so the answer is almost certainly "tell your DM that the way they asked you to play the character has caused an out-of-character problem that you're not happy about and they should back you up when you discuss it with the group"
@Carcer Well not exactly. Not every question needs a system tag. Just the questions for which it is important information (which honestly IMO is almost all of them, but that is another matter entirely).
@goodguy5 The answer is obvious if we're talking about D&D, but for other games, it may be less obvious. Some games put a high premium on players acting out their characters irrespective of how it affects group cohesion. "My Guy Syndrome" doesn't really exist in some games.
spoiling the surprise by having the DM say that "there's a reason the character is acting this way, don't hate on the player" is better than having the players actually upset with each other
surprise forced character actions is one of those things that sounds really compelling on paper, but doesn't work in play, imo
like, if it were an actual story, with an author and everything, you might read that and be all "oh no! billy has been mind controlled and his friends don't know!"
@goodguy5 I had this exact same situation in a Star Wars RPG where I got possessed. Started doing evil things and using dark side powers and tried to make it really obvious, but still people got grumpy with me, the player when I was only following instructions.
@Rubiksmoose That's why I'm a fan of all character information is player public. Scoring and rewards are meted out based on how well the players role play the perspective of their characters. Only exception is puzzles.
"An elderly demon is crossing the chasm, it appears that someone is going to help her." "Well, I do what anyone would do, I kill them both, we don't need that kind of behavior in our community"
Neutral Demon Player "I dunno man, killing off everyone who does something good is gonna tip the scales too much and get people proactively killing anyone who looks like they're even thinking of helping. This is fine for the solo powerhouse demons, but some of us need gangs man."
"Plus if we're running around offing our own kind, the angels are gonna notice eventually and try to capitalize on it. Be discrete, I guess?"
@goodguy5 Generically, "can anything with a walk speed jump?" or the negation "Are there creatures with a walk speed that cannot jump?" and the related, "Can snakes jump?"
@goodguy5 Can or will? I imagine they're pretty lazy fellows. Mostly just lounging around the place grousing about how the last football match ended in a shootout.
Is this Dretch Swarm too Oppressive? I expect it to be a CR5
HP: 150 or so Proficiency Bonus+3 Damage Resistances:cold, fire, lightning Damage Immunities:poison Condition Immunities:poisoned Sensesdarkvision 60 ft., passive Perception 10
Claw and Fang : The Dretch Swarm makes two attacks +4 . 7 damage. normal swarm traits.
Fetid Cloud .A 10-foot radius of disgusting green gas extends out from the dretch. The gas spreads around corners, and its area is lightly obscured. It lasts for 1 minute or until a strong wind disperses it. Any creature that starts its turn in that area must succeed o…
The HP is a bit high for usual, but making swarms is hard. I couldn't quite figure out how much it "should" have with the vulnerability of aoe and not healing
This feels like a stupid question, but is the number of 1° nodes on a sphere really 360^2?
@goodguy5 Pretty much has to be --- they specify the order (resistance first, then vulnerability) in the rules. I can't think of any reason why they'd make it work like that though.
@KorvinStarmast Nah it wasn't the length of the title. It was the certainty with which you proclaimed it and (to me) the lack of support. You've definitely backed it up a lot more though now which I think is very good.
I still don't think you can proclaim it as true universally though. Especially if you look at it averaged across the number of players (which, to be fair, would be a different intrepretation and it is highly unclear what OP wanted).
@Rubiksmoose Given that I don't universally declare any such thing in the answer, I still think that the question will remain closed since there is no indication that the querent will return. We'll see.
If you think that the title / header could be improved, I am open to suggestions.
@KorvinStarmast Well the first version certainly seemed to say that (at least I read it that way). Just explaining my reasoning. But yeah the current version seems much more like "in my experience, this has been the most used".
@KorvinStarmast Based on your conclusion I think your title is fine.
@KorvinStarmast I'm with you there.
@goodguy5 After thinking about that question for a while I'm VtCing as unclear. I have no idea what kind of resolution they want on this and that is vital for an acceptable solution.
it made me realise that this exact phenomenon is exactly the same reason why people make bad suboptimal decisions in stories
@Shalvenay regarind your trouble understanding why someone might make a decision in a story you're reading that could be considered unwise given all information available to them, consider if you've ever had heated interpersonal arguments why you weren't able to formulate the perfect takedown on the spot
and what was going on at that point and why you weren't able to fabricate a perfect response and flawlessly maneuver the situation
@KorvinStarmast Sadly it's not as often as I'd like anymore. I abandoned half of my active Stack involvements and my new work location is not conductive to lurking in chat for too long when not on break.
Unless everyone involved really wants to get to the truth of the matter AND they trust each other, no one ever gets convinced by other people arguing at them
@GreySage I find arguments highly.producrive with the right people. My brother and I always challenge each other's ideas and make each other better for it (at least we try to)
@trogdor My family loves to argue over trivial things, but we accept that they are trivial so no one gets emotionally invested. My wife's family on the other hand argues very seriously over every little thing. Family drama is a matter of course for them.
(I once got them to hate me for a week because I joked that Maleficent (in the movie Maleficent) was an abusive jerk.)
I once got in a don't-speak'to-each-other-for-a-week level screaming match with my cousin over whether or not having a snack late in the afternoon would cause me not to be hungry for dinner.
I disagree @GreySage, let me put for my argument why...
forth*
(I'm not writing my argument why btw, it was a joke centered around arguing about arguing)
Moving swiftly on due to the lack of big lulz though, @goodguy5, that question is pretty clear about the random shooting and (as always) it kinda annoys me it has been locked down.
Sure, OP might not actually want to shoot in complete random directions, but surely a good answer could cover that? Aren't questions meant to be about more than OP anyway? Surely an answer that covers both truly random and 'blinded but generally in a certain direction' would cover what most people come to the question looking for.
I also completely disagree with Erics comment "...the odds of hitting something on a truly random shot are so low that..." - Well no, the odds of hitting something are pretty much 100%, I've never fired an arrow IRL or otherwise that never hit anything. (Of course it is pretty obvious he means hitting something meaningful which is why I changed my mind about responding :))
Oh, the king says that anyone who kills her will be the next king? Tell your friend that if you two can manage to convince the king that you killed her, you can also protect her home from intruders by virtue of being the next king.
@Yuuki True, but threatening to kill the princess (among others) and weaseling her way into becoming the princesses surrogate mother to steal her away permanently doesn't make her a nice person.
@GreySage Sure, but everyone was a jerk in that movie except the princess and arguably the prince.
Sure, he doesn't revive Aurora by kissing her but how long did that guy know her? It's really not his fault if he doesn't count as true love's kiss yet.
@Yuuki Especially because the burden of proof wanted by the King was lower than required to actually kill the witch. And apparently cutting parts off a witch causes them to become sentient and try to rejoin her.
Like seriously. "Oh, you can just take my wings." "Wouldn't that... leave you without wings?" "Just bring them back in a few months and I can re-attach them." "... what."
@RyanfaeScotland I was actually waiting for an argument, but either way I wouldn't be personally offended if you sincerely through she was a good character.
@GreySage I only saw that once and I was very young. (Young enough that I was excited my parents were letting me watch it for the first time because I couldn't before whatever age that was)
About the only thing I can point to where it's worse than the 1967 film is Bill Murray's singing (or lack thereof, could you really call that singing?).
Maleficent is interesting because its central thesis is that the prior Disney movie, Sleeping Beauty, was basically just lies and propaganda. So it avoids the usual mistake these remakes usually make, where they try to "fix" problematic stuff by trying to plaster around them, while still having to indulge the central plot beats, and Maleficent comes along and is basically like "nah, it was all lies and BS", so they're free to restructure things and reorder things, and they only have to pay scant lip service to whatever events they decided really did happen.
@RyanfaeScotland Moana—and movies like it—brush up against the really hot debate between cultural representation and cultural appropriation, and whether it's possible for a movie—especially a movie made by an immense multi-national corporation whose very existence often threatens the cultural autonomy of the cultures it seeks to represent—to authentically represent a culture without appropriating it.
It's still not an accurate or respectful depiction of any Pasifika culture; it's a mashup of stereotypes with more accurate textures. But more meaningfully it's still a major American company using Pasifika culture to profit in ways that steal cultural intellectual properties and don't give any significant benefit to the communities in return.
Lindsay Ellis also had a great video that focused mostly on Pocahontas, but also discussed Moana as part of the same conversation, and how the conversation had advanced in the two-decade span between those two movies: "Pocahontas was a Mistake, and Here's Why!"
And then there's the whole issue of intellectual property which is... A Thing. Indigenous cultures generally have very strong, well-defined structures around what we'd call intellectual property, which are completely unlike the American-style attitude toward IP.
You may attributing more power to the film than it deserves though, I mean, it's a Disney film not a documentary, I think most people would realise the nations represented in it are not to be considered accurate portrayals...
@Zachiel It's easier to agree with that sentiment when your culture hasn't been expressly taken advantage of by a dominant culture, or when your contributions to your own culture aren't regularly minimized or dismissed in that context.
I have 1 lawyer - well, no, one relative that studied law but then got another job, and I'm not sure he's good at it given his political choices and facebook posts :p
@RyanfaeScotland I think the bigger issue is that Pasifika cultures don't really have any kind of accurate representation in popular culture, so the Disney movie is the only thing that has any serious cultural presence. That's why people write a lot of thinkpieces about movies like Moana (or back in the day, Pocahontas).
@Xirema For sure, if there were more visible representation of Pasifika peoples by Pasifika peoples, each individual instance of representation would have less weight. Until that happens...
@Xirema, did it have any representation? Isn't inaccurate better than none? Least it gets people thinking about it and can lead to more accurate stuff in the future...
That's why my friend cried at Moana when she saw taro on the big screen for the first time ever: the ground had moved underneath her. A real, personal part of her life was now shared with people around the world. She was, just a little bit, less unknown, less exotic, less unthinkable.
I don't know much, admittedly, about how much child tales and myth intertwine in the Pasifika "literature" (I think it's mostly oral tradition?) but my expectations are that it's more correlated.
@RyanfaeScotland Well, there was a big advertising push by Disney to represent Pocahontas (and later Moana) as their attempt to "tell the stories of Indigenous Americans/Indigenous Pacific Islanders". The movies themselves are a lot less pretentious on that front, but Disney at least was very interested in the cultural credibility of these movies.
Like, straight up Moana is not a Polynesian story because it's resting on Hero's Journey tropes, and Polynesian stories don't buy into the epistemological assumptions about community and individuals which the Hero's Journey presupposes.
(I suspect that Waititi's script put wayfinding on the center stage, and the line "We know where we are" would've been a statement of the main theme. But the mystical, spiritual ways that wayfinding and identity are connected in Polynesian epistemologies would've been very hard for a Disney audience to comprehend, much less swallow.)
Especially Pocahontas. If you take the accounts from Disney at the time seriously, the people working on it were convinced that they were working on solid gold Oscars material that would have dominated the conversation for years.
And it kind of did.... but very much NOT in the way they wanted.
@BESW I cried a bit for the same reason watching Bao (which I still contend is far more value than The Incredibles 2 ticket you bought to see it). Which of course resulted in disappointment when I came across the general Internet reactions.
Disney did not give back to the Pasifika community in proportion to the advantages they gained from using the Pasifika community's cultural resources.
That they misused the cultural resources so badly makes it worse, but the real concern is that Disney now controls a multitude of Polynesian intellectual properties and is pretending (through the fig leaf of the Oceanic Trust) that they were freely given.
Controls. Setting aside Disney's notoriously grabby attitude about intellectual property rights and how indigenous IP is largely undefendable in Western courts because they have an ownership structure unrecognized by our laws... Disney have massive international cultural influence. Their depiction of Polynesian reality is louder than any voice Polynesians have.
Going forward, anyone making stories about Maui is going to have to be super careful about how they do things, lest the Disney juggernaut glance in their general direction.
The themes of Moana are largely Disney and NOT Polynesian or Pasifika. Moana's personal journey is very Disney Princess; the depiction of a volcano as evil or bad or corrupted is downright offensive; Māui's portrayal is... well, Māui can be found in the stories and faiths of many different cultures and he's always a bit different, but it's hard to see the film's version in any of them. He's usually physically unimpressive but extremely clever, almost a trickster character.
The visuals are mostly right, though not always treated with appropriate respect (eg Moana's grandmother would probably not have chosen her manta ray malu; in most cultures it would have been bestowed on her by an elder after years of forming a relationship). Also I don't care how nasty your coconut is, only someone like Māui or Gadao could crack it open so casually.
It could branch out into other subjects like the ways Moana doesn't understand the Pasifika relationship with the landscape, but the core conclusion is that the film is about identity and it completely fails to understand that indigenous identities often don't start with the self.
Like, straight up Moana is not a Polynesian story because it's resting on Hero's Journey tropes, and Polynesian stories don't buy into the epistemological assumptions about community and individuals which the Hero's Journey presupposes.
@Mithrandir It would take a lot of time and energy I don't have right now to support the claim, but it boils down to: No, because the central theme "know who you are" has an individualist rather than collectivist conclusion.
That's something that I felt that they had trouble with in Mulan as well. Or rather perhaps that was a problem of audience perception. Mulan is not a story about gender roles or individuality. I think the ending where Mulan returns home to her family in her old place as a daugther (and possibly marries Shang) bothered people who thought it was a story about female empowerment.
Mulan didn't go to war because she was a tomboy who thought she was just as good as the men. She went to war for her father and her family.
The scenes with the ancestor spirits and the slapstick comedy was also kinda bothersome.
@Yuuki Since the I Want Song is the emotional core of a successful Disney Princess narrative and usually establishes the primary tension of the plot... yeah. Again, Moana shares that problem:
Urrrgh I do not have time to write that movies.se answer. It would have to talk about how Miranda wrote Moana's "I want" song by going back to his teenage bedroom and trying to remember what it felt like to be a... Puerto Rican boy in the '90s...
"I Want" songs state the central character conflict in the movie. Why does Mulan do what she does? In "Reflection", the implication is she wishes that she could be herself.
I felt it would've been accurate/nuanced if her "I Want" song was about she felt unable to live up to the role that her family/culture had given her. Yes, you lose a lot of individualism points, but Chinese culture is not an individualistic culture.
That would feed into her character arc as she leaves to join the army. Because "Reflection" clashes with the precipitating conflict event. Mulan leaves home because she sees that her father is physically incapable of becoming a soldier again, that to join the army would spell death. And so she goes in his place out of filial/familial duty to her father.
Not as a reaction to her father telling her to put away the sword and be a real girl, something that would've matched the "I Want" song much better.
(But would have also made the story much worse, imo)
With a different "I Want" song, it reinforces the theme of familial duty. Mulan feels that she can't serve or honor her family by being a traditional Chinese woman so therefore she attempts to do so by pretending to be a man.
It dovetails nicely with the ending scene of the movie, where her father tells her that the greatest honor is having her for a daughter.
@BESW Fair enough. I've just seen a lot of discourse among scholars, natives, and "ley" people. I find it difficult to come to a conclusion since everyone makes good points on all sides
People have different perspectives and opinions, it'd be terrible to expect everyone in a whole group of connected cultures to share the same attitude.
@DavidCoffron Excellent! It's complex and there's no easy answer. Anybody who tries to give you a "this is all good" or "this is all bad" answer has missed something significant.
Lin-Manuel Miranda has said that he was inspired to write musicals partly because, as a very young child, the Jamaican stereotype crab in Little Mermaid was his first exposure to representation of Caribbean people in musicals and it showed him he could be part of that scene too.
Obviously that crab is terrible representation, but it pushed someone toward making much better material that's coming from the own voices of the people being represented. Moana will, at the very least, continue that generational pattern.
@BESW And it opens up the discourse for people to discuss what makes "good" representation (of which Maui is widely considered to have missed the mark by either a lot or a bit depending on who you ask).
