TRPG General Chat

Miniman

00:07

@trogdor I think Guamian flows better, but it definitely sounds much less formal.

And, obviously, I wouldn't have to live with it.

trogdor

no you would not XD

I think we have enough informality here as it is

not that I don't like informality, but there does need to be some kind of balance, and we do have a lot of it

Miniman

@trogdor I'm not sure it's possible to be too informal :)

trogdor

@Miniman I didn't say we have too much

XD

Miniman

@trogdor You did say you think you have enough, which I took to mean that more would be too much :P

trogdor

well true

Miniman

00:11

Thinking about it, I guess in some cultures formality and courtesy are effectively the same thing, in which case you could definitely have too much informality.

trogdor

but I think when designating a word to call people who live here, informality in the name itself might come off as disrespect

Miniman

@trogdor Well, us Ozzies know all about that XD

trogdor

@Miniman there is a little bit of that here

@Miniman is that term considered disrespectful there? or possibly ok for you to say but not for anyone from outside of the country?

anyway, part of my point is that the world at large does not tend to think about Guam much or take it very seriously

an incredibly widely used informal sounding name for the people who live here would not help with that

Miniman

@trogdor As far as I know, no-one considers it disrespectful, but I'm sure there's people out there who would disagree with me.

trogdor

mm

Miniman

00:17

@trogdor That's unfortunately true. I have to admit, I'm not sure I'd ever even heard of Guam before I started hanging out here.

trogdor

I asked precisely because reactions to nicknames for a wide group of people like that one are quite often taken in a variety of ways

Miniman

Side note: Gah. I got 400 rep worth of upvotes yesterday, but because I'm a good citizen who downvotes untested houserules, it didn't count for Legendary at all :(

trogdor

@Miniman I mean, don't get me wrong, we are not doing very much to get recognition from the world, and I certainly don't want Guam to be world famous, but when people do think about us I would prefer it not be just because something is going wrong for us or reflecting poorly on us

and that seems to be the majority of the attention we get right now T.T

Miniman

@trogdor Yeah, there's one nickname for a nationality that I hear used a lot, but have no idea whether it's derogatory or not, and don't know anyone of that nationality well enough to ask them.

Adeptus

@Miniman Which nationality?

Miniman

00:23

@Adeptus Phillipino.

Adeptus

@Miniman If the nickname you're talking about is "pinoy", I believe that's one they call themselves (maybe in/from their native language)

Miniman

@Adeptus I've heard it used, yeah, but still have no clue whether it's offensive from an outsider. And Google hasn't helped me.

Adeptus

@Miniman True, the "from an outsider" might make a difference...

BESW

01:59

@Miniman Well, I wouldn't say it.

Miniman

@BESW I don't say it, but I would still like to know.

BESW

Next time I see Jake, I'll ask him.

Miniman

@BESW Thanks! I'd appreciate that.

Miniman

03:23

Because I was bored, I present for consideration: Who is #1 in each tag?

trogdor

I am kinda surprised how many names I recognized were on there

Joel Harmon

you are more likely to recognize them because, by definition, they're common

Miniman

@JoelHarmon True dat!

In a similar vein, How many tags is each user #1 in?

This also stems from a realisation: data.SE appears to store every query I run in perpetuity. So the least I can do is give them useful names.

Joel Harmon

I suppose you could also dominate a category with one or two really highly voted answers, in which case it's an obscure category or you've almost certainly come across the question before

Miniman

@JoelHarmon Yeah, there are plenty of tags on that list that only have a single post to their name.

BESW

03:44

Hah! I'm #1 in social-stats. Obviously I rolled 18 in Charisma.

Unfortunately, I'm also #1 in consequences. "Oops."

@doppelgreener You're #1 in cthulhu.

Miniman

@BESW [Eyes @doppelgreener suspiciously]

BESW

@Miniman He's also #1 in forced-movement and dungeon.

[eyes even more suspiciouser]

Miniman

@BESW Wow, that got weird fast.

I'm afraid to say that I'm #1 in fear.

Also dwarf, which seems fitting given my username.

BESW

I'm #1 in spirit-of-the-century, which I haven't even read.

@Magician is #1 in dungeon-design, megadungeons, and multiattacking. I assume he contracts with @doppelgreener.

Magician

...

I assume that's one question in very under-used tags

Well, ok. No. Hopefully it's two questions.

BESW

03:53

You're also #1 in odnd.

Magician

Actually, new game. Randomly select two or three tags. Come up with a title of a good question that'd use them.

Meanwhile...

№ 612 Lady SETI, DEMON of: ‣ irrespective smokehouses ‣ jigsawed kookaburras https://t.co/lNVV2P1wer

Tweeted by ebooks_goetia on June 21, 2016 at 12:00 AM

BESW

@Magician Megadungeon x10, dungeon design x20, odnd x16.

Magician

Randomly generated demon summoning grimoire, complete with sigils.

Miniman

Given how much it seems to come up, I think I'll add the total number of questions in the tag.

BESW

[closes eyes, spins scroll]

@Magician wolsung, improvisation, pokerole

Magician

03:56

"Wolsung: Steampulp Fantasy is a roleplaying game of cinematic action set in the daring times of the Magical-Industrial Revolution."

"An RPG based on the Pokémon video game franchise."

Had to look that up. Um.

Miniman

There we go! You can see how busy the tag is, and it orders your tags by how busy they are so the more obscure tags are at the bottom.

BESW

"How can I make my Pokerole NPCs more racist?"

Magician

Well that's definitely an angle.

"more racist without planning for it beforehand"

BESW

(For the blissfully unaware, Wolsung has... strong tendencies... with racial subject matter.)

[tries again]

puzzle, megadungeon, concealment.

Miniman

@trogdor should ask and answer a burnination question so he can be #1 in burnination.

trogdor

04:00

lol

that tag has no use though

Miniman

Interesting, turns out you can't capitalise letters in a tag.

trogdor

I will just have my question removed and get a nice note about how the site works XD

@Miniman just another reason I won't be doing this thing

BURNINATE requires caps, no other way of saying it will do for me

BESW

@Miniman Can't format either.

Miniman

@trogdor "I want to optimize my character for BURNINATION. Which feats and spells should I use to become the greatest BURNINATOR I can be?"

Magician

@BESW "I'm building a megadungeon with recurring theme of light and darkness, and need a variety of puzzles based on line of sight/light."

BESW

04:02

@Magician VTC brainstorming request.

Magician

Drat

BESW

(I assume the hard part of the game is making up questions that won't get closed.)

Magician

Yeah

How do you get random tags, do you just scroll through the list?

BESW

Put the cursor on the list, close my eyes, scroll, and then double-click before opening my eyes to select a line.

Joel Harmon

How can I adjust the difficulty of finding puzzle pieces/clues hidden in my megadungeon?

Magician

04:09

shadow-of-the-demon-lord chases magic-item-creation

Joel Harmon

this is a harder than expected game

Miniman

cover monk shadow-of-the-demon-lord

Magician

A popular game, SotDL

BESW

@JoelHarmon Make it "in my fog-filled megadungeon" and I think that's a winner.

Miniman

I'm trying to write a query to generate 3 random tags, but those 3 come up every time - I think data.SE uses caching, and it's throwing things off.

Joel Harmon

04:11

what's your query?

BESW

"Chaching" would be a good name for a goblin.

Magician

Proposed refinement: reroll if you get a second setting (obviously can't automate).

Miniman

This one does the trick.

Just enter something (doesn't matter what) as a parameter.

doppelgreener

@Miniman [sweats]

Magician

@Miniman Invalid column name 'asdf'.

Miniman

04:13

@doppelgreener If that's an attempt to prove your humanity, it won't work.

nevermind, it should work with anything now.

doppelgreener

Miniman

Although if you give it the same thing twice, you'll get the same results.

Magician

So it's... random seed?

Miniman

@Magician No, it does absolutely nothing.

It's just to convince the database that you're running a different query and it shouldn't just give you the cached results.

Magician

Ahhhh.

doppelgreener

04:16

@Miniman "How can I ensure my hobbit passes by the Eye of the Demon Lord without being seen in his territory?"

Miniman

Or at least, I think that's what's happening.

@doppelgreener Monk?

doppelgreener

@Miniman ... i picked two of your three XD can't think of how to do monk as well

Magician

"How does demon monk's ability to sense virtue interact with cover in SotDL?"

Miniman

@Magician I think knowing about the game system might be cheating XD

Magician

(I don't know if there are demon lords in that game and whether they can sense virtue, but there should be and they should)

Miniman

04:20

Well, nvm me then.

Magician

Hehe. We can't be expected to know the random systems. As long as you can convincingly make stuff up, you win :)

Miniman

dragons minion magic-item-creation practically writes itself.

doppelgreener

> CHACHING
Concept: Hapless goblin lackey; Trouble: Kleptomaniac; Live to profit another day!
+3 Quick
+2 Sneaky, Clever
+1 Flashy, Careful
+0 Forceful

But look what I grabbed!: Whenever you concede in a fight, you get an aspect with one free invoke representing some riches you stole.
Play dead: You get +2 to use Flashy to distract someone when drawing attention to yourself with overdramatic injuries or death.

Miniman

@doppelgreener Chachingkacha!

BESW

@Miniman "Is there a magic item that fits my minion's budget which lets him tame a dragon?"

Miniman

04:27

@BESW I was thinking more along the lines of "What kind of minion would a dragon keep to make magical items for it?"

doppelgreener

@Miniman "How can I craft a magical pocket dragon minion?"

Miniman

@doppelgreener pokerole

doppelgreener

@Miniman [leaves question unmodified] :D

doppelgreener

04:51

Google now provides accurate medical summaries on conditions you google so that the internet won't convince you you're dying. (At least, in some locations & on some devices.)

Miniman

@doppelgreener That's pretty cool.

BESW

Yeah, but wait 'til it starts telling everyone their symptoms are from a lack of Google Fiber in their diet.

Miniman

Obligatory xkcd comic.

doppelgreener

@BESW i don't know how to respond to that XD

Miniman

(It's pretty big, so I didn't want to let it come up in chat as an image.)

@doppelgreener Like this: "You mean fibre, right?"

BESW

04:55

I do, but Google doesn't.

Miniman

@BESW I know. I just like to stick up for the underdogs of the spelling world.

BESW

I tend to use an unholy amalgam of British spelling with American idiom.

Miniman

It's one trick my family has started abusing in games like Fibbage: Using a distinctively Americanized spelling makes everyone think that your answer must have come from the game, not from one of the players.

lisardggY

06:22

@BESW I thought of something else regarding Ancillary Justice. I'm reading it in English, as you probably did as well. My wife read it in Hebrew, which is much more gendered a language - every verb, every adjective is conjugated with the gender.

How's Chamorro in that respect?

Also, while I'm on the subject, how many books are translated into Chamorro?

doppelgreener

Amazon is repaying credit to a lot of people who bought e-books between 2010 and 2012. Check your email spam folder.

lisardggY

Hmm. No email. Maybe I didn't buy any books that were part of the suit.

Let's see if I have any credit on the site.

Hmm. Amazon claims I'm a customer since 2008, which is a shame, because it means I've lost the account that I've used since 1998.

I would be nice to find and merge the accounts, since I ordered so many books over the years and some might be in the Amazon Matchbook program.

Miniman

06:42

Wow, a question just reached a 4:1 ratio of deleted to nondeleted answers.

lisardggY

@Miniman It should be protected, preserved, and brought as an example of a bad question that draws bad answers, then.

Which is it?

I've tried efbulkinsert.codeplex.com which is nice and fast for pure inserts, which is fine for most of our usecases, but we might also need the ability to update, not just insert.

Miniman

@lisardggY This one.

But a quick query tells me that there's another one with a 5:1 ratio out there.

lisardggY

Lots of gamerec. Not surprising.

Miniman

Yeah.

Actually, that gives me an idea.

Hmmm, potentially contentious tags didn't turn out to be very informative.

doppelgreener

06:58

@Miniman I know exactly why hybrid-rpg has that ratio.

@Miniman Amend it to focus on questions with at least 5 or 10 answers actually existing.

Because at the moment, it'll pick out tags where only 2 or 3 answers actually exist. The one or two deleted answers are just statistical anomalies at that scale.

Momonga-sama

9

Q: When did Baldur's Gate's Outer City come to be?

Last weekend I was re-reading the setting booklet from Murder in Baldur's Gate. Since the only game I have in this area is happening closer to the Year of Wild Magic than the Year of the Awakened Sleepers (or in less fancy terms: historically placed around when 3rd edition came out.) so far I've ...

forgotten-realms

I know it's not much, but it's a shame the points will go to waste :/

Miniman

07:25

@Momonga-sama I was trying to work up an answer for that one even before the bounty, but I just can't find anything :(

@doppelgreener Simple enough to do, but I'm not sure it's really helped.

This might just be not a useful measure of contentiousnessness.

BESW

@lisardggY Chamorro is almost as gendered as Spanish, so in between English and Hebrew.

And very little is translated into it; the language is on the edge of dying out. One of my friends was astonished to learn that a few dozen Baha'i prayers and holy passages have been translated.

(Was out taking my dad to an appointment, and then had food from a stall at the Wednesday night craft market.)

@Miniman I like Tuggy's comment on one of those answers.

(For the under-10k-ers, the comment is this close to saying "I find your lack of citation disturbing.")

@Miniman I like how Paranoia is in the top 3.

Miniman

@BESW It's annoying how when I keep fiddling around with a query, links to it don't stick to the version they were actually linked to.

BESW

07:44

Heheh.

doppelgreener

07:55

@Miniman I think you need to be forking the query if you want to fundamentally change how it works but keep a version link.

Otherwise you're just, y'know, overwriting the same query.

BESW

Yeah, fork that query.

Miniman

@doppelgreener Yeah, I know. Unfortunately, if you wrote the query yourself, you don't get the fork query button - I have to remember to copy it to a new query editor.

doppelgreener

@Miniman say whaaaaat

BESW

If he won't, I will. "Whaaaaat."

trogdor

lol

BESW

10:11

I'm pretty sure this is a dupe of this. VTC if you agree?

Fibericon

12:05

So I saw someone from my old Exalted group yesterday. He made it pretty clear that he thought I was in the wrong for disagreeing with anything the GM did, and was quite unpleasant to be around in general. Wasn't really prepared for that one.

Francisco

13:09

@Fibericon

@Fibericon What did the GM do wrong in general?

Fibericon

He based a whole story arc off his NPC, so we were just tagging along for her epic redemption arc. When we finally got to the big bad, there was nothing we could do to hurt it - the option was not available to us, because only his NPC could hurt it.

He then proceeded to kill two party members, including hitting me three times in a row while I was already unconscious, and ignored said NPC. Immediately following this, he magically ended the combat by saying the NPC finished casting her spell, so the big bad died instantly with no ability to resist.

I said, after the last session of that arc, that it seemed like poor form. He responded by shouting and showing me the door, so I gave it a couple of weeks of thought, then informed the group I would be leaving.

Francisco

Best decision. That says a lot about him as a person.

Fibericon

I guess. His other story arcs were decent - we'd been in this campaign for a while, switching back and forth between him and me running it. I got blindsided by his inability to take any criticism though.

Francisco

13:28

Story arcs could be decent. But it more sounds like he was putting the story on the rails. Not so much letting the PCs have their own choice.

Fibericon

Yeah, we were largely incapable of even solving any of the major problems that came up in the story. The final battle was just the most blatant. Having the big bad with only one weakness that can kill it for good is fine. I figured we were just going to beat the snot out of it, hold it down, and let that NPC wiggle her fingers to finish it off. No such luck.

Francisco

Nothing like sitting by and watching that final cutscene :D

Fibericon

Mmmm delicious cutscenes. At least there were no quick time events.

Francisco

Nah. That would add too much interaction with the cutscene

Fibericon

We lost party members though. One of them was female. If I'd known this was going to happen, I would have named her Aeris. Missed opportunity, really.

David Wilkins

13:48

@Fibericon That sounds like someone who either doesn't understand player agency, or blatantly wanted to deny you access to it. Depending on how many sessions this took place over, I would probably not have lasted to the end.

Fibericon

@DavidWilkins If I hadn't known the GM for such a long time, I probably wouldn't have made it past session two. That was about when I realized that we couldn't even make the journey without deus ex machina.

Francisco

14:03

I mean there's always the idea of railing the story a bit. Especially to fall into what the DM/GM had planned so you know, he's not sitting there trying to ad-lib absolutely everything. But then there's revolving the entire story around an NPC. Huge no.

Fibericon

I had that happen, in reverse, when I was GMing a Star Wars game. The PCs became absolutely obsessed with finding/rescuing a particular jedi who'd been captured. My original plan was to just forget about him for two years in game time, but I guess he was just the most lovable guy you've ever met, because the PCs made the entire story about him.

Grubermensch

17:30

@waxeagle are we having a game tomorrow night?

Waterseas

17:53

Its odd how good of audio books R. A. Salvatore's writing makes

Momonga-sama

18:32

0

A: What are some alternatives to using miniatures for games that require them?

Paper dolls/figures/models Similar trick is used in miniature wargames. There are lots of this stuff on the internet. Probably you will find what you want without a problem. Just search for paper models/figures. You can just print them on paper and glue it to appropriate size base, bu...

Zachiel

19:00

After seeing how high a dispel magic check might be, I think I'm leaving the "let's raise my caster level" tactic aside and I will instead try "let's hope they never try to dispel me".

SPavel

20:23

It's highly unlikely that someone will have all of those boosts on them

I think you have to be level 50 or something

Zachiel

This game plays up to level 33

No psionics, luckily, leaves out some options, including the biggest buffs

@SPavel Also, players can use up to 2 prestige classes at a time, but I'm not sure this applies to NPCs as well.

BESW

20:41

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[UScons](http://casualgamerevolution.com/blog/2016/01/2016-tabletop-gaming-conventions-a-comprehensive-list "List of RPG conventions in the US.");

SPavel

21:00

Yeah, with 33 levels to use and Fate mantle unavailable, the bonus is substantially lower.

BESW

The word of the day is leucocholy.

> leucocholy - noun - leu·co·choly - \ˈlükəˌkälē\
plural -es
: a state of feeling that accompanies preoccupation with trivial and insipid diversions

Zachiel

22:21

@SPavel still very high

BESW

22:37

D&D 3.5? Yeah, a good rule of thumb is that it's easier to get "doing things" numbers higher than "stopping things" numbers, but that neither is as useful as "ignoring numbers" things--and you can almost always find one of those.

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