@goodguy5 my new party wanted to use milestone levelling (which I agreed to at the presession and session 0), then we didn't get to session 1 until after the holidays leading to me forgetting and reflexively keeping track of XP throughout the session. It was super awkward when at the end I was like. "You all gain 450 xp" nd they were like huh?
@goodguy5 I had a GM who wasn't very experienced and still had a very old-school (and frankly, narrow-minded) insistence in personal XP tracking despite frequent absences. And despite us playing DnD 4e, which is not at all tolerant of level differences.
IIRC we had one player at level 3 when the best of us were at level 5.
As an example of why it works especially badly in 4e, I give you that it awards +1 to two stats every other level. Sometimes +1 to all, I can't remember how often. Monster defenses and attack bonuses scale accordingly, so it doesn't take a huge difference until you won't be hitting anything anymore, and will be getting hit more often.
@goodguy5 For those unaware: it's a Weeb term, referring to characters (usually but not always female) who crush on someone else by aggressively insisting (sometimes violently) that they actually hate the person they crush on.
Interesting bit of Dndbeyond news: Fandom has bought Curse. https://www.reddit.com/r/dndnext/comments/a5p5e0/fandom_formerly_known_as_wikia_just_bought_curse/
I am familiar with the term limn:
limn
/lim/Submit
verbLITERARY
past tense: limned; past participle: limned
depict or describe in painting or words.
suffuse or highlight (something) with a bright color or light.
I heard the phrased "limned in the same light" and immediately starte...
@DavidCoffron Out of curiosity (as a sanity check) did it seem like I did anything wrong there? I think it all came down to miscommunication and some missteps on my part.
@Rubiksmoose As best as I can tell, you didn't do anything wrong. Your (and his) comments got hidden from the main post in the chat conversation, and the user apparently didn't understand the mechanics of this network well enough to deduce that you didn't (directly) have anything to do with that.
One of my favorite bits of linguistic worldbuilding was in Pullman's Golden Compass (which was otherwise a mixed bag that got worse as it went), where one of the alternate universes had swapped the roots for "amber" and "electricity," so they had anbaric current and chunks of electrum.
The amber/electricity switch makes sense if you're familiar with the history of Latin/Greek roots in science and the use of amber as an early electrostatic material.
(I once ran into someone who thought I disliked His Dark Materials because I'm a person of faith. No, I disliked His Dark Materials because it's a really bad series that squandered great potential on thoughtless vitriol.)
@Rubiksmoose Pssshhh... just write yourself a model to store it as a quantum state in or on the surface of a blackhole. It's what all the cool physics kids are doing these days.
@KorvinStarmast Do you have a citation for the 5e designers ignoring the Multiclassing rules when designing the PHB subclasses? Because that's news to me if it's true.
@Xirema THis goes back a few years to something I read either here, or on GiTP. Not sure if it was mearls or crawford who made that observation. Mutli Classing was an add on, as they described it.
(And as you can see with the plethora of Warlock dips ... the choice to Cha versus Int (the original plan) for warlock was exposed as a less than brilliant idea when MC comes up ...)
@Xirema I see that assertion around a lot. I don't know that I've ever seen it cited.
@KorvinStarmast not worth an answer but FYI:
"The +2 AC from flaming soul can probably be left like it is. +2 on the top is pretty significant, but it's a very specific case." There is at least one concentration cantrip that does fire damage (Create Bonfire, a druid spell). That does mean that the Druid can effectively get that boost at all times for free as long as they are not casting another concentration spell. Probably not insanely broken but I feel like something should be changed there and might be worth mentioning — Rubiksmoose2 mins ago
@Rubiksmoose It might even have been one of those youtube ramblings M or C had in the last three years ..
@Rubiksmoose If you are spending your concentration on bonfire, your enemies are laughing at you. ;) And concentration can be broken with one hit. I am less worried about the 10th level skill than the problems Ben exposed at level 2. I seriously need to rework that.
And that's why I posted that here. The second level ability may need to be "once per long rest" ... I'll ponder that. No need to rush this. Also, fire is one of the most resisted and most immune damage types in the game.
There are a lot of enemies who will laugh in this druid's face.
@BESW I think there are upper and lower bounds on the level of explanation needed for fiction-specific/invented terminology or concepts. Over-explain and the narrative gets saturated; under-explain and the narrative is confusing.
@KorvinStarmast I don't think the +5 to AC is really a problem. Or at least, it's not more of a problem than Wild Shape always is. Instead of attacks hitting you, but not doing anything (since Wild Shape just absorbs damage like a sponge), the attack doesn't hit at all, but you are still vulnerable to Saving Throw based effects.
@GreySage Thanks, good points. I think I need to soak in a lot of feedback, so more is better/welcome.
The only chance I have to play test this is in my brother's group, if our other DM comes back from RL induced exile.
@GreySage what if I went "as many times per long rest as you have proficiency bonus" ... might that mitigate it a little? (At higher levels, monsters do a lot of damage).
@Rubiksmoose "Whenever you are concentrating in a fire spell of first level or higher ...' Maybe ... still pondering.
@BESW Correct. I suppose I'm trying to say that the more terminology that's introduced, the harder it becomes to introduce it in a coherent way, without bombarding the reader or breaking the flow of the story
Ancillary Justice and Story of Your Life, for example, are both centrally about ways of being that readers will find completely unfamiliar. But both are extremely deft at introducing those ideas through character experience, so that by the time those concepts are required to understand the plot, the reader's totally there.
@KorvinStarmast There's more leeway in interactive media. In a TTRPG, if the participants (players) need more info then they can ask; if they need less info then they can stop asking
A major element, I find, is making sure that the unfamiliar bits are limited to what's necessary so you can dedicate the proper space and effort to explaining them.
If someone forced convinced me to play a Wheel of Time TTRPG, I could ask "Wait, who or what is a ter'angreal? Is it important right now? Is it related to the 20 other made-up terms you just mentioned?"
Obsidian and Blood struggled with making compromises to keep the setting accessible, while trying to stay true to the utterly-unfamiliar-to-us ethos of the culture.
@MikeQ It's more or less a logistics theory for how a system gets parts, pieces, and resources: supply-push or demand-pull. Sorry, from a different part of my life. We also used a variation on that theory to try and figure out how many pilots to train per year. Your Wheel of Time TTRPG point very well made.
@BESW There was a pretty major thematic change in the movie adaptation of Story of Your Life but I think they handled it pretty well for the general public.
Arrival is still one of the best major sci-fi movies in recent years, I feel.
@GreySage High AC plus Wild Shape is vastly more powerful as it greatly increases the utility of wild shape for characters above L6 when you start getting into encounters with four or more CR3's
@ColinGross You do that in lieu of wild shape, or have you just found a loophol from a lack of specificity? Hmm, I did not specify ... hmmm. good catch.
I think that because the script writer didn't understand SOYL, he didn't change the right parts of the story to support his rebuttal of what he thought the theme was.
@KorvinStarmast Have you looked at the Circle of Spores archetype found in GGR? It has a similar conception to the Homebrew you've cooked up, although it emphasizes decay and mold and, well, spores, instead of being about fire.
@BESW Those are like lunches in that none of them are actually free? also, they only get executed after you're dead. Seems a little unfair to the wills. Maybe they're all ancient Egyptian though...
But because the script-writer wasn't familiar with the real-world experiences that Chiang was allegorizing, he read it through the lens of his own culture which is, frankly, obsessed with free will as an expression of individuality.
SOYL mentioned free will as part of the allegory, and the script-writer thinks free will is a very very important theme, so he though that's what the story was about.
@Xirema I do not have that book, and I did not like the circle of the spores UA at all. Not interested. I may some day get GGR as a pdf, but I also am not keen on MtG staining D&D since it is by default high magic. But I may mellow on that in time.
Yeah, based on the interviews I saw/read, the scriptwriter interpreted it as a story about free will and even based on that premise kinda misinterpreted it.
@Yuuki Which is understandable because it's not a story about free will... so reading it through that lens will necessarily provide a distorted idea about the theme it doesn't have.
But this means that he then didn't understand what parts of the story needed to change in order to make HIS version a story about free will, because he thought it already was.
Authors are often the worst people to ask when it comes to what's actually in a work, because they're full of the ideas that they brought to the project but never made it into the final text.
Perhaps I've had it explained poorly to me, but my frustration with the "death of the author" concept is that I see any sort of story as a communication between the author and the reader. I do think it's important to understand the author as one side of the communication and the idea that you should just cut them out entirely is bothersome to me.
@MikeQ I posted it as a question, and it originated in a post at GiTP. I'll go final once I get the awesome analysis that RPG.SE folks offer. So far, some very good stuff.
Ben Barden and Xirema have already weighed in with value added.
@BESW Over the last decade, I swung hard in my opinion on this very subject to arrive at the general sentiment you're now expressing. It's really tempting, especially when you're younger, to treat authors as the "Gods" of their own universes, and as I've gotten more familiar with the concepts of literature analysis, and also been.... disillusioned.... with some of my favorite authors (coughcoughjkrowlingcoughcough) I've been backing off of treating Authorial intent as authoritative.
@KorvinStarmast Fun coincidence, I also toyed around with a fire-based druid circle. Meant for persistent burning damage, and getting access to some iconic arcane fire spells.
@BESW I'd actually be pretty interested to see what ideas were left on the cutting floor and how that relates the final work. And that leads into literature as not just a one-way communication (author to reader) but a collaborative work akin to movies with editors.
@Yuuki Oh, sure, but that's a different kind of dialogue than literary criticism usually entails.
Again, I'm interested in authorial intent more from the perspective of a writer than an analyst.
To put it in RPG terms, I don't really care what a RPG designer was thinking about when he wrote a particular rule when I'm trying to use it in a game, but it's VERY useful for me to know his thought process when I'm learning how to make games.
@Yuuki My general take is that authors, by practical necessity, divorce themselves from their own finished products. Like, if a story ends with "X stepped into the beam of light. We never saw them again, and don't know whether they lived or died!", and then the Author says "Actually, they are definitely dead, I have always used glowing beams of light as metaphors for death".... how do you resolve that?
@Xirema I dunno, I'm less concerned with canonical storylines. Like what literally happened in the narrative is less of a concern to me than the narrative itself.
On one hand, if we take the author at their word (and let's be clear, that's not always an easy task) then knowing what they intended has a big impact on how we read that kind of scene. But on the other hand, as a reader, the only way you'd know that is if you had access to the author's social media page, or read a news article about that subject, or got an "annotated edition" of the story.
From the perspective of the reader who just picked up the book from the library, then returned it, and never interacted with the author, the author's assertion about what happened in the story, or what the story means, might as well not exist.
@Yuuki Sure. I'm only using explicit diegesis as an example.
Ultimately, authorial intent is a critical lens like any other. I don't think it should be prioritized over other lenses the way it often is in fandoms.
To use Rowling as an example, Dumbledore's sexual orientation didn't really affect the arc of the narrative. Granted, it's not like Harry had much a character arc either way.
You could've transplanted the 11-year old kid from The Sorcerer's Stone into the last 50 pages of The Deathly Hallows and the plot would've resolved itself exactly the same.
Re-reading that Ted Chiang interview, I'm reminded of something I'd be interested in for a science-fiction story. A story about AI that explores the implications of a state of being situated entirely within a virtual world rather a physical one.
How would that affect your views on consciousness?
His initial defining characteristics are "brave and lucky", and maybe there wasn't anywhere to go from there, since nearly every big conflict is resolved because he's brave and lucky
Maybe he's a bit more brave due to more knowledge about magic and having confronted the wizard neo-nazis in close combat, but regardless his defining features haven't changed
@Yuuki I don't know. Certain types of character arcs can be cathartic, I suppose. Or at least to demonstrate that something has changed in the story's universe, deeper than the surface-level expository narrative
@Xirema I may have to review my drinking habits. My wife asked me to toast some bread and I raised my wine glass and said "here's to bread!" She didn't laugh.
Generally though, knowing author intent might be useful for literature that is conventionally used in academic settings to convey complex messages, i.e., books we read in school
Odds are, when students are taught the "morals" of an older book, there's input and opinion and filtering from the academic institution
@MikeQ Absolutely. When I was in high school, if you came to a different conclusion than the 'accepted' one you were penalized. Although that could have just been my horrible teacher.
@GreySage That's a generalizable experience - students typically don't learn the intended message, but rather what their institution thinks is the book's message
(I wrote a high school paper about how the island in Treasure Island represents the Garden of Eden, and Long John Silver is the Serpent. It was patent nonsense, but supportable nonetheless.)
I mean, Bleak House opens with Dickens imagining what it'd be like if dinosaurs started walking through the streets of London. It's not so far-fetched that he'd do something amusing with whales.
It's the "nautical action story" part that's more out of character for Dickens.
@MikeQ As the answers there mention, Wrath of Khan takes significant notes from Moby Dick and Paradise Lost. Specifically, Khan has cast himself as that tragic hero driven to self-destructive vengeance by the injustice of authority figures.
This only works because Melville's Moby-Dick is a man-dominant-over-nature theme retaliating against the contemporary man-amongst-nature philosophies of, eg, transcendentalism.
A Dickens version would not have been so concerned with nature as an antagonist; Dickens saw humanity as its own greatest antagonist and would have framed Ahab in less glorious terms.
It's sometimes fun to see people miss the point of it. Like they say "if Khan read Moby Dick, then wouldn't he know that Ahab dies at the end?" That's completely not the point. Khan does know that Ahab dies at the end. He does know that his revenge might very well kill him. He doesn't care.
Death of the author (if I understand the concept correctly) can be ok, especially in cases where the writing was likely influenced by viewpoints I'd rather not propagate, but the final product (without the context of the author's views or intents) has some redeeming aspects
mmm. I tend to use it less in an "erasing the author" sense--because I think it's important not to ignore problematic qualities of things I like--and more in a "making room for the reader's context" sense.
Authorial context tends to obscure reader context, and that's really what the lens is about.
@nitsua60 I had a mainland professor dock me points for faulty conclusions in an essay about a high school teacher on Guam who changed the curriculum because her students couldn't get the intended discussion out of a story with an incidental suicide; the professor just couldn't imagine that it was actually that prevalent in the kids' lives, and insisted it must just be the teacher failing to teach the story properly.
Yeah the way I see it, the Author can't completely control what the reader gets out of thier work. However if the reader is bothering to even bring up death of the author I think it's equally important for them to understand what the author was intending
Barthes' original death of the author said that the text is a collection of cultural references, and that understanding the text requires analyzing the cultural context of the reader rather than analyzing the individual context of the author.
The "death" he was calling for was the death of the author's supremacy in literary analysis.
But then there's Foucault, who was simultaneously saying "yes, there's an author, but it's not the living person who wrote the book."
Foucault said that the "author" is a collection of authorial qualities that characterize a mode of discourse.
The first and last were painted by the actual physical person we know as Picasso. The first and second are painted in the mode we know as Picasso. In the modern art world only the second would be considered a "fake." But if it gives a viewer all the experience of looking at a Picasso, in what sense is it a fake?
If you sent someone out to buy you "a Picasso" and they came back with the third, might you be more disappointed than if they came back with the second?
But it's a bit reductionist. We're talking about the relationship of the "author" to the reader and text in the context of literary analysis, and the different things "author" can mean in that space.
@trogdor Well, and if you were an art investor you'd be much happier with a Blue Period painting by the physical Picasso because the art economy has placed more value on physical creators than on skill or style of individual pieces.
The problem with "language is use" is that it invites a lot of blind assumptions about the scope of language use. We have major hangups about "proper" use.
I am familiar with the term limn:
limn
/lim/Submit
verbLITERARY
past tense: limned; past participle: limned
depict or describe in painting or words.
suffuse or highlight (something) with a bright color or light.
I heard the phrased "limned in the same light" and immediately starte...
