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00:00
Or you could try a game where you always succeed, but sometimes success to unforeseen complications.
Powered by Apocalypse games, uhm... no example comes to my mind and... Do?
I think I'm more of an Anima Prime player
Whatever you do leads to success, except in combat, where you still don't die
I'd like games where yeah, you fail, but someone pats on your back and teaches you how not to fail, and in the end it works.
I guess that's why I want to learn to play the social part of my D&D game. I crave for someoone teaching me how to assess risks, take chances and win. I like my character's downfalls to be because I wasn't able to do something I can learn, and not because of something mechanical.
Then... again, D&D is not the game for you.
D&D is built on a foundation of inherent, inevitable, and unavoidable failure.
More than that, D&D's attitude toward failure is that you cannot learn from it.
00:16
And neither I think it is the game for them, but that's what we're playing, because it's a site made by D&D players for D&D players, hoping to gather more D&D players for D&D is popular (and that's why it's not a PF game or a 4e game).
But unavoidable and inevitable and inherent failure? With wizards and clerics?
They aren't playing D&D. They're playing a freeform social game with bits of D&D smushed into the gaps.
then the "you don't want to play D&D" problem should be done with XD
@Zachiel Yes. There's always a bigger, more capable enemy, there's always low rolls, there's always the thing you didn't prepare for.
I think I like it more than playing a D&D session because it's more narrative. Which is strange for D&D
@Zachiel It sounds like you're playing D&D with a freeform social game smushed into the gaps.
Hence all of the confusion and miscommunication about optimizing vs roleplaying when you try to get advice from them.
00:20
@BESW that first point is basically why, next time, I'm not going to put an 8 in constitution and do 17 levels of wizard before 17 levels of cleric because "the important thing is to get things, doesn't matter how fast". Enemies scale faster than me was a problem
@BESW someone else is doing that, succesfully
that bugs me
@Zachiel So, I'll be honest with you: if I were playing with you, I'd have no idea what to do with you. I'd try to show you a game or two I like, played in a way I like, maybe, but, beyond that, I have no way of interacting with "I don't want to fail and I don't want my character to change."
Because the only things I can think to do in play are to throw you super-far into a supporting role (i.e. not the protagonist at all) or passive-aggressively try to test the edges of that and see what I can threaten that'll force you to react differently (which would be me being a dick and not communicating about social contract issues in good faith).
@AlexP It sounds to me like the game Zach wants to play is actually "Whatever it is these guys are having so much fun with."
@BESW Yeah, I get that. I don't know that I could play with them without passive-aggressively trolling the hell out of their little clique-ish freeform community.
Which is great, but the game they're playing has a myriad unstated rules and conventions that he's not party to.
@AlexP If he knew Italian, I'd be throwing Trogdor's brother at this group so hard. He's a master troller.
2
My impression is that D&D character-building bits are things they hand out like candy for participating in effectively-systemless play-by-post. So basically nothing you do with those bits is gonna help you much. They're almost like a reward for not using those bits in the first place.
00:30
[pokes iTunes vigorously] BRING ME CAPALDI!
...Looks like iTunes won't make it available until the 2nd of January. Boo.
[sniffs around for other sources]
Heya @BESW
@Lord_Gareth Hey! What's up?
Writin' stuff, responding to beta tester feedback. Getting ganked on another chat by some guy who just found my homebrew >.>
Heh.
@AlexP quite the contrary. Being able to do something mechanically allows your character to do it fictionally. So if I got immunity to fire I could walk into the fireplace, which would be narratively cool. If I had some reason to do that, of course. One of my biggest problems is I want to showoff what my character is able to do. Right now Leilani ordered a iron-hot meal just because she has resist fire 10
@Lord_Gareth you can't gank alone, can you?
Ok, maybe she ordered it because she can and because she has a reason to, being a Sensate.
(in the planescape setting, Sensates are hedonists and experience-tryers)
00:43
tabbed out, ping me if anybody needs me.
 
3 hours later…
03:44
04:03
Huh, there's a Mathematics and a Mathoverflow?
04:31
"Chromatic proprioception." I learned a new word!
What is chromatic proprioception, specifically?
The impression that one's stomachache, for example, has a particular color.
Oh, lol, I KNOW WHY.
Good job finding a way to watch it.
I got it from a tweet, actually.
04:52
Based on sf.se, though, the episode looks like another typical Moffat Ignores Logic story.
@BESW There's not much to it, in my view. It's about 10 minutes of resolving some past plots and 5 minutes of setting up the next Doctor.
It's not bad per se.
But if felt like another one where the ideas are better than the execution.
Tell me it doesn't have at last one "And now you have to re-evaluate everything you knew about seasons worth of X!" moment.
I'd say it has like 1.5 of those, but they're a bunch of 0.5s adding together.
[face/palm]
I'm a bit of a pessimist.
04:58
Moffat is great at emotion, poor at explanations and making things fit together logically.
The goodbye monologue (that you already know is) at the end was good.
Sadly, he loves explaining how things fit together!
@BESW My wife agrees with you. He'd be better off cutting back a bit on the explanations and letting you fill in your own.
Old Who was great at throwing their hands up and going "We don't care how, it just does!"
I think one of Moffat's problems is that he's a fan.
He spent decades on the other side of "We don't care how," which is "Let's figure out how to make the pieces fit together!"
And now that he's at the helm, he wants to still explain how it fits rather than create the puzzles.
05:13
[examines recent stars] BESW's getting close to critical mass again.
I have no idea why my comment about Trogdor's brother has any stars at all.
I'm sure you can blame the singularity somehow.
06:12
Trogdor's at the Pizza Hut
Trogdor's at the Taco Bell
Trogdor's at the combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell
06:28
@JohnCraven They have those. Also KFC. Kentacohut.
they even have a song about it!
but not the ones with KFC because that would be racist
There's kind of a ridiculous KFC / Taco Bell (no Pizza Hut) in D.C. Where all of the decorations are these, like, town scenes but various objects (like cars and houses and blimps) are food items.
And it has the name of the corporation that owns all these businesses. Which is called Tricon Global.
Our Taco Bell had a Papa John's for a little while.
This makes it sound like it's some kind of terrible bio-engineered cyberpunk future dystopia where half of our stuff is grown in Kentacohut food vats.
(Well, I mean one of our Taco Bells; it was the first, so I still think of it as "the" Taco Bell.)
06:31
Across the street from that KFC / Taco Bell? A Burger King. Not just any Burger King, though.
@AlexP And citizens are kept content with trivial consumer goods delivered directly to their door by automated drones?
It's a two-story Burger King where the top floor is a knock-off Planet Hollywood and the bottom floor is a knock-off Hard Rock Cafe.
@BESW Automated drones made out of chicken wings.
07:09
Burger King might just be the worst chain burger ever.
@JohnCraven I think so too.
@JohnCraven I'm curious, when you played BW, did you use the "persona alternate complication" (optional) rule?
um
I'm not sure
If you're about to go splat you can spend a Persona point to fall off a cliff or break your sword or whatever instead.
It's like WFRP's fate point thing.
 
2 hours later…
09:42
It turns out that a very small portion of our questions are actually about an RPG named Sorcerer
So I've retagged them with to disambiguate that tag
09:58
I approve.
It's very, very strange for me that we're giving a system tag the tag that is not its actual name, because a smaller unit (a class, from only one series of games!) is supplanting it
but validly so - it's more frequently used that way
10:32
Sigh.
Moffat, you share blame with RTD for this, but you could've just ignored the meta-crisis Doctor...
1
Q: Why were there 13 doctors prior to #12?

Keavon13 doctors encapsulated Gallifrey in The Day of the Doctor and in The Time of the Doctor it mentioned 13 prior to his regeneration. I count 12: #11 + the War Doctor. Where is the 13th Doctor?

11:08
@JonathanHobbs If it's true of roughly half the things Moffat's ever written, I'm not sure it's a spoiler.
11:21
If I plotted the responses to Time of the Doctor from my facebook/twitter feeds on a chart, it'd resemble the EKG of an epic heart attack.
@BESW I figured I'd wait until I could be sure people've had a good chance to see it
Watched Doctor Who, kind of all over the place with the pacing. Nothing but the end speech seemed to have the weight it needed.
11:43
so I just saw this blog: rpgcharacters.wordpress.com/maps
And I have a question. Is there a good place for making it easier to pick adventures or maps without being overwhelmed by the options?
I feel like it would make good community wikis, but I imagine this has allready been discussed somewhere?
@GMNoob I would've given my best d20 for a searchable keyworded database of maps and/or adventures, but I never found one.
Shouldn't we make one?
How? The vast majority of useful content is protected IP.
I don't mean make a database, I mean, should we have questions like "What is the best Scifi Adventure underwater for more than 6 players"
and then have all the modules listed as answers, and people will vote on their favorite
That's not really how SE works...
11:48
Maybe it's not how other SE communities work...
;D
But I thought that was how community wiki questions worked, no?
M'rr.
Community wiki questions don't get special leeway.
People used to use them for Questions Which Kinda Suck, but nowadays we deal with those by closing them.
Two major problems: first, if there's no Actual Problem To Be Solved, what keeps the site from getting choked with idle, frivolous questions about any and every possible kind of adventure in every possible system?
A post should never* be community wiki.
* there are few and rare exceptions, such as when an answer has just been edited so many times it clearly needs all hands on deck and becomes community editable.
"What is the best scifi underwater adventure for more than 6 players?" "Less than three?" "Fantasy underwater adventure for more than 6 players?" and so on.
11:50
@BESW That's easy. Just "ask" about situations we care about.
Second, and this is what we've run into with these kinds of questions before, they encourage "shotgun" answers.
Ideally, I'm picturing a new page sort of like meta for this
@BESW I would want one module/adventure per answer, and make it all community wiki, so it's not really an issue.
Unless the question can be phrased so specifically that it might not be useful to many other than the OP, you get swamped by answers like this.
@GMNoob that's a list question with no specific best answer, since 'best' would be entirely subjective.
Game recommendation questions and character build advice questions can be very prone to lists wherein each answer is equally valid, so just like those, we would enforce that the question must impose explicit requirements such that we can objectively determine what answer is 'best' or 'good'.
@JonathanHobbs the best answer is the answer with the most votes. It's not subjective, just the method at arriving to the best answer is subjective.
11:54
Otherwise, everyone just votes for their favourite sci-fi underwater adventure for less than 6 players and there's no single good or best answer.
@JonathanHobbs But that is exactly what I want!
@GMNoob that is exactly why list questions don't get accepted on SE.
They are popularity contests.
The Q&A system breaks down and votes cease to be an indicator of actual quality.
@GMNoob There's nothing inherently wrong with that concept, it's just not an approach SE is very interested in supporting.
Good idea, wrong venue.
@JonathanHobbs You are missing something here. Normally on places like Stack overflow, somebody actually wants to know what is the "best" product. I.e. which product of all these products should I pick, and be commited to picking. With RPGs it's very different.
What I want to know, is out of the 239,582 adventures out there, which 3 or 4 should I bother looking at.
The ONLY way to know the answer to that question, is to find out which is the most popular.
A popularity contest is exactly what you need to find out the answer to the question.
@GMNoob So ask the question for yourself, in relation to your specific needs, and the site's normal answering system will provide for you a small selection to look into.
11:57
@BESW I can't, because it's currently not allowed.
@GMNoob ...it is.
12
Q: Recommend a published encounter for 4e to demo its strengths to newbies!

Matthew EverhartI'm looking for recommendations for a published (but not necessarily WotC), fun, single encounter to introduce some friends to D&D 4E. We'll be using a virtual tabletop (Roll20 specifically) for it, and are planning a relatively short session of 2 hours. Since most of the folks are new to 4e, I'...

16
Q: A good 2nd level DDI-subscription adventure for a family with little kids?

NathanI have a game group of myself (DM + a support cleric (N)PC), my wife and 2 boys. The kids are very young for dnd (10 and 6) but they are getting right into it and we're having a really good time ... but we're running out of content, the Starter Pack is almost done! I'm looking for a 4e essential...

8
Q: Fantasy adventure modules with naval adventuring

Tavis AllisonAt the Recess mini-convention this weekend, someone was telling me about a classic D&D module that involved seafaring and presented rules for falling overboard in armor, etc. I'm wondering if anyone can identify what this might have been and/or suggest other published adventures in which naval co...

16
Q: What adventures focus on courtly intrigue and social conflict instead of combat?

corsiKlause Ho Ho HoMy wife bought me the Dungeons & Dragons 4e Player's Handbook for my birthday, and we've been talking about playing it. She has experience with video games: we've always played video games, and even met on one. She also has some experience with RPGs: she has a level 85 on World of Warcraft, so sh...

I'm noticing that answers with the most votes are not the "accepted" answer
12:00
@GMNoob That's why votes and accepting are different.
It models your "popularity" concept.
What's not allowed are generic, open-ended questions that aren't based on the desire of the OP to run an adventure within specific explicit parameters.
Which is what it sounds like you're hoping for.
I see
Ask for what you need in your actual, real-life gaming situation, and obviously the answers you get will be largely the adventures the answerers like, and then the answers get voted on by citizens based on how much they think you'll find each adventure useful--which naturally includes whether or not they like it!
You, as the asker of the question, get to indicate which adventure you actually wound up using by accepting that answer.
The small problem there, is that it requires that I know exactly what I'm looking for.
@GMNoob Yes, it does.
That isn't a problem.
If you don't know what you're after, we have nothing to answer with anyway.
Like any other question here, vague wonderment is hard to answer.
12:07
Some of the answers you pulled up are good, but got lost in the tags in general.
There are plenty of tools to help refine your question. Read other questions like it. Use your question space to describe your situation and circumstance.
I think an adventure-recomendation tag might be want I'm asking for
And you do want certain things. You might not want an underwater campaign that is 100% politics or 100% combat, you might want one that doesn't involve the players being at constant risk of drowning, or maybe that's a sense of dread you actually want.
Though what I really want is a bunch of lists to browse through
and to easily recognize what the list that I'm looking at is.
@GMNoob That, we cannot do. But! you can ask a question about where you might find such a thing.
12:10
@BESW So this is a funny thing about D&D Next. I'm now open to modules and adventures that are not from the game system I'm using, since it's so easy to conver things
So unless someone builds a new website collecting all this data, it won't exist in one place. business idea!
Now, I'm going to wash dishes while watching Peter Capaldi swear like a sailor's grandmother playing Halo.
Ping me if I'm needed.
except ofcourse here
have fun!
12:34
0
Q: Can we add an adventure-recommendation tag?

GMNoobI was looking through the [adventure] tags looking for some insights on modules to run. However I was getting a lot of questions that were just noise for me. I would like to propose adding an [adventure-recommendation] tag to separate out those types of questions. This is different than [game...

12:55
@RedRiderX Hi!
Howdy
Alas, when someone leaves a comment saying an answer is exactly what they were looking for... but neither accepts nor upvotes it.
@BESW Correct me if I am wrong, but is not the word "alas" used unnecessarily there?
Unnecessary in the strictest utilitarian sense, yes.
But then, the exclamatory interjection was never very utilitarian to begin with.
Also, hi @InbarRose, @Aaron.
13:10
Hello.
Alas, the word "alas" is never necessary.
@BESW sorry for the confusion on the meta question. I fixed it.
I was startled, because I'd linked you to specifically.
I've left a comment on the question proper, asking for objective clarification re: the useful distinction between the tags.
That contains "a lot of questions that were just noise for me" is the crux of the reason you're proposing a new tag, and "just noise for me" is pretty subjective.
I CANNOT BELIEVE that we MISSED. AGAIN. And AGAIN. ... And AGAIN.
@DalekThay How many times have we told you? Stop converting Stormtroopers.
13:28
Hah
wth?
beg your pardon?
@BESW question updated
14:05
@JonathanHobbs I don't understand why "sorcerer" is a tag at all. What would the tag really cover, given the sorcerers are just 98% the same mechanics as wizards?
14:16
@AlexP fighter is also a tag.
14:27
@GMNoob A pretty useless tag, from the looks of it. It's a bunch of D&D3.5/PF questions and a bunch of D&D4 questions -- completely different mechanics, tactics, and group role. All of the questions include "fighter" in the question text anyway.
@AlexP It would cover questions about being a sorcerer and not a wizard.
An experienced character optimizer might be able to say a few things about why the two are different
What's the point of class tags in general?
@AlexP for questions about that specific class
@Aaron That doesn't address the point of a tag.
@AlexP How so?
14:42
It's a topic people can ask about that people can be experienced in and it's describing the content of the question in the way that tags should. What isn't the point?
I don't understand why more tags are a bad thing
@JonathanHobbs I guess "can be experienced in" makes sense. Though, erm, 3e/4e problem presents itself.
@AlexP That's why we have system tags
B&CG specifically destroyed a bunch of tags because they weren't useful as stand-alone tags. Like "rules."
@GMNoob More or less isn't exactly an issue. Too many and there will be duplicates so it will be harder to find what you are looking for. Not enough and you can't properly describe your question
14:43
A question is not the same field of expertise as a question
@JonathanHobbs That's an argument for making the fighter tag useless actually :D
(likewise is not the same as even though they bear a lot of similarities and they do have things in common)
@JonathanHobbs But "file-io" is a meaningful concept independent of language. "Fighter" isn't.
@GMNoob It is not
@Aaron Correction: I don't understand why more non-duplicating tags are a bad thing.
14:45
@AlexP Indeed. We need systems to constrain things in general. So all our questions have them. You, on B&CG, might get along splendidly with game tags alone. On RPG, we find value in having finer tags than that.
@JonathanHobbs A fighter in adnd2e is VERY different than a fighter in Dnd4e. file-io isn't so different between java and C#
@GMNoob and basically every other tag we have is very different depending on what other system tag you add to it.
So this discussion is about why tags like fighter, Wizard and sorcerer are needed?
And yet, having these finer tags is much more useful than nuking them and having game tags only.
Right, but I mean, some tags stand alone.
14:48
@JonathanHobbs But is it more useful than something like "dnd4-fighter"?
@AlexP a single tag called dnd4 fighter?
why not?
@AlexP Do you really want a single tag for every current combination of class and system when we could just search for both tags?
@Aaron Yes. Because that's ugly but defines the actual scope of experience / favorites better than "fighter."
@JonathanHobbs You can't favorite or ignore-list a combination of tags, though.
@AlexP And so we do not have a single question that just has the "fighter" tag. Our tags often do not stand alone. We do not expect them to.
14:50
@AlexP Not really. the two tags do the exact same thing the single would. BUT they also allow users to easily search for general knowledge of either system or class
For example
@JonathanHobbs Back to my question. What's bad about more tags?
Is there a cost to a tag that I'm not thinking about?
@GMNoob Look at History SE for an example. Their tags have become useless for search and filtering.
@AlexP Are ours?
lets say the question is tagged 3.5 and fighter. I am a player who is new to 3.5 I want to search for anything 3.5 with two tags I will get that question with a single I wouldn't. same if I searched for fighter after finding I was interested in fighter. with a single tag I would miss that question with both of my searches.
What is useless about history's tags?
14:52
@GMNoob Yes, for the same reason Stack Overflow does not say you must use for questions concerning file IO operations in C#. Because it's enormously cumbersome.
@JonathanHobbs No ours are quite good.
@JonathanHobbs No, but I see a bunch here and there that don't seem to do anything. "saving-throw" and "class" on the front page, for instance
Zero followers and no description is a sign that a tag may be irrelevant.
@Aaron Or you can search for fighter in tag 3.5.
@JonathanHobbs honestly, I find any tag that isn't a language of a framework worthless on SO
I don't understand the need for the file-io tag at all
@GMNoob memory-management might be a better example
@AlexP That is another discussion over whether we have a couple of crap tags. We probably do, and I'm not going to contend that.
14:55
There are lots of people who can answer memory-management questions effectively across a broad range of language domains. And there are lots of people who know a language but can't really drill down into memory management questions about it.
@AlexP What would you say should happen?
@JonathanHobbs All I'm asking is whether specific classes ought to be tags at all.
@AlexP Which is probably worth asking on meta.
Because their entire functionality seems to be covered by tag-searching within edition tags, as far as I'm aware.
@AlexP That applies to everything bar the system tags themselves has been my point thus far.
Almost all of our questions have a system tag attached and would become kind of useless and horrible if they did not have a system tag attached.
14:57
@JonathanHobbs Nope. GM techniques.
Our system tags may be something like meta tags. But they are really important.
Ok, almost everything.
I see where you're coming from, I really do.
And where I'm coming from is why "but it can't stand independent of a system tag!" is not a reason not to have a tag. That guideline works for other SE sites. It doesn't work for this one.
Some tags I think can stand alone without a system, even though they are infinetly better with a system. Like Magic-Items, or Traps.
Several tools ended up not working out for this stack, like community wiki answers.
15:00
Every SE site forms its own ways of doing things within the SE framework, and this is one of the ways of doing things we formed.
I think mostly I'm questioning whether D&D really has enough questions to justifying tags that drill down into individual bits of it. Like class names and "saving throw."
It certainly has a crapton of questions.
@MadMAxJr This is a great point, Max.
@AlexP It's pretty massive, so yes, but the merits of individual tags like saving-throw can be disputed.
but when someone has a question about a class, do they ever want to ask about the class as a concept, or are they just asking about the detailed rules of that class within a system?
@AlexP I repeat: just because B&CG does the nothing-but-the-game thing with tags, does not mean there is something wrong with us not following suit.
It is worthwhile drilling down because people have decided it's worthwhile drilling down.
Currently if you do a search, you get roughly in the ballpark of what you're looking for. I'm not sure there's enough content in this stack to warrant to-the-letter, structured tagging.
15:03
(This is the same thing B&CG says when people ask about drilling-down tags, just that nobody's done it because the SE works fine without it)
If you think there's a problematic tag, go ahead and ask on meta whether it's worthwhile having it.
@JonathanHobbs That's not quite what they do. They decided "meta" tags like "rules" were dead weight, but that's about it.
@AlexP Well I mean like: nobody uses
conventionally, people just stick with the game and that's it
I don't mean rules, just the way people happen to do things.
Oh hey, there's a deck-building tag.
Huh. Sorcerer the class tag (well, the class / game tag, until yesterday) has six people following it. Wizard has two.
15:59
grumble
@Zachiel That is adorable
16:57
Hey I am still working on it but any ideas or comments?
meant to link to this...
 
3 hours later…
20:20
Does anyone have a link to the discussion of 4th Edition D&D movement?
 
1 hour later…
21:50
@Metool Which one?
@BESW Well, any notable.
 
1 hour later…
23:02
Woah trippy man
23:22
@3ventic Hi!
Hi
I'm just here to fix my custom stylesheet as RPG rooms seem to have the trickiest CSS to override..
Interesting.
Yes very
It works pretty well for a lot of rooms right now.
But RPG.SE is rather fancy.
It should work for pretty much all rooms now
All I've been to anyway
Stars and all site logos don't quite fit in but meh
and I haven't bothered with hover things yet
Of the SE sites and chats I've visited, I feel RPG has the best design. In space efficiency, in visual cues, in font choices.
SF&F, for example, has poor font choices and not enough differentiation between design elements.
23:34
I'm too used to Arqade's style
Arqade, as I've lamented previously, has pinstripes which synch with my monitor's refresh rate.
It's like looking at a bad florescent light.
I've heard that there's a redesign coming to Arqade at some point
I also have Opinions about using sans-serif for body text.
sans-serif is a lot easier for me to read than serif is
It depends on the specific font, but generally speaking sans is easier to read in short bursts --titles and signs, for example-- while serif is better suited for sustained reading.
23:39
Could be
I tend to avoid long texts
But I'm a print-media graphic designer. I know interlacing and other digital-display-specific concerns have influences on digital design choices, but I'm not as familiar with what they are.
I'm a [level below university with no good English equivalent name] student, so what do I know..
Good night
ttfn
23:57
Ok I think I got a new facet of my problems with RPGs with more than a player and a GM
I get nervous when I have no control over what is happening
Ahah.

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