It's pretty much the same way we describe, say, a fork in the timeline: you took the world from a specific moment in time, and made a copy that is now different.
I work in an environment where we fork things all the time, and I used to contract for a government department where they forked things up all the time
Meme: jQuery
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Background: A Stack Overflow-centric meme, jQuery began its career early on as the answer to beat for any question that even remotely referenced JavaScript. Its popularity became so great that eventually jQuery becam...
for slightly more info
I find it interesting the comment increases are outstripping all others. I wonder if deleted comments don't count and this is just counting the comments that remain after older stuff has been cleaned up.
I'd like to know if there is a command or macro that would help my problem. At the beginning of each session I roll 5d11 and if there is a repeating number(s) roll again until you don't. I can't seem to find anything on repeating numbers in the wiki. If I've missing something I will happily accep...
> Q: Can a Tome of Clear thought be used multiple times to bring a Stat above 30? A from Crawford: Ability scores can go from 1 to 30. See "Ability Scores and Modifiers" (PH, 173).
@Rubiksmoose Sort of :) You're missing the 7 in 173 and there's a later quote that's more firm "The Ability Scores and Modifiers table notes the ability modifiers for the range of possible ability scores, from 1 to 30."
@nitsua60 A comment was just deleted on the ROll20 5d11 question (due to foul language), can I see what the rest of it was as it answered a comment I left.
There seems to be a knee-jerk reaction to "easy" questions that involve quickly answering by copy/pasting embarrassing links to lmgtfy.com (or similar responses in comments, which aren't downvotable) in an attempt to belittle the questions' authors. I think this comes from engagement in forums, w...
This has been something that a good deal of us have been trying to do for months now. When we see someone post something along the lines of LMGTFY or "You should have googled first" we comment telling them that it is not useful for precisely the same reasons you are giving above.
And then we wi...
How should you respond to "Give me a fish" / RTFM questions? I mean the case where people post questions simply to get someone else to write their code for them, on topics that would usually be the first result on Google if they had taken the effort to search once before posting.
Usually I just...
> I have a 11 powers, because of [dumb stuff] I now randomize the powers ever session from 1 to 11 and keep 5. I'm looking to streamline it because i'm rolling up to 12 times so far in this process because of duplicates.
I've commented twice on it - That they're approaching this wrong and should use Collections instead of a dice formula. Unfortunately I'm at work until the evening, and can't really put an answer together.
In the situation of having a high entropy random number generator, that generates numbers in the range of 0 and 2,147,000,000.
If i have a list of 1,000,000 integer values, what are the chances that a random number will already be on my list?
Also, basic summary: we are not RPG Stack Exchange as in we answer questions about the content of RPGs. We are RPG Stack Exchange as in we answer questions about engaging in RPGs on the whole, including answering about history, design, publishing, social issues, and a number of other things -- gameplay itself is only a portion of what we do.
So if they're rolling 5d11 and hope to get 5 unique numbers, and if my math is right, there's a ~65% they will get at least one duplicate, and need to reroll
@doppelgreener Occasionally I've edited one of the auto "moved to chat" comments to provide a little context. Instead of "these comments have been moved to chat" I'll put in "these comments about the suitability of nail polish to the game table have been moved to chat." (Or whatever it is.)
@nitsua60 Oh you're right. I've done that a few times now but forgot about it. I guess the number of times I've edited someone else's comment was single digits.
Once it was to turn one of those "relevant" link comments into one that correctly referenced the question instead of a comment on it or something.
(I don't remember others.)
It's a power that pretty much universally doesn't need to get used. When there's an issue with a comment we either don't need to care from an enforcement POV or the answer to the issue is to delete the comment. The times it does have any merit being used are statistical outliers.
Another example is a case where a newbie was making a constructive comments but also swearing throughout it, so one of the mods replaced the swears and pinged them letting them know they'd done that & that we don't use expletives here.
I actually can't think of other cases. The ability to edit a typo in my own comment five hours later is pretty awesome though. :U
I don't know how to explain to that 5d11 guy that (as I understand it) that he's wrong. "keep rerolling until you get a different result" is the same as "sample without replacement"
but he commented that I was wrong, and then restated his position
@goodguy5 yes but more like draw then put back(record what you got), and if it's the same stone put it back and draw again until you have 5 unique numbers. – Kmnder 1 hour ago
"sampling with replacement unless you get a duplicate" is the same as "sampling without replacement"
Lots of people just think about probability strangely. Remember a few weeks ago we got a question asking if someone rolls an extra die but ignores it, are the other die changed as if there's some kind of magical inter-dice influence going on.
@Shalvenay Oh! Shalv, I have a paper for you that I am sure you will enjoy very much.
m.slashdot.org/story/338799 "A paper recently published to ArXiv highlights just a handful of incredible and slightly terrifying ways that algorithms think... An AI project which pit programs against each other in games of five-in-a-row Tic-Tac-Toe on an infinitely expansive board surfaced the extremely successful method of requesting moves involving extremely long memory addresses which would crash the opponent's computer and award a win by default."
@doppelgreener -- in the vein of nonconventional solutions to problems: 50 minutes of how to 'sploit the humble door. (some of this might be useful for the rogues in the channel, for that matter)
There is a section about a flight simulation AI responsible for tuning some landing variables that used an integer overflow glitch in the physics engine in order to use lethal amounts of force to instead appear to be granting the pilot an incredibly smooth landing
but this conversation goes back to something from last week I think.
"How can I use this tool to accomplish this task" being broken down into "That tool is bad for that task. If you really want to do the task, use this tool"
@MikeQ that's actually funny that you brought up bogosort, because we have a sorting problem (putting things in geographic order, basically) at $work that keeps being a pain in our rumps :P
@goodguy5 it is the hardest comparison operator to deal with that I've ever seen
@MikeQ it's not that bad in some ways (if you could get a reliable comparison operator, it sorts itself out :P) but worse in others (things go to pot at places where the mile markers go all haywaire)
@NautArch I dislike his style of writing (particularly the faux swearing) to the point I always feel embarrassed linking him to my group, but he does have very good points. The one about traps in a similar vein is a recommended read too!
@kviiri interestingly, we havent really been a trap group.
I ran one encounter that involved traps (we finally had a rogue, and I wanted to give them something to shine)
it worked pretty well (unsure if a trap was down the hallway, random guards would come by so waiting to look may be a bad idea, doorways that might contain something, but might be a trap, etc.)
@NautArch I tried having traps in one subcampaign, with the idea being that the traps were obvious but hard to avoid, yet also potentially useful (eg. you could push enemies at them).
Didn't really work out, because well. Turns out players are rather hesitant to try anything strange when they can just hack and slash.
@Shalvenay Oh, that's clever! I should definitely do something like that in my game, to stop the party rogue from trivializing the environmental challenges
This actually sounds really tricky. Disabling the trap means blocking progress, so does that mean the players need to (intentionally) trigger the trap? Will that result in unwanted GM railroading?
This AngryGM post about character death was also quite good, in my opinion... except it sort of starts only after the subtitle "Death Sucks": theangrygm.com/death-sucks
Although he sort of loses me at Batman being mortal.
A lot of heroic figures are ostensibly mortal, yet the risk of them dying is purely cosmetic. There has to be a next episode of MacGyver, after all.
in storytelling there's two primary types of suspense: - you don't know what's going to happen - you know what will happen, but you don't know how things are going to unfold
macgyver's life being in danger is the second type
I once read an article about a film critic regarding some movie about a child who, unwittingly, brings a bomb on a bus aboard his luggage. The audience know it will explode at some point. They just don't know when, and according to the critic (whom I agree with) that was the real genius of the movie.
Every time there was a scene that seemed like a fitting moment for the bomb to go off, the audience tensed. You know, the usual fare: a young couple is just about to share their first kiss, a little bump in the road, someone says something impossibly genre unsavvy like "on beautiful days like this, it feels as if nothing could go wrong!"
Must be nerve-wracking.
I don't recall which film it was they were describing though
i just know that when i start casting downvotes on a day i've hit the 200 rep limit, the upvotes i receive past that point start filling in the rep the downvotes cost me
@doppelgreener Overall I think that Death Sucks -article has "DnD" written all over it, now that I finished it.
I guess it makes sense since it's more natural to think of death in a system like DnD where the majority of sentient life wants to off PCs, but there's also plenty of systems set in far less hostile environments and it's not like "PCs acting like they're immortal" there is a widespread problem, is it?
BESW has mentioned the time his group played a game session in a Fate story where all they actually wound up doing was babysitting a kid and fix an air conditioner, and that was a fine & fun session.
There are detective stories in which life and death are not what the game is about.
Golden Sky Stories is a game about playing as Japanese spirits and animals trying to help people who are having a bad day or something or otherwise need some love and/or support. It's from an author who's actively investigating what RPGs can be outside of their roots of being about violence.
In Masters of Umdaar, being a Fate game, death is just simply off the table unless it's going to be suitably dramatic and satisfying. But you are encouraged and incentivised to bear in mind your own character's mortality and capacity to injury because of the Fate flow between setbacks and successes, and crisis and victory.
@kviiri Combat is just a simple straightforward way to present opposition one must overcome, and RPGs have their roots in wargaming, meaning ostensibly we're still a hobby where the most-explored problem space is physical violence with an outcome of death.
It is an easy fallback. It is such an easy fallback that there is a prominent RPG designer who has vowed that he will never again produce an RPG about violence, because he wants to find out what else RPGs are capable of, and is just going to eliminate that opportunity for a lazy fallback.
Back to violence, you know how some WWII games like Commandos have missions where you have to assassinate Nazi officers governing occupied territories? That actually happened - once.
The collective responsibility thing (where the Nazi regime punished locals for the assassination) was a rather big reason to not do that more. Once assassination and punishment start piling up, the situation becomes a rather twisted war of attrition.
@goodguy5 It's just a 1st level spell, though. That could get big quickly by allowing the crits. Or even a Champion Fighter/Sorcerer build for critfishing on it.
@goodguy5 The defining reroll isn't on weapon dice, it's "When you roll a 1 or 2 on a damage die for an attack you make with a melee weapon that you are wielding with two hands"
@goodguy5 Depends on your build. Yes, it shines on damage compared to a Sword&Board build, but you are sacrificing your own AC and tankiness to be a heavy hitter.
Jason Morningstar is an award-winning indie role-playing game designer, publishing mostly through Bully Pulpit Games. Morningstar's games are often GM-less and about things going badly. Grey Ranks (2007), for example, is about doomed child soldiers in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, and Fiasco (2009) is about impulsive crooks pulling heists that are sure to go terribly wrong. With these two games, Morningstar became the only named person to have won the Diana Jones award twice as of 2013. Morningstar also works with academia and industry, consulting on using games for teaching and learning in education...
He designed Fiasco, Durance, Night Witches, and others.
The relevant question: Dice Notation - Dice that start at 0
Top answer:
According to Wikipedia, this is called zero bias notation, and you simply use a "z" instead of a "d". I.e., your example would be written as 3z8. The only reference provided for this is an RPG.Net post. I've never seen a...
There's gotta be a way to get a roll20 macro to accommodate a variable number of targets.
...ahah, the 4e character sheet hasn't been updated since they added the multiple target query option, so I have to put it in manually. Which means I have to learn it from scratch. Yey.
In the situation of having a high entropy random number generator, that generates numbers in the range of 0 and 2,147,000,000.
If i have a list of 1,000,000 integer values, what are the chances that a random number will already be on my list?
The relevant question: Dice Notation - Dice that start at 0
Top answer:
According to Wikipedia, this is called zero bias notation, and you simply use a "z" instead of a "d". I.e., your example would be written as 3z8. The only reference provided for this is an RPG.Net post. I've never seen a...
