@Medix2 You can phrase it however you want. If there are direct book names/quotes/page numbers/etc. and it's seemingly unambiguous which system it is, I'll basically phrase my request to them to edit in the tag accordingly
(A vast number of systems dating from the d20 Boom/Bust period share directly quoted passages from D&D 3.5...)
(Ditto games that are Powered by the Apocalypse, or Forged in the Dark, or run on the various Fate engines, or For the Queen, tend to share significant portions of text with their cousins.)
Yes I know these things. But I find it highly improbable that people accidentally combining editions occurs in the majority of questions lacking a system tag... That's all for discussion elsewhere though
I just greatly worry how "there are thousands of RPGs out there" sounds coming from a supposed expert when a question involves direct quotes (plural) and the like. But the policy isn't changing so instead I'll attempt to phrase my suggestions to edit in such a way that they hopefully won't cause annoyance and bewilderment for the OP
I will not defend the hostility of the Stack's structures, but experience has shown that trying to make policies more exception-based leads to a lot of arguing and even more hurt feelings. On the other hand, the way the policies are presented can be done with kindness and gentleness.
So long as we choose to play in the Stack's infrastructure, in a hobby whose most visible online spaces are aggressively argumentative and defensive so that most of our users come to us assuming we operate the same way, there will be deep unsolvable conflicts between the way we want the site to be, the way the mechanics of our hosts force the site to be, and the way the hobby's other online spaces influence this one.
Yeah that's fair. I suppose much of my upset comes not from the policy itself but from how it's enforced and talked about. Whether that's a result of the type of policy it is or just its history or something else entirely I've no idea
There's a tendency for the dicussion of that particular topic to be reduced to "I have shown why one particular argument is weak and therefore it should be changed immediately" and ignoring all the other arguments which in total can be said to justify the policy even if none of them individually is strong justification on its own.
Yeah some of the policy debate definitely gets lost in typical and false ideas on "how to shut down an argument". You don't just argue a single point they made and suddenly topple the argument (well, unless the argument stood solely on that single point). It's built on multiple pillars and thoughts and unless you counter enough of them or provide your own demonstrably better option, you're not getting very far
There's also a common trend for well-thought-out policies to get angry "you're being mean control freaks for no reason" pushback, so there's a high bar for showing that there IS a problem before meta is going to take it seriously.
Yeah I always feel a bit... Unusual(?) discussing the system tag policy given that I wasn't around for when it was enacted or previously discussed... Makes me question whether my points are even valid or worth, well, anything
This particular policy is, in part, an ideological statement that while D&D happens to be the lion's share of our content, we don't want it to be the default/assumed system for this Stack or for the hobby in general. And because it takes up so much room, we must be deliberate and firm about clearing space for other games to exist alongside it here.
I think the argument for keeping it that I most agree with is the idea that doing anything else will open the floor for debate over what makes a question "obviously part of X system"
I feel like we and B&CG should have a bit of a meeting of the minds over the shared RPGSE/dnd5eSE BCGSE/MtGSE problem we face. I assume we could learn some from each other....
The fun of "well, is this a duplicate?" and though that can be (and is) taken to Meta, I'm unsure how well the idea of taking every "this is X system, right?" question to Meta would go over or even work
Another justification for the policy, or something like it, that I consider very solid, is the "teach a man to fish" argument. We expect users to tag their systems. If we tag systems for new users, we get new generations of users which learn that other people will clean up after them.
@Medix2 Also, just because you weren't around before doesn't mean your points aren't valid! Obviously being aware of that fact can help you avoid making assumptions due to lack of experience. But if that were true it would mean a whole lot of people's opinions wouldn't be valid for much of anything lol
@Rubiksmoose I'm also always happy to have newer users pointing out for us where we're doing a particularly bad job of explaining or modeling or teaching things.
Tagging is supposed to be an emergent folksonomy, created by the people who write the questions and adjusted by others only when there's a clear problem which needs to be addressed.
@BESW so much this. I think the only reason that hasn't been fixed is that it's actually not causing that many problems because we get so few of them. And trying to fix it would cause so much arguing.
@BESW This as well. We've brought some of these concerns up for changes before and got responses like "you're doing tagging wrong" back from SE people.
So... I occasionally sit on a board that visits schools as part of their accreditation process. And one thing I've come to appreciate is that these accreditation organizations evaluate everything through the experience of the student.
The Overlords continue to insist that the emergent folksonomy their system mechanics enforce is the best universal solution and that problems with it must be addressed on a site-by-site policy basis, despite the evidence of almost every single site that it requires some additional mechanical nuance.
Like, a school can have really inefficient accounting practices that make the business office work a lot harder than they need to. But we have to ask: is it impacting the students? Maybe it's so bad that it's pulling people away from other things, or slowing things down, and it is effecting students' experience. Or maybe it's just making the accountant go grey a little early.
So we're stuck trying to adjudicate an imposed system whose flaws are touted as features, and who better to do that than a community that spends its time explaining D&D to each other?
That's the difference between a "major" recommendation for improvement that actually needs to be addressed and documented back to the accreditor, vs. a "minor" recommendation that may just help the school, but is not ~required~ for accreditation.
Tags work, they help find questions, there's just the problems of when do you use them and which ones do you use (and many more)... I know other sites (not SE related) have policies of "tag everything you see" though there's certainly some reason that wouldn't work for SE, such as arguments over what is actually seen...
Meanwhile Metas have required tags, though Meta is its own weirdness of being exceptionally similar to a mainsite despite at times attempting to function incredibly differently
So in a discussion like this I think of the "power users" more like faculty, and the casual askers and readers as the "students" whose experience should be primary in focus. But I worry about neglecting the core, active users, too....
(Sorry, I'm just babbling. Slash: avoiding my work.)
@Medix2 The Stack Exchange devoted years to developing an interface and infrastructure to enforce an epistemology that values pithy independent responses to clear, precise problems. This interface and its accompanying infrastructure actively discourages discussion, ambiguity, and accompaniment.
....Then they applied that interface to their space for discussing policies, identifying ambiguities, and accompanying each other.
It's very telling that the Stack Exchange, having defined itself by its ability to hone an interface that creates a community, has put literally no effort into crafting the interface for that community's backroom.
Within the Stack Overlords' imposed paradigm, the don't-guess-systems policy is the best solution we've yet to find. But that paradigm is, at its heart, hostile to @nitsua60's concept of valuing the experience of the user--especially new users.
@BESW Yeah--I was just spelunking to find this blog post announcing the creation of meta from 2009 (!). One will probably notice that almost nothing mechanically has changed in the intervening eleven years.
Though... I also wonder whether that's a meaningful or useful statistic. After all, answers are a major part of the site and if a new user only ever asks one and only one question and does nothing else .. I wonder how much the niceness of the introduction impacted their decision not to stay
@Medix2 If you're trying to look at "niceness" or, maybe more-measurable, "stickiness" of the site... I suspect that looking at retention beyond first response might be a little better? I.e. when you post something and get a response--answer, comment, edit with custom summary--what happens from there?
@nitsua60 People might continue to visit because they find valuable information, but might be put off contributing. That would show up in a slightly different way than posted and never came back. It would be posted and never posted again. That would be difficult to disambiguate from actually having nothing to say or just being a one-time poster most time lurker and there's no deterrent involved.
(Aside, the more time I spend thinking about games as a designer/developer, and the more time I spend playing games from the RPGSEA indie community, the less useful rpg.se becomes to me as a Q&A resource. And while part of that is the kind of people who use this site, it's rooted in the assumptions about valueable questions and answers which come from the site being designed by and for USA tech communities--which also influences the kinds of people who come to these sites.)
As for teaching people to fish, I generally would advise putting in the correct tag and pointing out that's the right way. I dislike the close and prod approach.
If you're looking for "the possible effects of a negative introduction" that's probably "how many people have made 1 and only 1 post (post = question or answer)"
Then again, if you're not counting deleted posts it's a pretty useless statistic
Maybe the number of people who've made a single post and deleted it but were not closed for being off-topic or duplicates and yeah... This all gets confusing and hard to even understand what a given statistic shows, hmmm
@Medix2 Assuming I'm doing this right, that number is about 8% (10641/128845). And again, it's been a while since I've done this, but I believe deleted posts will be in all of these counts.
And even then there's no way to distinguish people who were put off by the site's presentation/something from people who just didn't ever have more questions and never planned to answer questions in the first place
But for the sake of the don't-guess-systems policy as it relates to new users, first-time querents who never asked again are really the primary focus--even if they've also given answers before or since.
That's true, so people who've only asked one question but it's been a statistically significant amount of time since that first question
Which requires figuring out the distribution of times between first and second questions asked while avoiding all the instances of people asking the same question twice in-a-row after the first is closed and many other things... Or we can just lump them all together and count the people who've only asked one question even though it's statistically likely for them to have only asked one question
Like, take a look at my stats: I've asked 88 questions and given 241 answers. It took two months after my first answer before I asked my first question, and I stopped asking questions a year before I stopped answering them.
Questions have always been a lot harder than answers for me, which flies directly in the face of Pearls, Not Sand.
And this is borne out across the site: questions get multiple answers more than they get no answers, there's a lot more people answering than asking. It took four years before this site awarded its first Tumbleweed Badge.
I have had some questions I posted where I would have loved more answers
I'm not saying the trend isn't actually generally a lot of answers to each question, but sometimes a question is about a system not a lot of people have even heard of let alone know
Apropos of literally nothing, I finished Darksiders Genesis last night, and my longtime habit of watching the credits payed off with pure gold - Gareth Coker composed the soundtrack.
Really fun. Darksiders 2 and 3 both look like the first one, but don't play like it. Genesis doesn't look like the first one, but it does play like it.
As far as 1-3, each was based off of trending games at the time. Darksiders 1 plays like Zelda + beat-em-ups (e.g. God of War), Darksiders 2 plays like an action RPG (e.g. Fable), Darksiders 3 plays like Dark Souls
@KorvinStarmast I wonder how bimodal it is...? Like, are there strong cohorts of "answers lots, asks little" vs. "asks lots, answers little", or is it a smooth spectrum from one end to the other? (A simple question which ignores a lot of other ways of engaging, to be sure.)
Could you ready the action: If an enemy attacks me then, once they've attacked, I will attempt to knock them prone.
If so it could be used if the distance between you and an enemy was too far to cross in one move, moving to 30 feet from them. Readying this action would give you advantage on your...
I was imagining a histogram on ratio of Q/A. (Hence the US unemployment assumption--that there's be a smear generally, and a lot of users with super-high Q/A.) But I'm not saying you need to do that, just what I had been thinking.
I saw discussion of Darksiders taking different angles with each new game and I'm just sitting here hype af for Sea of Stars the Chrono-Trigger inspired JRPG sequel to The Messenger the Ninja-Gaiden inspired Metroidvania
That sign really makes me wonder if they say "Sorry vacancy"
@Miniman It's a fantastic game, well, assuming you even like the genre(s) of course. It's got a good free DLC as well. I'm just waiting on the prequel in... two years
Thoroughly enjoyed La Mulana and Rabi-Ribi though both are pretty unusual. Axiom Verge and Dead Cells two others games I've enjoyed quite a lot. Honestly... not sure the last time I just disliked a game
I can't remember exactly where I got to in HK pantheons, but I know I haven't unlocked Sisters of Battle yet (because that pretty quickly became the goal I cared about most).
Let's see...Bloodstained is on the todo list, Momodora and Minoria were both great, Dust was good but not great, Monster Boy was great, Shantae was great, Iconoclasts is on the todo list, Indivisible was great but I struggled to stay motivated for some reason, Blasphemous was good, Ghost was good, Owlboy was meh and I couldn't bring myself to finish it.
Bloodstained I loved, Momodora was interesting but some of my friends just hated it. Time to google Minoria. I loved Dust but am partial to the artwork. Monster Boy and Shantae YES. Iconoclasts, hmm, the story is a wonderfully jumbled blob of never knowing what's going on. Indivisible I kept going only for the many constantly added characters and that ending was great. Plus there's NG+ coming out soon!! Owlboy and Blasphemous are great. I need to actually boot up Ghost 1.0
Unepic I actually enjoyed a lot more than I thought I would though one section of the game is particularly unfair
Chasm, Cat Maze, and Chronicles of Teddy exist... The first has just the weirdest replayability ever, the latter is short but does some cool stuff, and the last is just plain weird constantly...
@V2Blast I'm only just now seeing this, but this is probably the least surprising change they've ever announced for 5e. I like the change, and I think it justifies me unbanning it in my campaigns.
I don't know that I have a preferred type of videogame these days... lately I've been playing Overwatch, Fallout 3, Terraria, and Infinifactory. I also restarted Fallout 1... wow, that's dated... still good in its own way, though.
@trogdor I think I've mentioned to you before my theory about the genres that get good indie games - 2D platformers are a lot cheaper to make than, say, 3D shooters, so we get a lot more of them.
many of which I just can't buy or else I would be buying all of them and be out of money
XD
@Medix2 I've decided that it shouldn't at least be a full veto, and I'm glad because at the very least I've been able to play maybe,... 3 or 4 games that really were good and not fully relying on fanservice
and that alone has been worth it
I still do,... try to steer clear of anything that looks like that's the whole point
it's a real blessing that it was only 2 seasons long
not to say I'm that glad because it was over kinda fast
but it was short enough I could finish it without stopping and having other things pile up on top of it, and it also, I think, reasonably wrapped up it's story in probably the only satisfactory way possible XD
also Viral for life
XD
I'm an extreme fan of him, his character growth/arc, and just yes
@Xirema Yep, it's only surprising that it took this long :P
@trogdor KLK is definitely... interesting. The plot is absurd but there's actually some kind of storyline there; the fanservice is given a reason in the plot but it doesn't actually prevent it from being fanservice. The action is over-the-top, just like TTGL. There are also some great blink-and-you'll-miss-it comedic segments with Mako that are the highlight of the show IMO :P
I also like when anime gives characters like, a temporary sharp tooth or something, but I like best what they did with Viral, he just has a whole mouth full of sharp teeth and it's just part of him
XD
I think I also mistook your avatar at one point for Viral
@trogdor Close, actually - he was fighting a shark fishman who kept on ripping the teeth out of his mouth to use as weapons, since they just grew back anyway. So of course Luffy grabbed a set to use in his own mouth.
I am playing a 3/3 Divine Soul sorcerer/Hexblade warlock, and have just chosen the Pact of the Tome, along with the Book of Ancient Secrets.
I have found a spellbook with Identify, which I am now transcribing into the book. I also have Unseen Servant as a known spell. I create a scroll, using t...
@nitsua60 A few games like go and chess are sold with the base game, more expensive games like zombicide, scythe... are sold separately as DLC, but the main point is the plethora of games available for free* in the Steam Workshop. I've found for example Settlers of Catan, Splendor, Dominion, Munchkin, Ticket to ride, Bang...
*as long as you buy the main game that is
I run it on a windows pc, should run on mac and linux too
I am playing a 3/3 Divine Soul sorcerer/Hexblade warlock, and have just chosen the Pact of the Tome, along with the Book of Ancient Secrets.
I have found a spellbook with Identify, which I am now transcribing into the book. I also have Unseen Servant as a known spell. I create a scroll, using t...
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