I do not think it's reasonable. We're not a community that's actually trying to vie "A! no, B! No, A! No, B!" — we're a community that's just trying to find what works.
Alleging that we're just going to experience the exact same in reverse afterwards is exactly a discouraging assertion that makes people dread engaging in the topic or developing a way forward together.
I think KRyan is saying (or at least my interpretation of it) is that historically we've seen the push and pull by mostly entrenched sides. Yes, there are those that move, but this is showing signs of entrenched positions by vocal users.
Other topics show our actual pattern is "A? Yeah, A. Actually, maybe B. Yeah, that's good. What about C? That's even better, thank goodness we moved on from A and B. What about D? Nice, that's working."
@NautArch We haven't seen that history, though. We've had several topics starting from this current policy—there's never been a B taking over and then people wanting to go back, because A has only gotten more and more strictly enforced over time.
@doppelgreener If it helps. I would happily switch to reverting the policy if and when I see a viable enforceable alternative. I don't support a wholesale reversion of the policy to allow any user to freely exercise their "expertise". I believe that will lead to many mistaken assumptions. And the current policy is the only one that I have seen that draws a line which is clearly defined.
@doppelgreener I understand that, but it reverts it from a clear line to a blurry one. Unless we can clearly define that line I believe we will simply trade one problem for another one.
There's many people saying "this isn't working for me" and many people saying "I want to keep doing things this way and don't want to go free-for-all", but there's not just two options in there, and I'm interested in finding out what will work for the community broadly.
@NautArch I don't think the problem is about D&D 5e, although that's where it's almost entirely showing up. We're not carving out an exception for D&D 5e, we're just approaching how to resolve this problem.
@ThomasMarkov I genuinely do not appreciate the lens at which KRyan casts the discussion and think it is, in fact, part of the harm being done to our discussions on the topic, including right there in that transcript, but I don't know how to express this in a constructive manner here right now.
the tldr being KRyan asserts he is not trying to stifle discussion, but he has specifically done exactly that multiple times in words and action
Like, I need to level here. I don't think the fatigue about this topic is about revisiting it—there's lots of topics we've revisited. I believe the fatigue relates to the behaviour some people bring to the topic which acts to chill discussion.
@doppelgreener So you agree with me when I said, "KRyan seems to be quite insistent that this isn’t the case, rather that the interlocutors who in various ways voice opposition to the policy merely represent an illegitimate vocal minority who are just bucking a well established, overwhelmingly consensual system."
@NautArch I highly imagine a new user with an unpleasant first experience is going to stumble upon and participate in Meta to question the process they were required to follow :(
@NautArch I was taking screenshots and documenting strife caused by the guess the system policy because all the comments (and questions/answers) kept getting deleted. And then my hard drive died
@Someone_Evil The reversal of the "On Hold" messaging. To simply be closed. I find it to be much more permanent in the new guise and less encouraging to users to attempt to resolve it.
@NautArch What they'll ball at is "I am using the Twinned Spell Metamagic on the Booming Blade Cantrip on my Lunging Attack Battle Master Fighter" "There are thousands of RPGs and we can't possibly know what you're talking about" " Oh, I'm playing 5e" "Do you mean 5e DnD, 5e Call of Cthulhu, 5e Masquerade?"
@NautArch All the ones I had were only with the OP
Like, I just ignored comment threads that involved long standing users just rehashing things in comments
@doppelgreener I spent like 20 minutes trying to think of how to explain what youre getting at, then decided that was stupid when I could just copy paste your answer into mine.
@linksassin Yes. As far as I understood it, they couldn't measure an improvement/benefit, so it got reversed to reduce system complexity (which is a general goal)
@NautArch Even I, as a dedicated avoider of 5e questions, have seen this be a source of frequent frustration (often turning to rather understandable name-calling) for the OP.
@Medix2 Probably did, I just disagree with them. Most of their statistics would be based on larger sites like SO where perhaps the change made more sense. Here I would have prefer the On Hold version
@Medix2 I wonder how much of that can be improved by having more guidance in the pro-forma comments. If you give examples to drive towards giving both name and system, or for obvious cases simply ask whether it's D&D 5e (so we can accept a "yes") it might help that process
@BESW thank you! i can't imagine much. i need to fill out papers, find a place to move to, do viewings, pack up and move, etc, which is part of the trouble lol....
and i seem to have picked up influenza last friday, so i need to do all of that but also take it easy this week ~_~
@Someone_Evil I mean... I'm certainly tired of reading the word "querent" which is used approximately nowhere else; so much so that a user will likely need to search online what the word even means. And then I also worry that pro-forms comments (or maybe just internet speak in general) are inherently flawed to come across as condescending :(
People have previously expressed those points ^ I'm just stating them again
@Medix2 Not sure how much the anecdotal evidence is worth, but we do get a lot of users who simply don't return to their first question, irrespective of how it was received. We also get some number who go "oh, sorry. Added. Thanks for pointing it out". Who I can't say how much this how we approch in each case, and how much is luck
@doppelgreener oh dear, hope you feel better! The flu season in my area hasn’t been that bad but tomorrow we move back into the higher COVID tier so a lot of things are about to shut down.
I had to look up what OP meant, it was completely foreign to my online experience prior to coming to the Stack. I knew what querent meant though, because it's a word I've read in books.
i am dismayed that i have twice found a wonderful place to move to and then, also, it turns out the person whose room i'd be taking can't actually move out yet and has to delay. (but one of those places was just this past friday and it's because of work hiccups they're trying to sort out)
@Medix2 "Querent" is a precise term, "asker" is bad grammar. Perhaps it is slightly rare in every day usage but I prefer to use correct english and precise wording where possible.
I have no issues with "bad grammar." Grammatical precision is a bugbear of class-based education, inserting shibboleths to keep out the riffraff by pretending their language is somehow less effective at communicating because their dialect evolved in a different direction.
(also genuinely this request I made earlier is one i'm making for my own health—I want to engage, but I need to not do that much, and I've been one of the most vocal people on the topic previously and that's not healthy for me nor the discussion especially when there's people trying to convey that my say is inherently illegitimate and doesn't count)
@Medix2 Dont get me started, the thesis reviewer at my college kicked back my thesis for bad grammar about a grammatical construction that was entirely standard in mathematics literature.
diversity of voices on the topic is important, not least because peoples' individual stances will vary and that's valuable, and individuals speaking up may bring novel ideas to the discussion that help us move forward in new ways
I keep thinking back to my post along the lines of "per question Metas shouldn't exist" and honestly, after having been helped out of having completely given up on this topic ever moving... The fact that people agree with that is... Alarming? Concerning? I don't know... I think about it a lot, but finding words is hard
@doppelgreener Oh gosh, I hope you can find a match with better timing soon! We'll assume that the others didn't work out because there was something about them that was going to be horribly wrong for you.
@BESW oh, yeah. london is very much a situation of lots of housing being pretty bad, so i need to find a place with a decent room that can fit a desk and a decent kitchen and good housemates, and those first two factors eliminate 90% of the market
but of the remaining 10% i've been having a lot of luck, so that's keeping me optimistic
@linksassin I don't know if you wanted to, but I feel like this answer works well with your recent answer. Or at least, it takes the stance that there are reasons not to edit in a system tag even when we know the system
@BardicWizard LJ was a blogging host platform, kinda like a stripped-down Wordpress or a proto-Facebook. People wrote diary-like entries on their pages and read each other's posts and commented on them. It had a very strong fanfic community that I was into for a while.
"we should not make edits even when they're obvious because it teaches people to do things for themselves" is a position we take on this issue exclusively
nevermind, you don't need to answer that, i am just frustrated by seeing that argument come up repeatedly
(LJ launched in 1999, was bought by Russian interests in 2007, which coincided with The Ficcer Purge, and they started moving to Russian servers in 2009.)
For many years there was a very tenuous truce between published authors and fanfic writers, because authors could get sued for IP theft if one of their novels strayed too closely to a ficcer's prior work in the same franchise. Then Anne Rice went on a rampage about other people getting their dirty fingers on her precious characters and got all fics based on her work stripped from major fanfic archives.
That tipped the scales of power toward published authors (well, publishers really) and began the era of aggressive "I own nothing, please don't sue" disclaimers, a toned-down version of which a lot of ficcers still use today.
For years, fanfiction communities knew that they were working in quasi-legal territory and if they attracted too much attention they'd get slapped with copyright infringement suits they couldn't afford to contest.
AO3 is a magical land of frolicking unicorns (and not the kind of unicorns that are lice-ridden and prone to stabbing you; the cute ones that rummage through your garbage) by comparison.
In theory. But fair use is a defense, not a permission.
Fair use doesn't keep anybody from being taken to court. It's an argument you use in court.
These days published authors are just advised to avoid reading fanfic of their own works so they have plausible deniability about where their ideas come from, and most publishers consider fanfic part of a healthy audience community and a form of free advertising so long as nobody's profiting off it without cutting them in.
There's still some wild stuff (Fifty Shades of Grey comes to mind, as does the whole Omegaverse legal drama currently ongoing, both of which come with "Google at your own risk" warnings for explicit sexual content and glorification of physical and mental abuse.)
True. Incidentally, @BESW, if you wouldn’t mind, I think you’re the last person currently active who hasn’t seen what happened in that pbp we’re doing?
@NautArch Yeah but I can't imagine that happening enough times that the number of regained spell slots it alarming; though turning a 6th level slots into a 5th, 4th, 3rd, 2nd, and 1st level slot is... scary
That's true, my thing definitely has this baked in assumption of one adventuring day somehow needing dream, stone shape, remove curse, arcane lock, and disguise selfall in that order
@Medix2 I would assume it's a feature they're implementing to let you filter/show by subclasses. Eg. which spells are on given domain lists, patrons etc.
I'm sorry that we got off on the wrong foot, as it's my first time in a forum such as this one. While I was banned from posting for 3 days, I found a more suitable forum, called Dragonsfoot.org where I can post questions as well as comment and post things other than very specific questions. I app...
My most recent question has been marked as a duplicate twice (it was closed as a dupe, then reopened, then reclosed again) of this question. It is not, in my opinion, but would like to get some commentary on it.
The linked question is asking about whether or not spells with a range of "Self" targ...
@BESW I'm playing in a PF2 campaign. The AONPRD2 site has all the updated SRD information, but it's badly organized and its search feature doesn't work well, so I google "aonprd pf2 <term or query>" and that generally gets the information I need.
Honestly I don't see the point in cleaning leaves. They just die off in the winter and grow back in the spring. Cleaning each leaf seems like wasted effort.
@MikeQ I dethatched the lawn and raked leaves yesterday. I then put down fertilizer (last feed before winter, basically) ... but there is no way I'd clean all those leaves.
@NautArch will I add any value if I add that answer again? Maybe the question needs a frame challenge.
when I was a kid, my dad use to burn the piles of leaves. Then, in the late 1960's, a city ordnance was passed and burning was not legal. (And we had neighbors who would narc people out) So my brother and I used to collect huge bundles of leaves in old table cloths or bed spreads and walk them over to the permanently wooded area, and dump them there.
We looked like that guy going to St Ives with Seven Sacks and Seven wives and all those kittens ...
I actually don’t agree with it cause it harms low income workers who do yard work for a living. Yes, it only affects them 34.4 days per year, but that can be the difference between making a living and not making enough to live on
I have this weird feeling that everyone is jumping to answers and replies rather than actually thinking things over (and rattling it in the back of their mind). Maybe this is part of the whole "entrenched" problem
I stinks that it's not possible for us to handle this differently. Nominate a single person to write their proposal and then have the community vote on those proposals.
But also, metas aren't usually an open collaborative space to work out potential solutions—they're a place for finalised definitive responses. So I think that's just, you know, a normal effect?
We could have an open brainstorming "so what could we do?" but that'd be a different kind of question
(and would similarly need to be without "but you can't" comments)
@NautArch Technically you could open a question, and close it so only clarifications can be made in comments and then open it some time later to formally accept answers
@BardicWizard I guess some more details will be out in the next few days, when someone says "technical malfunction" and it's a helicopter, it could be one of a few hundred things ...
@AncientSwordRage I repeat my suggestion of wish, or possibly just wait until the next one, on December 14 of this year in various parts of the pacific
Is there a D&D Build that relies entirely on reactions to do damage in combat? I was thinking of this because I was watching a MTG video about decks that do something similar
@BardicWizard I mean you can do most things via Wish, besides change SE policy, seems like overkill
@AncientSwordRage Now I wanna see hellish rebuke mixed with... uh... armor of agathys and... uh... Swashbuckler Rogue's Panache? Something that incentivizes "attack me"
Though remember that casting a spell isn't attacking, so you may want to reword/rework it. (Theoretical optimization is one of those things where sandboxes are good)
@AncientSwordRage That's way too broad. What if they're making a deal with a powerful entity? Or they have a big red button that says "drop a piano on each creature in the multiverse"?
The question needs criteria about the character's immediate environment, otherwise it invites arguments like a CR 0 creature "causing" 20d6 damage by pushing someone off a cliff
@MikeQ I think there's a big general assumption that things like indirectly damage (fall damage and the like) don't count. But that could easily be stated
Though they also often come with a "How much free time do you have before combat starts" and what the monsters/creatures of the combat are allowed to look like; which should be somewhere
The DMG outlines what it means to be a spellcaster:
If the prerequisite is to be a spellcaster, a creature qualifies if it can cast at least one spell using its traits or features, not using a magic item or the like.
The requirement to cast spells from scrolls as referenced by the Spell Scr...
Ah it quotes "a monster qualifies [as a member of a class] if that monster has spell slots and uses that class's spell list."
> A monster with the Spellcasting class feature [...] has a list of spells known or prepared from a particular class. [...] The monster is considered a member of that class when attuning to or using a magic item that requires member-ship in the class or access to its spell list.
@Someone_Evil Yup, thanks for that; wouldn't have found that otherwise