@waxeagle It seemed like a poorly thought out rant rather than any useful question. Just how may VTC reasons it got so fast suggests it might not be worth restoring.
I've been erring on the side of caution and moving all the 5e conversations into the sideboard, but thus far this one seems okay and productive to have in main chat.
@JoshuaAslanSmith I feel like I get too many false-positives on my troll-dar, so I simply started assuming all questions are in good faith (even if rants) until the evidence becomes overwhelming.
We're not gonna change the way the community works because someone thinks there's a clique of users in control of everything. But challenging the boundaries of our framework is always a good idea. As long as someone can admit that one position or the other will have the final word.
@MrJinPengyou I'm kinda holding my breath because the suspended user got unsuspended yesterday. I think a showdown is inevitable and it will be graceless.
@Tridus I think because the discussion about 5e got really intense and everyone was talking about it and it was a problem because the main chat was drowned in conversations about 5E and nobody could talk about something else
We spent about a week trying to keep conversations from becoming debates, but personalities couldn't keep it calm and civil (I admit I was part of the problem).
And yes, the main chat was becoming 5e chat because people weren't able to let things go.
Eventually Brian B-S came in and laid down a moratorium.
Felt kinda nuclear at the time, but we'd tried the other options.
Aaaaanyway.
Some of the issues which were being brought up are things that need to get addressed eventually. Just--not while they're associated with that unnecessary drama.
But for 5e questions, it's a temporary thing.
People are excited, they want to ask questions, so we get questions that aren't thought through as well.
A couple of years ago I wanted to run a short, prewritten module for Fading Suns. But it felt a bit off to start the game with a party of brand new characters showing up at a derelict spaceship, so I decided to run a session or two of pre-adventure on-planet, so the characters could meet in-play and form some bonds and connections. That pre-adventure took 5 months. So yes, I have experience in evaluating. My experience is that I suck at it.
First and foremost, the number and complexity of expected combat encounters. A simple combat encounter (PCs vs 2 NPCs at a comparable EL) is in my group at least 30-45 minutes for setup, PC planning, actual combat, and looting.
Context is that I've been running cthulhu-dark games, and mostly they've fit neatly into a single three-to-five-hour session, but my last one ran way over. There may be some non-adventure-related factors (players who hadn't met each other before, and a mix of Skype and IRL players), but I think it was also just a longer adventure.
A more complicated combat is at minimum an hour, and a really complicated one involving armies or big bosses is an entire 3 hour session
Next longest thing is if the PCs already know what they're going to do or not. When we're continuging from what they'd decided to do last session, planning time is basically nil and we can start right away. If they don't have anything actively going on, they can take over a half hour figuring out what it is they want to do.
@BESW Yeah. I consistently underestimate that too, but when they're in town and I want them to do something they don't know about yet, there will be lots of debate about if it's worth doing or if they should do something else.
Once they decide what to do, they will move fairly quickly
My previous Cthulhu Dark adventures were "base under siege" style stories (fitting, as they were taken from old Doctor Who plots), and this one was investigative (taken from a Scooby-Doo plot).
Scenes that involve things like traps, puzzles, riddles, and such I tend to give 15 minutes per trap/puzzle/riddle. They almost never go over that, and tend to go under
Investigations and diplomacy attempts are really hard to judge because when they can do them free form, they can go really off script
Luckily I don't usually have much in the way of script, and Cthulhu Dark adventure format doesn't either.
CD adventures are defined by The Descent through five "layers" of horrific experience, with the fifth layer being that you actually get to meet the horror at the root of the story.
Once you've experienced at least two things in one layer, the next layer's list becomes available to discover/experience (but the previous layer's list is still available too).
@Tridus My group is very mutable; I've two players I've been working with for years, and one I've just started working with a few months ago, and I never really know who's going to be there from week to week.
And now I've got two more players who like to join via Skype when possible.
Which is all great--for about a year I had one player most evenings, and we'd just watch TV instead of play most of the time--but massively disruptive to my systems and habits re: game prep.
Right now I'm trying to mostly run single-session campaigns.
(Hence using short-form systems like Cthulhu Dark, Roll for Shoes, Pilgrims of the Flying Temple, Lady Blackbird, and FAE.)
My previous eight years of experience was all long-form high-crunch D&D gaming, so... old dog, new tricks.
I like aspects, I like making villians, I like running encounters, I dislike setting difficulty, and I dislike that my players cumulatively will never even match my time investment.
That last one... yeah, it sometimes chafes, but only when I stop having fun with that time.
(As I did in 3.5, and again in 4e.)
It's one reason I'm using so many premades and short-form games with built-in plots.
Cthulhu Dark has needed some more prep, but it's really just watching a Doctor Who or Scooby story, writing down what happens, and then re-arranging it to fit the Descent mechanic.
At work, but mostly pulling my hair out because I have to support an app that I have no documentation on and know little about. And it is having issues that I have to fix.
Today I found out that we initialise an array with a size of that constant and then fill the first three. Result: Null pointer that get suppressed into the word "error" in two differnt places
There are 3 permanent programmers and currently about 15 contractors. I joined this company as it acquire a piece of software that was in development for 7 years. At that point I was one of two permanent programmers and there was one contractor.
@Mourdos Had that before. Worked on a project where stuff was developed in Germany. Best part was when unicode characters leaked into the source code and Clang (we developed cross-platform) flew through the roof when you tried to build on Mac.
I can just see sitting next to someone coding in this and you just feel them go into shock. They look over at you and just whisper. "It deleted everything"
At my previous job I worked on Windows mostly because XCode couldn't handle our project. I use Linux primarily on my personal machines. Going to be working on Macs at my new job.
From other meta I have this quite clear: do not accept an answer if there isn't a good one.
But what should I do when I am requesting experience based advice and there are several good ones, each approaching an angle? What if I can't decide which answer is best because all seems good to me? Shou...
@BESW I've been trying to think of a good question, so I can get in on the contest. But I haven't thought of anything that is not either clear from Basic, or speculation until PHB.
@doppelgreener (I'm having trouble remembering what to type for your autocomplete...) I'm thinking Lady Blackbird for this weekend's game.
I showed it to Daniel and he's interested; I know all my IRL players really enjoyed the one session we played a while back; and it feels like maybe it'd lend itself to good Skyping (that's just a guess).
