@kviiri @Miniman @NautArch welcome to the staff--we're glad to have you helping keep this a healthy community full of knowledgeable, considerate people. . Any unlabeled items in the break-room fridge are thrown away on Tuesdays and Fridays. Make sure to sign up for the health care by the Nov. 1 deadline.
Trolls are best dealt with using a combination of conspicuous good-faith handling and fire. (The mods keep the fire in a back room.)
@BlackSpike Yup--fleshing out the complement of Room Owners.
@BESW has done an amazing job over the years of helping steer this place to one of the nicest and most welcoming and genuine and capable-of-hosting-challenging-discussions places on the Network, IMO. But that doesn't all need to rest on one set of shoulders!
@V2Blast :campfire:
(I've given up trying to use emojis in chat. Now I just use my words and trust that people can translate to pictographic charsets in their heads.)
@NautArch Fun bit of trivia: when the movie was made Swingline didn't offer a red model; the one used on screen is painted with nail polish, IIRC. (The production designer really wanted Milton to have a red stapler, or the writers....)
Now it's revolutionized Swingline: they started offering red, then all sorts of colors.
@JoelHarmon This is a little off, though. Against any given enemy, there's generally going to be a "best" cantrip, so the issue isn't really action economy, since from that POV you only need one. More combat cantrips let you perform more optimally against wide ranges of enemies.
@Miniman Major considerations are damage type, target counts, and range.
Reminds me of a character I once made in 3.5 who had as many cantrips as possible. Pretty weak overall, but the role play was pretty good. Lots of prestidigitation and mage hand there.
@Miniman Druidcraft. Best cantrip, hands down. Against any enemy.
(As long as you want to die.)
TIL that "gyromancy" involves putting a ring of letters on the ground, spinning around until you fall, noting the letter you fell toward, and repeating until a prophecy is generated. I'd say that's remarkably silly, but I studied quantum mechanics. At a certain point it gets hard to rule anything out.
Lecanomancy: divination through interpreting the ripples of a pebble dropped in water.
Cromniomancy: divination through interpreting the sprouting of onions. I feel like this one's really a long-game payoff....
> One method is to place onions on a sacred altar to learn about friends and family far away and out of contact. The names of the beloved are inscribed on individual onions and left undisturbed until they began to sprout. The faster the sprouting, the better health and happiness was enjoyed by the friend named on the onion.
The talk page for cromniomancy is disappointingly empty.
Lampadomancy and lychnomancy feel like -mancy inflation: one is divination through observing a candle, the other is divination through observing three candles.
It's like an applicant for court seer who was planning on lampadomantic perfoemance saw the one right in front of them in line do that. "Uhh... I use three candles!"
@nitsua60 I'm of the opinion that the need to lump everything vaguely associated with supernatural means of knowing into one specific "divination" category and obsessively label each one as if they're all branches of the same tree rather than completely unrelated elements of distinct cultures, is sillier and more insensitive than any mocking of said system could ever be?
Last lich I GMed was destroyed by a paladin conjure animaling 32 horses 50' above the lich's head. He could come back, but I figure he's too embarrassed to show his face skull on this planet for a few millennia.
The first lich I GMed was removed from the campaign by the party accidentally blowing up his floating island lair and dropping the rubble, including his soul gem, into a portal that scattered everything across four different alternate planes.
A situation arose yesterday wherein a player with a fighter and Great Weapons Fighting Style rolled a '1' on his damage. He re-rolled and got a '2'. He re-rolled AGAIN and got a '4'.
That seemed odd to be so we checked in the book and it said nothing about only re-rolling once. Not wanting to s...
> Hold my Beer: before perming an action, the DM flips a coin. The next action you perform has advantage, or disadvantage, based on the result of the coin toss.
In unrelated news: my IRL LMOP group is basically about to fight the Black Spider in some souped-up version of the fight that I haven't really planned out yet at all... They'll hit level 5 afterwards.
A new player (someone we knew back in middle/high school) wants to run a new campaign afterwards, which I'm perfectly fine with... But he also wants each player to make a level 10 character and 2 level 5 "companions" for the DM to use as NPCs. which I'm pretty sure will overwhelm most of our players, given that only one of them has even actually made a character (the rest all used the pregens, at my request when I first started out inexperienced with D&D) and certainly none at level 10.
Fighting Monsters by Kevin Petker is on sale for Halloween. Yes, we were monsters. We had our difficulties and problems, but we were a community, held up by mighty pillars; we did little harm and kept to ourselves, we even worked together to make things better. Then the Terrors came.
Chrysalis Cycle Rebirth! by Olivia M. is (or will be) a tabletop role playing game that takes the magical girl genre and shines it through a queer, neurodivergent prism. It is also now on sale for Halloween!
Ruralpunk by Cass K has entered public playtesting. You are survivors trapped on the edge of the Wild, living in the graveyard of rural towns left behind by the cyberpunk future. There’s crumbling roads, unpredictable digital networks, experimental livestock escaped into the woods, rusting cyberware, and hungry monsters stalking the perimeter.​
Lumpley Games has added community copies to all their itchio games.
https://www.epicgames.com/store/en-US/collection/free-game-collection Layers of Fear: Masterpiece Edition and Q.U.B.E. 2 are free on the Epic Games Store until October 31st (after which Costume Quest and SOMA will be free for the next week).
@BESW Oof, that seems strange. I don't remember the last time I actually started the app - I just get the free games from the site to play at some distant point in the future :P
> 1843, from French prestidigitateur, a hybrid coined 1830 by Jules de Rovère (who sought a new word, "qui s'accorderait mieux à ses nobles origines" to replace escamoteur and physicien), roughly based on Latin praestigiator "juggler" (see prestigious); influenced by Italian presto "quick," a conjuror's word (see presto), and by Latin digitus "finger" (see digit).
It is a pretty creepy game. I've watched a full Let's Play of it by Achievement Hunter. (They're not the type to actually read the documents and stuff, though - they do usually stop to "view" them so interested viewers can pause and read themselves.)
We were discussing neo-Latin etymologies over some beer a while back. Eg. the taxonomic names are neo-Latin: one of my favorites being the brown bear Ursus Arctos, where "ursus" is Latin for "bear" and "Arctos" is Greek... also for a bear.
The town of Pori in Finland has, for reasons I know nothing about, a Neo-Latin name, Arctopolis meaning "bear city". And it's called a Latin name despite "Arctos" and "polis" both being Greek in origin.
@Someone_Evil Ah, fair point - I didn't see that before my edit to the question, as I didn't see the capitalization issue as central to Allan's confusion. If it seems I misunderstood it or if that might be the cause of the confusion, feel free to revert my edit :)
I often find myself a bit at odds with Dale's answers but I really like the fact that he's attacking the attack-vs-Attack jargon "myth".
"Myth" in scare quotes because well it's essentially true for most cases, but I find our scholarly circle --- myself included --- has often latched itself far too much on the distinction of capitalization and not the distinction on whether it's called an "attack" or an "attack action".
@kviiri I mean, I pay attention to both aspects, which is why I never find it confusing in practice. It's just that the capitalization issue is more likely to cause confusion so it's what often gets addressed first.
Some answers about how certain abilities/interactions work in specific systems are simply incorrect and go against what has been defined in rulebooks (I am not referring to answers being rendered incorrect due to changes to rules but ones that are incorrect from the get-go itself).
Now normally...
@KorvinStarmast Our maps are definitely looking good with the minis on there :) just gotta convince the other 3 guys to get custom and have him paint them.
@doppelgreener It was a good one. Though I don't think my wife realised why I found it so humorous (the part about Guam specifically). But I immediately was thinking about our Guam folks here.
(I've heard some hair-raising stories about trying to find a map in the 1970s Tel Aviv airport that actually identified Kiribati because nobody there had heard of it.)
@doppelgreener When I went to Haifa a couple years ago for the Bahá'í International Convention to elect the UHJ, the Kiribati folks went through ahead of us and were still negotiating with customs when we were done--and we had someone whose dual Australian/Malaysian citizenship (with Guamanian residency) was raising eyebrows. We stuck around to make sure they got through okay.
Maybe it was just how I was hearing and no one else, but I totally took it as "We went to this conference and look at all of these ways manual QA and automation have to work in tandem. Manual QA is still important. Please love me."
One thing she actually said was that if a process takes two hours to do manually and it would take two days to automate, keep doing it manually.
Creating automation in QA is important for routine things, but manual has its place in a lot of scenarios. Our QA at work both automates and does manual runs (for e.g. new features, things we don't have to test often, exploring new potential paths, etc).
But computers exist to handle mindless boring repetitive tasks so humans don't have to, and by extension, QA tools exist to handle mindless boring repetitive QA tasks.
Oh, I'm well aware of how valuable man-hours (is that still gender neutral?) to QA, but something about the way she said it. But again, perhaps I overread....
I bet if you put up posters that said "you are a cog in the machine" but the art has a cog that's on fire wielding an assault rifle and two other cogs that are somehow attractive? are attached, people would love it.
When I was a kid there was a humorous game show I loved that was specifically about geography, with the main price being a trip around the world. For some reason I still sucked at geography :D
Anyway, I think that's why I know Kiribati exists.
@Rubiksmoose I know what you're referring to, but my brain keeps changing "otp" to "oc" and that you have a character named "little cog" and it's adorable
When performing an Investigation check to investigate traps, do you activate the traps if you roll under the DC?
If you are, for instance, checking out the floor looking for pressure plates and roll low, would you activate the trap? Or would the DM just tell you that you found no traps?
oh, completely off topic but I love the ping sound for these chats compared to others like say Facebook, Hangouts, or Discord. It doesn't hurt my ears or startle me as badly lol
This question was asked by a new user today. The terminology is clearly referring to D&D 5e, and they even link a related 5e Q&A.
However, I still proceeded to ask the user that we cannot answer the question without knowing the system, and the question was closed as unclear (as we usually do wit...
@MikeQ yeah, it's actually kinda neat looking. Still trying to figure it out. www.sw5e.com
i'm in and out of conversation today, but one thing I noticed last night as I started trying to build a character was spell selections include cantrips. THey aren't separated.
Andn that some classes are clearly 1:1 from 5e, others are mashups.
So if teleportation does not conserve momentum does that mean if I fall from a sufficiently high place so that I've fallen 500 feet and still have not yet reached the ground I can cast something like Dimension Door to teleport to the ground and avoid all damage
there's another thing to consider: as they say, it's not the fall that kills you, it's the sudden stop at the end. so the question is, if teleportation doesn't conserve momentum, does that mean your inertial reference frame has remained constant, or did you experience a very sudden stop anyway?
[wizard teleports to the ground, entire body stops, still liquefied on the inside and dead due to the sudden halt of all velocity]
i think the solution here is to pick up a nice essay on inertial reference frames, roll it up, and hit me with it while scolding me for bringing real life physics into D&D
I actually found a way to turn the peasant railgun into fast travel and even space travel. The only thing other than the railgun that you need is a bag of holding
let me just add that to my no context quotes real quick
another fun thing is the DM could rule that while it doesn't create the opening if it's not placed on/against a solid surface it might still rule that it comes unfolded if you throw it and you could throw it like a frisbee for added distance
@MikeQ Playing Saltmarsh, the GM is using Strongholds & Followers. The ship we stole liberated is getting upgrades and generating interesting benefits via the stronghold rules, and the crew are followers. It's working pretty nicely =)
I'm realizing that it's an interesting twist on the old overland/dungeon dichotomy. Dungeons are nice and easy to work with because there are defined paths and locations one can think about and prep. Overland can get tricky if you allow the group to go any direction, because you need to have lots of "world" up your sleeve, or ways to deal with unexpected direction. Ocean/coastline splits the difference. Sure, you can go any direction. And almost every time the answer is "nothing there." (Which the players accept, as opposed to how strange that'd sound in overland.)
The Sorcerous Revolution, V. 0.1: So I won't pretend this was a good idea, but I made another Sorcerer homebrew for 5e. It's not exactly version 2 of the Metamagic homebrew I wrote earlier in the year, as that had a different set of priorities and goals, but this does borrow a few of the ideas from that.
Also, because I know someone is going to say it: yes, the level 17 features are busted. They're intended more to offer suggestions on what kind of effects I'm going for, not a "yes, I definitely think this is balanced" kind of feature.
I'm preparing to run Curse of Strahd, and one of my players wants to play as a Shadar-kai who is loyal to the Raven Queen.
In the adventure's set up, it says (p. 9):
For obvious reasons, I'd like to know more about the connection between these Dark Powers of the Shadowfell and Strahd.
I've l...
In Curse of Strahd, p. 15, it shows two entries for "Broken One (King of Diamonds)", one after the other (I'm not using spoiler quotes because they only work without line breaks, and that makes the below look like a mess):
A. Broken One (King of Diamonds)
Your greatest ally will be ...
When was the Eldritch Knight first introduced, and what is the basis for the kind of character? Obviously there's the space for some kind of cross between a mage and a warrior in D&D and other TTRPGs, but why was it specifically called "Eldritch Knight"?
My first encounter with this name was ...
@MikeQ So... I'm a player. We just tell the GM "we want to go to the black tower" or "crabber's cove" or "that island we heard about at the tavern, and then we make a navigation check, and we usually do badly and end up running into pirates.
The Lingering Injuries table in the DMG (p. 272) contains some wounds that can only be fixed by powerful healing magic, for instance:
Horrible Scar. You are disfigured to the extent that the wound cannot be easily concealed. You have disadvantage on Charisma (Persuasion) checks and advantage ...
When was the Eldritch Knight first introduced, and what is the basis for the kind of character? Obviously there's the space for some kind of cross between a mage and a warrior in D&D and other TTRPGs, but why was it specifically called "Eldritch Knight"?
My first encounter with this name was ...
A situation arose yesterday wherein a player with a fighter and Great Weapons Fighting Style rolled a '1' on his damage. He re-rolled and got a '2'. He re-rolled AGAIN and got a '4'.
That seemed odd to be so we checked in the book and it said nothing about only re-rolling once. Not wanting to s...
I'm interested in the balance of this new edition's classes. Are casters still noticeably better than non casters?
Some answers about how certain abilities/interactions work in specific systems are simply incorrect and go against what has been defined in rulebooks (I am not referring to answers being rendered incorrect due to changes to rules but ones that are incorrect from the get-go itself).
Now normally...
When performing an Investigation check to investigate traps, do you activate the traps if you roll under the DC?
If you are, for instance, checking out the floor looking for pressure plates and roll low, would you activate the trap? Or would the DM just tell you that you found no traps?
When was the Eldritch Knight first introduced, and what is the basis for the kind of character? Obviously there's the space for some kind of cross between a mage and a warrior in D&D and other TTRPGs, but why was it specifically called "Eldritch Knight"?
My first encounter with this name was ...
The Lingering Injuries table in the DMG (p. 272) contains some wounds that can only be fixed by powerful healing magic, for instance:
Horrible Scar. You are disfigured to the extent that the wound cannot be easily concealed. You have disadvantage on Charisma (Persuasion) checks and advantage ...
