TRPG General Chat

BESW

00:56

Today in "I don't think you meant to say that:"

> Gmail virus scanners are temporarily unavailable - the attached files haven't been scanned for viruses. Please download these files at your own risk.

SevenSidedDie

@Mala I am now. What's up?

BESW

Ursula Vernon is selling weird pendant necklaces on Etsy, but they're bought up so fast you have to watch her Twitter like a hawk for a chance to snap one up.

Adeptus

01:11

Alot

Alot (Hindi: अलोट) is a town and nagar panchayat in the Ratlam district of Madhya Pradesh, India. == Geography == Alot is located at 23°45′44″N 75°33′36″E. == Demographics == Alot has a population of 40,948. == Culture == Alot is a tehsil place and a small town; it is a tahsil of Ratlam district and the hometown to Jangalwa Dynasty. It is on the route of the Delhi–Bombay railway track. Through trade routes Jewellers and Businessman established themselves in the town before the 17th century and flourished businesses in ginning and jewellery. A glimpse of the business lifestyle during t...

BESW

[sigh] This coffee shop's Internet is slightly better than a sharp stick in the eye.

They have the best coffee on island, though.

I just wish I could patronise a friendly, quality local business AND do my work.

nitsua60

@Magician @BESW possible first botch topic for me: "The day I learned how much systems matter." That's definitely not a title, but maybe the topic. I'll try to punch out a rough draft either Thursday or Friday.

Also, just found this oldie when searching on "blog":

Mar 4 at 0:52, by nitsua60

If RPGSE had a blog I'd think there should be a series entitled "Why do we do this to ourselves?" It'd be a non-tongue-in-cheek series written by GMs on what each enjoys about the role.

Shalvenay

hey there @nitsua60

nitsua60

Favorite mainsite quote of the day:

> Know what's really boring/doesn't give you a lot of XP? When you fall in a pit and break your leg.

@Shalvenay hiya

Shalvenay

@nitsua60 how're things going?

Magician

01:22

@nitsua60 Sounds good.

nitsua60

@Shalvenay Good. Left work early to work out, build a compost heap (rather, the containing walls for one), do some bushwhacking (literally), and shovel a whole pickup-full of mulch... all in time to still make dinner. Levaing me pretty beat now =)

Shalvenay

@nitsua60 ah. bored over here, actually....

Magician

Speaking of botch blog, has anything progressed in any direction? Last time I checked, we had 5 posts ready to go with a couple of drafts stored. And a bunch of people who'd said they wanted to contribute, but haven't done so yet.

BESW

If I can find a place with decent Internet, I'll have time this afternoon to work on the banner.

Magician

Cool.

BESW

01:27

As usual, I'm making it a lot more complicated than it needs to be.

nitsua60

@BESW isn't that the theme of the blog?

[Ed McMahon-style "hey-ooohh!"]

BESW

True. [doubles down]

nitsua60

Alright, heading off. Night, all.

BESW

ttfn

Magician

G'night

BESW

01:32

...I really need to get an iMac.

But that'd mean no more coffee shop office.

Miniman

@BESW They're pretty portable.

BESW

Not that portable.

AFK a bit, my swap is getting bloated.

doppelgreener

@BESW today in phrases I don't understand and sound kind of horrifying but I'm sure have a perfectly ordinary meaning

3

Miniman

@doppelgreener Glad to hear that wasn't just me.

BESW

01:56

Swap is OS X's memory management, a measure of the exchange between RAM and the hard disk.

Hmm. Testing something, can somebody ping me please?

Miniman

@BESW ping

BESW

Hmm, interesting. Thanks!

Garan

02:33

Why does everyone assume that Lawful Good is the painfully annoying, "do all the most tiny of things that bogs down the rest of the party" alignment?

Because I see Lawful Good as "I don't care that this bad person had a change of heart. The laws of the gods say he must die."

BESW

Because of the Paladin.

Specifically, the heritage clause that paladins lose their powers if the people they associate with violate the paladin's vows, regardless of the paladin's own behaviour.

Garan

Right, but is there ever expressed definition of the Paladin's vow?

BESW

I mean, also because the alignment system is a morass of internal contradictions stemming from multiple designers' uncoordinated attempts to apply it to contexts it wasn't ever originally designed to accommodate.

Garan

The DM could rule that "No mercy to evil" is part of the vow.

BESW

@Garan But that wouldn't be Good, really, if Good is (as often suggested) valuing all life.

Garan

02:39

@BESW Well, that's a related, but different problem.

BESW

The alignment system is problematic at its core, and defining the Paladin's vows is part of it--especially since we're talking about a half-dozen different iterations of the theme designed by different people as if they're a monolithic entity.

Garan

@BESW Again, expressed definition of "good"... but now it's more "fundamental question about the flawed alignment system."

BESW

This article is relephant.

And we started with a blanket "everyone assumes" that's demonstrable hyperbole.

Shalvenay

@BESW agreed -- alignment is extremely problematic, which is why I support 4e's and 5e's decision to remove race/class/alignment interlocks altogether (which makes making alignment optional/"fluffy" much easier compared to AD&D/2e/3.x)

@BESW it appears that 5e also scrapped that (quite problematic) clause

Joel Harmon

@Garan I'd say the problem also has a strong social component; it's easy to parody extremes.

Shalvenay

02:47

@Garan there are also some sticky wickets with things that are assumed evil but not necessarily so -- warlocks come to mind offhand immediately

BESW

So, to tamp it back down: Lawful Good has a common history of being the most restrictive alignment. This is partly because the Paladin's powers are historically tied to the party's behaviour, partly because of GMs' tendency to use Lawful Good as a reason to guile players into doing things they don't actually want to do, and partly because the alignment is presented as the "right" philosophy which everyone ought to be...

...but alignments are so poorly and inconsistently defined that any behaviour can be justified within any alignment frame, so it becomes a battle of wills between players and GMs arguing over their real-life philosophies rather than a game concept.

Lawful Good thus has a history of being used as a rhetorical cudgel.

Modern gaming has, as others are observing, backed away from that in many ways. But the legacy persists.

Shalvenay

@BESW yeah, and it also doesn't help that there are strong RL perceptions of "lawful" that don't always align with how the law works, or was originally intended to work, IRL

so that further distorts the picture -- quick example: Jason Leopold's in a courtroom, again

BESW

And all of this is in the context of a setting where alignments aren't negotiable: they're tangible forces of the universe with the power to create planes of existence and grant magical power.

Shalvenay

@BESW yeah -- and it's unclear how much the race/class/alignment interlocks were intended to be part of any given setting because they're part of the base game

BESW

Aye. It's difficult to separate our real-life ideas about Good, Law, Evil, and Chaos, from the game world's ostensibly concrete but actually ill-defined notions of them, and it's difficult to ignore them in systems where they've taken root so deeply in the mechanics.

Some folks have taken the alignment axis to mean not a life philosophy, but a declaration of faction loyalty in an eternal multiversal war.

Shalvenay

02:55

@Garan if you're still around, mind if I sketch a character for you here and ask your reaction to seeing it?

Garan

@Shalvenay Sure

Shalvenay

@BESW that is indeed one way to look at it, and probably a much more consistent/less problematic way too

Garan

@BESW Yeah, only even in D&D there's a range of how concrete that is.

Joel Harmon

in the earliest editions of D&D, alignments had actual languages, that you could only understand if you were that alignment

Garan

Demons and Devils fight over Law and Chaos, but does LG and CG fight nearly as much?

Shalvenay

02:56

@Garan Bronze Dragonborn Oath of the Ancients Paladin/Pact of the Blade Feylock, Lawful Good

BESW

But while that solves a lot of the PC-characterisation issues, it doesn't deal with the deeply troubling "some groups are genetically bound to an alignment" problems which are at the root of the alignment system as a mechanic to justify PCs' thoughtless slaughter of sapient creatures while still being The Good Guys.

Shalvenay

@JoelHarmon I'm glad that idea fell by the wayside swiftly

Joel Harmon

yeah... changing your alignment would cause, iirc, level loss and you'd lose the language

@Garan that's a good point, and one I like to base one-shot games on

Shalvenay

@BESW yeah -- the whole idea of "genetic binding to an alignment" makes negative sense -- it implies some sapients have free will and others somehow don't.

BESW

Looked at from the "justification for killing sapients" angle, we start to see some really disturbing parallels between alignment rhetoric and the rhetoric used to justify horrific real-world practices and ideologies.

Shalvenay

02:59

@BESW yeah -- both Greyhawk and Faerun are deeply racist worlds ICly

Garan

I once wanted to run a game in which there are two primal forces fighting, and two "divine" forces. The supposedly "good" primal force was going to end up aligning with the supposedly "bad" divine force.

Shalvenay

(and alignment rhetoric is part of how that is justified)

Garan

@Shalvenay Try looking at Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay.

Shalvenay

@Garan hrm...how come?

BESW

@Shalvenay Which, yanno, would be a lot more okay if that was a deliberate focus of the setting instead of an incidental and unexamined byproduct.

Garan

03:00

Your race determines against which races you MUST be racist.

BESW

I'm about to start a game in a deeply racist setting, but it's part of the theme of the game.

Garan

As a dwarf, you are required by the rules to be racist against elves and goblins.

(etc. for other races)

Shalvenay

@Garan yeah -- that's the kind of setting which can lead to snubbing the new arrival in all the wrong ways, which then leads to large objects hurtling at your home rock at relativistic velocities ;P

@Garan -- you got the character sketch-ish btw, right?

Garan

@Shalvenay "Objects" being other members of your party (the elves tried doing this to the dwarves and vice-versa because we had a trebuchet [because why WOULDN'T we have a trebuchet?]).

@Shalvenay I'm not that familiar with the character details.

Shalvenay

@Garan no, much larger than other party members. ;P

@Garan ah -- Oath of the Ancients in 5e is basically a "fey knight/green knight" and Pact of the Blade is what weapon-focused warlocks use (vs Pact of the Chain which is familiar focused or Pact of the Tome which is casting focused)

Garan

03:05

@Shalvenay In other words, "With this sword I stand against evil because it is how I in my way protect the world."

Is that about right?

And it's less focused on a particular religion as much as doing as the paladin sees fit?

Joel Harmon

depending on the warlock path, it could well be a variety of nature spirits helping you in their own ways

Shalvenay

@Garan actually, none of the 5e Pally oaths are focused on a specific faith

Garan

@Shalvenay But aren't they still in some way organized?

Joel Harmon

Paladins are not

clerics are still, I believe, members of some church hierarchy

Shalvenay

@Garan not as much

@Garan as to oaths -- Oath of Devotion is the classical honor/courage focus, Oath of the Ancients is light standing against darkness (so close to what you said for my char), and Oath of Vengeance is closest to your original LG interpretation of "no mercy for evil"

Joel Harmon

03:09

Paladins remind me of certain characters from the Dresden Files novels (being vague to avoid spoilers)

Garan

@JoelHarmon And this is where you stop, because I plan to read them at some point.

Joel Harmon

hence the qualifier and the pause, just in case :)

Shalvenay

@JoelHarmon yeah -- in a sense, the aforementioned Pally/Feylock is a knight of the fey courts

BESW

In broad strokes, I see Lawful Good and Chaotic Good as roughly matching rule and act utilitarianism, respectively.

But that doesn't actually match a lot of, eg, the 3.5 material on the subject. At all.

I'm much more interested in other systems' methods of determining characterisation through motive, attitude, and relationships.

Shalvenay

@BESW yeah -- those sound far more fruitful than "baked in" alignments

BESW

03:14

Bubblegumshoe and Umdaar both explicitly ask the player to write a pithy phrase explaining why their character is driven to do the ridiculous and unsafe things the game is based around the protagonists doing.

Garan

One of the huge constraints the alignment system has is it's very hard to have a corrupt church/religion in a D&D game.
I wanted to have characters ultimately turn away from the "good" religions but because of how the spells work, I'd need to give a good reason as to why otherwise neutral parties are considered "evil."

trogdor

@BESW I think the Umdar stuff is a little more ridiculously unsafe XD

Shalvenay

@Garan I agree that it is a major constraint -- and it also fails to handle the case of the "tyranny of good"/"oppressive nanny state" being itself banal-evil

Magician

@Garan D&D typically has active gods. Hard to have a heresy when the source of contention can always show up to clarify its stance.

Joel Harmon

I was amused at this corrupt religion: giantitp.com/forums/…

BESW

03:18

Again, early alignment concepts were basically there to describe a simple "heroes vs things heroes kill" environment. The system strains under the weight of moral complexity.

Garan

@Magician Not heresy. More like "The gods themselves have been lying about what happens in the afterlife."

BESW

@Garan And then you wind up with ridiculous "don't think about this too hard" stuff like Faerun's "Oh, an evil god killed a good god but nobody knows so the good god's worship power is feeding the evil god now."

Shalvenay

@BESW "Alignment: Nuke It From Orbit"

BESW

To be fair, Faerun's deity system is more focused on portfolios than on alignments, but that just leaves us wondering why alignment is still a thing there (because legacy, that's why).

Garan

@BESW The "Don't think about it too hard" is exactly what the "good" gods were doing.

Magician

03:24

@Garan If the gods are lying, maybe they're lying about what's "good" and "evil", too? But that's subverting alignments...

Joel Harmon

not even lying, necessarily; just a different point of view

Magician

@BESW This. The general argument extends to any other conclusions about the larger D&D world drawn from rules designed to handle adventurers in a dungeon.

BESW

@JoelHarmon Except that in a setting where alignments themselves have the power to grant spells and create planes, there is nothing akin to our real-world subjectivity over philosophical positions on the nature of good and evil.

Garan

@JoelHarmon Like, it's not even that they are even lying. The souls of the good are transferred to the divine plane to fight the endless fight of the divine realm.

The downside is that it drains the mortal realm of energy.

(which ultimately weakens the prison that holds back the primal forces trapped there)

Joel Harmon

@BESW that presupposes the ideals create the planes and gods, rather than the gods creating planes they agree with

Garan

03:28

@JoelHarmon Yeah, well, this is my own campaign. The gods are just beings native to a different plane.

Magician

@Garan Alignments are very arbitrary. If the gods defined it... "Thou shall not kill. Thou shall not steal. Thou soul shall transfer to the divine plane to fight the endless fight of the divine realm."

Joel Harmon

@Garan you seem to be referring to a particular story world with which I'm not (very?) familiar

BESW

@JoelHarmon Depends on the setting/edition, obviously, but in eg 3.5 it's very clear that the alignments are equal to, if not higher than, gods in their power and agency.

Garan

@JoelHarmon The story of a campaign I wanted to run in 3.5

Joel Harmon

@Garan ah, got it; typing vs. reading disparity there.

Magician

03:29

@BESW Definitely higher. Alignments are. Gods are transient expressions of them at best.

Garan

In any case, the evil gods decided that the mortal plane is better, and decided to move there.

BESW

@JoelHarmon A cleric can worship an ideal rather than a god. Alignments get entire planes emergent from their natures while gods are forced to share pre-existing planes with other gods.

Joel Harmon

@BESW @Magician do you have specific references for that? My cosmology isn't that great

gods or even wizards have the power to create demi-planes

BESW

Gods can be made and unmade, their power can be stolen or enhanced. Alignments persist, unincorporated and unassailable.

They're elemental forces like Water and Wood.

Planes of themselves simply exist because they exist, not through any conscious choice--because they have no consciousness, they simply accrue power to those things and people which best embody them.

The alignments are building blocks of the multiverse, fundamental components of existence alongside the elements and the energies.

Gods by comparison don't really have any existential compulsion to be; gods exist because they, or mortals, want them to, but the multiverse doesn't seem especially chuffed about it one way or another.

Garan

“The story so far:
In the beginning the Alignments were created.
This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”

7

(to paraphrase Douglas Adams)

Joel Harmon

03:35

well played, sir.

BESW

Gods can redefine reality on a (cosmically) local scale, but gods aren't necessary to reality's original existence.

Joel Harmon

how do you see alignments relating to primordials, @BESW ?

BESW

To the best of my knowledge in 3.5 they're exclusively a Faerun thing, so I have little opinion.

Shalvenay

@Garan hahahaha :D

BESW

Faerun being its own weird Jörmungandrian oroborus of lore, which I've only ever followed enough to amalgamate a version of Wee Jas and the yuan-ti into my own setting.

Joel Harmon

03:39

I'd have to dig up the book on the gods, but I thought there was a greco-roman Titans vs. Gods style thing going on there

Magician

If that's the case... Primordials are much closer to the building blocks of the universe. They're typically elemental, from what I know, probably because alignment-primordials would be way too abstract.

And so primordials are more likely to be necessary. That's why they're imprisoned, not killed.

trogdor

alignment primolrdials would be silly

@Magician I got the impression they actually couldn't die

at least permanently

Magician

@trogdor 3.0 Manual of the Planes had positive and negative energy elemental-y things, IIRC. That's... close?

@trogdor Yeah. Universal forces are annoying.

trogdor

@Magician well sorta, but at the end of the day they could both technically kill you

and I don't think either one would sweat it more than the other that they had

BESW

@trogdor ...Modrons?

trogdor

03:48

@BESW I suppose those might count

I don't know much about them other than that they seem real weird

Magician

Actually, yugoloths are primordial evil, aren't they?..

Miniman

@BESW Nah, modrons are the LN equivalent of demons for CE, devils for LE, etc.

Inevitables might qualify as law primordials, I suppose.

BESW

Oh, man. Inevitables would've been an awesome idea for a game where the default response to conflict wasn't "kill the thing."

[should add inevitables to a campaign some time]

Garan

@Magician Mostly because how poorly they were defined.

doppelgreener

05:14

What are inevitables?

Miniman

@doppelgreener Inevitable.

(As the name suggests.)

doppelgreener

Those are awesome.

Taking some (re)creative liberties, this gives me some great ideas for the right setting.

Miniman

Then, of course, a Dragon article added the Chaotic version, the Evitable. They hunt down people who abide by laws and keep promises. Sometimes they don't. Sometimes they do something completely different.

Adeptus

@Miniman April issue?

Magician

...of course.

BESW

05:24

@doppelgreener I know, right. Ridiculously overpowered robots designed to punish the most egregious of the multiverse's evildoers who are too powerful and cunning for anyone else to take down, but who eventually break down into overreacting letter-of-the-law punishers of trivial misconduct.

Miniman

@Adeptus @Magician At least, I assume this happened.

Magician

Ah. There only seems to be homebrew.

And of course slaad are the embodiment of chaos. Because giant frog.

BESW

...has anyone done Frogs vs Robots yet?

Adeptus

One of my favourite April Dragon articles was the Wandering Damage Table. The author said that the real reason for Wandering Monsters was to do the PCs some damage in between set encounters. So, to save all that time spent in combat, they proposed skipping the middle-man and just rolling on the Wandering Damage Table.

Miniman

@BESW Like, in real life, or...?

BESW

05:29

As an RPG, of course.

...now I'm getting an idea for a ridiculously controversial alignment-based version of Lasers & Feelings.

Miniman

@Adeptus But damage is still a middle-man! So what the hobby really needs is a Wandering Death table.

BESW

@Miniman OH DEAR, I SEEM TO HAVE ARRIVED AT AN INCONVENIENT TIME.

5

Magician

@BESW Law & Fruitloops?

Adeptus

@Miniman But you don't want to kill your PCs. Not before the set encounter, anyway...

Miniman

@Adeptus I thought the goal was to kill your PCs as often as possible!

doppelgreener

05:33

@BESW In my mind, they are flesh and blood pseudo-mortals (as in Gandalf) crossed with a cowboy bounty hunter / sheriff. So, when I say "the right setting" that means a lot of things. :D Wild West with mysticism going on.

Miniman

@doppelgreener There's a Garth Nix short story called Hope Chest that you might want to read.

It's in his Across the Wall and Other Stories, which I highly recommend to everyone, if only because of Down to the Scum Quarter.

Magician

@doppelgreener Saint of Killers.

doppelgreener

@Magician Oh? :D

@Miniman I found an audio reading of it.

Magician

SoK is a major character in Preacher. And he's already appeared in the tv series, in flashbacks before he actually becomes what he is.

Miniman

@doppelgreener Fair warning, it's a bit on the cheesy side. But it might have some inspiration for you.

Magician

05:42

Preacher is, of course, full of black humor and violence.

doppelgreener

06:42

Hmm... medieval fantasy setting I might go for some other intelligent creature type (including human), where the inevitable is effectively an impostor among the species it appears to be, and purports to be some type of traveler. a knight, a squire, a merchant, someone who's just got family a few towns away, etc.

they might still have "programming", but it'd show up in the form of a biological person who's mostly fine but altogether not quite right for reasons you might not be able to put your finger on.

BESW

@Magician What dimensions for the botch banner, again?

@doppelgreener Aaaand now I think you've come up with an awesome re-skin for Dogs in the Vineyard.

Magician

@BESW 1088 × 300

Though we should maybe poke at different themes to see if we like another one better.

BESW

What resolution?

Magician

Er. 1088 × 300 pixels. Is there a difference?..

BESW

Mmm, I guess I'll go with 150dpi.

[pokes scanner] Work.

doppelgreener

07:02

@BESW Ha! What, the player characters as Inevitables?

BESW

Yes.

An itinerant group serving as judge, jury, and executioner with absolute authority to both define and enforce the laws they operate by, whose only obstacles are internal disagreement and the extent to which they're comfortable with collateral damage.

Anaphory

@JoelHarmon If on a wintry plane a freebooter. I got it through Epimas 1.5 years ago, lost the files, asked the person I gifted that package to whether they still had it. It's an hommage to Italo Calvino's When On A Winter's Night A Traveller, which I managed to read 3 months ago after not getting it probably like 12 years ago when I first encountered it.

@BESW I looked at that description and thought, “Is he talking Dogs?”

before reading backwards and seeing that yes, you are.

BESW

I really admire the underlying thematic concepts in Dogs, but I've never found an implementation that I'm at all comfortable playing.

doppelgreener

hahahaha

that statement also applies for talking about regular bark bark dogs

BESW

And not in the "Dogs is supposed to make you uncomfortable" sense, but in the "unintended implications that distract from the ostensible focus" sense.

BESW

07:26

This scanner's dimension choices are really annoying me.

Fibericon

07:59

Whelp, I got my face bashed in during the last fate session. Currently have a 6 shift called "blind in one eye".

They weren't even awesome super soldiers. It was air traffic control dudes. One of them picked up a fire extinguisher and clobbered me with it.

BESW

Awesome.

trogdor

lol

Fibericon

We managed to run - should have done that sooner, but oh well. My character is now in Japan with an eye patch working at a reverse harem cafe.

BESW

Concessions are fun!

Fibericon

Oh yeah. I do actually have a backup toon in case this one bites it, though. Since this character is basically me turned up to eleven + fire magic, I figured he might not survive the whole campaign.

BESW

08:14

Generally in Fate your character doesn't die even when they have every right to, because that's one of the most boring failure outcomes possible.

Getting captured, or losing something important, or owing someone a massive debt, now those are things which make the story more interesting going forward.

Fibericon

True, but it's hard to reason with the ground when you fail at parkour from the 10th story.

Anyway, I'm not super worried about it either way. Character death can be cool, avoiding it is always nice.

Anaphory

It's getting warm here, I should find a dungeon somewhere with big isolating walls.

BESW

08:36

Tonight for dinner I'm trying an experiment: string beans cut french-fry length, sautéed in sesame oil with brown sugar, garlic, ginger, and black pepper, served for dipping in hummus.

And for a side, apple slices with a peanut butter/honey/olive oil dip.

RandomGuy13421

@BESW I have no idea what you just wrote, i'll have canned tuna and bread, maybe some olives if i can find any in my fridge

BESW

Ooh, I like putting canned albacore in things.

RandomGuy13421

08:54

@BESW Very nice, i wish i could cook well to make my meals a little more than "eatable... not very good but eatable"

BESW

I cook for my family, or I'd be a lot less vigorous about it.

I highly recommend Edward Espe's "Tassajara Cooking."

He's very good at explaining the how and why behind various types of dishes so that you can make your own with whatever you have around, rather than just giving you specific recipes (which he also does, as examples of how the basic principles of a dish like soup or casserole are applied to common versions of that kind of food).

RandomGuy13421

Thanks, i'll se if i can get an used copy maybe, i have to get into it sooner or later or i'll live off of sandwiches for the rest of my life lol

BESW

Heh.

Cooking can be as easy or complicated as you make it, but learning how to turn that dial takes a while.

RandomGuy13421

well, for now i know how to make pasta, popcorn and a kind of pizza using a piadina as a base, so the only way i can go is up i guess

BESW

I've settled into a pretty good pattern of sautéeing vegetables and a protein, served on top of a grain I can cook on the side like noodles or rice, and I vary it up depending on what the specific ingredients available are.

Sometimes I make a casserole or savory quick bread instead.

RandomGuy13421

09:04

seems like a good mix, nutrient-wise

BESW

But that's "sauteéing things and putting stuff in a rice cooker" is my default quick-and-easy-but-versatile dinner idea, and it lets me use up leftovers in lots of interesting ways.

Eg, if I used spaghetti as a base one night I can make something like pancit (spicy noodles fried with veggies) with the next.

RandomGuy13421

I see

How long did it take you to learn cooking?

BESW

I've been helping around the kitchen most of my life, but I didn't get serious about learning to cook meals until about 2008 or so.

RandomGuy13421

you said you cook for your family so i dont expect a straight answer, i presume a log time

BESW

Prior to that I knew how to make pancakes, a couple of quickbreads like scones, and a mean spaghetti sauce, but that was about it.

RandomGuy13421

09:08

So you have quite a bit of experience, nice

BESW

Yeah, and I feel like I've only really started to get into the "groove" a year or two ago, and there's always more to learn.

RandomGuy13421

I usually eat out at launch becouse of my work, and at dinner i eat whatever i find becouse i'm too tired, not very healthy i know lol

BESW

...I ruined hot dog buns last weekend.

RandomGuy13421

:(

BESW

Was too focused on the dogs on the stove, forgot about the buns broiling below.

RandomGuy13421

09:11

hot dogs are still good even without buns lol

BESW

(Again, veggies and protein in a pan served on a grain: vegan hot dogs sliced in half lengthwise and grilled in a pan with onions and sunflower seeds, to be served on store-bought whole wheat hot dog buns with organic ketchup.)

(None of my family is vegan, but vegan-plus-fish is the intersection of all our dietary needs.)

RandomGuy13421

I'll have to remember that combination

Thanks

BESW

(And I feel a lot less stressed out about cooking when there's no raw meat involved.)

RandomGuy13421

Vegan stuff is pretty good if you can mix it with other ingredients, but it's pretty expansive

BESW

@RandomGuy13421 You might consider a crockpot. I haven't used one because my father does strange things with them so we don't keep one around, but it's a good for starting the food in the morning and coming home to a cooked meal.

@RandomGuy13421 It can be, but doesn't have to be.

RandomGuy13421

09:15

Is a crockpot like a pressure cooker?

BESW

yes.

eg, a can of vegan hot dogs will be the protein for at least two meals (chop a few up for the "meat" in a stir fry!).

RandomGuy13421

I have one, i use it to boil potatoes the rare times i eat them, is it safe to leave it running for the whole day?

BESW

I can't swear to your particular machine, but a long slow simmer all day is one of the things crockpots are designed for.

RandomGuy13421

Wouldnt want to come back home to a blown-up pot and mashed potatoes on the floor, my crockpot was given to me by my parents so it could be quite old

BESW

@RandomGuy13421 Generally we buy a lot of good cheap ingredients, and get a couple special things to add each week.

RandomGuy13421

09:17

maybe older than me lol

So like, rice veggies and pasta?

BESW

Yeah.

RandomGuy13421

Ever tried your hand at cakes?

BESW

Urgh, I'm pretty bad at cakes. I like making cookies and sweet quickbreads.

RandomGuy13421

When i was little i wanted to be a baker but this didnt go quite that way

BESW

They're much more forgiving.

RandomGuy13421

09:20

Cakes and pancakes are probably what i'm most succesful in, unfortunatelly you cant make whole meals out of them

BESW

We'll occasionally do a pancake meal.

The "trick" is to have things like fruit and yogurt as toppings.

RandomGuy13421

When i feel like it i make cakes in a cup, so it would be 1 portion, in the microwave or oven, pretty easy

Yeah, pancakes are pretty versatile

BESW

We often bake the pancakes in the oven.

They rise up kinda cake-like.

And we're experimenting with a Japanese pancake, it's traditionally made with potato starch flour and has veggies baked into it.

Okonomiyaki

Okonomiyaki (お好み焼き, o-konomi-yaki) ( listen ) is a Japanese savoury pancake containing a variety of ingredients. The name is derived from the word okonomi, meaning "what you like" or "what you want", and yaki meaning "grilled" or "cooked" (cf. yakitori and yakisoba). Okonomiyaki is mainly associated with the Kansai or Hiroshima areas of Japan, but is widely available throughout the country. Toppings and batters tend to vary according to region. Tokyo okonomiyaki is usually smaller than a Hiroshima or Kansai okonomiyaki. == Kansai area == Kansai- or Osaka-style okonomiyaki is the predominant version...

RandomGuy13421

They look nice

I like when there is a "stock" recipe and you can add whatever you want to it

Too bad i'm not really inventive

BESW

Tassajara Cooking might be good for you, then.

doppelgreener

09:25

okonomiyaki can be nice, though the one i've had was too dry and floury. alas.

(and it had okaka on top, which i stayed away from initially - but when i tried that i wretched and could still taste and smell it for hours. perfectly good stuff - except for someone whose tastes and entire body apparently are disgusted by most kinds of fish.)

BESW

@doppelgreener I have no response to that.

doppelgreener

it's the equivalent of getting through most of a particularly delicious apple, then seeing half a worm in it.

(not that this has ever happened to me, so i'm estimating)

oh, right, i mean - i ate most of the okonomiyaki except the part of the top they'd put okaka on.

then i was like "i wonder if this is really fish stuff, it smells a bit like it" and tried it and yes it was.

BESW

09:45

@Hadashi [wave] Hello, Water Mouse.

Hadashi

Hello. XD

BESW

What's new?

Hadashi

Not a lot. How about you?

Surprised you recognised me, lol.

BESW

Working on preparing a plot the players will discover for the first time in a long time.

@Hadashi I'm kinda into Ursula Vernon's art. Have you seen her newest thing? Tribal chicken pendants.

Hadashi

@BESW Not until you mentioned them. XD What are they like? I can't seem to google them up.

BESW

09:51

They've been selling out as soon as she puts them up; if you don't stalk her Twitter account it's hard to see 'em. One moment...

i am particularly pleased by "pendant on saber-tooth tiger skull cast." https://t.co/2kLumixW0b

Tweeted by UrsulaV on July 17, 2016 at 7:14 PM in reply to UrsulaV

This newest project started about a week ago and now she has an Etsy shop.

I grabbed one for my mother this morning; I was lucky enough to see her tweet about new items within the first couple minutes.

@DuckTapeAl I've been staring that that line for a day now, and I think the most horrific part is the implication of ranged haircutting.

BESW

10:23

@Trish Hi!

Anaphory

11:48

@BESW That sounds like a cook book for me!

BESW

@Anaphory It really is a cook book rather than a recipe book, and I love it for that.

Ed shows you how to cut a carrot or a potato, or prepare a pepper, and he says things like:

> Soups can have either a thick base or a thing base (background). Thicker soups can be based on beans, potatoes, winter squashes, grains, nut butters, or a flour-thickened sauce. For thinner soups the background is usually water or vegetable stock with added seasonings.

Hadashi

@BESW Those look really nice. :) I've always liked her art.

BESW

Then he talks about each, starting with the basic outline for a thin or thick soup and giving examples of each ingredient before showing how common soups follow that pattern.

Anaphory

echo Edward Espe Tassajara Cooking >> ToBeRead; # or something like that, when I'm back on my own computer

BESW

He does the same thing for salads, sauces, and other things. The other half of the book is "Here's a common ingredient, how to prepare it, and some examples of dishes that feature it."

There's also Tassajara Bread, which does the same for muffins, quickbreads, etc.

Anaphory

11:56

I did think that if I ever managed to become good at cooking, that would be the kind of cook book I'd write.

BESW

@Hadashi I know, right? And her Kingfisher stories too.

Anaphory

@BESW I managed to read the Labyrinth Diary explorer thing (that wasn't the title, but you'll get what I mean), I should continue reading more, maybe that brand of hers.

BESW

@Anaphory She's writing kids'/YA books as Ursula Vernon, and more adult-targeted stuff as T. Kingfisher. Both are quite worthwhile, I think.

Also, Digger. Oh my, Digger.

Hadashi

12:11

Oh, you guys were talking about Japanese food earlier? I had osaka pancakes at a Japanese convention once, they're really good.

Anaphory

@BESW I got that. And Digger is the first one of hers I read, and I have re-read it twice so far.

Trish

13:12

ouch, forgot to look here while playing factorio... damned game...

nitsua60

Okay, I get that I'm nine hours late to the conversation, but I've got to stand up in defense of ODD's alignment system:
(1) It's actually based in fiction, so people have more than just corebook+implications to draw on;
(2) Law and Chaos are external agents vying for the manner of reality, and the planes are just game-boards they've set up for their contests;
(3) Many races were created by one-or-other of the forces, leading to, yes, genetic ties to one side or the other. Not evil/good, but Law/Chaos;

My point being, the system as a whole worked pretty darn well, allowing the GM to insert a grand cosmic-forces war feel if 'e liked, or just setting their happenings among people who (a) are ignorant, or (b) don't care.

It seems to me that it's semi-dropping the system that causes all the heartache that follows.

I.e. in the "full" scheme, it's fine for mechanical effects to depend on whether you're created by/servant to an overarching cosmic force. It seems to get problematic when your character suffers/gains mechanical penalties/boons depending on how players judge your character's actions and politics in relation to the players' RL standards.

</let me tell you how it was when I was a kid>

@BESW My treasured possession is my mom's 30-vol. "Women's Day Encyclopedia of Cooking." You look up an ingredient, and you'll find dozens of recipes featuring that. We had a bumper crop of cucumbers a few years back and went a week eating them two meals a day without repeating a dish.

BESW

13:29

Nice.

nitsua60

(OTOH, looking up something like "pork" can be intimidating, as you flip through and realize there are over a hundred pages of recipes.)

My dad and I have long daydreamed about writing a cookbook for cooks like us: it'd be a picture and a good (perhaps two-sentence) caption on each page. That's it.

BESW

Heheh.

Anaphory

Ideally, my cookbook is a set of templates, like “This is how you do a casserole”, with interfaces like in the (German) Kochbuch für Geeks, which I have; Plus a huge graph of “Try this with this; Don't use this with this”.

BESW

I often Google two of the ingredients I want to use that night (usually because they're about to go bad) and see the sorts of cooking styles and flavours that get used for them, then improvise from there with what I've got.

Anaphory

Yep, same here.

Or an ingredient and a dish style.

When actually looking for a specific recipe (like vegetarian pOrk pies), I mostly google for around 5 of them and then see what they share, don't share, and if they comment on the things where they differ.

Trish

13:36

a 30 volume cookbook?! that's nice to have, I have about... 2 dozen cookbooks, and the one I love most is the "Dr. Oetker Schulkochbuch", which does not only have alltime classics, it also has several variants for most dishes. It does teach the basics you need for most other cookbooks too!

nitsua60

@Trish Yeah, it's pretty awesome. I believe it was a subscription-type thing that my mom got when she was first out on her own. (Here's an example.)

Trish

ohhh, yea, I hope they kept the style of the receips.

nitsua60

One of the volumes is just techniques, and after a good explanation of and set of exercises for each technique it lists (w. vol/page references) recipes that utilize/feature that technique.

@Trish how do you mean?

BESW

BTW, @nitsua60, did you see my proof of concept for the botch blog banner?

klogd

13:52

Could anyone give me a guess of how long Black Fangs Lair (pathfinder beginner box) would take to play (inexperienced players and GM, but GM knows the rules pretty well). would 3-4 hours be sufficient?

Trish

@nitsua60 the writeup method. It changed considerably over the last years - in the 60s cookbooks had at times measurements that are not used nowadays.

Anaphory

For example?

nitsua60

@Trish I've no strong recollection. I mean, it's tsp and oz and cups and minutes...? No drams or grains or picoseconds =)

I do have strong recollection of the photography style being very easy to pin down as "60's housewifery"

@BESW I have now!

Anaphory

@klogd I don't know, but I have got good answers for other duration questions on main site.

nitsua60

I like the concept. I really like "my GM is such a-"

Trish

14:00

@nitsua60 it might be more relevant in germany: we had Pfund (500g) as reference often, which was phased out fully.

nitsua60

I must admit, there's a depressing lack of picosecond-cookery out there....

It's the 21st-century. Where's my replicator!?

Hmm... that was an interesting set of flags. Anyone else see them?

And now I'm getting notifications for messages but am not allowed to vote on them... along with a (0) notification? Anyone know what's going on?

BESW

@nitsua60 They're getting voted on by others faster than you can load them.

nitsua60

@BESW Okay, so I load but before I vote it's already been cleared? Makes sense.

klogd

@Anaphory I know it's not an easy question to answer as it depends on so many variables, but a vague idea of how long other playthroughs took would be helpful :)

Trish

@nitsua60 Fun with Sheldon?

@nitsua60 And... I once wrote a fun cookbook. I only used SI units, even for a tablespoon of salt.

Anaphory

14:18

@Trish 1.7×10⁻² kg?

I do generally prefer relative volumetric units, because they are very easy to measure even under crazy circumstances.

Trish

@Anaphory kind of like this, yes. Or mol...

nitsua60

@Trish I forget who the users were. But it seemed like two users, arguing in a room created for a conversation space between those two users, and no bad language or threats or overly-personal attacks, so I didn't see much to react to.

The Oracle

14:42

0

Q: How can we rein in playstyle conflicts on a Q&A?

How to handle a player asking too many questions between sessions and its answers seem (to me) to be verging on a few troublesome points: a GM knowing better than his players what's fun for them, answerers knowing better than the GM what's fun for his players, answerers knowing how the GM shoul...

Trish