TRPG General Chat

12:20 AM

@Miniman on this answer, I think to be precise, it's worth noting that it's actually Mearls who says that the interrupted long rest cannot give the benefits of a short rest. Jeremy's saying that the two types of rest can't happen simultaneously. (And Mearls is dead wrong, by the rules.)

Shalvenay

hey there @nitsua60

SevenSidedDie

AWWW. Hatmas is over. :(

trogdor

12:36 AM

I still see hats though

well, after I said that they went away XD

Miniman

@nitsua60 I removed that paragraph - it wasn't really adding anything anyway.

trogdor

actually,... I do still see some hats

when I scroll up I still see hats

also, I am keeping that dang hat, I just need to go home and put it on again XD

nitsua60

@Shalvenay hiya

@Miniman Some day when we both have time I think we should schedule a chat-debate on that question. It's the only one I can think of on mainsite where I really do disagree with you. (Maybe we could sell tickets!)

Shalvenay

@nitsua60 how're things going?

nitsua60

@Shalvenay Good--you?

Shalvenay

12:43 AM

@nitsua60 good here. looks like I swung a spot at a sandbox-style AD&D table at my local FLGS

nitsua60

@Shalvenay Awesome--how regular/frequent are the sessions?

Shalvenay

@nitsua60 looks to be weekly

SevenSidedDie

@nitsua60 (Maybe “tuque”?)

nitsua60

@SevenSidedDie really!? mind=blown!

(I retract my comment, my downvote, and bow down to your chapeau-command!)

SevenSidedDie

@nitsua60 This is one of those rare Canadian superpowers: knowing how to spell toque/tuque since grade school. ^_^ (The name is the fault of Quebec.)

@nitsua60 Aw, but I could just edit for you, if you wanted. The rest all kinda fits the season. :)

nitsua60

12:49 AM

@SevenSidedDie Too late: I've already doubled-down on my American, overbearing, taking-advantage-of-Canadian-graciousness by vandalizing your post!

SevenSidedDie

waaaat. how dastardly. Just wait until I find a polite Mountie…

Miniman

@nitsua60 Happy to talk about it sometime (not now, unfortunately).

nitsua60

@Miniman Yeah, me neither. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow. But someday. Soon. And for the rest of your life.

(I think it's the one downvote I've cast your way!)

Miniman

Ooof.

trogdor

@SevenSidedDie wait, they are not all polite?

:P

SevenSidedDie

12:59 AM

@trogdor They're all polite but it would be impolite to imply the possibility of an impolite Mountie.

trogdor

lol

nitsua60

1:56 AM

@SevenSidedDie grr... did you delete that comment as I was flagging it? How dare you clean up that mess before I had a chance to tell you to clean up that mess?

=D

SevenSidedDie

@nitsua60 Possibly! Which comment?

nitsua60

SSDip.... [grimmace]

@BESW in your recent meta A, bullet point "Up voting and down voting are wholly..." did you intend up- and down-vote links to point to the privilege descriptions, but the close-vote link to point to a search result? It may be that you did, but I can also imagine it's easy in a post like that to get a link or two mixed up.

BESW

@nitsua60 Yes, the close link is showing high-voted but closed questions, demonstrating that the two are unrelated.

nitsua60

Gotcha.

BESW

There's a description link on closing later, in a bullet point more focused on that topic.

nitsua60

2:06 AM

Okay--slowly making my way through. I'm a depth-first reader, so I've read a lot of linked metas but have not yet finished yours =)

+1 for "boy howdy did we try" btw--nice turn of a phrase for the drama and trauma and passion and angst you're summarizing there =)

Miniman

Mental note: include the phrase "boy howdy did we try" in all future posts to get a free upvote from @nitsua60

5

nitsua60

It works on chat, too. See! ^^

Miniman

XD

Incidentally, I went back and looked at your answer to the short rest/unconscious question - I upvoted it when you posted it. It looks at the available evidence and finds a perfectly reasonable conclusion.

SevenSidedDie

@nitsua60 Oh! Hah, no, I hadn't seen that. *digs* Interesting. Looks like the comment contained enough rudeness-keywords that your single flag was binding on that comment. You deleted it. :)

Miniman

I think this is just a case of "not a lot to go on, pick interpretation as per your inclination".

SevenSidedDie

2:15 AM

@Miniman Yeah, the rest mechanics in 5e annoy me a bit. It's a spot of mixed high mechanisation and otherwise squidgey natural-language, and it does not have clean interfaces with its surroundings.

Miniman

Mmmm. It's not the only spot suffering from that problem, either.

nitsua60

@SevenSidedDie don't forget: really large consequences, too!

SevenSidedDie

Yeah. Pick one or the other — but 5e says, “…both?” and gets itself into some knotty problems.

Miniman

I'm tempted to rewrite my answer there a little, but with yours arguing the opposite side I think it makes sense to have them remain polarised.

SevenSidedDie

@nitsua60 Yeah! Injury and healing should be straightforward rules, or if they're not, have a lot of discussion and guidance on how to handle it.

Miniman

2:18 AM

Although I might drum up some extra scraps of evidence for mine :D

nitsua60

@Miniman Third contender for site motto: "perfectly reasonable conclusions"

2

Actually, it looks like that's the fourth

@SevenSidedDie Alternatively, we could explicitly make it a smorgasbord of simulationism, game-design, and balancing, and never disclose any of our thinking on the matter =)

(Don't mind me, just polishing my bona fides for a job at TSR some day.)

@Miniman I'd love to see it. The scraps you've currently got don't look that appealing to me =)

SevenSidedDie

@nitsua60 TSR definitely had a push-me-pull-you dynamic going on. I did prefer the design that wasn't exception-based though — it's much easier to go “eh, there's an undefined hole here where a handling method wasn't invented” rather than go “every aspect of play is entirely covered in general rules, amended by exceptions… wait, what does this hole mean?”

Shalvenay

@nitsua60 I'd actually say the NEC is easier to interpret than some editions of D&D

SevenSidedDie

I think that's where 5e and I have our differences: though written in natural language, it's still working from exception-based design principles.

2

(Oh, hey, we can still see our hats on the Winterbash RPG leaderboard!)

CTWind

3:19 AM

I can see either way on the short rest while KO'd thing. On the one hand, being KO'd says you're unconscious for 1d4 hours. Since you can do nothing but 'short rest'-qualifying activities while KOd, you'd automatically get one at the end of 1 hour... but then why roll in the first place? There's one exception that'd make that not meaningless, and that's if you have 0 hit dice left... but that might be enough.

nitsua60

@CTWind Being KO'ed doesn't say you are unconscious for 1d4 hours, it says if you stay unconscious for 1d4 hours you will then regain a hit point.

trogdor

@SevenSidedDie were there fewer hats this year? seems like the top person has like, 10 less

nitsua60

Being healed otherwise will end the unconsciousness. (Such as, I'd argue, spending a HD at the end of your 1-hour short rest that you're currently taking by dint of being unconscious.)

CTWind

Right, sorry, shorthanding it.

nitsua60

@CTWind Other than that, I'm right with you. (I think I spell out in my answer that having 0HD left is one reason that it's a meaningful distinction.)

For me it's the last clause of "long rest" and its omission in "short rest" that seals it.

SevenSidedDie

3:27 AM

@trogdor I don't recall what the full hat count was off the top of my head, but I bet there's a 2015 all-hats thread on Meta… Hmm! Look's like you're right. I count 28 regular hats and 13 secret, for 41 hats total in Winterbash 2015.

nitsua60

I wouldn't argue too hard with a GM who says that you can't spend a HD while unconscious, as the PHB explicitly says that a character spends a HD, but all SR-recharges should happen. (Unless, of course, you-the-player construe that hour as part of a long rest, in which case we have to retcon the SR out of existence, since one can't SR and LR simultaneously.)

CTWind

I just wish if that was their intention, they actually phrased it as "After being unconscious for 1 hour, you may take a short rest and spend hit die if you have any to regain HP. Otherwise, you remain unconscious for 1d4-1 hours before you regain 1 HP" (or however phrasing that last bit would sound natural)

trogdor

@SevenSidedDie wow, that was a lot

nitsua60

@CTWind you mean in the "Dropping to 0 HP" section?

SevenSidedDie

@trogdor Yeah! Maybe that's why I was underwhelmed when I saw the list of regular hats this year: insufficiently interesting opportunities simply due to there being too few.

trogdor

3:31 AM

I hope this isn't indicative of us having fewer and fewer every year

nitsua60

@SevenSidedDie I have to admit, I just downvoted your answer on the "short rest while unconscious" answer. While I agree with the last 90% of it, having it lead with the absurdity "you can't rest while unconscious" which links to an answer I disagree with... I had to do it.

I'm sure you'll survive =)

SevenSidedDie

@nitsua60 I will. :)

CTWind

@nitsua60 Yeah, in the stabilizing a creature subsection. (Probably more accurately "Otherwise, if you don't get healed, you remain unconscious for 1d4-1 hours, then regain 1 HP.")

Just for clarity's sake.

SevenSidedDie

@nitsua60 I'm kinda split on the fundamental point, actually. On the one hand, from unfortunately real experience of late, I know that unconsciousness caused by injury is not that restful. But I doubt such nuance is baked into the rules intentionally; what's left is ambiguous. For that answer, I mostly defaulted to the top answer in the link I used.

nitsua60

@CTWind The (nitpicky) problem I have with this wording is your "After being unconscious for 1 hour you may take a short rest." My core contention is that "after being unconscious for 1 hour you have taken a short rest!"

@SevenSidedDie Ugh--I'm sorry to hear that. Hope it wasn't too dangerous....

CTWind

3:35 AM

Sure, so final phrasing: "After being unconscious for 1 hour, you are considered as having taken a short rest and may spend hit die if you have any to regain HP. Otherwise, if you don't get healed, you remain unconscious for 1d4-1 hours, then regain 1 HP."

SevenSidedDie

@nitsua60 Everyone's going to be fine, but wow, small kids do no like concussion recovery protocol. :) It's super-boring.

nitsua60

@SevenSidedDie Yeah, there needs to be some sort of healthy medium between current thinking and the protocol when I was a kid: an ass-pat + "get back in there, champ!"

SevenSidedDie

@nitsua60 They're working on it, actually. The current protocol works really well when followed, but is hard to follow. And might be too much for some cases. We were going to be part of a long-term follow up study to learn more about long-term outcomes' connection to recovery-time actions, but the kidlet does not like MRI machines and so we weren't useful study candidates.

(Don't see why, MRIs are so cool. I have pictures of my brain from a university study on language and music.)

trogdor

I had to have several tests as a kid

some doctor thought I had like, brain cancer, or something like that

the MRI was extremely boring

nitsua60

@trogdor I have trouble staying awake in one. Something about that thrumming puts me right out. (Same with planes--I'm usually out cold before pushback from the jetway. Once they spin up those engines...[snore])

trogdor

3:44 AM

to be fair, they are probably considerably different now

I have not been in one since that time, and it must have been something over 20 years ago

CTWind

I get that riding in cars on long trips. Sometimes having a fan near bed helps too.

nitsua60

@SevenSidedDie What is the state of Canadian thinking on concussion recovery? No light? Normal light? Rest? Active?

trogdor

and I probably have more patience and self control now too

SevenSidedDie

4:08 AM

@nitsua60 There's a multi-stage protocol where you start with complete physical and cognitive rest (i.e., deliberate boredom) until symptom-free for 24hrs, then try the activities in the next stage, moving backwards a stage if symptoms reappear, moving forward if 24hrs are symptom-free again. Keep iterating until having advanced through all the stages without symptoms reappearing.

I'm not sure if it's exclusive to Canada or not. Because our medical systems are so different and regulators separate, some kinds of treatment are out of sync.

BESW

@nitsua60 Hooray, somebody's reading my links!

SevenSidedDie

@nitsua60 I had to fight falling asleep the one MRI I did. Planes though — I've worked on the fringe of aerospace, and I know too much of how that sausage is made to be relaxed during takeoff or landing! (Completely irrationally — they're really safe in FAA territory. But knowing too much is still unsettling.)

trogdor

@SevenSidedDie I have trouble for different reasons, I have a fear of heights, and planes are not exactly close to the ground

I also irrationally fear planes not receiving enough upkeep, but it has nothing to do with any real knowledge of the industry of plane building and maintenance

SevenSidedDie

@trogdor Eugh, yeah, that can't be fun.

trogdor

I am personally glad I don't have to fly anywhere too often

it happens infrequently enough that I can put up with it

BESW

4:26 AM

I'm pretty sure this guy's an NPC quest-giver.

trogdor

but he went on the quest

with two other people

SevenSidedDie

4:48 AM

@trogdor Escort quest maybe then

trogdor

but no one was escorting anyone

they were all on the same quest

BESW

7:21 AM

Richat Structure

The Richat Structure, also known as the Eye of the Sahara and Guelb er Richat, is a prominent circular feature in the Sahara near Ouadane, west–central Mauritania. == Description == The Richat Structure is a deeply eroded, slightly elliptical dome with a diameter of 40 kilometres (25 mi). The sedimentary rock exposed in this dome ranges in age from Late Proterozoic within the center of the dome to Ordovician sandstone around its edges. The sedimentary rocks comprising this structure dip outward at 10°–20°. Differential erosion of resistant layers of quartzite has created high-relief circu...

Magician

8:01 AM

@BESW Is the quest in the urn?

BESW

@Magician "Here's your quest. Don't open it until I'm gone, please."

"Why is this quest ticking?"

4

Magician

If only players asked that question more often

...which, I now realise, is a traditional GMing sentiment that doesn't really apply to my games anymore. Huh.

BESW

I still enjoy games where that's a legit question--I just enjoy it for different reasons than I used to, and often it's the players who decided the quest was ticking in the first place.

Anaphory

10:06 AM

@Anaphory @BESW Rereading its blurb, it may be that A/N/N is the game to try to play with the crazy people who enabled me to try so many other games over the last two weeks.

BESW

Cool!

Anaphory

In that case, I may have a chance in about 10 months.

BESW

...oh.

Anaphory

It was during a larger event, of which we have about 5 per year. I don't think I will make the Spring and Summer event, so Autumn it is.

Still, 10 months is better than Never!

BESW

True! Yey!

Anaphory

10:09 AM

In particular now that I know I managed to introduce a keen interest for non-trad RPGs among several people there.

BESW

Ooooh.

Anaphory

I think I played various game with … a dozen different people? And people played Fiasco without me, but wouldn't have done so without my facilitating last event, or without my rules and playsets.

BESW

Nice.

Anaphory

How's your Solarpunk idea coming along? I had a course on future prognoses for 2050 and I would love to play something with a positive, active outlook.

BESW

No movement, really. It's more @doppelgreener's baby with my enthusiastic support, but first he needs to figure out how to sleep better.

Anaphory

10:15 AM

Okay. Sleep is important!

BESW

It occurs to me that "using existing technology, infrastructure, and social constructs in creatively unexpected ways to personally satisfying but not necessarily cinematically dramatic effect" is a mandate Storium might be able to support nicely.

Anaphory

I registered for Storium and looked at the tutorials yesterday. Haven't delved deeper into it, so I cannot assess that.

BESW

Well, you can make cards representing just about any kind of asset, be it physical, social, spiritual, whatever. And you can use them to solve problems in any way that you choose to narrate; the system doesn't care.

Challenges can be large or small, abstract or concrete, and there's plenty of space for internal character growth and focusing on personal victories.

doppelgreener

11:06 AM

BESW and I have both been considering individually and together how a solarpunk game might look. If either one of us would run it, it would very likely be me at the moment. BESW needs his time as a player too. :)

trogdor

@BESW that certainly is a nice idea

BESW

11:33 AM

RPG.SE Winterbash 2017 leaderboard.

trogdor

wait, what?

that is just the 2016 one isn't it?

BESW

Sorry, typo.

trogdor

ah ok

doppelgreener

12:19 PM

Look at that! I'm right at the top of the leaderboard.

nitsua60

@doppelgreener I don't want to taco 'bout it =|

=D

RollingFeles

Good everything to everyone =)

@nitsua60 hey! How're things?

BESW

1:04 PM

@RollingFeles Absent, apparently.

trogdor

@doppelgreener yes you are, and I guess you just like the number 3 better, so they gave it to you

I would have gone with 4 but wtv

XD

RollingFeles

@BESW It seems so :)

@BESW, @trogdor hello! :)

BESW

[wave] What's new?

RollingFeles

I'm in a great mood today. Great first day at work after holidays. I've visited rpg.se 333 days. Aaand I will be running DW with my small, but inspired party at friday for the first time :)

BESW

Yey!

RollingFeles

1:18 PM

By the way, I was absent from chat for a long time. How's your chatizen DW game?

BESW

Successfully concluded! We took a winter break, and will try some D&D 5e next month.

Also I'm trying to get into Storium again, which may become a chatizen-y thing.

I mean, everybody in the first refamiliarisation game is a chatizen already, but I may do something more ambitious later.

RollingFeles

Nice! Yeah, I remember your invitation to all chatizen into this game. I liked Storium idea and, well, as many ideas it's in a long list "must try someday" :)

Hmmm. Actually, If you would bear my broken English, I'd like to try Storium chatizen game :)

BESW

Cool.

doppelgreener

@trogdor [handwave] That's like, the number of a runner in a race, I'm sure. Just a participant number.

nitsua60

3:13 PM

@RollingFeles Hiya--busy! (But in a good way.)

RollingFeles

@nitsua60 That's great! :) So, how's Rogue One? Did you and your family like it?

LegendaryDude

VtC shopping question

nitsua60

4:23 PM

@SevenSidedDie yeah, I was confused by that comment, too. It seems like he's saying exactly what you say, and then downvoting you for it?

SevenSidedDie

@nitsua60 Yeah, not sure what's up there. But to be fair I don't think there are any new downvotes, so it's merely confusing. :)

SevenSidedDie

4:43 PM

@trogdor Huh, turns out that this Winterbash also had 41 hats, so there weren't actually fewer than in 2015.

nitsua60

5:49 PM

@SevenSidedDie uh-oh... we've created a fourth space =|

LegendaryDude

6:02 PM

VtC Unclear/opinion-based

LegendaryDude

7:16 PM

Re: This question, this going to get weird. My name is Evan R in meatspace :3

The first comment I saw tagging that username, I for a split second thought was addressed to me

SevenSidedDie

7:50 PM

@nitsua60 Turned out to be a misreading that lead to an answer improvement. Yay!

@nitsua60 Potentially an ∞th space, since post sources are a renewable resource!

@LegendaryDude Yeah, that's gotta be weird. I have a sufficiently unusual first name that I never hear it except when it does mean me, so the rare times when I mishear something that only sounds like my name I get really confused. I'm tuned to consider my experience of the cocktail party name effect to never be about someone else.

LegendaryDude

@nitsua60 Evan isn't as uncommon a name as it once was but my whole life I've been the only Evan R (there was also an Evan M for much of the time -- the joys of growing up in a small town).

Whoops, last message was supposed to be a response to @SevenSidedDie

SevenSidedDie

8:11 PM

@LegendaryDude I think it's a sign of insufficient sleep that the idea of deliberately addressing all chat messages to nitsua60 for a while, regardless of who they're meant for, strikes me as amusingly absurd. (That would be a bad/disruptive thing. Bad mod!)

trogdor

9:17 PM

@SevenSidedDie oh, ok then, guess I was just wrong there

@RollingFeles hi, sorry about that, I was logged out when you said that

@doppelgreener fair enough

Joshua Aslan Smith

bring out your close voets

0

Q: Why is being a powergamer considered bad, hindering roleplay?

I am a powergamer myself. Not that I don't like RP -- I just believe that it's hard for me to put huge effort into roleplay while my character has very hard times actually surviving his encounters. Powergaming also doesn't always mean that all of my points go to the combat stats -- by calculatin...

@trogdor hello

SevenSidedDie

@trogdor Me too. It felt like many fewer hats this year.

CTWind

@nitsua60 (and others) twitter.com/JeremyECrawford/status/818568908508495872

Zachiel

@Baskakov_Dmitriy I agree, that is opinion based, but we can always discuss about it here in the chat.

SevenSidedDie

@CTWind WOO! Let the confusion be banished. :D

Zachiel

9:32 PM

I have a pair of things to say on the matter:
First, not all powergamers are like you. I've known powergamers whose only reason to powergame was to steal the spotlight. They could do things better than the others, or could do everything the others could, and they abused it to get fun at the expense of other players. No wonder other players wanted to ban "powergamers". They just conflated the means and the reasons.

Second, sometimes, in order to get some powerful features, you have to twist the behavior of a character in ways that make them feel unnatural. Take my cleric that needs to be good because otherwise he'd lose loads of ability bonuses and his wings (of course, D&D 3.x is one of the worst offenders in this field, linking features to flavors), or that needs to worship a nature god in order to get a huge boost to his stats and armor.
Lots of people like more a character that's weak but doesn't break suspension of disbelief, or dislike players in need to argue to convince the GM that the many be…

trogdor

@JoshuaAslanSmith hi

@SevenSidedDie well, sometimes you feel something, and it turns out that that isn't the best way to gauge actual accuracy XD

SevenSidedDie

@trogdor What. Noooo … This seriously impacts my proposal for a feelings-based fuel source as the basis of the green economy.

3

trogdor

maybe you can make it work, it feels like a good idea XD

SevenSidedDie

@trogdor True! Now I just have to find a source of magical ponies.

Zachiel

@SevenSidedDie Here

SevenSidedDie

9:47 PM

@Zachiel yessss ponies

trogdor

oh, fair enough, if those work

BESW

@SevenSidedDie I'm pretty sure most feels-based fuel sources are invented by evil geniuses and run on the screams of children.

Word up on the Hat - Our Fate Worlds author @DaveJoria is beta playtesting his own game: Dungeon Tours. check it:… https://twitter.com/i/web/status/818494361134477312

Tweeted by SeanNittner on January 9, 2017 at 4:27 PM

Joshua Aslan Smith

@SevenSidedDie Gold star material here

nitsua60

@CTWind Thank you! I've edited my various answers to include that reference.

SevenSidedDie

@BESW It really gives feels-based fuel a bad name and makes it hard to get into hearings.

nitsua60

9:52 PM

@SevenSidedDie Now there's the interesting experiment to see how the votes play ~from now on~. I.e. how much is that privileged "top billing" worth?

=D

BESW

...our D&D 4e campaign had the evil empire invent a feels cannon. You stuck a victim in the seat and tortured 'em, and the whole army you were pointing the cannon at felt it.

Joshua Aslan Smith

lol

BESW

We used it to defeat the elder god from beyond reality by hitting it with Real Feels.

Joshua Aslan Smith

sounds like an a good excuse for a Hard Choice tm where a sniper mage/archer has to take out the person suffering

SevenSidedDie

@nitsua60 I'm thinking this may actually call for a fresh canonical question to be asked, so we can close this debacle forward as a duplicate (especially now that the asker has got himself deleted for Highly Questionable Choices and Literally Daring It). It's hogging a good canonical title, but it's not really just about that.

Or maybe it makes more sense to just heavily edit the question to be just about the nominal question.

(The Feels Cannon is terrible and awesome.)

BESW

10:04 PM

We also once reverse engineered the 3.5 Quiver of Lies (hand brace which conjured an arrow every time you told a lie) into a Quiver of Jokes and equipped a gnome army with them.

Army morale surged, and enemy morale fluctuated wildly.

CTWind

My DM likes to give troll items he found on a list somewhere. I have an Orb of Grade Detection, a magical sphere that rolls in the direction of downhill if it's on a slope.

SevenSidedDie

@BESW Those are both fantastic items and I'm stealing that.

BESW

...I think your GM's world has, at some point, been host to Oscar Zoroaster Phadrig Isaac Norman Henkle Emmannuel Ambroise Diggs.

LegendaryDude

@SevenSidedDie Since the user is deleted, would it be acceptable to heavily modify the question to make it the canonical one?

Considering he can't protest the edit and there's no concern for modifying the original intent, I mean.

SevenSidedDie

@LegendaryDude That's another possibility, yeah. I'm writing up a quick meta so we can decide this properly.

BESW

10:09 PM

> Quiver of Jokes. You can use Provoke or Rapport (pick one when you take this stunt) instead of Fight to attack with a ranged weapon.

@SevenSidedDie I'm coming down on the side "Don't hijack someone's question just because they aren't around to protest anymore."

We don't do it for users who've left the site of their own accord (old unclear questions from inactive users don't get edited to say what we think they should say).

SevenSidedDie

@BESW Normally I'd very agree. There's a certain amount of “they were almost certainly a sockpuppet of a particular suspended user” that is mitigating it in this case.

Deleting it as a “hey, you're not actually allowed to use the site while suspended” is another possibility, allowing that question and title to be organically asked again in the future, giving future-someone the deserved rep for it.

BESW

Delete it, sure. But don't hijack it. Just because we know they're misbehaving doesn't (a) mean the common courtesies no longer apply and (b) even if it does nobody else watching will know so the effect on community morale and understanding is the same if they weren't a sockpuppet.

SevenSidedDie

@BESW That's an excellent point…

Oracle should get around to giving us a link to that meta I just posted at some point…

… Wait, nevermind. I haven't posted it yet, I just clicked the "add an answer too" button.

BESW

I was going to say, it's not on meta.

Is there a badger for answering a question before it hits any of the feeds?

Joshua Aslan Smith

@BESW If you run a game in this on the interwebs I would definitely play but our usual time zone differences

my company just set up a station in Guam and I was like "I know all about Chamorro time"

BESW

10:26 PM

@SevenSidedDie Question separation done.

SevenSidedDie

@BESW Sadly no. (But watching the front page would be an easy way to get it, since the “questions changed” banner is nearly instant.)

Miniman

It's actually faster than the questions page for picking up new questions.

Joshua Aslan Smith

@SevenSidedDie Would be [badge:Quickdraw] if it existed.

SevenSidedDie

@Miniman (Caching!)

Miniman

@SevenSidedDie Ugh, probably.

Joshua Aslan Smith

10:31 PM

flush dat cache

BESW

Miniman

Can someone remind me what purpose caching is supposed to serve? I know it's not meant to be just a way of preventing users from seeing the actual page, but in my hatred of it I've forgotten.

BESW

As I understand it, the idea is to reduce latency of elements which aren't expected to change regularly, and (perhaps more importantly) to reduce unnecessary data transfers.

SevenSidedDie

@Baskakov_Dmitriy One observation on the reactions to “powergaming” you've shared in your post: in the past I found it actively distracting when only one player in a group powergames. It's a matter of where the creative energy is being invested and the play-time is being spent: when everyone is focused on character or fiction, one player using their contribution time/energy to focus on optimisation and mechanics is like gears grinding. It's a group dynamic incompatibility issue.

@Miniman Yeah, @BESW has it in overview. It's a method of optimising the data stream against redundancy. When your servers are nearly saturated sending out data, it makes a huge difference on that end and a small (rarely noticed but very annoying when seen) difference on this end.

Joshua Aslan Smith

What besw said regarding cache

basically an easy way for each level of the internet to be faster/more efficent

from your computer up to CDNs

SevenSidedDie

10:59 PM

And what I should be doing now is prepping for tonight's game or washing dishes. Do widzenia, chatizens!

Baskakov_Dmitriy

@Zachiel I would definitely enjoy playing such a character -- the one who is constantly on the edge of committing something against his deity, but he understands that this will break all that he worked that hard for, maybe he was even a criminal in the past and always struggles not to return to his old path. In fact, I was invited to play a Pathfinder group, and I am going to make a paladin with such a history now, after reading this message.

What's wrong in such a concept? It might be so interesting! A typical good paladin with no internal struggle and any flaws doesn't seem like something I could enjoy.

@Zachiel One doesn't need to be a powergamer to constantly try to steal spotlight. Moreover, minaxing in it's typical way makes you good at, say, combat, and very weak in everything else. If you minmax like me (just as good at combat as others, but also plays a lute), there is no problem. If you can only fight, you will have nothing to do in social scenes, and if you have problems with spotlight being not on you, you will frustrate a lot.

To be short -- again, not the problem of powergaming at all.

BESW

@Baskakov_Dmitriy Nothing's wrong with the concept, but there are systems which actively work to make it less feasible. A great deal of digital and real ink has been spilt talking about how D&D-style paladins are designed to be boring or to fall, with little room for other arcs.

Baskakov_Dmitriy

@SevenSidedDie Ah-ha! I see your point. May I please ask you to explain how can it happen? Most of the powergaming actually happens long before the game starts, when you work on your character sheet and player's handbook/whatever source of knowledge your system offers, probably some programs on AnyDice... When you start the game, you already have everything prepared, including the development plan. You may change something, but not a lot.

You may bring a table or two to the game to quickly (around 2-3 sec) make decisions about which roll to make, but you don't even speak about it, just have a quick look while waiting for your turn and then roll when it comes.

BESW

(your mainsite question, btw, conflates many misunderstandings and generalisations which would need to be sorted out before it can be answered usefully, from the so-called "stormwind" fallacy to the notion that one playstyle's tendency to do a thing is rendered moot if other playstyles do it too)

Baskakov_Dmitriy

If a person has poor RP and minmaxes, is it, again, a matter of minmaxing or generally poor RP of that person?

Shalvenay

11:14 PM

@Baskakov_Dmitriy there is no universal definition of "poor RP"

BESW

@Baskakov_Dmitriy This is why a lot of game groups spend the first session working together to make characters and figure out what kind of game they're going to play.

Baskakov_Dmitriy

@BESW I think I might agree, if you clarify what exactly is wrong, would be a lot better.

Shalvenay

something I know from experience firsthand -- someone can be playing their character very well, but have trouble because the design of that character is incompatible with what the rest of the group is trying to accomplish

for instance, playing a fluid, space-filling utility figure can be seen as spotlight-stealing by folks who are leaving "holes" in group compositions intentionally to create plot points

Baskakov_Dmitriy

That's the problem of them being not on the same page, not the problem of powergaming.

(not on the same page about which the group should be able and unable to do)

If players want a group that performs poorly at, say, social interactions -- one could just tell it to a minmaxer, and he will reallocate points.

Miniman

Speaking of terms with no actual definition which are being thrown around a lot, "powergaming" is one.

Shalvenay

11:19 PM

right -- but at the same time -- when there is no single group involved...things become exponentially more complicated

also, you're forgetting that some systems (D&D 3.x most notably) take a "versatility is power" approach to optimization

BESW

@Baskakov_Dmitriy First, "powergaming" is a poorly defined term.

As has been said many times, there's no universal understanding of good or bad roleplaying, or powergaming, or whatever.

The Oracle

3

Q: What to do with “Can you take a short rest while unconscious?”

The asker of Can you take a short rest while unconscious? decided that account deletion was their preferred future on the site, leaving behind a question that's a bit of a mess. (There is also the detail that, very likely, they were not supposed to be using the site while their real account was s...

discussion specific-question

BESW

Because of this, a lot of folks talk at cross purposes. If you tell someone you're a powergamer, they're going to hear implications you didn't intend.

Notice that Zach says he's met folks who embrace the "powergamer" identity with very different goals than you have.

You also seem unaware of the so-called "stormwind" fallacy, which may be influencing reactions to you.

Your chat indicates you may be feeling defensive enough to engage in poor logic yourself, such as arguing that a potential problem with powergaming is not a problem if other play techniques also suffer from that problem.

Transcript for