The first time I saw the chick, it was still halfway inside the egg. However a friend says he watched it in the morning and the chick was apparently hatching then
Their question is bad at the moment, but it might be salvagable if it was changed to a 'How can I assess what would be a balanced alternative to offer my player, is there any offical guidance on this?"
well, the first question is "by raw, is the second language proficiency lost?" The followup is "Since the language proficiency is lost, what is a good consolation prize for my player?"
(by "the first question", I mean that I, personally, do not know what happens.)
Yes, but their as stands is what else would be good to give them as an alternative, which I'm not sure is answerable. Without knowing anything about their setting surely any langauge is equally valid as an answer?
@NautArch (Actually, the resonances we form to enhance overtones – formants – are much more significant than the fundamental pitch, for anyone who's interested in those things.)
@doppelgreener Similar thing to the difference between vowels, except the high-power formants are removed and only some higher-pitch formants remain where our auditory system has less resolution, which is why it's harder than vowels.
Nasals are still somewhat easy, stops are really hard.
They are mostly pauses and some minor changes to the vowels nearby, so the machine learning thing I'm fiddling with at the moment to solve that has huge problem finding them at all.
I've been thinking about working people from chat's names into my homebrew as place names, either as is, or with a little tweaking. (I'm not sure whether I'm doing this for fun or out of laziness of coming up with something better)
@kviiri He was German... If you serve in the German military you are more German than wherever you were born. John Witherspoon was far more American than Scottish (for comparison)
Since nationality is defined as a state of belonging and Adolf strongly considered his belonging to be that of Germany. He did, after all, see Austria-Hungary as a collapsing state [Kershaw, Ian (1999). Hitler: 1889–1936: Hubris. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.]
@DavidCoffron In that case I think the bigger issue is not the definition of "who belongs to nation X" but "who is the chief authority of nation X". Hitler quite adamantly decided he was the sole leader of all German peoples, and many of the peoples he annexed were proud Germans but not all of them wanted to be annexed anyway.
attempting to change subject: we've got a fight starting in our campaign on thursday where it seems the DM has made it very dangerous to move. We're on a boat, 500' from shore. Some sort of Control Winds type of effect int he air with a major storm also churning the sea. Seems to be hinting neither flying nor swimming is going to get us there.
@kviiri Yes he laid claim to people who did not want to belong to his nation. The leadership of a nation certainly affects whether a person would want to belong to that nation. (Look at the French Revolution, those people DID NOT want to be a part of THAT France)
@NautArch Huh. If it was lower, then I'd completely agree that the wind + water stuff is a clear signal of "Don't fly or swim". But at this level I figure the party spellcasters can do magic hijinks to turn this in their favor, maybe?
@MikeQ Pirates. We fought them earlier in the campaign and the light cleric cast control water and took out a ship ( making an excellent enemy of us). There's likely something else in there (possibly Kraken) and two of these flying snake things.
So, I have no idea how this is going to work, but if people are bored I am brainstorming superhero villain names/powers to try to come up with something fun for my campaign. If anybody has something that sounds interesting feel free to throw it my way :)
@Rubiksmoose I have a list of characters that I had prepared for my ill-fated mutants and masterminds campaign a few years back. Most, if not all, of their names were puns.
@Rubiksmoose In one superhero one-shot, I had a villain triplet called XYZ. X (for "Xerox") could copy powers from others, Y (for "Yin-Yang") could create a shadow duplicate of himself and Z (for "Zero") was a power damper. (yeah, having a fairly meta-heavy powerset was a part of their concept)
@DavidCoffron I don't think so, but that also kind of takes them out of the fight a bit.
DM has heavily implied falling into the water won't be a good thing. ALthough with water walk and swim/water breathing I'm not sure why it's a problem.
@DavidCoffron Yeah, i think the plan right now is to stay on the boat as long aswe can and then see what happens. Just didn't know if anyone had some other ideas :)
Hopefully I can stop one of the snakes from getting within 10' for at least one round.
I'll probably start up Bless (the clerics aren't big on blessing, i'm generally the one who casts it)
Fun power thing to consider: In Don't Rest Your Head, people have only a single power, but they can use it more and more powerfully the stronger their insomnia gets until it's dialled up to 11. I played a character who had a power of manipulating plants, and at the end summoned a giant tree through the center of a spaceship.
In Thor: Ragnarok, Hela's power is basically: knives. Most things she does is summoning knives in smaller or larger ways, and at the end she summons knives turned way up to 11.
@doppelgreener I haven't yet! I've been working my way through a bunch of material (Teen Titans, Young Justice) and have just gone into the more adult superhero movies
@DavidCoffron I like advantage :) hitting an enemy is a big deal! And now that i'm 15th level, i can use a reaction to attack my target of enmity when they attack me or someone else (while sentinel just lets me attack if they attack someone else)
and my CHA is only +3, so i'm generally wary about it.
@NautArch When I played a vengeance paladin, it was a multiclass fighter for tons of ASI and I was a grapple/controller, not a DPS'r, so I guess it is very different
(Paladin gets some pretty good low level control spells)
@NautArch I'll start with the primary antagonist. Basically Batman, without the arbitrary morality imposed by writers. No superhuman abilities, just lots of time, resources, and cunning.
@DavidCoffron i'm seriously considering it, though. Stopping the snake in it's tracks is pretty cool. May be worht it, and I may get advantage other wise (we use flanking rules)
He had two ice-user henchmen, called Cold Feet and Cold Shoulder
There was a hypnotist who could make people hostile, and could take away heroes' desire to help others. Called him Schadenfreud but only one of the players got the joke :(
There was a weird meathead who was vulnerable to everything, but whenever he dies, he resurrects on the following round with increased strength. Called him Deadlift.
But aside from the silly villains of the week, Night Terror (the anti-batman guy) was an interesting villain because he was virtually untouchable. He was a popular philanthropist and industrialist, who had the law and economy on his side. He didn't need powers.
And if he ever did need a superhuman to do something, he could just pay or blackmail them into working for him, even if they didn't know it.
@Rubiksmoose I read the web serial Worm two years ago, it has a lot of cool superhero concepts. Also a lot of totally bonkers ones.
The protagonist can control spiders and insects (and some assorted other low-intelligence animals but that's never a big plot point). One of his teammates can create darkness, another can induce nerve twitches in others.
@Rubiksmoose Actually I would suggest checking out Worm, it's very creative in its powers. It wasn't just "strong guy", "fast guy", "laser guy", "guy with a gimmick antique weapon"
There's Clockblocker, who has a very strong but unreliable power of freezing a thing or a person for up to a minute (the exact duration is the unreliable part)
Golem, who can punch the pavement to cause a larger, concrete fist to erupt anywhere within his sight...
(works for other materials too, as long as the target and the material "punched" are similar enough)
And there's also Tinkers whose thing is having a supernaturally good ability to construct things
There was a minor character named Interface, who could use any electronic equipment as a means to control any other electronic equipment, provided that he gave a sufficiently technobabbly explanation. He used a calculator to hack a squadron of military robots.
@Rubiksmoose Do mind though, it's a loooooong one. I think in word count it's like the whole Harry Potter series twice over? Or maybe 1.5 times
One supervillain has the power of just being very hard to notice. Not invisible, nor impossible to hear, but for most intents and purposes exactly so because they just... well, sort of deflect attention.
(note that when I say "supervillain", I mean in the legal sense - a lot of supervillains receive a sympathetic portrayal)
This is really annoying. I tried to edit a few questions and kept getting the error message. This crops up now and again, and I cannot get a handle on why.
@doppelgreener it is intermittent. I have no problem loading pages. I have no problem making comments. cc @NautArch No, and on this machine that is not an option. (I never have this problem on my laptop with chrome).
@KorvinStarmast Totally worth bringing up in a bug report then. (Mention that stuff.) It sounds like an intermittent API outage. That may be getting caused by your environment, but it's almost certainly also something the Stack devs would check on to see if there's something they should resolve. Sometimes issue reports like this are the tip of an iceberg.
@goodguy5 At my table, I would rule with RAW most likely, unless a character brought it up (after a successful Nature check recognizing that disease-curing magic works on the worms) in which case I would let him "use his lay on hands without expending points" to "cure disease" thanks to divine health
I try to use RAW whenever possible unless a player finds a unique way to address a problem
@doppelgreener I know, I wasn't setting up a dichotomy intentionally. But any other answer has to make more assumptions. Occam's razor says the simplest solution is the best one
