I feel like on one hand, that is too cruel, on the other hand maybe it would actually work better as a method of deciding that kind of thing than what we do now
Although that is probably more of a sad condemnation of what we do now than an endorsement
[self-eyeroll] I can't believe I caved on another request for adding information to a question that people who can answer the question should already have access to.
Tangling with apparently @boymonster’s hero Tall Poppy in the basement of City Hall while one of my teammates distracts Evil Mary Poppins. #SentinelsRPG
I think the biggest issue with any system of government is that we tend not to implement them perfectly as intended (because that is extremely difficult) and then we pretend we are doing it exactly the right way until enough people complain or revolt hard enough
@trogdor I don't know if you saw (because roughly a week's worth of chat flew by in the last twelve hours) but my 4e PHB1 came in today. It'll probably be the weekend before I get to take a look, though.
@trogdor Agreed- I actually find the 4e DMG (and DMG2) to be worthwhile reads even as a 5e player. There's quite a bit of non-4e-specific good advice in both.
I don't know for sure when we will be back on track with my 4e game but very likely not this week, my estimate is 50/50 either way on wether we start back up next week or not
@CTWind yeah that's what impressed me most actually
Not nearly as much 4e specific advice in it as would be expected
I primarily recall the 'make interesting encounters (variety of enemy types/purposes/etc.)' and 'determine what types of players you have/what they're looking for' bits.
Off-topic but: Okay so this new question is scaring me; is there a bunch of useless features (class casting of spells, monster casting of spells, a bunch of magic items)? I can't find anything to refute the weird RAW reading.
Also trogdor, I agree. My brother used to DM me and my siblings and it always felt like a boxing match. Not that I'm complaining, we were like 12 and 13, but it was rough.
@DavidCoffron Nothing in the quoted description says why/how it's cast at 5th level, but typically two things: first, spells from items are usually cast at their lowest level, and second, a spell cast with a higher slot than needed is a spell of that higher level (so I'd say if the item is explicit that it's level 5, then you do get the bonus d8's)
Since the default text is "at higher levels: when you cast this spell using a spell slot...", it seems implied that the spell slot makes it higher level, and the higher-level-ness makes it better. I agree it's not explicit.
Meh. This seems like errata-style territory which means we will never get a definitive ruling. (unless I missed something that will come up in answers). G'night folks
As long as your bard stays away from danger, you can get very powerful beasts at a low level; when it falls off at higher levels you can always replace it
They messed up the level to CR calculation for the spell in my opinion
Turning your wizard with expended spell slots into a T-Rex is probably the most powerful effect in the game at that level, period (apart from over-tuned magic items you can get)
yeah whats that have to do with Bound? That's like saying if you Polymorph your Wizard buddy into a T-Rex he has no idea he's the wizard and could just rampage you and everyone else
If the Wizard is still a Wizard then the Golem is still a Golem. Just Dex/Str/Wis/Int/Cha/Con that change
To United States' credit, they had little to base their system on. It was a good first attempt, but while others have been able to learn from their mistakes, it's really hard to reform a flawed democracy through its own processes.
The really sad bit is seeing all those 19th century political cartoons lampooning gerrymandering and such
One'd think that a problem known for so long would be fixed, but no, people in charge are still callously exploiting the rules of the redistricting game to abuse a weakness of the First past the post system
I read a history book in high school that brought up gerrymandering, and assumed it was at least toned down by now, fast forward to a few years later I realize it is not
and get really mad that no one fixed it already
I mean,.... it's so obviously wrong
just because everybody does it,.... no one wants to fix it
True. Also, my group has decided that "distract the monster by throwing something at it before running like all Hell's demons are after you because they probably are" doesn't count as auto-fail fighting, but probably automatically calls in the failure die.
@Ryan We're playing CoS too, but we've mostly been walking around and befriending the thinly veiled Romani.
It's actually one of the things I really dislike in the campaign... there's a significant latent hostility between the Vistani (Romani equivalents) and other Barovians, with the latter usually claiming Vistani are in league with Strahd. It's one of those conflicts where the players have little more than their gut feeling to work with.
...except they do, because it seems unlikely to me anyone in their right mind would actually make the Vistani be, as a category, in league with the devil Strahd.
@SPavel Hey, I want to apologise for how I responded to you last night. I lashed out and lost my temper, and neither you nor RPG General Chat deserved that. I'm sorry.
@kviiri I'm not passing any judgment, personally, on the worth of different government systems. I just noticed that nobody'd chimed in to let you know what KS meant by "Churchill's maxim."
And it's not like Churchill was some font of deep wisdom. His other witticisms included "the Aryan stock is bound to triumph" and "I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes."
Even "for his time," dude had a very narrow perspective on justice.
Well I will point out that I am more generally mad that our democracy has not caught up to some other countries on certain ways than I am mad at democracy itself
I don't hold Churchill as some personal hero
Though I do think he fulfilled a crucial role especially during WWII
It's been my experience that when something sociopolitical seems new in the past few centuries, the ancient world was already busy doing exactly that thing 2–6 thousand years beforehand, or some non-Western source was doing it contemporarily. :U
But it seems new to us in retrospect because the other sources simply never came up in our education.
The same co-worker also said that "each nation has exactly the kind of government they deserve", which I don't really agree with even as a tongue-in-cheek generalization. I have had a rather limited amount of contact with US citizens, but by my small sample it seems people are generally aware and unhappy about the flaws in the political system - eg. gerrymandering.
Okay, I'm not too well-versed in early US politics, but I believe many of the same systems that are causing headaches today worked much better in a younger, more idealistic nation.
There are a lot of informal systems (like everything around assuming only two parties can matter) which cropped up later and don't mesh well with the original text--which wouldn't be a problem except the original text, at some point along the way, became fetishized.
But, well. The whole country is founded on some very nasty principles that shift and change skins but have never gone away, and laws alone can't exorcise that--especially laws originally rooted in those ideas.
If nothing else, the 2 oldest generations will die and leave some hopefully still unsatisfied and change driven generations to actually clean up the mess they can't seem to take care of themselves
It will change. It is changing. It's increasingly obvious to the entire world that many of the old ways of thinking and doing aren't really working anymore. Unfortunately the people who benefit from those ways tend to be very attached to them: but the more they cling to broken methods, the more obvious it is the methods are broken.
So far in the past century or two, as far as I'm aware, major constitutional and governmental reform has only really happened on account of a country losing a war or gaining independence from another country.
I like to think of things as games (as in game theory). But I also try to be a virtuous person, not just a homo economicus. It's clear that optimal gameplay isn't always virtuous, so my chief concern is processes where virtue is not rewarded or is downright punished.
In democracies, one simple virtue is this: you vote for the person who you would prefer to hold the position. That's why I dislike systems that encourage tactical voting like first-past-the-post does
It can even create Abilene-ish situations where a party no one really likes gets to rule because the obvious alternative is worse and everyone just assumes the other alternatives will lose.
@kviiri I'm involved in a global neighbourhood-based initiative that, as a primary focus, trains people in an area to work with kids and youth to instill a spirit of selfless service as a primary motive in their decision-making, combined with critical awareness of the needs of their communities. In places where this program has been sustained on a broad scale for more than a decade, the entire community starts to shift as those youth become adults in the community.
@doppelgreener I know about it because I know some Baha'is who were living there at the time, and he consulted with the Baha'is on how to make the changes; some of the new election processes were inspired by our electoral systems.
@trogdor Yep. And they really didn't even need to do that, it'd happen on its own too unless the people of the district mustered the will, the faith and the discipline to vote for a third party
Here, we have parliamentary elections using the D'Hondt method in 13 districts based on old administrative boundaries (so they don't get gerrymandered)
But gerrymandering isn't totally unheard of here, either
we don't have a lot of positive awareness of outliers,..... and I think that honestly also feeds the,.... either low or low seeming viability or participation in an outlying party
@trogdor A bit of this, a bit of that :) I've been following the news a bit lazily, but the first Regional Elections have been postponed because the government has failed to decide what the regional administration's responsibilities would be, exactly. It's a bit silly.
I'm not sure if it's been pushed to next year already
The regional administration has been a hot topic in politics for a while now - formerly, public health care and other basic services were done mostly on municipal level, but because of increasing urbanization an increasing number of municipalities has been unable to provide all these services to their populace. So the responsibility is moved to a regional level, for better scaling.
Yep, although there's also a bit of muddiness in that the chief architects of the reform are the agrarian Centre Party who are often blamed for trying to artificially create jobs in the countryside by introducing new bureaucracy.
Helskini, right? One of the 114 training institute youth conferences in 2013 was held there, and when I was at the international election convention in Haifa I spent a good amount of time with members of the National Spiritual Assembly of Finland.
@goodguy5 I'm near the end of episode 2. I'm... undecided on it. I'm not totally interested in people describing their sessions, characters, settings, &c., but they get into just enough talk about what they're thinking when putting things together or running or playing that I'll probably keep coming back to it.
@goodguy5 Not really, but not because it's "broken" in any way, just because it tends to slow things down.
@kviiri Then they should also remove the ability to punch with your fist (unarmed attack) and play low prime-stat characters and you shouldn't be able to take bad spells, or choose a chicken as a ranger's companion
