(Side note: "level 1 means you have no history" was a pet peeve of mine in D&D, mostly because it meant saying "no" to players' character concepts a lot, but also because plenty of non-PCs die of old age before hitting level 2 so it doesn't even make sense in the game's own mechanics.)
@BESW I suppose that there are people like that in most places I've lived. Just, maybe, a little more of them the more extreme (geographically, climatically, societally, &c.) a location is.
@Ash I mean, we also get people coming here because they think we're so small (and brown) that their mediocrity will be less of an obstacle to success since obviously nobody here will be better than them.
user15026
@BESW I can't make enough no thank you face for that
Are we talking character optimisation, or elaborate backstories? Because I'd say that charop is less of a thing in 5e than, say, 3.x, and backstory seems to be table (or individual) dependent.
@Adeptus Both! Whether your prefabricated character is "at level 5 I'll take a two-level dip in Druid, and then pick up this prestige class..." or "and then I'll reveal my secret origin...", it makes you not want the emergent story to disrupt your plans.
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@BardicWizard Yeah I got there. But 6 spam flags from the community will also auto-delete. The post if we don't get to it before then. Thanks for point it out but as Mark says we get notifications for flag anyway. Generally you can let flag do the work but we would rather you alert us than not if you see a problem that needs our attention or you need more room than the flag message gives you to explain it.
Last week electricians blew up the circuit board at my office during unscheduled testing. They thought because no one is in the office they didn't need to tell anyone. Kill all our remote sessions for 8 hours.
Yeah it's all good. In all honesty our response wasn't as good as it should have been though haha
"You smell something burning?" "Yeah smells like rubber?" "Nah that's insulation" "Oh ok." ... "wait..." ... "Oh ok no that's bad. Everyone out"
It wasn't serious though. The emergency response was great, but it was excessive for the issue. I think something was simply shorted out and only caused something to start melting, not actually catch fire. So we turned the power off and the issue was dealt with within an hour :)
@linksassin Good enough excuse to call it a day? :P
I did the math once for what our quarterly town hall meetings cost. ~400 staff for a 3 hour meeeting. Most of them on engineering salaries. Many dollars...
The last time I was involved in a fire was during the second tech rehearsal of my 8th grade school play. I was running sound, and a 6th grader was running lights (I’m not sure why he got to do it, though I was already making cue sheets and had to do sound setup). He forgot that the two light boxes can’t be plugged into the same circuit, plugged them in on the same outlet, and left his math homework on top of one of them, which caught fire. Ruined the light box and made me be at school really late since my dad was the volunteer light designer and he, my best friend’s parents, and the drama …
IIRC, he didn’t get to do lights again until he had written out a safety plan on how to properly set up the lights and an apology to the principal who had to turn off the fire alarm before the firefighters showed up (My best friend, the student assistant director, took over for two days and that’s how I learned cats cradle)
That play was amazing
My best friend: “my role is to shout for [the drama teacher] and try to keep people quiet”
We had an old air conditioner start blowing smoke at home. We ended up in hospital for a few hours observation for smoke inhalation. The home insurance inspector came out and said, "I'm really sorry, but it didn't actually catch fire..." (claim refused)
@BESW the school was tiny, the drama program smaller, and there were maybe 8 kids doing tech stuff (including set building) and 10-12 actors in any given production. And yet, the shouting was still necessary. Our drama teacher also taught art and ran one PE class (there were only 2 elective teachers for 300 ish kids), so she can shout like you’ve never heard before, and the AD was still needed to do more shouting half the time.
I did the posters and ads for our university's theater productions from fall 2012 'til fall 2019, and shouting is still very much a part of the process.
@BESW I went to a couple set builds for our spring play last year, and even with 5 kids and 3 parents at the build the theater tech teacher (my high school has a really good theater program) still yelled a lot
And yeah, the translations are a little wonky but I can usually figure out the meaning and if I can't be pretty confident I understand it, I just scroll on.
@Ash yeah I heard that at least one specific time while in High School and immediately thought some kind of football jock must have come up with the phrase (there wasn't a football program at my school I just figured that was probably one of the only ways that could be true, as steriotypical as that is)
@trogdor Well.... don't. It was groundbreaking for its day - especially in breaking standards of vulgarity and "you can't show that on television" and a lot of the forced saccharinity of American television, but it really hasn't aged well.
@trogdor The clip included the recurring "4 touchdowns in one game" line, I take it.
I think Ed O'Neill's role in Married With Children was a big part in his casting for Jay in Modern Family, which in many ways is a reversal of his classic role and, in general, of the portrayal of families.
I mean, this was the late 80's, when TV was general a lot more racist, misogynist, ableist and many other things, and still MwC tried to be more vulgar than that.
It was important for helping TV get over a lot of its puritanism - I mean, it had a whole episode devoted to a toilet because it was still almost unheard of at the time to refer explicitly to toilets on TV - but just because it took justified potshots at bad things doesn't mean it wasn't as bad - or worse - in others.
@trogdor Most of the jokes are aimed at him, and the rest of the family, because (at least for the first several seasons) the family were explicitly made to be unlikeable. They weren't "losers with redeeming qualities", they were vicious, hateful assholes.
In later seasons they started to hit the problem of keeping interest up in unlikeable characters, so they gradually got less nasty.
No offense to anyone who actually liked the show, but at least to me MwC seemed like one of those things that invariably was on only when you turned on the TV at some weird time and had no idea what would be on. The idea of intending to watch it feels weird to me x)
@BESW I've been watching Leverage recently, and something's just prompted me to remember one of the scenes from it.
Elsewhere I've just been talking about what it takes to make a satisfying narrative defeat of a villain.
In storytelling, to make the defeat of a villain feel satisfying, the exact circumstances of their defeat must come as a direct result of the very same vices and failures that characterised their villainy, and as a result of their refusal to learn and change for the better.
There's lots of good examples from pop culture! In Avatar TLA, Admiral Zhao's pride had him create the very enemy that would defeat him, drive away his allies, and refuse the help that would save him. In Star Wars Episode VI, the Emperor fails to learn the value of love and togetherness, and so is blindsided and overthrown by people acting on those values. Ronan the Destroyer from Guardians of the Galaxy is also defeated the same way.
This is fairly typical of Western storytelling; other cultures will have their own rubric for satisfying conclusions to villainy. Eastern cinema will often follow different rules for example.
But in Leverage, there's an episode where a guy has robbed hundreds of people of their homes. Midway through, the protagonists—being the ridiculously expert thieves and con artists they are—have set up a scheme to bait this guy to get involved in. They try to rope this guy into the idea of profiting at the expense of some people who all have fatal illnesses.
They draw up a list of people who they'll be ostensibly profiting off, and give the guy the list.
Every single identity on the list is made up—no real people are actually involved—but it's later revealed th at the names are all the names of the people whose homes he stole.
The man's greed and lack of compassion was the M.O. of his villainy, and his greed and lack of compassion both drew him into the scam that set up his defeat. His greed and lack of compassion meant he didn't even care about knowing the names of his victims—and if he'd known the names at all, he may have been able to see what was coming his way.
Leverage often leans into one of my favorite tropes from the original Mission: Impossible series, and both use it because it helps give the protagonists moral deniability. They set up the villain in a position where he will be defeated easily if he continues to act villainously.
I have... feelings... about this trope. I really like it, but it's also very often used as a moral cop-out to let the protagonists arrange for truly awful things to happen, without the story or the characters feeling obligated to wrestle with the responsibility for those awful things.
It also often gets used for a sort of reassuring moral passivity message, that villainy is self-defeating and so we don't have to take action against it.
Something that makes the Star Wars example work better for me, for example, is that the Emperor has failed before Luke walks into the room: Luke's friends are going to blow up the Death Star no matter what the Emperor, Vader, or Luke, does. The throne room conflict is a battle for the souls of Luke and Vader, not a battle for the Empire.
Right, but the Emperor's moral failure isn't the cause of his defeat: he chose how he was gonna die, not whether. He was gonna get blown up either way. So there's a call to action against oppression (no "don't worry evil will defeat itself") and a responsibility for tragedy (Luke's friends are responsible for all the deaths on the Death Star regardless of the Emperor's choices).
Yeah. I'm just saying that I see the trope used to say that a lot. I really enjoy it when it's employed in a more nuanced way, but when I use it myself I have to be cautious about what I'm saying with it.
The value of this trope, and the reason it's satisfying, is because of the message that those who are able to change, learn, grow, and exhibit and live by positive traits (often love and compassion) are going to be able to save the day in the course of living by those traits. Meanwhile, those who follow courses of evil and refuse to learn, change, and grow to be better are going to have their downfall because of what they're doing, if we work to defeat them.
@BESW Definitely also real life is showing that it doesn't work this way, but we still feel like it should, so we see the things missing as a failure of the environment around us that we also need to work on.
Re: the trope of evil failing due to its own... sheer impossibility, I there's an even more common, maybe somewhat downplayed version, where the traits that cause the downfall are not by themselves evil, just conductive to evil
On a related note, does anyone else feel like there's been an uptick in spam recently? Or maybe that we're coming out of a downtick? (does this data exist anywhere...)
@Someone_Evil Metasmoke should give you a detailed dashboard describing everything going on on RPG.SE specifically. You can access it because you're a diamond moderator, I can't. I don't remember where to find it but someone at Charcoal HQ should be able to point you to the site-specific stats page if you ask for some help finding it.
eg. like how Sauron does two major screw-ups in the Lord of the Rings: first, he leads his army personally wearing his supercharger artifact whose loss insta-gibs him, and second, he never accounts for the possibility that his enemies might try to destroy his supercharger artifact instead of using it against him. In both situations, it's his arrogance, underestimating the abilities and wisdom of his foes, that does him in. A foolish trait, not per se an evil one – but certainly related.
@kviiri I've toyed with how to make a system which showcases the idea that character traits are at the core all positive, but can be manifested in twisted toxic ways. Like confidence/arrogance.
"Thinking everyone else is at least a bit dumb" seems to be a major defining feature of megalomaniac villains like Sauron
@AncientSwordRage True, but I guess I want to point out the distinction that arrogance itself doesn't make one evil – it's a harmful trait but not inherently villainous, and is a fairly common... what's the antonym of "redeeming quality"? For heroic characters, anyway.
Sauron's arrogance and desire to destroy also lead to a failure to learn and change. His lack of value of life was also instrumental in shaping his army, which was also unable to protect him and unwilling to do anything more for him than it had to.
Frequently the heroes themselves exhibit the values that the villain lacks, such that his refusal to learn those values and change is a large part of both his continued villainy and his defeat.
One thing I enjoyed about MLP:FIM was that it repeatedly had antagonists who, when defeated by their failure to comprehend the virtues of the protagonists, humbled themselves to ask for help to learn those virtues themselves.
@Rubiksmoose yeah, doesn't look to be that marked out on our site. Looking at the last year on MS, those events don't really jump out (they do on site analytics f.ex)
@kviiri When it first came on, I immediately disliked it and would not watch it. Now and again it might be on at someone else's house, and what I saw of it I still disliked.
Can anyone point me to a good game about doing espionage/heist? My school group’s interested in doing something based off of ocean’s eleven or mission impossible (or this book called the great Greene heist) where they do a caper with extensive planning and things start going wrong.
Shadowrun is pretty rich with nitty-gritty details. By my understanding it's geared a lot towards players who want the gameplay to be heavily strategical and tactical
@BardicWizard Aeon Wave is a cyberpunk Fate Core setting/adventure with half-pre-made characters hired by a dead client to find out why she died at the heart of one of the most secure corporate R&D sites in the world.
My very limited exposure to Shadowrun (through people more experienced with it) suggests that the intended playstyle has lots of planning for different runs, with security measures listed sounding a lot like... well. What one'd expect from actually performing an armed raid on an armed company.
Some scenario book, by what I was told, instructed the GM that the company expects diversions, so whenever their facility is attacked, it is common prudence to dispatch two security teams: one at the initial site of attack, the other at the complete opposite end of the facility, to see if anyone's coming in that way.
> You are a normal person in search of money, adventure, or fame, with multiple Field Agents hanging out in your brain. Will you succeed in your mission? Find out in The Agency, a Fate World of Adventure by Tracy Barnett.
@BardicWizard If you're open to doing some homework, Condensed seemed to work OK for low-resolution, cinematically-influenced heisting for me so far (one heist already done, some intermediate criminal activity in-between, and one underway; players commented on some parallels with Mission Impossible, but I was actually going more for a Blacklist/Hitman kind of feel, and never watched MI, so there may be some differences in the results).
@kviiri and that is why I no longer play heists with one GM. Got us every time with a second team even if we planned for it (once we planned for three teams and got four cause one came from the ceiling)
@vicky_molokh-unsilenceMonica I have time most days, and that could be fun to try; the cinematic aspect is really cool sounding
@BardicWizard A great thing about the Leverage RPG is that the end of the heist has everybody do a flashback to describe (invent) something they did off-screen "earlier" in order to justify winning despite the odds "now."
It's basically going around and saying why you're so awesomely prepared that you deserve an extra roll toward victory.
I will also mention that Blades in the Dark has an SRD on its site, and is one of the most popular new heist engines.
Bears in the Dark is a free game designed to introduce people to the Blades in the Dark game engine.
@BardicWizard Fate Condensed is not a heist game; it's a newer way of explaining the same basic core engine that's used in Aeon Wave, The Agency, and all the Worlds of Adventure. It can be heist-y, but I'd recommend using one of the iterations that's been specifically tuned for heisting, and use Fate Condensed as a reference doc.
It's heavily inspired by the "Powered by the Apocalypse" style of game engine, but even PbtA is so wildly varied across its different iterations by different people that "PBTA" is often more of a gesture towards intended style than a description of content. And Blades ventures further from PbtA than most things which carry the PbtA label, both in style and substance.
To say that Blades in the Dark is Powered by the Apocalypse would be about as accurate as saying that No Dice No Masters is Powered by the Apocalypse.
I've heard lots of vague praise towards BitD but for some reason I still have a somewhat negative preconception about it. Maybe someone's been unhappy with it and I just forget
I find it... frustrating... because I love a lot of what I'm seeing about the engine but I have yet to find an expression of it that I want to actually play. Maybe Bears in the Dark...
Blades itself is grimdark and a bit misanthropic. A lot of its Forged brethren take thematic cues from that, and I'm not interested in misanthropic play.
Using this search query, one can find slightly more than 30 questions that clearly mention Path of War, an alternative ruleset for Pathfinder published by Dreamscarred Press, but that are not tagged as such. Due to this fact, it's not possible to find them if searching using the path-of-war tag.
...
@BardicWizard Ages ago TSR put out a game called Top Secret, but I am not sure if it has aged well. It was an attempt to do a bit of James Bond or The Saint or The Avengers; Leverage (per doppel) I have no experience with, but I have heard good things about it
@doppelgreener I wonder if my copy of Firefly RPG is going to become a collectors item.
I think I need to read up on why MW productions is exiting the RPG scene. I'd like to hear what she has to say on that topic ... (And yeah, it is a small market)
@doppelgreener Aha, I think I had seen something about that kickstarter, and am glad that Cortex at least remains alive and well. Thanks for the link, and I think I have an idea on why MW stepped back. She's just about a decade older than I am, and I suspect that she's chosen to devote such energy as she's got to her first love, writing.
There was a game I had played at camp back in the early 1990s. Debating about putting up a question for it, but it was like an escape from europe during ww2 rpg.
@kviiri Having played it, I can give some less vague praise: (1) the engagement - score - payoff - downtime loop is a decent outer structure for episodic play but leaves the interior structure fairly open, (2) the core resolution mechanic only has outcomes of "you succeed" and "this bad thing happens", and (3) it has some mechanisms to discourage obsessing over plans, which is otherwise a huge problem when running heist scenarios.
@NautArch Have you looked at what they get in the class feature variants UA? I have a player using that on a Ranger atm, and it seems fine (admittedly only one session played)
The context for the rogue is A) the player is newer, B) her Dexterity score at level 8 (6 Rogue 2 Int!Warlock) is only 16, C) her spellcasting stat (Int) is 14, D) During the session, across like 10 attacks only one of them landed, and the monster only had an AC of 14, so these were absurdly unlucky rolls, and E) I didn't tell the player they were getting an ASI, I just had their patron (An Archon that can only communicate through emotions) tell them they had to choose "Head or Hands?"
They chose Head, and I gave them a permanent +2 to their Intelligence.
@NautArch They did not, this was a later-in-the-campaign decision.
And their stats are "fine" when looking at the aggregate, it's just that as a rogue, missing your sneak attacks in a turn really hurts your damage output.
So the player had expressed to me a few times they felt like their character wasn't pulling her weight.
@JohnP My exposure to it was quite limited - one of our gaming group got it, and we were looking forward to multiple sessions, but, as can happen, the usual late teenage/early 20's male social friction thing arose - over something else - and that particular group broke up. I didn't get to try to play it again. The next group that formed began playing Chivalry and Sorcery ...
@Xirema i mean, it's all about having fun, and if the other players are cool with it and they're also having fun, then there really isn't an issue. But I would probably talk with the player about choices and consequences.
@JohnP Heh, I wish I had bought the game, though. I read about it quite a bit in Dragon magazine but never found anyone who had it and wanted to play it in the years following. So it goes ..
@NautArch I mean, all the other characters are significantly better optimized. The Cleric, Fighter, and Monk have 20 in their primary stats (especially the fighter who took the Sharpshooter feat) and the barbarian has tons of HP (and still a 19 in strength).
The rogue's main feature has been absurdly high ability check rolls, since she took the Observant feat. Which is really cool and helpful in a lot of circumstances, but in combat she's fallen behind.
@KorvinStarmast Yes, I do think I made the right decision. =P
Also, if you're looking for a short-term patch for unlucky rolls in combat, you could give the player Inspiration if they're failing too much, to offset the bad luck
@Xirema When the cleric casts guiding bolt, that's a good time for her to attack since she'll have advantage ... it's a good combo when the team can pull it off ...
@Xirema Right, it may be a reframing of what they're good at - rather than making them good at everything all the time. I may have opted for a magic item rather than the ASI.
But I'm also a believer that the modifiers aren't the biggest thing in 5e - the die is.
But she rolled like 4 13s against an AC14 creature between using her daggers and then trying to eldritch blast it, and I was like ".............. okay, maybe it's time for an adjustment"
@MarkWells Forgot to thank you for this insight – the first one in particular sounds good to me (I thrive with rigid frameworks with enough blanks to fill) but sadly I think I won't have the time or energy to play it in any foreseeable near future x_x
@kviiri Yes, in the negatives column for Blades I'd mention that it is not quite as low-prep as it's often said to be. There's not a lot of prep needed for the score itself, but keeping track of the moving parts of the setting has given me some headaches.
@NautArch not all af my group would agree to it, its one of the things I’m going to add to the list of “things I might eventually do as a one shot if i get a different group”
I did a series of one shots where I built the whole party bard characters, but modeled after other classes. The premise was that my Bard in our main campaign was telling stories about ancient heroes. It took three sessions before a character in our main campaign asked my Bard, "are you sure all those heroes were actually bards?" so next time I ran a one shot I pulled out the real characters and let them use them.
I want to create a homebrew playable race called Fools. Essentially the idea is court jesters but as a race. They have bright, multicolored skin. I want them to have the abilities of the original Fool character in my short story, but I'm afraid they might be too overpowered and/or unbalanced. I h...
My players recently decided that they would like to cast the Scry spell on a creature that has the Legendary Resistance trait.
Does this trait function outside of combat?
My major concern is that the creature wouldn't necessarily know it was being scryed on in order to use the resistance to avoid...
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