yo

@BESW But was the chandelier poisoned?

yes, yes it was

just cuz

probably not really though

@Bankuei Hello!

I considered asking the candidates a question in the upcoming moderator elections over in EL&U, but then decided against it. I probably don't want the headache.

What question might that be?

Given the spirited discussion around this question a few months back, do you believe that the site has a real problem that needs to be addressed, do you believe community moderators can and should be the ones to address it, and how can it be addressed?

But while I don't think the moderators over on EL&U are the problem, they also haven't been able to help much with solutions.

A page on gear in 5e Starter set. I'm mildly curious how much of a copy-paste from previous editions it is. The table formatting is very 3.x.

Other than useless (to me) weight counting, what can we see? 1. Each item comes with its own rules, some of which are quite detailed. 2. Characters have proficiency with tools, like thieves tools and cards. I think that's how skills are now? So a thief doesn't have Gambling or Open Lock, they have proficiency with tools for those things, and add the prof. bonus to an ability check.

3. Healing potion is not tied to hit dice. Ugh. I wonder if it's tied to cure light wounds or something, of if it's an entirely random magic item. 4. Healing potion is red. Hi, Diablo.

Some of this was probably well known before, but I can't recall much of the details from the playtests, they kept changing the skill system.

@Magician Is the healing potion the exact same shade of red as Diablo's?

@Metool No picture, sadly. But one can assume.

That moment when you're sneaking and someone hears you... and you know you can't get away before they catch you... so you pop an invisibility potion and stand completely still, praying they don't bump into you and they walk away before the potion wears off.

I wonder if I'm officially old and jaded now: two previews of D&D 5e we've seen, the wild magic table and the equipment section, utterly fail to elicit any interest in me. All I can muster is "meh" and "I'll ignore this anyway".

@Magician I tend to agree. It looks almost identical to the 2e equipment section, too.

Oh, that was mostly a comment to your starred comment.

But yes, it feels like "more of the same". 4e might have angered a lot of people, but it really tried to be different, to be new, to do something. I'm sure 5e has a lot of new stuff as well, but it really doesn't come out in those snippets they leak out.

4e still uses estimated 4-6 man party sizes right?

@Dorian Yup, 5 is the sweet spot.

I thought as much. I never really looked at 4e from a DM perspective, just as a player.

Then I'm glad I didn't sound like a fool in the comments for that leveling too quickly question lol

@lisardggY Their marketing seems really terrible. For an edition that's all about bringing every D&D player ever in, they really lack a post on "If you like edition X, you should play 5e because..."

I hope that after the Starter Set they'll focus a bit more on selling what's actually in the game, not what it's not.

Considering looking up Kim Possible and watching the entire series again.

Yeah, I should just give in to the temptation.

Any of you here in non-English-speaking countries? What's the translated RPG situation there?

Indie rpgs are getting translated into Russian.

Apparently it's easier to get rights to publish, and handle a 200-page small softcover book, than 1000+ pages of D&D manuals.

Though 3.5 PhB was translated and published, with little success.

There's a long and somewhat depressing thread on a local facebook group here.

It appears there are no plans to translate 5e any time soon.

4e's core books were translated, but nothing further, as far as I know.

Psh, tell everyone to get with the program and learn English :P It's the superior language anyways.

I haven't seen any discussion of 5e in the last month on Russian resources, at all. It's a bit odd.

The dynamics and economics of it all are interesting, even if not encouraging.

And there are far, far more Russian speakers, and (I assume) gamers than there are Hebrew speakers.

RPG books are big and heavy, thus expensive to ship overseas and expensive to store. Buying from Amazon or BookDepository is usually cheaper than a local retailer could hope to sell.

And translations are a huge risk, very expensive (especially with RTL conversions!) with a small market.

Apparently her character continues to crusade under the banner of Paladins for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

@BESW So... no mounts in bags of holding?

And no donkeys in trees...

Oh wait... noone knows that story here >.>

@lisardggY Primal Grove is probably acceptable.

That's a pretty awesome ritual.

You've seen Brian's abuse of it, right?

The Instant Army Anywhere in Ten Minutes.

(And there's an ED which lets you cast a travel ritual in, like, a round.)

Nope. I don't read 4e questions.

He talked about it in chat.... last year?

Must have missed it, then.

I can see the potential for abuse.

The demiplane can host 200 Medium creatures indefinitely--food, drink, air, shelter.

And a ten-minute ritual opens a portal to it linked to wherever you cast the ritual.

Now, think pixies.

Yup, that's the one. That's the ritual I had to ban.

Because that's not really an abuse of it. It's what any reasonable person would use this ritual for. Which instantly destroys so many tropes of fantasy warfare, it's not even funny.

Every PC takes a multiclass feat which grants Ritual Casting, and now you have... 200 Medium characters multiplied by 4 because pixies are Tiny times the average size of a party... 4,000 battle-ready pixies available anywhere in the multiverse on ten minutes' notice.

And we haven't even started on having someone open a portal to the same grove in a distant army encampment.

I seem to recall there being an option to open a portal to it and from it at the same time, or maybe just casting the ritual twice. In which case you just march through it.

Or filling the grove with 200 medium-sized ritual casters, each with their own groves.

jinx :)

Groveception!

The same ED that lets you cast a Travel ritual in a single round lets you walk anywhere safely in 24 hours.

"In exactly 24 hours from now, use this scroll." [hands over scroll] "The other end of the grove will be in Orcus's wine cellar."

@lisardggY Spsh. Fill each of the party's five groves with 800 ritual-casting pixies.

It'll be the twee-est and the bloodiest Escher tribute ever.

I only have one question, and I realize it's a futile one. Given that your world-conquering plan depends on an army of pixie spellcasters, where would you get one?

@Magician I'm an epic level PC. I gather them by hand from the four five seven corners of the Feywild, train them in the art of war through a gruelling boot camp in the Elemental Chaos, have them blessed and anointed by angels of the Astral Sea, and equip them with weapons of pure darkness from the Shadowfell.

Well, honestly, at this point the question of logistics has kinda faded.

All of this costs me less than one of my boots, and any fairy which fails me is ground to dust to power my rituals.

Hello.

@InbarRose COWER BEFORE MY LEGIONS OF PIXIE BERSERKERS!

(@Lord_Gareth hasn't been around much lately. I try to cover for him, but my brand of world domination is distinctly more twee than his.)

Are pixies diminutive or tiny ?

Tiny.

About a cubit tall, I think?

And I assume you are using the roman measurement for a legion?

@BESW Berserk pixies aren't very useful as spellcasters.

@lisardggY They just need to be able to use one scroll.

Why would thousands of pixies who are all enraged and (i assume) carrying weapons, need to cast spells?

Well, there's only 800 pixies per casting of Primal Grove.

So you give each pixie a scroll of Primal Grove.

@BESW THEY WILL RIP IT TO SHREDS WITH THEIR TINY FISTS OF FURY.

@lisardggY "Tiny Fists of Fury" is the name of the army marching band.

They do deathmetal covers of Loreena McKennitt.

Also, they go berserk and enter extended 25-minute tuba solos.

The shrill oomph of a twelve-inch tuba strikes fear and confusion in the hearts of all who hear it. Mostly confusion.

@BESW I only found regular (folk) metal covers of Loreena McKennit.

@Magician Tiny Fists of Fury is a groundbreaking sound.

And nobody dares upload them to YouTube; their copyright enforcement is literally draconian.

This guy is totally a Scale Island NPC:

@BESW YES

"The strange man of the swamps"

Made another move by the way.

Well, more accurately Endufal did.

Nice.

Hmm. I don't think that sentence works in English. @BESW How should I say that sentence, I am curious.

Which sentence?

"Well, more accurately Endufal did."

Doesn't sound grammatically correct.

That's totally legit and legible.

It's got an elided verb, which is advanced English.

Cool.

(Doesn't know what that means... google)

The verb is omitted, present only by implication.

So how would you write it fully?

brb

"Well, more accurately Endufal made another move" is the full meaning.

But you said "made another move" in the previous sentence, so instead you referred to the action already stated. It's more common in a single long sentence.

Hrm. [re-analyzes]

Okay, it's not the verb you elided, it's the.... bah, my English skills are instinctual and I don't have all the vocabulary.

"Endufal did it" would be a slightly more conventional way to reference the previous verbal phrase, but you left the target of the action out.

Interesting.

Anyway. It's a legit grammatical construction. Maybe not entirely by the book, but it's a common enough structure. Since when does English care about the book anyway?

I think the only thing I'd change is add another comma after "accurately", to be clear that it's a separate clause.

I read somewhere that English is one of the hardest languages to learn because of it's many, many irregularities.

So if we remove the "Well," and the "more accurately", your core sentence is "Endufal did", which is perfectly grammatical. The object is elided here, but that's common in conversation, since it's supplied by context.

Endufal did [that thing we were referring to earlier]

@InbarRose Eeeh. Try learning a language which assigns a gender to every noun. Try learning another language which assigns a different gender to every noun.

@Magician Hebrew has gendered nouns, and verbs, and numbers.

@Magician It's very common for Russian speakers learning Hebrew to assign the wrong gender to things. :)

@lisardggY Commas are fun. After I read Brenda Ueland I started taking out every comma that wasn't absolutely necessary in my non-casual writing.

@BESW Not necessary, certainly, but useful to separate speech units, signify pauses that occur in natural speech, or otherwise clarify what could otherwise be ambiguous.

More often than not commas are either unnecessary (used to shore up poor structure) or actually inaccurate (because they're so often used to indicate vocal pacing rather than grammatical structure).

@BESW I don't see the latter as inaccurate, but merely as serving a second role (and some would say, the original role).

Except in dialogue, commas should not be used to indicate spoken patterns.

Of course, this depends on whether I'm writing a text, or (as in chat) an ongoing dialog

Aye. I use commas more freely in this context than I do in my non-casual writing.

Even in Storium I try not to go crazy.

I agree with you that in a letter, blog post or even SE question, I would use commas for their grammatical, structural use. But chatting, texting or (occasionally) emails, I would use them for pacing.

My non-chat writing process involves getting the content down without worrying about structure and punctuation too much, then editing for format.

(I'm very aware that I have one basic sentence structure I rely on overmuch, and I try to switch it up in the editing.)

(But re-reading Bujold has shown me that I should be less concerned about that than I have been.)

@BESW which is it?

@Zachiel [Statement], [conjunction] [related statement].

From my last Storium post, after revision:

> Snake-birds rise in flocks to darken the sky as it passes, but the cattails don’t even rustle while it rushes by. [...] His body falls to the ground, colourless, and the ghostly serpent pulls away a Ricky-shaped shadow in its jaws.

@Zachiel See also: the sentence in which I say I have the problem.

If you just scroll up you'll see I do it a lot. If you also count statement-semicolon-statement, the frequency probably doubles.

@BESW I guessed it was that one, but I was not sure you meant that by structure

Ha, I did it too.

It's a totally fine sentence form, but I overuse it.

It seems to be one of the basic patterns my brain thinks in, and I need to get it out of that rut sometimes.

(BTW, notice how many of these sentences would have no change in meaning or disruption of flow if the comma were removed entirely.)

@BESW In Italian, it would be incorrect to use the conjunction after a comma, unless that comma was used as a howdoyoucallthis(

parhenteses?

bracket?

like, "His body falls to the ground, colourless, and..." would be ok, "His body falls to the ground, and" would not, because the comma and the conjuncion serve the same purpose.

@InbarRose, @JoshuaAslanSmith Operafloozy made a move, and I added a quick cutscene to it.

Cool.

I got to use the title "Episcopus of Death," so I'm happy.

Ill have to check it out

I think you will really like my move.

Goodmorning

Indeed.

Hey.

@InbarRose Very flavourful.

Yes. I like this flavor of magic, it's very inducive to stories.

Hmm, I hate how Google chrome's spell checker sometimes doesn't like the words I use.

Even though they are real words, like inducive. It marks the word as erroneous.

@InbarRose most of them are only comprised of the most commonly used X thousand words, so it's unavoidable...

there's certain words for which my phone's autocomplete knows the plural form, but doesn't recognise the singular, even if it's just a difference of an 's' on the end, for instance

@InbarRose Yey!

@JonathanHobbs Which is ridiculous because it's very easy to include a full dictionary of words.

It's not like there is a memory problem.

It's maybe a few megabytes.

@InbarRose If things in software development were done because they were easy, releases would never happen on time

Best bad subtitle ever? "Ra's al Ghul" becomes "Ra's al emu."

As a consultant one of the earliest lessons drilled into me during my training course was this: if someone says "How easy will it be to do X?", you reply saying "Well, not that hard, but it might take a while."

or, if it is that hard, y'know, you say so.

(and, y'know, you be honest about the time estimate too, but the focus being: it doesn't happen automatically, and it's either going to be that feature/fix or other feature/fixes, so pick one)

Quick, Easy, Cheap, pick two.

Right, yeah.

I don't know the ins and outs of memory management on smartphones, but I won't be surprised if a couple of extra megabytes in a process that's used as intensively as the keyboard spellchecker might have real implications. Or possibly it used to have those implications.

@lisardggY Well, possibly, but I was originally talking about my Chrome browser.

Speaking of Chrome, and text. This is an amazing extension I recommend. Project Naptha

@InbarRose I have it installed. It's still far from perfect (a lot of garbage OCR), but it's still extremely sleek. Very nice.

@InbarRose [amused] My script blocker makes it think I'm using Firefox.

@InbarRose There homepage font has inconsistent letter stroke widths.

the i is thicker than the l...

Oh, seems that's just because of the exact size at which they are using it.

But they have Captain Mal as a sample image, so that's a plus right there.

Anyway, I gotta go.

Bye!

My new stock response when people point out anachronisms in my games: "That's just to confuse time travellers."

If we keep to established timeframes and continuities, then the time terrorists would have had already won!

And by "time terrorists," we mean "Time Lords."

Well, yes.

"Dragon Cyborg Werebear Time Lords"

@trogdor Oh, you mean the Seventh Doctor.

lol

no, cause he was also a wizard on top of all that

I was giggling at Epic Rap Battles of History: Doc Brown vs. Doctor Who

And right after the announcer says "Doctor Who", the 10th doctor starts singing: "Actually, if you don't mind it's just the Doctor"

I liked gandalf vs dumbledore

@BESW Wait, multiplied by 4 or by 40?

Oh, wait, the average party is 10 adventurers?

@Metool That'd be 800 or 8,000 pixies too. @BESW I think you done mathed wrong.

oh

5 adventurers

[fetches coffee]

@BESW <-- @Metool Aha, it's 800, but each member of the party of five has a grove. 5 times 800 = 4,000.

It's too early in the morning for maths.

@JonathanHobbs But the 4,000 came up before any mention of the pixie ritual casting!

When the pixie army strikes, math will be outlawed anyway.

@Metool The members of the party do the ritual casting. The pixies can also do stuff, but each member of the party just has a grove with their pixie army in wait. (Who might also do ritual casting, but they might also all just be raving berserkers who've gotten into a fight and chewed each other to bits before they could all be summoned.)

@JonathanHobbs I think they're too busy dancing to celtic deathmetal.

(Note to self: do not train mainly berserkers for a portable grove army.)

@lisardggY That'd do it. Just need some bards to keep them busy. \o/

@JonathanHobbs Schrodinger's Pixies.

@InbarRose Yes! Haha.

@lisardggY That sounds amazing.

I'm sure they would also sound amazing.

finally got net back at home :(. Found the source of my intermittent problems too

@waxeagle Was it a berserking pixie army?

A berserking pixie army using up all your wifi?

@lisardggY sadly no, careless previous homeowner :(

lol

the interconnect from the UG telephone lines to the house was simply sitting in the dirt under my back porch

The guy came yesterday afternoon and tested the line at the pole where it enters my property, sounded fine from the service to the pole, but from the pole to my house was very noisy but he couldn't find the box and didn't want to crawl around looking for it where it might not be. I came home, found the box, realized it was borked from sitting on the ground (and a quick open of the customer side of the access confirmed that quite thoroughly (it was quite dirty inside)

Getting filth into your internet connection!

aye. the box has now been replaced and the box has been hung out of the muck

so you're saying an exposed hardline connection had physical dirt and debris?

@JoshuaAslanSmith yep

not sure how much the dirt penetrated the service side of the box, but the customer side was filthy

crazy

@JoshuaAslanSmith yep. From what we figure, the homeowners moved the box from the house when they built the porch and there didn't seem to have been even an attempt to rehang the box that I could see

lol crazy

It's so maddening that it is "lol crazy"

well, it's a box, right? It's closed, right? What could even happen?

And now I must exit stage left.

bye

I'm gonna exit stage right, just not to bump into you. Ttfn.

overland travel in 4e...yum

haha

so tasty

so not what the system was made for

nope, not at all.

oh another reason to pick up descent 2nd edition when you play the campaign inbetween combat encounters theres a world travel mechanic with a card deck

would totally use that for 4e

good and bad stuff happens

that would work really well for 4e

basically when you are moving to places you move along roads in different terrain and the cards have (or dont have) text corresponding to the terrain types. So if youre in a certain type of terrain and there is an entry on the card you drew, well it happens.

very nice

probably ends up telling a better travel story than most 4e games tell

hah yes

some of it is very game specific, basically the evil lord (100 percent antagonist player vs the up to 4 party members) might get a buff for the next encounter or the PCs might

PCS might lose money or items or find money or items

might take damage or start out with less stamina (resource used to take extra move spaces, use certain abilities)

yeah, you'd write them custom to your campaign, but the mechanic is really cool

oh yeah Descent 2nd edition (it matters because there were major mechanics overhauled from the 1st version) is one of my favorite boardgames which I rarely play because my playergroup gets really stressed out about winning and rules right now

@waxeagle thanks for the comment, edited them in

@SevenSidedDie I wonder if I'm missing something: you've replied to a couple of my comments basically repeating what I already said or stating what was -to me- the obvious.

[blink]

Yes, I know he's not here.

you might want to leave him a comment directing him to chat, he won't get your ping most likely

Done, thanks

@AdrianoVaroliPiazza Hey-o.

@AdrianoVaroliPiazza Which set of comments? There are two going on there, and interleaved with other comments.

y'ello. It's about the question I made at 17:05

both of them, really

I said "this content resonates with this question, but I don't know how to turn it into a relevant answer", and you replied with a summary of the link and then "I mean, that I don't see any way to turn it into a relevant answer. It's irrelevant to both players, but for opposite reasons. It explains them, but doesn't fix them".

and the bit about stating the obvious goes for your reply "Self-imposed restriction" should probably be read more charitably to be understood. It makes sense if you read it as "self-imposed roleplaying challenge".

@AdrianoVaroliPiazza The comments on the question: I see the relevance of the article, I agree that it resonates with the problem, but I don't think there is any way to use it to craft an answer. When you say "I don't know how to turn it into a relevant answer", that implies you think it still can be. I offer my opinion that I don't think it can.

:16015531 Ah, ok. I think we're tripping over the way the question presents the two players. I don't think those are reasons they both share. Those sound, to me, like reasons they have each given, but probably don't share. The guy who played the flail snail sounds like the source of the "a character no-one can related to" and "normal people are too hard" reasons. The woman who respects the metagame is who I'm guessing the "self-imposed restrictions" reason comes from.

I might be wrong about who the reasons match up with, but either way, the question doesn't clearly indicate that the reason for choosing a flail snail was for self-imposed roleplaying challenge.

True, but then, the context is of those players building problematic characters, anyway.

To be honest, and on a different topic, I'm a bit bummed with the site. Since a while ago, I've started to focus more on some repetitive comments applied to questions where they don't seem to belong.

@AdrianoVaroliPiazza True. The flail snail is pretty unreasonable in most games, yeah. But it's not fair to leap to the conclusion that the motive for the flail snail is self-imposed restrictions, since it makes self-imposed restrictions seem like a laughable excuse for a flail snail. When really, self-imposed restrictions are a pretty common roleplaying method that often doesn't cause problems of the Flail Snail variety.

@AdrianoVaroliPiazza Like what? Not saying there aren't, just wondering which are getting to you.

e.g. BESW's comment in this particular question "Can you give some more detail about what it is that's disrupting the group? If you have to give an example of something which happened at the table, that's fine. Some groups would be fine with this setup, so we need to know details about your group in order to provide answers you'll find useful. "

The examples were there from the first version of the question

@AdrianoVaroliPiazza Yeah, but that comment got pushed back on pretty hard. (I did too, but I've since deleted my comment because that argument over the question was "won" by the side who didn't think the question was missing anything.)

I recently asked a question about Numenera and got some comments that really angered me. While the question did need polish, the first comment by a mod was essentially "hmm, I don't think this question is workable here". I answered with "well vote to close then".

There was another question about immersion where people commented to the effect that they needed to explain how their immersion was being broken, when it seemed obvious to me. That was annoying too, yeah.

And some following comments were (paraphrasing) "I think this question is too speculative for the site, it's not a serious enough subject"

@AdrianoVaroliPiazza I remember that question, though I'm not sure I can find it now. Did you delete it?

Or is it the Cyphers question?

one caveat: this is what I remember. The comments were rolled back. The question is still there. rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/38356/…

exactly, that one

Right, now I remember. I don't accurately remember the comments myself either, though.

@waxeagle just thinking about the distance again, by default everyone in 4e is the legendary hoplite who ran to announce victory

I think the trouble there was just phrasing. For example, the third revision asked if it would be "playable", which is a very vague term that can only be answered with opinion (because everyone has a different standard for what makes a system playable).

It's still open now though, so despite the unpleasant turbulence during clarification, the intended question was always an acceptable question.

It was reopened after closure.

I eventually got some useful comments and got to modify it to make it acceptable.

@AdrianoVaroliPiazza Yes. Though, when you ask a mod to vote instead of commenting on problems with a question, that's kind of asking for it. :) Mod votes automatically close questions, so they can't "just" vote.

but the starting comments... I got really mad at the attitude perceived, since I got in with the perception mentioned above.

I meant it. In the sense of "hey, you have tons of rep and experience in the site, if the best you can do is tell me "I don't think this is a useful question"... well I don't really know how to make it clearer. I said that, too.

Some other "starting comments", let's call them, that bother me are the ones like "Hey everybody, let's remember that for this kind of question, you should answer in this and that manner, and answers that are X Y or Z aren't accepted here".

@AdrianoVaroliPiazza Do we have many of the latter kind of comment these days? We had those a lot for game-rec questions for a while, but that's replaced by a nice official-looking banner now.

I don't know. I don't really read many questions anymore.

I'm currently playing Mage - The Awakening and GMing Numenera, and there aren't that many questions on the latter here. I have doubts on the former, but not ones that I can ask clearly here.

Unless: "I want to play a techno shaman, I'm a Spirit (3) ??? (2) (don't remember now, and the GM has my charsheet) Life (1) Thyrsus of the Free Council, what can I do?" is a valid question.

possibly, though you should have a goal or 2 for that, would be a character optimization question sort of

That's the problem. I have just played 2 sessions, and the mechanics and what my character can do are still a bit handwavey for me. Half the time I don't know if I should be improvising magic, if I should be using the spells I've already studied but don't know how to apply... I end up more often than not eschewing magic.

I've a feeling this is more of a question for my GM than for this site, right now.

@AdrianoVaroliPiazza Hm, yeah, I see what you mean. That's the kind of question that I'd take to a forum: someplace where I can dump an half-formed problem and people will pick at it, or just spout off their opinions and advice, so that I can just absorb a bunch of ideas and wisdom. There are lots of questions I don't bring here.

Well, this chat just paid itself. I just sent the mail to my Mage GM asking the same questions.

so thanks.

@AdrianoVaroliPiazza Awesome. :)

hey