I smile every time someone 'goes to our superiors.' In general whenever we escalate these things to our superiors in mod superchat, they generally say something along the lines of "screw that miscreant why haven't you banned him already." We're a lot more tolerant than the average it appears
@mxyzplk I do look forward to some meta conversation around the help-pile problem/phenomenon. I know I'm probably on the "pile" end of the spectrum, so it'll be good to hear some other perspectives on the matter.
I tried to see if we could to an expanded FAQ or Help page but its not really in the cards and honestly if someone cares/tries they will learn from listening to the comments
@Miniman No problem! No way you could know. I just happened to be reviewing Enchanted Hobbit's past activity and noticed a new associated account had popped up minutes before.
@MadMAxJr Yeah, but if I can help there be one single place on the entire Internet where you can get RPG information without all the nonsense and trolls and hatemongering and poor content and time waste that inhabits... Well, every other RPG social site... I find it worth it. Keep the light shining that the Internet doesn't have to be all memes and fruit loops.
Yeah. Over the years I still lean on this place for getting useful questions and answers. But good god when a debate breaks out it gets bloody fast here.
Wonder how many active users are left from the beta days.
hmm, depending on the definition of "left" I bet we could do a query. users that have had activity in the last... month that also had activity in beta period kind of thing
Ah, I see. I can't imagine using it to run everything... we're on SQL Server at work and are desperately working to migrate away from it due to licensing and costs and general DB administration problems
@LegendaryDude yeah, i'll stick by with what I said. if you don't have the people in place to actually maintain the server/s and database/s, you're going to run into the same problems
@DForck42 We're working on many things. Moving to Aurora MySQL is the first step of many, next is to break our monolith out into microservices. That's where a lot of the data redesign will come in (fingers crossed).
@LegendaryDude seems like it would have been easier to do the data redesign and the migration at the same time (but I dunno the full process, just what you're telling me)
I spend a lot of time writing queries and updating/creating stored procs used by our applications but I had basically 1 class with sql in my masters course and then didnt use it for a year and I can't do any of the core stuff which is all locked down for very reasonable security reasons
@DForck42 I wanted to emulate the 4e database but didnt wanna deal with the legality of that (would just be on my pc not hosted but still illegal)
but I think Ive settled on creating a cocktail database for my various books I have
@LegendaryDude It patents it for computer use or “traditional hardcopy”. They're just fancying up the concept of “smaller scale hexmaps correspond to larger scale ones, and let you more precisely locate things in the larger hexes!!!1!” in order to make it look like a valid technical invention.
@DForck42 Yes. If p is your "base" probability of hitting before advantage, then p_adv = 1- (1-p)^2 = 2 p - (p)^2 is your probability of hitting with advantage.
Simply because the US patent office is overworked and their policy is to approve things unless they're obviously invalid, then let courts and lawsuits correct them.
D&D 5E has an "advantage" concept where instead of rolling 1d20, you roll 2d20 and take the highest. Likewise, disadvantage means rolling 2d20 and taking the lowest.
How does this affect the expected average outcome of the roll?
@nitsua60 Asterisks embedded in non-space strings often mess up. I think it's the adjacent hat punctuation that's making it parse as text instead of formatting.
@SevenSidedDie I threw a whitespace between the asterisk and the hat, but perhaps I'd forever-queered the deal by making it initially-text-parsed.
@JoshuaAslanSmith +5 is great when the roll you'd need for success is a 11. But since we're usually choosing actions for which we have a better-than-50% chance of success, the +5 rule of thumb usually overstates things.
My objection to replacing (dis)advantage with a modifier--even if properly chosen to be exactly on the money, mathematically--is that it eliminates what I believe is the true brilliance of (dis)advantage: you get to see the roll you dodged!
@nitsua60 That's been mostly turned down because there's a userscript people use for that, which is popular enough on the really mathy chats that there's little impetus to do MathJax in chat. (Also I think it's technically difficult to enable it, since right now chat is all one site.)
@DForck42 Also, I don't know if it's clear, but that p_adv arises as it's the chance of failing twice, subtracted from 1. I.e. it's the probability of not having failed twice.
Here's a thing relevant to chat. I don't think RPG.se chat specifically runs into trouble in this regard, but possibly because we're already doing it and so this should be nicely validating (cc @BESW):
This is sort of a follow-up to two past discussions:
Toward a philosophy of Chat
Does the Be Nice policy require SE users to "be nice" to people who are not SE users (e.g. public figures)?
Over the past year, there's been an uptick in discussions of politics in chat. JUST LOOK AT THIS CHART!
...
I'm looking for RPG games with flexible magic systems. What I mean by flexible is
No spells lists or grimoire.
The only limitation to what can be accomplished with magic is the player creativity.
As long as the mage has enough power/time/comprehension he/she can do virtually anything.
The casti...
Hi Paulo; unfortunately as of a policy change last year game recommendations have become off topic. However feel free to join us in Role-playing Games Chat where we can explore the topic with you. — doppelgreener25 secs ago
(also, VTC it's a game rec)
@MadMAxJr I'm cautiously interested but I'll get excited if and when I find out it's actually good as a game.
@paulodiovani No worries. I'm not sure about activity at the moment, but a lot of us have explored a great many magic systems. @Magician has played Ars Magica; @BESW and @trogdor have played the Dresden Files RPG, and those two and I have played various editions of Fate Core where magic is definitely flexible.
Dresden Files is actually effectively an earlier version of Fate than Fate Core, and imposes quite a considerable amount of structure on its magic that Fate Core (being not specifically about magic) doesn't really worry about. It works pretty well, speaking as someone who's played FC but never the original DFRPG.
Specifically we played a modern fantasy/sci-fi game based around an ancient black ops organisation trying to handle Weird Stuff in the modern world. I played a Dryad with plant magic; @trogdor played her creator (a Swamp Thing scientist who created her to test whether he could viably turn himself from a human into a plant man) as well as a dragon; @BESW played a girl with a time gun and jetboots, etc.
We've also played in Masters of Umdaar (a world of adventure based on Fate Accelerated) which does Laser Fantasy, a la Thundercats and He-Man. Fantasy, magic, weird species, and laser guns.
... Miracles would make a good character name if you pronounced it Greek/Roman style (as with Heracles or Hercules).
@BESW has also been putting thought into mixing the mechanics of Shadowcraft (a Fate game) and Bubblegumshoe (a Gumshoe-based game about teenage sleuths) into a patron magic game.
@SevenSidedDie could probably talk to you about magic in Dungeon World or whatever other Apocalypse World-based games could feature it, like Monster of the Week.
@doppelgreener @doppelgreener I still have to get my hands on The Paranet Papers. As I read about it add some updates to DFRPG systems. Probably based on FATE Core.
@paulodiovani DFRPG works as a good gateway to port a player from D&D to fate core eventually
it abstracts some systems a lot more and teaches the fate mechanics but there are giant rules sections about magic for them to hang onto without it being a system shock
@paulodiovani The stock classes use Vancian-like magic, yes. But since the rules for magic are self-contained in a class's sheet, replacing the Wizard with a freeform magic class (e.g. The Mage) gives you freeform magic.
@SevenSidedDie I concur, there are a LOT of 3rd party classes for Dungeon World that essentially go that route
there is no unified magic system in Dungeon World, the game just uses very similar terms for The Cleric and The Wizard for sanity's sake when describing their moves
@JoshuaAslanSmith I recall BESW having mixed feelings about DFRPG, including its approach to imrpovised magic backlash. (And some sorely missing guidance about what to do with it.)
@JoshuaAslanSmith I'm looking at a pile of 3rd party classes right now, because I'm spinning up a DW game in a more Final Fantasy style to start next week.
@doppelgreener I never got that deep into it because the guy running it moved across the country
but yeah I could see that
@SevenSidedDie The beauty of DW, its also very easy for a player and GM to collaborate to make a custom or tweaked class to fit the party/player/setting/story better
TheWalkingMind blog has some great Dungeonworld/Apocolypse engine tweaks in general
@JoshuaAslanSmith Aye. Nearly built a custom Monk, until I found one that does nearly exactly what I want (and is clearly designed with a solid understanding of DW, not something I can say about all 3PP classes).
Most recently in terms of magical characters I created an alchemist for our Fate Core ancient-organisation-combating-Weird-Stuff game and found it pretty flexible, once I'd understood how I could more flexibly use the mechanics than I'd been doing previously.
For my dryad, I'd tried defining everything about her character up-front, which meant I looked to her stunts for creating magical abilities. When I got to the alchemist we tried having characters that started off mostly blank and got filled in as we went, and I was finding I didn't need stunts for her to do magical alchemist stuff.
@paulodiovani The shortest description of DW-style flexible casting I can think of is that you say what you want to do, and it likely just happens, but first you roll to see if your attempt gets you in trouble. If so, the trouble is up to the GM (within certain trouble-type choices). The balancing comes from the trouble being potentially as “powerful” as the original attempted magic would have been powerful, so it's “beware overreaching” type of balance, rather than preventing things up-front.
@SevenSidedDie yeah ive seen good and Ive seen bad. My one friend played one called the dashing hero (trying to be an errol flynn type pulp hero) but most of the moves were about using other classes moves
@SevenSidedDie though it's also a game where you can eventually pick up a power that can sometimes let you say "i decapitate the Big Bad Boss Monster" and it happens, so I imagine the bounds of magical stuff goes pretty far & pretty much just happily adds to the story.
@JoshuaAslanSmith Oh, hm. I was looking at the Dashing Hero but haven't bought it yet. Maybe it's not the swashbuckler I'm looking for. I thought I'd heard ages ago that it was supposed to be a class suited to one-on-one DW campaigns, but I couldn't quite remember if it's the one I'd heard about. I guess that confirms that!
@doppelgreener @doppelgreener I played Mage: The Ascention a lot, so I can easily figure out what to do with a backslash (hijacking Paradox ideas)...
For example, a 2-4 shifts could simple add some Aspects on the scene, with free invocations for the enemies. Anything beyond that could easily hit everyone in the area with 4+ Shifts. Huge backslashes (possibly caused by Thaumaturgy) could make things really interesting, like summoning/setting free a demon or throwing the PCs to anywhere in Nevernever.
Quick question for anyone who can help me - I just unlocked "Reopen vote" recently. I just edited my question, should I be voting to reopen or leave that to others? Can't seem to find the page explaining it currently.
@Sh4d0wsPlyr if you have a closed question, you can edit it and, if you think it's now a suitable question for the site, you should be able to cast a reopen vote
it'll get dumped into the reopen queue where others can review it and vote, either to open or keep it closed
I have a solid group of 3-5 players who regularly play together and I DM for them. One of these players regularly dies during our campaign (sometimes multiple times). I typically allow people to re-roll a new character and have them rejoin the campaign when this happens.
Based on observation, I ...
I wanted to avoid using our specific in-game examples and make it a more general question about the issue itself and why it happened. But I can certainly make those changes to add more context.
Editing now with a couple of the more recent examples.
The only concern I see is that if it comes down to specific examples I cannot cover all bases. This has happened a number of times (at least 7 in the last campaign, and many more in previous ones).
It was so bad he was dying once a week (e.g. session) for a while.
It's important to know, for example, if anyone at the table is getting legitimately upset. If the other players are OK with it, good, that's not a problem factor. You're clearly frustrated by it since they're not playing the way you would prefer them to.
If its really important to you and talking to them about changing behavior doesnt work you might want to penalize the player and not the PCs, make death an actual penalty, give them a set number of lives per arc, use up and you are done
its a common problem as a GM to invest time and energy into building/running a game to want it to be a set tone, they treat it more like a video game or think that it should be like those RPG stereotypes so this is as it should be to them
@JoshuaAslanSmith It's been mentioned here in chat and in other problem-player questions that when you provide in-game penalties for undesirable activities, all you've really done is codified the behaviour as a legitimate part of the game (that may come with a cost).
Josh you might want to consider this in your answer - but one concern I would have is that they now seem to enjoy it. Taking it away or making it less fun might hinder their experience at this point (possible next campaign I start have the rules clear).
Although they do seem to enjoy the joke and fun of it so maybe I am worried about nothing. I feel a discussion with them might be best but it would be great to have some ideas at this point.
I remember there was a question recently where a GM was super frustrated his players metagamed, sharing information with each other as players their characters wouldn't be able to share. He decided he'd punish them in-game with XP penalties, which some answerers pointed out just made sharing metagame information effectively a free move within the game you use at an XP cost.
(I think the advice for that question was generally: chill out, you've got different expectations from your players but you can't bludgeon them into playing your way, they've already shown they obviously don't want to play your way at all, so try playing their way.)
@doppelgreener I had an issue with that a while ago (diffrent group, I was a new DM at the time) and I decided to punish by making it hard enough that the Meta-game was required to do decent. I thought those campaigns were fun because it was "Survival: Maybe".
well there's also options like "if everyone's having fun, there isn't a problem and you can relax, you are doing it right, the objectives for playing a game have been met" -- which is why it's important to consider who may not be having fun if anyone.
My group realised that a campaign is becoming less fun because of diverging understandings of its themes and goals, so we're doing other stuff until we have the time and emotional energy to re-build expectations and assumptions on that game from the ground up.
Ah ok - I do something similar. I basically invite people one at a time and explain it. However since I generally game with the same group it typically is a quick conversation of "this is the setting, all books, this is your 'general goal' of the campaign, and here is where you start and why you are there".
Always using pure RAW rules, no homebrew/etc.
@doppelgreener Fairly well - it is ironically why my campaigns are considered "difficult" among my friends. They enjoy the challenge and I enjoy trying to kill them while they beat the campaign.
Guys, I have a lapsus. How do you call that thing where you want to believe that something is real, the thing that can be broken if you introduce wacky elements in the narrative or when the mechanics distract you?
Ah, so is this a sort of antagonistic GM-vs-players style of game? GM sets up enormous challenges, plays within their rules as the players try to overcome them efficiently?
@doppelgreener Yup. I am fair in the sense that everything is possible. No challenge is "meant" to specifically kill them and they can accomplish anything.
The best part if when I pit them against each other occasionally, find some good story point to cause tension/conflict in the group and see how they react.
@DForck42 D&D isn't designed with intraparty conflict in mind. Resources, balance, progression, all start to fray at the seams in most editions when PCs fight PCs.
In other news, as the owner of a clr18ftr1, beating a CR 24 mystic theurge and his gang of 10 CR 17 wererat warriors with the help of two lower level combatants feels good.
Sometimes I have the impression that the DM is just letting us win for the sake of story, but this time we broke into his lair while he was still trying to regroup, with less buffs than usual and a surprise round. And I had the right spell to deal with him: dimensional anchor.
@SevenSidedDie I saw that! I kinda wish it were a bit more general, though. This particular chat community has been actively avoiding most discussions about specific political figures recently, but we can talk about other usually-fraught topics because we try to adhere to similar guidelines.
Personally, I try to imagine that whatever group of people I'm talking about, the person I'm speaking to has a beloved grandmother who's in that group.
@MadMAxJr I'm curious, but not very invested in 80s nostalgia to be personally excited.
My memories of the 80s are limited to things like feeding baby coconuts to the neighbour's pet deer, and having a freezer full of snakes in Tupperware.
I am keenly aware of how much the 80s seen through contemporary media is a fictional reconstruction that has little to do with the 80s as they happened, though.
Nothing's necessarily wrong with that, I'm going to start calling it 80spunk.
@DForck42 It prevents people from teleporting away, which this guy liked to do. Basically, every time we dealt him enough damage to render him unconscious he automatically healed up and teleported away.
@BESW This is approximately my own policy. I try to imagine that someone who is lurking is of the particular group spoken of, and to speak in a way that wouldn't make such lurkers feel unwelcome.
@SevenSidedDie That works for public chats, but less for personal conversations. I like having a one-size-fits-most internal guideline, it's less for me to keep track of.
Yours is probably better where it's applicable though.
@DForck42 The downside is that this spell takes the form of a ray fired from my hand, and directing it is tied to Dexterity - not the best Ability score for my character.
Good. Wednesday I was draaaaggging, after three straight nights of 5e sessions. Thursday was regrouping. Today I felt like I was in withdrawal. Tomorrow's a marathon afternoon-dinner-evening session.
I'm not sure I'm going to survive this playtest =)
@nitsua60 sheesh. I did managed to get one of my other 5e games off the ground yesterday -- party so far beat the living daylights out of some local hoodlums, then got kidnapped in their sleep, locked in a box, somehow survived knocking themselves and their box off whatever craft was carrying them, and now are castaways on an island. at least whoever was on the craft airdropped them their stuff back. :P
now...to deal with scrawny goblins who apparently don't have a clue where food comes from
(hint: if you're a fatso half-elf gambler rogue sort, playing grab-arse with someone who's better armed, trained, and armored than you isn't a smart plan. it's especially not smart when there's a 6'5" half-orc lass in the corner who doesn't look kindly on the parentage of those who play grab-arse)
@BESW I just play the popularest game--no shame there. I have been pleasantly surprised by how well almost all hats work with this ridiculous avatar =)
It's not so much the time, it's the roller-coaster effect on my preoccupation/work balance of doing three evening sessions, two days off, marathon session, day off, repeat three more times.
D&D 5E has an "advantage" concept where instead of rolling 1d20, you roll 2d20 and take the highest. Likewise, disadvantage means rolling 2d20 and taking the lowest.
How does this affect the expected average outcome of the roll?
This is sort of a follow-up to two past discussions:
Toward a philosophy of Chat
Does the Be Nice policy require SE users to "be nice" to people who are not SE users (e.g. public figures)?
Over the past year, there's been an uptick in discussions of politics in chat. JUST LOOK AT THIS CHART!
...
I'm looking for RPG games with flexible magic systems. What I mean by flexible is
No spells lists or grimoire.
The only limitation to what can be accomplished with magic is the player creativity.
As long as the mage has enough power/time/comprehension he/she can do virtually anything.
The casti...
