TRPG General Chat

12:19 AM

@Himitsu_no_Yami don't forget about half speed with grappled creature. How's the total weight looking?

@NautArch already factoring in the half speed, I think the enemy is light enough to just barely be within carry capacity

NautArch

Dang, 50' fly speed.

Himitsu_no_Yami

yep

nitsua60

12:45 AM

@NautArch Yeah, that's why it needs a dash.

@Himitsu_no_Yami Now you just need to convince the player that a STR-based Aa Rogue is the way they needed to go.

Expertise in athletics, bonus action to dash =)

BESW

Kurt Potts' Birthday Bundles: Solo; Little; Fantasy.

Rubiksmoose

1:18 AM

@V2Blast Thanks for cleaning that link up BTW :)

V2Blast

@Himitsu_no_Yami aarakocra :P

@Rubiksmoose :thumbsup:

Hot RPG Questions

1:35 AM

8

Q: Can a druid/trickery domain cleric use Invoke Duplicity and Wild Shape, then cast spells through the illusion?

I am DMing a D&D 5E game. I have a player who wants to use Invoke Duplicity and Wild Shape, then cast spells through the illusion. My thoughts are Wild Shape says the druid can't cast spells, and Invoke Duplicity says the cleric casts spells as though the caster were in the duplicate's space. So ...

NautArch

2:09 AM

@nitsua60 a very cool move

Peter Cooper Jr.

@nitsua60 And yet, not the subtlety I expect from a Rogue.

nitsua60

2:43 AM

@PeterCooperJr. It's, like, the roguishness of Fezzig, not of Vizzini or Inigo.

GcL

3:58 AM

Oi @Ben, you around?

Ben

4:28 AM

@GcL wave

GcL

4:49 AM

@Ben We've not been conscious concurrently recently.

How's the corruption system going for you?

Ben

Yeah, I've been a bit tied up lately with work.

GcL

I blame the cats. It's probably the music they listen to.

Ben

I've seen all your comments about rewords and everything, it's been really great :D My only main thing is that I am thinking about nerfing the whole system a bit.

@GcL Sneaking some of the 'nip when you ain't watching :P

The idea is that it's meant to be a flavour system - sure it can have some mechanics to it, but I don;t want it to be a permanent deficit to the game. You're going to be potentially building 2 or 3 major afflictions throughout the campaign, and as it is, you'll have disadvantage on rolls, creatures will be able to track you freely, etc. It really stacks up.

GcL

@Ben I was wondering about what the target number of afflictions was.

Ben

So I'm thinking that Minor afflictions are simply just flavor text, then the Major afflictions are -2, etc.

Yeah. In my campaign, I don;t see them having more than 4 or 5 at most

GcL

5:02 AM

I figured the decent into hell flavor was slogging through uphill odds. Actually, I figured the creatures tracking wasn't such a bad thing. Any diablo-esq hero I imagined was going to cut through the mundane creatures. I was thinking the player (and character by extension) would grow tired of it.... like cutting down the denizens of hell was a wearisome task of mowing an endless supply of weeds.

Ben

Yeah, the campaign is designed for levels 1-5

3-5 players

GcL

5:22 AM

@Ben So running the entirety of Diablo 1 before L5?

Ben

Yeah. Basically level per level. Diablo is on the 5th level, so players will be level 5. Figured it would be the smoothest way.

I could be convinced to double it (potentially), but I'd really need to pad out the story events

GcL

5:38 AM

L5 just doesn't take that many encounters to get to.

Ben

Ok thats a fair point

linksassin

6:45 AM

@Ben I think the bigger issue is how much of the game you want to run before 3rd level. In 5e most class abilities don't really come online until 3rd level. Gameplay at 1st and 2nd level isn't super fun. Increasing the level range would let you get through this a bit faster.

Hot RPG Questions

7:29 AM

2

Q: Does an Adamantine greatclub always deal critical damage like other Adamantine weapons?

In general adamantine weapons always deal critical damage on a hit: Whenever an adamantine weapon or piece of ammunition hits an object, the hit is a critical hit. - Xanathar's Guide to Everything, page 78. However, in SKT chapter 6 room 14 (page 154) it says: She wields an adamantine ...

dnd-5e weapons special-materials storm-kings-thunder

The Oracle

0

Q: Improvement on Deleted Answers Help Page - deletion due to rpg.se policies

Deleted answers help page starts with the sentence: Answers that do not fundamentally answer the question may be removed. And goes on to give examples of non-answer answers. Yet, deletion can also be performed when an answer does indeed answer the question, but it disagrees with the rpg.se...

discussion help-center deleted-answers

kviiri

8:12 AM

Oh hey, Diablo. How topical, my commune mates are playing D3

I am mostly a stranger to the series. A friend made me play a bit of D2 and... well. It feels like a game that could've gotten me seriously addicted in my early teens, but too bad I was in my mid-twenties x)

Hot RPG Questions

5

Q: I don't like a fellow player, what should I do?

We're playing online. I don't like the player, not the PC, the PC themselves is fine, which kinda makes this worse, if it was the PC, I could chalk it up to good RP. This player also isn't unlikable/overtly terrible like in rpghorrorstories where I can call them out that what they're doing is w...

problem-players group-dynamics

AncientSwordRage

8:48 AM

@kviiri it's addictive at all ages I think

AncientSwordRage

9:21 AM

Does anyone listen/watch Beyond Heros ?

kviiri

@AncientSwordRage It didn't really click for me

My tastes are somewhat specific nowadays I guess

AncientSwordRage

@kviiri yeah it does feel like most dnd shows online are more fun for the participants than the viewers

I was trying to figure out if the current one is set on Theros, how they have existing characters, but they've just explained they're travelling between worlds

kviiri

@AncientSwordRage I meant diablo the video game

AncientSwordRage

@kviiri oops

linksassin

@AncientSwordRage I definitely found that with some. There are too many inside jokes or references you don't understand for the game to be enjoyable for viewing.

kviiri

9:35 AM

@AncientSwordRage x) no worries

V2Blast

@AncientSwordRage I have not, but I've read some of the episode summaries/writeups on the site and seen some clips

AncientSwordRage

10:35 AM

It seems like Beyon Heros violates @BESW principle of safe narration (You should phrase things as 'My character says X', not talking in character)

(apologies if I've misframed/miscredited it)

BESW

10:56 AM

I dunno what Beyond Heroes is?

MikeQ

Why does talking in-character mean unsafe narration?

BESW

I wouldn't say it automatically does, but narrating character is an RPG technique that's useful for a lot of reasons, including but not limited to bleed reduction.

If Beyond Heroes (whatever that is) demands in-character RP, or stigmatizes alternative narrative styles, that could be unsafe because it's taking away tools from players.

(Bleed is the term for when players experience the emotions of the characters they're playing. It's not an inherently bad thing, for a lot of players it's a sign that the game is good. But it can be unsafe if the players and groups don't have the tools to handle it, and forcing players to use techniques that encourage bleed is a basic violation of consent.)

The TRPG Safety Toolkit includes some tools for bleed management; in particular, helping people disentangle their emotions from the emotions of their characters after a session. Many of these aftercare tools were developed in LARP spaces and a sign of a really good LARP is one which makes space for structured aftercare.

For a lot of my group, describing characters' actions rather than inhabiting them is less about bleed and more about just being more comfortable not doing voices or feeling pressured to improvise extensive dialogue.

(We usually get invested in characters, but not immersed in them.)

2

AncientSwordRage

11:46 AM

@BESW Beyond Heros is the 'official' WotC D&D campaign on their youtube channel. You don't have to speak in character, but from what I've seen a lot of the players do

Something I find, is that narration over directly speaking as the character makes it easier for me to watch

BESW

I wouldn't say that violates any safety principles, then. A lot of people find first-person dialogue key to enjoyable games. My group does it semi-regularly. We swap techniques around as it seems appropriate for each moment in the scene.

I find streamed games difficult to follow no matter what techniques are used.

AncientSwordRage

@BESW 'Violates X principle' is just the way I find easiest to express they're not following it

it's possibly more extreme/dogmatic than I intend for it to be

AncientSwordRage

12:03 PM

@vicky_molokh-unsilenceMonica congrats

vicky_molokh- unsilence Monica

@AncientSwordRage Thanks!

AncientSwordRage

I had some time left, but I'm never confident where a bounty goes if I leave it too long

or if you get the full amount

vicky_molokh- unsilence Monica

@AncientSwordRage It gets divided up equally between the AI which runs the stack and the user which has the answer with most upvotes.

Or something like that.

AncientSwordRage

@vicky_molokh-unsilenceMonica damn dirty AI

nitsua60

@doppelgreener can you think of a time in the three years I was moderator that we had to unwind answers that came in on a question that relied on a system tag after a well-meaning user had "guessed the system"?

I was elected something like ten vote-reapportinoments after you, so I think of myself as the younger of two fraternal twins =)

doppelgreener

12:14 PM

@nitsua60 my brain is having trouble parsing that today, but if you mean all the times someone guessed at the system and their answer was deleted ... I think that happened a lot? :P

nitsua60

@doppelgreener No--someone tagged based on a "guess" and someone else answered, but that answer ended up being erroneous (because the guess had been wrong).

AncientSwordRage

@nitsua60 starting to sound like a SEDE query

Someone_Evil

Unless I'm reading the timeline wrong, there wasn't any system tag on that question when it was answered

doppelgreener

@nitsua60 from what I understand, if we mean this question, we don't know for sure the guess was wrong, just people didn't agree the guess should be made (yet)

personally this is the exact situation we were noticing; it's pretty obvious this is going to be D&D 5e and the policy is saying "noooo, you can't be sure, don't do it"

and now a whole lot of trouble is happening on account of not being able to just go "yeah, this is pretty clearly D&D 5e, let's handle it as such"

NautArch

12:45 PM

@doppelgreener although, to be fair, the trouble is the same trouble we always have when it's 'obvious'.

doppelgreener

it is, yeah

nitsua60

@doppelgreener Well, I'm obviously prompted by this question, but what I'm really wondering about is the sometime-cited risk of "if we let people guess at tags, then someone could answer with the wrong info then it gets clarified and we need to delete, and that person's effort was wasted and anti-rewarded." But I can't remember ever seeing that actually happen.

(To be clear: that's not the only risk that's pointed to, but it is one.)

NautArch

@nitsua60 I'm fairly sure, but could easily be wrong, that the answer was posted before it had any tag.

doppelgreener

@nitsua60 I have not seen that happen in several years.

nitsua60

@NautArch Yes. I'm not talking about that question, though.

NautArch

12:47 PM

Oh!

then nevermind :)

which question are you referencing?

nitsua60

None.

doppelgreener

I have seen people assume a question with no system information at all was D&D, but that's a different scope. We see it a lot in system-agnostic and social questions where people tend to assume the game is D&D, or works like D&D, or that the solutions that apply to D&D will definitely apply there with no issues. Sometimes they'll do it in spite of the question making it clear what the system was and that it wasn't D&D.

nitsua60

I'm referencing one of the risks cited when arguing against allowing users to use expertise when tagging system: that an incorrect "guess" could allow for an innocent (other) answerer's efforts to be wasted.

NautArch

ah, gotcha.

yeah, i guess that's the big risk. It's also moreso that the querent may get incorrect information.

For me, it's more of the latter than the former.

nitsua60

@doppelgreener Hell, people answer things tagged with other systems as if it's dnd5e. I've written a whole answer and only noticed as I was about to (or just just) hit POST ANSWER.

NautArch

12:50 PM

I personally have less of an issue with an answerer 'wasting time' than I do a querent getting bad information.

Someone_Evil

I mean, I wouldn't expect to see that a lot because answers without a specified system tends to get closed really quickly and guesses reverted, to it's really hard to answer a question with a guessed system tag

nitsua60

@NautArch a querent who didn't specify their game? I'm not too moved by that.

NautArch

@nitsua60 A querent who didn't know they had to specify a game.

nitsua60

Seems like a good learning experience to me....

doppelgreener

@NautArch I don't, personally, find it a big risk. Like, people who actually calculate risk for a living calculate it as such: risk = chance x damage. The damage incurred by getting hit by lightning is catastrophic, but the chance is almost zero, so the risk is low. Here, the chance is low (nonzero, but from what I see it's less than 1%) and the damage is moderate and reversible.

Meanwhile, the current policy means on a regular basis (multiple times a month) we will encounter significant strife and frustration, people getting annoyed, answers getting deleted, etc. Chance is high, damage is low but exists. That's more of a problem by itself.

NautArch

12:54 PM

I'm honestly very confused about what folks are debating here. Are you arguing that we should guess or should not?

doppelgreener

@NautArch nitsua60 is opening this up on this scenario: people guessed the system, answers were made, and the guesses were wrong.

I'm just discussing the scenario and the current situation with a specific question being representative of what had me interested in loosening up the policy or disposing of it as-is.

NautArch

Gotcha. Although in that scenario, I don't think the answer came when a tag was up. But I could be wrong on that.

nitsua60

@NautArch there is no question--particularly not a recent one--that I'm referencing.

doppelgreener

I mean, I'm not specifically talking about it coming up while a tag was present myself. Someone just made an educated guess at the system and answered accordingly.

NautArch

Either way, I'm more on the side of "this is really obvious and there are enough 'tells' for me to make a well-educated guess based on my expertise".

nitsua60

12:58 PM

In the metas on "guess the system" the specter is raised: "but if people guess the system, other answerers will in good faith answer and their efforts will be wasted and have to be deleted which is a black mark on innocents."

doppelgreener

@nitsua60 meanwhile, to be clear about it for NautArch's sake, I am talking about the current situation around this question that is happening, so that might be confusing :P

NautArch

But if our overall goal is to get querents to understand our system and put tags in or provide the level of detail we really like, then I get the no guess thing.

nitsua60

I was trying to remember whether, in 3 years, that had ever happened.

@doppelgreener Ofc.

Someone_Evil

Hmm.. mostly musing: if a good question was asked without system specified, an edit guessed it and good answers came in, and then the querent comes back and says they meant a different question there's little harm in having them post that as a new question. We could even offer to disassociate it from their account if they don't want to touch it. My quess is that's its gonna be really rare anyway

nitsua60

Personally, I'm wondering if SSD's Gordian Knot-cutting approach of "stop treating them differently" wouldn't have been a more-convincing approach on the last go-around.

doppelgreener

1:00 PM

@NautArch Yeah but we don't handle other situations that way. Do we do that with post formatting? Clear phrasing? Paragraph breaks? We don't close the question then unless there's literally nothing we can do about it ourselves—e.g. the whole question is a screen-filling blob of nearly incomprehensible text nobody has the will to sort out. We teach by doing it and showing them what we did.

Someone_Evil

@nitsua60 Wouldn't stop treating them differently mean the system would have to be specified in body?

nitsua60

As for the "we've got to teach people" argument, I've finally realized that I should have pointed out that positive reinforcement exists, not just negative reinforcements.

Do we really have a flood of people who've met "hey, I think this is X, I've tagged it as such, that helps experts find it" failing to learn from that example?

Crap--a minute late to a meeting. Gotta run.

doppelgreener

We often even edit in citation to answers when it's missing, if we can do that and want to do it, to help improve those answers. Then those people learn a bit about how we handle citations.

BESW

Non-D&D questions get "guessed the wrong system" answers semi-regularly despite being properly tagged, so.

NautArch

@doppelgreener Also true, but that goes back to me wanting to make educated guesses and not agreeing with the hard stance :)

doppelgreener

1:05 PM

@BESW yeah, in this whole issue though my observation has been that anyone not asking about D&D is always fairly clear about their system because they're super aware they need to do that, and it's the D&D questions where people take for granted that D&D is the only question that exists on this site so they don't need to say.

BESW

Yup.

Ultimately I think the problem is that we've been saddled with a tagging system that doesn't support tag priorities.

NautArch

And those of us familiar with D&D recognize them as such (and generally edition)

BESW

@NautArch Except for, like, the people who think Unearthed Arcana or Tomb of Horrors are edition-specific titles.

I've seen a couple of comment struggles between people convinced UA is either exclusively a 3e thing or exclusively a 5e thing.

Ditto famous adventures from one edition that get republished as another.

NautArch

@BESW ah, true.

but the content within can often be determined

but not always. When it's not, though, the experts generally realize that and ask.

doppelgreener

@BESW could you unpack that last bit about not supporting tag priorities?

BESW

1:12 PM

@doppelgreener We don't have tools for things like flagging tag categories as actionable in their absence (eg, an automatic "It looks like you're writing a question without a system tag" popup).

Which, of course, isn't something that can just be added to the existing system, because emergent folksonomies don't mesh with that.

Someone_Evil

Mhm... I wonder how much we would have had to scream to have that added as part of the new ask page

BESW

The tag system was designed with the assumption that tags are not co-dependent and no tag categories could be necessary, all tags must be sufficient.

It would have to get re-worked from the ground up with a different attitude toward the nature of tagging, to accomplish the kind of tagging job we're asking it to do on rpg.se.

Peter Cooper Jr.

Anyone have any idea how often Stack Overflow has to deal with someone asking a question without a programming language tagged? Or do those just go into an abyss where nobody ever sees them so they just sit around unanswered?

AncientSwordRage

@BESW this is the system I like, and I always have to consciously back track when I want to question tags on this site (and often on Sci-Fi)

Glazius

@doppelgreener Still, in all of those cases there are formatting conventions that other people can agree upon that it can be argued the querent doesn't know.

BESW

1:18 PM

@AncientSwordRage My problem is less with the system, and more with our Stack Overlords' conviction that customizing the system to each site's needs can be done exclusively through soft policy hacks.

Glazius

But in this case, the querent must know (or be able to find out) what system and edition they're playing, and unless they've done something like link to materials from a particular game system without specifying that (which the dragon-god question did not do; the link was added later, as an assumption) we can't know that this is not their thirty-year old constantly-updated Rolemaster hack.

doppelgreener

@BESW gotcha

AncientSwordRage

@BESW I agree, unfortunately I think we're never going to be in a position to leverage anything more than that

doppelgreener

@Glazius the way i'm thinkinng of it, in all those cases and this case, we have sufficient information to make those changes ourselves.

@Glazius in the past five years it has never been their thirty-year old constantly-updated rolemaster hack. It's been D&D, and usually D&D 5e, and usually whatever we guessed was right.

BESW

We're here because the Stack Overlords thought their extremely programming-specific curation system was generalizable to literally any subject without any hard-code modifications. This means there are certain impossibilities on our end no matter how hard we try, and I think finding a truly satisfactory system-tag policy is one of those impossibilities.

NautArch

1:21 PM

I'm trying to think of a case where I thought it was 5e and I was wrong. And I can't really think of anything. Not saying i'm infallible :)

BESW

@doppelgreener I'm positive I've seen a couple of "Oh, it's actually a bizarre homebrew hack of two D&D editions and some random other thing" questions where the guesses were right about one of the influences.

Someone_Evil

Pretty sure I've been surprised by a question turning out to be PF at least once

doppelgreener

The dialog around this issue keeps falling back on specters rather than what's actually happening and that concerns me. "It could be {wild example that has simply never happened recently} for all we know". The damage people imagine would happen is also, I imagine, a specter at this point that outgrows anything we've actually seen.

BESW

@Someone_Evil Yeah, PF/3.5 mashups were pretty common during the 4e era.

doppelgreener

@BESW My current estimates put this kind of situation (or a 30 year rolemaster hack, or an OSR retroclone, or so on) as something like a once-a-year occurrence.

BESW

1:24 PM

I think part of the disconnect here, is that the conversation about system tagging first got momentum during a time when there was a lot more diversity in which D&D editions (and D&D-likes such as Pathfinder) were being asked about. During the 4e era, "assume it's the most recent edition" was much less reliable and we DID have more problems with guessing the wrong system.

I wonder what would happen if there was no policy and we just leave the tagging as a free-for-all like the Overlords intended.

doppelgreener

@BESW I fully agree, and that same conversation has simply continued with the same arguments being made because they were made previously.

There's a lot of baggage to it.

@BESW I do too, and I expect it would be pretty unremarkable and very little would actually go wrong. I expect maybe one question a year would have fuss over someone being wrong, but I'd prefer that to what currently happens.

BESW

Aye. But since I don't actually contribute to the mainsite these days, it'd be irresponsible armchair philosophy coming from me.

Glazius

At this point it probably would be very little because a question about any particular non-dnd-5e system is a once-a-year event.

doppelgreener

(oof, that got me right here)

Glazius

I exaggerate, of course, it's closer to once a month.

AncientSwordRage

1:31 PM

@Glazius I would love to challenge accepted there, but I roleplay as much as BESW contributes to mainsite these days

doppelgreener

I've had not much tabletop RPG play happening recently either, but the games I've been playing are ones where issues we run into are trivially resolveable without much effort because the game is clear and internally consistent and all moving parts have a clear interaction with one another.

And if the issue isn't that, they're bigger philosophical issues where an answer won't be found by asking the internet.

BESW

@doppelgreener And/or the game is clear about leaving certain things to the group and doesn't have anything to say on those subjects.

doppelgreener

(Or if they are found, they need space for ranging discussion, so, not Stack Q&A.)

@BESW Right.

Glazius

@BESW In that case though you could still ask a social question or expect something good subjective - we're not coming up with helpful things on this, can somebody give us some pointers?

BESW

@Glazius I could. I have in the past. I don't anymore.

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