@Adeptus It's not like that...your answer is perfectly correct, I'm just missing a rant about how a level 20 character who has chosen to optimize for AC literally has no impact whatsoever on the game.
@Adeptus I've got this ridiculously disproportionate attraction to heat-themed deserty stuff in games, but I just realised I almost never actually put it into a game. Huh.
Art in the solarpunk ethos tends toward Art Nouveau or Arabesque designs. But it's not just a fictive mode; it's also an attitude toward practical contemporary design.
Anything that's trying to leverage modern technology to incorporate natural, living ecologies into human spaces is edging toward solarpunk.
Think... the kind of "living with nature" civilisation one more commonly associates with elves or Wookies.
@Miniman Yep. Fire domain power lets him Turn water creatures & Rebuke fire creatures, too. Since the big-bad in this game is genie-kind, I thought it might help. Haven't had opportunity to try it yet.
@Adeptus Elemental turn/rebuke was one of those "awesome in concept, hardly ever useful" things that kept me in 3.5 for so long while also frustrating me dearly.
Regular turning has served me well, though. Out of 4 groups of undead we've encountered since I started with this character, he's single-handedly taken out 3 groups entirely, and one half. (Not counting the undead in the anti-magic zone... turning doesn't work there)
@BESW [ponders] A method (and probably technology) that has trees grow at a fast pace into grant bridges, and then settle down. Bioluminescent plants for street lights. Power sources that either have minimal impact on the eco system (solar power) or benefit it (chemical energy or byproducts from turning human waste into mulch). Recycling system that largely involves micro-organisms breaking down materials once thought nondegradable. That kind of thing?
(Right now, most human design is predicated on "When I put a thing in a place, it should say there until I want it to move." Organically, that's just not possible.)
@Miniman I've gone through a similar shift. In my case, I think it's partly that I used to have little money for games, but lots of time. Now, I have more money, but less time. Also, it's so much easier to get games quickly, cheaply, and legally, than it used to be.
@Adeptus It's true, making the legal way easier than the illegal way is probably the biggest factor in making people reconsider.
I think it's one of the main problems with non-game entertainment media (movies, TV shows, and music) - it's still easier to get it illegally than legally.
Solarpunk is nascent enough that it hasn't yet been firmly codified.
Like other *punks, the ethos emerges organically and is only given a coherent definition retroactively.
(You gotta wait for a large enough body of work to accumulate before you can recognise the patterns and commonalities which mark pieces as part of that body.)
"Science fiction" and "fantasy" are useful distinctions to be able to make, but good luck getting people to agree on where one starts and the other stops.
and then there is the weird blur you might sometimes run into just in the ability to really distinguish a thing as either a science thing or a magic thing
@Miniman Solarpunk is an utopian eco-futurist philosophy/aesthetic, envisioning a merging of technology and natural ecosystems.
And it's not just fictive; it's got a strong contemporary-reality element to it, wherein people are working to leverage existing technology to realise solarpunk ideals in the real world.
@BESW Likewise. Analyzable magic means magic is an alternative form of science/engineering that works on the same guiding principles only different basic assumptions. That's fine, and interesting. But I like my magic fundamentally different.
that being said, I am certainly not against it working for you the first time and not the second or third time, though the two things are not always mutually exclusive
@lisardggY That's one reason I like the Young Wizards setting.
On the surface it looks like programming magic, but it quickly turns out that "programming" is just a formal mode of talking to the universe, and the universe likes being talked to.
In Young Wizards, you often don't have to cast a spell at all: the door LIKES being used (that's what it was made for!), so all you gotta do is chat it up and it'll probably unlock for you.
Programming magic is just for submitting formal requests to the universe that are too complex or too ridiculous to talk your way through.
@lisardggY Pretty much. In the setting's cosmology, the purpose of wizards is to manage entropy by reducing suffering and waste. Wizards learn The Speech, a divine language understood by everything, and they learn how to use it to shift energy and settle conflicts.
Younger wizards are strongest because they have more imagination and less sense of what they 'shouldn't be able' to do, but older wizards have more control and nuance.
Sometimes wizardry is throwing fireballs at agents of the Lone Power, but often it's just convincing two trees to stop strangling each others' roots.
In one of the novels, a planet-sized AI is given wizardry by a young and unsupervised wizard. It nearly destroys the galactic cluster by treating the universe as an editable program.
@BESW Reminds me a bit of Le Guin's Earthsea, where magic is based on knowing the True Names of things, which is similar, in common mystic symbology, to knowing its True Purpose.
On the other hand, the Speech is in many ways comparable to programming. When you cast a teleport spell, you have to be super careful to describe everyone you're teleporting accurately because a spell is fundamentally describing the change you want to see. If you describe someone wrong, that's part of the change you're requesting.
(A wizard has to learn to be self-aware enough that they recognise when their name in the Speech should be changed to reflect personal growth.)
It seems like a useful classification to describe agencies through different agents - through the character, through control of your character's immediate surroundings, or through the narrative as a whole.
When the people playing an RPG feel like their choices can/do have meaningful impact on the game, we say they have agency. If we'll succeed no matter what bad choices I make, or if we'll fail no matter what good choices I make, I have no agency.
Without agency in a game, players become pawns us...
My advice: Keep it a secret, reveal it only to the Rogue, let him come up with why the party needs to go on the quest. Maybe he'll reveal it to some other party members to get them on side, or maybe he'll blurt it out and have to convince the Paladin that there is a greater evil at hand that the ...
Needs a mod to deal with the ever expanding comments as answers fast
@BESW There seems to be a pattern to these honeypot questions which get bad answers from new users acting in good faith. Usually system-agnostic or popular system, campaign-related, easy to remedy in a particular situation with a deeper underlying problem where the issue at hand is only a symptom.
Well, genuine non-answers get flagged, offensive answers get flagged, unhelpful answers get downvoted, comment discussions get popcorned and then flagged when they're obviously not productive.
@eimyr It depends on the style of game, of course, but springing something that's potentially very unpleasant and even traumatic to the player just because the GM didn't think to stop it in time doesn't help the game, quite the opposite.
Wait, who's the one who doesn't know what they're doing in your scenario?
I like Sardathrion's answer, which takes into account that any narrative choice needs to take into account the players' preferences for content and tone.
@eimyr No, I mean, are you talking about the GM who didn't anticipate this problem when he allowed the seduction roll, or the player?
Seems like some commenters and answerers take the "this can make for a good story, keep it!" without thinking that other players and groups might have different lines and veils than they do.
And for a touchy subject like this, an unqualified "this is good for the story!" is a problem.
You know how sometimes you want to write a good answer and you are demotivated by the fact that your approach challenges the problem in a thorough and deliberate way while there are simplistic "here-and-now", high scoring answers already?
But I actually feel that when there are already upvoted straightforward answers, there's actually more leeway in giving a "take a step back and think" answer.
Because the OP already has a straightforward solution, so you can give a complicated answer without worrying that the frame-challenge is the only answer given.
I've invited the querent to chat if they want to workshop their question.
Nzall--right now you've basically got three questions. (1) Should I change the backstory of this NPC to avoid a situation I'm concerned will disturb my players and not just their characters? (2) If I should change it, how? (3) If I shouldn't change it, how do I help make this development palatable for my group? Answers are having trouble covering all three of those subjects, so they tend to instead focus on the sensational nature of the unexpected event. — BESW5 mins ago
If you're asking for help with (1), we need to know a lot more about the nature of your group, its dynamic, and why you feel it might or might not cause "irreparable damage." I'm not sure if it's possible to provide sufficient detail to make it a Stack-answerable question, but there are other places including Role-playing Games Chat that can help with that. If your question is limited to (2) or (3), that's a lot easier for the Stack to help with. — BESW2 mins ago
But I've got three microRPGs I'm halfway through designing, some new ideas about an old system design that are begging to get played with, an NPC for another campaign that's currently on temporary hold, and now I'm thinking about re-writing a quick-start guide to strip the setting from it.
- Polishing up Colonypunk for a final PDF version. - Still letting Surgadores percolate. - That new "hero on the radio" thing is still in the early stages. - Hounds of God is bugging me to get worked on again now that I understand Fate a bit better. - Epyllion has far too many props to be directly useful, but I still want to mine it for My Little Psychosis ideas.
- I've got an ongoing project helping a friend hack together a zombie system for his campaign. - The Thing You Prize recently reminded me that it's a half-formed mess from my early design days.
@Waterseas Right now the only things I've got that are at the tuning stage are Colonypunk (three coins instead of two, I think is all it needs) and Surgadores needs more playtesting before I know what it needs.
@eimyr Well, technically not everything on that list is a microgame, but none of them are planned to be more than a few pages.
And then there's my campaigns, present and future-possible.
So: experience has shown that questions about specific problems tend to get answers which are also broadly useful--but questions about generic situations tend to get answers which are too vague to be actionable for anybody.
I'll be completely honest: this particular situation was purely hypothetical, and honestly, many of the questions I post on RPG.se are also not based on situations that I have encountered in campaigns. In fact, I don't even have a stable RPG group right now. The reason I post them is because they are interesting situations that might help others.
Because of that, i don't really have any additional information to add on the matter. I am not aware of any meta decisions that disallow hypothetical situations
The catapult question from a few years ago: also hypothetical, for example
Hypotheticals aren't disallowed. But as you can see, they tend to cause problems with the Stack format which makes those questions hit other reasons to get put on hold.
The Stack works best for "actionable solutions to real problems." We can stretch it to fit other circumstances, but the further we stretch the more we run into problems.
as @BESW says, there's nothing wrong with hypotheticals per se, but the lack of actual practical foundation tends to show up as other issues in the questions
@BESW that's one of the reasons why I post more hypotheticals on there than on RPG.SE: they have established how to deal with them. Also, hypotheticals on WB don't require as much framing
We're a lot more strict about this sort of thing than, say, Worldbuilding or Science Fiction & Fantasy in part because we do have a plethora of actionable challenges to solve, there are many other forums that are good at handling hypotheticals (RPG.SE feels no need to duplicate existing services that it can't do well), and the RPG community at large really likes to argue.
@Nzall One could have such a perception, though in WB voting system seems more like a poll of popularity, not necessarily a measure of correctness or usefulness. I'm not saying it's bad - I'm saying it's not a model Stack behaviour.
@Waterseas The goal is to use Dog Eat Dog to help students externalise their experience in a peri-colonial culture, because their immersion in it makes it difficult to recognise.
(I created Colonypunk as a response to playing Dog Eat Dog and seeing spaces in our island's experience that it didn't focus on which I thought were important.)
@eimyr RPG.SE also has a certain "popularity contest" aspect, IMHO. maybe not for rule-based decisions, but it does have them for more open-ended situations, like "I encountered this in a session, how to fix this".
@Waterseas It's a game about the imbalance of power between Natives and a Colonising force. Very much in the Forge tradition of "use the rules to make the players feel and think."
Precisely. I think the premise of WB assumes multiple equally useful answers, whereas RPG dismisses the idea. Of course, there are cases where competing points of view coexist, but I think the community votes to show which one they believe works better, not which one they like better.
One person plays the Occupiers, and everyone else plays individual Natives. The Occupiers have ultimate power over the narrative, and the Natives only get their way when the Occupiers let them. However, at the end of each scene the Occupier judges everyone (including himself) on how they followed the rules. The first rule is "The Natives are inferior to the Occupiers."
If you followed the rules, the Occupier gives you a coin from his pile. If you broke the rules, the Occupier takes a coin from you. If the Occupier breaks a rule, he loses a coin forever. After the Judgement, the Natives consider how the Occupier behaved in the scene and they use that to figure out a new rule about how to engage with the Occupation.
@eimyr I would argue that for more socially oriented aspects, the concept of "one answer to rule them all" is inherently flawed. Every situation is different, and what works for your group might not work for another group
The game is over when all the Natives have no coins (the Occupier subjugates the Native culture) or the Occupier has no coins (the Occupier decides to leave the Natives' land).
@Nzall Yeah... The thing with RPG.SE is that 90% of social questions could be answered with "talk to your players, be honest and appreciative, work out what is most fun for everyone, if you can't - leave".
I live on an island that is still functionally a colony, although in some ways we're post-colonial, so it's a very interesting game to bring to the community.
Crap. My intended greeting was "Hi! Awesome question, I really want to post an answer, there are folks discussing it a lot here" but then we started arguing about WB vs RPG attitudes.
They are difficult to answer sometimes. Often they are closed. There's nothing wrong with that.
Also, my opinions might not be representative of the rest of RPG.SE folks.
@eimyr and that's my main concern. I don't mind having my questions closed, but if too many of my questions are closed, I might risk losing certain privileges
A friend of mine once lost his ability to ask questions because he kept asking questions that were not scored high enough in proportion to his answers (he actually didn't post any answers). I've got a few hundred reputation points and nowadays I tend to ask much more questions than I post answers...
@eimyr if you post too many low quality or closed questions, you start getting warnings that some of your questions are not well received, which tells you to check your older questions, and that if you continue having your questions closed, you could get a question ban
They don't give specifics because they don't want folks to game the system, but yeah. I've seen a few folks get it here when they serial-post poor questions before understanding that the Stack isn't a traditional forum.
We aren't elected mods, so we can't see your deleted questions ratios.
If you're concerned, you'll need to reach out to a blue diamond.
But, well. I gotta say. There's a big difference between asking hypotheticals and pretending to have problems you don't have.
@Nzall comparing us to world building to say "well hypotheticals are allowed there" is a bit strange, because hypotheticals - fictional worlds - are fundamentally what the site is about. Our site is fundamentally about very real circumstances - real social situations between real people, or interpretations of real and established rules. If we have questions that are totally hypothetical they are very rare.
And, well, evidently we do. there's another person who also had a tendency to ask purely hypothetical questions. We tended to close them because we needed clarification they could not provide because it was totally hypothetical and there was none to provide.
@doppelgreener I'm not so sure on that, I'm sure B&C has a ton of hypothetical MTG questions, I'm sure it's similar over here given the similar complexity of tabletop rules
Mmhmm, I understand, but was raising a different comparison to counter; complex rules tend to breed many unique game states, some of which are niche enough they're more likely to come up in thought than in practice
Welp, in the past I posted some hypotheticals about a possible upcoming situation. The community driled down, discovered it was hypothetical and asked me what my problem is right now. I went with "I'm worried that..." - apparently the answer is "Don't worry."
@BESW I think it's still good to refresh your policy once in a time, so you A) know what your policy is, B) know if you still agree with it and C) can educate those that are less aware of them
Tis also quarter to one in the morning which marks about 45 minutes of tech support which got us halfway to a resolution. Now: bed. Morning: more tech support.
Just created a short program for Excel dungeons that lights up spaces as the characters explore. I have a big screen that I can put in front of my DM screens so the party can see the dungeon as they explore. Prevents all those transcription errors.
Won't know if it works for the group until we try it. I guess that makes it hypothetical.
A "Thaum" is the basic unit of magical strength. It has been universally established as the amount of magic needed to create one small white pigeon or three normal-sized billiard balls. - Terry Pratchett
@lisadoggY I would think the same would go for sufficiently advanced magic. If I were to tell you what card you chose, using my advanced magic, wouldn't you believe it was a parlor trick?
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced. - Gregory Benford
Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology. (Clarke’s third law, addendum.) aka parlor tricks
Is it possible to have a multiclass character in Dungeon World?
Please notice that I mean a real multiclass character, not moves multiclass dabbler and multiclass initiate.
For example, is it possible for a fighter to get thief's Trap Expert, Tricks of the Trade, Backstab, Flexible Morals and P...
Are there any circumstances in which "Our DM is pretty good at what he does, but…" does not turn out to be code for "Our DM is actually pretty terrible but we don't know any better"?
When the people playing an RPG feel like their choices can/do have meaningful impact on the game, we say they have agency. If we'll succeed no matter what bad choices I make, or if we'll fail no matter what good choices I make, I have no agency.
Without agency in a game, players become pawns us...
Is it possible to have a multiclass character in Dungeon World?
Please notice that I mean a real multiclass character, not moves multiclass dabbler and multiclass initiate.
For example, is it possible for a fighter to get thief's Trap Expert, Tricks of the Trade, Backstab, Flexible Morals and P...
