a servant of Bastet.
(we really like the idea of the first female pharaoh ordering the all-female temple of Bastet to allow a man in their ranks.)
(And since I found out about Hatshepsut's mummy being a fat, diabetic, cancer-ridden woman in her 50s, I feel like I've got a much better grip on how I want to play her in the campaign.)
15:29
@BESW You could make them both outsiders in some way. I mean, Ajani is already.
Really he just needs a buddy eventually, I think.
Aye.
I'm kinda dry on ideas for a character, though.
You may actually want to look at Japanese religious life. Like Genpei War times. All of these monasteries competing for status, often by beating each other up and setting things on fire.
Hm. Not something I'm familiar with.
Short version:
People weren't emperor very long, on average.
They didn't die a bunch, just retire to a monastery.
For living so close, I'm woefully ignorant of Japanese history/culture/mythology.
15:33
So the most affluent Buddhist monasteries were super-competitive about drawing high-profile people.
To the point of fighting each other at times (which happened in Europe, too, over land rights sometimes).
What made their system extra-busted was that retired emperors would still have some degree of power. So sometimes the sitting emperor would proclaim something and one of the retired guys would say the opposite.
You described priesthood as kinda a temporary job, in your setting.
So I feel like there's room for a similar attract-the-cool-kids dynamic.
What's your Egyptian society like, below the pharaoh? Is there a noble class of some sort?
There's nobility that ostensibly rules each area.
("Who are the rich and powerful people?" in other words.)
@BESW Seems like there's room to overlap the temple conflicts with more, erm, temporal conflicts.
But in many areas, the actual power is in the temples. The high priests are permanent pharaoh-appointed positions, and the other priests are government servants rotated through the temples as a part of their service.
How does one become a government servant? Are you born into it to some extent?
Is it like the cursus honorum?
Because the pharaoh can't be seen to visibly oppose the priesthood, or her godhood will be questioned, and because she's expected to be seen increasing the prestige of the temples in order to enforce her godhood, the temples quickly become powers in their own right.
Hmm. Not sure.
[looks it up]
Okay, yeah, it's a caste system.
There's room for movement, but usually your birth defines your role.
Temples are government sponsored because they support the gods (and the pharaoh is a god), but they also collect taxes and store grain.
15:43
Like if you distinguish yourself as an artisan, or on the battlefield, or are shown to be blessed by the gods?
And do the right people some favors.
Ajani is an unusual case, because he didn't do anybody any favors. He has no patron except the pharaoh's order that he be allowed into the priesthood.
@BESW I was just about to say, it seems like a lot of people are going to expect those favors retroactively. :)
Ill-suited to the priesthood is an apt Trouble on many levels.
One of my issues is that Ajani is a physical-skills character thrust into a political world.
I want to explore that without castrating him (metaphorically or literally).
@BESW Hahahahahaha.
Oh, believe me, some of the priestesses are trying to figure out how to arrange it.
They'd be much happier about a neutered cat.
15:56
So, since I'm playing a hunter character as well...
Yes?
One thing I noticed recently is also that her physical skills didn't really lend themselves to, erm, direct engagement. Basically she's thrust into a role that really kinda calls for a warrior mentality to actually resolve things (though a hunter mentality works better for, erm, surviving until you do).
Ajani is about prep.
One of his aspects is Good at waiting.
He's got a stunt that gives him +2 to Stealth when creating advantages to stalk prey.
:D
He's also much more of a combat beast than my character, probably.
+4 Shoot.
15:59
On account of that whole cat transformation business.
The cat is actually more stealthy! Better at taking punishment, but no better at dishing it out.
The cat's +4 is Burglary.
Much more of a house cat than a wildcat.
Neither of them are built for melee confrontation.
The cat is all sneaky, but can take a beating. Ajani's got some people skills, and is all about setting up for a good shot to finish the fight before it starts.
Yeah, I've really been feeling the limits of that kind of thing in our game. Also not having resources, both social and physical.
Before he went in to the valley of Horus, Ajani researched the falcons in the library, tried (and failed) to bless his weapons, and talked a priest of Horus into giving him a day tour.
@AlexP What do you mean "not having resources"?
@BESW Something you kinda forget if you're used to, say, D&D. Sometimes, even having a proper weapon is a big deal.
Contacts and social status, wealth, equipment.
That's what the Contacts and Resources skills are for, and the assumption that your aspects can allow certain things to be true.
I'd assume that Ajani, with his Talkative and Helpful Hunter aspect, always has a bow and arrows near to hand unless the specific circumstances say otherwise.
16:15
@AlexP - I lost all respect for my aunt when I learned that Gone With the Wind is the first and only book she's read the whole way through that wasn't a textbook.
See if she likes Jane Eyre.
[grin]
@BESW - "It's the romance I really love - you know, from back in the days when men were really men."
@Lord_Gareth That is a reaaaaaally loaded statement.
@AlexP - Every time she talks about that book I lose a little bit of faith in humanity.
So, I have a children's glockenspiel (I'm not sure how that's actually different from a xylophone, but that's what the box said). And I have just learned the secret to playing it.
Take a bunch of the metal bar things off. So it's only like 60% full.
That way when you flail around on it sounds more, erm, melodic.
16:25
@AlexP Without shame.
@AlexP Scales?
Sounds like yours wasn't made with enough space between the bars.
No, it's just that lots of songs don't spread themselves out over all the notes evenly. So if you're just flailing like an idiot, you can simulate that by removing some of the notes.
Like mine looks like C D E - G - B - right now.
Ah.
So it's got sort of a pleasant waterfall thing going.
16:28
@AlexP Waterfall thing?
@Metool It's the Swamp Thing's cousin.
Huh. Desktop Notification just stopped using the default Growl thing and now has a persisting message you gotta click to close.
Yeah, mine keeps changing around.
Haven't had to manually close 'em regularly yet, but the style and interface keep changing.
@Lord_Gareth My wife just reminded me that What's-His-Face both spousal-rapes Scarlet to fix her depression.
I'm not sure if that's better or worse than when he saves her from being raped using his Super Klansman Powers.
::gag::
@kryan too much is lost taking duskblade to fifth level instead of only third. That's another level of cleric spells. Practiced spellcaster might be beneficial, but really that character only used Kelgore's Fire Bolt against the taint elemental in a diverse dungeon.
16:33
@AlexP My aunt thought that scene was very romantic. He 'really took charge' the way 'men are supposed to.'
FWIW The movie does not make Klansmen awesome heroes like the book does.
At that point, may as well go to 12th or so to get a full attack, and then take cleric the rest of the way. Inflict offers a save, however, very few critters resist or are immune to negative energy
As far as I know, the author was still alive and complained about that.
@AlexP Since she read the book, that's worth precisely nothing.
Also that they didn't give Scarlet giant "raven's wing" eyebrows like in the book.
16:34
@LitheOhm Thanks for taking it to chat. I left a comment to Ryan suggesting same.
Who's Ryan?
KRyan.
Oh. Surname basis, then.
Or something. Who knows with handles.
Heck, I answer to "Eric" in real life, for reasons I myself am unclear on.
Curious.
16:41
I answer to 'Knives' a lot. This sometimes leads to hilarity
I managed to get a highschool friend to answer to "Fish" with some regularity.
17:01
Okay, sleep now.
ttfn
17:26
@BESW, My group decided what they want their next session of FAE to be
17:38
They want to be young Death Eaters in the Harry Potter universe, and try to kill Harry Potter. They think the idea of a trio of evil people doddering around in the background failing to kill Harry Potter throughout the series is hilarious and want to give it a go. A bit odd, but should make for some hilarious times. I'll let you know how it goes.
Sometimes it's difficult to tell when comments are about to spill over into "chatty" domain instead of "improve/refine the answer." However, it's not terribly difficult noting when one is deep in argument or discussion territory :P
the threshold is the tricky part
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