TRPG General Chat

doppelgreener

00:50

I just learned that awarding a bounty used to be tied to accepting an answer, and it made the acceptance of that answer completely irreversible (even if another better one popped up): blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/01/…

This was January 2009 though, before the site's first birthday.

doppelgreener

01:04

compared to the ideas the current bounty system operates on that sounds like a terrible idea to me, but there's iterative improvement for you

BESW

04:46

@doppelgreener Have you read the Hover skill? (p92)

doppelgreener

@BESW Yeah

BESW

I don't understand the Attack entry.

doppelgreener

I suspect that might be an error and it's supposed to be Overcome, Create Advantage, and two Defends.

BESW

Makes more sense.

doppelgreener

You Overcome to cover ground, and you Create Advantage to position and maneuver and emerge from walls.

Unrelated, I really really like the attack and defend emblems: the attack is slamming into the defend, and their relationship is thus conveyed in their images

BESW

04:50

Yup!

doppelgreener

[grabs example for others' sake]

BESW

(I'm looking at ghostery for tomorrow's session.)

doppelgreener

Ooooo.

BESW

I'm simultaneously looking up archeological hoaxes, the infrastructural impact of atmospheric ionisation, and the guy who wrote "It was a dark and stormy night."

doppelgreener

Mister Poe!

No wait!

[expletive]! That was the raven.

BESW

04:58

> It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents — except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness. --Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, "Paul Clifford" (1830)

(The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest.)

BESW

05:12

I'm researching Bulwer-Lytton because --on the virtue of one of his later novels, mostly-- he's widely considered to have had deep insight into topics of esotericism. So I'm using a concept from one of his earlier novels which later become associated with esotericism and the Thule Society; in fact, it's made an appearance in the Atomic Robo comics, albeit briefly.

Really, it'd be so much easier to forgo research and just based Weird Things on the bizarre hallucinations my father wakes us up for in the middle of the night.

Miniman

@doppelgreener "A midnight dreary" probably doesn't imply storms, although it doesn't necessarily rule them out.

BESW

Since "dreary" and "bleak" are both used to describe the night, and both have implications of lifelessness, it's probably an unnaturally still evening.

(And if there were a storm, he probably wouldn't have heard a bird knocking on his door, or held the door open so long.)

However, the Gothic standard is "wet and thundery," so our pop culture subconscious impinges on the text.

Magician

Greetings and salutations.

BESW

Yo.

Saw The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies As Told By A Drunken Legolas In A Bar.

("An', an' then all theesh gian' batsh came outta nowhere, y'know?")

Magician

05:34

...not sure if that's a different thing or a more accurate description, haven't yet seen it.

BESW

At least half an hour of a 2-and-a-half-hour film was Legolas memes.

Another fifteen minutes was people staring at stuff the audience hasn't seen yet.

There were some awesome bits, and overall the film was a lot of fun, but would have been better with half an hour or 45 minutes cut off the runtime.

Magician

So, very much like the previous two.

BESW

....yes. Except Now With More Legolas!

And Cheap Wormtongue Substitute as Comedy Relief.

Smaug was good. Thorin's acid trip was silly.

The acting was all around awesome, but sometimes undercut by very questionable editing choices. The ADR was noticeably lazy several times, and the editing around Thorin's breakdown turned an excellent performance into Shatnerian levels of scenery-chewing narm.

The orc armies were awesome. There were at least two roll-in-the-aisles-laughing moments (on purpose! There are a couple others that I don't think were intentional). There are a couple scenes where they just trust their award-winning actors to act and it pays off brilliantly.

trogdor

07:03

I agree with all of this

I also enjoy that they show off the main orc character's intelligence instead of making him some mindless kill drone "leading" the orc army.

doppelgreener

I have not seen this movie yet but I liked that they did that with the other two

trogdor

making him an actual leader?

BESW

The orc army had strategy.

And, like, a coherent system for communicating it efficiently to all troops.

doppelgreener

He's a smarty pants, and not an instinct-driven dummy

trogdor

mind you, I don't want smarts to be a trait that all orcs pick up for some silly reason, but when it is the leader of the orcs, he really aught to be a smarty pants

doppelgreener

07:11

well yeah totally

i'm cool with the foot soldiers being different, they're the foot soldiers

trogdor

I have seen plenty more than enough orc "leaders" who were only called such cause they were better at killing stuff

BESW

WAAAUUUUGH!

trogdor

lol

Magician

You've misspelled WAAAARGH, but for a humie it's acceptable.

BESW

There's a scene in Battle which made me think Awesome Thoughts about using Fate mechanics to model battles that heavily feature environment destruction.

Magician

07:18

BESW

Two characters are in melee on a bridge, and they do more damage to the bridge than to each other.

Magician

WAAAGH being an actual ork term.

BESW

I figure one way to represent that is to give the bridge consequence slots which everyone on the bridge can use to absorb harm.

@Magician I'm aware of the Warhammer thing, yes.

Anyway, time for Friday Sunset With Folks. BBL to stat up opposition for tomorrow night's Indiana-Jones-flavoured flashback.

Magician

@BESW I think that needs a requirement of some sort, to be able to use them. Like invoking a bridge aspect first. Because otherwise there's no cost to using these shared consequences and it's just a couple of extra rounds of beating on the environment.

Cya!

BESW

@Magician Consequences change the landscape and grant free invokes to the GM.

It's a high-pulp fight-prolonger, yes, and I'd tune the price to the game style.

ttfn

doppelgreener

07:22

@BESW have fun :)

@BESW and when they're all gone, the bridge gets taken out?

i would like this mechanic. :)

the cultist chargen doc has two anonymous meese

trogdor

I don't see those. lol

doppelgreener

you may be one of them!

trogdor

yeah, but I see an anteater

not a moose

doppelgreener

07:44

after refreshing i only see one moose too - but that means you are the moose ;)

trogdor

ooooohh myyyy goooooood

that is the last thing I thought I was

doppelgreener

[rocks your world]

BESW

08:29

@doppelgreener Anonymeese!

doppelgreener

@BESW The most surreptitious of large prey animals

BESW

I see an anteater and a hippo, as well as a Hobbs.

doppelgreener

You are a platypus.

BESW

(There was a meese earlier today.)

doppelgreener

> Concept: Trained thief
Intrigue: No lock can hold me
Cultist: Working to upset the social order
Action: In the nick of time
Omega:

This is bugging me. The cultist aspect doesn't feel right but I can't put my finger on what I'd write in its place.

BESW

08:35

What doesn't he like about the social order, and/or what does he want in its place?

(What's the status quo, and what's the disrupting event?)

doppelgreener

There's this character in Cabin in the Woods who believes society needs an upheaval to remain healthy, and I'm channeling him a little on this part.

BESW

So he's basically interested in keeping society on its toes?

doppelgreener

That sounds like a good way to put it. The established order of things is not producing enough chaos to let things grow properly. Things are too rigid, laws are too many, etc.

BESW

Chaos is necessary.

doppelgreener

There's the taoist notion that people are only criminals if there is a law that says what they do is a crime. If there is no law, there are no criminals. In his line of work he probably feels the constraint of that and resents it.

BESW

08:41

("Life/ Feeds on life/ Feeds on life/ Feeds on life:/ This/ Is/ Necessary!/ This/ Is/ Necessary!")

doppelgreener

What's that from? :)

BESW

"Disgustipated," by Tool. (lyrics)

Actually there's a better song or two but I'm afk

doppelgreener

This song is really good. Wow.

BESW

I like Tool.

I'd suggest your guy draw from the Aenima album.

doppelgreener

[digs it up and listens]

Also: have you seen Cabin in the Woods?

BESW

09:02

If you want him to be more zen and less angry, try the Lateralus album.

@doppelgreener I have not.

Aenima is societal, about flushing out the old to make room for the new; Lateralus is personal, about individual growth and change.

Both are about humanity's tendency to cling to the familiar, necessitating dramatic, often traumatic, events to force change.

Both draw on pop culture, classic theosophy, child development theory, Biblical allegory, and a variety of other sources to make their points. They dig pretty deep with the metaphors and allegories and references wrapped into their works.

Also there are dick jokes, if you're into that.

(Part of Tool's thought which I disagree with--and there's lots I disagree with, though I think their themes are important and insightful--seems to be that being crass and offensive is necessary, whether to express frustration or to gain attention I'm not sure. They mellow a bit as they age.)

However, @doppelgreener, it's probably good to remember that Tool is twenty or thirty years after your cultist.

doppelgreener

09:21

[anachronistically has him listening to Tool, on his ipod, thanks to inner-ear wireless pickup]

BESW

Hee.

"I can hear the future! But only MTV Radio."

What meant, actually, is that Tool channels a different generation's anti-society philosophies, if you care about that kind of anachronism.

doppelgreener

I am not well educated enough on this sorta thing to even recognise that kind of anachronism!

BESW

Kinda like how the fears embodied in 1984 are very much the fears of a post-WWII nuclear society.

@doppelgreener Well, for example, 1970 was during the Vietnam War and the escalating Cold War. With Nixon and Watergate two years in the future, there was growing dissatisfaction with government individuals but still faith in the system.

doppelgreener

09:40

Whereas nowadays there's growing dissatisfaction in both.

BESW

10:28

@doppelgreener Yes. However, the '70s also had a stronger sense of the End Times: we're talking about a generation who grew up with the ever-present threat of nuclear war, entering a decade of energy crises, the racial tensions coming to a head with the assassination of Dr. King and the rising influence of the Black Panthers...

Today we have lots of global crises, but much less sense that all humanity could just stop existing.

lisardggY

Ola

doppelgreener

ahoy!

BESW

[wave]

lisardggY

*nods vaguely and arbitrarily*

Just finished reading the D&D-reference-laden Ready Player One, which was fun, though a bit annoying towards the ends.

BESW

(Specifically, if our cultists are in their 20s in the early '70s, they're the baby boomers who just missed the hippy era: they grew up with the sense of urgency and injustice which spawned "make love, not war," but they also grew up seeing that attitude not changing anything.)

Metool

10:35

@lisardggY oh?

doppelgreener

@BESW i think Brother James would be a relatively avant-garde anarchist then. incidentally the 70's were the founding of this particular phenomenon:

Anarcho-punk

Anarcho-punk is punk rock that promotes anarchism. The term anarcho-punk is sometimes applied exclusively to bands that were part of the original anarcho-punk movement in the United Kingdom in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Some use the term more broadly to refer to any punk or rock music with anarchist lyrical content, including crust punk, d-beat, folk punk, hardcore punk, garage punk or ska punk. == History == === Before 1977 === Some protopunk bands of the late 1960s had anarchist members, such as the German blues rock band Ton Steine Scherben and English bands connected to the UK ...

lisardggY

@IronHeart amazon.com/Ready-Player-One-Ernest-Cline-ebook/dp/B004J4WKUQ/…

Metool

Annoying, huh?

lisardggY

Oh, you were asking specifically about what was annoying?

BESW

Hmm. I'm positive I had Patti Smith's Horses on my computer, but I can't find it.

lisardggY

10:37

I had two issues with the ending. The first is that it was too saccharine - the happy end was too happy, the sacrifices or apparent setbacks that befell the protagonists near the end were all conveniently erased, and the bad guys got their comeuppance.

BESW

@lisardggY [waves cheerfully at Steven Moffat]

lisardggY

The second is that it ended with a tacked-on "Don't waste your life in virtual reality, the real world is where it's at!", but without actually giving any reason to think it was so - the real world was still crap, the virtual one still overwhelmingly better, and there's no reason to accept that conclusion.

(I've starting writing it up on my blog, so I'm using you guys as sounding boards. :))

BESW

@lisardggY [waves cheerfully at the Wachowskis]

lisardggY

(I also have a problem with the techno-utopism that's straight out of 90's internet visionaries, which is a bit annoying for a book published in 2011)

@BESW Yes, exactly. Other than some mystical "This is real, y'know?", the Matrix is superior in every way.

And in this book, there isn't even that shred of mysticism. The real world has absolutely nothing going for it.

That said, it reads like the love child of Snow Crash and Microserfs, which are two books I love, and is a fun, fun read.

BESW

So... again, Wachowskis? All the fluffy stuff you like in a crunchy candy shell: "melts in your heart, not in your brain!"

lisardggY

10:49

Doesn't feel quite as overblown and pretentious as the Wachowskis, but yeah.

Lightweight.

BESW

It's hard to be as pretentious as a Wachowski film.

lisardggY

Also ridiculously geek-friendly, with references to the classic Tomb of Horrors D&D module and 80's arcade and console games being major plot points.

I have a friend who had just played that module a month before reading it and recognized all the references and descriptions.

BESW

Hee.

BTW, if you've some time and brain available, your proficiency with theme and so forth might be useful to me in the Fate room.

(I'm trying to make an adventure provoke thought on certain themes, but I have less than a day before the session. Usually I have at least a week to percolate this kind of thing.)

(source)

doppelgreener

11:19

what's that ceramic tile thing?

BESW

It's her house. Seraphim are bad for flooring.

doppelgreener

oh XD

BESW

(But since cherubim just trashed everything else in the house--hence why the seraph showed up--it's kinda silly to complain about the tile now.)

detly

I'm trying to write quick "port your characters from D&D 4e to 5e" instructions (for my group, not the public at large), and basically I've got "throw out your magic items but keep the flavour text" and "all that non murderhobo-ey stuff we fluffed in between sessions now has some vague mechanics"

Sound about right?

BESW

Kinda? Did your 4e PCs use themes and backgrounds?

detly

11:33

Not so much

But they were level 6, so on average we all had a (L-1), L, (L+1) level magic item

I see that 5e doesn't assume or require the amazingly delicate economy of magical items and GP that 4e did

BESW

I'm not familiar enough with 5e to really speak to it.

detly

I'm not hugely familiar with it either, although I found myself really enjoying the couple of sessions we had

DMing 5e was easier after two sessions than 4e was after a dozen

BESW

Still waiting for a proper answer to my question before I dive into it.

detly

Yeah, I was in the same boat, but someone got me the starter set for Christmas, so that was that :)

But there's definitely a lack of resources at the moment

Personally, I'm not liking the lack of electronic materials

BESW

That is awkward.

detly

11:41

My group is spread across three states, and having online character building utils for the players, and PDFs of the PHB and DMG for me, is a huuuuuge effort saver

BESW

Aye.

detly

(BTW, maybe consider a bounty on your question, since a lot has happened with 5e publications since July and bumping it up might get some fresh answers)

Oh man, I remember that Smiley Bob adventure

Fun times

BESW

My group's split between Guam and Australia, and even the on-island players rarely meet in person outside of game sessions. Online tools (for us, Skype and Drive) are crucial to maintaining continuity.

I'll bounty it when I see a good opening in my gaming schedule; right now we've got a lot of good stuff going on and I wouldn't really want to block our momentum.

The longer I wait, the more likely it'll be that the thing gets a good answer.

detly

We used Hangouts (for narrative, set up, etc), Roll20 for gridded stuff (not as essential in 5e as 4e), and Drive for artwork, maps, recaps, etc

true

BESW

For game time we basically just need a shared Drive sheet for scene info and Skype for the talking.

detly

11:47

My big (unsolved) problem is that, at a tabletop session, you can pass the PHB to the warlock who's just gained a level; online, you can't.

Even with PDFs, it's not legal to, say, screen share your copy (although the relief there is that usually the electronic copies of manuals are cheaper).

BESW

Ah, yes. That'd be a thing my current systems obviate.

detly

My gamers will all have to buy their own PHB or not use feats/non-FWCR classes

Or, y'know, we in Sydney will have to make new friends, but then I have to do the "gaming group breakup" thing

"Look, you've been really good players, but it's just not the right time for this group. It's not you. It's us."

BESW

@detly I've lost groups to that.

detly

I'm already halfway there, because I love tabletop sessions so much

BESW

12:08

M'rr. Okay, I need to stat up some Federal Wildlife Refuge Rangers for my cultists to trick/maim/slaughter tomorrow.

detly

"Hi Barry? We need you to go and investigate reports of tentacles in the reservoir. Yes, tentacles. Well if I knew, I wouldn't need to send you, would I

...look out for randos in robes, it's nearly full moon."

trogdor

@BESW :'(

I am so glad that isn't going to be real

BESW

About halfway through putting together this adventure, I realised that it needed more "being evil cultists" to balance out all the normal "action science" stuff I was putting in.

trogdor

in all honesty though, I am actually excited to be playing an evil session

BESW

So, in this reality, Wildlife Refuges have armed Rangers with military training.

trogdor

12:21

my first evil campaign was definitely fun for other reasons, but shaking it up by being evil every once in a while is great

lol

BESW

"Hey! You in the robes! Get away from the American White Pelican or I'll fill you with lead!"

> Concept: Elite Wildlife Ranger
+5 Notice
+4 Athletics
+4 Combat
+4 Physique
+4 Tactics
+4 Vehicles
+3 Contacts
+3 Provoke
Stress: OO

And I'll probably give them some disgustingly big gun that you guys can take from 'em.

(I could give them a stunt, but I think gear is more fun for this.)

BESW

12:45

> SONIC STUN GUN (hardware)
Function: Nonlethal rifle
Flaw: Slow to reload
Benefits (4):
Brain Scrambler. You can use Combat to make mental attacks with a Weapon:4 rating.
Obscenely Dangerous. On an attack that succeeds with style, spend a fate point to prevent the target from checking a stress box to absorb harm.

I'm not sure I need that last bit.

> STUN GUN (hardware)
Function: "Nonlethal" supersonic rifle
Flaw: Slow to reload
Benefits (3):
Brain Scrambler. Use this gun to make mental attacks with Combat at a Weapon:4 rating. Targets can defend with either Athletics or Will.

I feel better about that.

Aaron

13:15

Morning

trogdor

morning

Metool

14:28

Yo.

JohnP

21:53

If anyone is interested in scale modeling, been trying to get a proposal off the ground in 51- area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/63543/scale-modeling

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