TRPG General Chat

nitsua60

12:47 AM

@KorvinStarmast It did, thank you very very much.

KorvinStarmast

1:50 AM

@nitsua60 peace be with you ....

BESW

2:45 AM

For the Queen, by @muscularpikachu and @EvilHatOfficial is now available, expanding the envelope of emotionally-driven roleplaying games. https://www.evilhat.com/home/for-the-queen/

Tweeted by Genesisoflegend on April 10, 2019 at 10:44 PM

nitsua60

3:43 AM

@Rubiksmoose this meta is one I have bookmarked for linking into comment like the (good) one you made to someone today. I hope you find it useful, too.

@KorvinStarmast It's been alright, but sleep eludes me. St. Augustine, my namesake, will (as usual) have something helpful to say on the matter: "Keep watch, O Lord, with those who wake or watch or weep this night...."

V2Blast

5:12 AM

hello all

just got accepted to an Adventures of Middle-Earth campaign

well... earlier today anyway

my lament from there:

> this ~~race~~ culture decision is probably the hardest one for me. damn it Tolkien why couldn't you have more people of color that aren't faraway villains and such

linksassin

It's not this one is it? youtube.com/watch?v=S0GJDTz0AbY

V2Blast

...no?

Adventures of Middle-Earth is an actual setting/set of rules modifications for D&D 5e

linksassin

I assumed not, just reminded my of and entertaining video I saw this morning. NVM

But yes, in general Tolkien's world isn't the most diverse...

V2Blast

ye

one of my few complaints

I did come across this list of playable "cultures": reddit.com/r/AiME/comments/badjsy/…

still fairly limited

I have yet to look through the rest of the Player's Guide besides the cultures

Hot RPG Questions

2

Q: Does coating your armor in silver add any effects?

Similar to this question, I am curious about the effects of adding silver to your armor. Though adamantine armor (being the other enhancement able to be added to weapons/armor) has a specified effect (under magical item), I have found no entry as to what effects adding silver to your armor would ...

V2Blast

5:25 AM

For any freelance writers:

We're Hiring!! If you think this might be for you get your CV and sample into us by April 26th!

Tweeted by cubicle7 on April 8, 2019 at 9:05 AM

trogdor

@V2Blast no argument here that's for sure

V2Blast

right now I'm leaning towards Beornings

anyone here played AiME before? any general thoughts?

trogdor

I don't even know what it is

V2Blast

cubicle7.co.uk/our-games/adventures-in-middle-earth

trogdor

Oh you had just been talking about it whoops

I mean, I assume it's entirely dependent on if you like the system and the setting

Although I suppose the adventure material could be especially good/bad

linksassin

5:47 AM

@V2Blast I haven't played it. But would be interested in hearing your opinions once you have played for a bit.

BESW

6:39 AM

A short thread:

Here's a really easy way to design a simple game. For those who want to jump into designing and have had a hard time, this one's for you. The next time you're in a conversation that really strikes you, take note of the questions and events that lead you deeper.

Tweeted by DungeonCommandr on April 10, 2019 at 7:16 PM

linksassin

6:49 AM

@BESW It's a good theory, but I feel it will be hard to apply in practice

Creating deeper more meaningful emotions and thoughts is absolutely the goal. But I feel many of those things are deeply personal and things that effect me may not work on someone else

BESW

So it's a good idea to practice a lot with small games that are easy for people to try.

It's been my observation that if one creates something which speaks honestly to oneself, it will also resonate to some extent with a surprising number of other peoples.

Microgames like the above are good exercises in exploring how to express a small but honest experience in a way that's shareable.

Most of our games shortcut that truth by using our shared experiences with media to activate schema, but microgames like those often found on itch.io tend to be digging into experiences that don't have a lot of shared pop culture schema to rest on, or are interested in finding more true expressions of experience than media tends to provide.

linksassin

Once again, a conversation with you exposes me to a whole world of things I have barely thought about before.

V2Blast

7:05 AM

It's what I love about this chat ^_^

trogdor

that dang ole BESW exposing people to new things

V2Blast

arrest that man for decent exposure!

linksassin

I was thinking the other day. Is there a log somewhere of all the starred messages in chat? Or stats for top chat users. @BESW must surely be in the running for the most stars in chat histroy

trogdor

there is actually

you can look up all,..... 9266 stars in this chat

on the right above the star bar there

linksassin

Yeah but there's not easy way to filter that by user or sort by most stars is there?

trogdor

7:09 AM

you can search by user

BESW

@linksassin It's full of stars!

trogdor

if you click on the star bar there, and then go to search and type something in, it lets you then specify a thing said, who it's said by, and in what room

and you can click on a thing to exclude everything that isn't starred

BESW

For example, every time I've ever said "yeah," sorted by stars first.

trogdor

yeah

XD

although I don't know if you can make it work without all the criteria filled out

BESW

I suspect @Miniman might be able to work some magic.

trogdor

7:15 AM

I think you can't unless you are only looking for your own stuff

@BESW true but I kinda mean like,... as is XD

but if you ARE interested in looking up your own stars you can just click on the Show all button there and go to "posted by me" yes I am vain enough to have done that several times

because this song is about me

bam call back

no one but me gets it, bonus points

I think

(haha gotcha, if you get it gotcha)

linksassin

I was hoping for something more like the user stats on the main site. But I guess not

trogdor

no idea

XD

BESW

Yeah, nothing in Meta Stack Exchange even asking for that feature.

V2Blast

I'm still proud of this one:

Feb 22 at 18:45, by V2Blast

the real bad guy was the enemies we made along the way

kviiri

@V2Blast I loved it then, I love it now

trogdor

7:27 AM

XD

linksassin

@V2Blast My friends and I have been talking about doing that for ages. The BBEG is just the annoying guy you robbed in the 2nd session

All the enemies in late campaign were just random NPCs until the party ruined there lives

V2Blast

@linksassin Haha, nice

Miniman

@BESW Sorry, chat sold separately.

linksassin

It came up because we keep ruining peoples lives tbh... We play a very neutral party and when things go bad we tend to leave once the money dries up.

Miniman

No, wait, I've got a better one.

Chatteries not included.

2

kviiri

7:32 AM

This seems to be my most-starred message:

Jan 5 '18 at 15:22, by kviiri

DnD is the game where I argue about rules on the internet for maybe 40 hours weekly and then spend four hours per month with my friends pretending to be heroes.

tbh it's not strictly true, I argue about playing styles more than rules nowadays

linksassin

@kviiri I can see why that is so high. Have another one...

kviiri

@linksassin You need to star the original to up its count! :P

linksassin

I did that too

Miniman

@kviiri How did you check that? (I'm hoping the answer isn't "check all of them")

kviiri

@Miniman I checked all of them

linksassin

7:36 AM

@Miniman It's easy for me. I only have 3 starred messages

Miniman

@kviiri :( I just finished.

linksassin

This is my one and only message with multiple stars...
https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/49596048#49596048

BTW how do you guys quote messages in chat?

Miniman

If you post the link it happens magically.

Mar 19 '15 at 21:59, by Miniman

@JohnP Because there are no experts when it comes to MS Office - only fellow victims.

kviiri

@Miniman Too true

@linksassin Post just the link

linksassin

Mar 21 at 23:15, by linksassin

It's the curse of gaming these days. When I was younger I had time to play games but no money to buy them. Now I can afford them but have no time to play them.

Ah, you can't post anything else in the same message. Got it.

Carcer

7:39 AM

it can be a reply though

13 secs ago, by Carcer

it can be a reply though

linksassin

Ah, good to know. Thanks.

Been a quiet day on the main site today.

BESW

7:58 AM

[rummages through own stars]

Not one of my highest starred, but worth sharing again:

Jun 24 '14 at 20:54, by BESW

(And yes, why he's not using any of the many systems which already have those features, but some men just want to watch the world homebrew.)

@linksassin I have 54 pages of chat stars in this room.

Six pages in the Not A Bar, nine in the Reading Room...

trogdor

Lol

You get starred a loooot

V2Blast

my highest is 5 for the 2018 D&D core books errata, then 4 for the sidekicks UA

BESW

Nah, I just talk a lot.

I've been here for what, seven years?

trogdor

No I'm not saying it's disproportionate

I'll correct, you have a lot of stars

Carcer

I'll say it's disproportionate if you like

trogdor

8:09 AM

Lol

You can if you want

I'm not gonna tell you to

I'm also not gonna stop you

BESW

Hmm, maths.

I've got just under 2,700 starred messages in this room, out of a total of not quite 182.5k messages.

trogdor

Mine seems to be six but I have a couple

BESW

Which comes out to about 1.5% of my messages getting starred.

trogdor

My favorite is this though

Jul 19 '18 at 2:35, by trogdor

Trogdor for president of the world, I promise that everyone will be Happy for up to a week before civilization completely collapses

@BESW seems fair, and for the record I wasn't saying,... That

XD

BESW

Barring room owner business like pinning this post, my highest starred post seems to actually be two, tied with 12 each.

Aug 11 '14 at 23:28, by BESW

I'm pretty sure that's D&D's pitchline. "Travel the world, see exotic creatures, stab them until they bleed magic items."

Feb 12 '17 at 4:01, by BESW

@Axoren Hateful rhetoric doesn't usually jump up and down and scream "I'm hateful!"

Both seem pretty on brand.

The Oracle

8:22 AM

0

Q: How to follow-up with updated versions of homebrew content?

Disclaimer. I'm not sure whether this question should be asked in this stack, or in the meta (or somewhere else). I'll ask it here since for me it relates to designing content for RPGs specifically. I've been noticing questions and answers regarding homebrew content offer a lot of insight in un...

discussion homebrew

kviiri

9:33 AM

@CTWind I've been thinking about "crit fails but narrative only", which seems to be a common pattern for people who want to have crit fails for any reason, but don't want mechanical consequences out of that

BESW

kviiri

I don't mean to judge people for it, but it seems a bit careless to me to include "let's break tone when the die shows up 1"

I mean, that is a consequence, mechanical or not

BESW

May 29 '16 at 4:17, by BESW

I'm inevitably reminded of Once Upon A Table's critical hit table.

I have difficulty following conversations about critical failures because they inevitably contain a lot of unstated but unshared assumptions about the subject and its variants and purposes.

kviiri

That's certainly true

BESW

CT's definitely got a point that it's deeply imbalanced to treat MC failure and lackey failure equally, because the consequences for one are much more dramatic and significant to the story and the players than consequences for the other.

(MC = main character; I'm experimenting with terminology that defuses the GM-is-not-a-player rhetoric of PC/NPC, and MC is an established abbreviation in many online writing communities)

It's very similar in function to how goblin dice, misapplied, create narrative stumbling blocks.

kviiri

9:50 AM

Aye

Someone_Evil

However not having critical failures can mean loosing fun(ny) moments of failure, which is the argument for having a rue to "generate" them

kviiri

@Someone_Evil That was kinda my point --- funny moments of failure being a norm can be awful for those who want a more serious-toned game, and maintaining one of those is tricky anyway

Hence my apprehensiveness towards the usual attitude that critical fails are a "safe alternative" to more serious critical fails --- they might not change the mechanics, but they do impact the game's tone.

Someone_Evil

Very fair, I'm not sure if there has been more than one discussion, but the one I knew of related more to how often they should happen, which is gonna impact the tone. (A comic relief once per three or four session versus five per, is quite notable.) And the difference in rate would let a GM make each one more creative and interesting, rather than being forced to add a penalty so they use the same, boring, (and very quickly unfun) outcome of a nat 1.

BESW

10:09 AM

@Someone_Evil That's... actually the first time I've seen that particular justification for critical failure.

The most common justification I'm familiar with is realism, that a certain amount of random failure accounts for personal error and unexpected situational interference and thus avoids unrealistically hypercompetent characters.

Someone_Evil

@BESW I think a lot of people take the nat1/nat20 houserule for granted. Our group certainly did (mostly people who hadn't played before)

BESW

Shortly behind realism, and somewhat related, is the idea that critical failures and successes provide the opportunity for dramatic reversals of fortune which incentivize trying unlikely actions and not giving up when outnumbered, while also keeping people from getting too cocky when the odds are in their favor.

Someone_Evil

@BESW I can ahve my party talk to any NPC to prove they are not hypercompetent

kviiri

In my group, the usual justification is a paper-thin wrapper of Realism over a huge, throbbing lump of the Cult of Natural 1 and 20.

Someone_Evil

@BESW Dramatic reversals shouldn't happen 5 percent of the time (10% if you count both kinds)

BESW

10:13 AM

To be clear, I don't think either of those justifications are a good argument for critical failures because the mechanic doesn't create the desired effect of the argument as well as other options would.

kviiri

@Someone_Evil The other way'd be... err, dramatic acceleration?

BESW

@kviiri I suspect the most honest reason for nat 1/20 rules in most groups is simply the brainchemical rewards.

Someone_Evil

@kviiri I guess it's more 10% chance that success/failure is determined irrespective of the difficulty

@BESW "brainchemical reqards" is arguably the reward for doing anything, but I do agree with you

kviiri

I feel tempted to grunt and groan about the needlessly unusual roll mechanics of Savage Worlds now

BESW

@kviiri [settles back with popcorn, makes "go on" gesture]

kviiri

10:19 AM

@BESW Characters are driven into two classes: Wild Cards and Extras. (Extra roughly correspond to "mook" tier of enemies and allies)

Extras roll a single die which explodes

(eg. if you roll a d4 and get a 4, you roll again and add the result to your total, with repeated explosions being possible)

The die size is determined by the character's skill, or occasionally a primary ability. Usually rolling a 4 is enough to succeed, but occasionally the target is lower or higher. Getting a result more than twice, thrice etc the target number grants "raises" or iteratively better results (not related to the 7th Sea term)

Here's where the unnecessary complications begin: Wild Cards (including all the MCs) roll two dice: one determined by their skill, one always d6. Only the higher die counts. With explosions, this gets rather complicated rather quick.

There are critical fails associated with specific items or kinds of items (eg. cheapskate weaponry misfiring), or particular hindrances (clumsy characters may find their equipment breaking) and they varyingly trigger off various things, most commonly "rolling 1 in your skill die" but IIRC sometimes also rolling 1 in the WIld Die, and sometimes rolling 1 in both

Someone_Evil

I wonder how much of this comes from a need (real or imagined) to use their dice mechanic to differentiate themselves (from other rpgs)

BESW

Sounds like Cthulhutech to me: less interested in being unlike other games, more just...

Oct 12 '18 at 22:55, by BESW

Cthulhutech is one of those ridiculously overengineered games that disappeared up its own ruleset and never noticed that it stopped being fun to play.

kviiri

@Someone_Evil SW does taste a bit like that indeed

Hot RPG Questions

10:53 AM

2

Q: How can I add encounters in the Lost Mine of Phandelver campaign without giving PCs too much XP?

I'm currently reading the LMOP scenario. I was thinking about adding some encounters if the PCs want to explore the forest or other side-story zones that aren't considered in the book. But actually I don't want them to earn too much XP from these, plus I've never DMed before so I'm not aware at ...

dnd-5e published-adventures experience-points encounters lost-mine-of-phandelver

BESW

Double feature idea, only half joking: Manimal and The Manster.

SmokeDetector

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Bad keyword in answer, bad keyword with email in answer, email in answer, potentially bad keyword in answer (248): In the Lost Mine of Phandelver campaign, is it a problem to have PCs advance above level 5? by Isabella on rpg.SE (@doppelgreener)

V2Blast

Spanish-language spam! How exciting.

Someone_Evil

Variety is a good thing

kviiri

I think that's the first non-English I've seen here

non-English spam, to be specific

Someone_Evil

11:07 AM

Surprisingly long tbh, but maybe I'm underestimating spammers

goodguy5

I assume we're talking about something from smoke detector?

Someone_Evil

@goodguy5 Yes, all gone now

goodguy5

Also good morning

yea, I muted smokebot a long while ago. I got tired of his daily messages

doppelgreener

Sí, muy interesante, pero esta muerto ahora

Someone_Evil

@doppelgreener Oui

BESW

11:21 AM

it's been said a million times but man, I'm sad that so many people still consider hyper-realism the pinnacle / end goal of all forms of visual art. the greatest art style is just whichever style best elevates your material and the themes you're trying to convey.

Tweeted by riibrego on April 10, 2019 at 6:06 PM

KorvinStarmast

12:06 PM

@goodguy5 likewise

Looks like smoke detector missed this one How to Choose the Best Funding Agency for Improving Credit Score & Quick Mortgages Flagged as spam.

kviiri

It's tagged planes

Someone_Evil

@KorvinStarmast I like that it was tagged with 'planes', implying you can take out a morgage on a plane of existence..

KorvinStarmast

@Someone_Evil Hey, even evil liches hiding on other planes of existance need financing ...

Someone_Evil

What is the RealEstate market like for elemental planes at the moment?

kviiri

My language's version of "jack of all trades" is a "plane for all places", which would sound a lot like some sort of teleportation magic if it wasn't about the tool, but the DnD-ish dimensionality concept

KorvinStarmast

12:14 PM

@Someone_Evil on the elemental plane of earth, you rarely have foundation problems with a house up for resale.

Davo

Based on this answer, I have a question: Do people normally have their next level character sheet prepared in advance? Because I do...

And it is pretty annoying when someone levels up and everyone has to take a 15 minute break, then come back and help this person with their mistakes.

BESW

@kviiri Wouldn't that be an aircraft that has wheels, pontoons, and skis altogether?

@Davo I did in most of my D&D games, though I know people who prefer to make choices based on what's happened to the character recently rather than on what will be optimal for a long-term build. And outside D&D-like games... no, rarely if ever.

Someone_Evil

@KorvinStarmast houses on the plane of air all have really good ventilation, but on the plane of water you need to check the woodwork very carefully

KorvinStarmast

@Someone_Evil on the elemental plane of earth, you rarely have foundation problems with a house up for resale.

Someone_Evil

@Davo My players typically agonize over their choices for the whole week between sessions. I'm not gonna have them level up mid-session (again)

Davo

12:19 PM

lol

KorvinStarmast

@Davo Yes, for those of us who think ahead that can be kind of irksome. Good time for a beer break if someone does that.

BESW

@Someone_Evil This was definitely a thing we did. It was a feature, until it started feeling more like a bug.

Someone_Evil

@BESW Yup. I learned a lot (mostly things not to do) from my first one-shot

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