TRPG General Chat

BESW

07:00

[cough] Fluff...

user61230

So much fluff.

Alex P

What were we talking about again?

Metamaterial girl

hands a fiver to @BESW

BESW

@AlexP Ponies.

lisardggY

Masterfully done, @BESW. Using fluffy ponies to derail the beer conversation, thus returning us to the topic of RPGs. Presumably.

user61230

07:02

what is an rpg halp

Alex P

Secretly, I don't even like beer. Just cooking with it.

Don't tell John.

Metamaterial girl

@AlexP Oh thank god, I thought I was the only one.

Alex P

@Metamaterialgirl high-five!

BESW

@Emracool RPG HALP (n): acronym for Role-Playing Game Heuristic Aid for Lazy Participants.

3

Metamaterial girl

@AlexP Offers toast with beer bread

lisardggY

07:03

@AlexP More for us, then.

BESW

I can't even cook with alcohol...

Metamaterial girl

@BESW Well, if you are really jonesing for the taste of beer in stew or bread, there's always near-beer. Ducks

BESW

Heh.

I've never had alcohol of any kind, and I find the smell distasteful.

Metamaterial girl

If anyone still makes that stuff.

Yeah, it's definitely one of those 'the destination is the point, not the journey' kind of consumables for me.

looks around Oh yeah, we're still in the RPG chat. coughs apologetically

Alex P

Not a forum!!

;)

Metamaterial girl

07:07

Fixed. :P

lisardggY

@Metamaterialgirl Well, I have friends for whom alcohol (or, ahem, other things) are an integral part of their gaming sessions.

user61230

forum (n): a place, meeting, or medium where ideas and views on a particular issue can be exchanged.

user61230

;)

lisardggY

@Emracool A-ha! But our issues are nowhere near particular!

Metamaterial girl

@lisardggY What could you possibly mean?! Looks around shiftily

BESW

07:08

@lisardggY Whereas one of the reasons I became a GM was to provide a controlled environment for my friends where we could be sure intoxicants wouldn't be an issue.

user61230

@lisard Oh, aren't they? But we do switch between particular issues, don't we?

user61230

So at each point, we are holding a forum on something new, are we not? ohoho.

Metamaterial girl

Issue of the day? Or the hour...*checks* or the two-minute interval.

BESW

For me it's part religious, part medical, part pure distaste.

Metamaterial girl

Yep. I had to bow out of a group where they passed around canned spinach during the session. Didn't even offer any tarragon vinegar. Philistines.

BESW

07:10

[snerk]

Metamaterial girl

:D

lisardggY

Although, if we were to return to core RPG issues, I have had sessions fall apart over choice of pizza toppings.

Metamaterial girl

@lisardggY Well, sure. Pizza toppings are a big deal.

lisardggY

Or, more precisely, over an overly pedantic person stretching the order process to over an hour.

Metamaterial girl

Wow, that's more impressive than systemic rules lawyering.

Ok, an actual RPG related statement: I'm curious how a system like Monsterhearts works for the relational aspect of a game--does it make the relation-y stuff happen in such a way that it contributes to a memorable story with emotional resonance, or is it just another axis to judge character interaction?

lisardggY

07:14

These days my regular-but-currently-on-hiatus group has a good routine for that. We usually play weekday evenings, so around 7:00pm the Guy In Charge Of Food starts rounding up requests by text so that he can place the order ahead of time so that hte food arrives just as the session starts. We eat and socialize, then start the game without wasted time.

Metamaterial girl

@lisardggY Efficient.

Alex P

@Metamaterialgirl I can't speak from first-hand experience with that particular system. Basically it's modeling the pull that characters in a teen horror drama (think Vampire Diaries or the like) have on each other. Their consuming love and hate.

Metamaterial girl

@lisardggy I had a thing going for about a year when we got everyone over every two weeks on a weekend, and I'd cook a bunch of stuff and everyone would chip in for groceries. Had fun with it, but it took some planning.

Alex P

@Metamaterialgirl Does Monsterhearts work well? That's kinda subjective. It's very much designed based on this school of thought: "when we want to let our characters off the hook, we need rules to threaten them; when we want to kill our characters, we need rules to protect them."

Metamaterial girl

@AlexP Huh. And actually turning that into a mechanic...I admit I'm skeptical about that leading to making a gripping story.

lisardggY

07:17

@Metamaterialgirl We occasionally do that in my Ars Magica group. It works well.

Metamaterial girl

And that's a school I hadn't heard articulated in so many words, but it makes sense in the context of RPG's in general...maybe with the exception of Call of Cthulhu.

lisardggY

To fit the theme of the game, our then-GM dug up some 14th century recipes and made them.

Alex P

@Metamaterialgirl It's a novel answer to the question of "What's the point of mechanics when you could just, like, not have any and say what happens together?"

Metamaterial girl

@lisardggY this was a popular offering.

lisardggY

@Metamaterialgirl Ah, yes. A friend made that a couple of months ago, but by the time I got over to his house it was all gone. :)

Metamaterial girl

07:19

@AlexP Right. The need for that line is unspoken in my freeform campaigns, but it does exist, and you can tell when you get too far off the line in one direction or another by how bored/stressed the situation makes you.

@lisardggY The slow cooker was my friend. Could spend the morning putting stuff together, then have pulled pork or lasagna in the evening.

Alex P

Slow cooker pro tip: you can also use it to strip paint.

Metamaterial girl

With nibbles to keep everyone's blood sugar up during the rest of the day.

@AlexP Wait, what?

Alex P

@Metamaterialgirl Say you're rebuilding a door or cupboard and the metal bits have been painted over (maybe repeatedly, if it's old). You can put them in a crock pot and just let it sit there for a while. The paint comes right off.

It's actually way easier than paint stripping.

BESW

@AlexP [takes notes]

Metamaterial girl

Huh. Too bad I can't just put my whole house in...

Alex P

07:24

(I'm not sure if you can use the crock pot for food afterward. Probably?)

BESW

If honey weren't so expensive, I'd make my signature peanut butter balls for every session.

Metamaterial girl

@AlexP I'd definitely soak the hell out of it afterward, but probably. Tough enamel glaze on most of 'em.

@BESW Ooo, my mom would make those. With chocolate chips and coconut.

Alex P

I kinda miss my weekly pizza from when we played in college. Nowadays, gaming with my wife, we don't really make a special food thing out of it. Although I did have a delicious steak sandwich today.

BESW

@Metamaterialgirl Probably not quite like what I make. [grin]

Metamaterial girl

Food was definitely part of the ritual of gaming for most of my history, though early on it was teenager food--i.e. Doritos and soda.

@BESW So how do you make them?

BESW

07:26

Equal parts dry rolled oats, chunky peanut butter, and milk powder, and a bit less honey (ie, if everything else is 1/2 cup, honey is 1/3 cup). Mix it all together.

lisardggY

/me is now hungry.

Metamaterial girl

Something that could keep us up till 5am on Sunday morning, buzzing on the caffeine.

lisardggY

I'll go see what I can scrounge up for breakfast. Lots of lunchables in the fridge, but nothing morningish.

BESW

Make balls of the mixture roughly 1 tablespoon each, and roll them in more dry rolled oats so you can pick them up without getting your fingers sticky.

Metamaterial girl

@lisardggY Grits?

BESW

07:27

Refrigerate for at least an hour, but 12+ hours gets the honey to start crystallizing and that's lovely.

Metamaterial girl

@BESW Sounds tasty, and far more virtuous than my mom's version.

lisardggY

Ooh, leftover brocolli muffins.

BESW

And of course the more organic stuff you can use the better. ESPECIALLY the peanut butter.

lisardggY

(They're tasty, I promise)

Metamaterial girl

@lisardggY Heh, I believe you. :)

BESW

07:30

@Metamaterialgirl I put it together from two other recipes, one for cereal balls and one for... some kind of honey glop that a kids magazine thought was clever.

Metamaterial girl

Food improv is one of the finest of arts.

Alex P

Speaking of "roll to control the narrative" (yeah, like 45 minutes ago): Trollbabe is a rather underrated game in this regard (you can basically ignore the setting). It's a really simple mechanic with some satisfying results.

BESW

It's very rich, but it's high in protein, good sugars, and carbs, so it's good endurance food.

Metamaterial girl

@AlexP I was just reading that link and going 'Aha!' at the description of 'abused player syndrome'.

'he played with me as a GM in the very worst of my illusionist abusive whammy asshole GM days, and as a result turned into a classic example of several forms of abused player syndrome. He turtles, he always looks for the right answer, he only plays characters who are of the most white-bread middle class superhero morality, he freezes under pressure, and he waits for the GM to tell him a story rather than participating in creating the story himself.'

And the fact that Trollbabe helped to get this poor kid out of that rut.

Alex P

The mechanic's basically "if you fail, you can reroll, but the stakes get bigger." I think the third reroll isn't even to see whether you succeed, just who gets to say how you failed.

lisardggY

07:33

So broccoli muffins and leftover wakame salad out of which I'm picking out the inexplicable red peppers. Breakfast of champions, indeed.

Metamaterial girl

Hah! Nice.

@lisardggY Sounds like all the good food groups to me.

@AlexP Reading through this, you're right, third roll lets you narrate your failure...or not.

Which seems like a massive positive reinforcement to any player needing some narrative encouragement.

BESW

Hmm.

Metamaterial girl

'You fail, but you don't just die, and you can still make it kind of cool if you're creative.'

BESW

I'm comparing this to Temple of the Flying Pilgrims.

Alex P

I think it's interesting because it makes "say what happens" into a clear reward of its own. Which is maybe not something I always want every game to do, but I can totally see how that's useful for "Aha!" moments.

Metamaterial girl

07:37

Gives a player some real buy-in to the concept of story being more important than 'winning' the game.

I think my two embryonic power gamers need some of this, stat.

Alex P

@Metamaterialgirl One turn of phrase I use sometimes (and people use elsewhere, though maybe not so much anymore?) is "advocating for your character." Like, I think games flow better when you do have a focal character who is "yours" and you are rooting for that character to succeed (even if they're a terrible person in some way -- you might be rooting for them to better themselves, for instance).

But you're not so much trying to "win" as trying to do right by this fictional person, I guess, as an author.

Like, when I play, I like to feel like it's my job to show everyone else how my character is cool, or interesting, or deserving of whatever I think ought to be coming to him or her.

BESW

In Temple of the Flying Pilgrim, there are two things that can happen on a turn (sometimes both of them happen): your character can help someone, and your character can get in trouble.

Metamaterial girl

@AlexP Though with the power gamers that just translates as 'make my character teh awesome' with regard to stats, and often leaving them very two dimensional.

Alex P

That third-roll failure thing taps into that.

BESW

The random determination is which thing(s) happen, not whether they happen successfully.

You always succeed at helping someone when you try to.

Metamaterial girl

07:42

@BESW That's an interesting take on it. Event probability vs. event outcome.

BESW

And you always get in trouble, if that's what comes up.

If your character helps someone, you get to narrate that by writing a short sentence describing it.

If your character gets in trouble, though, everyone else collaborates to write that sentence.

Alex P

@Metamaterialgirl I think that's because they get used to something like this, maybe? You come up with a cool image of a character. Like, a static image. Imagine a picture or a comic-book cover or something. That is your ideal thing of the character. And then you spend your time in play just trying to make your character be that thing, because it's hard or time-consuming (e.g. you won't feel your character is awesome until you get to level 10, so until then you are kinda grinding for XP)

Metamaterial girl

@BESW Oho! Amusingly evil. :)

BESW

Your character's only stats are 1) how you help people, and 2) how you get in trouble.

(There's a secondary set of stats that you track to determine long-term character development, kind of like XP.)

Alex P

@BESW The 3:16 player in me immediately named these "Helping Ability" and "NOT HELPING Ability." ;)

BESW

07:44

@AlexP Pretty much, yes.

And it can be as silly as you like.

"Giving people food" or "Singing too loud" could each by a helping trait OR a trouble trait.

Metamaterial girl

@AlexP I'm not sure it even gets that far for them, sometimes. More like, oh, 'I need to get this set of attributes maximized so I can beat the boss on Epic mode.'

BESW

Imagine a character who helps people by singing too loud, and gets in trouble by feeding people.

lisardggY

@Metamaterialgirl I think a lot of that is due to the parallel evolution of RPGs and videogames/CRPGs. They're two distinct things, but that share a lot of terminology and concepts.

Metamaterial girl

@BESW 1). Enemy distraction. 2). Horrible cook.

Alex P

Can I help people with murder and get in trouble with murder? Or do they have to be different?

lisardggY

07:45

So it makes sense that people would conflate the two things, try to achieve the goals from one in the other.

Alex P

(Serious question.)

BESW

@AlexP At the end of each session in Flying Pilgrims, your character changes either the helping trait or the trouble trait (which one is part of the secondary stat you track during the session.)

lisardggY

(Only 9:45am and I can already scratch "use the word conflate" off my list of things to do today. Score!)

BESW

@AlexP It's more interesting if they're different, but I don't think there's an actual RULE against it.

Metamaterial girl

@lisardggY Yeah, and the last time I was in here I think we touched on it a bit, how the video game culture has had an effect on the tabletop RPG culture, to some degree. At least to the ones coming into tabletop after they've done video gaming for awhile.

@lisardggY Next WOD is: confusticate!

BESW

07:48

Actually, the helping trait and trouble trait are expressed amusingly.

Each pilgrim has a twofold name, like Clear Beast or Tangled Scarf.

The first name is their "banner," and describes how they get in trouble.

The second is their "avatar," or how they help people.

Weird and amusing interpretations are encouraged.

Tangled Scarf, for example, gets in trouble by being involved in love triangles, and helps people by expressing his avante-garde fashion sense.

After his first adventure, he might become Ascendant Scarf, and now he gets in trouble by appearing to be a great leader.

Alex P

Which is a neat way to tie the most prominent thing on your character sheet into the theme of the game (the whole pilgrim concept).

BESW

yes.

And technically, your name always starts with Pilgrim.

You are Pilgrim Tangled Scarf, and then Pilgrim Ascendent Scarf.

Metamaterial girl

Wonder how that ties into the identity that the player carries around in their head? I've put some effort into unique names in previous characters, and only once have I changed a character's name for a story purpose.

BESW

@Metamaterialgirl This game is about characters growing and changing and finding themselves.

Metamaterial girl

Right, so the names changing supports the evolving character concept in a really palpable way. Neat!

BESW

07:55

Each PC is an orphan raised in the Flying Temple. When they're teens, they go out into the world to answer letters written to the temple asking for help. In the process they discover who they are and decide whether to live in the wider world or to become monks at the temple.

At the end of each session you decide if it's time for the pilgrim to make his choice. If so, the secondary stat determines which choice he makes.

If not, the secondary stat determines which of his names he's going to change.

Metamaterial girl

That's pretty snazzy. Bookmarks YET ANOTHER rpg page

;)

BESW

The secondary stat itself is kinda cool too.

When it's your turn, you draw three stones from a bag of black and white stones.

Then you choose one color to put back.

The number of stones you're left with (combined with whether you're in trouble or not) determines what happens that turn (help and/or trouble).

And the session concludes when anyone has eight or more stones.

But the color of the stones is logged at the end of each session, and that's the secondary stat: how many white stones did you keep, and how many black?

So you can ignore the color of the stones and just make choices for numbers to try and get the effect you want each turn.

Or you can play the long game and make choices for color as well as number.

And, of course, the more stones you keep each turn the more likely the group is to succeed in fixing whatever problem they've come to help with... but it also turns the clock faster so they have less time to do it.

Tying so many different effects into one simple choice you make each turn is very dramatic, and lets people play at many levels of strategy from random to chessmaster.

Metamaterial girl

Will definitely check it out.

And go to bed like a good little recovering night owl now.

'Night :)

lisardggY

G'night.

Alex P

Good idea!

I should, too.

lisardggY

08:05

Sleep is for the weak!

(and people in other timezones)

BESW

Goodnight!

Inbar Rose

Hats, hats everywhere!

GMNoob

Check out my hat!

BESW

That's a hat.

lisardggY

And so, the Americans retire to their cots and to their beds, and the Israeli rise up again.

GMNoob

08:17

@BESW how many stones are in the bag?

BESW

20 of each.

GMNoob

So it's a quick game?

BESW

Well, the session's over when any one person has eight or more stones at the end of a round.

So each session lasts between three and eight rounds.

More is possible, but unlikely: you can get 0 stones if you draw all three of one color and choose that color to put back.

lisardggY

And a round would be a scene? Or shorter?

BESW

Usually a scene or more.

Depends on the scope of the letter for help they're answering, and the choices they may make about how to narrate it.

Here are some example sentences:

> Pilgrim Blind Owl convinces the ring that he would be a superior host, then traps the ring in a jar just as it flies off of Red Lantern’s finger.

> Pilgrim Red Blur spins around the whale so fast that it becomes nauseous, burping the little girl from its blowhole.

> Pilgrim Red Lantern is possessed by the power of a magic ring, obeying its will to conquer the universe.

> Pilgrim Rising Diploma is called into the principal’s office to face charges of breaking and entering.

GMNoob

08:26

Are the first and third sentence connected on purpose, or is that just random luck?

BESW

> Pilgrim Running Nose has an embarrassing allergic reaction from Elder Sweet Cane’s cake

@GMNoob On purpose.

I'm copy-pasting from examples in the book.

GMNoob

They sound like randomly generated sentences :P

BESW

It's a wild world.

Imagine The Little Prince crossed with Firefly and The Last Airbender.

Lots of very small worlds, each fairly isolated with their own schtick and vibe, but overall with a generally Old-East feel.

The Flying Pilgrims soar between planetoids on their own, but other folk need special crafts or hitch a ride on air whales or the like.

afk

BESW

09:42

back.

lisardggY

front

oh, we're not playing word associations?

My first word association for any word is word associations.

GMNoob

association football?

Inbar Rose

"word associations." Is two words.

lisardggY

It's my first word association, not my association word.

GMNoob

word up!

BESW

09:46

mother.

GMNoob

trucker

BESW

highheels

(Don't ask.)

Inbar Rose

meals on wheels

BESW

photo shoot

Inbar Rose

pot luck

lisardggY

09:49

Great. Now I'm hungry again.

BESW

balutan

Inbar Rose

Thats what google tells me is Balutan.... What?

lisardggY

You know, if you keep on slipping Chamorro into the conversation, we'll all just flip to Hebrew.

BESW

Balutan is taking home leftovers from a party.

Inbar Rose

So the image works perfectly then. [wicked smile]

BESW

09:53

Heh.

Traditionally it's a tinfoil-covered paper plate of leftovers.

Inbar Rose

"Traditionally" I am not sure how traditional tinfoil is.

BESW

"Tradition" is a funny word around here.

Inbar Rose

Okay.

Hey - my country has been around for less than 70 years. Who am I to argue :)

lisardggY

"Traditionally" is what your parents did.

"Long-established traditions" = grandparents.

GMNoob

@InbarRose how far back does waterfights on Shavuot go?

Inbar Rose

09:59

@GMNoob Beats me.

GMNoob

@InbarRose I need to know if it predates the water gun or not :)

BESW

English-language webpages on the subject don't provide me with original sources, but it looks like the common wisdom is that it comes from Judaic traditions of northern Africa where water physically symbolized the Torah, and life.

GMNoob

10:14

@BESW nice! I was concerned for a minute when I looked up the Wiki article about water fights in general :P Which says it comes from Poland during Easter.

BESW

I suspect, however, that all of this comes from one uncited source, so the apparent corroboration by multiple sources is meaningless.

Kind of like "dord" as a synonym for density.

GMNoob

Well, the corroboration for me is cultural. I notice more Morrocons doing it than Europeans in my town.

BESW

That's promising!

lisardggY

Hebrew Wikipedia agrees that it's a North African tradition.

(he.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%97%D7%92_%D7%94%D7%9E%D7%99%D7%9D)

GMNoob

definitly predates waterguns then.

lisardggY

10:21

I tried running Google Translate on that wikipedia page to English. Came out... badly.

Vaguely intelligible, but far from clear.

BESW

Yeah, I did that so I could track down the citation.

Magician

On cosmology of D&D Next, in which, and I kid you not, they liked the old cosmologies so much, they've changed everything all over again. Ravenloft ate Shadowfell (which previously ate Ravenloft), and Negative plane glomped it all. Fairies are now Positive. 4e's Astral Sea, unsurprisingly, got shafted.

BESW

Right-margin justification made it even harder to read.

Magician

(sorry to intrude, but this had to be shared)

lisardggY

I liked Spelljammer.

BESW

10:23

Ravenloftception?

lisardggY

I wish they'd bring back Spelljammer/.

Magician

It's BACK!

As D&D in space. Not as a planeshifting thingo.

BESW

Or would a "yo dawg" joke be more appropriate?

Magician

@BESW I think it would be. I'd compare it to an uroboros, but by this point, it's kind of trite.

BESW

On the other hand, I kind of like the idea that the Fey are associated with positive energy.

It gives a face to the Burning Hate side of positive energy.

The evils of positive energy were always kind of... forced.

Magician

10:26

Does no favors for the faeries, though.

And they'll now squeeze all the fluff all over again to fit it into the new interpretation...

BESW

Eh, the fey were squeezed dry a couple editions ago.

4e aired them out a bit, but they'd still lost all their stuffing.

Now, if the Seelie were positive and the Unseelie were negative...

GMNoob

I'll have to read this more in depth, but I tend to side on "everyone is overreacting"

BESW

My honest reaction is that I liked the 4e cosmology. It was clean and tight, but with room for anything I wanted to invent.

GMNoob

@BESW Ha good luck! Google seems incapable of understanding Hebrew citation methods, especially for works dating back to the middle ages or rabbinic citations.

BESW

Previous cosmologies were overcomplicated and redundant. It felt like they existed more to justify producing new books than because they were actually interesting or useful in play.

Magician

10:32

@BESW Have you read the post? The Great Wheel is back, times 3. Sort of.

BESW

The artificially-enforced symmetry of the Great Wheel meant that for every good idea, an equal and opposing idea had to be forced into existence too.

GMNoob

I liked the wheel, and it's symetry.

BESW

The Wheel itself isn't a problem.

GMNoob

for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

BESW

The problem was that the Wheel's symmetry conceit became both necessary and sufficient justification for useless pablum.

GMNoob

10:34

Oh.. Ha this isn't even new information. Definitly overreacting. They have made changes since July 1

Magician

Oh, I have nothing against the Wheel as such, though I also prefer 4e's Astral Sea.

It's the burning desire they display to fit everything into the same cosmology. Every story is true. Every edition is Next. Everything they do is a metaphor.

BESW

The developers were at the mercy of their own idea.

@Magician A meta for what, though?

GMNoob

Fae are not positive. They are a border between positive and prime :P

Magician

For Next, of course. That article says every bit of cosmology, other than 4e, is true, creating a bloated uber-wheel. If that's not a metaphor of Next, I don't know what is.

@GMNoob Just like azer are not fire, they're the border between fire and prime.

BESW

Sigh.

Here's what I mean: Azer are kinda cool.

Fire-dwarves make sense.

GMNoob

10:37

I don't know what azer are :P However, somebody made a drawing of this back in July. Tottally overreacting. :P

BESW

But the Wheel demands that there also be water-dwarves, and plant-dwarves, and nega-dwarves, and fire-elves, and fire-hobbits, and fire-goblins.

And water-elves, and water-hobbits, and water-goblins, and so on ad nauseum.

The Wheel's conceit demands the needless proliferation of concepts to an inanely Escher-like conclusion: some poor soul in dev has to come up with culture and feats for water dwarves because the Wheel demands they must exist, regardless of whether anybody actually wants water-dwarves.

GMNoob

Who doesn't want a pirate dwarf?

BESW

@GMNoob Thing is, it doesn't matter if you want it or not.

That's my problem with the Wheel as it was implemented in 3.5, at least: it created content whether anybody had any good ideas for the content or not.

It's a classic case of Infinite World Syndrome.

In a fantasy or sci-fi story dealing with infinite possibilities, the author is faced with the potential to have anything happen. Any setting, any creature, anything at all. And that's awesome.

But many authors are unable to control it.

Because while anything could happen, it's still the author's job to make sure that only the stuff which ought to happen does.

GMNoob

@BESW If I don't want it, I won't use it or read about it. If I do want it, I want it.

BESW

@GMNoob That's the right attitude to take. The problem is when the developers don't want it, if they have no good ideas for it, but they feel compelled to work on it anyway.

It's bloat, choking the good stuff in the publications and wasting the developers' time and energy.

GMNoob

10:46

@BESW I doubt that happens. I'm sure they think they had great ideas.

BESW

I imagine they often managed to convince themselves of it, for the sake of their sanity. [wry]

And yes, often what looks like bloat was really someone's adored brainchild that got mulched by the dev and publication process.

But... look at the Book of Vile Darkness and the Book of Exalted Deeds.

The lion's share of the BoED's crunch is nothing except an inverse version of something from the BoVD, whether it made sense or not.

GMNoob

I know people who love those books :P

BESW

They've both got some good stuff.

GMNoob

One man's fantasy sense, is another woman's fantasy WTF

BESW

But BoED is choked by unimaginative inversions of previous material, existing only because the Laws of Symmetry demanded it.

GMNoob

10:50

@BESW Or because the writers were unimaginative, and didn't like the assignment.

BESW

@GMNoob Which just further implies that the BoED itself would not exist except that the BoVD forced it to.

If nobody had enough good ideas to fill a book, why did the book happen?

Because the yin existed, and the yang had to follow.

GMNoob

@BESW Or there was a market demand for it, cause some people just love playing evil.

BESW

@GMNoob The BoED is the good book. The BoVD was first.

(Exalted Deeds, Vile Darkness.)

GMNoob

Ok, the market demand was the concern of D&D being too evil and needing extra stuff for good people to.

Who knows what went through their heads.

I am sure there are parts of planescape that do not have well defined content.

Also, I get confused as to which Cosmology had the Mud planes, and the Ash plane etc.

I'm pretty sure some of those were made without content.

did the salt and steam and mud plane exist in 3rd edition or just in second?

BESW

3.5 brought 'em back as the splat expanded.

The Wheel contains infinite nuances (one reason calling its spokes "planes" is so silly), and thus can be milked for infinite splat so long as the audience will bear it.

GMNoob

11:01

plane of existence, I believe in the concept. But someone did take it litteraly and created a die of the planes.

BESW

image not found.

GMNoob

this is the only way for me to link to the key: commons.wikimedia.org/w/…

They thought these were great ideas back then.

Magician

Here's why the new cosmology is annoying me. I don't mind Great Wheel, I don't mind Astral Sea, I don't mind whatever other settings had. I can conceptualize multiple cosmologies being true separately, and pick the one that I'd like best for a particular world or game. There's zero need to smash them all together to make them all true simultaneously. It's a wasted effort that degrades each individual cosmology. It's a retcon to avoid retcons, and so it fails at its purpose.

Because right now, it says Feywild is Border-Positive (Borderline Positive? Sort-of-Positive?). I thought it was Primal. Is Primal now Positive? Because those are different concepts they're suddenly equating. Which is to say, no thank you. By this point it's not an overreaction, it's idle curiosity as to just how utterly useless the result will be to me. Sadly.

GMNoob

Primal is defined as the mixture of Prime material and Positive energy. A border means that it connects two different planes. Just as the Salt plane is the border between Negative Energy and Water (don't ask why, just take it as dogma :P )

They didn't retcon anything really, they just make the picture larger and better defined.

Everything stays where it is was in 4e, you just now have more complicated labels.

Magician

@GMNoob Can I get a citation on that definition of Primal? That's not what my understanding of it.

I could be misremembering things, naturally, and the concepts are related. Just not so straightforwardly.

@GMNoob Also, Astral Sea is quite incompatible with Great Wheel, which is why it's not even mentioned in that article.

GMNoob

11:18

The Astral sea is the collective name of the outer planes.

@Magician I can't cite the definition of a border plane. I wouldn't even know where to look . It's just obvious to me.

Magician

@GMNoob Astral Sea has planes floating in it. There's no obligating symmetry to it that @BESW laments.

GMNoob

Outer Plane

In the fantasy role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons, an Outer Plane is one of a number of general types of planes of existence. They can also be referred to as godly planes, spiritual planes or divine planes. The Outer Planes are home to beings such as deities and otherworldly creatures such as demons, celestials and devils. Each Outer Plane is usually the physical manifestation of a particular moral and ethical alignment and the entities that dwell there often embody the traits related to that alignment. The intangible and esoteric Outer Planes—the realms of ideals, philosophies, and gods...

You call it Astral sea, I call it Outer Plane, tomatoe tommato

I thought people who were upset that the "wheel was gone" were also over reacting.

Magician

Planes are the same, structure is entirely different. Wheel has hung (fractal) tomatoes on itself, Astral Sea is salsa.

GMNoob

The cosmology of D&D has only changed on the "Map". And since these maps correlate to undefined "space" it never really matters.

No, "you just thought" it was salsa.

Without Spelljammer, there is no way to know what the actual structure was like. :P

Magician

Urrr. Except for the whole "sail the Astral Sea" thing people did. Including our group.

GMNoob

11:25

Someone could make a nice story about 4e being the "dark ages" of D&D. where knowledge of the planes were lost, since civilization was restricted to "points of light"

Magician

Oh, it's very doable. In my 4e game, Great Wheel used to exist before the end of the world broke it. But that's kind of my point: it's a retcon. It's a retcon they're doing in the name of not doing retcons.

The whole idea is silly.

GMNoob

They never said they aren't doing a retcon. They said it's the last retcon

However, what is the structure of the internet? Could anyone really claim to have the correct map over another person?

Do you map it by server location? IP number? Content?

What I'm saying is that the great wheel was never broken. It was just drawn and understood differently.

I'm so thankfull for the internet as a way of talking about multiple planes and dimensions

Just to clarify, the Sundering is a "retcon" if I'm understanding your use of the word correctly. They are just claiming its the last one.

Magician

I suspect I'm not putting my thoughts clearly. Lets see here. This is a tangent that we've gone on, and not actually related to my overall dislike of the new cosmology, but. Astral Sea and Great Wheel are incompatible. They are not different ways of conceptualizing the same thing. One is chaotic and decentralized. Things exist in it because someone or something made them. The other is regimented and structured. Things exist in it because other things exist it in.

The vagueness of the planes goes out of the window the moment you have multiple splat books detailing them, and characters actually travelling them. The retcon of "it's all true at the same time, here's how" doesn't work, and is what I dislike, because it invalidates adventures that were had and worlds that were built despite trying to not do that exact thing. Ravenloft can be Raveloft and Shadowfell can be Shadowfell. They don't need to contain one another.

BESW

11:48

@ProfessorLokiCaprion Hi!

Inbar Rose

This discussion is amazing, I really hope the ones working on the D&D stuff discuss these things as much (or maybe even read your discussions here? because who knows?)

GMNoob

I just fundamentally disagree. In a fantasy world, things are only as true as people understand them to be. Nothing invalidates anything unless your table or GM decides for it to be invalidated.

When you say that one is chaotic and decentralized, my initial reaction is "You just don't understand the order and structure" When you say that something exists because it was made, while in the other it exists because things exist in it, my reaction is that you* just aren't fully aware of the creation process. *"You" can even refer to the creators of the realms.

BESW

@GMNoob That's fine for your campaigns, but the official line, supported by mechanics and lore, is that the 4e multiverse is structured in a way incompatible with the Great Wheel.

GMNoob

And it's not like we don't have real world examples to understand how this works. The world was flat until it wasn't. The Sun revovled around the Earth until it didn't.

BESW

This isn't about perception or individual interpretation, it's about what the source materials flat-out say AND what they demonstrate to us in practice.

GMNoob

11:52

@BESW The official line is that you missunderstood what it said.

BESW

...I have no response to that, except to ask for a citation.

GMNoob

From the article here

"To begin with, we're making some tweaks to the cosmology to reconcile the differences between various editions and worlds. Our goal is to make it so that as much prior material as possible is still useful and relevant. In a sense, you can think of this approach as attempting to ensure as much story compatibility as possible when you convert an existing campaign over to D&D Next."

Magician

@GMNoob There's a difference, though. In a D&D world, characters speak to gods and gods answer. They know the structure of their world. The only explanation would therefore be that it's a divine conspiracy to hide the true nature of the cosmos from the mortals, that's been successfully perpetuated for millennia. Which, granted, is a cool campaign plot, but not something they meant to say, I'd wager.

GMNoob

@Magician Since when are the divine infallible in D&D?

Magician

@GMNoob So there's an even greater power hiding the truth from them?.. That hole's getting awful deep.

GMNoob

11:58

@Magician Okkam's Razor. Their own biases influenced their understanding.

Professor Loki Caprion

@BESW Wa-hey!

Sorry, I logged in here, then had to figure out a very archaic part of my company's e-mail system

BESW

@ProfessorLokiCaprion Ooh. Did you get a hat and bullwhip?

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