I do not find Terry Pratchett especially engaging--he's a better writer than Douglas Adams, but like HHGTTG it feels like once you've read one of his books you can see the jokes coming from a mile away (if you like either one's jokes, the repetition doesn't get boring as quickly, of course). But that editorialising seemed.... unnecessary, deliberately provocative, and poorly researched.
I did enjoy his earlier stuff more than later. eg, in the city watch "thread"(?), I liked Guards, Guards better than Thud! or Fifth Elephant (though they had their moments)
I have a great bank of quotes and phrases and concepts, but I can't pin it down.
The Doctor is contradictions: responsible but childish; charming but scary; wise but foolish; self-absorbed but self-sacrificing, jaded but easily awed.
I'm trying to come up with a generic Doctor, with a bit of focus on the warm fuzzy bits.
@BESW Charming and scary, and responsible and childish, are not necessarily mutually contradictory. The first two can come from mere force of personality and confidence, and the latter is something we can all be from time to time, or both at once. (One can be responsibly childish.)
@BESW I think a large part of the doctor's troubles come from the fact that who he must be day to day in order to get by is at odds with who he really is or wants to be. Sometimes it seems he is tired and jaded and wants to have a very good long sleep, but he can't, and stays with the world day to day, and despite that he notices the small wonders and enjoys them.
Those small wonders help give his life meaning when he's otherwise pretty tired with all of it, or at least that's one way to interpret it.
My brain's actually been running on that since yesterday. It's convinced there's a phrase that's close to the format of "I have no mouth but I must scream", like "I have no rest but I must sleep."
From the tired old man perspective, that's the Doctor pushing himself, because if he stops he might just stay that way.
and might be scared of that.
What if the Doctor doesn't actually have a Trouble?
Or rather, not just one Trouble. Give him a high concept and four aspects. His four aspects are all formulated as double-edged the way a Trouble would be.
True; often the only thing distinguishing a Trouble aspect from any other aspect is that it was chosen to be the Trouble.
Okay, so with that notion, I want to walk back and figure out what I want to say with the aspects.
The Doctor is scary intelligent, with the knowledge (though often not the tools) of Gallifreyan science at his disposal and a particularly sharp ability to improvise.
The Doctor has a very strong personality which he can leverage to make you delighted or brown-pantsed. Some Doctors can tamp it down to appear inconsequential, but almost always the Doctor is un-ignorable whether he appears to be benevolent, malevolent, or just foolish.
Although the Doctor really likes humans (he's said more than once that we're his favourite species), he's inhuman. Both his perspective on life and his biology are vastly different to ours, and on the whole he's justified in feeling that he's just plain better than us. I want to capture that undercurrent of arrogant superiority.
@BESW Also, really, he's been around long enough to see our entire middle ages, and thus see history repeat itself over and over and over in the ways us short-sighted long-lived people wouldn't even recognise. But he's gone one better: because he can travel through time, he's able to just take periodic glimpses and skip 90% of the inconsequential details.
Which means he could well know human history better than most historians, and from an academic standpoint understand us better than... most of us.
Including the really bad parts of history our ancestors experienced, perpetrated by quite terrible individuals, which we tend to forget ever happened and we imagine we don't have personal capacity for. (But some people do.)
Here's an aspect I think works (paraphrased from a couple of different quotes): "I don't know why I like you humans so much."
Combines his love for humans and his disgust with what we sometimes do.
And I think the Fourth Doctor's "Sometimes my brilliance astonishes even me" encompasses his improvisation, his education, and a facet of his arrogance.
I don't think I want to feature the TARDIS too heavily in this one-shot, but if I do: "The TARDIS is my only home."
In many episodes, he arrives, leaves the TARDIS, and doesn't return until the end (and in others he's flitting about all over the space-time continuum...)
Sadface; if our recent email-paranoia spam filter got added, our adversaries are intelligent human beings actively interested in working out how to spam here.
Nearly 100 of the First and Second Doctor episodes are missing because they were lost, recorded over, or disposed of for various reasons. All of the audio is recovered from fan recordings, and all of them have on-set snapshots so we have a general idea what they looked like. Occasionally an old forgotten reel turns up in an African television station cupboard or someone's grandfather's attic.
Many of them, like Marco Polo, have been re-created using the snapshots and audio with a combination of subtitle narration and digital animation filling in the gaps.
(All the Third Doctor's stories are extant, but some are poor-quality black-and-white copies sent overseas instead of the colour versions that originally aired in Britain.)
Unfortunately the longer we go without finding more, the less likely we are to find more; time is not friendly to 1960s film.
Also, keep in mind that's nearly 100 episodes, not nearly 100 stories. Prior to the 2005 reboot, almost all Doctor Who stories were between three and nine episodes long.
(The Sixth Doctor actually got a whole season that was one single story with two or three flashback stories buried inside it.)
Yeah, I have watched from the mid-late 80s (but not every episode... I think I really got into it with the 7th Doctor, before that I'd just watch occasionally)
I don't think I've seen all of any Doctor before Eight (and Eight's best adventures were audio, of which I've only heard a couple), but I've watched... a lot.
Last summer I gave @trogdor a whistle-stop tour of Doctors One through Eight, which was fun.
Is there a database or list for items in Pathfinder that is filterable by what can be gained from it? (I'm especially looking for items that enhance my CON score - or at least CON modifier)
I am looking for a database or a filterable list online where I can find out specfic bonuses on abilities.
My current specific problem is, that my player has lousy CON stats, and I'd like to improve these. It would be great to find some on-line database, a filterable/searchable list based on thi...
Quick Fate question re: special effects in Venture City Stories. It says: "whenever you succeed with style on a roll that utilizes one of your powers, you can forgo the normal benefits of succeeding with style to add one of your special effects instead. ... Special effects always happen in addition to the normal effects of success."
Say, I use my super-strength power to punch someone and roll 3 shifts. I can inflict 3 stress, but I also have Forced Movement special effect and want to punch them clear into the next zone. Do I forgo the damage?..
I understand how it would work if I was just Overcoming something: I'd succeed, and not get a boost as per regular success with style, instead getting my special effect if I so chose.
I'm pretty sure I know the answer, but let me double check.
> When you succeed on an attack, you inflict a hit on your target equal to the number of shifts you got. That forces the target to try and “buy off” the value of your hit by taking stress or consequences; if that’s not possible, your target gets taken out of the conflict. When you succeed with style on an attack, it works like a normal success, but you also have the option to reduce the value of your hit by one to gain a boost as well.
So that specially effect says "When you succeed with style on an attack, it works like a normal success, but you also have the option to reduce the value of your hit by one to gain a boost as well or, instead of a boost, to apply your Forced Movement special effect."
I am making these vegan "raw cookie dough" bars to take to my NSA meeting tomorrow. Never made 'em before, but they look super easy and super indulgent. Vegan != healthy.
....dear recipe: that is a ridiculous amount of chocolate chips.
I trusted you, and now the chips are precipitating out of the dough!
> I never get involved in the affairs of other peoples or planets.
Okay, first draft of the Doctor's aspects (all are designed to be trouble-ish):
> Renegade Time Lord and cosmic hobo - There's no point being grown-up if you can't be childish sometimes - I don't know why I like you humans so much - Sometimes my brilliance astonishes even me - I never get involved in the affairs of other peoples or planets
Aye. (It's the Eleventh Doctor, not the Tenth, actually). The Doctor's Wife was--like most of Gaiman's work in other franchises--stuffed full of nods to fans and obscure lore, and new ways to look at old conventions.
@Mourdos It's from Eleven, five seconds before he gets involved in the affairs of other peoples. It will be invoked with a firmly ironic twist of the mouth, and have the opposite effect.
@Mourdos This is actually very much in line with one fan interpretation of the development of the First Doctor; the show starts with him as a nearly sociopathic man driven by his own curiosity and whims. In the first story he nearly kills a wounded man who is slowing the group down, until the Doctor's companions stop him.
In the second story he deliberately sabotages the TARDIS to keep them from leaving a planet he wants to explore--and gives them all lethal doses of radiation poisoning as a result.
But in that progression, we see that his human companions (who were originally accidental stow-aways he couldn't just take home because the TARDIS was randomised) teach him the value of acting.... humane....
@Mourdos Bah. The Doctor's "I don't use guns" thing is a blatant lie invented by RTD.
And when he's not using guns, he's often doing much worse.
Seven gunned down three or four Daleks with a Time Lord bazooka, then used words alone to trick Davros into blowing up the populated Dalek homeworld.
Five--generally considered the most peaceful and nonviolent of all the Doctors--killed what he thought were the last remaining members of a species with terribly painful poison gas.
I could almost justify the change in post-Seven Doctors because of the manner of Seven's death, but... Eight wasn't nearly traumatised enough by guns for that to make sense, and we all saw Nine go for the BFG as soon as the Dalek got loose.
It wasn't until Ten that the Gun Thing clicked into place, and it seems like a quirk specific to his regeneration.
I tried promoting Worldbuilding SE in a couple of roleplaying groups I frequent. Always found myself having to explain it's not actually my site and I can't really do much about their random complaints.
I think that that with a rewording, the original intent of the question could remain while the answers would be more appropriate. Just off the top of my head:
What techniques can be used to keep track of complex interactions between cultures in a world?
How do you organize your design so...
Imagine a Dwarf meets an Elf. Both speak common, but the Elf doesn't speak Dwarven and the Dwarf doesn't speak Elvish. The Elf is in a bad mood and decides to speak to the Dwarf only in Elvish instead of their common language.
How could I handle this in a authentic, immersive way? How can I, as ...
A friend of mine picked up the starter kit for 5E. After some discussion, we have 4 players and a DM ready to start a campaign. Three of us have little or no experience, while the other two have a few games under their belts but still think of themselves as novices.
Between the group members, we...
Anyone want to assist? My first step is to go level by level and figure out what a spellcaster is capable of at each level and try to match it in the martial class.
@JoshuaAslanSmith Do you think he edited the baby question to be more appropriate? I still think the best answer is babysitter or assigned rotating member
I was thinking of posting an answer but you were VOC right?
Definitely off-topic, because look at the answers: they're "find something else for the kids to do" and "ask the kids to join you." These are the same answers you'd get if they were asking about their children interrupting while playing hearts, or Halo, or Monopoly, or bocce ball.
That means it's a parenting.se thing, not an rpg.se thing.
@BESW [asks on parenting.se talking about a generic game with war theme that requires immersion] insert memeface here [gets told not to play this awful and life-consuming game while raising children]
jokes apart, I'm very sleepy for no reason and I'm going to bed. Ttfn.
Kidna bummed about some down-votes on a question about rules-as-written; reminds me too much of a bad experience I had back on the Exalted Forums, when I encountered folk who insisted that twinking charms was "as written."
neat. :) I'm actually more curious about this site as-is. Are "RAW" questions common, and do they usually assume abandoning all creativity on the part of the GM?
I don't know enough about the candle thing specifically, but "The GM can fix it by clever role-playing" is usually not a well-received response when the question is explicitly asking for rule-based answers.
(And don't take KRyan's abruptness personally; 3.5/Pathfinder RAW is his bugbear.)
@mbriand I'd be blocking a few tags I'm not personally interested in, but I feel my moderator tools give me a certain responsibility to be aware of and interact with the site as a whole.
I wouldn't be able to use the moderator tools appropriately without the full context of the site.
(I know plenty of people with my level of rep feel differently, and that's fine, but it's my take on the thing.)
Instead I've got the "greyed out" option on common tags I can't contribute to in terms of content, only in terms of general site policy.
I think that that with a rewording, the original intent of the question could remain while the answers would be more appropriate. Just off the top of my head:
What techniques can be used to keep track of complex interactions between cultures in a world?
How do you organize your design so...
