I got a message from one of my former RPG table mates that her GM had inserted one of our earlier DnD adventures in their current game as a legend, that was fun to hear
It's a plot point in the movie. The humans on the other world speak a language based on Ancient Egyptian, but the linguist doesn't recognise it at first because the vowels are different. He learns their dialect by reading hieroglyphics and being corrected on pronunciation by a local.
Is there a good dupe target amongst these: https://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/139940/what-counts-as-willing-movement https://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/114650/would-a-frightened-fleeing-creature-be-considered-moving-willingly https://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/60618/does-fear-induced-movement-count-as-moving-willingly https://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/13481/is-teleporting-a-creature-considered-forced-movement-of-said-creature
We have already had a similar discussion years ago, when the official SRD was Paizo's own PRD.
Now things have changed. Archives of Nethys (henceforth AON) is a community-mantained, errata-including SRD just as d20pfsrd.com (henceforth PFSRD)
A question asking about preferences between AON and th...
I don't know why this is even a rule, we can obviously tell he's talking about 5e Warlock. Just add the 5e tag instead of voting to close. rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/174301/…
@RevenantBacon Indeed. I was thinking of doing that since the direct quote from PHB is a contextual clue. Thanks for beating me to it. I just had not opened my SRD yet to make sure the words matched.
I could have sworn that either 3 or 4 had a hexblade. Maybe my brain is misfiring.
@ThomasMarkov Contextual clues allow for adding the tag, blind adherence to a contested 'policy' is how we get arguments on meta that don't go anywhere. Five years RPGSE experience with that. :(
No harm was done to the site by doing this. The PHB text matches perfectly.
@ThomasMarkov If a policy is widely know to be a bad policy, it shouldn't be blindly followed. This policy needs to change, I have personally seen it be detrimantal in several situations
@RevenantBacon It is... not widely known to be a bad policy, That is, to my knowledge, every time it has been discussed in Meta it has gotten considerable support over alternatives offered.
Oh, wow, it's almost like we could figure out the system by reading what the OP put in the question and using context to figure it out without guessing
@ThomasMarkov The PHB text quotes word for word in the text of the question itself. I think that the windmill should be left on its own today; rather than calling for the lance. Not guessing, helping. That's how I see it.
@RevenantBacon I don't think you were wrong, I just think the policy should be followed until it is changed by consensus. I personally think its garbage.
@RevenantBacon It's not about just that. (I advise you to read the Meta conversations about this because they bring forth solid points that might not be obvious)
@RevenantBacon FWIW I think it's beneficial to teach users to properly tag their questions. Even when it's obvious to us 9/10 times, that 10th time is useful to catch. If we don't follow it those 9 times, we don't catch the 10th time
I'll go and get a cuppa coffee, please let's not go after each other this morning. I got all cross and grumpy a few days ago while I was talking to Ben, and realized a day or so later that I helped nothing and nobody in so doing.
The "solid evidence" case, for example, being countered by the fact that people by and large are not good at deciding when evidence is solid and when not.
Something from a flight manual I used to have to remind other pilots of:"The procedures in this manual are not a substitute for sound judgment." I think the same can be said about the meta policy in question. @kviiri in this case, the evidence is a word for word quote from the system's PHB.
Please be good to each other, I'm off for that coffee.
@RevenantBacon Yes, this case. But if we have a policy saying that "solid evidence" is enough to guess the system, we either have to have a very rigorous guideline on what counts as "solid" or leave it to the users' judgment, which is not fault-proof.
That's one way to do it, but it would only "fix" a small amount of cases, and would be prone to different faults (eg. editions of the same game having identical text as often happens). I personally would like to see something riding less on specific exceptions while still being clear-cut.
@kviiri I don't know of many systems that do that, and of the few that I do know, the edition is likely to be irrelevant if it's something that got ported over between editions.
Also, please be courteous in your language. You're allowed to be critical of the policy but describing it as ridiculous comes off as an insult towards the people who worked on it.
I know this is common, but my google-fu is failing me (particularly since the relevant search field would mostly be in the comment section of deleted answers).
Does anyone have some helpful example questions where users posted an answer assuming a question was for D&D 5e when it was already appar...
(and those who supported it – I reiterate that "Don't guess the system" has been consistently the most popular stance for system tagging for several years, and while it doesn't mean it's the best possible policy, it means you should at least try to respect the fact that it's been the community's choice)
@RevenantBacon Well. I've seen a system being assumed to be "clearly DnD 5e" because it mentioned... I think it was Flurry of Blows? People are generally not good at intuitive conditional probabilistics.
Whether that's a big problem is another matter, of course
@RevenantBacon Anyway, even though I might sound like I'm trying to oppose your idea, I'm mainly just trying to remind you that the policy, as it is implemented, has a point, possibly to a degree that you haven't considered. I'm not oblivious of the fact that things have changed though, both in terms of public opinion regarding the policy and the general layout of the wider RPG community that we seek to serve.
@AncientSwordRage So I looked through this, and it's about people answering questions while ignoring the system tags that were already there. Tangential, but not exactly what I'm talking about
The latter meaning: when DnD 5e was new to the markets, it brought in a huge influx of new players that didn't know there were editions of DnD (remember that 5e is notoriously badly edition-labeled) and as fairly common among RPG players, assumed DnD is pretty much all there is to RPGs, or in a weaker form, that every RPG works more or less the same as DnD so it doesn't really matter which one you ask about.
That situation has stabilized now, I guess. People tend to know they're playing 5e, at least I think? Might be just my biased cognition at it.
But remembering that the old policy has a point, I urge you to work towards a better solution. Make a proposal, put it in Meta, let the community discuss it.
@ThomasMarkov My understanding of the D20 System is that it was a framework, owned by Wizards (and I think licensed out in the OGL), that was used to make 3.5, PF 1e, 5e, D20 Modern, M&M, and so on.
Not to bring up a controversial topic again but I do feel this needs to be clarified. The most recent meta on "system guessing" very narrowly upheld the standing policy: "if OP doesn't tell us explicitly and unambiguously what system they are playing and it is necessary for the question we do not add that information for them". We expect people to continue to follow that until such time as meta consensus says that we should not.
And note that I say this as a person that has written answers in support of overturning or modifying the policy so I completely understand where dissenters are coming from.
We have a couple things in the oven that may help us move forward on this issue, but that's where it stands for now.
As always if a borderline case appears, bring it up on Meta and we can talk about it.
I think those things are all being worked on in various ways (though I don't think we can add links to the tour, but are adding to the main help center page)
@AncientSwordRage So, the recipe I was using was a high hydration dough which I've never really done before. It looked pretty liquidy but I figured it was just something that came with being high hydration and that after fermentation and folding it would have more structure and strength. Well I poured it out today and it was a puddle. No structure at all. And no structure means no gas capture -> no bread.
@RevenantBacon So I just added a bunch of flour, some commercial yeast (in addition to the sourdough I had started with) and kneaded it until it felt better.
We expect people to follow rules that are difficult to find, when you do find one (in purgatorymeta), it might not be the most recent, and even if there you go with the highest voted answer, it's surrounded by dissent?
@GcL In short: no. Various ways we try to fix that is that you can navigate faq for example to get a gist, but we have no landing page for all the rules and polices and guidelines.
@AncientSwordRage I'd argue that we mostly operate on (best) practices, which are much harder to pin down. At current count we have two policies as far as I've found (never guess the system, and wait 72h for homebrew review iterations), I'd love additions though
Coming from this question what to put on the main help center page, the suggestion is to have a (relativly short) list with important meta questions to help introduce new (and network) users to our site and our practises. This question is for determining which questions to put on, which may inclu...
@ThomasMarkov mentioned it earlier, but honestly the way we teach people in practice is to tell them when they've run afoul of something. To be honest, that would probably be the case no matter how well documented our guidelines were because generally, people don't read stuff before getting involved.
@Rubiksmoose That's the whack on the nose training method. I think that works well for systems where the rules don't change. E.g. never pee on the carpet.
And I do tend to think that our approach to correction hopefully feels less like a nose-whack and more like a teacherly-correction. We try to only whack people when they do something so blatantly wrong that it is hurting the community (and should have been obvious) or when they repeatedly do stuff they have been told not to.
@GcL We don't punish, we talk with. As for rules changeing, we can't really do better than expect our engaged users to keep an eye on meta if they want to be on the top of things, at least any stuff that gets features (which would be anything important anyhow). It's the best tool we have for that
@Rubiksmoose That's making assumptions about how the recipients view the close/comment/revert/whatever actions. Also, some people don't like teacherly correction. Difficult to know the tone with which others read things.
@GcL Sure, that is indeed why I couched it as "hopefully feels". Unfortunately as Someone_Evil said, we can only do the best we can given the tools we have. Undoubtedly, some users will perceive even the slightest correction to be aggressive. And some users will refuse to accept any correction even when hard action is taken.
I think that not having a both easy-to-access list and comprehensive list of policies is detrimental, especially to new users, who are unlikely to even be aware that we have what amounts to a second site that solely exists to have discussions about site rules
@RevenantBacon But to be clear, I think it would be impossible to have a comprehensive list of stuff. Especially when you start to get into community norms. And as soon as you portray something as comprehensive, you'll get people fighting back when some niche thing isn't listed and thus wasn't incorrect because it wasn't in the "master list of all rules"
@AncientSwordRage Sometimes me... when using a screen reader... and people are screwing with the headings so that jumping to content is a colossal pain in the butt.
@ThomasMarkov Ya, he fixed up one of mine yesterday. I wasn't aware that you could do some of the formatting he did, I thought the markdown would have been to restrictive.
@AncientSwordRage Actually, I highly recommend using a screen reader for browsing for a couple weeks. It will open your eyes to a lot of accessibility issues.
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@Rubiksmoose Should probably link to that from the help page. I wouldn't think to go to a site, find a subdomain that is a weird shadow copy, and punch in "faq" into the search bar.
I was thinking of writing a question like "Would it step on the Undying's toes if there was a warlock invocation that granted 1/day or 1/rest use of contagion" but then when I read it I was like....eh.
> Disciple of Life > Also starting at 1st level, your healing spells are more effective. Whenever you use a spell of 1st level or higher to restore hit points to a creature, the creature regains additional hit points equal to 2 + the spell’s level.
> For the duration, each target has advantage on Wisdom saving throws and death saving throws, and regains the maximum number of hit points possible from any healing.
@MarkWells I don't mind that. Most parties I played with or DM for end up with a cart, pack animals, and laborer henchmen. Paying a whopping 1 gp/day for 5 travel laborers is usually worth it just to not have to track overland encumbrance.
@AncientSwordRage Definitely the one that states immunity to the spell. The entire spell is a disease effect, not just the max HP reduction. Damage type that causes the reduction is irrelevant
Keeping with everything in the spell follows as a result of the previous, the pull is a result of the thorns... which being piercing immune makes one immune to.
It's just an analog for "are subsequent statements dependent on the previous?" I think if immunity to disease gives immunity to necrotic damage in harm then piercing immunity avoids the pull of thorn whip
@GcL I think otherwise. This is how I see it. Immunities only make you immune to what they say they do eg immunity to piercing damage only gives you imunity to the damage. Immunity to disease gives you immunity to the disease and all effects therof, as in: you can't contract the disease in the first place, so you can't suffer any ill (or beneficial, theoretically) effects from it.
And as I see it, the entirety of the Harm spell is the result of giving someone a "virulent disease"
I would disagree on the thorn whip example being the same. The piercing damage is not the cause of the pull, it is a result of the whip, so immunity would only make you immune to the actual damage. In the case of harm, the damage and lasting effect are both results of the disease.
@GcL to be clear though, you think the spell causes "a virulent disease" and "necrotic damage" separately, not necrotic damage as a result of the virulent disease?
Just a gentle note: stars in chat should really be used for noteworthy things (significant or funny) - something you'd want someone to see in the sidebar and would still be interesting enough to check out a couple days later. Try not to use starring to "like" too many minor things. :)
@GcL Maybe. If the creature with immunity were a slime, say, then yes, it definitely gets pierced, but wouldn't take damage, because piercing it doesn't actually do anything that would harm it. If it were instead an adamantium turtle construct, that is immune just because its armor is impenetrable, then I don't think it would get pierced
@RevenantBacon AFAIK this is not a browser thing. SE simply doesn't support it at all. So something strange is going on... might be a userscript as Someone_Evil suggested.
It will show the markdown taking effect in the preview which is what i was going by. after taking a look at it, it wasn't utilizing the markdown once posted.
This is how I see the Harm vs Thorn Whip question.
If you're immune to disease, you're immune to everything below it, but being immune to the piercing damage of Thorn Whip doesn't confer immunity to the pull.
Maybe I'm going crazy. I just ran my test in Meta, markdown didn't work in title. Unfortunately, I'm also 100% positive I saw the words Thorn Whip in italics in the title of my post at least once, but now I can't seem to replicate.
I understand editing questions for clarity, but is there a style guide somewhere for Questions and Answers, detailing things like "These things should be italic, these should be bolded, capitalized these powers but not these in references, etc."?
I'd like to have some reference so that I can form...
Should spell names be capitalized and/or italicized? I've seen examples of both:
An example of capitalizing a spell name (command -> Command) — How does the Staff of the Python work?
An example of the opposite editing (Arcane Lock -> arcane lock) — What mundane means can overcome Arcane Lock?
...
(Preface: I'm not looking to establish an official formatting style we, on this stack, must adhere to. This is for my own personal writing consistency when writing on the topic of 5e.)
I've been doing some writing on the topic of 5th edition in my spare time, and have run into a few instances wh...
@GcL Frostbite would essentially be the same flowchart as thorn whip. The disadvantage is caused by the spell's "numbing frost". You are immune to the cold damage, but not all effects of the spell.
The reason it's different for harm is because the disease is the top-level effect.
So the general gist I get from those Meta posts are that styling is irrelevant unless there could be confusion on whether they are referring to a spell (as in, say light, or Light)
Or more commonly shield vs shield. It's not necessary, but is useful for legibility and there are certainly sentences where marking out the spell (and other) names help readability a lot and so often gets edited in if not there already
And ideally edited alongside other fixes. Just italicizing a spell name usually fall under Too Trivial (though there's a lot of human judgement in that term)
To be clear, as a DM I would definitely rule that something like frostbite has no effect on a white dragon for example, but RAW the dragon would only be immune to the cold damage portion of the spell.
Maybe, maybe not. It's just a visualization of my bolded statement "Both the damage and the reduced hit point maximum are the result of this virulent disease..."