@nitsua60 nits, a colonel I once worked for smoked the LD during an attack to confuse the Iraqi anti tank guns (1991) ... cover the battlefield with smoke ... worked IRL
The warlock's pact of the chain looks really bad in comparison with other pact options. You just have better familiar than other people.
One the other hand, you have pact of the blade (with a subclass based one the pact, and almost all invocations are at least super useful), and the pact of the ...
Does line of effect apply to non-spell aoes. I have a forest gnome player who keeps a pet in his bookbag, and im wondering if that protects the animal from traps etc.
I am a newbie DM and started mastering because our current master was too lazy to bring a nice and engaging story.
I am doing really good on the role playing and storytelling, but my encounters had been nothing more than some fun for my player's characters. I even edited some foes stats and used...
@Akixkisu re: saving a falling object from damage, just tonight's session I had a monk ask to catch some falling potions the way he's been practicing on arrows people helpfully shoot at him (Deflect Missiles). I went ahead and rolled "falling damage" for the potions and the monk rolled to see how much of that they deflected. Having, in fact, taken care of all the damage, we ruled that he'd very impressively (and monks don't impress me, generally) caught four potions in a blur.
Then he spent a ki point to chuck one at the rogue and beaned him in the head.
I've have a D&D 5e question, although as a rather contrived situation I'm not sure it's suitable for the main site. Suppose you are under the influence of a *geas* which includes the condition 'you may not cast *antimagic field*'. Then suppose you cast *antimagic field*. In doing so you have just violated the terms of your *geas* and are eligible for 5d10 psychic damage. However, you have also just suppressed the spell *geas*, which might prevent it from dealing damage. I see a few ways this could play out: 1) You take the damage before *antimagic field* comes into effect. 2) You take damag…
@kent The effects of traps are up to what the GM determines them to be. But if the book-bag is good enough to protect the pet from fireball, cloud of daggers and other AoE spells, then I would expect it to work for AoE traps unless those traps were specifically designed to affect carried items. No use inventing separate rules.
I don't think there's a clear correct answer, but I'd go with 1, because even if action-length spells are effectively atomic in the mechanical sense, it takes an in-universe moment to cast and that's duration is when you are violating your geas without the protection of the antimagic field. It's still in the works.
@BBeast I think it is ambigious, but if someone would nail me down this is what it comes down to "acts in a manner directly counter to your instructions" which makes 1 most plausible due to trigger phrasing.
Generally I encourage my players to be clear about their trigger phrasing to prevent headaches later.
Yea, the way I see it, Geas is spell somewhat divorced from the mechanics and therefore its effects are the most sensible to interpret in-universe (where casting a spell takes a few seconds or so, and therefore Geas is being violated before the field comes online). But if there was an argument about this in my table I'd go with "whatever the players want" probably.
Yup, if my player is the one doing the phrasing I tend to be generous and If I leave a loophole that my player finds, and they get excited about it, then all the better.
(though it is hilarious when the barbarian swings their axe at the rogue that comes back from scouting in their eagerness to hit the first creature that comes around the corner)
After some googling, they're called countersigns in English. Fascinating.
I recall a vague frustration from my army days when they told us what I feel is an obvious security tip: your sign and countersign should not be related. And then, everytime we had a countersign... it was something like "Ringo --> Starr"
rpg.stackexchange.com/a/165865/44723 <- this user has had problems with quoting/citing/scourcing their answers and questions, and they have now deleted a few answers after being downvoted by what they perceive as injust. Might be reasonable to keep an eye on that before they are too frustrated.
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@kent one problematic bit is a creature usually can't end a turn on another creature's space. So having your pet in your bag is a concern..but as long as the pet never is part of combat, I'd personally have no issue leaving them safe.
Purple Monkey did an I hate to be that guy comment (which I think was tactful) and they responded that they felt attacked and deleted that answer. After that they deleted two more answers after they were dovoted. The last I linked.
quick news flash, I have heard that the Chinese have identified two different strains of the COVID-19 in their ongoing efforts to deal with this outbreak: one strain is a bit less dangerous/damaging than the other, but the reports are 'early' and I'd wait for more info
@goodguy5 if you mean this user, suspension is over
@KorvinStarmast not all surprising - like most viruses, it's mutating a lot. (see nextstrain.org/ncov for public tracking of the variations that have been detected so far)
I'm in high school and very new to dungeons and dragons so I have no experience with this. I joined a new group recently made up of 3 mildly experienced players and a relatively new DM.
Our DM decided to try Mines of Phandelver but it got horribly derailed. It was going good until I missed one ...
<sarcasm>I feel like we need to start closing all of these "my group has a jerk in it" questions as dupes where the answer is HAVE A SESSION 0</sarcasm>
@goodguy5 I think "have a session 0" is a good start. (hehe)
But it's just a start. I haven't been in any social group activity of non-trivial duration where all disagreements about how it proceeds were pre-empted by initial agreements.
Fun fact, according to the search function I've used the word "non-trivial" six times in the chat prior to my previous message. And they all were in 2018... this is one of those cases where I really suspect the search is broken somehow because I could've sworn it's one of those words I keep over-using :D
One issue I've had with session zero discussions is that the group is simply not on the same wavelength about what's going to happen in the game, despite using roughly the same words. (See all my previous rants and rant-ettes about "The Three Pillars")
@kviiri I like asking everyone about movies that come to mind when they think about the themes of the game. E.g. "List three movies that come to mind about 'spying'" when that was a theme.
@Akixkisu My main problems have been of the kind where everyone can kinda agree on what in-universe stuff we want to see, in rough terms, but how things actually play out feel like the GM scarcely gave them a thought
@kviiri my favourite is when people say that they are intrigued by puzzles which means pulling an obvious lever after 3 minutes of thinking most of the time.
@Akixkisu What kind of puzzles? Plays on words? Rube Goldberg devices? Mathematical puzzles? Logical puzzles? Riddles? I once made the mistake of not asking for clarification... was a disaster.
@Akixkisu My un-favorites have to do with "exploration" equating with "lots of territory and details" and "social interaction" equating with "you talk to NPCs"
Lots of boring sessions where the main content was picking which door to open next. Nothing but a few coins behind most. Or talking to a bunch of NPCs, who all tell roughly the same stuff.
I can't quite put my finger on what exactly I would want from these keywords, but I have a few motivations: exploration should be driven by curiosity, not feeling compelled (eg. due to every place having treasure) and social interaction should be interaction, not treating NPCs as one-way information stations for the players.
@goodguy5 I have had great fun with model construction in a wizard's workshop (sentences and arguments, where the players had to give a domain and extensions of predicates to make the sentence true, false, or show that the argument is invalid, etc. to shape reaility accordingly).
@NautArch that's why you have the woodpecker mount the forest gnome using the interior of the backpack as a saddle. Sigh. How do people even fish in dnd
@kviiri Sometimes, I wonder if I would just have much more fun playing duets because I occasionally feel like I avoid doing certain things because "hey, I'm in a group and everything needs to move the group narrative along".
I thought Tolkien's dwarves were a racist caricature of the Jewish people, for a while. Of course I'm far better informed about the possible effects of confirmation bias nowadays... but still, there are some uncanny resemblances between dwarves and Jewish culture, as well as Jewish caricatures.
@kviiri IIRC, Tolkien's reaction to someone mentioning that to him was "Jews are really cool and I wish I was a Jew" not "no, I didn't base the dwarves on Jews".
@kviiri Never saw any of the dwarves in the hobbit as Jews. Huh. I had the darnedest time not visualizing them as dwarves like "Snow White and the Seven Dwarves" cartoon movie by Disney
@KorvinStarmast There is one objective connection: Tolkien based the language of Khuzdul on Hebrew. The rest is very "connect the dots" stuff between dwarven traits and [perceived] Jewish features that may or may not be intentional.
So I just realized that on the community ads Meta question the answer block is already filled in with a correctly formatted answer just without the image and "text" (mouseover). I'm just wondering how this was done / when it can be done?
@KorvinStarmast Jokes aside, what I mean is, assuming that fantasy races are stand-ins for human cultures tends to break down once you actually take a look at the full spectrum of races found in fantasy, such as Thri-Kreen, Illithid etc.
@vicky_molokh-unsilenceMonica it also breaks down when you, like myself, base draconic on Swedish because of skyrim. Even though the in game description is of a more guttural language
Like the word for "panda" is two characters but those two characters are for "bear" and "cat", so you could easily just say "bear cat" instead of "panda".
I've never considered that as one word, two syllables but I suppose that's the thing about translation.
@Yuuki Well, to get some sort of common reference of the concept of the term across languages, do you consider an English 'carbohydrate' or a 'werewolf', or a 'woman' one word or two (as all of them are bimorphemic)?
@kviiri I feel like I've seen stats that people who grow up speaking tonal languages are significantly less likely to be tone-deaf than others but I might be hallucinating memories
Although I do wonder, in a Sapir-Whorf kind of way, whether the proportion of tone-deaf people is lower in populations whose primary language is tonal.
I had originally typed half of that out like five or ten minutes ago but was called to a meeting.
Re: Recent Don't Guess The System Policy Question on Meta: It's tremendously reassuring to see that the moderators and community members alike are watching things like this and taking action when visible harm/confusion/dissent has been caused. Thank you all!
I could see that learning a tonal language helps develop the tone/music-related parts of your brain, but it also wouldn't shock me if that isn't the case and it's simply a coincidence because a lot of tonal languages are Asian and Asian cultures frequently emphasize a hard work ethic in children (who go on to work hard on learning music, thus developing the music parts of their brain)
@Yuuki Now I want to know... Though there are some very interesting ideas about how tonal languages originated, or at least, why a language would go from not having tones to having them. But also worth pointing out is that tonal languages come is huge varieties. Some have two times total, others have six
Not to mention register tones vs contour tones
But also, a pitch-accent is a form of "stress". While in English when we stress a syllable we increase volume, length, and pitch, Japanese only increases pitch. This results in the language having certain words that differ only in pitch/tone/stress/accent . Course what even "pitch-accent" means is up for debate and studiers of language stress haven't agreed, really ever
@vicky_molokh-unsilenceMonica Trying to get common terms to fit cross-linguistically is probably a bad idea. People tried it with the parts of speech for years and it did us linguists no favors. We have phonemes, syllables, moras, affixes, morphemes, etc... And even those can get muddy.
@vicky_molokh-unsilenceMonica Yes but I don't think the compounded-ness of a word is something worth hashing out. Just define it by syllables, morphemes, and affixes and you've probably got your answer.
There's also the problem of whether the morphemes are still recognizable. A firetruck has a clear origin whereas most people could not explain how a wheelbarrow or strawberry got its name
@Medix2 Well, recognizability is one of the many ways in which something can be opaque to a layman and require a specialist to answer. Philology is no exception to that.
Wheelbarrow's etymology is interesting. The word comes from the ability to move heavy things quickly as if they were tied to an arrow. And when one rides in a wheelbarrow, they feel a sudden urge to go "wheeeeeeee". And because wheelbarrows originated in England, they were often used to move things that were weighed in pounds, thus you have "whee" + "lb" + "arrow" -> "wheelbarrow".
@kent Stress is hard to notice/find. One method is adding the swear word, as I did above, in which case the following syllable holds the stress. You could technically learn the stress rules of English but they're ugly and please don't XD
@Yuuki The Continental competitor, the "wheekgarrow" was more efficient and was adopted by the Germans, the only Europeans capable of pronouncing it. Thus kicking off their advantage in transportation infrastructure that tragically, but predictably (by philologists) led to WWI.
@Medix2 I think you are forgetting that innokent and innocent are the same pronunciation in Celtic, right? There was the lateral glottal slide 1700 years ago that changed ... nah, my linguistic humor isn't up to scratch today
@KorvinStarmast Speaking of food that most people don't like, small intestine is one of my favorite things because it has a nice crunchy crispiness to it.
this help question really seems like a duplicate. But I'm unwilling to throw the hammer until we have 4 votes.
@Yuuki I'm very much in the camp of if something is delicious, tell me what it is after I eat it. I will not care at that point.
If it looks and tastes good...yeah, i'll eat it.
I also know there are likely some cross-language issues here, but I don't know the system well enough to parse and re-write. And definitely spending my time in typing out their text blocks from the images.
@kent I would not. Or at least if I did, I'd probably take control of their mount. But I'd also still allow targeting. It's pretty clear where they are.
But I also tend to be more strict in things like Hiding, too. Run around the single corner and 'hide"? Yeah, I still know where you are. You aren't hiding if you're only in one place and I know you went there.
It's like my kid playing hide and seek. They run into the closet and I see them run in. They're in the closet. And I know where they went and where they are no matter how quiet they are.
In DnD 5e context, it's a tad tricky. I mean, you can do stuff like counter-spells and stuff like that, but ultimately, if the GM gives you a NPC not capable of surviving AoEs and combat involving AoEs... there's really not much you can do. I mean, unless the GM wants to have a sort of puzzle solution or something.
@kent The tricky part there is also that if you are asking for them to do an escort mission and want it to succeed, then you should only throw things at them they can be successful at. If you know there isn't anything they could do have or do or expect that it's coming and have a solution for...don't throw it at them.
5e also doesn't lend itself very well to defending targets in general. Its combat design makes it rather hard to provide sufficient deterrent against just... waltzing to your intended target
One option is just to toss the NPC into some sort of portable demiplane, I think at the end of the day there's tons of options, it's just unclear what's available for your party
I generally don't do large level differences either, but I concede it's largely a playstyle thing. I originally decided against level differences in DnD 4e, where even a relatively small level difference skews gameplay badly.
And the primary reasons why level differences would happen don't really apply: I don't want to punish players for not attending, so I give full XP (or levels) to everyone. And punishing character death by level loss feels harsh to me.
Plus it makes prepping easier to use story-based leveling with constant level
If you're interested about what the deal with 4e is: it scales to-hit and all defenses very fast by level. This means a lower-level character will have trouble even hitting their enemies in combat, leading to potentially very frustrating game. (And conversely, they will get hit by most enemy attacks, resulting in "death by a thousand cuts" if not quicker demise)
@Rubiksmoose I have no strong feelings one way or the another about the tag guessing issue, but I have strong (and positive feelings) about your initiative to improve the situation. Kudos!
I may have feelings about it tomorrow. Have to see if I'll have more energy to think about it x)
I've heard of time crystals, they're this funky new kind of matter that appears to oscillate ad infinitum without energy input which is kinda freaky. It's like a permanent motion engine, in a very loose sense.
Basically how a crystal has a repeating structure in space, a time crystal has a repeating structure in time. As strange as that sounds, it's been experimentally confirmed.
Time crystals possess "motion without energy"—their apparent motion does not represent conventional kinetic energy. It has been proven that a time crystal cannot exist in thermal equilibrium. Recent years have seen more studies of non-equilibrium quantum fluctuations. TILT, thanks @RevenantBacon!
@Someone_Evil yeah, it took me a moment to realize that.
2020 has come! But… oops, where did the time go? It’s already March! Belated as it is, it’s time for a refresh of Community Promotion Ads!
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I'm in high school and very new to dungeons and dragons so I have no experience with this. I joined a new group recently made up of 3 mildly experienced players and a relatively new DM.
Our DM decided to try Mines of Phandelver but it got horribly derailed. It was going good until I missed one ...
