So I just saw that question about counting the sources of disadvantage and advantage and letting disadvantage stick if there's more (or keeping whichever's greater) and I did some thinking on this ages back: wouldn't you be able to just list an arbitrary number of situational environmental bonuses, and whoever can come up with more things the GM can't argue with wins?

It's like that wuxia game where you're incentivised to come up with as many possible details as possible about your move. It's fun! It has you make crazy detailed fight scenes, which is exactly what a wuxia game neds!

Except in this case it's incentivised to come up with as many possible advantages as you can list, which would seem fun for a bombastic game of one-ups-manship, but doesn't seem so fun in this context.

(Mainly because that's a lot of work for a binary reward: you eventually just have disadvantage or not. In the wuxia game you get a bigger benefit the more work you put in.)

There are only so many things that (the RAW says) grant dis/advantage. Beyond that is up to the DM. So the DM can refuse if they feel the players are abusing the rule.

What would you guys think about having a [food] or [eating] tag? Maybe [food-and-drink]? There seem to be a lot of related questions about that, but I'm not sure what would be a good tag to capture those questions about eating food and drinking water (without including stuff like potions; not sure where alcohol - or other drinks - would fall in the categorization). I'd propose it in meta but my thoughts aren't really organized yet so it'd end up being an unclear discussion prompt.

@ColinGross It was a decent discussion prompt

@MikeQ Yeah my thinking was that if there were already a couple of situational advantages granted by the GM already, it would be difficult to decline more, so the GM might just go: "ok, nope, throwing all the situational advantages out the window, just the RAW ones" or just throw out the ones that weren't already there or just slap the player with a trout.

@V2Blast They should fall under the umbrella tag of potent-potables

I'm not sure what the benefit of a consumables tag would be.

As a broad rule of thumb, we let askers make their own tags without supervision until a problem emerges, and we re-tag to fix that specific problem.

fyi this is also something people would ask about as a social thing: rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/57971/…, rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/117623/…. Not a dealbreaker for such a tag but something to be aware of.

@doppelgreener Good point

@BESW I mean, I've felt for a while that there are a significant chunk of questions about how much characters need to eat/drink, how often they need to do so, what they can eat/drink, etc. It seems like a useful categorization...

Okay, expand on that: how is the tag useful? we don't tag everything we've got a lot of.

@BESW When I worked retail in the 70's we tagged everything.

This is what the meta will expect you to support: the claim that curating the organic tagging system will create more benefit for the site than the effort it'll take to curate.

Alternatively, just tag your own questions with the foody tag of your choice and see if it catches on.

Well, to the extent that tags can be useful for searching where plaintext is not, a food-and-drink tag would make it easy to look up previous questions about food and drink if you don't remember the exact wording of them and don't, say, always talk about the same gimmicky foods and beverages whenever you answer a food and drink question.

@BESW that is indeed the way most tags happen

half the non-game tags i think i've created were just that

Yeah. You only need a meta if you want to go on a re-tagging spree, really.

Normally we just run it up the flagpole and see if anyone salutes.

If the tag catches on, then we can talk about re-tagging the backlog.

@Glazius Yeah, this is one where I think the "just browsing" rationale holds up pretty well. I don't want to have to search "starvation" and "food requirement" and "foraging" and "hungry" and... if I'm poking around that part of the ruleset.

I'd consider that a supportable argument for the tag--but it has to be said, not just implied, that browsability is the reason for the proposal.

@nitsua60 @Glazius Thanks, this basically sums up my thoughts. This is why I was asking in chat, so that someone else could verbalize what I was clearly failing to :P

@nitsua60 yeah that would suck, I usually assume we only have one e tag that means something, not 5 that all also mean that same thing

When that's not the case it's kinda frustrating

@DavidCoffron Unless you ascribe to my theory that he might be authoritative but never has been on Twitter =)

@nitsua60 wait who?

@trogdor Jeremy Crawford

I thought we were just talking about tags

XD

I must have missed something

[uncrosses eyes] no, you're fine. I was trying to respond to a message of david coffron's from, like, a day ago and must have misfired. [rebooting...]

ah

I do think it's weird that he would make rules off of Twitter

that just seems,.... not very great

@nitsua60 Yeah. I tend to agree with that philosophy. If it's in SageAdvice publication it is much more important to pay attention to

@nitsua60 Technically his rulings are "official" (or can be) even on Twitter but I also agree that they're not as official as proper Sage Advice columns on the D&D website or the Sage Advice Compendium

Anyway. @trogdor and @DavidCoffron feel free to weigh in on my suggestion above (about a [food-and-drink] type tag) with any suggestions to help refine it before I or someone else posts it in meta

not sure I can give much advice on that

I don't typically make tags myself

@V2Blast I honestly have no idea. That is a part of the site I haven't really dove in to.

Amazon just discounted a bunch of the stuff that was on sale even more

in particular, Waterdeep: Dragon Heist and Waterdeep: Dungeon of the Mad Mage are each around $10 now

(the other stuff got about $3 cheaper each at most)

wait. I dun goofed. looked at the wrong page

@trogdor I used to like it, because having one ultimate source of authority does reduce the need to debate and argue over pointless little stuff

But then I realized that.... no it doesn't

And JC's rulings don't seem particularly informed, as a general rule. There's no quality check, no editorial oversight.

So nowadays I say the PHB is not in Heaven, but here on earth, for us normal mortals to make sense of.

Evening all

Evening

(Or well it's 4 PM here but dark already so it counts)

Just finished a game of pathfinder. Combat went for 2 mins (in game)

IRL, 2 hours lol

We spent the first half of the fight just chipping away at the enemy's defensive spells, but then the barbarian got the first hit, on a crit

Dealt 37 of its overall 40 hp

It then spent the next 3 rounds healing itself, after incapacitating everyone

I ended up tripping it, for the barb to deal 20 damage, killing it (it had 19 HP)

We kept making jokes about it, in which we determined it was a CR 18 Lich. Lol

Sorry, "determined" :P

Classic ^^

Enemy healers is one of those things that should be used VERY sparingly

He had a spell that was basically "harm living/heal undead",and he was undead

But yes. I agree. It only drags out the fight.

Were there healer enemies in ODnD or is it a CRPG influence?

No clue lol.

@V2Blast A large gulf exists between "are official" and "can be official." Sage Advice Compendium is official. SAC also tells us that a tweet can be official. Nothing, anywhere, that I've ever been pointed to has made the statement that "tweet X is official." (And that's good, since the tweets are sometimes just-plain wrong.)

I think there is a decent question here that might need some clarification. Any PF wise folks able to address my comment?

@trogdor +1 to using twitter as a rules revision mode being not great.

@kviiri yes, there were. NPC clerics and evil high priests healing their allies was a thing in some of the fights I was in.

Not to mention the usual regenerating monsters like trolls and vampires ...

Hey, I'm making an evil fortress for an evil character and I'm trying to scrounge around for ideas. I want visitors who visit this place to be welcomed in, poisoned, looted, and erased from existence. What's the best way to erase someone from existence?

Disintegrate?

Might depend on system

@JohnCarroll what's your game system?

DND 5e

Disintegrate looks interesting

I've heard you can dissolve people'd corpses in acid too? I'm not a caster and I've just reached level 11. I'm trying to find cheapish way to make this happen so I can make it seem reasonable to my DM.

@JohnCarroll a lich's phylactery is the easiest way

@JohnCarroll but to a cheap way, have them eaten by a Barghest

@kviiri that's part of what I mean, I assume normally a team is supposed to look at this stuff, and heck even when that's not the case, the same guy might be less inclined to make a mistake or even contradict himself if he (or she, or they) is writing down an official book source rather than,... dictating things through something like Twitter

I suspect this is too opinion based to ask as a "real" question, so I'll ask here: In D&D 5E, are the optional rules (Feats, Multiclassing, Variant Human, etc.) commonly used? That is, is it the norm to include them and it'd be kind of weird not to have them in a game, or is it normal to only explicitly add them after careful consideration?

It's probably impossible to say, with any certainty, what's "normal" or "common" in D&D groups. They're so widely spread and thinly connected that any attempt to make generalizations is only going to be accurate for whatever bit of the D&D experience we've managed to contact.

(I think it's easy for RPGers who spend a lot of time in online RPG spaces, to underestimate just how many RPGers avoid online RPG spaces like the plague they so often are.)

That said, I would suspect based on personal observation and RPG.SE trends, that many groups only use the material in the core books and avoid optional variants even in those.

Not as a principled stand, but because it's presented as the default by the books and it's the path of least resistance to actually getting down to playing the game.

My DND group has no qualms with accepting varient humans. Basically, if it's in the PHB it's fine.

Feats are nice for the Fighter (my current class) because he gets almost more ability score increases than are useful. So after a certain point, feats are fun to just read over and choose. Wizards get to pour over and choose which spells they want, Fighters get to look at which Feats they want.

@PeterCooperJr. In my half-dozen groups I've yet to have one either exclude any of the variants you mention or include a variant not on that list (that I can think of). (By way of full transparency: there's plenty of overlap among some of those groups. Probably representing 25-30 players, all-told.)

^^

I mean, I use a time pool (houserule) and each campaign starts with conversation of what classes/races/pantheon/tech-level/societal-organization/&c. makes sense (collective worldbuilding), too. But not a lot of variants, and almost never UA.

@PeterCooperJr. those three example variants I see a lot (and also flanking and magic items), but some I never/almost never see used (like proficiency dice)

Alright, off to co-run a 40-player six-table session. Wish me luck!

(Took ibuprofen already.)

@nitsua60 Good luck!

I'm mostly certain this works, but just in case: is there any reason a sorcerer couldn't cast a spell that normally has verbal components via subtle metamagic in the area of effect of silence? (D&D5e)

I always thought that was the point of those sorts of features.

I've always been focused on using subtle for things like enchantment spells in social situations, but recently I've been thinking about a niche use sorcerer. Variant human, Prodigy feat for athletics expertise, divine soul sorcerer with quicken & subtle metamagics. Against enemy spellcasters, go up, grapple, quicken silence over both of you. If needed on future turns, subtle metamagic to keep casting spells while in silence.

In 3.5 there were anti-magic handcuffs that activated a targeted anti-magic effect on only the person the cuffs were closed on.