TRPG General Chat

MadMAxJr

17:03

I see the spelling 'Starship Troupers' and begin thinking of Starship Troopers as a barbershop quartet musical.

Spindly moustaches, striped clothing, flat-top hats, and pulse rifles.

Phil

17:32

did someone mention savage worlds? <- my favourite system :)

@Tritium21 Savage Worlds has a number of different settings that fit the bill - Weird War Rome, Weird War 2 and Tour of Darkness. With each of these its pretty easy to strip out the weirdness and be left with a straight military campaign

let me know if you have any questions on these, as I have copies of all of them

lisardggY

@Tritium21 There was Twilight 2000 back in the 90's. It was a really depressing game. You're a military unit stuck in the middle of nowhere when society crumbles.

Twilight 2000

Twilight 2000 is a role-playing game set in the aftermath of World War III (the "Twilight War"). The premise is that the United States/NATO and the Soviet Union/Warsaw Pact have fought a lengthy conventional war, followed by a (limited) nuclear war with all its consequences. Characters in the game are survivors of the war. == History == The adventures in Twilight 2000 typically involve a military unit which was stranded in Central Europe after the nuclear war and places emphasis on attempting to realistically depict military and social systems after a nuclear war. The manufacturer of the game,...

wax eagle

anyone in the audience have a 4e compendium sub? seems down right now

Tritium21

Twilight 2000 eschews the exact thing i was looking for - playing in a structured functional military.

lisardggY

@Tritium21 I think the intent was to play in a functional micro-level military unit, even when the macro-level military organization has gone to hell.

Bradd Szonye

18:18

@Magician Finally got a minute to read the draft you posted last night about paradigms of play. Good stuff there.

@lisardggY Hey, funny, I was thinking of that game too.

I used to have a copy, borrowed from a friend. I think I actually saw a revival version of it recently.

Or it could have been vintage, who knows?

Bradd Szonye

18:41

10

Q: European Medieval Fantasy RPG with less bookkeeping?

I want to run a campaign in a fantasy-setting. I want there to be a primary focus on travel, adventure, swordplay and sorcery, with the option of pursuing more diplomatic solutions to problems. I want to have knights and wizards, maybe an elf or two or some other exotic creatures, and I want to ...

Edited this question a bit in hopes of moving it toward reopening.

Tritium21

19:41

I dont think i have seen a question with as many votes and with answers with as many votes.... closed

Bradd Szonye

@Tritium21 Yeah, I don’t really understand why it’s closed either, as it seems quite specific to me what it’s looking for, and the top half dozen answers fit the description quite well.

And mxyzplk closed it originally for a reason (none of these games are anything like Maid RPG) that the question’s author has totally rejected.

And with absolutely zero close votes from the community, and plenty of good answers before the question went on the Hot Questions list. I just don’t get it.

Also, mxyzplk claims that “the same answers are appearing to it as every other [game-recommendation][fantasy] question” and yet it has zero answers in common with his first example of a similar question.

Tritium21

I dont have the rep to vote to open

Bradd Szonye

Maybe a meta post would be a good idea, although I’m not super motivated to post one yet.

Plus, I gotta run for lunch for a bit.

Maybe I’ll post to meta this afternoon if it’s not reopened by then.

Tritium21

kay

Smurfton

21:02

I don't have the rep to open either, but totally would.

Bradd Szonye

I see what mxyzplk is saying, I just think it’s a bit overzealous, especially since the question owner has been responsive to constructive feedback and nobody else has even suggested that there was a scope or clarity problem.

6

Q: Accepting an answer on a game-recommendation question

I've recently started a game-recommendation question and have received some very good suggestions from the community. I'm ready to try a few of them, but there's a more immediate problem that needs addressing. These questions are all very good...but I'm not sure what the proceedure is for acce...

discussion questions game-recommendation

While mxyzplk was claiming that all of the answers were terrible, the author was posting on meta that most of the answers were excellent.

BESW

21:56

>You are at the co-op. >There is a brightly painted goat here. http://t.co/QOL6Zk2ubZ

Tweeted by UrsulaV on October 28, 2014 at 9:47 PM

Bradd Szonye

22:13

@Smurfton Thanks for your help on the purple robes question.

Smurfton

You're welcome.

Bradd Szonye

And sorry for writing a bit of a moving-target question.

I just couldn’t shake the suspicion that I had missed something, or not read far enough ahead, plus the dragonclaw in “Sanctuary” really threw me.

And I had trouble expressing all that on the first pass.

So far I like the adventure, but there’s a few things it just describes really poorly.

Like, Episode 1 uses a dragonclaw, but neither the encounter nor Appendix B explain that dragonclaws are simply higher-ranking cultists.

The only place I’ve seen that is the sidebar in Episode 2.

Miniman

@BraddSzonye The thing that really bugs me is there keeps being things which it mentions the players possibly doing but doesn't provide any suggestions for what to do if they do them

Bradd Szonye

So when it came to describe that encounter, I didn’t know whether that was a human or what.

Miniman

Also. there's a chat room for this if you want to talk about it in depth.

Bradd Szonye

22:23

@Miniman Yeah, I caught that too. Like what if they decide to go hunting for Frulam Mondath?

Miniman

HotDQ discussion (warning spoilers!)

Horde of the Dragon Queen discussion

Bradd Szonye

Oh! Did not see that.

BESW

[sobs for Minister of Chance]

Black Glove is also not looking good.

Miniman

Kickstarter's like that sometimes.

One of the 2 projects I ever seriously thought about following didn't even come close to making it.

And it was one of the coolest sounding games I've ever heard of.

BESW

I'm not surprised by Minister of Chance--it's obscure inside obscure--but Black Glove really ought to be bigger.

Tritium21

22:33

kickstarter.com/projects/1990654819/paranoia-rpg

ill just leave that there you commie terrorist mutant scum

BESW

@Tritium21 It's been pinned on the right side of the chat for five days.

Tritium21

[zooms out] oh theres a sidebar

Bradd Szonye

Usually I miss out on Kickstarters, never see them until it’s too late.

Only one I’ve participated in was Fate Tokens, which I luckily got into at the last moment.

BESW

That's why we try to link and pin them here.

Bradd Szonye

They were already funded, just wanted to help push them into the next target.

And of course get some tokens.

BESW

22:58

@BraddSzonye My group thanks you for helping us to get so many bonuses.

Bradd Szonye

Ha! My pleasure.

Smurfton

Just got to 200 rep for the first time on a SE site! Hoorah! ...I was pretty excited when I saw +510.

Miniman

Never mind, I worked it out.

Smurfton

@Miniman 100 for each SE i'm on: Meta, SO, ...

Miniman

@Smurfton Yeah, I realised when I remembered the 200 thing. I don't tend to think of cross-site rep

Smurfton

23:05

I don't either, but it was added together in the rep gained/lost thing at the top.

Bradd Szonye

The community had four votes to reopen this question, but re-closing it for a different reason has wiped out our votes without possibility of voting again. — Bradd Szonye 16 secs ago

What the heck is going on with the D&D Lite question? The moderators have not only gone against community sentiment and author feedback twice, now they’ve reset the reopen queue in a way that prevents any of us from re-voting.

Miniman

The particular problem of a re-closed question losing re-open votes has come up a lot lately.

One of the mods has an answer on that question, oddly enough.

Bradd Szonye

Yeah, the one who just re-closed it.

I don’t understand what’s going on.

I’ve been editing and doing everything I can, short of a meta discussion, to get the question re-opened, and by re-closing the question the mods have wiped out all progress so far and prevented the most interested parties from re-voting.

Phil

go to meta with it then I guess

Bradd Szonye

23:20

And it’s not like the question is attracting a bunch of random or generic answers either, except for the inevitable ones you get from being on the Hot Questions list.

I could see protecting the question but not closing it.

Not sure what angle to take on meta with it. Or whether I should just let the OP do that if he cares enough.

Phil

I would meta it if I were you - you obviously have a clear opinion that the way it has been handled is less than great

Miniman

@BraddSzonye I'd recommend asking specifically about the (accidental?) wiping out of the reopen votes

That_Knight_Guy

@Miniman Agreed

Bradd Szonye

@Miniman Yeah, I just don’t really know how to approach it.

Because there’s a few things here that I object to.

BESW

This guy seems to be missing something fundamental about the Stack experience, but I can't quite put my finger on it.

Miniman

23:26

This needs some editing but I don't know the system.

BESW

@Miniman It's OSR; I suspect the answer is "narrative common sense applies."

Phil

OSRIC

OSRIC, short for Old School Reference and Index Compilation, is a fantasy role-playing game system. == Description == OSRIC, a recreation of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, is one of the most successful retro-clones. OSRIC describes itself as "a compilation of rules for old school-style fantasy gaming...intended to reproduce underlying rules used in the late 1970s to early 1980s". It is a role-playing game. OSRIC uses the Open Gaming License and the System Reference Document to create a new artistic presentation of the underlying rules set. The purpose of OSRIC is to provide publishers with a tool...

Miniman

@BraddSzonye I'd recommend against protesting the actual closing of the question. The wiping of reopen votes is a problem because it locks out the people most likely to have an opinion. Closing the question, regardless of community sentiment, is something they have the absolute right to decide on.

Bradd Szonye

I’m not sure whether to object to the re-closing that wiped out reopen votes, or the fact that (based on the question and two linked ones) there’s no reasonable standard for making a D&D Lite request that won’t be closed, or the fact that it’s been closed and reclosed against a developing community consensus.

There’s something bogus when the mod says “the same answers are appearing to it as every other [game-recommendation][fantasy] question” and yet one of the posts he links for evidence has exactly zero answers in common.

So one of the questions I have is what would make for an acceptable D&D Lite question, because so far it looks like all of the examples are being closed unilaterally with no advice for improvement.

That_Knight_Guy

So...who moderates the moderators?

Bradd Szonye

23:31

And in all three cases it was done long after several upvoted answers were posted, some of them by the moderators themselves.

Miniman

"developing community consensus" and "long after several upvoted answers were posted" don't actually matter for issues like this.

Bradd Szonye

Probably too late, but am closing this - a question too general, which probably 50% of extant RPGs could be argued to fit, along with a batch of answers of which only the small minority bother to meet our requirements and are largely poor fits anyway. If nothing else the close can warn future posters to take this one with a grain of salt. — mxyzplk ♦ Jul 14 '12 at 15:58

That was the closure reason for the last similar question cited.

Phil

@Miniman this

Miniman

@That_Knight_Guy As far as this is concerned, you can escalate an issue to the higher SE authorities, but you'd need serious evidence that the moderators weren't acting appropriately

Phil

first port of call is to raise it in meta, as that gives visibility to the other moderators

Bradd Szonye

23:34

I would be much happier if there were at least one example of this question that was not too broad that could be used as a duplicate or signpost.

BESW

@BraddSzonye Sometimes the issue is simply that the question type is too broad for Stack to easily accommodate, and nobody's yet found the sweet spot, if it exists at all.

It's important to remember that RPG.SE is one of the only Stacks which accepts any recommendation-type questions at all, and the only way we're able to do so is by applying strict additional guidelines to that question type.

If we can't adhere to those (experience-generated) guidelines, we'll stop fielding rec questions entirely.

Phil

@BESW yeah, and as a consequence, it is the most problematic type of question when it does appear

Bradd Szonye

This question wasn’t accumulating a bunch of random answers, though. It had several excellent answers that spoke directly to the requirements of the question. And then a few more by new posters who didn’t follow the recommendation-question guidelines at all.

That’s a situation where it would seem more appropriate to protect the question than put it on hold.

Because all of the answers that followed the recommendation rules were good ones, and not all that many. Maybe 5-6?

BESW

So it'd be a great use of meta to call for discussion and insight from the mods on exactly where the problem lies.

AFK Cthulhu Dark.

Bradd Szonye

Yeah, I’m trying to think through how to formulate it.

Partly I’m torn between “What makes a good D&D Lite question?” and “Why was this (re)closed instead of protected?”

Miniman

23:39

@BraddSzonye The thing is though, it doesn't matter if no D&D lite question can ever be successful

Phil

go for the second

its much more directed and to the point of the issue

Bradd Szonye

@Miniman That would be an acceptable answer, although the mods’ responses so far have implied that a hypothetical D&D Lite question could be acceptable.

Just that any time it has come up in practice, they shut it down.

Phil

alternatively post both questions separately

BESW

@BraddSzonye They aren't going to make categorical statements like that, that'd be silly. They rule on actual issues, not theoretical ones.

Bradd Szonye

I don’t know how to title this.

Phil

23:41

post the question here and we'll help

Miniman

@BraddSzonye Don't worry too much about that, meta isn't as strict about that sort of thing as the main site

As long as you get your point across in the body of the question, it should work fine

Bradd Szonye

“Why close this twice, voiding reopen votes, instead of protecting?”

BESW

He's had meta titles backfire on him before.

Bradd Szonye

Ha.

BESW

@Emrakul [poke]

HotDQ discussion (warning spoilers!)

Transcript for