TRPG General Chat

JohnP

00:56

Man, I always forget how petty people can be about their answers.

Shalvenay

holy cow -- that was some intense workshopping

had to fold in 3 edits from SevenSidedDie due to edit conflicts

user61230

01:35

@doppelgreener I've made many changes. Still thinking on how to best implement stat and skill scores... but changes are made, and changes are good.

doppelgreener

02:00

@Emrakul You might want to expand these enums too:

public enum MPPoint
{
    POS_M, POS_P, POS_MP, POS_MorP,
    NEG_M, NEG_P, NEG_MP, NEG_MorP,
    NONE
}

Adeptus

@Shalvenay At first glance, I read your question as non directional bacon... Needless to say, I was confused

user61230

02:20

@doppelgreener makes the names long; POS_MENTALPHYSICAL

user61230

not horribly long, but kinda annoying given how much it's used

user61230

hmm, I can always change it, though

doppelgreener

Oh, I see how it is.

So there might at some point be a mental/physical point, and it adds or removes from Mental, Physical, both, or just one (somehow)?

user61230

Yeah

user61230

that's why there's an "inconclusive" mental/physical point modifier function; requires user decision

doppelgreener

02:24

ok. i'm going to suggest an alternate data set you may find useful:

(whilst I'm at it, C# convention is to have TraitType.Character, not TraitType.CHARACTER, for enums, since in C# they're not constants, just enum values)

[Flags]
public enum PointType
{
    None = 0,
    Mental = 1 << 0, // 1
    Physical = 1 << 1 // 2
}

public enum PointAction
{
    Positive,
    Negative
}

user61230

...what is this magic and how does it work

doppelgreener

because of the [Flags] attribute on PointType, I can do this: new PointChange(PointType.Mental | PointType.Physical, PointAction.Positive)

PointType.Mental | PointType.Physical can count as both of those values.

user61230

wwwait

user61230

[Flags] allows you to send multiple of a given enum type to a function?

doppelgreener

No, [Flags] allows me to use that enum as a bitmask.

432

Q: What does the [Flags] Enum Attribute mean in C#?

From time to time I see an enum like the following: [Flags] public enum Options { None = 0, Option1 = 1, Option2 = 2, Option3 = 4, Option4 = 8 } I don't understand what exactly the [Flags]-attribute does. Anyone have a good explanation or example they could post?

the basics is this: PointType.None counts as binary 0000, Mental counts as 0001, Physical count as 0010.

user61230

02:33

what does the | operator do here?

doppelgreener

It's a logical OR operator.

user61230

oh, duh

doppelgreener

Mental | Physical == 0001 | 0010 = 0011

then later I'll do this:

var mental = PointType.Mental;
var both = PointType.Mental | PointType.Physical;

(mental & PointType.Mental) // true
(mental & PointType.Physical) // false

(both & PointType.Mental) // true
(both & PointType.Physical) // true

user61230

right, makes sense

doppelgreener

so you pass along a point type as an argument to a PointChange() class's constructor, or something.

user61230

02:35

it's just a clever binary thing

doppelgreener

yes

user61230

...I'm really liking C#

doppelgreener

it is a clever binary thing that makes you feel clever for knowing about it and using it well too ;)

user61230

so the only confounding part of this is the fact that the point change can be sometimes indeterminate

user61230

well, it's not that confounding

user61230

02:37

there are a lot of obvious ways to do it, but is there a better-than-naive way to do it?

doppelgreener

suddenly instead of having an enum that's handling three different things (pos/neg, combinations of mental & positive, and some third purpose for something that accepts mental OR positive) you just have one for pos/neg, and one for mental/physical that naturally supports saying "both!".

What does an indeterminate point change mean?

user61230

it means the program doesn't know, and the user needs to select later at some point

user61230

things like Tracker give +1 mental or +1 physical, and you have to pick

doppelgreener

alright. what I'm imagining is this: you have an enum for the types of points, and an enum expressing what's happened to them.

You may record, on a character, the changes that have so far happened.

You may separately record, on that character, the changes pending user input.

I get the sense that there are times a player may choose to add a mental or physical point, or may only add a mental point. You may store an object that grants permission to add a type of point, and give it PointType.Mental | PointType.Physical to say "the player may pick either of these"

or something like that.

user61230

that is probably going to need to be a property of the lifepath

user61230

02:41

hrrrrrrm

user61230

I think I know how I'm going to do it

doppelgreener

\o/

user61230

the user can modify lifepaths freely anyway, so when they add a lifepath, ask them to decide whether they're adding a mental or physical point from it outright

user61230

just edit the copy of that lifepath and store it, so the program logic never has to deal with it past the first creation of the lifepath

doppelgreener

sounds reasonable

doppelgreener

05:23

7

Q: How do I make a touch attack?

I'm a newbie to Pathfinder and the general D&D 3.x area, having only played a small number of sessions ever. Following a recent question I dove into the touch attack rules, since I realised I didn't know how they worked, having never seen them in use. What I have learned is: I have absolutely no ...

pathfinder spells touch-attacks

this question just hit 2.5k views and has only 7 points

I find this a little bit funny :)

BESW

05:38

Hey, I'm one of them.

doppelgreener

One of the views?

BESW

And one of the votes.

doppelgreener

\o/

I'm not complaining about the lack of votes, but it is surprising that a low-voted question is also a very heavily viewed one!

I have received a downvote on it too, so some people here consider it a good question, others don't want to vote on it for whatever reason (maybe it's mediocre), at least one considers it bad in some way

and yet it is a question a lot of people have

BESW

06:08

Some Id monsters that have been raised thus far:
Desire to be in control of one's own fate
Desire to be in control of the fate of others
Desire to be acknowledged/accepted/validated by others
Fear of rejection or abandonment
Fear of mockery or betrayal
Fear of becoming cruel

Based on some conversations I'm adding "Fear of losing one's mind" too.

doppelgreener

06:30

Babbage may have a fear of losing his identity.

or others not treating him as a person, but as a robot that can be junked. "What's this brain bit? We don't need that at all!"

(If his backstory has a point at which he was in storage or something, this was probably an unpleasant experience for him.)

BESW

07:02

Hmm.

And what motives him?

Babbage as a fear of becoming a non-person. What does he have a desire for?

doppelgreener

07:22

This is something I don't know yet. (I do also want to be relatively faithful to the actual Babbage.)

I suspect it comes down to stuff not too uncommon: he wants to make his contribution to his fellow people, he wants to understand the world around him (and lists and charts help with doing that wonderfully), he wants to make things and have fun doing it but probably doesn't have the attention span or self-discipline to get each job done (oh good! i have a grant for the difference engine! now I can buy parts for that other machine I've been wanting to build!)

he probably also wants to be liked. and make friends and stuff. y'know, not too uncommon geek stuff. except he didn't understand how people worked all that well, evidently. (I wonder if he had something like I used to have going on, but unchecked.)

BESW

That seems very likely.

I think he liked to take things apart and see what made them tick, but people remained elusively un-take-apart-able in any way that really helped.

I get the impression his major character note was insatiable and detail-oriented curiosity, tempered by a streak of contrarian independence a mile wide.

doppelgreener

@BESW Yes, this is exactly what I think.

(Those would probably also make two good Fate aspects: his insatiable detail-oriented curiousity for a Science aspect, his contrarian independence as one of his other aspects.)

Tempted to give him this stunt now:

> Small talk: You can use Science in place of Rapport when in conversation with someone who's a scientist.

BESW

Also...

> Contrarian: You get +1 when using a Science skill to do something you've been specifically asked not to.

Also his high concept should probably be a signature aspect.

(Not least because this will give him TWO Fate points when joining a brainstorm.)

(And really, that seems exactly right.)

Concept: Preserved brain of a Victorian statistician
Science: Insatiable near-sighted curiosity
Cyborg: NASA's best hardware... of 1959
Banter: A loveable crank
Omega: Always tell me the odds

doppelgreener

07:46

@BESW Haha!

I like a lot of those.

especially the cyborg and omega.

user61230

@BESW "Oh, I tried. I tried desperately. The bits and pieces were littered around my lab, and there's just some stuff that doesn't wash out. The smell; my gods, the smell. But all the while, it just felt... right. It needed to be done. Even if it didn't yield results, it... needed to be done."

user61230

@BESW "I had to try."

BESW

Luckily, Babbage was not given to bouts of serial killing.

Biology was probably far too imprecise to hold his interest that long.

doppelgreener

"You... you messily dissected a person?"
"No, goodness, I tried to build a mechanical human! Didn't work a bit."

user61230

"Wh-what was the smell?" "Ever worked five days straight?"

doppelgreener

07:48

@Emrakul plus that gasoline gets everywhere

user61230

(I'd like to add that I have absolutely no idea what the context is or what's even going on, and that this is pretty much my continuous state of existence.)

BESW

In our game, Charles Babbage (real-life inventor of the original steam-powered computer in the early 1800s) had his brain preserved in a steampunk Personality Sphere which was later upgraded and used by NASA to help with the Moon landing before he was abandoned. We've rescued him from a cult and plugged him into our spaceship as the AI.

During his lifetime, in real life, Babbage was well-known in London as a mad genius: extremely brilliant, a great mind for numbers and mechanics, but unable to focus on anything useful or to navigate politics or society with any grace.

"Babbage has published a pamphlet of charts about that" was a common punchline.

...damnit, the weevils got into the barley.

trogdor

whoops

I have had that issue with cereal and pasta

BESW

I think they migrated from the rice.

Weevil Goes West.

doppelgreener

08:32

@BESW I made that character calculation spreadsheet.

The one thing that it doesn't do yet is calculate the point value of each mode.

Because for that, it'd have to go through all the X's in the column above, see what skill they're associated with, and see what the point cost of that skill is.

I have no idea how to do that. (If you do, I'm all ears.)

actually there's a bunch of things it doesn't do, so i'll probably just make a web-based tool when I want to seriously use this! :P

doppelgreener

08:51

Actually on second thought, spreadsheets are a terrible tool for this and I'll do it another way. :P

BESW

09:25

@doppelgreener There was a time when I knew how to do that in Excel....

(Everything I know about Excel, I taught myself to make a D&D 3.5 character math spreadsheet.)

doppelgreener

I'll make a thing using HTML and its companions. At some point I'd like to offer that in fate looms.

BESW

BTW, @doppelgreener, one reason I've been looking up Max Headroom lately is because he has parallels with PAL/Babbage.

doppelgreener

09:58

@BESW is this stuff i can now look up?

BESW

@doppelgreener Might as well, the poll didn't go anyway and my curiosity went unsated.

Max Headroom is a digital personality.

He's based on the brainscan of a reporter, but he lacks the reporter's self control--and he's running on a system that can't buffer him very well.

It's from a British TV show in the 80s, about a dystopian cyberpunk world "20 Minutes In The Future" where the world is run by corporations. Max gets loose and helps his reporter original expose corruption, with witty but poorly buffered antisocial commentary.

The parallels lie in a human adapting to a new life filtered entirely through digital inputs.

He has a hard time telling the difference between reality and simulation, for example.

doppelgreener

10:25

@BESW as would a human experiencing hallucinations

BESW

Except that for him it's backwards: he thinks everything is fake, just a TV show production, unless he can be convinced otherwise.

doppelgreener

When I'm very sleepy, I get auditory hallucinations, and I think I might get sensation hallucinations (whatever the word is for that). The fact I know they might be hallucinations doesn't help me distinguish them from reality any better!

@BESW He thinks stuff is just a TV show production..?

BESW

Yeah. He thinks most of the inputs he gets are fictional (expect when he takes it in his head to cover a GI Joe show as a real war atrocity).

So Max doesn't take much seriously: it's less that he lacks self-control as that he doesn't think he needs self-control because he's just messing around with staged events rather than real people.

doppelgreener

@BESW I see... and that's kinda understandable, because they aren't his usual senses.

There's a mental condition I can't remember the name of: you can lose the ability to recognise faces, and sufferers can come to believe all their friends and relatives they meet are impostors.

It's because if that's your mother right there, why don't you recognise her face?

these people can have a conversation with their mother over the telephone, because they recognise her voice, but if she walks into the room - even still holding the telephone - she seems like an impostor.

The input they get isn't the input they expect or are used to, so they have difficulty believing it's real.

... I can imagine a similar kinda thing happening to someone's brain such that they take reality as fake, because all they get are digital inputs.

BESW

Aye. Whether it's coming from a video lens or a rendering program, it's going into Babbage's shell through the same ports.

doppelgreener

10:52

That said though the reason I brought up hallucinations was I don't think Babbage is exceptional in that way - nobody has a superpower to detect false input, unless they can somehow deduce it doesn't make sense - but he is special in that he can be hacked. Maybe.

(It could be that nobody's sure how his optical system works, and so they can't do much to it, same as with a human.)

BESW

13:08

And the edit of the day is...

doppelgreener

this question really does seem to just be inviting opinion

"yes, you can do this!" "no, don't do it!" "no, i would never allow this!"

Aaron

@JohnP I didn't find one called that but I did find Nekrogoblikon. They don't sound too bad for heavy metal.

BESW

Spluh, I (re)designed an entire culture around one player's PC concept.

Aaron

Morning

Oh wiat

doppelgreener

@BESW doin' it right

@Aaron Hi!

David Wilkins

13:17

Mornin'

doppelgreener

@DavidWilkins Hello!

And with that, goodnight!

Have a good day, everyone who has not already completed theirs! I am off.

BESW

13:42

@Patta Hi!

GamerJosh

15:06

"Numenera: Strand is a fantasy/sci-fi short film based on Monte Cook Games’ Numenera": kickstarter.com/projects/numenerastrand/numenera-strand

JohnP

17:30

Dangit. I hate putting a good answer together that gets pre-empted while I'm typing. :/

@Lord_Gareth - Yo, dark one! Were you going to send me an email, or did you not need any assistance any more?

Joshua Aslan Smith

17:53

yolo

Theik

Avast grasshoppers.

Joshua Aslan Smith

dont push your AV here!

Theik

Hm?

Avast is pirate-speak for hello. :P

wax eagle

it's also a popular antivirus program

Theik

I know, but why would I say "anti virus grasshoppers" when I enter the chat? xD

Joshua Aslan Smith

18:09

just being silly

Theik

Fair enough. :P

Joshua Aslan Smith

Maybe what I need to to do to reconcile myself to 5e is to run a game for some peeps

I am however super enjoying the dragon stuff with your Wax

David Wilkins

Actually, "avast" is a nautical term for "cease" or "stop"

wax eagle

@JoshuaAslanSmith thanks :)

Joshua Aslan Smith

lol I just got a notable question badge on arqade

I always get these for the sites I hate using like arqade or sci-fi and fantasy

on questions i earn 30 rep off of

wax eagle

18:15

weird, lots of drive bys then

Theik

And "stop" is pirate for "hello".

David Wilkins

heheh

Theik

Cause you can't just steal their booty without saying hello first. :P

Joshua Aslan Smith

@waxeagle so I was looking at shifter and its pretty meh

tying a +1 to a rest required recharge ability is super bad

If they got +2 dex default and then a +2 to the ability of the shifter type that would make sense to me

wax eagle

the abil increase is always on, the shifting feature is the temp part

Joshua Aslan Smith

18:19

one sec

Ah okay

I see how I misinterpreted it, less basd

Theik

I don't like shifters.

They're always such shifty figures.

Joshua Aslan Smith

I still think its underpowered compared to the other races

Theik

Badum tish

Joshua Aslan Smith

those shift powers are pretty minor vs. racial spell casting, or abilities like dragon breath or the half-orc resilent power.

Grubermensch

18:34

@waxeagle We having a game this week?

wax eagle

@Grubermensch yes, if my voice holds on

Grubermensch

Alright cool

wax eagle

@JoshuaAslanSmith Greg Bilsand (who just got laid off) mentioned that he wasn't a fan of racial bonuses to AC

Joshua Aslan Smith

I dont know I think its legit for WF to get it

it makes a ton of sense

David Wilkins

20:08

I have never had a DM say "you can't count squares to see if your target is in range"

wax eagle

@DavidWilkins that would be dumb.

it's a model, expert archers know their range, a PC should too

David Wilkins

1

A: Can a character relay a distance to another character in exact feet/squares?

When I've GMed similar situations (in AD&D, The Fantasy Trip, and GURPS), I've allowed the character to do what he would reasonably do -- if he takes the time and risk to pace off the distance; he can give it in yards or paces. He can say anything he likes, but without some means of measurement,...

Seems awefully simulationist to me

Joshua Aslan Smith

20:33

what a question

bleh

Zachiel

@DavidWilkins yet, depending on if it's accepted otr not, invisibility's power varies from "you can't find me" to "you might miss me"

JohnP

22:04

area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/82797/scale-modeling/…

@waxeagle - Reboot of the scale modeling proposal

@sevensideddie - Same message

@BESW - Welcome. REbooted the scale modeling after closure, so your cool rpg link is now out of date :/

Purple Monkey

22:23

@Escoce Whether you like it/think they're fair or not, RPG.SE has rules, as outlined in the help center and perhaps in more detail in over on meta. And as stated in the game-recommendation link, these types of questions require a narrower scope of what the asker is looking for.

JohnP

@PurpleMonkey - Wha?

Purple Monkey

@JohnP Regarding his comment/suggestion to reopen this question. Figured I might try to explain why it was closed as too broad in chat rather than in comments.

As I stated in my comment there are a lot of adventures within the current scope of the question and anyone can just google "fun, short dnd adventures between levels 1 and 3" and produce a long list as an answer.

We try to avoid this type of Q&A and narrow down the scope because unlike, say, a forum, we require suggestions to be backed up with experience as outlined in the Good subjective, Bad subjective link

BESW

22:40

If he hasn't been in chat recently, the ping won't catch.

This is gonna be useful if you do engage with him:

8

Q: Can we improve the way we treat newcomers?

Lately, I'm encountering the following situation more and more often (at least three times this week): A relatively new user (rep of less than 150, sometimes rep of 1 [ = first post ever]) asks a question. The question has some problem with it, sometimes it is downright unsuitable for this s...

discussion new-users

Purple Monkey

@BESW Oh, haha, thanks for letting me know. I'm learning new things about the site everyday.

BESW

Only elected moderators can "force" pings to work on people who haven't already joined a conversation, whether it's in chat or in comments.

user61230

Hey! Or pro-tem! :P

BESW

Same smell.

Miniman

23:51

I'd love to see the no-really-we-mean-it tag on more things.

3

Grubermensch

Haha

Miniman

Like, for example, "No, comments are not required on downvotes and never will be. Stop complaining about it and trying to guilt downvoters."

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