TRPG General Chat - 2018-10-22 (page 2 of 3)

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2:12 PM

Is the asker of the curse question a chat-goer (was mid-answer when the question was deleted). If so, the monster manual lists 10 monsters created by or marked by curses and 1 where the curse is mentioned in a later book

Banshees, some demons (such as manes), drider, fomorian, harpies, lycanthropes, medusa, mummies, nothic, and maybe peryton. Kenku curse is mentioned in Volos Guide to Monsters

@DavidCoffron curse question?

@NautArch seems to have been deleted

It was asking which creatures in 5e were cursed

Was almost closed as Too Broad which it may have been but I was mid-answer and was just typing descriptions for all the curses (I'm on mobile so I couldn't even save my work before the question vanished)

@DavidCoffron sad trombone :(

apparently, my players think that the city that we're currently in has Stand Your Ground laws.

@NautArch I also think a magic item that emulates cursed creatures is super cool and wanted to help, but I don't remember who the user was

@NautArch as in theyre afraid to go into other people's property or they kill people who trespass?

2:22 PM

@DavidCoffron That if they get in a fight in a city, then they feel justified in killing the threat.

Some urchins were trying to get paid to provide some information to the party. The bard proceeded to rip them off (told them he'd pay a lot, then tried to intimidate them and scare them off and not pay).

He scared off all but one, who left with the group, but winked at the bard knowingly.

Shortly after, they were accosted by some thugs who were in fact backing up the kids.

Rather than go for knockouts, they straight up killed them.

Session ended with two bodies in the street and the other thugs running away.

@DavidCoffron asker was hohenheim I think

@NautArch yeah... Its tough to get out of that mindset when you are used to killing most threats

@DavidCoffron I don't want to throw them in jail, but trying to figure out a way to educate them on killing residents of a city isn't a great idea - even if they're thugs.

I may just let them get away with it, but now they've basically made an enemy of some folks who are somewhat influential in their current story.

My hope was they'd use these like Baker Street Irregulars

but instead, they turned them into enemies

@NautArch have the investigation lead to them. If they turn themselves in and a trial is held make it obvious that they are only getting off because they turned themselves in. If they try to escape you have a nice little escape event and a city with baggage that can come up later (i.e. plot)

(Self defense is usually a valid defense and the magistrate might go light on them if they have foreknowledge that the party are generally good people)

@DavidCoffron the party has been in town for 3 days. :(

At this point, i'm leaning more towards rumors of them spreading and influencing how they deal with others.

rather than introduce the law.

Although there already is a connection with the captain of the guards that is part of the main plot.

2:33 PM

@NautArch Possibly...the thugs rat out the party to the guards. Guards capture a couple of them, the others are free to plot escapes, etc., and then the thugs come after the now diminished party in revenge. Or to press them into doing some really dangerous expedition for them.

@JohnP The guard captain already has them by their short and curlys :) THose dangerous expeditions are already coming up.

I'm not sure the thugs would interact with the guards in that way. It seems more plausible they'd just start to actively interfere with them.

a new subplot could come up in trying to appease the to-be-created thug leader.

How well heeled is the thug group? Capable of hiring good assassins?

@JohnP Haven't decided yet. I wasn't expecting the party to screw over a good source of information.

@NautArch Hrm. Well, the guard captain certainly has to send someone with the party to make sure they do what they are supposed, make him an assassin double agent :p

@JohnP oooh, that might be interesting. Although it implies the guard captain doesn't have control over her people.

2:38 PM

@NautArch To a gang this would just be business, maybe the new leader recognizes the party as a valuable asset

@SirCinnamon Oh!

but sees it as they owe him a favour for the muscle they took out

YES!

that' smuch better than simply making life hard for them. But is it an "offer they can't refuse?"

they do a job that that group was supposed to do, something vaguely illegal

which then puts them in the precarious position of working for the guard captain AND a gang.

owing favors to both

2:39 PM

@NautArch By implication maybe? I did watch the godfather just yesterday

@NautArch - Ever seen "Usual Suspects"?

@SirCinnamon I'm liking this idea - give sthe party a chance to make a friend again.

@JohnP I own a copy :) Haven't retwatched recently since the kevin spacey news.

@NautArch And the mob boss type fellow could be a more... old fashioned sort, give them a taking too about not killing when disabling is possible

@NautArch Eh, I ignore a lot of that. But same concept. Every one of the gang for the caper was chosen because they "owed" Kaizer Soze for some reason.

@JohnP yeah, separate artist from art and whatnot. I still like listening to von karajan conducted music.

2:42 PM

@NautArch I think if you dug a little, you'd find the same thing about quite a few people.

@JohnP But I like that idea for a potential future encounter arc.

@NautArch Yeah. "____ was a major ____ but man was ____ an awesome movie anyway"

@JohnP Doesnt really make it better though

@NautArch zackly. They go through life whacking innocent people, eventually all these incidents come home to roose.

While off-topic, for me the most OP gun for Fallout4 was the Deliverer with a sneaky build.

2:46 PM

@SirCinnamon No, it doesn't. I'm going to leave it there, because I don't want to start an off topic holy war in RPG. :)

Suffice to say, I spend a lot of my spare time teaching people to defend themselves against various attacks, but dragging up stuff from 30 years ago?

I'm liking the idea of being 'summoned' (maybe drugged and delivered) to the 'boss'.

@NautArch "So, I've got you guys here for a little talk. Bardboy, hows your sister doing? Pretty little thing, I hear"

and being told that they're being watched but he liked their moxy. Could be a job in the future. Will be a job in the future - and they will be asked to do it.

@NautArch Drugged might set a pretty bad first impression as a first attempt. Maybe just an polite but strong invitation

@JohnP even more interesting. Bard isn't from around here. In a way that shouldn't be possible. He could fetch a high price himself.

@SirCinnamon true, drugged may end up in another fight.

2:49 PM

@NautArch Two words. Naked and afraid.

I don't care how powerful someone is. Drugged is drugged.

@JohnP also true :) and they pretty much expended most of their resources during this fight.

I mean, if the gang is willing to taint the food source for an entire inn to get to the party... ::shrug::

so they get woken up in the middle of the night, they're unarmed, unarmored, and out of resources.

@NautArch Pretty much. Occasionally every party needs a good railroading DM to trample on their well laid plans.

or at least to get them back on path. Really was hoping for them to use the informants as an ongoing resource.

2:56 PM

@NautArch Yeah, parties jack up the best plans. Time for you to return the favor. :p

3:06 PM

@NautArch Make sure to give them the benefits of a short rest at least, if they've been sleeping half the night.

@GreySage Yeah, they'll be able to get a short rest. It's not even lunch yet :)

3:36 PM

this meta further pushes me thinking homebrew just isn't a great fit for the stack.

3:49 PM

I think I have to agree. Actual improvement on homebrew requires too much iteration to be good here (where here that would be either new questions each iteration, which isn't a good feel, or editing the question and invalidating current answers, which also isn't good), and feedback on homebrew is usually tip-toeing the line of "opinion-based"

Plus, homebrew questions aren't really re-usable. A given question on a given homebrew won't necessarily be relevant at all for later askers

Learning from what makes a homebrew succeed or fail is invaluable for others creating their own homebrew.

@Delioth I guess that depends on the exact homebrew

I create custom magic cards for fun, and the custom magic community learns a ton from what is good or bad about each custom magic card created.

I'm not gonna disagree, you know better than I do, but I feel it's kinda sad to exclude whole categories of questions independently of the question themselves. This is gonna be a rules-lawyering stack and nothing else if everything else is off-topic :S

@NautArch in what way?

3:53 PM

@doppelspooker Wow. Official Magic cards tend to be unbalanced as heck. how do you even balance homebrew ones? haha

@doppelspooker @Delioth sums up a lot of my current thinking on it, but it's just getting very hard to both ask and answer in an appropriate way. It isn't the problem is in the questions, it's in how someone asks and how someone answers.

maybe we're just not giving people enough information on how to do it right, or not enough time to see what is there.

@Helwar i'd assert that it's via the first half not being entirely true or all there is to it :P

@NautArch Yes. Both. The question is literally six hours old and it is on voters to sort based on usefulness.

There is already a new answer outscoring that one that provides constructive feedback on how to improve.

And was at the time I left that answer.

@doppelspooker I'm not talking about that specific question, though.

@doppelspooker True, but an abundance of questions which aren't duplicates that don't necessarily even relate to each other or a new asker's question... isn't a great resource

@Delioth questions do not need to be duplicates or relate to each other to be useful resources

3:56 PM

@doppelspooker Is learning by many potentially ill-formed examples better than a single question about how to homebrew?

@NautArch why is it just one or the other?

@doppelspooker Because I think the current system isn't working.

In what way?

The desired workflow would still require an asker to sift through a bunch of questions that aren't directly related to their question to get the "feel" for the homebrew; that's not a useful resource in my mind (example would be an encyclopedia that requires you to search through definitions and anecdotes from a dozen other books to get to a partial answer, and you'd still need to ask the question on its own at the end anyways)

@doppelspooker In questions that aren't yet ready to be asked and answers that aren't really helpful either because of that or for the problems of iterative design not being something that can be done in a single question.

3:59 PM

@Delioth This is why I cite my direct experience making custom magic cards. Through sifting through a bunch of entirely unrelated custom magic cards, and responses about why they are/aren't good or their various points of success or failure, I learn better about what makes a magic card tick and how to create good, effective, fun, fitting custom magic cards. So that is exactly what makes a useful resource to a homebrewer.

@doppelspooker well they are unbalanced on purpose. Like... You have gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/… and I now can't think of another, but there are plenty of worse cards for more mana, like 3/3 for 3, that has absolutely nothing going for it...

@doppelspooker It makes it a good resource to a homebrewer. It does not make it a good resource for a Stack-Asker

@Delioth Stack users include homebrewers.

@Delioth Isn't a homebrewer a stack asker?

But let's take a step back.

@Helwar or compare that card to grizzly bears

4:01 PM

i think a problem may be in the issue that balanced homebrew isn't necessarily the same thing as table-acceptable homebrew.

Judging balance isn't easy to begin with as indirect comparisons could be considered 'opinion-based'.

@NautArch yeah. There is an XY problem in many cases.

which is what homebrew is.

Basically, if a category of questions is going to be ruled off topic, it cannot be because "I don't like these questions" or "this is not useful to me personally". It must be because fundamentally the querents are not getting useful answers to their questions and/or our Q&A model is fundamentally broken. I see homebrew requests getting reviewed answers and responses describing what's wrong and providing pointers — maybe not in extraordinary depth with detailed analyses, but those aren't required

Unless they're looking to publish (in which case they should do playtesting, not internet-asking) then balance matters less than whether the table will be okay with it

A lot of this discussion recently seems to be “I am unhappy with how this is going”, but not “this is functionally broken”, and that is not good. The first gets resolved by providing better guidance, both directly in comments and in meta Q&A.

It also gets resolved by not interacting with content you're unhappy with engaging in.

4:04 PM

@doppelspooker Except there is a precedence for things be closed or made off-topic for "not happy how this is going". I''m not saying that's the totality of my argument, but the stack has made decisions already based on that.

@doppelspooker I try to go in depth when I have the time... But usually the less detailed answers capture most of my points by the time I get around to the homebrew so I upvote and carry on

@NautArch They're not mutually exclusive, but when it gets down to the metal, the site is made for a certain workflow - Question, and Answer. A general homebrewer can glean a lot of knowledge, but when someone comes to Ask on the stack, they have a specific question in mind. A huge repository of general knowledge that's tangentially related with that specific question isn't useful to them (where a more general canonical CW "What makes Good 5e Homebrew?" etc. may be vastly more helpful).

I don't know that the handling of Homebrew on SE is necessarily broken, but the way we handle Homebrew has exposed just how little this site has been designed to accommodate questions like them. Homebrew balancing, if it's going to be done well, needs to have a robust mechanism for handling iteration on different versions of the same content, and SE provides only indirect tools to handle that.

The best this site has right now is that if you link to another question in your post (like, say, the previous version of this homebrew) it'll get added to the list in the sidebar of the page.

Users like to answer questions whether or not they're ready to be answered. The biggest issue I see is that many of the homebrew questions are NOT ready to be answered yet based on the criteria of Meta. So we can say that either that criteria needs to be redone or that we don't have criteria.

@NautArch I can think of 3 topics that are marked off topic when they seem related. Product identification, designer reasons, and list questions (the overly extensive ones). They were marked as off topic because they don't serve the site well as experts aren't required to perform Google searches or page flipping. Homebrew and character optimisation do utilize expert-level experience.

4:09 PM

The looseness of homebrew gives it more leeway in asking than we generally have.

@NautArch Or we need to be more aggressive about closing Qs that fail the criteria.

@GreySage Yes, but when a large portion of users are okay with it, that's difficult.

I almost feel like homebrew Qs need to be reviewed before going 'live'.

but id on't like that idea.

SE kind of incentivises answering questions ASAP no matter what state they're in, because early answers get more points by and large

@Carcer Earlier and longer answers get more points

that is often also true

4:14 PM

@Carcer well most of the top regular answerers (at least for 5e questions) are high enough reputation that points arent that influential in decisions on when to answer.

speak for yourself

We can add this to the list of things SE needs:

1. A more discussion/forum-like interface for dealing with questions that are too subjective to fit in the "upvotes for most correct, downvotes for more incorrect" style the website uses as its primary interface. Pretty much every single meta should be replaced with whatever this is, and more POB-based sites should probably switch to something like this as well.
2. An iterative format to handle multiple versions of one person's attempt to solve a problem. I'm being a bit generic, but that's because I could see this being applied to "homebrew"…

(I speak to 5e questions because I don't pay all that much attention to others usually, not because I doubt that the answerers have the same level of site experience. They probably have more)

I shouldn't be spending this much time on SE at work but I've been effectively skinnerboxed and I feel good when my numbers get bigger

And to follow our meta recommendation is a LOT of work. Needing to outlay your homebrew, provide the reasoning for both why did certain things and a comparison against existing mechanics along with a highlight of areas that you'd like to focus is on something that I'm not sure I've ever actually seen done.

or done in a way that's reasonable to parse

4:18 PM

@NautArch almost sounds like that requires an answer to the "is this balanced" question from the OP itself, justify his/her decisions. At which point other answers are rebuttals to that answer and we have a discussion forum (which is not the goal)

Game recommendations were made off-topic because they were functionally broken, consistently re-experiencing the same problems, and experienced community members were broadly unwilling to follow the only rules game recs had to follow.
Tool recs ... due process was not followed there *but* on re-evaluation we decided the better way to handle those was treat "give me a tool to solve this problem" as an XY problem.
Designer reasons metas were consistently a trap where 99% of the time an answer would be pure speculation masquerading as fact, and we saw no way to stop it.

@doppelspooker But is homebrew review suitable to the Q&A model? It's got several issues (and maybe this is the meta Q that could be asked?): 1)The initial question are often not fully formed; 2)Evaluating balance could be opinion-based; 3)no knowledge of existing table rules or gameplay makes it hard to say if it's balanced for their table which is ultimately what they want to know;

4)If there does need to be iterative design, then we potentially either have multiple questions to build a homebrew OR we never see the final build that would help in understanding how to use answers; 5)How does someone pick the 'best' answer?

@doppelspooker I believe NautArch's argument is that homebrew questions (as iterative, broadly interpreted, usually loosely defined questions) dkesnt fit the Q&A model.

He beat me to it (rightly so, I shouldn't presume other people's arguments anyway, sorry)

@DavidCoffron A sentiment which I generally agree with, although my response is that it's the Q&A model that needs tweaking to better accommodate such questions, instead.

In this capacity we're basically deriving from Code Review as demonstrating best practices on this bend of the model

And so far we've had it because it provides useful feedback to people seeking it

@NautArch (1) They are fully formed, only based on a work in progress thingy. (2) Good subjective applies, which doesn't require direct experience of the thing, but can instead be based on experience of what does/doesn't work. (3) That's a supposition. They ask, and we answer, whether it's balanced. (4.a) Yes, we do. (4.b) Not our problem. (5) Vote up what you consider to be useful advice.

4:33 PM

@doppelspooker I'm not sure I understand your response to (1). What do you mean by based on a work in progress thingy?

We talk about questions that can potentially have a best possible answer, but that specifically is to highlight the need to be able to differentiate answers based on something other than popularity contest. In Good Subjective questions we can differentiate answers based on whether they are providing useful advice that holds up to scrutiny, and that applies here. We don't handle questions where every answer is equally valid: there is no way to provide a bad answer.

@NautArch The initial question is fully formed. It is fully formed based on homebrew that is (functionally) a work in progress, but that makes the question itself no less fully formed. That the material they are presenting may not be “finished” does not make the question about that material unfinished.

As for code review - the difference between code review and this is that true code review isn't as subjective. THe software runs or doesn't. It may be able to be streamlined, but that's not the concern the asker has. With homebrew, it'll work as-is. It may be overpowered, but that's going to potentially depend on the table.

@doppelspooker If that's the case, then it seems like we don't need/shouldn't have the Meta on how to ask homebrew. Because what's in there doesn't need to be in there based on what your saying now, no?

code review is about good practice and how well the code performs just as much as whether or not it ultimately does the task that it's meant to do

Having used code review, it is far more subjective on that. We dive into best practices, variable names, readability, design patterns, code layout, styling, indentation, etc — all things which do not fundamentally change how the program functions or how well it functions.

Code review is very much not “it runs or it doesn't”.

In fact, a predicate of asking anything on code review is that the code must already run correctly; it is not a debugging service.

Okay, I was just looking at the stackexchange codereview and many seem to be like that. But ALL of them do have what's in your Meta about "this is what i'm trying to achieve, but it's not working" or something like that. ANd our questions don't have that.

4:37 PM

@doppelspooker E.g. in the case of Python, there's official guidance on naming conventions, style, indentation, etc. so one could argue it's not subjective even with respect to these things.

@NautArch I suspect you might be sampling incorrectly. (Or summarising incorrectly.) “Here is what I want to achieve, it's not working” is categorically off topic on Code Review and belongs on Stack Overflow instead.

okay, I've got the solution to this problem

I will go and amass about 10,000 twitter follows and then tweet that the lack of a rpg homebrew review stack is a problem

@Carcer then rpg.se gets taken off HNQ and deleted from the network

:P

I wonder how much traffic we do get from HNQ

We have something like 3 HNQs a day, and a HNQ attracts something between 1,000 and 10,000 visits

4:40 PM

relative to other traffic?

but that's not necessarily positive or constructive for us, as many responses in the feedback meta are pointing out

(can I see stats? how fancy do I have to be to see stats?)

yeah, I was thinking that I'm not sure traffic from HNQs is particularly high quality for us

@Carcer Site analytics require 25k but do let you see visits. Our visits/day are in the mid-to-high 5 figures, page loads/day are in the low six digits.

So HNQ accounts for maybe 5% of our site's daily traffic, maybe?

fun fact, just over 90% of our site's visiting audience comes from searches (overwhelmingly google)

@NautArch I should clarify also: everything I'm saying here about homebrew review questions is my personal feelings, and depending on how meta goes, I'm just one person. The stuff about what it takes before a question category is declared off topic is general practice, but when it comes to homebrew specifically I have a lot of personal thoughts on the matter.

Mainly, I think there are people unhappy with how homebrew reviews are going, but that needs addressing in ways other than getting rid of them. (Including maybe re-evaluating expectations.)

Not to mislead though, I am one of the four people who need to be convinced before a question category would be declared off topic given diamond moderators are also gatekeepers on potential destructive acts and huge community changes.

@Carcer #toosoon?

=)

@nitsua60 I think you mean #topical

4:52 PM

i have made a tweet joke directly in a CM's vicinity :P i think being able to bring some humor to the situation is kinda helpful

@doppelspooker Expectation reevaulation might be my personal problem here. But I honestly don't fully understand your viewpoint in conjunction with your meta answer on how to ask homebrew.

@Carcer Yeah, but it drives eyeballs and isn't obviously a problem, either. Individual questions sometimes get a little gonzo when five 1-rep users (or 101-rep) users come in and answer strangely, but you-all have been really good at handling that, IMO.

You seem to say "Ask like this" but then you also seem 100% fine with not asking like that.

@doppelspooker I found this site from a Google search

I cannot remember how I got here

probably from featured questions via stack overflow or server fault, given my profession

4:57 PM

@DavidCoffron I was browsing the Network sites from SO when I was bored once at work. I found a handful of sites (including this one) that I thought could be interesting, and here I am

Im curious which question titles triggered IPS being removed from HNQ. it's spawned a lot of controversy and I dont really know where to stand, as the original tweet screenshotting the two has been deleted

@Carcer HNQ for me. I'd been a tex.se lurker for years when one day I happened to notice HNQ. Had my "Saul on the road to Damascus" moment when I realized that my favorite game actually had an online presence =)

Does anyone know? Was it really that bad?

@SirCinnamon from memory: "How can I approach my friend about his girlfriend asking to sleep with me?" and "How do I get the students at my school to stop flirting with me?"

you can probably find the exact questions searching IPS from there, I'm too lazy to do it (apparently one of them was title-edited shortly thereafter by the OP)

@Carcer Oh... that's not that bad in my opinion

it doesnt have to be to warrant changing HNQ obviously but given the amount of twitter drama I expected worse

5:02 PM

no, they're really not that bad, and I do feel the original complaint was overblown, though there's an argument to be made that they are inappropriate in the context of, for instance, being on stack overflow

twitter drama largely because the way it's presented implies that the questions themselves are somehow sexist or misogynistic and a lot of people waded into to say that they're absolutely not

@Carcer Yes, I see that side of it, but I think overblown might be a good word for it. I mean the second one doesnt even specify gender...

which, yeah, those questions aren't sexist, but the tweeter's argument was "doesn't matter, they make us feel bad"

Dang it. I was hoping I could see what the first question that brought me here was. I upvoted the answer I liked and it gave me the "you don't have enough reputation for upvotes to count message. It says that the upvote will be recordee so i assumed if i get enough reputation it will apply retroactively and went and answered this question.

I admit I have difficulty getting into the headspace to understand seeing those question titles out of context feeling unwelcoming on SO but then I'm used to SE as a whole network and also not a woman so I don't have the relevant contextualising experience

But the activity section doesn't record votes (for obvious reasons)

5:06 PM

@Carcer Same - SE started and is probably still mostly used as a software site so out of context stuff from across the network could be , lets call it out of place in that mindset. And I am not a woman but I could see SOME way of reading the first title as sort of bro talk stuff that you dont want to see

But honestly I dont think either of those questions should be excluded from HNQ necessarily, theyre on topic and controversial (in a good way, promoting discussion)

Adding an option to hide HNQ unilaterally seems helpful

you have to hide it by default for that solution to matter

and at that point it might as well not exist

391

Q: How to avoid "Hot Network Questions" on the sidebar

This may sound like a 'first world problem', but I am quite easily distracted by the 'Hot Network Questions' sidebar, as I find them quite amusing and some of them quite intellectual But where the problem lies is that, even at work, if I google something up and find a solution on Stack Overflow,...

discussion feature-request hot-questions sidebar

it's not about allowing a user to go "oh, I don't want to see those, nevermind". The default user experience is someone who turns up via a google search and reads a Q/A without having an account or any other engagement

it is those people about whom our SE overlords are concerned

You can disable it as an ad. You're welcome ;)

@DavidCoffron As a rule I dont use adblock

5:10 PM

oof, it's hometime for me

later folks

@Carcer I think adding as an option is a fair compromise (whether others would is I suppose a different matter)

@SirCinnamon you could make your own extension then to snipe HNQ

@DavidCoffron I wouldnt choose to hide it anyway, though I understand why othersmight

@SirCinnamon There's an entire extension deliberately designed to remove sidebars from SO. I love the internet

chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sidebaroverflow/…

@DavidCoffron Well when youre one of the sites most trafficked by web developers haha

5:21 PM

@DavidCoffron I don't know... "entire extension" is kind of overstating the thing

Is just a little manifest that tells Chrome to run a script on any SE sites (and the script is just a couple if(element exists){remove element) statements, effectively

@Delioth valid. I just thought it was funny that someone published one

Oh yeah, but people will publish... anything. I can't say how much actual effort must go into publishing a Chrome extension though, since I've not done that.

Hell, a buddy of mine has a github repo that "fixes" anyone's webpage formatting issues.

It's actually just a library that deletes everything on the page.

And if you ask it to "unfix", it refreshes the page so that everything comes back

@Delioth that's glorious.

@Delioth the best kind of trolling is the one that is harmless but only after the person freaks out a bit

Oh, it's a client-side library; no-one would ever be harmed by it unless they deliberately use it (or a dependency of theirs used it). It just finds the document's <body> element and clears it out.

@Delioth Jokes on you, I put all my elements outside the body element!

5:29 PM

It's 100% a tongue-in-cheek developer joke ("All the problems with the page our fixed! That div isn't floating over the header anymore boss!")

@SirCinnamon Well, at least your documents must have a good <head> on their shoulders

@Delioth The time to first byte is so low.... and it's the same as the time to last byte

@SirCinnamon Nah, you'll still have all the same performance issues, it'll just clear all that out after all your libraries and immense document is loaded

Whole page load might take a long time, but the page is blank post-load

@Delioth Ah, the worst-of-both-worlds approach

Also, can I just say I love the guy who wrote that sidebar-killer extension? Look at his other repos

github.com/ShivanKaul/gitmail

It's beautiful

WHY

5:35 PM

I 👏 think 👏 his 👏 repos 👏 are 👏 the 👏 best

github.com/ShivanKaul/emphasize

oh 👏 this 👏 is 👏 perfect

could use some css though

Some of them are actually really, really cool too

github.com/ShivanKaul/Typewriter

@DavidCoffron I have to take issue with your comment, on the grounds that you're assuming the mechanism by which a spell "becomes" a warlock spell is part of their Pact Magic feature, but no part of the Pact Magic feature makes any such specification; the feature merely assumes that any spell cast through it is already a Warlock Spell

@Xirema That's kind of why i was asking how they got the spell onto their warlock list.

The general assumption is from pact magic, but there could be other way (magic initiate?)

@NautArch Well, the wording of the Celestial Warlock feature is pretty explicit.

> The Celestial lets you choose from an expanded list of spells when you learn a warlock spell. The following spells are added to the warlock spell list for you.

Nowhere does it say "if you choose a spell from this list, it's added to the Warlock Spell List".

It just says "these are added to the warlock spell list".

5:43 PM

@Xirema Bingo. BUt I think you'r reading it differently than I am. Those spells on the expanded list are available for you to choose from. THey aren't on your actual chosen list. You don't yet have them, you just now have an option to get them.

As it stand right now, they ahve the Bard spell Cure Wounds that they can cast. They do not have the Warlock Spell Cure WOunds that they can cast.

Well, I'm reading exactly what it says. It doesn't say "... are added to your warlock spell list", it says "... are added to the warlock spell list"

Implying that there's a Platonic Ideal "Warlock Spell List" from which you are selecting your "Known Warlock Spells"

RIght, but you have not yet chosen that spell. It's just an option.

The cure wounds you do know is not from the Celestial Warlock's list. It's from the Bard's.

It being in both doesn't matter. It matters where it actually is from for the character.

But it just says "these are added to the list", it doesn't say "these are added to the list if you choose to learn them"

Like, you can tell me what the devs probably intended, but that's what's written.

@Xirema The list is the list of Warlock spells that they can choose from. Not from their known spells.

@Xirema But it also has to be a spell they can cast and my reading is that this character cannot cast the warlock spell cure wounds but only the bard version

5:47 PM

And the reference for understanding that is based on spellcasting rules,

I think you're looking at one specific line out of context of the rest of the spellcasting.

@NautArch Maybe, but if so, what's the contextual passage that negates my argument?

There's actual wording (which I revised my answer to address) regarding Divine Soul Sorcerers that makes their Cleric spells only become Sorcerer Spells conditionally contingent on their decision to actually learn them.

In other words, at least by the wording, they're not the same as Celestial Warlocks: until a DS Sorcerer explicitly chooses to learn the spell, it's not a Sorcerer Spell for them.

So if the OP had tried to make the case with taking a level of a Divine Soul Sorcerer, I'd be in agreement with your arguments.

@Xirema The passages specifically referencing casting of spells on different class lists (see Szega's answer)

6:02 PM

@NautArch So what happens if a character has a racial feature that permits them to cast a spell like Cure Wounds, and takes a level of Celestial Warlock, but doesn't learn the spell as a Celestial Warlock? Because the multiclassing rules (which is where that passage is taken from) wouldn't apply in that scenario.

(I'm hewing to that specific example, but other warlock patrons have other warlock spell lists; I'm not certain which canonical examples exist)

@Xirema I'm pretty certain racial feature spellcasting isn't class feature spellcasting, but gimme a sec.

Thye know it as their race, not as their class. And for that Boon, it's all about knowing that spell from those classes.

@NautArch The Boon is rather unspecific: it just says "a 1st level sorcerer, warlock, or wizard spell" you may cast.

@Xirema "Choose one 1st-level sorcerer, warlock, or wizard spell that you can cast"

A Drow, Archfey Warlock who may cast Faerie Fire, but doesn't learn it as part of their Archfey Warlock list.

> The Archfey lets you choose from an expanded list of spells when you learn a warlock spell. The following spells are added to the warlock spell list for you.

@Xirema right, faerie fire is not a warlock spell for them. It's a racial spell. It's on the warlock list, but it's not a warlock spell for the drow.

Spells can be on multiple lists.

But it only matters which list you're using it with for a character.

6:08 PM

@NautArch Does it matter what list it's on?

For spell casting modifier?

@ColinGross matters for spellcasting modifier as well as use of foci.

and making the case for mechanics like Boon of Spell Mastery.

@NautArch Ooo foci.. good point.. good point

@ColinGross See szega's answer

Spell source matters

that's why there are rules around it for ability scores, foci, magical secrets, magic initiate, etc.

@NautArch TBH, I think that's the point where I Occam's Razor into the argument. It requires more assumptions to say "Faerie Fire is not eligible because it's not a warlock spell because even though it's on the Warlock Spell List (for an Archfey Warlock), and they are able to cast it, because they didn't specifically learn it as an Archfey Warlock, it isn't eligible for the Boon"

than to say "They can cast Faerie Fire, and it's on their Warlock Spell List, therefore it's eligible".

@Xirema I think I see the problem

6:13 PM

@NautArch I think I'm with @Xirema on that answer. It's on the players warlock spell list AND they can cast it.

Being on the Warlock spell list does not equal being on player's warlock list.

It's purely an available spell t pick from when it wasn't before. But it's not actually on their list of chosen Warlock spells.

L19 Bard L1 Celestial Warlock... infinite cure wounds is kind of immaterial at that level.

Warlock's can't cast every spell on the available list. THey pick which ones they want at level.

It's an available choice for them, but it's not actually on that character's spell list.

The L1 Celestial warlock can't cast cure wounds?

@NautArch Well, the specific wording that I quoted from the Celestial Warlock (and other Warlock Patrons) very specifically says differently.

6:16 PM

@Xirema "The Celestial lets you choose from an expanded list of spells when you learn a warlock spell."

you're getting hung up on the followup sentence and ignoring the first.

@ColinGross Infinite Level 1 cure wounds at that. It does trivialize short rest recovery though.

@NautArch Yeah, so you learn cure wounds as an L1 warlock.

@ColinGross Right, you can learn it. But this character has chosen NOT to learn it as a warlock spell because they already learned it as a Bard from the Bard list.

@NautArch I'm getting hung up on the followup sentence because it doesn't specify any kind of conditional between each other.

@NautArch So if they took warlock at L1, and learned it then it counts as a warlock spell?

6:18 PM

@ColinGross Right, because they chose it as one of their warlock spells. If they didn't, then it's just another spell option that they can choose.

What if they didn't learn it during their first X levels as a bard, then took a level of warlock, and learned it then?

@ColinGross As long as they actively make the choice to learn it as a warlock, then it's a warlock spell for them.

I think I have a related question...gimme a sec.

@NautArch Okay. So they have to choose cure wounds as a warlock spell. I assume that's why they took a level of warlock.

> The Spells Known column of the Warlock table shows when you learn more warlock spells of your choice of 1st level and higher.

This implies that your "warlock spells" are the spells you have learned

the player could sing a song of cure wounds or channel the patron's power. They have cure wounds twice.

6:19 PM

@ColinGross But OP specifically said they didn't choose it as a warlock spell.

Seems like a waste of a known spell, but that sounds like their problem.

@ColinGross Correct, they'd need to pick it for both classes.

At L20, who even cares about L1 spells? The encounters at that level aren't going to be swayed by L1 spells anyway.

@DavidCoffron My argument is that that wording presumes (correctly) that the spells you learn are Warlock spells. It's not a mechanism that transforms a "classless Spell" or "non-Warlock Spell" into a "Warlock Spell".

@ColinGross They could swap it on level up right?

6:21 PM

This is identical to the foci issue. You can have Minor Illusion as a Bard spell. But you can't cast Minor Illusion with your druid focus.

@SirCinnamon Yeah. Can you swap your warlock spell when you level up in bard?

@ColinGross Good question. Doubt it?

@NautArch I think you're correct there.

This is the same mechanic essentially at the heart of the foci question.

@ColinGross Yeah, I'm reasonably certain you cannot.

@Xirema yes, but if he hasn't learned cure wounds from pact magic then it isn't a warlock spell for him

@SirCinnamon no. They are level 20 (that's why they're getting an epic boon)

6:23 PM

Relevant: This + multiclassing rules: "You determine what spells you know and can prepare for each class individually, as if you were a single-classed member of that class."

+ "Each spell you know and prepare is associated with one of your classes, and you use the spellcasting ability of that class when you cast the spell. Similarly, a spellcasting focus, such as a holy symbol, can be used only for the spells from the class associated with that focus."

So even if you know a spell from multiple sources, you must associate it with a single class at most and can only use that class' focus.

@Xirema You're correct. "Additionally, when you gain a level in this class, you can choose one of the warlock spells you know and replace it ... "

@ColinGross That, at least, they were pretty specific about.

@CTWind double fisting foci. Drink from the arcane or divine power.

When drinking from magic sources, remember the old adage, "Arcane before divine, you're fine. Divine before arcane, and you're in pain."

Now excuse me while I go marinate in the downvotes for an answer I gave that made a RAW specification even though Epic Boons are under no obligation to adhere to any kind of RAW ruling in the first place, so I'm essentially arguing on behalf of semantics that—literally—do not matter. =P

@Xirema the difference between "on your [class] spell list" is distinct from "[class] spell" is my main point.

@Xirema why wouldn't epic boons cohere to the rules?

6:29 PM

@Xirema I love semantic arguments! I'll come join.

@DavidCoffron Because they're optional rules. A DM isn't required to use them or even acknowledge them, or use them as written. They're not even on the same level as AL-promoted Optional rules (like Feats or Multiclassing), which at least have enough conformance by social contract to be "effectively non-optional".

Curse of Strahd continues. Three sessions (totaling about ten hours of pretty slowish play) in, still nfc where the eponymous vampire is.

@Xirema umm... optional rules are rules as much as any other rule. The only distinction is that they're optional. If a GM chooses to use them they would not be houseruling. But they would be houseruling if they changed the optional rules.

I have nothing against houseruling but optional rules still follow the rules (if the table wants to follow the rules)

...and I mean three sessions in Ravenloft x)

@kviiri Are you playing or Dming?

6:35 PM

@SirCinnamon Playing

@kviiri And you've never seen strahd?

@SirCinnamon Oh we've seen him many times, but now we're in the part where we're fully equipped to kill him expect there's this huge castle to search and he could be anywhere. (if he were really savvy he would just hide in a dacha or something instead of being in his Obvious Boss Lair!)

@kviiri And miss out on his legendary lair actions? Not a chance

he clearly is very attached to those

When we were about to enter Ravenloft, the GM told that he expects there to be two more sessions, "or maybe one long session over Saturday or Sunday". I somehow knew better from the get-go

I was worried you were saying you had never seen strahd and were already at ravenloft which would be massive disservice to the ambience imo

6:38 PM

I have no idea how much of Ravenloft we've explored so far but I predict two more sessions.

@kviiri So many factors - random encounters, exact route, how fast your group does combat

ravenloft aint small

Exact route is effectively a random guess: our wizard used some detection spell to get a "target arrow" on Strahd but given how maze-like the castle is, we have had terrible luck finding ways to him. (we know, based on the prophecy, where he is but not the route there)

@kviiri You need something of his and a cleric to cast find the path :P

I suspect we didn't get the easiest possible hideout. (I'll be happy to tell you more if you want, but let's do it in a spoilroom)

@NautArch No cleric in party :(

Showertime --> brb

@kviiri or an arcane archer with Seeking Arrow

it's also a bard/druid spell

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