TRPG General Chat

12:27 AM

@Axoren I've used it and don't consider myself an advertiser. Quick little tap, a little table acknowledgement that we're not going to pry answers out of that dude on-screen, and off we go.

Shalvenay

12:39 AM

@nitsua60 besides, the best tools for prying answers out of someone are an overstuffed recliner and their favorite beverage

nitsua60

@Shalvenay That'll pry a nap out of me every time. I guess that's my answer =)

trogdor

12:52 AM

lol

nitsua60

VtD, IMO OP should just start over when they've an idea what they're asking.

Shalvenay

1:31 AM

hey there @ThomasWard

Greetings.

how're things going?

they're meh today

1:58 AM

DMing went well today. It involved a failed attempt to shapeshift into a rat. This resulted in a rat... with no legs.

Thomas Ward

heh

BlackVegetable

While in an inn, next to a custodian afraid of rats...

trogdor

a rat with no legs, the best kind of rat

XD

BlackVegetable

Her moves were to roll around awkwardly, and to squeak.

Miniman

@nitsua60 You should probably explain that to him though, if his question just gets deleted without comment it's unlikely that he'll see it as an invitation to restart it from scratch.

BlackVegetable

2:02 AM

She got quickly pocketed into another character's knapsack before she was caught by the inn's staff.

Shalvenay

LOL @BlackVegetable

BlackVegetable

2:57 AM

More context around the legless rat: rpg.stackexchange.com/a/94711/33511

Shalvenay

hey as well @ObliviousSage

and @RollingFeles too

RollingFeles

@Shalvenay hello!

nitsua60

@RollingFeles we were chatting about something ~14 hours ago--what was it?

Looks like it was you prepping fronts for DW session 2--how'd it go?

RollingFeles

3:17 AM

@nitsua60 I made notes about some ideas and went to bed :) I'm working on it right now.

Axoren

Unrelated to the last thing I spoke about here: Puzzles

It recently came up in discussion as to whether or not Puzzles could exist without meta-gaming in Pathfinder

BESW

Well, that's a question with three undefined terms.

Shalvenay

@Axoren puzzles in what sense?

Axoren

@BESW Sorry, I got distracted thrice-ways while writing

Shalvenay

@Axoren and why is that a problem? (other than in an alternate-Tippyverse sort of sense)

Axoren

3:21 AM

Essentially, a puzzle in the conventional sense. A riddle or manipulation puzzle, for example a rubik's cube.

BESW

"Puzzles," "meta-gaming," and "Pathfinder" are all very nebulous concepts which might mean a totally different thing for each group or player we ask.

Axoren

There's no way to tackle a conventional puzzle with the aptitude of the character, but instead with the aptitude of the player.

Shalvenay

@Axoren Open Lock is really a puzzle-solving affair of a sort :P

Axoren

But then it stops being a puzzle

And starts being an Int-check obstacle.

Shalvenay

@Axoren to the players, it's now an Int-check obstacle, to the characters, it's still a puzzle :D

Axoren

3:23 AM

Yeah, but if the DM presents it to you as a puzzle, you roll the dice, and the DM tells you it's finished.

It's not really a puzzle in the conventional sense.

Where it's been "solved"

In the past, players were presented with a 3x3 dial pad puzzle

Shalvenay

our very own Magician has a relephant blog post where he discusses this problem

in the general case

Axoren

Where they needed to toggle all of the keys off

The players all failed to understand from the GM's description exactly what was happening

But most of our players were over 18 Int

When it was finally described to us visually well after the fact, we were all able solve it quite easily, but some argued that our characters should have known the answer.

Shalvenay

ah, "Fiat Gated Ingenuity" is what I was after earlier

ponderingsongames.com/2014/11/03/paradigms-of-play

that's the post

Axoren

@Shalvenay I'll check it out

Magician

@Shalvenay "Our very own Magician" is becoming my official title.

9

BESW

3:40 AM

So you want a problem which is not solved through game mechanics but only uses in-game character resources to solve.

Axoren

@BESW Rather, I'm limiting that to conventional puzzles

BESW

That's... a tall order. But maybe only because you're talking about it within a particular mechanic/narrative paradigm.

Try looking at the Masters of Umdaar mechanic "Cliffhangers."

Magician

There's a very interesting thing Mansions of Madness does, a board game. In it, characters frequently encounter such puzzles, effectively minigames. But they also have stats, including intelligence (or lore, or whatever they call it). The solution is ingenious: the player gets a number of moves to solve the minigame determined by their character's intelligence. This may mean it takes multiple turns to solve the puzzle.

Axoren

Oh that SJW question is weird. It took me a few rereads to see that they didn't want their party influenced by queer ideology.

Alex P

"Queer ideology"

Axoren

3:47 AM

Weird

Alex P

Yeah.

Shalvenay

@Axoren what...?

the whole premise of that question sounds bizarre

Axoren

@Shalvenay rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/94713/…

Nathan Tuggy

TBH, to me it sounds fairly reasonable from a certain point of view...

Axoren

The premise would be fine if given a different basis. Let's say that there was person with strongly held political beliefs of some other sort. Asking about the presence of influences in a text can be important in those cases. Like, if a majority of the system excluded rules on spellcasting because of the historic association to Witchcraft and Devil Worship

Alex P

3:52 AM

It's not a point of view we need to bother to entertain.

Nathan Tuggy

@Axoren OK, good example, yeah

So… I'm having trouble understanding why a naive reader of Chick tracts would be welcome to ask a question about systems that do not have witchcraft in them

The Oracle

0

Q: Are questions probing a designer's personal life and its influence on his games on topic?

I feel like the question Is Dungeon World SJW influenced? has an answer, but even considering the question—and bracing for an onslaught of similar questions like How did Gygax's narcissism influence AD&D? or whatever—makes me uncomfortable. Are questions that ask users to connect the dots betwee...

discussion

Axoren

But yeah, it's not painted very nicely the way they said it

BESW

If it was using less inflammatory rhetoric, I'd be more okay with it, but phrases like "self-proclaimed queer" are from the rhetoric of orientation-as-choice. Which is, at best, divisive.

A_S00

rpg.stackexchange.com/posts/94714/revisions you tried honey

Axoren

3:54 AM

@BESW I thought that the LGBTQ community reclaimed the term, hence the Q.

Is it still considered derogatory?

BESW

@Axoren It's not the "queer," it's the "self-proclaimed," which falls into the idea that sexual orientation is a casual choice one can make and change.

Alex P

"What does a hypothetical version of this question that isn't a vehicle for bigotry look like?" is kind of a pointless game to play, imo.

Axoren

@BESW I'd not interpreted that as such. It also doesn't seem like that's SSD's reasoning behind the hold.

Nathan Tuggy

rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/94713/… seems to make it clear that it has nothing to do with the terms used at all, but the basic premise being about (not) playing with game that has a given ideology.

Alex P

"Queer" as a noun is by itself basically a slur.

A slur that has been partially reclaimed.

But the "Q" in "LGBTQ" is an adjective. "Queer people."

BESW

3:57 AM

I could see, for example, "I'm not comfortable with games that focus on real-life social justice issues, does [X] game have that?"

Alex P

"I'm queer"

Axoren

@BESW I agree. That would be an acceptable question.

BESW

Or "My group isn't interested in games which portray a wide variety of sexual practices. Does [X] game do this?"

(That actually IS one reason I'm wary of Apocalypse games--I don't want a lot of sex in my games.)

Axoren

I think SSD was right to put it on hold the way the question is presented, as it's charged with those notions, it seems.

Shalvenay

@BESW yeah -- that's definitely one of the trickier bits of the PbtA philosophy

especially when you start adding races with different mating hardware to the mix :P

Axoren

4:00 AM

But to me it doesn't seem like the question is outwardly hate speech in the sense that I'd expect a hate speech post to be.

Nathan Tuggy

I got the impression that the idea of trying to play a game that way raised a lot of hackles, wording or no wording

Alex P

@Axoren Part of a mod's job is to figure out when someone's just here to inch up to the line and discourage that, too.

Axoren

Either way, the right decision was made to close that post.

BESW

@Axoren Hateful rhetoric doesn't usually jump up and down and scream "I'm hateful!"

11

Alex P

@BESW FWIW, the "special moves" in AW really are optional. They're there (and a few other things, like Impossible Reflexes and Arresting Skinner) so I can see how it might be a problem just in terms of distraction/mindshare, but the book emphasizes that nothing bad will happen if they never come up. And the author himself generally "fades to black."

Shalvenay

4:03 AM

@AlexP nods yeah, DW has no equivalents for that matter

well, "Carouse" is probably the closest, but that can mean lots of things

BESW

@AlexP I'm talking more broadly about games that are Powered by the Apocalypse, some of which ignore the concept (DW) and some of which embrace it (MonsterHearts).

So when I see PbtA, I have to go check.

Alex P

Ah, gotcha.

This is where the ability to download the character sheets and just see what's on there is a big help.

Though that may not really communicate, like, how much Monsterhearts taps sexuality vs. how much AW does.

BESW

Yeah.

user61230

Still, if it's there at all, that's a hint from the game designers that it was meant to be played.

BESW

Yup. I'm a big fan of hacking games to do what I want, but I'm also very firm on the idea that if I have to fix it, it really was broken.

3

Alex P

4:09 AM

An interesting variant of the pbta "special" I saw was some Star Wars hack where your "special" was "when you die..."

2

BESW

[snork] yes.

Alex P

Like the smuggler gets to have a foolproof escape plan to get everyone else to safety. Or the Jedi Master is a Force ghost.

(And, of course: thermal detonator.)

BESW

Or you get turned into a bitter, cynical cyborg toady of the villain.

BESW

4:23 AM

@AlexP From now on, "SJW" means "Secretly a Jedi Wookie."

6

RollingFeles

4:40 AM

Actually, I don't feel any "SJW" or "LGBT" influence in what Koebel do. I watched some of his "office hours", games he run and he doesn't manifest this. I haven't studied his world views though. But I never cared.

Sage on the other hand have a lot of political content on his twitter. At first, when I saw question title, I though the question will be about him.

BESW

> Man, woman, ambiguous, transgressing, or concealed.

Some variation of that (mostly just with or without a "concealed" option) is on the "looks" section of pretty much every AW character sheet.

Dungeon World has mostly removed that kind of option entirely.

Shalvenay

and then you have humanoid species who are always ambiguous...(that's the way I envision reptilians and dragonkin to be, for instance)

BESW

But it's hard to know what somebody like that is looking for, or not looking for.

Everybody's got a different idea about what representation looks like.

And, for example, he may also be looking for a community that's not interested in issues of social justice. Any community around a subset of Apocalypse World will be likely to fail that criteria.

Shalvenay

@BESW then again, there are two roads leading away from that point, in very different directions

BESW

4:56 AM

In summary: unclear exactly what's being asked, but RPG.SE clearly doesn't want to support the goals underlying the question.

Nathan Tuggy

@BESW The question this raises in my mind is whether this is a Be-Nice level of "not supporting" (as in, get off our servers or we'll ban you) or a downvote-level (as in, ugh, what a dumb thing to try to do)

BESW

@NathanTuggy I voted to delete the question, but I wouldn't ban the user at this point.

Nathan Tuggy

SSD seems to believe it's the former

Magician

@BESW SJW != social justice.

Shalvenay

@Magician very correct -- some of the most anti-SJW folks I follow are those who are actually trying to bring justice to the world (if you're familiar with Scott Greenfield's blog, you'll know what I mean)

BESW

4:58 AM

@Magician Oh, indeed. But the comments and context make it clear the querent isn't making that distinction.

@NathanTuggy Be Nice enforcement is a spectrum, and we treat non-spammers as corrigible unless/until they prove us wrong.

Magician

@BESW Probably. Which is why it's a bad question: we have to infer what it means.

Nathan Tuggy

@BESW OK, let me rephrase then: fix your behavior, or get off our servers, or we'll ban you.

Shalvenay

@Magician yeah

Magician

As a side note, I'm extremely unimpressed with claims that some games aren't meant for or wouldn't be played by people with certain views, when the rules (and most of the text) of the game in question have nothing to do with those views. It's petty tribalism.

Shalvenay

@Magician I agree -- I don't have much of a problem with PbtA as an engine (at least so far) and I'm definitely not in the bin that's interested in "social justice" in the way BESW is -- but I'm the kind of person who sees CDLs as analogous to systems hackers and SJWs as analogous to UI designers, to make an analogy to The Night Watch

CTWind

5:05 AM

I've always found this to be an interesting but difficult topic to discuss, as many people seem to assume any critique of either side means you're in the extreme 'opposite' camp.

Shalvenay

@CTWind exactly -- and they assume it's a completely bipolar situation as well.

BESW

Mmm. Our society thrives on false dichotomy.

Feb 10 '14 at 23:37, by BESW

Pepsi vs Coke, Kirk vs Picard, Republican vs Democrat, RAW vs RAI, Tennant vs Smith, Islam vs Christianity, Edward vs Jacob...

RollingFeles

@BESW still this is AW. Koebel, at least, is not co-author.

And when I looked up if he had a part in AW I stumbled on his bio.

Yeah, "I'm a queer person" and "I care about LGBTQ".

That's all.

Shalvenay

"If you really want this 'social justice' thing -- learn how to fight hate speech with more speech, and stop mumbling things about 'technicalities' when the cops lose a guy because they did something unconstitutional while trying to collar him!"

"also, get it through your thick skulls that 'bad guys' have civil rights too"

4

ends old-school liberal rant, steps down from soapbox

BESW

> While you're living, dealing with other human beings, people whom you love, all you can do is have passion. The bottom line is this: You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can't, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world. In some way, your aspirations and concern for a single man in fact do begin to change the world. The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way a person looks or people look at reality, then you can change it. ...If there is no moral question, there is no…

2

Alex P

5:16 AM

@Shalvenay Err, I've followed like a hundred people involved in various levels of "social justice" work for about two years and I've never seen anyone get upset over an unconstitutional search being thrown out. Many are anti-carceral. Many more are anti-money-bail. Almost all have spoken out about abusive search practices by police (e.g. NY stop-and-frisk). So, respectfully, I don't know where the hell you got this stereotype.

Shalvenay

@AlexP I was speaking to society at large, not just the "SJW" crowd. I agree that the folks you hang with are in the right on many of the things you list -- but at the same time -- I've noticed that SJWs frequently miss the mark wildly on 1A issues

but yeah -- you'd be surprised how shrill the harpies can get on both ends of the political spectrum

whether it be letting the cops run roughshod over your 4A rights or trying to muzzle Milo with prior restraints up the ying-yang

Alex P

I actually wouldn't be surprised, no. But also, this is an incredibly facile thing to say when the "harpies" on one end of that spectrum are very close to power right now.

Shalvenay

@AlexP sadly, you are right on that -- at the same time though, the harpies on the other end are busy trying to polarize away our best bulwark against what the harpies on one end are doing

(see some of the debates re: revenge porn, for an example)

Alex P

I embrace a diversity of approaches in combating fascism and racism and I don't really care if the proverbial "Tumblr teens" have bad praxis.

There'll be plenty of time to turn the bus around before we're somehow living in a carceral-communist craphole. For the other side? Not so much.

Like, the current state of America is "waiting with bated breath to see if the judicial branch can actually make the executive do something."

Shalvenay

@AlexP yeah -- mostly because Congress seems to have some sort of baked-in design defect that keeps it from Congressing other than once in a blue moon, no matter who we send up Capital Hill

(I personally suspect that CRS + Congressional staffing being badly underfunded currently is the primary cause of said dysfunction)

doppelgreener

10:32 AM

Learned a word: indefatigable. Meaning a person who persists tirelessly.

BESW

@doppelgreener Good word.

@AlexP "Carceral-Communist Craphole" would be a good name for a hostel that caters to punks and/or hipsters.

trogdor

10:48 AM

indeed, that is a very good word

sadly, it doesn't get used often in conversation

doppelgreener

@trogdor i'm still trying to wrap my tongue around it... in-de-fatigue-able is not the easiest set of bits to remember.

trogdor

this is true

and I don't necessarily have too many opportunities to use indefatigable in casual conversation myself

let alone necessarily remembering to use it when I do XD

doppelgreener

11:25 AM

Spam in the stack!

It's been a while since I saw magical doctor spam.

BESW

11:59 AM

The mind control romance magical doctors are the creepiest.

trogdor

12:11 PM

wat

why would you even advertise something like that?

BESW

I mean, they don't say it's mind control. But they're all variations on "the abusive sleazebag who left me is back thanks to Doctor Racistname and he's a better person than he ever was before!"

So I'm guessing mind control or body snatchers.

trogdor

12:51 PM

lol

it's just like,... who would believe both A. this kind of thing works, and B. there is no possible reason this kind of magic would be really horrible

doppelgreener

@trogdor desperate people who really want it to work

trogdor

fair enough, it just seems real insane :(

BESW

Mmm. People who really want something to be true can exercise some truly awe-inspiring suspension of disbelief.

trogdor

fair enough

that is more or less a similar phenomenon when I read something extremely interesting

it certainly isn't comparable in all ways, but I think I can use that as a frame of reference to some degree

nitsua60

1:55 PM

@Shalvenay Sorry, are you saying CRS is part of the problem, or that CRS being underfunded is part of the problem? (Also, I assume you're talking about Congressional Research Service? It occurs to me there could easily be another CRS I don't know about.)

BESW

Chaotic Rogue Syndrome.

nitsua60

VtR-O based on comments and edit.

Oblivious Sage

2:23 PM

@nitsua60 It got re-opened. I'm voting to close because it's blatantly a "read the book to me" question now.

nitsua60

@ObliviousSage I always went with downvotes on RTBTM rather than closure, but whatever.

Fibericon

3:48 PM

Hey all. I don't suppose anyone knows of a hero machine alternative that's useful for creating child characters? Running an anime game and I can't find useful reference images for small children in full plate armor for some strange reason.

Shalvenay

4:06 PM

@nitsua60 Congressional Research Service being underfunded

BlackVegetable

7:52 PM

But seriously, those Jedi Wookies should just do everything out in the open. They aren't fooling anyone.

Zachiel

8:03 PM

O_o

Is that @AlexP down there?

[waves]

Zachiel

8:16 PM

I hate you, RPG.SE ç_ç

Why did I get lost reading questions instead of stating "I'm back" in my play by chat game, losing the beginning of an event?

Alex P

@Zachiel Hello.

Zachiel

@AlexP T_T

Alex P

8:44 PM

What's up.

Zachiel

I lost an event because I didn't bother to start playing

Alex P

oh no

Anaphory

9:34 PM

Oh, been editing a text and its graphics all day and forgot to think about prep for my Firefly crew tomorrow. And I don't really know where to go with them now. I know I need to give a good reason to get one PC back on board…

Option 1: Make Pilot #3 busy with his core job as a mechanic, so Pilot #2 is the best option as Pilot again, even though the caption doesn't like #2.

Option 2: Give the captain a job for which the nobility and high-access credentials of Pilot #2 are a really valuable assett, so the captain takes #2 back on board for those reasons, in which case he might as well also fly.

Option 3: Find another way to continue the “another week, another pilot” theme to the satisfaction of Pilot #2.

Shalvenay

10:06 PM

hey there @Zachiel

Anaphory

Oh, hey @Shalvenay!

Shalvenay

@Anaphory how're things going?

Zachiel

Hi

Anaphory

Quite good! Apart from me not having sorted my prep for the Firefly game tomorrow, I am in good shape for the near future!

Shalvenay

@Zachiel how're things going?

Zachiel

10:11 PM

@Shalvenay The guy I had to play with tonight has been janked into a quest while I was talking with him to organize without making clear that my character was around too.

Shalvenay

@Zachiel ah. so does that mean you've been left without a game then?

Zachiel

I have found another one since then but I really wanted to play that one

Anaphory

What kind of game are you playing (or trying to play) there?

Zachiel

Plus my character is still fictionally there but he's not helping and only the gods know why

@Anaphory D&D in a persistent world

And it's considered bad form (for understandable reason) to ask to join only after noticing that a quest is going to happen

Otherwise, some people would only play if there's a quest and they would not contribute to creating a story around the quests

Where a quest in context is a single gaming session where the DM shows up and there are NPCs and monsters being actively played.

Anaphory

What medium? Chat, maybe plus Wiki?

Zachiel

10:37 PM

@Anaphory Several chat rooms each representing a place, plus a forum, plus private messaging, plus chat whispers, plus private forums and chats for guilds, plus a DM forum, plus character sheets...

Anaphory

Oh. That's quite some infrastructure, how does anyone keep on top of all of it? Is there some way things are linked, or do you have to do all of it manually?

Zachiel

@Anaphory It is all enatly packed into a single site. You create a profile, then you create a character inside your profile, then you fill some forms to create your character, then you open your character sheet and you fill some more forms, then most things are not automatized (you keep track of your HP manually, same for every score in the game, but there's a spell memorizing field you can only edit once per day)

And when you write in a chat it's nicely formatted and your avatar, race, guild and sex show near to your message

Anaphory

I guess the automation would make routine easier, but some non-routine things very hard, so it sounds very reasonable without having an active dedicated full-time dev team.

5d10

Dice Service

7

4

8

10

9

Anaphory

5d20

Dice Service

10:47 PM

17

10

13

11

9

Anaphory

(just found a scifi plot generator, it might help me sort what I actually want or give me some inspiration or both.)

Zachiel

@Anaphory That kind of game is pretty popular here in Italy so there's a sort of prepackaged basic system that does all this, but then there's programmers that customize it because they like D&D and they want to run their own place to play in.

Lately, the guy who managed the one I'm currntly in got fed with some people being too wanting and he decided to quit the place unless someone paid him to keep the place up and implement new things

So the current admins are paying him, which is both good for him and a bit sad because other sites like that are completely free of costs save for paying the server

But it's usually a single person taking care of the site and often very jealous of their code.

BESW

11:37 PM

> One metric tonne of a powerful narcotic needs to go home but the Emperor of the Galaxy wants it. We need a less sarcastic AI and only a legendary ghost ship populated by androids can help us.

...I have the sinking feeling that's already an anime.

2

trogdor

11:53 PM

lol

doppelgreener

Snowfall broke a tengu's nose, so the caretakers put a bandage on it.

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