also, in 3.x, am I correct in my interpretation that you need ranks in UMD to use an item that casts a spell that's from a different casting domain than your own? (i.e. bards are typically considered arcane casters, so they'd be able to cast from arcane scrolls/... without a UMD check, but to cast from a scroll of Bane, they'd need to roll UMD to do so)
One is a matter of procedure: a number of citizens, myself included, feel the retirement of the recommendation experiment wasn't handled clearly and transparently by the mods. This is different from thinking the retirement was wrong: it's just letting the mods know the way they handled it wasn't received well so they can reflect on it and maybe change how they do things in the future to be more clear.
The other stems from that lack of clarity: the difference between "game recommendation" and game-recommendation, and the relationship between game-recommendation and tool-recommendation was clear to the mods but not to many users who participated in the meta discussion which resulted in both being closed.
It can be legitimately argued that tool-rec and game-rec are sufficiently different in practice (although they're quite similar on paper) that decisions about them need to be made separately.
If everyone had understood that they were being discussed as one entity in the first place, this could have been addressed before the retirement took place.
The recommendation experiment was dropped because we had rules that worked, but the community wasn't able/willing to follow/enforce them strictly enough to keep the quality up.
@Sandwich ...um. That's exactly what the recommendation experiment was doing, and the conclusion was "These rules work great, but a significant enough portion of the site's users deliberately disobey them that the work to maintain the rules isn't worth the added value to the site."
@BESW yeah, game-rec vs tool-rec confused me -- I thought the meta discussion was mostly game-rec then SSD slapped a mod close vote on my one and only tool-rec question, which caused me to send close votes the way of a bunch of other tool-rec questions because "hey, apparently tool-rec questions are no good any longer"
@DuckTapeAl Yes. The point under contention is whether we discussed shopping questions or not. That's the difference between "game recommendation" - apparently all shopping questions - and game-recommendation - one set of them.
@DuckTapeAl Yup. Each Stack adjudicates its shopping policy independently, and the meta which resulted in the closure of all shopping questions on RPG.SE was worded so that many folks thought it was just about one kind of shopping question.
All in all the whole conversation went nothing short of catastrophically and whilst I've had time and energy I've been putting together a question to prompt the discussion we should have had.
@DuckTapeAl tool-rec questions are rare, and mostly consist of a few canonicals and their dupes, which is why you never really knew what was going on in that tag
Both game-recommendation AND tool-recommendation were allowed, with some people understanding the latter to be exclusively a subset of the former and others seeing them as separate entities.
@BESW Under that separate entity interpretation: one with lots of rules attached, the other none at all really beyond standard good behaviour expectations, GSBS, etc.
@BESW in my mind, they're very separate entities. game-rec seems to be where most of the problems stem from IMO -- tool-rec seems to be an unintended casualty
Personally I think that given our understanding of tags as an evolving folksonomy, it's silly to say "we've always considered X to be true about this tag, so it's still true now by default."
So... are tool rec questions shopping questions, or not? I've been reading stuff about this debate for the past hour or two, and I'm not seeing a clear answer for that.
Frankly that's not the right question to be asking. The question is, "is tool-recommendation making a problem for site curation?"
Thus far I haven't seen anyone actually talk about that.
The objections to tool-rec are founded on "they're just a subset of game-rec and also shopping," when "being a shopping question" isn't why game-rec got shut down here at all.
And the support of tool-rec is either "I didn't get to participate in deciding its fate" or "we can change it to make it less shoppy," both of which are also missing the point.
@DuckTapeAl Yes, and we decided the rules don't work for game-rec because the community rejects them.
The way to save tool-rec is to show that the community IS following the rules for that tag.
It's quite simple, really, but it takes a lot more actual work to compile evidence than to argue about procedure and cast blame.
There are procedural challenges that this issue is highlighting. But it's not helping anyone to conflate a discussion about our community's ability to follow a tag's rules with a lack of clarity and a tendency for blame-casting in meta discussions.
These need to be two different topics.
I don't have enough interest in the issues to put that kind of emotional energy into figuring out how to do it.
@BESW I'm about to create the room in which I publish the draft of the question I'm going to ask for this. Would you have time & energy to help in ensuring it creates a safe enough spot where the right kinds of questions will be asked and get the right kind of answer?
deformity/evolution/advancement, all the same thing
Actually, one sec.
> The Hylians, also known as the Hylia people, are a recurring race of humans in the Legend of Zelda series. Creatures that worship the goddess Hylia, from which their name derives, the Hylians are the original race of Hyrule. It is said that they were created by the Goddesses Or Oocca race. Physically, Hylians resemble other humans, and the only difference appearance-wise between them is the Hylians' long, elf-like ears that supposedly enable them to hear special messages from the goddessess. It is shown that Hylians have an extended life-span, to the point of living for centuries. Their h…
@Adeptus I see an image that says beebook publishing.
You may want to save and upload whatever t is you're seeing if it's not that.
@Adeptus The strength aspect is pretty important though. They're strong and hardy. Link isn't the magical hero of being smart, he's the magical hero of kicking tremendous amounts of butt and looking great doing it.
What I mean by Super People though is this. Zelda, being a video game where you play as one particular Hylian, gets to have a particular conceit: you're part of an ancient race who has all the things humans do, except all those things are slightly better, plus you have unusual powers to boot. So does that Zelda girl, and various other people important to the plot. In D&D, where all races are supposed to be equal, including to humans, that won't translate as well.
@doppelgreener yes, that was replying to BESW's comment (somewhere back there ^^^) that bookkeeping is a better word than beekeeping
So, anyone who's been following my ongoing saga of the (mostly)core-only 3.5 game might remember that I was dissatisfied with the usefulness of my Ranger, and that the Cleric's player was threatening to leave. Well, after some indecision, he has left. As a result of the two, I am now considering switching to a Cleric.
What is slightly frustrating is that all the charop guides assume all books are in use. Making it hard to pull out the core-only options. But, since clerics are usually regarded as tier 1, and the rest of the party aren't optimising (except maybe the druid), I guess I can just do whatever & still be relevant.
Every time someone tells me they're running core-only to reduce game breaking loopholes or combos, I want to cry in frustration and rage. Because all of those loopholes ultimately involve core, and the majority of the worst ones are entirely core. All of the most powerful options in 3.5 are core. The most powerful classes and races in the game are core
I'm pretty great. \o/ Weekend wasn't so good but things are better now. Weird things are going on. Lots of things are going well. We're experiencing continuing tensions with one of our housemates and I'm steadily reaching the conclusion that although things are working better with her, it might be the case that I like her but do not like living with her. And the same is probably the case for others. So, um, there is that.
Other than that things are in alignment and looking peachy.
@doppelgreener That is unfortunate. :( I hope the situation can be resolved as cleanly as possible. Sometimes that does happen... someone can be a lovely person to know but not necessarily to live with.
(I clearly have no idea how to invite people. Might be there is no such thing I guess.)
@BESW Will you be putting it back? I'm interested in reading it.
@Pixie I hope so too! All of my diplomacy abilities will have to come to the fore for this one. This person is unpredictable and impulsive, so I have concerns about revenge via property damage, but I don't know them well enough to know if they'll actually break anything.
So when I say that a bioform is inclined to a certain class, it's just "these are the listed classes with a +3 in that bioform's typically favoured approach."
(There isn't any place where they lay out all of this stuff; it's just implied through the tables and mechanics and incidental flavour. Hence why I made the document, to collate it.)
My thinking is: Stellata should totally be a Swashbuckler with Flashy at +3. I know this game has opinions on plants being careful, but Stellata is probably not the kind of plant this game had in mind when it decided what plants were.
(And for the record, I'm not planning to ask you guys to translate your ARRPG characters into Umdaarian mechanics. I'm going to inflict your ARRPG characters on Umdaar.)
Umdaarians will still be using FAE mechanics. I'm going to boost the numbers a little bit so their mechanical effectiveness matches their narrative effectiveness in ARRPG terms, but that's all.
I suspect I'm fretting over a trivial loose end in the rules, but I might be missing something pretty fundamental about the coin economy, so I'd like to get it cleared up.
On page 24, the book says that when pain dominates it "has a game effect of requiring the player to place a coin of despair ...
I'm planning my first Don't Rest Your Head session for next weekend, and I'm feeling like I just don't get it yet. A solid one-session Actual Play recording of a Don't Rest Your Head game could really help me out here.
Audio-only (podcast-style) is preferable, but a video works too. Text-only w...
Two DRYH questions posted within an hour of each other. First answered, second not. The second question has accumulated more upvotes than the first question AND its answer combined.
@trogdor One thing this will change: you can make Doctor Light's madness talent whatever you like, don't worry about the plans we talked about earlier.
Yes! It's also good to be back in a position where I can travel around and meet people and not feel like time is running out. So that's what I did the last month.
Maybe two: One for a continuing campaign using a well-designed system, generally narrative, rules-light and not tone-black (some dark shades appreciated) and one to try new, interesting and maybe even somewhat whacky games. At least one of them physical, because the digital games I've been in in the past felt slow and made me easily go distracted.
Hi all. Would anyone be interested in having a go at playing out an RPG online through a Stack Exchange chatroom? It would be an interesting experiment, and potentially gives us a chance to play with people we wouldn't usually play with. I'm cross-posting this to a few other chatrooms as well, so it's not just the people here!
@Pixie Ta. I know almost no details about it at the moment, we're just trying to gauge interest. Someone suggested Pathfinder, though other suggestions welcome. Times are up for debate.
In the recent years Onyx Path has released 20-year anniversary editions of popular white wolf games which include both mechanical and plot/setting changes, like the removal of the metaplot that formed the World of Darkness in previous editions. To my knowledge, Vampire, Werewolf and, recently, Ma...
