TRPG General Chat

Smurfton

00:03

Do you read any other webcomics?

BESW

Not a lot right now, but in the past yes.

Narbonic/Skin Horse, 2D Goggles, Drive, leveL, Schlock Mercenary, and so forth.

doppelgreener

00:27

Wow, this takes save or suck ability drain to a whole new level for me:

15

Q: Do I lose access to a feat if ability drain results in no longer meeting the prerequisite?

Do curses or ability damage/drain cause a character to be unable to use his feats? For example, a Ranger with 20 Dex who has two-weapon-fighting feats and is using two weapons gets cursed or ability drained and his Dex drops to 14. Does that cause the character not to be able to use his two-wea...

"Zap! Now you lose access to a chunk of your character's features."

BESW

eeeyup.

Miniman

Ability drain and level drain have always been the worst of the worst, though. Even being turned to stone can have some benefits, particularly in a narrative sense.

And dying is only bad because it drains levels.

BESW

Well, death is also a very strong combat debuff.

8

Miniman

00:42

@BESW Heh. I was definitely talking about long-term consequences.

In the short-term, even disarming is a pretty bad thing to have happen to you.

doppelgreener

It occurs to me that almost all of this is something that spellcasters either do not care about or can do something about, whilst melee characters will be destroyed by any of this and be able to do little if anything about it.

Miniman

@doppelgreener Sadly, that's not a new thing. The ability of spellcasters to dish out instantaneous character crippling is matched only by their ability to defend against it.

Oxinabox

01:08

The things I miss out on by hiding DnD questions:
http://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/50138/can-wizards-wear-cloaks-and-capes-instead-of-robes#comment102270_50138

I like to interpret that question as "Is it physcially possible for a wizard to wear a cape?

BESW

Heheh.

Oxinabox

"No, wizards can not. If he attempts to it will just slip off. The only exeception is if he renounces his wizard-ship. Then he can wear what he likes. Unfortunately he is no longer technically a wizard."

BESW

And if you wear a robe and a cape, you get arrested for impersonating a Time Lord.

Tarmikos11

02:06

Or you get the same results as putting a portable hole in a bag of holding.

BESW

Time Lord arrests look a lot like that.

Miniman

@BESW Why wouldn't you just imprison them at birth?

BESW

That would itself be a violation of the Laws of Time.

Miniman

@BESW You know you're in real trouble when people start capitalising Random Words at You.

BESW

The Laws of Time are not expressions of universal physical forces; they were invented by the Time Lords and are enforced via automatic system protocols invented and implemented by early Time Lord society.

(Before Rassilon, time was very wibbly-wobbly, and quite content to be so. It was the Time Lords who decided cause should follow effect all the time--not just most of the time--and created the Web of Time and other technology to enforce their vision of How Things Should Be.)

So Time Lords followed their own Laws, becoming a society of aloof watchers of events who only interfered when their idea of how time should work got flouted.

Adeptus

02:38

@BESW Except for rogues like The Doctor, who interferes all over the place, for all sorts of reasons

BESW

Right. Which is why he's a renegade and a fugitive.

The Doctor, the Master, the War Lord, and the Rani are all Gallifreyan renegades. Occasionally useful renegades, but nonetheless they're outlaws and deviants.

Smurfton

Does it ever matter in-show?

(I have only watched 3 episodes)

BESW

In the classic series, it matters very much indeed.

The first time we ever see non-renegade Time Lords is when the Doctor encounters a renegade he can't stop on his own, so he summons Gallifrey to stop the guy... and then runs like all get-out trying to leave before they show up.

It doesn't work: they freeze time before he can get to his TARDIS, put him on trial for his crimes against time, and sentence him to be forcibly regenerated and then exiled to Earth without a working TARDIS.

Miniman

@BESW Which was the setup for the particularly low-budget phase of the series.

BESW

Well, they did save money not having to make so many alien-planet sets.

Smurfton

02:45

I was under the impression that summoning planets wasn't exactly pleasant for the surrounding area.

Miniman

@Smurfton Heh.

BESW

@Smurfton Well, "summoning Gallifrey" is sort of like "summoning Scotland Yard."

Miniman

@BESW The mental image that that now conjures up...

2

Magician

Sorry to interject, quick question. We (the hobby) have words such as "munchkin" or "rules lawyer" to describe those who pay too much attention to the rules (among other things). Do we have a term for those who willfully ignore the rules?

Miniman

@Magician GMs?

Magician

02:47

@Miniman ...I'd star that, but it really needs the context.

4

Miniman

@Magician I was tempted to go with 'wizards', but that really comes under munchkins.

@Magician Also, I'm starring that cos I've thought it pretty often :P

Magician

The irony!

I've seen "magic tea party" used to refer to the rules-light games, but it's not quite the same.

Miniman

@Magician In freeform they're called Sues, but that's a pretty different phenomenon.

BESW

I think the issue is that there's a lot of different forms this can take.

Miniman

@BESW True dat. Like the 'freeform reform' -ist who believes any action is legitimate if roleplayed.

Smurfton

02:54

You could argue that the opposite of a munchkin is a munchkin.

Miniman

@Smurfton Shit just got ~~deep~~ Zen.

trogdor

I wouldn't say that everyone who seems to be ignoring the rules are really "ignoring" them so much as they don't know them or have trouble grasping them

not that there aren't people who do actually ignore the rules

Miniman

@trogdor Which is another form. Like BESW said, this is a pretty broad thing.

trogdor

yeah

exactly

Lord_Gareth

@Magician YOU HAVE SUMMONED ME

AND I ARRIVE TO ANSWER YOUR QUESTION

trogdor

02:56

my point is partly that one name probably can't describe everyone in the general category

Magician

@trogdor Even "munchkin" or "rules lawyer" are extremely broad terms, basically amounting to "likes mechanics more than I do".

trogdor

this is true

Miniman

@Magician Or possibly - likes to abuse mechanics, doesn't love them enough to uphold their spirit or intent.

trogdor

but there should at least be a distinction between people who ignore rules they understand, and those who just want other people to handle the rules for them so they can just play the game

at least in my opinion

BESW

So, @Magician, do you have a particular expression/effect of this notion that you're trying to describe?

Lord_Gareth

02:59

Okay everyone stop

Stop

Pause

Miniman

STAHP

Magician

GARETHTIME

Miniman

RAEGTIME

...We stopped, what now?

Lord_Gareth

@Magician - The trouble you're running into is that there are multiple conflicting definitions for any given word. Do you want the modern rundown of all terms used to describe various kinds of players, or just ones that could be described as clinical?

Magician

I guess I'll quote from the post I'm writing for context

The other class of issues is due to a clash of paradigms within a group, be it between fellow players or a GM and a player. As an extreme example, imagine a GM presenting a puzzle to players, only to have them declare they roll Intelligence to solve it (GM expects FGI, players go with AGM). Alternatively, imagine players flooding a dungeon with a decanter of endless water - an FGI solution to an AGM problem. And it's not just the players who can be the cause of a clash: the infamous tucker's kobolds can be seen as FGI used by GM (with themselves being the fiat arbiter, never a good sign) ag…

Miniman

03:02

FGI, AGM?

Magician

Fiat Gated Ingenuity, Abstract Game Mechanics. Have been discussed here before, and post is almost done.

Sorry if it doesn't make much sense on its own

Lord_Gareth

Okay, good

Rules Lawyer has become less of a negative term over the years, incidentally, but:

Rollplayer - cares only about the mechanics, won't/can't roleplay; munchkin - attempts to "cheat" at the game, see also rollplayer; Special Snowflake - insists on hogging table time and/or refuses to accept consequences of die rolls and/or complains about the same

You also sometimes hear folks just saying "disruptive player", which is the polite way to talk about it.

And sometimes used to describe behaviors that are common but less talked about.

Such as the guy who refuses to make serious characters in a serious game

Miniman

Is there a term for players who try to use roleplaying to get around the mechanics? Fiat Gated Ingenuity being one example of this sort of thing.

Lord_Gareth

@Miniman Usually either gets filed under Special Snowflake (if the DM is an asshole) or else "One of my players doesn't quite get the paradigm of the game, how can I help him?"

BESW

@Miniman I tend toward this kind of behaviour as a player: IRL charisma checks to snow the GM into not calling for mechanical resolutions.

Lord_Gareth

03:09

Most of the time those folks aren't actually trying to cheat.

In cases where it REALLY IS cheating, they're munchkins

BESW

Aye, it's not deliberate on my part.

Lord_Gareth

AFK, hope I was helpful

Smurfton

Do we even have words for various types of problem gms? There's definitely a variety.

Lord_Gareth

@Smurfton Killer GM, Newbie, Control Freak, Railroader/Storyteller

Miniman

@Lord_Gareth "Control Freak, Railroader/Storyteller" - Difference?

Lord_Gareth

03:23

@Miniman Control Freak GM is more deep and pervasive. It involves infringement or elimination of player agency at all levels.

Railroaders are looking for a specific outcome, either in one scene or to the shape of the story, and they infringe on agency towards that goal.

Control freaks are the guys who have "secret house rules"

Miniman

Makes sense (if only in the context of some of the questions I've seen on this site.)

trogdor

Newbie,Railroader/Storyteller,Killer GM,... I literally did all this

Lord_Gareth

@trogdor DMs go through many phases as they learn the craft.

The trouble is not doing it. The trouble is getting stuck.

trogdor

I killed my players a lot because I didn't know what I was doing

Magician

I think I've said all I wanted to say. I'll be afk for an hour or so, here's the link to the final(?) draft, on the off chance you want to take a look, maybe I've missed something important or just stuffed up. Otherwise it goes live when I return.

trogdor

03:28

I also mostly railroaded the story in that same campaign

Lord_Gareth

Well, notably, a killer GM is a guy who is trying to murder his PCs

Accidental death is more "newbie"

trogdor

ah ok

I see

then scratch that one

I was trying to make things hard, but I wasn't trying to kill anyone

Miniman

I've railroaded on 2 separate occasions.

trogdor

and to be fair, after (some of) my players started power gaming in response, I don't think anyone died anymore

BESW

> Fate’s fate points superficially share the same fiat issues

Miniman

03:32

Maybe 3, actually, but one was a stealth railroad.

BESW

The key to their success, I think (and you may not want to put this in the article as it's kinda tangential), is that they're tied to aspects and aspects are explicitly group-moderated. This means it's group fiat rather than GM fiat which runs the Fate point system, and aspects give something firm to grab hold of in achieving some kind of group consensus.

Lord_Gareth

@BESW This reminds me of how my American History teacher described the writing of the Constitution.

BESW

> The exception, as usual, is 4e, which was quite honest about its methods and functionality (and yet people tried).

Tried what?

Lord_Gareth

"The founding fathers didn't want to give anyone the power. The government would abuse it, the states already failed to do anything meaningful with it, and the people were idiots. So they handed everyone a piece of the power, put the rest in the middle and yelled, "Take it if you want it!". Fighting over the remainder has kept us afloat for years."

BESW

> In this particular case, a player utilizes the existing rules for alchemist fire, which the game can’t handle – creativity breaks its mechanics.

I think you skipped a step in that thought.

Lord_Gareth

03:37

[Squees as he sees himself get quoted]

Fanboy squeeeeee

BESW

Random uncollated thought incoming.

GNS is--as much as it's anything after having been filtered through the community lens--about what is fun.

It provides a Venn diagram for thinking about how we have fun at the table.

Miniman

@BESW COLLATE Latin1_General_CI_AS

BESW

Magician's categories necessarily have some element of that, but the focus is very different. While GNS is about the take-away, the reward, Magician's talking about the process (which GNS only discusses inasmuch as sometimes the process is the reward).

Magician is talking about... well, about the ludonarrative.

He's exploring how we separate or integrate the player and the player character, using combinations of rules, acting, and collusion.

Lord_Gareth

03:52

Which is super cool, incidentally.

@BESW Any opinions on what my next post should discuss re: gaming?

BESW

@Lord_Gareth I'm always interested in the effect of environment on behaviour.

Lord_Gareth

@BESW Meaning vhat in this context?

BESW

04:08

In RPGs, environment is a very broad term. It can mean the physical location in which we game (snacks? music? distractions? sofa vs kitchen table?); how the rules are presented (orally, RTM, only as they come up in play?); and so forth.

Lord_Gareth

04:21

@BESW Noted.

BESW

A lot of it is encompassed by what we call "table culture," but there's not a perfect overlap between them.

Lord_Gareth

04:35

Man, when Falconshield does awesome one-liners they don't mess around with them.

"Open up my embrace, face eternity's story."

Magician

04:45

@BESW thanks for the feedback once again! Fixed up those things, here's the expanded bit on fate points:
"While Fate's fate points superficially share the same fiat issues, they are the foundation of the system, interacting with it on multiple levels. Fate points tie into aspects, which are not only often created by the players but explicitly moderated by the group as well. Fate strongly encourages the MSC paradigm and requires group consensus to run at all, making it much less of an issue."

BESW

@Magician Nice.

If I were going to expand on it (you probably shouldn't in that article), I'd discuss how aspects serve as markers and signposts. FGI often fails because it turns into "Guess what's important in the room," while AGM says "Nothing in the room is important unless it has mechanics attached to it." Aspects are a way of marking elements as "Important; attach mechanics as needed." Which is pretty much MSC in a nutshell.

Magician

05:01

Aaand published!

Should show up in the feed some time soon, if the blog is still in it.

BESW

...sometimes I wonder if I should have my own setting.

Then I think, "Nah, I'd get bored with it."

lisardggY

@Magician Good, I'm glad those assorted discussions got wrapped up into an ordered post. Now I can use FGI and AGM in conversation. :)

Magician

@lisardggY I'd be very happy to see this parlance adopted by some subset of the community!

lisardggY

I'll post it to the other forums I inhabit, though I can't guarantee how much traction it'll get.

Miniman

@BESW Don't you have a bunch of your own settings? e.g. a small island in the Pacific with an absurdly high level of supernatural activity?

(And so on and so forth.)

BESW

05:09

Yes, but almost of them are a single campaignworth of setting.

Miniman

@BESW Well, yes. What's your point?

BESW

Context might be useful.

Specifically the first two sentences.

Magician

@lisardggY Much obliged! Send me a link if a discussion happens around it.

lisardggY

@Magician I could, but it'd probably by in Hebrew. :)

BESW

@Magician It's been added to my profile's link lump.

Miniman

05:14

@BESW Hmmm. I guess there's only one thing for it. You must combine every setting you've ever created into the ultimate roleplaying planet - BESWorld!

Magician

@lisardggY I look forward to the monstrosity google translate makes of it.

lisardggY

@Magician It's a Facebook group, which means it has built-in Bing translation, which is even worse!.

Magician

@BESW Sweet!

BESW

@Miniman [squint] I'm not sure I can reconcile that without turning to a seriously messed-up multiverse cosmology.

Like, "This makes the DC multiverse look simple" levels of messed-up.

Miniman

@BESW Oh, so you're not just after a setting, or even a world-sized setting, you want a setting with internal consistency?

lisardggY

05:18

@Miniman Best Ever Setting-World!

4

BESW

That's kinda the point, isn't it? A world that can span stories without losing coherence.

But I don't design worlds (until very recently) to contain multiple stories.

I design worlds around a particular story.

Miniman

@BESW Now you're just being ridiculous. If I had a dollar for every internally consistent universe I'd ever heard of, I'd have $1. Wait - wave-particle paradox rules out our universe. I'd have nothing.

@Mal Hi!

BESW

Even now when I'm running mostly games without pre-mapped plots, I wrap the world around the plot as it unfolds.

@Mal [wave] What's up?

lisardggY

@BESW I agree that intent is important here, but it can still evolve naturally. Write a world around a particular story, and then try to think of a different story around that same world, and then expand the world for that second story. Bounce back and forth.

BESW

Aye.

Magician

05:23

I have a good enough multiverse set up for fantasy settings, but I'd rather not drag sci-fi or modern ones into it, as that just wouldn't fit.

BESW

Unfortunately I tend to a) create fair all-encompassing worlds without a lot of room for empty corners by the end of a story, and b) bounce from one conceit to another like a monkey huffing Flubber between campaigns.

@Aholio Hi.

Aholio

How's it going? New here. I just popped in to check things out.

Lord_Gareth

@Aholio Flee! Flee for your sanity, innocent mortal! Flee to a place where the sky is not a howling hole in the world that sucks away at all hope and joy! Flee to where the sun still shines and tell the sons of laughter to make peace with their gods!

BESW

Glad to have you. This particular chat is dedicated to tabletop role-playing games (such as Dungeons & Dragons). If you're looking for another topic, there are a ton of other rooms to check out.

@Lord_Gareth ...

Lord_Gareth

@BESW Yes?

BESW

05:28

That was OTT even for you.

Lord_Gareth

@BESW I can only strive.

(Welcome to chat man)

(Ignore the pony)

BESW

Don't strive too hard, you might rupture something.

Miniman

@Lord_Gareth Except when the pony says to ignore the pony. RPG.SE is not responsible for the consequences of attempting to ignore the pony under these circumstances.

BESW

@Aholio Anyway. Are you familiar with tabletop RPGs?

Miniman

@BESW Or are they familar with you?

Lord_Gareth

05:34

@Miniman If you see something, say nothing, and drink to forget.

BESW

05:55

This needs major formatting love before I can even tell if it's a good answer or not. I'm not sure it is; it seems like a momentary "gotcha" rather than a solution.

lisardggY

06:56

@BESW My problem with the "anything players can do, GMs can do better" approach, when applied to D&D or a similar game, is that it's not a case of "showing the player it's no fun on the receiving end", it's a case of encounter too easy vs. TPK, which isn't equivalent.

BESW

Aye

It's not an attitude which is useful when you want the players to rein it back.

It's an attitude of giving the players control over the optimisation level.

Tarmikos11

The problem with putting players against tougher challenges in response to them making bigger, meaner characters, is an arms race.

My pathfinder group discovered this after building the ultimate cuisinart.

BESW

Aye.

Lord_Gareth

@Tarmikos11 The other trouble is that in most groups, this is a race someone ends up losing.

And without both players and a GM, you have no game.

Tarmikos11

Something to the tune of 14 hits because of a feat we accidentally made up.

Our GM ruled that Multiweapon fighting progressed the same way as two-weapon fighting.

BESW

07:08

That's a classic example of creating mechanics that make sense through comparison to other mechanics rather than by evaluating their implementation in the game.

Tarmikos11

It was insane the first time I played the character.

Lord_Gareth

@BESW Which is part of the reason I make sure to repeat, over and over, that RAW is not a creature that works in similarities.

It does not matter what a mechanic looks like.

Read it and rule it as though it was wholly unique.

Tarmikos11

I was in position to sneak attack and did 500+ damage

Pixie

Yeesh.

Tarmikos11

It was beautiful in the most insane way.

Metool

07:10

Don't forget you got 1/3 that damage from a major debuff.

(Wait, was that the marilith?)

Tarmikos11

It was beautiful in the most insane way.

Yes, that was the Marilith.

Lord_Gareth

Tarmikos11

The story of this character was that he was a member of a thieve's guild who turned over a new leaf, and in the midst of a war against all things demonic, he got sucked into a hell-portal, and turned the taint of the underworld into a weapon.

Like if Ghost Rider had short swords and a LOT more chains.

He had 5 sword attacks, 4 tentacle attacks, and then five more sword attacks.

Pixie

On the other hand, waltzing through encounters can get boring after the first few times you do it, so ramping up the challenge for players is a necessity... but it's a weird thing to try to balance.

Tarmikos11

With the possibility of bumping the swords to 7, and the tentacles to 6 attacks.

Lord_Gareth

07:15

@Pixie That's not the only option. There is also the power of rebuilding!

Tarmikos11

He later wound up chopping off all of his tentacles.

Lord_Gareth

If you lack the experience or knowledge to ramp up safely, you can ask your players to ratchet down, and then ratchet down yourself.

Tarmikos11

Because he couldn't handle having that many limbs to track.

lisardggY

@Pixie But in this case, it's not a case of showing-up the players, it's simply a case of both GM and players playing the escalation game, and playing it straight.

Pixie

@Lord_Gareth That is definitely true, scaling down is an option as well.

Tarmikos11

07:16

I didn't know what I was doing, I had a wonderful R&D department to thank for that monstrosity.

This was followed up by a tank Pally build that can give people +18 AC.

And itself can get 51 AC.

If I found a way to get natural armor, that could go higher.

Pixie

@lisardggY I was chiming in on the "arms race" bit more than anything else. I see now that that situation was kind of special, too. At a certain point, it can definitely be a mistake to try and go bigger.

Tarmikos11

It's also got a feat that lets it literally draw aggro.

lisardggY

@Pixie I don't think an arms race is necessarily a bad thing if everyone is into that.

Tarmikos11

The whole group turned into Glass Canons.

So, I built a tank with a pop-gun.

Pixie

@lisardggY My point precisely, it was framed as "the problem" in Tarmikos11's original comment. That's why I was commenting that sometimes scaling up the challenge is a necessity and just part of the progression of the game. Though I wouldn't necessarily call that an "arms race," that has a more adversarial connotation to me.

lisardggY

07:21

@Pixie In that case, we are in complete agreement.

Pixie

@lisardggY It seems so!

lisardggY

@Pixie This being the internet, we're obviously doing something wrong.

5

Pixie

@lisardggY We're a bunch of heretics here, considering each other's view points and everything.

Tarmikos11

I'm not sure what I could say that'd both be offensive enough to inspire an argument, yet wouldn't deeply hurt people's feelings.

Metool

Green!

What do you know about Eberron?

Lord_Gareth

07:24

@Tarmikos11 Well, you could diss 5e :p

lisardggY

On an unrelated note, found an interesting analysis of US State Flags, most of which (except for Texas and California) I'd never seen before: medium.com/branding-the-nations/…

Tarmikos11

@Metool Very little.

Also, 5e is for lame-asses.

lisardggY

> Flag of the State of New York. Also known as “One lady dropped her crown while the other is poking an eagle with a sword, framing Kool-aid Man sun about to consume 18th century ships and a globe. EXCELSIOR!

Pixie

Ahaha. My state's flag is pretty busy and clipart-y.

lisardggY

Which one's that?

Pixie

07:29

West Virginia. It has an awful lot going on.

BESW

And then there's my flag.

Metool

That's interestingly computer-generated.

Pixie

To be fair, everything on it has a meaning (darned if I remember most of it since I haven't had state history since middle school); I think it's mostly in keeping with coat of arms principles. But that doesn't mean it looks good on a flag. :P

Ooh, image posts. Let's see if I understand the help page right...
http://www.statesymbolsusa.org/IMAGES/West_Virginia/Flag-west-virginia-1.jpg

doppelgreener

Wow my city's flag is bananas

commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/…

Pixie

Nope. :v But that is the image, nonetheless.

Lord_Gareth

07:33

doppelgreener

It represents the sun, the river, commerce and a military regiment

(The pretzels are the military regiment)

BESW

@Pixie Gotta be all in its own entry.

lisardggY

@doppelgreener The City of Medicinal Pretzels.

Pixie

Famous for innovating the delivery of medication to small children and finicky people via delicious, fresh-baked pretzels.

BESW

@doppelgreener I am terribly disappointed to discover that your city's flag is not literally bananas.

6

Pixie

07:36

lisardggY

Mine uses a terrible green as its base, and is basically the city's coat of arms set against the country's flag.

doppelgreener

@BESW me too

Metool

Hmm, this one's fairly mundane compared to pretzels.

Pixie

Yeah, seems like slapping a coat of arms on the middle is the popular choice.

lisardggY

I mean, the city name isn't even centered properly!

Although that might be the fault of Wikipedia's sloppy SVG-based flag.

Pixie

07:41

Coats of arms are fun, though. I spent a long time designing one for a noble character of mine fairly recently, even though I will never have any use for it ever. I should draw it sometime.

BESW

Somewhere, I probably still have the flags I designed for my big year-long New World campaign.

Pixie

I've never actually designed flags for anything, or coat of arms either before Nerian's. As intense as I can get with setting design, maybe I should. :P

doppelgreener

Arms race: a race to grab the limited supply of gripping limbs. Coat of arms: the one worn by the feared Ten Thousand Armed one, whose coat lets her possess and use many arms at once.

5

Magician

08:07

Hekatonkheires are a thing. Even in D&D!

Pixie

I want to play that in a fighting game.

Whew, Charahub was down, and I was afraid something had happened to it. It's the nicest character profile site I've used. I really should use it more often, but formal profiles are time-consuming. >_>

BESW

10:13

H. P. Lovecraft endorses a Lovecraftian dinner party game.

H. P. Lovecraft and P. H. Lovecraft try D&D.

trogdor

10:29

and he is the worst kind of player XD

BESW

I can roll with HP. PH, though--he's the kind of player who'll stab the quest giver and sell the world-ending artifact to the highest bidder.

BESW

12:48

[face/palm] Auntie Beeb really needs to get a PR guy supervising the @bbcdoctorwho Twitter account.

First they spoil the Shocking Twist to the end of the first half of the season finale before anyone outside Britain has had the chance to see it legally. Now they're "sharing" their favourite 12th Doctor quotes: first one up is an awkward anti-Scots joke that we really wish they hadn't made in the first place.

lisardggY

@BESW Thanks for the warning. I don't follow them, but I'll try to avoid any retweets as well.

Haven't watched this week's episode yet.

BESW

Yeah, and this is a big spoiler. Like, bigger than "The only water in the forest" big.

lisardggY

In that case, I'll watch it tonight. :)

doppelgreener

13:04

@BESW isn't PR supposed to be the people running the Twitter accounts?

social media interactions is PR first and foremost

BESW

@doppelgreener You'd think.

lisardggY

I've noticed that for large, established organizations, New Media are usually separate from the PR department, or maybe a part of them, but operation separately.

For nothing except historical reasons, usually.

doppelgreener

Makes sense, but social media is about relating to the people (and managing how they relate to you), which is PR, though not in the traditional sense

since it operates at a much greater pace

lisardggY

Oh, I agree. It's precisely PR. But PR, like many other disciplines, has its own momentum, so many PR people see "doing PR" and "doing new media" as two different things.

doppelgreener

that's true

lisardggY

13:09

Inertia, I think, would be a better word than momentum.

doppelgreener

probably will get wrapped back up in PR in a few decades

lisardggY

Yup.

doppelgreener

@lisardggY both work about as well (to entirely different meanings, though they both work)

lisardggY

Yeah, but inertia is more what I had in mind. Tradition that prevents change.

doppelgreener

it also has its own momentum in a totally different direction :)

BESW

13:31

Severe delays across the entire network due to someone replacing the toilet roll in the staff loo so that it hangs under rather than over.

Tweeted by TlfTravelAlerts on November 3, 2014 at 1:16 PM

Joshua Aslan Smith

man a lot of 5e questions wehre people ask 1 questions but really mean another

Aaron

13:50

Good mornin guys

BESW

14:05

[wave]

I'm poking my CV into something shaped like a college graphic media instructor.

Joshua Aslan Smith

lol

my job hunt continues and my sister slowly gets me the graphic design jobs I commissioned from her

BESW

The chances of my getting this job stand a slightly better chance than a snowball in Hell, but it's worth putting myself out there.

I wouldn't even have been asked for my CV if the department weren't feeling seriously desperate.

This is a good little reflection on the practicalities and pitfalls of implementing Rule of Cool in a game.

Joshua Aslan Smith

oh man great john woo film screen cap too

BESW

14:35

Note: Idea for a setting: post-apocalyptic modern earth. Apocalypse was supernatural equivalent of dirty nuclear winter: magical fallout & its effects are defining environmental hazard.

This is a great line (from this article): "I'm a big fan of Norse mythology, so I choose futility."

Magician

You want to do context-less quotes? Lets do context-less quotes.

"Incidentally, you might expect that when one joins the Catholic priesthood there is entailed a sort of implicit agreement that one will refrain from engaging in recreational necromancy, but apparently not."

BESW

> "The universe is not only sillier than we know; it is sillier than we can know."

> "Heroism is not an acceptable scientific explanation."

Joshua Aslan Smith

15:43

@besw cant read any of his stuff because I sent him an email once and he shot me back such a douchy reply.

I read every panel of his FF/D&D panel but then I was like yeah Im done

MadMAxJr

19:22

I managed to get my players feet wet with story driven gameplay as opposed to their usual "Open door, fight monster, debate rules for fighting mosnter, get the loot, debate the loot split" style of play.

They were confused when I said "You're only going to need 2d6 tonight. Your sheets have been provided, and yes, there's only five words and five numbers for stats." Then went on to explain collaborative storytelling. The GM surrenders some control and becomes more of a narrator, leaving the players free to fill in some detail on who they are, how their powers and abilities work. Freeform.

Baffled the minds of those who only love the warm embrace of d20 rules of when/where/what you can do.

Joshua Aslan Smith

hahaha

MadMAxJr

Open the fence gate and watch the herd just stand there curiously looking at the open gate.

Zachiel

20:09

Fiasco and my "I only like mechanics-driven roleplay" player: "It's not the kind of game I like but it's neat."

OTOH, I'm starting to hate Fiasco. It's our go-to game for 0-prep but I'm not a good Fiasco player. I always try to have too complicated plans that never go right and, despite that being the aim of the game, I don't like when they do not.

MadMAxJr

I've yet to play Fiasco but I've thumbed through the book. Doesn't it generally not end well for everyone anyway?

Zachiel

@MadMAxJr how it ends is really a function of luck and how much you've managed to drive scenes towards good or bad results, depending on the dice you got assigned during the first act

Getting a good result is rare

Last game we were playing in Shakespeare's London. One player was the Duke of Essex, then there were his secret lover, a potion peddler who gifted her a bracelet, another potion peddler looking for that bracelet because of hidden espionage info and then me. The duke and me just lost lots of money because of a shipwreck and I was secretly trying to become a spy for the french

So I made scenes to tell I staged the shipwreck and to tell the spy-peddler I was the one sending the bracelet to her

but on hindsight the bracelet's past was not that coherent

wax eagle

20:32

mearls AMA ongoing: reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/2l69tp/…

2

Zachiel

@Pixie My city has a coat of arms. No flag, tho'

The Oracle

0

Q: Change the definition of "rules-as-written"

There appears to be general consensus that "rules-as-written" mean the core rulebooks, followed by their errata, followed by any later published source book and it's errata that does not contradict a previously published rulebook. This comes from a very strict reading of the blurbs included at th...

discussion

Joshua Aslan Smith

I dont normally troll for upvotes but please upvote my answer on the meta

this user wants to change rules-as-written to reflect 3.5 specific canon on RAW interactions

@waxeagle his answer about the eldtritch knight is illuminating

seems like they specifically wanted to stop it from being more powerful than a wizard fighter 10/10 multiclass (or some other combo)

wax eagle

20:48

@JoshuaAslanSmith yep

lisardggY

@JoshuaAslanSmith If I read it correctly, they wanted to stop it from being more flexible than a wizard/fighter. Which makes sense.

Specific subclasses should be specific.

Once again, I am 2 upvotes on someone else's answer away from a gold Populist badge. :)

Joshua Aslan Smith

ahhhhhh there will be mass combat rules, NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

MadMAxJr

Looks like Mearls is focusing on questions about content and is totally walking around the D&D political issues.

Joshua Aslan Smith

its not so much the flexibility I take issue with, those 2 schools make sense for a mage knight if you will but the way the class features interact with core rules its ridiculously non-optimal when compared to some flavor of wizard fighter in terms of action economy

the EK features and fighter features never seem to fully achieve action economy harmony

wax eagle

@MadMAxJr disappointing, but basically said up front he's not talking about digitools which is what I'm most interested in

he's hitting softballs right now

lisardggY

20:51

@waxeagle I really don't know enough about the whole Dungeonscape fiasco, but I'm glad they cut the ties early rather than trying to get version after crappy version out there.

wax eagle

> We're evaluating plans for digital tools and publishing as I type this. Nothing to report yet, but when we have news we'll share it. I know it's frustrating to not hear, but we want to avoid making announcements that lead nowhere. In the long term, I think that's worse than delaying things today.

that's useful enough

@lisardggY late, buggy, good coms, but that's basically it

MadMAxJr

I'm guessing the plan for 5E third party content is 'no'.

Joshua Aslan Smith

not just softballs but utterly pedantic and worthless niggle questions

wax eagle

my major issue with the whole fiasco is that this stage should have hit 6 months ago, not 3 months after init release

Joshua Aslan Smith

wil the DMG include X table

lisardggY

20:54

@MadMAxJr They said they'll publish 3pp guidelines in November with the DMG, and the license will go live in January/February, right? Is there anything new?

wax eagle

@lisardggY I've seen nothing further on the subject. I think they were banking on an appstore model via DS

MadMAxJr

Hmmm.

wax eagle

(but that's speculation)

Joshua Aslan Smith

Ironically I think the issue with dungeonscape is WOTC gave them too free a hand (Vs teh criticism that they were overbearing by forum trolls)

MadMAxJr

Hmmm. Question about if old settings will return...

wax eagle

20:59

reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/2l69tp/…

that's an interesting one right there ^

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