I'll avoid spoilers to others in the room, but I'll just say that I really like it when a show or franchise isn't afraid to make real, noticeable changes to the world, rather than retreating to "everything's pretty much the same for the next episode".
...I was just saying the other day that I should make a chat room called BESW's Off-Topic Emporium, and this is exactly the sort of thing which would go into it.
@Dane Ok, tl;dr. But a "Celestial creature" is a template that has some angel (or good outsider) ancestors. For some reasons, you get "celestials" to spawn "Half Celestials" to spawn either other Half Celestials (of the infamous half celesial half gold dragon half troll half ogre character concepts), planetouched like the aasimars or "Celestial creatures". It's a big mess. But any good outsider turned evil keeps the [Good] subtype.
unless it's done through a template that explicitely loses it.
Oh ok I'm reading backlogs and it looks like Gareth stormed in with your answers. Listen to him.
@aaron in reference on good ways to get more rep (if you want to) try learning some other, newer systems, preferably simple ones so its less of a time investment and itll also broaden your scope. I learned Fate for the lulz and Dungeon World for similar reasons
So I need some help to balance a character I have I accidentally made too powerful for our game and he does about twice as much damage as everyone else in our party. I already talked to my DM and party and told them I am going to try to remove damage from him so he is more balanced. Are there any feats that increase accuracy at the expense of damage?
I'm just going to drop in and mention meta.rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/3447/… ... and encourage chat's feedback on this one. There are some fascinating deviations form the average comments per post that I believe chat could help with.
@BESW I think you once gave me a link to an image showing the names of all the parts of a font, and I also think it could be a great answer to this question. graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/q/29280/15541 All yours.
On the RPG Data Explorer ... I've made a query of the number of comments per user.
The results, especially done as a ratio of comments over posts is fascinating. At this point, I will simply encourage users to contemplate their comment activity versus their more productive activity.
Are there ...
@JoshuaAslanSmith I don't know if there's a global cutoff that's meaningful. @BESW's got a relatively high ratio, but I feel his comments are almost always constructive, and thus "productive" in the sense of helping generate more quality content for the site.
mods have some limited access to deleted comment stats, but only on a per use bases and it's only a list, so that's not really a dataset that's queryable
I have more comments deleted because I don't fully espouse the anti-comment theory, so I am more willing to post comments that are going to get deleted
and because I am by nature and habit argumentative
and thanks for moving the discussion besw though when you moved it I was catching up on what was going on (midway through I typed out this should be in the bar message) so all of a sudden it blinked away.
@Aaron Start reading Varney the Vampire; or, the Feast of Blood. Either you'll have a 666,000-word epic to read, or you'll be so insanely bored that anything else will seem awesomely exciting.
@BESW To be more precise, I think CCleaner killed the plugins along with the startup program that I think tells Chrome he needs to load them (Chrome Wallet). With any luck, It'll load them twice next time I start my laptop.
@InbarRose I guess wheat Im saying is I dont think open source is the best model ofr security related systems the flaw was apparently in the system for 2 years unspotted, it was only exploited within the last few months, but would a private developer paying a white hat firm to break its own system have discovered this sooner?
@besw im sooo on the fence about pfferneuse. Good ones have the crunchy shell with chewy interior (almost like a macaroon), but Im so against powdered sugar in general.
> Many GMs claim, "I am not trying to kill the PCs, they won't die unless they do something stupid." So that puts the players in a position where if their character dies, it is their fault.
@AlexP I think this is totally system and table dependent.
so in 4e this might be disingenuous by accident if the GM is just bad at designing encounters. on paper (ie xp budgets) the encounter may look fair, but they may be using monsters from MM1 or simply be using too many of the wrong type of monsters that makes the fights unfair to the party
@Zachiel what I mean by table dependent is more that when the social contract about this needs to be publicly and openly established when a game begins, not become a fallback defense mid game disaster.
Still, where such a rule is in the explicit social contract is where it's most effective. The problem is the players knowing that if something goes wrong it will be their fault.
basically instead of your character dying when they hit 3 failed saves or negative bloodied they take a major wound (they also take a minor wound for simply going unconscious at zero hp)
The problem is that the promise is deceptive. You can't really make that promise unless you resort to rampant illusionism. And "if you screw up, you die" is less lethal than random death, but it can feel just as punishing.
I think it's a worst-of-both-worlds patch to trying to run a game in a way that the system doesn't really handle that well.
@waxeagle I agree with this. In the context of those kinds of games.
@Zachiel I feel that its the GM's duty to bring the players outside the roleplaying and warn them when they are making mistakes due to PC vs Player understanding. The GM can narrate opinions or commonsense that a real person would naturally feel or know, but that a Player may completely overlook by accident.
4
social context and danger cues in an RPG setting are extremely vague and tough to communicate
@waxeagle let me know what you think about Less Death, More Danger!
@JoshuaAslanSmith I'm intrigued by the concept. And I may pitch it to our group. Right now we're in early paragon and slogging through one encounter a session. DM is kicking around bringing in L1 damage equivalencies (At my suggestion) and knocking down monster HP a bit. Adding this would make upping the danger factor from L1E a little more interesting
@Zachiel it certainly puts the question on another level. When it's both the danger clue and the you're right queue
but I think part of that is that you putting yourself in danger is the DM's best friend. Which makes it the right answer.
Similarly, a student having an original thought is a professor's best friend, which means that "Are you sure" being the response to both right and imaginitive answers is the right question from their standpoint too.
@JoshuaAslanSmith Having already taken a look at that content for my campaign, I can tell you I found it unnecessarily complicated and I have the vague impression it adds to that "and I punish you for not being able to play warhammer with penalties that make the next battles harder". Losing a character or the money to resurrect him - and even the felling of having lost a battle - should be bad enough to get the player invested in winning
@waxeagle I mean more when they want to know if you're sure about an answer and then you become usure because, you know, you're fallible and maybe you really gave the wrong answer and he wants you to acknowledge the error.
I'm perfectly aware that, since you get a higher result in your oral exams when you're sure about your answers, that behavior really rewards those who are better suited at facing life.
A bronze face is a hugely useful asset to have.
(I think bronze face is an idiom in English too, isn't it?)
@Zachiel I think its enabling because outside of narrative character death it removes inhibitions from players to take chances in the tactical fights that come up through 4e and all of the wound powers have a encounter power like thing where you can actually benefit from your wounds "powering through them"
I played in a campaign where there were so many player requests the GM said "whoever dies first leaves its place to the ones waiting in line, and getss queued again". The campaign stopped before any of us could die.
@Zachiel Beyond just making death really punishing, there's a frustrating subtext there — like the GM is saying "This is my game, 100%, you're just a temporary and interchangeable audience."
I am trying to make this character really hard to hit. I have an amulet of nat armor +5, Ring of protection +5 and bracers of protection. Armor bonus, enhancment bonus and deflection bonus. Is there anything else that ups ac?
@Dane Pathfinder and it is a high level/power game.
@Lord_Gareth Well'it's an NPC. It's not like he's going to live, one level dip to get a single class feature he would probably actually use in combat isn't the worst idea ever.
I know that min-maxing has been done on AC many times. I only suggest Monk or another class so that you can add another ability modifier to AC. If the guy has a 32 WIS to match his 32 DEX, then he gets to add +12 to his AC with a level of Monk.
@Aaron It's certainly possible that someone using comments to that extent is doing so in compliance with the site comment policy - but it's diminishingly unlikely. Mods had to remove 500 comments last month and we'd like it if people used them correctly.
@waxeagle Yes, we're handling this in a different manner atm.
I need to stop looking at such aggregates. Makes me realize how low I'm on the reputation race (I know, it's not important, I get no prize for getting first, but... the data tempts me)
@mxyzplk I think the biggest boogie-men are (1) mini-answer comments on questions and (2) quasi-boilerplate "this is a system trap" comments on certain kinds of mechanics answers.
I think I've seen some posts by Jason_c_something where he makes a request and then aggressively defends some assumptions. I wanted to call him to a chat but I wandered for like 10 minutes on his profile finding no easy way to do so.
On the RPG Data Explorer ... I've made a query of the number of comments per user.
The results, especially done as a ratio of comments over posts is fascinating. At this point, I will simply encourage users to contemplate their comment activity versus their more productive activity. Refer to th...
@waxeagle Something you might know as a mod elsewhere: That recruiting question has the poster's e-mail address and the names of a bunch of players. Is that something to flag so a mod can expunge the personally-sensitive details? Or do we not usually do that on SE?
hello there. i'm thinking of printing a book i purchased in pdf, anyone knows the type of paper the old AD&D II Edition were printed on? I remember them to be some kind of cloth-glued bound and the paper was opaque and kinda heavy. Loved it.
@Zachiel as wax eagle pointed out, you'd have to leave him a comment. but there's more to it: it's quite probable inviting him into chat would've been inappropriate; stuff regarding the site should stay on the site or go to meta. sometimes it's fine if you leave a comment to the chat room in comments so that people could follow up on it.
you might recall The role of chat at RPG stack exchange, which was at least in part in response to things like chat users 'workshopping' questions, where we'd drag them aside and have discussions outside most of the site public eye, then the public would be out of the loop and act not in accordance with any information from the chat conversation.
as one of the mods has put it, it kinda takes community moderation power out of the hands of the community and puts it in the hands of a subset of users: those of us regularly using chat
if it's concerning behaviour that's your judgement call but it would absolutely need to be linked to in comments somewhere if you do invite him to chat
@GabrielA.Zorrilla That sounds like the kind of thing it'd be appropriate to ask on the main site. Unusual, but scoped for RPG experts and requiring clear objective answers.
@GabrielA.Zorrilla as a side issue, consider that you may not have the rights to do this, so if you contact a printing company to do it for you, they may refuse.
depending on your country's copyright laws, ownership of a PDF doesn't mean you should be able to own the book, nor necessarily even make physical copies of it for personal use
@JonathanHobbs I'm talking about a "moving comments to chat, where we can talk face to face without posting huge chunks of text that make understanding what you're trying to say to me really difficult"
My aim was to avoid discussion in comments between me and him, to allow for my answer to answer his doubts in a way he found acceptable
However, I have no problems linking the chat to the comments. My problem was I coun't find that "start a chat with this guy" button I'm sure I've seen when clicking on profiles here on the chat.
Having only seen him once in that chart with all the canon and non-canon doctors, where I believe there's a cartoon rendition of him, me recognizing him is quite impressive.
@Zachiel and ok sure; that would have been helpful i guess. i'm just wary that there are some habits of chat use we need to grow out of but i suppose you're not falling into one of them
On the RPG Data Explorer ... I've made a query of the number of comments per user.
The results, especially done as a ratio of comments over posts is fascinating. At this point, I will simply encourage users to contemplate their comment activity versus their more productive activity.
Are there ...
