@BESW I can see why my friends might have recommended that if I ever watch LOST, just stop at the end of the second last episode and pretend whatever my theories are at that point are true.
@doppelgreener I used to recommend that. (After years of anger borne of watching the last episode as it aired.) Five years on I started my first rewatch with a buddy (who's never seen it) and I'm through the anger. I'm not saying it might not be a good idea to stop at episode N-1; just that if you do watch it not all is... lost.
[Was it the setup? Too long? Like spending six seasons trying to figure out what the hell was happening, only to find out the writers didn't ever bother figuring it out and just pulled the ejection handle?] =) (I guess there's still some residual anger,after all....)
I get the impression it would've been received better if the writers hadn't worked so hard to assure their audience that they had a plan from the start and were sticking to it.
Exactly the same show, but presented as "Join us for this wild ride as we figure out what's going on!" instead of "Trust us, we're professionals--whoops.."
@KorvinStarmast "gooder" is totally a word, so thanks for the compliment. It means a lot coming from someone who clearly understands the roots like you do. (Some of your answers where you do some heavy research into previous editions and Dragon articles and the like are among my favorites on the site.)
@Adeptus Actually, I just meant that I hoped they're all out for the count. It always feels like I'm jinxing it if I say they're down for the night. But I hadn't thought of those disturbing second- and third-entendres. =\
so...I was thinking about urban-intrigue type scenarios I'd run, and one theme comes to mind @nitsua60 -- lawfare.
Kafkaesque proceedings, procedural dancing, appeals and counter-appeals, and just a touch of courtroom drama....I could see that being an interesting game/campaign for the right bunch of players
@Adeptus (I hope the '=\' thingamawhatever conveyed in two characters that I appreciated the play. I'm not great at text-nuances, so let me just say it: I wasn't really made uncomfortable. Well played.)
@Miniman I'd probably wind up cribbing heavily from what we have IRL -- I don't think that it'd be fair to the DM to make them invent courtroom procedure from scratch unless they wanted to be that hardcore
(thankfully, the US court system is pretty darn well documented.)
@nitsua60 could be interesting as a resource -- the stuff I'm familiar with is a bit more esoteric, where you have a government that's trying to wriggle out of their due process bounds, and the heroes are busy trying to stuff it back in the box. ;)
(sadly, that's not a RP these days -- various parts of the USG need to be sent back to Constitutional Law 1)
Gonzo chargen of the day: yesterday a new (5e) player wondered aloud "what are the odds I'd have no stat below 14?" Me: "...what method did you use?" Player: "4d6 reroll all 1s, drop the lowest, do this seven times and choose six. Then add racial bonuses." Me: "And why didn't you just save yourself the trouble and write down six eighteens?"
When I make that meta (probably not for a day or two, I need to sit on it and also get my car fixed), I hope you can chime in on the sorts of situations where you'd like to add a comment but responses like Aramis's give you pause.
Personal testimony: As much as the responses from citizens are sometimes grindingly aggravating, without starting my time on RPG.SE during an era of frequent moderation-explaining comments I'm not sure I would've ever realised the responsibility to use my own rep-based moderation tools, or become involved in the meta at all. (YMMV on whether that's a good thing or not, but there it is.)
@BESW Dr. Yamaza sounds pretty yamazing. [e-mailing now...]
@BESW Something about this reminded me of "Steal This Album!" [Wonders if "Flag as spam!" would make a good name for an album? Answer: nope.]
Do we have any sort of stats on user turnover/activity lifecycle? Like how many users are active for a month and then die off, a year and then move on, &c.?
Seriously, though, I suppose defining active vs. inactive would be the tricky part. I wonder about defining a "normal" activity profile on a per-user basis, then looking for deviations... yuck. But maybe you'd get something like those elegant hypsography curves that show off the bimodal density distribution of crust; each user has a characteristic "active" and "inactive" pattern.
@BESW for me the message button is a big blue rectangle offset in the wrong position, the message entry is uglier than the unmodified one, and the sidebar is borked.
Specifically it contains three buttons and that's it
@KorvinStarmast on a side note, is this answer actually an unannounced frame-challenge? I was just looking back and re-read OP's last sentence and realized... I don't answer!
@Miniman Thanks. I hadn't intended to not answer. Just that reading the back-story, hours after starting a new campaign with a new group I'm running, had me overwhelmed by the feeling of "Well, your setting's completely changed under your feet. Time for session zero of your new campaign."
@BESW I do wonder if that one's going to get downvoted into oblivion. Or start immense flame wars. I should probably log off and come back tomorrow to see what happened....
@nitsua60 ten answers on the whole site use use the phrase. That's an insignificant fraction of our frame challenges. Nobody needs to announce them. Worry about whether that 10-rep asker or the broader internet community would ask "wtf does this even mean".
Since I feel we should be writing answers for 10,000 people from Google, and not the insular community, I also feel the phrase should never be used in an answer, and if it is, it should seem to a reader that not understanding it is inconsequential.
@nitsua60 If that's a frame challenge, it's a mild one. I just liked the way you got down to basics and told him that the campaing had changed ... and unwritten ... he had let it.
@KorvinStarmast Ok, thanks. I feel like my number of imaginary points is getting to where people might start listening, so I should be careful not only with my words and facts but also with my structure.
PSA on Stack site magic links: [rpg.se] in a comment or chat message auto converts to a link, behold: Role-playing Games. Same goes for any other site prefix: [gaming.se], [meta.se], [boardgames.se]...
Shot in the dark: anyone have an infinite series whose convergence/divergence they find particularly interesting? (I'm writing a quiz and at a loss for inspiration.)
Oh, and PSA for folks explaining markdown: although bracketing a phrase with ` will force it to ignore any markdown within, you can get a similar effect by typing a backslash before a [ or ].
@nitsua60 Garfield, which has diverged away from comedy and converged solely on jokes about mondays, lasagne, and how Jon is a dork who gets angry at garfield. Most life has been sapped from it and it is entirely (or almost entirely) done by ghost writers. Commentary adaptiosn of it are more amusing than the original, e.g. Garfield Minus Garfield, or Garfield Minus Garfield Plus Photorealistic Cat.
[certain this was not the kind of series nitsua meant, but too amused not to answer with it]
I learned a decent amount of mathematical knowledge from my formal education, but my understanding of maths is pretty much limited to whatever Sq1TV gave me a foundation on which to build.
Fun thing to do: as you begin a book, draw your first mental image impression of a character. When you finish the book, draw your mental image of the character again. Compare. Do this for any characters that catch your interest.
@doppelgreener I think this needs to be mentioned more often in meta discussions about whether a particular thing should be enshrined in the site because it's an element in the RPG/geek community.
> Unpronounceable. Your name is so alien that human attempts to summon you (Lore) cannot succeed. If a human's attempt to summon you would succeed, instead it only ties.
@Polyducks It's a Fate stunt I just made up. Would probably be more appropriate for an NPC, but I've off-handedly considered the logistics for a Cosmic Characters game.
Hmm. [wanders over to Fate room to contemplate stunts]
@MarcDingena My current thoughts are that rep doesn't directly attract more rep - people with rep have that rep because they know how to write solid answers that attract votes, and when they write those answers, they get more rep.
@doppelgreener I think a high number of votes on any answer, or having a lot of reputation in general gives a sense of trust. I believe that trust accelerates the rep income on existing high-voted answers or new answers from a high-rep account. I mainly said that because @Polyducks seemed to upvote my answer which I didn't think he read in the 60 seconds or so I had posted that link, but it's possible he had seen the answer before, and didn't vote on it yet.
@MarcDingena I agree that rep creates a sense of trust, but that trust also has to be backed up by a trustworthy-looking answer - which is that extra moving part.
I also agree that upvotes attract more upvotes, because it makes a post look like it's more worth upvoting.
Just because the answer has a score of +58, I don't think that alone deserve another upvote. I rather gain rep when it stands for something; my contribution to this site.
It was only my assumption that Polyducks upvoted "too fast". I can't actually prove that, nor am I really fussed with getting extra rep. But for a brief moment, it felt "wrong".
@Polyducks I know at least one other citizen does the same, confident they're a fast enough reader to be able to retract it if, at the end, they change their mind.
@Polyducks I think there is a stack iteration where the vote buttons always stay in view. But it's not active on this stack (or any stack I know of, but it was a discussion in overflow meta I think).
- Fully searchable online database of all 4e mechanics published in official Wizards books, magazines and adventures. - Moderately searchable and entirely downloadable access to all 4e *Dungeon* and *Dragon* magazines, by issue and by article. - High-quality online character builder integrated with the searchable database with online and offline character saving options and the ability to print out customised power cards.
All materials were regularly updated, with a lag of one to two months after publication.
(Presumably there's not much new 4e content anymore, so that's not a thing?)
- NPC/monster online builder for GMs, also tied into the searchable database. Lets you mix and match published monster abilities, change level and difficulty for existing monsters, and invent you own entirely new monsters.
I'm answering a question on which I am not an expert (imo) but by reading and interpreting the rules I think I can put together the actual answer. Is that frowned upon? I'm afraid my answer might be easily dismissed because I don't have very broad knowledge on the subject matter.
@Miniman I kind of assumed that at least some knowledge comes from experience as well. With one foot in the books as a backup. I don't have any experience on the matter at all but I'm familiar with the system and its SRD that I'm just trying to gather enough to base an answer on.
If you can support your answer with the books, that's great. If you can support it with your experience, that's another kind of great. Heck, you can even cite other peoples' experience.
I've come up with an answer to their question, but I want my answer to be as complete as possible. One gap I'm having difficulty with is that I can't find (and don't know myself) if constructs are allowed to have feats.
> Skill points equal to 2 + Int modifier (minimum 1) per Hit Die. However, most constructs are mindless and gain no skill points or feats. Constructs do not have any class skills, regardless of their Intelligence scores.
So if a construct has no intelligence, it has no feats. But if it does have intelligence, how many feats does it have?
As for caster level, how do I calculate that for a construct? count the number of Hit Dice?
The caster level of the construct as a created thing keys off its maker; the caster level of a construct as a caster itself keys off HD if the effects are supernatural or spell-like, and caster class levels if the effects are from a class.
Use <sup> and <sub>:
This is a <sup>superscript</sup>
This is a <sub>subscript</sub>
This is a superscript
This is a subscript
Using <pre><code> blocks, because they're strange, lets you do this as well:
<pre><code>This is a <sup>superscript</sup>
This is a <sub>subscript</sub></code></pre
Phew! That was an interesting answer to post... Usually I'm patient to wait until a question comes along that I can confidently answer from experience. And I don't have a lot of experience, so I don't answer often. Today I actively searched for a challenge. Answering a question to which I didn't know the answer, but was confident I could find by digging through the rules. In essence, I actually answered the question for myself!
After you have answered a question, the page shows the Add Another Answer button. Sometimes I combine all advice in one answer and may even include one or more alternatives to a problem.
Am I supposed to post these individually, so that the "best one" can be accepted? I assumed it was frowned up...
Use <sup> and <sub>:
This is a <sup>superscript</sup>
This is a <sub>subscript</sub>
This is a superscript
This is a subscript
Using <pre><code> blocks, because they're strange, lets you do this as well:
<pre><code>This is a <sup>superscript</sup>
This is a <sub>subscript</sub></code></pre
