@BESW I see what you meant now. The "oh, you have a knife but cutting onions requires Kitchen Proficiency feat and Slice and Dice sueprnatural ability." was always a reason why I often laugh at D&D being a "choose from the list" game.
@eimyr Right. Instead we gravitate toward games that have a very small list of mechanics which are broad enough to encompass whatever situation we find ourselves in (assuming the engine is designed to encourage stories where that kind of thing happens).
There was a time when I really liked relying on developers to have designed a shockingly wide array of very narrowly applicable options each tailored to a particular situation.
Well, the character pictured on my avatar is an all-around circuswoman. Lots of skills in all things physical, lots of feats and character classes taken just to have her be good at that while sacrificing combat and all ability scores but Dexterity and Intelligence. And then, we get a character that has "contortionist, acrobatics, gymnast, boxe, brawl, running, karate" as tags of the same Athlete trait, with one other trait for being manipulating and seductive, one for being an artist and still one to spare.
Awesome. I started GMing my first Dungeon World adventure a couple of weeks ago, but my players aren't available for the holidays here. I've been jonesing for some dice and storytelling action.
That weird feeling when you caught yourself thinking "eimyr's avatar is still more flexible than mine. What should I do?" - D&D contortionist problems.
@BESW That's a set of points equidistant from eimyr. Can be defined by any three points in space or one point and one eimyr, assuming eimyr is a point entity.
Well, not any three points. Three points on the same line is not going to satisfy it. Also, not any three points defining a circle whose axis does not point towards eimyr.
I hope I did my math right.
My coworkers would now say I'm a fun-killing nitpicker.
A mod said I should ask if there is a rule that says one single (arbitrarily defined) question per post. Too Broad does not mention it. Is it an actual rule somewhere or a guideline or what?
And how does it define 1 question? Questions can need very broad answers (like explaining how a spell work...
@Magician Your posts have a good length for not needing “Read More” links. But if it continues growing, at some point it will be hard to skim through articles even on tag pages.
I'm just really confused on how to split my incorporeal question. I can probably make it 2 questions, or 4 or even 10. I just don't know how much [content] is enough, and how many [separate questions] is too many. rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/86270/…
I can easily see how other folks would see that as too broad, though, and Mxy seems to have put his foot down on it; he's usually right about that sort of thing, even if he's not always the nicest person to have tell you about it.
Ask for what you really want, no more and no less. If it needs to be pruned in order to fit the Stack form, we'll see if it can be pruned into a still-useful question.
But artificially expanding a question beyond your needs just gets bloated, vague answers or discourages people from answering at all because they can't hit every point.
Some questions are complex, and we can deal with that pretty well. But questions that have complication artificially added tend to just make headaches for everybody.
It's been my experience that folks tend to like to talk and have opinions; answers often overflow the strict boundaries of what's being asked, just because of human nature. Encouraging that garrulousness, though, leads to problematic levels of noise.
We do occasionally get waves of conservatism passing over certain parts of the Stack, but they pass.
<- is wishing he'd read the end of the long published campaign in more detail at the start so he doesn't now have to work out how to make up for all the bits he's misinterpreted whilst running it so the end actually works and makes ssense :/
In this case, I wanted to point out the quoted and “answered to” post (also pinned on the right) to Wibbs.
I did that by copying the post, clicking it's “reply to” link, and editing a > and the link manually into my post above.
This is not very convenient, I would have prefered to look up the post number (via permalink, for example, giving me 31590057) and then typed something like @Wibbs: :31590057 to make that connection.
@SevenSidedDie when you've got a moment, I've a question about this comment I left. I was a little on-the-fence about writing it, worrying that it might be crossing the "small/incomplete answer" or "discussion-ey" line. When I later saw that you'd done some cleanup I was actually surprised to see my comment had survived... can I ask what you saw as redemptive about it?
@nitsua60 Certainly! Yeah, I can see how that seems inconsistent. One of the rarer (and more rarely properly-used) purposes of comments is to “Add relevant but minor or transient information to a post”. Links to related questions are obviously useful; off-site stuff is a judgement call, sometimes used to “answer without answering”, but sometimes is just related reading. That post doesn't try to answer the question, so it looked like a fine, related bit of reading.
@SevenSidedDie To be clear, I'm not terribly concerned about consistency in the abstract. I just noticed that in this instance you were nearby with the broom and dustpan and thought "eh, that's okay" and wondered what you saw.
Question to the room: is it true that the "contact us" link at the bottom of main/meta pages is the way to get in touch with CMs?
@nitsua60 Gotcha. I saw a good-faith link to some cool reading that was topical. Sometimes such links are left in a passive-aggressive way that implies “this question shouldn't exist, here is a link that will induce shame in such ignorance” or a LMGTFY vibe, and those get the dustbin fate, but links with no whiff of that are cool. They don't always survive general cleanup, but when there's attention to spare, it's worth sparing them. :)
@SevenSidedDie Offenders looking something like "uhh.... did you try [this]?" where [this] links to the google search result for the title text, I suppose?
They're like the front-line service peeps for the community side (as opposed to business side) of the company. Anything sent from outside to SE-the-company goes to/through them.
@SevenSidedDie I've only had one interaction, when trying to navigate my way around Area51 for the first time. I was just asking so that I can be sure of my facts before leaving a comment; just trying to help, I hope it works out that way.
(I don't know the emoticon for distressed-anticipatory-grimmace.)
@SevenSidedDie I also think might help for mxy to explicitly spell out what he's meaning when he says "any additional traffic on this topic," as there are actually a lot of different topics that seem to run together in the OP's mind. But I'm hesitant, because every single character directed to OP just seems to add fuel to one-of-many raging fires. :S
@nitsua60 That's a good point, on both counts. I am torn. “Steer well away from the whole fiasco” is kinda the hoped-for course of action at this point, because trying to steer close-but-not-too-close is a rare skill that we can see isn't in play. Defining more precise boundaries than “all the stuff that has resulted in trouble” unfortunately would probably be taken as permission to steer as close to the rocks as possible.
@SevenSidedDie "Torn" is a good point. I'm perfectly happy to leave that troublesome decision to you-all. I'm already feeling like I've gone sailing in a thunderstorm, just leaving my one hopefully-unambiguously-helpful comment!
Should I comment on this question linking to 8 kinds of fun, or is that more of a frame-challenge-answer than a related-reading-comment?
@mxyzplk the first sentence of the comment you just left on encouraging roleplaying diesn't quite scan, I think. At least, I can't quite figure it out. I think your overall gist is "answers don't have to challenge frame, and could just answer the question posed." But if it's not that the comment might need work.
@nitsua60 I'm saying "everyone is bugging you to clarify whether it's what you want or the player wants" - feel free and clarify, but don't let that intimidate you into not proceeding if the answer is "it's what I want." Because allowing every player to do what they want isn't IMO the best way to have a successful game, and you don't have to.
(you the OP)
I've dealt with shy players, and sometimes that's been getting them to open up, and sometimes it's been them leaving the group because our expectations aren't consistent with what they can give.
Having too many bump on a log players impacts the play experience of the group. So they are valid in the kind of fun they want, but it's not necessarily congruent with the goals of the group.
@nitsua60 I'm still wondering how independent these (or the ones listed as Metagame rewards) are, i.e. which ones go well together, which ones are actually orthogonal, and how much they depend on personal vs. situational preference.
I would have guessed Fate (few other games have dedicated dice, and I thought I remembered you playing D&D), but I did not want to assume.
@NiekBergman … was that just a reflex, or is it worth pointing out that you have a grace period to edit posts in this chat? For me, I get recent posts to edit by pressing the “up arrow” key.
@mxyzplk New version conveys that perfectly well, IMO.
@Anaphory Yeah, they're certainly not a perfect partitioning of the game experience. But I think they're an excellent prompt to think constructively about "what're all the things going on at my table--and in my mind!"
It wasn't until reading that and thinking about my players in that paradigm that I ever took the time to sit back and think about my own play, even. Turns out, a lot of the reason I like to play D&D is as an arts&crafts outlet!
And they look sufficiently useful as tools to say “I want to play a game with lots of X”. My wondering is purely academic interest, let the social engineering go on with what we have!
@Miniman on this answer, penultimate paragraph: "I think most people would allow...." I'm not completely sure I'm following you. Are you saying "casting feather fall on someone currently falling even if you weren't within 60' of them when they started falling?"
It kinds reads to me, as currently written, "I'd let you cast it on someone who's 120' up when they start falling, even though that's outside the range of feather fall" where I think you mean "I'd let you cast it on someone when they enter feather fall's range, even if the fall had started higher up."
Well indeed! The rest of that sauce is likely to be salad dressing tomorrow. (Also, I did not follow any recipe, I just mixed those or substituting ingredients)
@Miniman Speaking of belltowers, today a lawn company ranked my school the most picturesque school campus in the US, mentioning the bell tower! Of course, they got the facts wrong, but it's nice to know that the fertilizer budget isn't going to waste =)
(Sorry, @trogdor, I was just messing with you. We really do sit on a river. We've got a pretty boss rowing program, which you can see shots of in the embedded video.)
It means the government has certain controls over it, and that it's been designed for strategic military use and disaster evacuation as well as for civilian infrastructure.
we have a lot of road that is speed limit 35 and below
most people do not go that slow anywhere
there are some main roads where it is a little silly to have 35 be the speed limit, but there is also an issue in actual legit 15mph areas of people still going like, 45
@BESW my dad just yesterday commented when I was driving him to pick up my mom's car from the airport that the 10 I was going over the speed limit was too slow for the guy who passed me at like, 60
