This comment really hits the nail on the head: "English seems to be a Very Serious Site. They probably don't like to acknowledge that there are words for non-existent creatures."
@AncientSwordRage I have a 1959 book of cryptids by popular science-explainer Willy Ley, Exotic Zoology, which gives alicorn as the term for the horn of a unicorn or unicorn substitute, and doesn't mention any other use of the term.
There's some evidence that they were a conflation of the awful stink from a well tapping into a sulphur-infused aquifer, and the fossils that were sometimes found in the same rock when people investigated.
Their original form tended to involve lethally bad smells.
@AncientSwordRage Nope, whenever I play a necromancer, we only ever fight boring weak critters. Being a necromancer has become "One of the things RevenantBacon is not allowed to do in RPG's"
Because it has the side effect of making the game kinda boring
Anyways, if we fight powerful critters, I reanimate them as (less, but not much) powerful minions, and if we fight weak critters, it's kinda boring as we mow through them like a scythe through wheat
@NautArch the San Francisco fog is pretty cool too but that’s because it’s by the bay! I live where the fog comes from the rivers and that’s fun too cause it’s gone by lunch and then it’s sunny and cold the rest of the day (except when it’s raining)
@BardicWizard SJV fog is fun until you have to drive in it, and then it's murderous. As a kid I thought it was perfectly normal to have (1) long stretches of highway where Dad drives at 20 mph because nobody can see, (2) road signs for measuring your visibility distance, and (3) TV news reports about 30-car pileups.
Why can't people do their jobs? So I work for a distribution company. We sell all kinds of stuff, OTC medication, beauty products, cooking utensils, etc. We also sell seasonal merchandise. Our seasonal stuff comes in the form of a display unit with product already loaded in, which we get prepackaged directly from the manufacturer in bulk quantities, then ship it to stores. For seasonal items, the process goes like this: we order some something, like maybe an assortment of winter-themed puzzles. The manufacturer sends us the displays cost information, UPC code, size, etc, plus al of that sam…
It kinda bugs me always when questions about indie systems get obvious playing-by-the-ear answers instead of expert answers, granted this time (and probably most of the times in general?) it's just a well-meaning newcomer who doesn't really spot the tag (or understand its meaning)
@NautArch Cases like this make me respect your quality standards more and more :)
A bit of vigilance is good, especially for less-played systems, eg. in yesterday's case most visitors to our site probably wouldn't know DitV, or that escalation is a specific mechanic in the game, so a question concerning it could get answers that seem good to most of our users while still being very well-detached from the game. Fixing that is a lot of responsibility for those who actually know the systems in question
A lot of games actually have these... "trap terms" that sound like they're something far more general than they actually are within the particular game
A mechanism that could help with non-experts butting in (not that such a mechanism would ever be implemented) is making system tags ignored by default, and having people opt in to tags for systems with which they have experience. (As someone who ignores some popular tags, I can say with certainty you will still see the questions in your ignored tags, and there's clear visual signalling that it's not your place.)
@MarkWells I know a couple people who aren’t getting their driver’s permit at 15.5 and their license at 16 cause the permit’s only valid for 6 months and that time for them is during fog season. They’re planning to get their permits in the spring before the wildfire season starts
@Powerdork I think more clear visual indications for system tags would be great... but even at the risk of bad answers, I think the visibility for indie systems is something we shouldn't compromise
I have a meta discussion rel that which I think we need to have, but I need to draft it up (and get some eyes on it before posting), so it'll be some time and until then I think the whole Q&A is best left as is (and yup, anything further should be in Dragons, though much has been said already)
@Medix2 Eh, I'd probably err on the side of letting a specific question stay up when the answer on the target is something like "it depends on the feature", which it seems is what we have here.
And ive probably made judgments before that contradict what I just said.
@NautArch Stone character tablets make character death that much more significant. Ripping paper and smudging clay isnt near as rewarding as destroying stone.
@RyanKinal Rules-light is somewhat subjective, but I'd say a crucial part is that a lot of more indie RPGs are more explicit about the experience they're after, which leaves room for questions
Well, what really helped was less that there were celebs playing it, and more that the image of D&D was pushed away from "something that only nerds do"
@NautArch A few months ago I got into a D&D5e campaign despite being mostly a Storyteller/GURPS/other kind of player/GM, and I do think it's more approachable than the editions I've seen before.
Xanathar's Guide to Everything "expands on the spellcasting rules presented in the Player's Handbook and Dungeon Master's Guide, providing...new options", including the ability to identify spells.
Identifying A Spell
Sometimes a character wants to identify a spell that someone else is casting or...
Say, my human Wizard permanently True Polymorphs themself into a halfling. That halfling won't have a class, so can it, say, gain Fighter levels? What about creatures that aren't playable races, like a Beholder, or a Cat?
Then again, if you are only able to see tomorrow, then you shouldn't be able to foresee your tomorrow-self. Otherwise you would be able to see your tomorrow-self while they are seeing into 2 days from now, and so on.
Thats the system. We always observe the same point of the next day at the same time.
That way there's no overlap
If I mistime it then I have to make sure I match up that time with the next observation period. If there too much delay, then someone else has to step in.
They observe and report in my place, and so that way they don't run into themselves, since they are the temporal adjuster. Once thats fixed i then step in again to reset the cycle
At this point, I don't know if I have thought about this too much, or if my logic is just on point today lol
Say, my human Wizard permanently True Polymorphs themself into a halfling. That halfling won't have a class, so can it, say, gain Fighter levels? What about creatures that aren't playable races, like a Beholder, or a Cat?
