@Shalvenay whoops thank you for the correction. @Zachiel ping.

When do you have neither Advantage nor Disadvantage? That's called 'chess'. :)

@RollingFeles Today's session of Dungeon World cemented for me that the Apocalypse Engine's greatest strength is also its greatest weakness: the insistence on players avoiding calling out their own moves. It helps enforce strong roleplaying and story engagement for the players, but it puts so much pressure on the GM to track dozens of customised moves that it can compromise the GM's ability to respond to that strong roleplaying in kind.

More than ever I feel that the Apocalypse World Engine lives and dies on a GM's ability to organise, memorise, and multitask.

Aye, that's why I myself use custom moves sparingly or as throw-aways. Tie one to a specific NPC and when the NPC dies, the move goes down with them.

And NPCs have short lifespans in AW.

Thank you for sharing experience! I'm not familiar with anything apart dnd 5e. How DW differs in that way from dnd? I've read DW rules and it looks like that it's more strict to GM.

I think I've missed custom moves part and that may affect my understanding.

@RollingFeles DW is based far more on narrative than DnD. Basically, everything happens in a moves snowball: the GM narrates, the player reacts, reaction may trigger a move which may require a roll (2d6 + bonus for almost all rolls) and result in other moves being triggered.

Everything is slightly less set in stone.

@BESW yeah, that honestly seems like an imbalanced way to play

maybe that is the Fate experience talking, but still

It's quick to learn, there's less bookkeeping and memorization involved, more friendly for varied roleplaying, but there's also less rules to rely on for various situations and implementing things like tactical combat is more tricky.

@trogdor 2 imba nerf gm plz

buff pllay0rz

not that kind of imbalanced

I still think Apocalypse World implements the PbtA ideas better than Dungeon World!

@kviiri and how move triggers avoidance increase pressure?

@trogdor y gm not nerfed yet ???? i cld rwite this 2x better than u

lol

@RollingFeles Sorry, I don't understand the question.

@kviiri so, it leads to situation when balanced combat falls on gm's shoulders whereas in dnd system takes it on itself. Do I understand correctly?

@RollingFeles Yes, although DW is less built around the idea of combat balance than DnD.

i might have very much confused you @RollingFeles with my joking around, I think

@trogdor is not saying combat is imbalanced, but that there's a tremendous amount of work placed on the GM, such that the workload is not evenly distributed (balanced) between the players and the GM.

@kviiri I'm sorry. @BESW mentioned " the insistence on players avoiding calling out their own moves" and that it puts pressure on GM.

@RollingFeles yeah sorry, my use of the word "Balanced" was to indicate the overwhelming amount of work left on the shoulders of the GM

trogdor and I play Fate, where the players have about equal power to the GM -- the workload is very evenly distributed. in D&D, the workload is more like 30% players / 70% DM -- the players have to know their characters' own moves, the DM has to know everything else. In Dungeon World, the GM also has to know all the characters' moves and everything else, and the players are meant to mostly forget about their own characters' moves -- the balance is more 10%/90%.

@doppelgreener no-no, it's fine :) I'm trying to understand other's experience with DW without my own and in comparison with dnd 5e.

@RollingFeles Yes, that applies out of combat as well. It means that instead of saying something like "I use hack and slash on them" or "I use dexterity to defy danger", one should describe what their character is actually doing. Like "I smash the gnoll with my shield and follow with a slash at his belly" or "I scramble backwards to avoid the ball of fire".

If I understood BESW's point, he means that at these moments, it's up to the GM to resolve whether that triggers a move or not.

That whole thing where the GM does 90% of the work and the players do 10% of it is the imbalance @trogdor refers to, I think.

To be honest, we're not too strict with this business in our games. We're like "I open fire on the cultists, that'll show them! Going aggro, right?"

@trogdor nothing to be sorry about :) I've understood kviiri that with dnd tactical combat is supported with system, whereas in DW it's another issue to handle for GM.

Mmm, kinda.

mk

The players do a lot of the heavy lifting, but all narratively through roleplay.

@kviiri ah, I see.

@kviiri For some perspective on "DW isn't built around the idea of combat balance": we've established on the site that there is a move that lets a particular class of character potentially instantly decapitate the Big Bad (if they get lucky).

@RollingFeles just trying to make sure I didn't confuse you :)

Basically as long as you say what your PC is doing, there's no harm in actually offering the move.

@doppelgreener Yeah, I know :P

Oh, sorry, that was mainly directed at @RollingFeles, but in reference to what you said

@trogdor I'm grateful for that and sometimes I really have a difficulties in understanding :)

@doppelgreener I don't mind - there was a fair chance I hadn't known that and I would've been interested ;)

we all do sometimes XD

Yeah

not me i'm perfect

It's the GM's responsibility to do two things in DW: (a) control the world and its non-PC inhabitants in ways that follow the goals of the game, and (b) notice whenever anything --a player's actions, a PC's actions, or an NPC's actions-- triggers the mechanics and then preside over those mechanics as they happen.

@RollingFeles In DW, challenges need to be adjusted somehow differently from the usual "monsters first, then bigger monsters" mindset in DnD.

Because even the toughest monsters are pretty easy to beat if players could just roll hack and slash all the time.

Because NPCs and PCs have custom moves in addition to the moves all PCs can do and the moves the GM can do (which are also separate and unrelated groups), noticing when the roleplay triggers a move can quickly get overwhelming.

@BESW @kviiri mentioned earlier that players after narrative can declare intention: "Going aggro, right?". Simillar thing I've read in DW's rules example

Yep. "Going aggro" is a good example (it's from Apocalypse World, a very related game) because it's also a very oft-misunderstood move by my experience.

(basically AW1e has "going aggro" which applies to both violent threats and pre-emptive attacks, and "seize by force" which applies to mutual violence)

So it's of the type people tend to "confirm" a lot.

Yes, but the Apocalypse World Engine tends to present that "declaring intended move after roleplaying its trigger" option as a sub-optimal choice for situations where the group isn't yet able to achieve the optimal scenario.

@BESW I dunno, I don't recall AW books saying it's a bad thing.

It does say that player statements like "I'm going aggro on him" should be followed by the GM saying "Cool, what do you do?"

[shrug] Every iteration of the Engine differs, but the ones I've read (which don't include AW) put a LOT of pressure on the players to never refer to their own moves by name, ever.

Huh, peculiar. I wonder why it'd be seen as such a bad thing.

Maybe they're trying to get away from the "I roll to attack" or "I roll Diplomacy" mentality.

@RollingFeles I sort of picture DnD combat as a bit like JRPG or MMO combat - people are flinging around basic spells and strikes, with the occasional limit break special move that can dramatically alter the outcome. In DW, combat is a lot more like movies, about what happens between the attacks. You can't penetrate the giant's thick leather socks, so you need to climb their hair to strike them in their throat or something. There's more diverse action, if GM'd well.

Having run tremulus (another, admittedly flawed PbtA game) a bunch of times, we've found it doesn't quite work. If the player knows what they want to do, mechanically, they'll try and match their narration to that. It's backwards.

Yeah.

Apocalypse World book actually says that if the player says they're doing something, without saying it's a move, the GM should confirm with them that they actually intend to make the move.

So I guess I'm still trying to figure out what the range of PbtA can look like, and if/which I'd want to include in my stable.

@BESW I've seen in DW rules that narration triggers moves, not declaring. But it didn't prohibit to specify what you tried to achieve mechanically. Actually, there are many examples in the rules that show this behaviour. And after that GM should decide if move is triggered. Aforementioned examples show that narration is leading and sometimes desired move is not appropriate and GM prohibited it.

Weird. That's not the overall impression I've gotten from the rules OR from the folks who have talked to me about playing it.

(My GM earlier today asked us to suggest when others might be triggering moves more than to announce when we were gong for moves ourselves.)

@kviiri DnD can be just a simple wargame, but in my experience I've never felt it that way. Maybe because my favourite class if fighter and it doesn't have much options :)

@RollingFeles If you're interested in DW, take the time to check out its gritty ancestor, Apocalypse World, too. The first edition (mostly the same as the upcoming second edition) is freely available as zip here: apocalypse-world.com/previews/AW1E.zip

And I know a lot of folks have touted PbtA as specifically an engine where only the GM has to know the mechanics at all.

@RollingFeles D&D was derived from Chanmail which was derived from actual tabletop wargames (the likes of Warhammer); it's kind of like a wargame with a close zoom in on the individuals rather than the army.

@RollingFeles I may see DnD as more war-gamey than it actually is, but I don't think it's a bad thing to have a combat system tied to relatively rigid mechanics. It just results in different kinds of scenes.

@BESW My first RP game was via texting in skype. System was Warhammer Fantasy RP and no one knew rules apart master. Actually, mechanics knowledge lets you fell characters boundaries and I kinda like it.

@kviiri Can confirm; D&D 4e was great, but so were brief fight scenes I've had in Roll for Shoes, which has no special provision for combat at all.

@doppelgreener yeah, I can feel it very well now. Funny: I felt it when I became GM myself.

While being player I never had wargame feeling.

@doppelgreener Speaking of which, I'm planning to run a game of RFS for Shalv and VI some time soonish, in which we're going to very carefully and deliberately examine the table-level tools used and choices made as we play, and why.

Sort of an exploded-view examination of the table dynamics and its effect on the ludonarrative.

@kviiri yep. I want to try DW in particular and more narrative-oriented games in general with my players to see if it fits. I have a feeling that we may love it, but on other hand I can see case when having dnd system and feeling boundaries will be more desired solution for players. Experiment time :)

@BESW what is RFS?

roll-for-shoes

Roll For Shoes

Sometime I feel myself like a toddler who ask adults all kind of questions :)

On a Q&A site.

Thanks! :)

:)

Yeah :)

@RollingFeles Bah, don't worry about that. The RPG world is vast and deep. Roll For Shoes is something this chat knows about, but a lot of folks have never heard of it.

I knew a slightly different variation of it before coming here, heard through a friend of a friend, called "<friend of a friend of a friend>'s RPG system".

I learned about RFS from @SevenSidedDie, in an answer to one of my questions on this site.

And whenever I mention it, someone pops in to say "OMG WHY HAVE I NOT HEARD OF THIS."

@BESW I'm used to all kind of questions, even stupid ones. I'm developer and one of the first things that I learned that worries about asking a question are stupid and futile. Nevertheless my questions are born not only because I lack experience in rpg world, but sometimes because I'm not used to fluent chat in english. Hence the funny feeling :)

Yeah, sometimes your syntax is a little confusing, but that's not unique to you either.

We've got experience with a wide variety of Englishes here.

So don't worry about it.

Yeah. And I'm grateful for everyone's efforts in explaining things for me :)

@BESW oooh, sounds interesting.

Hey, often the "noob" questions are the ones which get us to challenge our own assumptions.

And if nothing else, there's nothing like teaching a concept to really help you master it.

@RollingFeles Basically, you could think of several different combat situations (tons of goblins, crafty bandits, huge troll, evil wizard, dragon etc) and think about what would you like to be the highlights, the best, most memorable moments of the combat, and adjust based on that.

> "We know more about the surface of the Moon and about Mars than we do about [the RPG landscape]" -- Paul Snelgrove

In DnD, the highlights are usually a player using their character's limited powers in a particularly good way - striking with Area of Effect damage when there's many enemies clustered together, or disabling some particularly dangerous aspect of the encounter.

In DW and other PbtA games, the actions themselves are more mundane, but yet, usually more grandiose. Stuff like what happens in movies: the hero leaps in the dragon's mouth, risking her life, but surprises everyone by cleaving the dragon's throat from the inside and leaping out through the wound.

@doppelgreener I think RFS is a good choice because it prompts interesting choices but the mechanics themselves are so bare-bones they make the ludonarrative more about choice than about system, but I'm open to suggestions for other systems.

But it's not clear-cut between DnD and DW - you can adapt the systems closer to each other based on what suits you best.

@BESW -- @RollingFeles Many people will say they learn the most about a topic when they have to explain it to someone else, because they finally have to actually articulate what was previously loose thoughts in their head. In explaining and teaching a thing, they solidify those thoughts and hone their expertise on the matter.

So! Newbie questions are good for us too, in addition to getting us to think about things we might not have, or in ways we might not have, like BESW mentioned.

Our first DW session was: We went to the town's weekly religious/social gathering and poked around asking nosy questions about a recent death until we were dragged out for making a nuisance, then got to know each other while waiting in a back room for the priest to come chew us out.

@kviiri I see. Yeah, it saddens sometimes that DnDs combat highlights are based on good rolls, than on good narration. However GM can fix this, if he/she try to reward players for creative thinking in combat.

@doppelgreener I can relate to that.

@BESW i think it sounds like a good choice too. if it isn't, you'll find out during/after your initial try.

@RollingFeles True and true - you don't have to settle to what the game offers you out of the box. I think it was BESW who once explained how they replaced a dragon monster with a set of "monsters" representing the beast's head, appendages, tail. That's already more interesting than just a single, atomic dragon.

@doppelgreener Yeah. I also want to run VI through a few other systems, just as a kind of overview of different ways the RPG experience can be enjoyed.

@RollingFeles part of the issue though with using D&D for certain purposes is the sheer number of "fixes" involved

@BESW (who's VI? someone from Discord or here?)

@doppelgreener Yes. Here she's VisuallyImpaired, hence VI.

Our DW game in Discord is the direct result of this question from her.

@BESW ok! :D

Oh, I see!!

I remember this one.

We chose DW in part because of the expectation that the GM would be taking most of the responsibility for the PC's mechanics during play, so VI wouldn't have to deal with a character sheet she can't read very well.

And I'm gonna give her a whistle-stop tour of other games like RFS and Lasers & Feelings which deal with the character sheet issue by just not really having one.

I need to try out Lasers and Feelings with a d10 instead of d6. I feel Laser Feelings occur too often with d6.

Interesting.

@BESW (coming into it a few hours late...) Yeah, I almost wonder if "never name your move" shouldn't be "avoid naming your move"

I'm starting to think even that is beating around the bush.

"Never name your move" is a GM maxim

Yeah, the GM shouldn't ever name their moves, that'd break the immersion.

Eh, immersion is a bugbear.

And it's lazy.

Groups that like immersion will develop their own customs depending on how they define it. For me, running Monster of the Week without explaining where my choices as GM were coming from was extremely distracting for @trogdor, who's used to understanding the constraints and freedoms of the GM.

"I'm activating your stuff's downside" doesn't quite feel as good as "you know, that machine gun REALLY eats up ammo fast. You're down to the last dozen or so rounds on your belt, which is a shame considering how many baddies are still left."

Fate lets us have our cake and eat it too. The mechanics are right there, but we understand their subservience to the plot and we make sure to do the vivid descriptions and story justifications.

I will confess that last night that I made a tactical error: usually I snag a three-minute break mid-session, useful to catch up on some notes, organize thoughts, re-shuffle things that have changed due to in-game developments. I thought a two-hour session wouldn't need that. In retrospect, I was wrong =|

@BESW We do sometimes find ourselves in a situation where players run down the list of aspects (their own, situational, opposition's, anything) looking for any appropriate ones. It's less than ideal.

I'm not actually sure who the MC moves are for, the GM so they have a checklist to rely on, or the players so there exists a list of stuff they can get thrown at them.

@Magician Yeah, but isn't that what aspects are for? Reminding us of narrative truths we want to be important but which we might lose track of?

Then again, the GM is there for the players, so by extension at least, everything is for the players.

@BESW Sort of? It takes us out of the action. Ideally it'd be "we're surrounded by Suffocating Darkness, so it'll be harder for them to shoot us", not "let's see, there's... no... not that either... oh, it's Dark here, isn't it. Yeah."

Yeah, I find myself looking for ways to drastically reduce the number of aspects in play, but I don't think that's a problem with the mechanic.

I think it's a playstyle thing.

I don't know if reminding is the primary function of aspects. After all, everything is an implicit aspect, made explicit when we care about it. Maybe reducing the number of aspects is the way to go.

Aspects, IMO, are there as an interface between the narrative and the mechanics.

@BESW yeah, exactly

As are AW moves.

Hrm. But the way they are used differs. Aspects are mechanics ("I want to get +2") -> narrative ("Suffocating Darkness hides us") -> mechanics ("and now I succeed on my defense roll"). Whereas moves are narrative ("I'm gonna hit that guy") -> mechanics ("oh, looks like I'm Hacking & Slashing").

Except that frequently also works out as mechanics ("I want to H&S") -> narrative ("I, um, hack that guy. Also slash him.") -> mechanics ("oh, H&S, what a pleasant surprise").

Fate recognizes it's a game, AW tries to obfuscate the fact.

I'm talking to myself again, ain't I?

@Magician I don't really see a problem with this, though. Except when we get to the point where simply "hacking and slashing" wouldn't cut it in most combats.

Which should come fairly soon in DW - Hack and Slash is a boring move.

@Magician This is a good thing to say, even to yourself.

I guess if the players don't like narrating their characters doing cool stuff, AW is a wrong game, though.

@kviiri That's not a problem with combat specifically (I have Issues with DW combat, just not this one), more with the general approach.

I dislike DW combat, to be honest. It's hard to run, and feels too much like AW except lacking AW's brutality.

AW combats don't get drawn out, because practically any damage disables a NPC or outright kills them.

@kviiri Because DW tries to still be about fighting monsters in dungeons, it can't be brutal to its PCs.

"Hard to run, drawn out, but lacking brutality" sounds pretty spot-on for most D&D combat, so it sounds like DW succeeded at its goals... they're just not necessarily goals we're interested in.

@Magician Exactly. I prefer AW over DW mostly because DW adapts things from DnD that I personally don't like that much.

"Cybertorso" would be a good name for a band.

@BESW I would be delighted to play Lasers & Feelings with them. It sounds ideal. RFS has a big list of skills and scores, so you might want to constrain the session length to keep things short and simple.

@kviiri I play Fate where we narrate and name our moves and have meta-level discussions regularly and it's one of the most immersed experiences I've ever had.

I feel like the meta-level discussion is helpful and not antithetical to immersion. It also helps remind me everyone at the table is just another human being and I don't get into Stanford Prison dynamics like I've repeatedly observed occurring in D&D-like games (including to myself).

There are moments in D&D-like games I've been legitimately unhappy with, yet somehow totally forgot I could just look across the table at the fellow human being (not all-powerful god-emperor) running the game and say "hold on a minute, I'm not happy with that". In Fate, I don't really find it hard to think to say stuff like that.

Yeeeah. With the exception of a few systems like A Penny For My Thoughts, I'm not a big fan of immersion as a priority play goal. It tends to sacrifice too many other valuable elements.

We usually have meta-discussions mostly between sessions. My GM is a rather ambivalent guy regarding those. He has a weird blend of "traditional" and "modern" qualities.

And one of his "traditional" qualities, by my assessment, is his role as a storyteller - not just a narrator.

Immersion, like horror, is only sustainable if everyone at the table is ready and willing to buy into it and everyone's agreed on what it looks like and how to achieve it.

But most attempts to create immersion start by throwing out the intimate collaboration-as-co-conspirators needed to achieve that situation.

Well that's true, to some extent. I guess it differs a bit depending on the kind of immersion one's pursuing.

Well, exactly. Like "horror," "immersion" is broad to the point of meaninglessness until the group sits down and finds a shared definition of their goal.

My current GM started RPGs in a table where I taught him AW. I think he picked up some of my worst bits.

I wonder if I was like that two years ago.

Or if it's just a matter of conflicting expectations or something... he's basically running AW as a more traditional adventure game instead of the "slice of very, very horrible life" I feel it's meant for.

It's probably bugging me more than most players we have - my character is a very well-grounded guy, with a casino to tend. I'd like to spend time tending to my casino and protecting it from various evils that might happen in my absence, which contradicts running around adventuring.

Anyway, with so few sessions in, I don't want to really think he's doing badly. I think it's not a bad idea to start an AW game, especially with new players, with a bit of action and travel.

Have to see where this is going, first!

@kviiri mm, i have a friend doing a sorta-adventurey AW game as far as i can recall.

that sounds like a matter of your GM wants adventurey stuff and you want slice-of-life stuff.

i personally want a game with high personal investment & stakes in what's going on across the game, and i sorta started getting that when we were playing bubblegumshoe, which is nice

Looking forward to continuing that game.

me too!

still need to get myself a replacement device, but it turns out the one i was looking at is no good.

@doppelgreener It wouldn't be necessarily wrong, except he's sort of railroading us a bit instead of working with the plothooks in our playbooks. No gigs, nothing related to the NPCs who want in on my casino.

it's lenovo, which still has a track record of loading up its devices with malware (accidentally or deliberately), some of it now evidently unremovable because it's buried in the hardware itself.

@kviiri that sounds troublesome then yes

@doppelgreener Classy.

And of course, with my character having that casino, I'd rather stick pretty close to it, instead of just adventuring. I think crises and drama should arise out of that.

It feels sort of pointless to name NPCs who want to take over or destroy my casino if the GM wants to run their own story instead.

For our first DW session, we were sort of flopping around looking for the story hooks--we had stuff that was happening, but all the hooks were buried under at least one layer of obfuscation. So I used a bard move to walk up to another PC and get her to define our first quest.

She said, basically, "That thing over there that sounds like a story hook? I want us to find out what's going on with that."

@BESW Very! So now I'm looking at either an ASUS touchscreen/laptop thingy, or some relatively much more expensive ACER laptops with no touchscreen, which I think I might be OK with since they'll last a good long while.

ASUS has something of a reputation for using shoddy connections that blow out if the power's dirty.

@BESW oh dear.

Yeah. [sad]

that might be a thing i should be realistically concerned about given the places I will bring this laptop.

Do your research, don't take my word for it. They may have shipped up.

well, I do know they have or had a reputation for very solid PC hardware.

My understanding is that the separate bits of hardware are good, but they sometimes/often cut corners on connecting them together.

My own experience with ASUS is 50/50.

ok, i was already inclining toward the ACER stuff so that's not so bad

@doppelgreener I got pinged

The response time is absurdly high, expect some serious lag.

@Zachiel oh, wow, that was right on the day fold on the transcript. immediately above my message shalvenay left a correction:

@trogdor also that kind of imbalanced, tho'

@doppelgreener I recognize "Oracle", "SQL", "injection" and "SQLite", all the rest is gibberish to me.

@Zachiel i made a recommendation you study stored procedures to guard against sql injection; shalvenay corrected me that it is is prepared statements or parameterised statements that do that. not necessarily relevant to you though.

The largest obstacle to me actually doing that now is that I'm probably not going to touch website building in months now, and the less comes in the way of batch-translating user manuals, the better my life.

At home, I'm torn between playing games, studying D&D 3.5e character building and thinking about how to tell my MMORPG that we need a coherent way, on game, to know if some character wants to be resurrected or not.

@Zachiel well, perhaps, I have not played every version of the system, or played it with a GM who was just out to party wipe us

I do think that kind of system requires buy in from everyone, or it doesn't work so well

@trogdor Well I'm not talking about such extremes, I'm just saying that, since DW uses task resolution, once you set out to achieve something you just say what you want your character to do, not what you want to achieve, and the GM gives you whatever he thinks is good or appropriate to what you described.

ah ok

I was given a good example of a possible problem. The fighter wants to beat the pulp out of someone in order to get informations, he describes it and to the GM it's hack&slash.

He succeeds, so he kills the target, and gets no information (and now we go back to "should the players have a say in which move they wanted to trigger?")

yeah that sounds like miscommunication at best

But if the game really wants you to declare what your character does, and it is the DM who has to choose the move (or if, really, the only move that makes sense is that one, since the one for getting informations requires you to be just menacing your opponent, and not really beating him into a pulp, but that would be out of character)?

sounds like a misidentified parley move?

I think the point is that with conflict resolution I can ask for an objective and since how I get it has no importance (except that it changes the fiction) I can do it however I decide. Meanwhile, in a task resolution system there are only so much mechanic ways I can use to get what I want to achieve, and I have to choose one of those.

Is there a good resource for designing a campaign, besides the dm guide for dnd?

@CBredlow Well, for starters I wouldn't include "the dm guide for dnd" in the good resources XD

In my experience, asking to other people who successfully did it is a good way to learn D&D DMing

For some other games there might be different answers. For example we've been talking of how to build horror games lately and a Rolemaster manual (IIRC) was named.

Some games have a built-in "this is how you build a campaign for this game" rules that you must follow if you want the game to look like the authors intended it

hey there @nitsua60

@CBredlow what system?

@nitsua60 dnd 5e

Ah, my fault. Maybe the 5e DMG is better than the 3e one.

@Zachiel I think the 5e DMG, like most D&D core books, is an excellent reference/resource for those who already know how to do the thing in question =|

@Shalvenay hiya

@Zachiel I guess I have never seen the boundary between those two species as terribly rigid. I'm very prone to ask a D&D player what their objective is, for instance.

@Shalvenay trying to re-interpret perfectly good code I wrote three years ago. Didn't that idiot-author know he should comment more? And more-usefully?

@nitsua60 hahaha :P

would now be a good time for us to talk re: last night? or would that be better saved for later?

@Shalvenay Now's a bad time--running out the door to pick up daughter from soccer, then it's dinner. After kids' bed tonight I'll be around and glad to debrief.

@nitsua60 alright then

@nitsua60 what's your goal? "To stab him". Roll to hit "did it" oh. Not enough damage.

(time to sleep now)

are adding puzzles to a dungeon a no-no?

@CBredlow not necessarily -- make it so that there are multiple disparate paths to progress though however (i.e. puzzles shouldn't be mandatory chokepoints as that creates spotlighting problems depending on play group and party composition)

@CBredlow If your group likes puzzles in dungeons, then puzzles in dungeons are awesome. Shalv's got some good advice on how to make the puzzles work well, but any "is it okay to do X in an RPG?" question boils down to whether the choice makes the folks involved happy while keeping them safe.

gotcha

Traditionally there's an expectation that some dungeons will contain some kind of puzzle, riddle, clever trap, or other intelligence-based obstacle.

In D&D, however, there aren't a lot of engaging mechanics for making and solving an intelligence-based puzzle in the game (for comparison, D&D has a lot of mechanics for the GM to make combat challenges and the PCs to 'solve' them), so the puzzle element of gameplay tends to become a real-life challenge rather than an in-game challenge.

(ie, the players who are best at puzzles are the ones who have the pressure to solve it--not the characters who are best at puzzles.)

This is more or less of a problem depending on the group.

I suspect mainsite has some useful questions and answers on the topic.

5e: Dual shield? Sure. Of course, all the second shield does is tie up an otherwise-free hand....

In 3.5 I found that one could get an amusing number of stacking bonuses/benefits from dual-wielding shields.

Not the base shield bonus, of course, but many extra benefits and features from classes and feats were worded so they'd accrue.

4e rewarded particular kinds of weapons over a second shield, though.

I just don't understand the part where OP recognizes that the second shield does nothing, but wants to do it anyway while "being effective or useful."

Alright, math-geeks: what's your favorite go-to method for an analytical solution when a non-linear ODE doesn't give it up to the method of Frobenius?

@nitsua60 sadly, I'm not a diff-eq type

@nitsua60 how badly non-linear are we talking about here?

[blink] I think you mis-abbreviated the Oxford English Dictionary.

....are you trying to model a suspension bridge? :p

@BESW No, but I wish I had. Because a non-linear OED would be awesome!

[Imagines throwing the library's OED through a shredder and letting it rain like ticker-tape off the library's upper balcony...]

@nitsua60 at least you've never asked a librarian to find you a document only to find out that not only does your library not have it, it's not available in the inter-library loan system

Says who?

@nitsua60 (i.e. the only libraries in WorldCat that have it in their collections refuse to send it out for inter-library loan)

@nitsua60 and the kicker? it's a document that's not even a decade old, and still being maintained/updated

I don't know what you're talking about.

@nitsua60 ...the time I tried to check out a copy of UL/IEC 60950

(it's the safety standard for power supplies for information technology equipment)

@Shalvenay cubic, btw

@nitsua60 ah.

(second-order, also)

i.e. y'' = O(y^3)

(to horribly abuse all mathematical notation conventions)

:P

ah. "non-linear" in a DE context to me only pops up when those pesky non-linear resonators come into play

read some of the more recent papers on the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse

@nitsua60 [HORRIFIC SCREECHING NOISES HEARD IN DISTANCE FROM MATHEMATICAL DEPARTMENTS]

"Hmm... sounds like Miskatonic Math's having their annual mixer again...."

@nitsua60 the seals are broken, and now I'm imagining a horror story about rogue mathematicians who must be resealed

@doppelgreener sounds pretty much like undergrad.