TRPG General Chat

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1:01 AM

Oh, I should re-iterate since he's in those lists:

yesterday, by BESW

In the past I've recommended games and materials made by the creator Swords and Flowers; in light of recently publicized information I recind those recommendations and will not be giving him any more air unless/until the Malaysian TRPG community choose to re-rembrace him.

His presence in those lists is not an endorsement by myself or the creators of the lists.

1:42 AM

Karanduun by LIQUORCANIN just had a v1.5.1 update. It is a high-flying, Filipino heroic fantasy Tabletop RPG in a setting inspired by Filipino Myth, Folklore, and Folk Catholicism. You play as young heroes who must make their legend known and become a legendary Karanduun by making God (whichever oppressive system and tyrant that is) bleed. And the new layout is BEAUTIFUL.

@BESW "folk Catholicism" is basically what we've been practicing in the nitsua household these last 4 months =)

kviiri

I guess we kinda delved in Punk Protestantism over the weekend

"Punk Protestantism" sounds like it should be a thing

@kviiri Given that it started by posting a bunch of complaints about the establishment out in public view, "Punk Protestantism" actually seems kinda redundant.

1:58 AM

:notes: we don't need no/consecration :notes:
:notes: we don't need no/pope's control :notes:

Quick, what rhymes with "transubstantiation"?

infantalization?

instantiation?

"mass hallucination" would be a nifty pun-rhyme

"respect the nation"?

Well sure, when you actually try to think of words.

2:00 AM

(though a lot of things could be substituted for "respect" there...)

@NautArch audiobooks are tough for me. I can't really listen to them while driving, because apparently I (gasp!) actually focus too much on driving.

Listening to them while I'm puttering or running or doing chores... I really despise the tempo/cadence of almost every one I've tried.

Exceptions are books I know really well, and books where you're telling me a story rather than reading it to me.

In the first category go the Harry Potter books, which we've listened to (Jim Dyle version) on many long car rides. In the second category go Gladwell and Carlin and... maybe that's it, so far.

Yeah, I struggle a lot with any audio-only narrative. Audiobooks, podcasts, etc.

Even if I don't have anything else to distract me, my mind wanders.

kviiri

2:15 AM

@JoelHarmon "Nailed it" --Luther explaining how he attached the theses to the cathedral door

@BESW Podcasts are alright for me. But reading to me... I can't even follow readings in church. Except, generally, the Gospel reading which I know well enough once I hear the first line that I'm still only half-following, but that doesn't hurt.

@nitsua60 I once attempted listening to an audio book while installing flooring; I would either lose track of the story quickly, or forget what number I was just looking at on the tape measure.

Adeptus

We occasionally go to a fantasy/scifi fan group locally - not quite a book club, but they generally talk about books. One time, they had a talk about an author whose style was "I'm telling you this story (but I've written it down)" - I wish I could remember his name, because that would probably be perfect for audiobooks.

@Adeptus You mean the style of the written work was like that, or that when they spoke publicly it was with prepared remarks that they then told-but-didn't-read?

That makes me wonder what an Allingham audiobook would be like.

2:25 AM

alliterative

Nov 23 '16 at 0:47, by BESW

> I write every paragraph four times - once to get my meaning down, once to put in anything I have left out, once to take out anything that seems unnecessary, and once to make the whole thing sound as if I had only just thought of it.
- Margery Allingham

Adeptus

2:51 AM

@nitsua60 The author's style was very narrative, like he was telling the story

Q: How much can a rat drag/carry?

Gotcha.

Hot RPG Questions

3:07 AM

6

I'm in a campaign where it's just me and my boyfriend, my boyfriend being the DM. He's very literal with D&D rules and has argued that a rat can carry 15lbs. Rats have a strength score of 2. Carrying capacity is Strength Score times 15, halved if Tiny. I think this is completely ridiculous that a...

Hot RPG Questions

3:55 AM

1

Q: Group with split likes in DnD game: role playing and combat

I'm running a game for 4 people, 1 of which has played DnD before. I have only ran a 1st session. This session lasted for about 5 or 6 hours, and it seems that it was a lot of fun for them. I will run the "Dragon of Icespire Peak" campaign, but haven't even started the 1st town or quests. At the ...

dnd-5e gm-techniques roleplaying group-dynamics

vicky_molokh- unsilence Monica

7:59 AM

@A.B. Yeah, it's Discordian anyway, so there's no point unless it can be fixed.

10:17 AM

@HotRPGQuestions About 1lbs! mentalfloss.com/article/86940/11-beady-eyed-facts-about-rats#4

11:25 AM

Zedeck Siew wrote a twitter thread about how "decolonizing D&D" should be the polar opposite of removing what makes us uncomfortable.

3

Q: Should a mechanic specific question that becomes ultimately about gming be retagged?

11:40 AM

@BESW thats interesting

The Oracle

0

My answer to this question about balancing combat powers has reframed it to be about being a new DM with new players. I've said why it's a bad idea in general, I've given some advice, but not answered the question as written. Due to the value in the answer, especially for new DMs should it be tag...

discussion tags

@AncientSwordRage It's a cool frame, and I think I agree with it in theory while in practice I just want D&D to go sit in a corner while Wizards thinks about what it's done.

@BESW it's good point of view, that you can't fix problems by erasing them

thats a technical approach to an adaptive problem

Yup!

In current terms though, D&D isn't the problem.

@BESW Yup!

11:50 AM

D&D is a problem and has been for... ever... but the problem with D&D right now is Wizards of the Coasts' abusive and exploitative practices as a business and employer. If Wizards can straighten itself out somehow, D&D can follow as the company matures and its employees become more diverse.

If Wizards doesn't straighten itself out, no amount of changing Wizards products will fix the awful influence Wizards has on the industry.

@BESW yup, I think yo've hit the nail right between the eyes

Pammu did a thread earlier today about TRPG industry in the Philippines. I won't link it here because frankly I don't trust everyone in this room to be mature about the Pinoy cultural aspect of the thread, but: a major influence on Pinoy TRPG community functioning is the fact that since their country doesn't have a TRPG industry of its own, or access to crowdfunding services like Kickstarter, WotC is even more the holy grail of TRPG jobs than in America and Pinoy designers hyperfocus on it.

This leads to Filipino TRPG spaces bifurcating into WotC aspirants and everyone else, and the divide can be very unpleasant.

Indie devs around the world face a similar bad choice: create third-party material for D&D and sell it on DMG and hope to get WotC's attention, or come to terms with never even hoping to properly support your family with a TRPG job.

Nick Butler asked D&D 5e creators on Twitter "after you have built your audience, what stops you from changing platforms?" The answers are often heartbreaking.

Anyway! I love the idea of games that lean into what makes us uncomfortable, and a lot of great games already do that!

12:20 PM

@BESW anything that gives you a safe way to roleplay conflict (which can either be from or cause uncomfortable things) is interesting

Absolutely.

I'd never play it with strangers, but playing Dog Eat Dog with a particular group of friends was astonishingly good. Awkward, uncomfortable, eye-opening.

And We Forest Three is a solo TRPG that made me squirm.

Heh. And there's a game that I don't mention in chat much anymore because its premise made people so uncomfortable.

On the other hand, rpg.se meta once had people arguing that the site should be neutral on the subject of a TRPG designed as a white supremacy recruitment tool by a convicted murderer, because D&D is about orc genocide and we allow that. [expansive shrug] I always thought that was more a reason to finally sit down and have The Talk About D&D, myself.

(Worth noting for future readers that the consensus was pretty firmly against being neutral/willfully-blind in that ^^ case, in case they don't go spelunking on meta.)

Frezak

Oh, good.

Yes, eventually. Some individuals made a LOT of fuss about "free speech" and la mort de l'auteur.

12:36 PM

Ooof. I don't think I was around for that conversation and pretty happy about that.

The issues of separating (or not) the art from the artist is a big one, but probably not for main chat.

and howdy!

[wave] Hi! La mort de l'auteur gets waved around a lot as if it were some timeless truth rather than a nuanced complaint about a specific literary analysis custom fifty years ago.

6

@BESW I very much see that, and i'm talking less about looking at the author to understand the work and more about appreciation of works by authors who have done bad things.

Yeah, it's okay to like flawed stuff; otherwise we wouldn't be allowed to like anything because humans are all exceedingly messy. It's what we do with the liking, how our expression of it can improve the world or fail to do so, that's the big reflection.

8

@BESW Yes!!

And acknowledgement of the flaws isn't a bad thing.

Absolutely. If we have to ignore a thing's flaws in order to like it, we're dooming ourselves to disappointment.

But when a thing's causing harm--like legitimizing harmful ideas, or funding harmful companies--then our appreciation of it, flaws and all, stops being the most important part of our choice about how to interact with it.

user15026

12:59 PM

@BESW I am now full of both trepidation and curiosity!

@Ash Oh, you know exactly what game that is, Troggy's gonna run it for us some day.

user15026

@BESW oooh yes. That is a thing I am super excited for.

user15026

@BESW its hard because people go "oh hey but the thing isn't bad and all companies are evil so shurg"

user15026

Which is not great.

Yeah, well. We know there's better choices than settling and we can make them without needing everybody's approval. And sometimes people see how much fun we're having and want in!

user15026

1:04 PM

Yep! That is very true!

Oh, gosh but Speak the Sky is prolific.

You for Me by Speak the Sky is an in-person epistolary game for two, written on both sides of an index card. You're soldiers in a terrible war, writing letters to one another as the fighting rages on. You know each other so well that as you write, you can hear their voice in your mind.

1:47 PM

@ThomasMarkov What's interesting, is if they added another Artificer-esque multiclass contributor you could have 3+3 = 4 or 3+3 = 3, there's a problem with either method of rounding if there were two that rounded up

Im adding a new answer to the original spell slots question.

I think Artificer likely round up because they actually get slots at first level, but they're identical after that :(

add first then divide and round gives a Paladin 1/Ranger 1 first level spell slots and no spells.

@ThomasMarkov I don't think you would add them at all, but I forget why... don't they not have the Spellcasting feature at all?

"Once you have the Spellcasting feature from more than one class, use the rules below." and a 1/1 doesn't meet that prerequisite

Ah, fair enough.

2:10 PM

@Medix2 answer is posted, go check it out.

Hmmm... Artificer 3 + Ranger 2 is very different from Ranger 3 Artificer 2... don't like that XD

LizWeir

2:38 PM

hah, just saw someone on another stack with 300 rep and a gold badge and got very confused

took me a minute to work out that was because they'd got a 100-upvote answer on a hot network question, and of course rep caps

MikeQ

There's also a gold badge for logging in 100 days consecutively, no rep required.

Or for having a question acrue 10k views, don't even need to be logged after asking it

LizWeir

yeah - the 100 day one occurred as a possibility, but the few seconds between looking at what badges they had and seeing it was the 100-score answer one and working out how that happened were Very Confusing :-D

Rubiksmoose

@LizWeir ah yes. Good ol' rep caps

@Rubiksmoose *Tips rep cap*?

3

Rubiksmoose

2:45 PM

lol

Ok, I'm glad that joke actually came across. It's hard to do visual jokes in text-only formats

3:02 PM

@ThomasMarkov Are a Paladin 3 and Paladin 3 + Ranger 2... the same??

Looks like my bounty failed :( I'll try and write up an answer.

@NautArch I was gonna write an answer but... I gave up

And it amounted mostly to people don't agree like my answer here

@NautArch I'll give it a shot. It will probably be this evening, but I'll throw my hat in. Unless I cant come up with any novel contribution.

I also kinda gave up defining "movement" / "your move" / "moving" in 5e-dnd... it's inconsistent

@Medix2 yeah we've been through that before lol

3:09 PM

I think what i'm looking for is a reasonable explanation of the mechanics. Not necessarily "what is the purest raw", but how does this work/what guidance can there be for a table?

3:21 PM

@NautArch This ruling mostly affects fighting in right corridors, no?

@Someone_Evil Most likely. Any sort of enclosed space, but that's generally going to happen within corridors are at entrances to rooms (which I guess in a corridor) :P

Corridors, like dungeons, comes in many shapes, sized, paints, colours, and flavours

@NautArch I'm inclined to say "Sure" were it my table (I think I have, but can't recall), because the alternative is often to have players not able to do something on a turn because of clumbing in some geometry, and that's less fun (for everyone)

@Someone_Evil I've waffled. At times I"ve allowed crossing in, attacking, and taking the OA. BUt then it's over and the rest of the party can do it with impunity.

So then I say, No. And then combat slows.

I don't do a lot of combats in tight spaces with a grid. For that it's usually theater of the mind, and used to involve a little sand flip timer to increase the sense of clausterF and urgency.

which reminds me it's one more thing to implement on foundry.

4:05 PM

@NautArch rpg.stackexchange.com/a/171583/38434 there

Improve as you see fit.

@GcL Id like to see more detail about how creatures are compelled to move out of the space. The rules seem concerned only with ending your move there, not what happens if two creatures find themselves in the same space at the start of thier turns.

4:27 PM

Why couldn't MooT have covered this by supplying extensive wrestling rules?

Only 50% sarcastic there

Yuuki

So natural weapons are weapons, right?

As in, you can't flurry while wildshaped as a druid/monk multiclass?

@Yuuki up to DM but I'd allow it

Q: Can a monk/druid use Flurry of Blows while in wild shape?

1

In D&D 5e, can a monk/druid use the monk ability Flurry of Blows in wild shape?

dnd-5e druid monk multi-classing

Yuuki

Well, that's one half of the question.

11

Q: What are natural weapons?

I am seeing some magical items that refer to natural weapons, but I can't find information about what they actually are. I don't remember seeing it in the Player's Handbook, and googling it isn't finding anything. Can anybody tell me what they are, and where the rules for them are found? If it m...

dnd-5e natural-weapon

is that the other half?

Yuuki

4:34 PM

Yeah. I'm trying to find some statblocks but some beasts have their actions listed like "Bite. Melee Weapon Attack".

@ThomasMarkov Sure. You start your turn there. You can't willingly end your turn there. Taking no movement is willingly ending your turn there. I feel like there was a question about that somewhere.

Q: Is a Wild Shape attack considered an unarmed strike?

12

So, I got intrigued by grappling after reading The Grappler's Manual for 5e. It didn't mention if wild shape attacks were considered unarmed strikes, especially in regards to the Tavern Brawler feat's last bullet, which enables a grapple attempt after hitting with an unarmed strike. It doesn't s...

dnd-5e druid wild-shape unarmed-combat

?

Ok everyone, favorite magic item you've seen (real or homebrew) go!

sphere of slope detection

@GcL Thats not what it says though, it reads "you can't willingly end your move in its space." Not turn, your move.

4:38 PM

@ThomasMarkov Your move occurs during your turn, does it not?

@GcL Not bad but I'm partial to the stone of gravity detection

If it occurs, it occurs during your turn. Is it ending your move if your move never began?

@ThomasMarkov Taking 0 movement of 30 available is willingly ending your move in the same square.

@Himitsu_no_Yami I'm fond of magical decks (other than that one) simply for what span of emotions it brings forth in players

The player could decide to move the character, and they decide not to.

4:40 PM

@GcL I'd say that depends on the DM. Personally I would consider not moving not starting your move

@Someone_Evil But that one can be so fun in the right situation

@Yuuki There's also this from this question

@Himitsu_no_Yami And so decidely unfun in the same sit.

@Himitsu_no_Yami "On your turn, you can move a distance up to your speed. You can use as much or as little of your speed as you like on your turn, following the rules here." Staying put is moving 0.

"ending your move" certainly seems to assume you used movement greater than 0.

I could end my move using 0 of my available speed.

0 seems to qualify for "as little as I like"

I'd love to send WotC's rules designers to the 5e tag here and tell them to answer as many questions as possible

4:44 PM

You cant end something that didnt begin. Also it says "you can" not "you do" or "you must" or "you move".

If it said "you move a distance up to your speed", then it would be clear that it is viewing 0 movement as moving.

Because it says "you can" its assuming that you are not moving unless you choose to use movement.

@ThomasMarkov "In combat, characters and monsters are in constant motion"

That implies you're moving in combat. Your choice is how much.

Interstingly, The Tabaxi feline agility gives some direction here "Once you use this trait, you can’t use it again until you move 0 feet on one of your turns."

My recollection was 3.5 had rules about losing your move and being "flat footed", however it's been a while since I've run those.

@GcL If they're in constant, undefined motion, doesn't that mean their exact position is undefined? Applying Heisenberg's uncertainty principle to combatants shows that they can be in the same space, albeit breifly :p

@Himitsu_no_Yami Boots of Knock

4:50 PM

@NautArch I think that does it for me.

@Someone_Evil It could just be Brownian motion. I'd rather not look at the rules through the lens of that microscope though.

It does seem the rules do not respect relative reference frames.

Otherwise moonbeam would be way more powerful