@BESW on workplace SE there is a single moderatror who has vendetta against comments. He goes around and delete comments in bulk, "because, it's not what comments are for", while the similar level of comments is quite ok on SO. So I'm guessing variations are inevitable, and and if SF can defend their right to comment away - good for them.
@doppelgreener I understand the premise: this is not a forum, not a place for socializing, but questions and answers site where one can find a good answer for a particular question, or ask a question if it does not have an answer yet. But the thing is, that often I get more insight from the comments "discussion" than from the answers themselves!
@doppelgreener I only ever get to workplace from the SO side bar and then following a trail - not an active user. But practically every hotbar question there has deleted comments and this also has been discussed on workplace meta with graphs and so on, to prove that it's a bigger problem on workplace than on any other SE site
@doppelgreener so I'm guessing my point is, that the level of comments I'm seeing is adding value for me. Of course there is a point when it becomes disruptive, but I rarely ever witnessed that. So to me it's a fight with non-existent problem
if the comments are such that someone can actually generally do that with them, perhaps a policy change could be suggested on workplace meta to give a warning before deleting comments
e.g. here, the mods will often leave a comment to the effect of "please incorporate anything of value here into the question/answer, then flag these as obsolete. these comments will be deleted shortly."
@zespri It also occurs to me that SO, being the original site, is quite likely to have its own distinct culture that makes it a poor standard to measure against on something like this.
@doppelgreener I think these are useful thoughts to edit into your meta answer.
Slightly off-topic, so don't take up too much space with them, but good for background/context because I don't think the question is really going to get good answers in a cultureless vacuum.
I gotta dash right quick, so can someone else leave a comment explaining to this new person how answers aren't for responding to other answers? (the opening quoted line is from the accepted answer).
@Grubermensch ah right. but there are quite a few other special ones I would imagine, it just happens so I frequent SO the most. An example would be SF that was discussed a bit earlier in this chat
From TV Tropes: "The first season was split in half and aired over two years. The second season was announced to premiere in May 2012, but the episode was not aired. After it didn't air it was announced that the episode would air on July 10 (almost a full year after the previous episode), but again didn't air. New episodes finally started on July 30, over a full year after the first season ended, and were burned off at 2PM monday-friday for a few weeks and briefly mis-labeled as Tom and Jerry Tales."
I just thought of a question that doesn't appear to have been asked/answered here - in D&D 3.5, can you combine Rapid Shot & Manyshot, to fire two Manyshots in one round?
@doppelgreener The characters had only heard of this guy (Henrik) so far, having arrived in his city late in the evening. Henrik had mandated that every friendly stranger should receive lodging, medical care, food and booze upon arrival to welcome them.
This served as sort of a character-defining moment - but it was only completed as an angry drunk in the same tavern was pushed to the floor and executed on the site for disorderly conduct and a minor battery incident.
The characters actually met Henrik the next day. He told them that everyone must obey his laws and orders on the penalty of death - but promised to not be a dick as long as their personal lives were in line with his reconstruction plan.
@kviiri he'd better be giving his populace a pretty sweet deal, since governments that have set the death sentence for minor indiscretions have generally lead to a terrified populace and revolt.
or potentially corruption, since the guards might be terrifying
He likes to keep his city clean, and it's the cleanest and sweetest city there is around. The only competition in the nearby area is a somewhat aggressive cult they're engaged in a war with, and a distant family of sixty or so inbred hillbillies.
And cannibals in the nearby forest, but there's usually little reason to go there anyway.
Oh, almost forgot, Henrik does tend to show clemency for minor crimes if you're not a repeat offender. Some of his guards follow this principle as well, others are more violent. Essentially each guard is a judge as well as the executioner.
And the guards always work in pairs to moderate each other.
@kviiri So if one is a young hotshot guard with attitude problems, the other is a veteran, more contemplative, and just three weeks away from retirement?
I didn't really elaborate on that - I'd assume one is the senior partner and the other is a junior one. For dramatic twists, the junior partner is the executive (heh!) one and the senior one stands by giving their two cents on the topic.
Once you cross a certain threshold, you don't need to kill people that much anymore. You start focusing more on offering advice and opinions for the junior partner to reflect on.
When Tom Baker stepped down after becoming iconic of the role , they cast a man who was well-known for his role in another BBC TV series, Peter Davison.
Patrick Troughton was a similar choice for a similar reason, when they were looking for the man who could win audiences into the idea of a Second Doctor.
But Peter Davison would be a very close parallel to Wil Wheaton.
Still, I do think Wheaton would be better as a companion.
He's got a kind of everyman aura that I'm not sure he could ditch.
I mean, the man was an actor first. I don't know if those chops have improved over time or not but looking at things like Eureka and Big Bang Theory, they're rather intentionally handing him abrasive roles. What can we say; Trekkies love to hate him.
If you've ever seen him outside of one of those roles, though, you can tell exactly how much acting is actually going on in those shows. So I certainly think he could pull it off. But we already know who the next doctor is anyway.
@WesleyObenshain I think it's less a matter of "can he act?" (yes, obviously he can) and more "can he act for that role?" (I haven't seen anything which makes me think so). But yes, most of his high-profile live action roles are all similar so it's hard to say.
It's kinda like casting Patrick Stewart: the man's a brilliant actor, but you've gotta ask yourself, "How much like Captain Jean-Luc Picard is the role I'm offering him?"
Stewart had a very nice role in an Israeli movie a year or two ago, as an impoverished British actor and minor aristocrat getting involved in a bank robbery in Israel. He did the part very nicely, but then at some point someone told me they originally wanted John Cleese for the role, which made me think.
@BESW That's kind of my point on both sides of the argument. People associate big-name actors (and others) with other things (like their Star Trek characters) which can make it difficult for the viewer to see past the old role. On the other hand, there's nothing that says those roles were definitive of the actors abilities.
In Stewart's case, even he has admitted that he's best as Picard.
Many actors do have wide range beyond their iconic role, but Stewart--somewhat amusingly--doesn't. The further from "Picard" he strays the less convincing his performance. Professor Xavier is a very Picard-like character, so he does that well. King Claudius... not so much.
@WesleyObenshain The role is like Picard enough that Stewart was able to genuinely inhabit it.
I'm not saying he always plays Picard, but that he's best able to play not-Picard roles when they've got very Picard-like elements to them; the speechifying empathic leader, for example.
Anyway, what I was trying to get at was that Wil Wheaton's last major acting role before his reemergence was Wesley Crusher, which was ages ago. Since then, he's pretty much acted the same character in every show because that's what those shows want from him. But it's nothing like Crusher or Wheaton. I think he could handle another role quite easily, but nobody wants him to. Its probably a large part of why he's done so much voice acting lately.
It's like Mark Hamill.
Anyway, I've made no effort to get any work done in the last 5 hours of staring at my computer screen so I think it's bedtime. Later.
The Environmental Protection Agency and the Guam Waterworks Authority are having a power struggle/jurisdictional battle/[impolite phrase] over whether or not the tap water in the central part of the island is contaminated.
@BESW Daniel and I will likely not be upset if you choose to focus on your three physically present companions, and give our game's continuation a raincheck 'til next week
I was surfing on the internet, and I have encountered rumours that in the 5th edition of DnD in Forgotten Realms world, the Old Deities will come back (Bhaal, Myrkul, Leira etc.) What is more, I have heard that Bhaal is confirmed.
Is this true, and are there any official sources that confirm thi...
@BESW I'm about 90% sure that they've been almost completely mum about it. which makes it speculation now, with the possibility of confirmation on Friday
@lisardggY What I mean is it assumes too much understanding of the context. I don't have any of the context, but it's possible that with that it is in fact a valid answer.
@Grubermensch I don't have the context either, but after some context browsing (here) I'm guessing that this series is exactly the right context, in the sense that it lays the narrative for the shift in the FR between the 4e state to the new 5e situation.
@lisardggY yeah, the Sundering has been the big world level event leading up to it. The problem is that we don't know what that actually means in terms of the game...
I only know about the Sundering because it's basically unavoidable if you're following 5e stuff closely (and I played the D&D Arena of War iPad game for a while)
Basically, I'm fond of the pseudo-medieval feel that earlier D&D settings had. Greyhawk had it. FR has it in some places. Other settings tend to go for the more exotic and fantastic.
@lisardggY Fair enough. I guess I preferred the fantastic because it helped me ignore the total disconnect between D&D and the medieval ethos it so desperately tried to pretend it had.
Every time talk drifts to settings and styles, I try hard to separate things that I actually prefer, vs. things that I have fond memories of from my youth.
If I like how a setting looks or feels, the themes it deals with or the cultures it's inspired by, I'll get excited out of proportion to how well it'll actually play for me and my group.
(Honestly that's half of why I want to play a shulassakar.)
@BESW I'm like this with movies. I'll like a film because something in it takes me to a cool place, but the actual execution of the film could be terrible.
(The other half of playing a shulassakar is that I like playing non-standard paladin-type characters; there's something very appealing about playing a priest of Quetzalcoatl in a culture that doesn't know much about Quetzalcoatl.)
(This question is a comparison to 3.x, though things might have been different in 4e)
In 3.5e there is a large power and capability gap between fighters and wizards that fighters couldn't hope to close, even in their nominal area of excellence. Is this problem still around?
So people are either asking questions which are unanswerable in the SE frame, or grasping at straws for questions which might be answerable (forced questions are rarely good).
In my experience, starter sets often contain explicitly 'wrong' versions of the rules for the sake of simplicity. Now, I understand that people certainly don't want to see something like dnd-5e-starter-set, adnd-starter-set, dnd-3.5-red-box. But we do have other examples of what I like to think o...
(This question is a comparison to 3.x, though things might have been different in 4e)
In 3.5e there is a large power and capability gap between fighters and wizards that fighters couldn't hope to close, even in their nominal area of excellence. Is this problem still around?
