My housemate was up before I was, she was in the living room and said good morning when I first came out of my bedroom. I didn't even register her. Lol
I wanna do DH/RT, but the DM doesn't like the "dark theme" of the game, which is fair. So instead we started another 5e game, which I wanted; I want to try and develop a character past level 4. But I'm really starting to feel like he doesn't like the way I want to play the game; I'm the "loose end" or the "wild card" he has trouble controlling.
I've been the one to try and clarify any miscommunication between us, and try and come to a solution, but he doesn't appear to want to be the one that was wrong.
Or at least the ending but that kinda drags all of it down really, I don't even think the ending as it was is bad,... If they bothered to put any work into setting it up
@Ben yeah no that's not what I was saying at all, I'm just saying it's still bad
Can you tell I'm maybe still mad about that abrupt ending?
We have one game where 2/3 of us are CN, and one is LG. We're currently on the way to his execution because his character consorted with demon to gain magical power (which was against the laws of his home country), and has recently been captured. He reckons he's going to repent, and face his trial, but the GM has made it clear that they are going to execute him.
The GM has even given us multiple opportunities to escape, but "it is his duty to face the consequences"
@trogdor I have a question over on sf&f about the effects of messing with time travel in Endgame. At the moment, it's been dv'd and I think closed as unclear, but I think I potentially haven't put across my point properly. Wouls someone be able to assist me with getting my intended question across?
Could you use Prestidigitation (or a similar cantrip) to throw your voice?
Or actually, you could just use it to make "harmless sensory effects".
I'm just thinking you could throw sounds around, to create theremin sounds and the "chh-chh-chh… cah-cah-cah" sounds to freak out people you're sneaking around
You would think they would be ready for a ninja to muder them after someone threw something hard and sharp at them and they walked right to where it was
@trogdor I mean, you'd think they wouldn't watch a guy murder their buddy then forget he ever existed just because he ran around a corner, but here we are.
@trogdor Yep, although some of the later enemies are much more perceptive, so when they turn to look at where the shard came from they just straight up notice you.
The humour columnist Dave Barry had a decades-long running gag where any time he'd use a particularly bizarre phrase in one of his articles, he'd note that it would make a good name for a band.
I was intrigued by a Starfinder "explore the universe"-type campaign someone advertised on the D&D/TTRPG server I'm an admin in (no, not that one, a different one :P) and somehow got sucked in because the DM decided to set it for Sunday night so I could play...
so now I'm reading the Starfinder rules. never played it before
If you know some own voice autistic ones I could start with that
I've only relatively recently realized that was even a thing in books and I've enjoyed all the ones I've read so far
(I've mentioned "an Unkindness of Ghosts" before for example)
I only read that mid last year
And it was the first one
But it's a great book and it was good and I loved it
user15026
5:06 AM
Talia Hibbert's Ravenswood books (starts with "A Girl Like Her", I know that one has an autistic main, the rest I don't believe do but they are very good), either of Helen Hoang's books, just off the top of my head
user15026
I could probably find more if I wasn't so tired, I will let you know
user15026
I still need to read An I kindness of Ghosts but I feel like it might turn me inside out emotionally
@Ash you are probably the person to ask about this. Considering the last time I spoke about any LGBTQI issues, I presented my stance on the issue rather terribly, but hopefully I can redeem myself.
It was relatively easy for me to read but it was my first "access intimacy book" and I don't have most of the discrimination based issues the Main character does
So I definitely caution that it could be a hard read at certain points
Yeah, I'm aware, thanks. I decided to have the conversation there regardless, so nothing to worry about (unless they feel these messages should be moved as well)
@Ben Yeah not too bad. I have a pathfinder session tonight which I've been building up to for a while.
Big group of orcs attacking a small village. Players are tasked to defend it. We'll see if they can figure out that the Orcs are being mind controlled by a mind-flayer before it's too late.
Kill the Illithid fight is over. Otherwise they might be going close to a TPK due to the superior numbers of the orcs.
@linksassin Oh this reminds me. When "building the world", the GM likes to ask for certain details from the players, to sort of "include" them in the world building.
My most used would be NPCs. I rarely use monsters. I don't love the idea that there is just random monsters roaming around otherwise civilized societies.
@MikeQ Well, I don't think that's the way the DM intended it - if anything the town we are in is known for its whaling trade. I think it's just in regards to the "monsters found in the surrounding areas"
@JackBrooker hi hi hi!
@MikeQ Yes when "whaling" was announced, we all recoiled
My current BBEG is a Drow Sorcerer who is going around destroying Magic Schools and Wizard Towers because Wizards "stole magic". To some degree she is correct, the original wizards did terrible things to those with innate magics a long time ago.
@MikeQ Pretty much, the dragon doesn't like this kingdom because it killed a bunch of it's dragon friends when it was first estabiished. The local townsfolk have a series of measures in place to avoid doing anything to help the king.
Though I think my players are going to miss out on that particular storyline. Things are coming to a head too quickly on the main quest. And it's the far side of the world.
Nah, use it as a filler arc. When they face off with the BBEG, they suddenly find themselves on the other side of the world and have to deal with a completely different problem before they can get to the extremely time-sensitive main story.
The old man in the back is rambling about something... Taxes... Dragons... Insurance... "The whole thing is a scam! The dragon is on their team, cos the dragon hates the king fer killin' 'is friends, 'n the villagers know the king'll fork out money's t' rebuild the place! They's in cahoots!"
Can imagine the party dealing with that.
"So... You don't want to kill the dragon, and the dragon has no intention of killing you, it's just happy to burn the place down... And it announces itself ahead of time, allowing everyone to evacuate... So, it's just tax fraud? Well, 3 of us are Chaotic so..."
@Ben google says "namesake" is used to mean both the person/thing that someone/something is named after, and the person/thing named after someone/something else
@kviiri I could probably bet that no, it doesn't have a single word, because contextually, situationally, grammatically, there would be a different word for different situations
Cos you know... English has so many rules, and it both does, and does not, follow them fastidiously
@kviiri If there's a word that's spelled the same AND sounds the same, but has multiple unrelated meanings, that's one specific kind of homonym. Like date (food), and date (romantic).
Yeah, be aware, all three of those words gets... fuzzy... because English long ago gave prescriptivism a wedgie and then took its lunch money.
You'll also often find both homograph and homophone with the positive quality (sounds/spelled the same) but considered neutral on the negative quality (might or might not spell/sound different).
And homonym is sometimes just a catchall for any similarity.
@Carcer And then you have those weird words that are pronounced almost exactly the same, mean pretty much the same thing, are cognates but are spelled differently, eg comptroller and controller
Hm, I looked up translations for my language's word for "person who shares their name with another person" and apparently "namesake" is also used for sharing a name without intent
@doppelgreener Cool! I have done a bit of reflecting too, as I noted in my meta post
Although I tried to steer away from discussing the problem's nature too much, as my main point was supposed to be "we need a consensus regarding this", not trying to start a discussion there what that consensus should be.
@kviiri I fear that the attempt to reach a consensus will be more likely to lead to 'whatever plurality wins will enforce its preference on the site, even though there is no consensus and probably no majority'.
As someone who does a lot of system-agnostic thinking about RPGs (or at least I like to see myself thus!), I found mxy's reply about good enough to give such questions enough breathing space.
I.e. it's not that I don't think there are ways to make things better, but I fear that trying to change things will make things worse for the agnostics.
Eg. the boundary between unclear/unanswerable system agnostic, and suggested ways of handling system-specific answers to system-agnostic questions
Although it's not in the site's philosophy to pre-empt problems, and I don't think I've seen "I just assume it's DnD" in a long while, so the latter point shall be moot for now although it's something where I don't trust the votes alone.
My impression was that 'assume D&D' is the opposite of SA: Q: I have seen such a problem in systems X, Y and Z (none of them D&D). Commenter: Oh did you really? I bet you just found this problem in D&D and it's not a problem outside it!
That was infuriating.
I.e. the commenter outright ignored the question body and the tag, and assumed the opposite of it!
I don't recall seeing that, but we have had a different issue where answers assume that every RPG works like DnD (or is DnD, more blatantly). That happens even in explicitly tagged questions.
Dungeon World has a particularly colorful history in that regard
Presumably because its intentionally similar lingo can make it easy to confuse...
Oh, I do recall a DW-tagged question getting an explicitly D&D-rule answer. That was sad, funny and infuriating at the same time. In downvoted the answer of course.
Basically I'd expect system-agnostic questions, where applicable, to have a reasonably good specification (appropriate for the exact nature of the question) of what the game they're playing is like (or intended to be like)
Sometimes a scope of a problem is wide enough that narrowing the scope doesn't make sense (e.g. when it shows up across a very wide spectrum of playstyles).
@Miniman No it doesn't. The tag wiki says: "For questions that are explicitly not restricted to any one particular system or rules, where the asker wants solutions to the question that are not directly tied to a game's mechanics."
@vicky_molokh They're not. But every argument I've seen suggesting system-agnostic is useful in some way depends on assuming it means the latter instead of the former.
@kviiri I guess that explains it, then. If we define it as shorthand for "multiple systems" rather than "system-agnostic", I have no objections. Other than the misleading name, of course.
Multiple-system can, depending on the question, be a subset of system-agnostic, in a technical sort of way. E.g. a question on how to maintain the proper mood in Eclipse Phase (which officially exists in two systems) is technically SA (though people won't agree whether the SA tag is required there).
@kviiri That...what? Whether they're playing D&D or Fate (for example) makes orders of magnitude more difference to "what the game they're playing is like" then their playstyle.
@Miniman DnD and Fate are quite extreme examples, though. And the concern might be legitimately system-independent in some cases. It might be something that recurs in several similar systems.
@kviiri "recurs in several similar systems" != "system-independent". That's my point - "multiple systems" is a perfectly valid tag, and if we're actually just using system-agnostic as shorthand for it, that makes sense.
@Miniman But why do you consider system-agnostic to be misleading?
Eg. you play DnD as a collaborative tactical combat game, your party mate keeps attacking your character for laughs. You switch to Savage Worlds as a collaborative tactical combat game, the friend persists. I don't see a reason why in this example the problem has to be construed as belonging to a particular set of systems, instead of a particular kind of game --- collaborative tactical combat (and of course the friend who doesn't get it).
A problem can occur in multiple systems not because its sources are in those multiple systems, but rather because the source of the problem isn't in the system at all.
@kviiri Well, to start with, it doesn't have to be construed as a particular set of systems. It's just a problem-players question. But anyway, it's not system-agnostic, because there are plenty of systems where it wouldn't be a problem.
@Miniman I still don't understand why system-agnostic has to mean the question has to be literally valid in any possible RPG system ever. The fact that we don't know of the system doesn't mean we can't have other limiting factors, eg. the style of the game.
@kviiri It doesn't mean that the question has to be valid in every possible system ever. But that means the tag doesn't actually mean "truly system-agnostic", just "applies to multiple systems".
There's nothing wrong with that - we have plenty of tags we use in ways that differ somewhat to their face value.
But if going into software metaphors, I think a helpful one is language-agnostic algorithms. When someone is taught an algorithm not in glagol and not in C, but in general, non-proglang terms.
When people view a word differently, and you force a realignment to ensure it's from now on, this means that from that point some fraction people will de facto be told 'You were using it word wrong, from now on stop using it that way, only use it in the other way'. When the word has been sufficiently broad / had a sufficiently high number of nuanced/differing meanings, a lot of people will get hit by this hammer.
An important thing to soften the blow is to provide alternatives that will cover the meanings that got 'orphaned'.
@Miniman This is actually something I'm not as sure about --- it sure seems to me that system-agnostic has gotten very rare compared to what it was when I started coming to this site
I did in my short stay here notice SA questions getting closed with 'But tell me the system!' comments in tow, and SA tags getting removed from such questions.
System agnostic isn't a talisman to ward off people needing more information. If people decide they don't have enough information, and the game system is one of those issues, then the question can and should be closed, and then updated with the information once supplied and then reopened.
If that does happen, good, that's the system working well.
@doppelgreener yeah. I don't always know when system-agnostic should be used and whether it's intended to mean "can apply to multiple systems" or "is an issue unrelated to system - but I've definitely seen questions tagged with it that also fail to provide specifics or explain the context of the question
@doppelgreener The problem is when the question is not about the mechanics, and people misuse that information to turn an answer into a mechanical one, when that is not what's being asked. Or when the provided information is misinterpreted as a request to change the tag.
Warding generally isn't a very constructive thing, sure.
It is normal practice to give e.g. a gurps system tag to inform answerers that the answers should be based on gurps and not, say, vtm. Similarly some people may want to tag the system to be system-agnostic to inform others.
I'll get more into the question's details, but the reason I ask this is the Kensei Monk. Kensei monks cannot use Heavy weapons, which results in them being unable to use all Two-Handed weapons, but the Double-Bladed Scimitar is a two-handed weapon that is not heavy.
Since a Double Bladed Scimit...