TRPG General Chat

3:43 AM

@Ben If you are referring to this question I do not believe it is opinion based or that it was locked for that reason. It was getting a lot of off-topic comments which I believe was part of the reason SSD locked it down.

Ben

That was my initial assumption too, which is my usual experience of locking a question.

Joel Harmon

@Ben It is also helpfully labeled as "This post has been locked due to the high amount of off-topic comments generated."

trogdor

Lol

Oh no, not helpful labels! Dun dun duuun!

Ben

True, which is why I was confused as to why I couldn't vote on the question. The comments had all been removed as well, so I missed the subject of conversation.

Rubiksmoose

@Ben It wasn't actually a conversation at all. It was a bunch of people posting jokes and comment answers.

All unrelated to each other. Although the two comment answers that I reported were both the same and they came one after another (have wookie rip arms off).

Ben

3:58 AM

:/ Constructive.

trogdor

Lol

Sometimes I briefly forget this is actually a chatroom affiliated with a whole site

I'm,... Not incredibly active with posts

Ben

5:30 AM

Who's the guy that makes the "official" rulings on 5e clarifications?

Through Twitter posts?

Mike Q

@Ben Jeremy Crawford

trogdor

Oh yeah I remember that was a thing

Ben

Ty :)

trogdor

What a freaking silly thing

Ben

6:33 AM

Ok... I think that's probably going to be received poorly, since it's not answering the question, directly.

0

A: What attributes are considered spell requirements?

To answer indirectly, I'm going to start off with stating that the wording in 5e can be ambiguous. Here are a few others that I personally came across where ambiguous wording caused issues: Wielding two weapons without “Two-Weapon Fighting” or “Dual Wielder"? Does Hellish Rebuke set nearby cre...

Miniman

7:34 AM

@Ben Contrast is everything.

kviiri

8:15 AM

Lots of spam today

AGAIN

trogdor

Yeah

Anaphory

8:28 AM

Hi fellows!

Running a game of The Secrets of Cats today, and it looks like I got potential new players for my One-shot group “try anything once (but the good stuff first so we never get to the bad stuff)” on Mondays.

On Cats, I'm not sure what themes I and the other players want to explore. The book (in particular the first expansion) seems to suggest half really dark stuff, like kids vanishing because they get murdered by evil spirits, and the other half really fluffy stuff like cats talking to a sapient swarm of bees that are driven from their home by construction work.

Now I'm a bit stumped for a plot hook or two that are somewhere in the middle, with exaggerations of imaginary horrors, monsters and nightmares; or fluffifications/fantastifications of real-life problems (prejudice, domestic problems, etc.; I think preferably related to kids or older people) that we could use if we want more serious undertones.

Hm. Maybe I should draw very indirect inspiration from bits of GM advice for Dogs in the Vinyard, and start with a few problems I might want to explore, and then muse how they might be caused by the supernatural.

BESW

9:33 AM

@Anaphory I also suggest checking out Good Neighbors.

Anaphory

@BESW Good idea!

BESW

Also: stakes don't necessarily correlate to tension.

You can have a terrifying, horrific game about a little old lady who feels alone and neglected, or a funny light-hearted romp through the end of the world.

Anaphory

By which you mean, I can have an intensive scene in which the stakes are not kill-or-be-killed?

Yes.

My two ideas so far:

BESW

Generally speaking, horror works better if you're invested in the things that are at risk. If the world deserves to die, or you don't care, then the end of the world won't be affecting. If we care that the little old lady is sad, then we'll risk a lot to make her happy and be very upset if we can't.

Anaphory

(1) A vengeful spirit of bad luck wants to hit hard on the rich industrialist living in the villa by the corner. It spreads bad luck everywhere, which hits the marginalized people a lot more than the rich.

(2) Donar comes to town with storms in tow. What about the rheumatic elderly man who has not been able (or forgot?) to pay his heating bill for months, but is to stubbornly independent to ask anyone for help? But sets a can of tuna out for the cats when they come by?

BESW

9:40 AM

Ooh, both are very topical.

Anaphory

Oh, interesting!

Really sad and unfortunately not extremely surprising, but interesting.

BESW

I suggest keeping the story very narrowly focused, and treat big things like storms and industry and poverty at arm's length. Cats don't get that sort of thing, they only see its effects on their immediate circumstances.

Treat the intricacies of human society as mystical forces that cats accept they will never understand, when they notice that such forces exist at all.

They see that there's an old man who's kind to them, but is cold and nobody's helping.

Anaphory

Or that Papa starts to buy the cheap cat food, and the kids are sad.

BESW

Anything more than that is GM's notes to help with improv, and the players may eventually piece it together but the cats won't get it and it probably won't help them find a solution because that's people stuff and they can only provide cat solutions.

Anaphory

Exactly that is the plan.

BESW

9:46 AM

Yeah. If your players want to go for existential dread, I'd lean on that route hard: the cats are affected by forces so beyond their understanding that they may not even be aware of them.

Anaphory

I doubt they will, but I'll see.

BESW

Human society is the elder gods of their world.

Anaphory

For now, I like the idea of combining my two ideas, following that article, and that should give me more than enough to do for one session.

BESW

Yeah, find some really personal and narrowly cat-scaled struggle within that framework.

Something a (magical) cat can notice AND positively impact.

Anaphory

And for that, see what characters we make first.

BESW

9:50 AM

I also suggest having a clear antagonist.

"The cold" is okay, but "poverty" is kinda harder for a cat to fight.

For a more traditional structure, and potentially a more satisfying game, identify an agent that's exploiting the situation for personal gain at the expense of others.

Again, something cat-scaled.

Anaphory

Ah, I was thinking of making “the cold” (steered by) an actual supernatural entity, an ancient god of storms or a vengeful sorcerer or something.

BESW

Cold demons are sucking the heat from grandpa's furnace (and thus raising his bills).

trogdor

XD

BESW

A crow sorcerer is taking vengeance for grandpa no longer using the expensive birdseed.

Anaphory

:D

Kiitos! That was really helpful.

BESW

9:58 AM

The recent storm blew in some new supernatural neighbors that aren't fitting in right?

Anaphory

That's, if this were to become a campaign. Which is not my plan.

I know I just did the worst thing for brainstorming for something awesome, but I have something good, at least, and should now get some work done ;)

trogdor

what was the worst thing?

Anaphory

@trogdor Blocking something with a disadvantage it has, instead of spinning it further with the next obvious idea.

trogdor

ah XD

ok I see

BESW

My first full BitD hack DOGS IN THE BARK is now available. Play a pack of dogs on the mean streets of Crow's Foot. Steal sausages, fight rats, evade the authorities! https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tS2Ulu4JoJVy_eKQ5Iqt2ewWZdEP3Tao/view?usp=sharing (with apologies to @john_harper for this ridiculous idea)

Tweeted by dog_blink on August 28, 2018 at 11:46 PM

David Coffron

1:50 PM

I just accidentally made a pun in my new character's backstory. "Gaul was the runt of the family but he was very gifted in magic so he wasn't looked down on at all"

Rubiksmoose

@DavidCoffron hah! love when those happen.

BESW

"The first spell he learned was to levitate himself."

David Coffron

@BESW +1 ^

Helwar

2:03 PM

:)

Colin Gross

However, he was the butt of many jokes?

His work never came up short?

The Oracle

2:16 PM

0

Q: Who handles an apparent violation of the Stack-wide Terms of Service?

I'm not going to identify the account in question right now, but I have noticed one particular account who continually makes posts using "we", rather than "I". There are more subtle contextual clues that indicate the account may not be a single individual, but rather a group of people. This is a...

kviiri

@ColinGross oh man, this takes me back

Colin Gross

@kviiri to the future or Martin?

kviiri

I had one friend who was ever so slightly shorter than the rest of us and we made so many puns about the fortune he made sellings stocks short, or his favorite short films, or how he could sing so low

When people who knew of the joke saw him, they usually noted that he wasn't in fact short

Colin Gross

@kviiri Napoleon? He just surrounded himself with 6'2" people?

Or is this you calling the tallest guy in your group "Shorty". Like calling the biggest guy you know "Tiny" ?

kviiri

So then he'd say he has trouble reaching up to the expectations about his shortness"

Colin Gross

2:26 PM

@kviiri I like that. It has layers.

kviiri

@ColinGross Nah, he really was the smallest guy but by the tiniest margin

Yuuki

@BESW Is this that study that showed wealthy people on average got richer while poor people got poorer in the wake of Hurricane Harvey?

Colin Gross

Much ado about nothing

Yuuki

(Likely as a result of rich people having greater awareness and ability to apply/receive disaster assistance)

Colin Gross

@Yuuki Isn't that the usual case?

Yuuki

2:28 PM

@ColinGross Moreso than usual.

There's this perception that natural disasters hurt everyone. And while that may be true as the disaster is occurring, the study showed that post-Harvey recovery efforts disproportionately benefited wealthier individuals.

To the point where wealthy people actually made money off of Harvey.

kviiri

That's nasty.

Yuuki

It's a confluence of a number of factors. Wealthy people can afford flood insurance, wealthy people have more accommodating jobs that give them the free schedule needed to pursue government assistance, etc.

nitsua60

@Yuuki IIRC you have direct experience with this, right? You were dislocated by that storm?

Yuuki

Whereas lower-income individuals had to go back to work as soon as possible and have schedules that are much less conducive to being on the phone for hours to talk to FEMA or the SBA.

kviiri

Things really need to change

Yuuki

2:34 PM

@nitsua60 Yeah. We've moved back in and things are pretty much getting back to normal for us.

But there are still Houstonians that are suffering adverse conditions due to Harvey.

nitsua60

@Yuuki Is the massive shock-to-all-systems that was Harvey the thing that created the "opportunity" for Houston's big bus system overhaul, or was that a thing that was already in the works, do you know?

Yuuki

@nitsua60 Don't know too much about public transit, but there have always been talks of fixing the bus system.

So probably a little bit of column A, little bit of column B.

nitsua60

I have some friends who are traffic engineers and say Houston's hugely exciting and is causing a lot of other cities to consider just up-and-redesigning their whole systems. (That it's much less disruptive to change and much more beneficial to redesign than people thought.)

Yuuki

I really hope public transit becomes much better though because Houston is like most cities in the Southwest where urban sprawl has become such a problem that personal transportation is pretty much mandatory to live here. And that's yet another problem for lower-income individuals.

@nitsua60 Do you have any articles on this topic? Pretty much everything I can find is on how Houston Metro dealt with Harvey but not much on post-Harvey.

kviiri

Enlighten an European, was Houston's old bus system notoriously bad then and why?

Yuuki

2:42 PM

@kviiri Unreliable schedules, poor service coverage, etc.

nitsua60

@Yuuki I will ask around.

Yuuki

Houston is an enormous city. It's larger than the state of New Jersey.

nitsua60

@Yuuki whaaaaaa!!!???

Srsly?

Helwar

I dunno much about traffic in the states, but I was reading the other day a thread on reddit about motorcicles "agressively possessing" their space in the lane, and how Houston is one of the worst cities to drive in the states, that you have to be agressive and drive bumper to bumper or someone will nudge himself between you and the next car, forcing you to stop or crash....

nitsua60

I've been there a bunch of times and never realized.

Yuuki

2:45 PM

> According to the United States Census Bureau, the Houston–The Woodlands–Sugar Land metropolitan statistical area has a total area of 10,062 square miles (26,060 km²), of which 8,929 sq mi (23,130 km2) is land and 1,133 sq mi (2,930 km2) is water. The region is slightly smaller than the state of Massachusetts and slightly larger than New Jersey.

nitsua60

@Yuuki Oh, fake news. Gotcha.

[ducks thrown census records]

Yuuki

I mean, the Woodlands and Sugarland like to pretend they're not part of Houston (because they're elitist suburbanites) but they're still Houstonians.

kviiri

Does Houston have a bad name then?

Mike Q

@kviiri Yes, and that's the origin of the phrase "Houston, we have a problem"

[rolls Bluff]

Yuuki

I mean, it's the story of every suburb. Rich (white) people don't like to see "the poors", so they move further out to make their own "city". Meanwhile, they still use government resources from the city (fire, police, etc.).

Colin Gross

2:49 PM

@Yuuki the suburbs there don't have their own municipal services?

They're not their own cities?

Yuuki

@ColinGross They do now but they used to and still occasionally do rely on city services.

Colin Gross

@Yuuki Usually it falls on the county as soon as it crosses a city border.

Yuuki

Mass transit is one of the services that the suburbs have never developed on their own.

And so Houston Metro is stretched pretty far trying to cover every corner of Houston.

@Helwar Yeah, Houston is a pretty rough city for people unaccustomed to driving here.

There's basically no speed limit on the highways. The police generally don't enforce the limits because of how dangerous the driving can be.

I still remember a story about how a police officer pulled someone over for speeding on the highway and got hit and killed by another car that was speeding.

Helwar

@Yuuki There are a couple of plazas in Barcelona city where 4 lanes go in, and the lines disappear. It becomes a jungle, and then you are supposed to go out in either of the 5 exits, with 3-4 lanes each. I get scared shitless whenever I have to drive there

Colin Gross

@Yuuki Good example. Chicago and NYC are the same. How is the cost of the system distributed? How is the value of transit distributed?

I know in DC property values in good proximity to the metro lines were sky high.

Yuuki

3:00 PM

Disclaimer, I don't know too much about the transit system. But what I do know is the metro system is largely concentrated in the downtown area and service becomes far less reliable once you're out of the 610 loop. Property values, as far as I know, aren't really affected by proximity to metro lines although I live outside the loop so my viewpoint might be skewed.

Unlike Chicago or NYC, Houston's transit system is almost entirely buses. We don't have a subway because the soil is mostly clays and sands. There's a light-rail system but it serves limited parts of downtown.

Colin Gross

@Yuuki Gotcha. I know that pg and montgomery county were like 1/2 of wmata's budget in DC when I lived there, but most of the service was in the city.

DC is mostly bus

but there is a subway

kviiri

When they were building the Helsinki subway, the construction faced a problem with a wedge-shaped clay intrusion deep into the rock where the subway was supposed to go

(Please don't stone me to death for any accidental misuses of geological terms)

The solution was rather interestingly to freeze the clay, drill through and then reinforce the hole

GreySage

@kviiri That pun rocked

Yuuki

@GreySage It was very gneiss.

I marble at the skill of their wordplay.

kviiri

3:17 PM

@GreySage I made some geologist puns in my "Vabucalypse World" RPG, about students celebrating Walpurgis Eve

They can also instantly teleport a stone's throw away

Maximillian

3:53 PM

My city hasn't quite figured out mass transit. No subway, but they did butcher a major downtown street to add a streetcar rail that runs north-south from business offices to a small commercial area.

'light rail' they call it.

Mike Q

They need to achieve balance by creating a dark rail

Helwar

It was a light rail in the begining, but then it got corrupted and everyone got sad, because he was supposed to destroy them, not join them

Rubiksmoose

4:21 PM

howdy @NautArch!

Colin Gross

4:42 PM

@Maximillian Is this detroit's silver line?

Maximillian

@ColinGross Nope. Downtown KC.

Colin Gross

That's the one that's actually in Oklahoma?

Yuuki

@Maximillian Our light-rail serves downtown, the University of Houston, and the Medical Center.

Rubiksmoose

@ColinGross Pretty good description of it regardless though lol

Maximillian

It's about as useful to KC as if it were on OKC.

Oh good, lunch is here.

NautArch

5:13 PM

@Rubiksmoose howdy howdy!

Rubiksmoose

@NautArch how goes it?

NautArch

@Rubiksmoose not too shabby. Starting to get back in DM mindset for the reconvening of my campaign saturday night. Just had a player email me about their backstory and integration in to the world, so I gotta think about that :)

He's an aasimar that somehow arrived into my world (which is currently locked from interplanar travel, teleporting, etc.)

So he's not a common race and his mere presence will raise questions - but I don't want to be too negative with it (i've got major story hooks for it, but not minor interactions)

Rubiksmoose

@NautArch I read this message first and as soon as you said "not a common race" I thought aasimar for some reason lol.

NautArch

@Rubiksmoose ha! Yeah, it's a sticky wicket.

My very broad stroke is that high ranking folks want to talk with him (positively or to use him), while lower folks are intrigued, but more on the 'who is this foreigner' path.

But he's looking for what he's done prior to the campaign start, what cities he's familiar with and what happened in them.

Rubiksmoose

5:33 PM

huh interesting. I don't think we've ever gone quite that deep in backstory generation. Or maybe we have but just in different areas.

NautArch

@Rubiksmoose Yeah, I wasn't really expecting it either :)

but it may impact when he arrives in those towns again and how he roleplays in general

and that's super fair. If he's had bad experiences (or good), it'll change how he plays his interactions with strangers.

He also talks in an israeli accent, which absolutely kills me :P

Rubiksmoose

@NautArch the character does? neat. That is not a very common one to hear whipped out lol

NautArch

@Rubiksmoose Yeah, the player is usinsg an israeli accent for the character. Very middle-easternesque and also fluffed a rapier to be a type of Khopesh (not entirely, because khopesh aren't really finesse)

but fluff is fluff :)

Mike Q

5:48 PM

Is the player also Israeli or is it a fake accent

Yuuki

Yeah, khopeshes are more like axes... I mean, maybe a kind of shamshir?

Shotel?

Mike Q

I'm curious about which accents or ethnic dialects are considered okay to mimic at the table without being considered offensive

Adam

I'm not sure there is really a codified list of what you can and can't do. It would heavily depend on context.

Rubiksmoose

@MikeQ I would imagine that would vary wildly from table to table and also depend highly on the skill and ethnic relation of the mimcer.

NautArch

@MikeQ fake accent

@Yuuki He was looking for the style of that hard curve in the Khopesh. It's more that he's got an exotic curved blade that deals slashing rather than piercing but is otherwise statted like a rapier.

Mike Q

5:56 PM

@NautArch why not Scimitar?

NautArch

@MikeQ not mechanically equivalent. The d6<d8.

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