TRPG General Chat

12:00 AM

lol

I'm not sure why a monster has both those things but I don't see particular reasons it shouldn't either?

@trogdor We have some people who get upset when anything is not reduced to a minimal mechanically sufficient form. "Why do I need toes when I already have fingers, which are strictly better?"

trogdor

well if they want to spent their time and emotional energy on that I consider it their loss

Mark Wells

I try to let it go, in accordance with the ancient proverb, "Your kink is not my kink but your kink is not bad." I am, however, very bad at letting things go.

trogdor

mm

for me it's entirely variable on what the thing I am letting go is

this is one of the things it's easy for me to ignore

Adeptus

It's well known (and confirmed by designers) that warlock's Devils Sight invocation lets them see in darkness (including magical) but doesn't help in dim light. I've just read Truesight & it only talks about darkness not dim light. So depending how the DM reads it, a creature with Truesight but not Darkvision could have disadvantage in dim light.

Joshua

3:17 AM

rpg.stackexchange.com/q/179744/22420 Space lich says not enough

BESW

3:53 AM

Grammarist on "casted": "Many people object to casted, but that doesn’t change the fact that it is catching on and not likely to go away soon."

Personally I'm in favor of allowing forms that avoid homophone confusion.

A Greeblin's Journey by Thomas Novosel. A solo journaling game about a travelling creature called a Greeblin. They have become unsettled from their home and are now travelling for the first time in a world they have never explored. The road is strange and not nearly as kind as their bed, but they had to do something. They had to go somewhere. Temporarily more expensive to fund finishing the game and making a print version.

Ben

4:07 AM

How is everyone doing today?

Joshua

feeling like antagonizing Mordenkainen for no good reason

Ben

@Joshua I'm not entirely up to scratch on LOTR expanded lore

:P

Joshua

I so wanted to answer that question with a few paragraphs describing the newly cratered moon and the country blasted to dust and the rumor that the stars themselves are become weapons and then say not enough

Ben

@Joshua That seems like the intended feeling they wanted to convey with the Death Star or the Star Killer Base

Joshua

Oh. I left an ambiguous "that". I linked a question about balance.

Ben

4:19 AM

Ah I see. Well, I stand by my previous statement, but in this context your statement makes more sense.

I'm in a bit of a muddle at the moment. I have the stress of managing business decisions at work (which at this point in time have been sidelined due to decision changes), looking forward to playing a 5e game this weekend, stressing over managing our 7 and 9-yo's behaviour, and being both excited and terrified about the process of buying a house

Joshua

Yeah I noticed the behavior problem and couldn't come up with something reasonable to say.

I remember as the kid choosing to lose the fight I thought I could win because the damage would be too high.

Ben

@Joshua over on parenting.se?

Joshua

Yup.

KorvinStarmast

@Ben The process of buying a house is, of the above issues, the most potentially damaging if done wrongly. Pri 1: get that right.

Joshua

Here I must repectfully disagree. The 9yr old's more important.

Ben

4:26 AM

Yeah. I judge my parenting by how I was parented, and I believe I turned out fine. But not everyone is the same; it doesn't have the same effect, it can be done better, it can be done worse. The best we can do is find a way to help everyone find the middle ground

Shalvenay

@Ben are you still searching for a house, or do you have one picked out and are trying to figure out whether to buy it or not?

Ben

Thankfully, on all of these issues I do have support, and advice to make sure we don't screw it up beyond repair, outside of making our own decisions.

As in, we have plenty of people giving us advice. Which is far better than trying to figure it out ourselves.

Shalvenay

@KorvinStarmast yeah, my thing is that I can't really get the things I want in a house long-term by buying a house, but I'm probably quite weird in that regard

Ben

@Shalvenay The situation is that my parents bought a house (since they're very well off in the market). Long story short, it's a rebuild after the previous building fell down... the rebuild was never finished off, but it's got all the walls and the roof, so we're paying (and working) to finish it ourselves, and then we've got an agreement with my folks to purchase it off them.

Shalvenay

@Ben ah. I reckon that has its advantages, no?

Ben

4:35 AM

@Shalvenay I certainly feel that way :)

Ben

5:44 AM

On a separate topic, are/can Forge clerics be proficient with shields?

MikeQ

Clerics by default are proficient with shields, assuming this is 5e.

Ben

@MikeQ yeah

Ok, that's good then

My warforged has the name "Hammer" (cos he's a forge cleric, and carries a warhammer).

But thought it could be cool if he carries a shield too, and whenever people call him the "hammer and shield", he corrects them that his name is just "Hammer"

Hurr hurr

He also carries a skull of unknown origin, but has an attachment to it. So maybe he can say "no, it has no name. It is not named 'shield'."

Hot RPG Questions

7:53 AM

3

Q: Mechanics to represent twin intuition?

I have 2 players who will be playing tabaxi twins, they have a really good backstory and have asked me is there is a way they could have some sort of a link, so if they are not together and one is in trouble the other has a chance of knowing something might be wrong. I am considering a simple per...

dnd-5e

AncientSwordRage

10:40 AM

@BESW I really dislike how it sounds, but my favourite issues people have with language is when an old form comes back, and they treat it like a neologism(?)

BESW

@AncientSwordRage cf gaslighting, gatekeeping

AncientSwordRage

@BESW also ain't, needful

BESW

Bring back thee and thou, return you to plural.

2

AncientSwordRage

Normalcy is one that Bill Bryson encountered, having been accused of it being an americanism

@BESW I'd back that petition

vicky_molokh- unsilence Monica

Hell yeah stop using you against single individuals, it's confusing.

English seems like a language with a rather cleanly demarcated singular/plural count, aside from a small bunch of exceptions.

BESW

10:47 AM

And I really need grammar pedants to understand just how much of standardized English happened artificially as forms of nationalist or classist propaganda.

AncientSwordRage

@vicky_molokh-unsilenceMonica but it gets there in a wildly chaotic manner

@BESW that too

vicky_molokh- unsilence Monica

@AncientSwordRage Then again, could be worse: people could yell at you for being 'archaic' when you use forgotten but coherent forms.

AncientSwordRage

When I learnt how previous english reforms were conducted, I decided that Webster wasn't that bad a guy

@vicky_molokh-unsilenceMonica yup!

vicky_molokh- unsilence Monica

@AncientSwordRage I'm not really sure English really meaningfully had reforms ever, what with not having a regulatory body.

AncientSwordRage

@vicky_molokh-unsilenceMonica it happened when we got the writing press...mainly

BESW

10:49 AM

@AncientSwordRage And in class-gated educational systems, repeatedly across several regions.

vicky_molokh- unsilence Monica

@AncientSwordRage It's not like it was with the deprecation of the end-of-word Ъ, for example, when the change was standardised across printing houses by the governing body.

AncientSwordRage

Isle and Island come from different sources, for instance, and used to be Ile and Iland (?). The original latin for Iland had an s, so they added TO BOTH! No care for the original source of the word

Why Is English Spelling So Damn Weird?!

►

vicky_molokh- unsilence Monica

@AncientSwordRage It's not as weird if you're educated about the etymology, but, judging by discussions with native speakers, there are issues with obtaining such education in school.

AncientSwordRage

@vicky_molokh-unsilenceMonica some of the etymology is just dumb

BESW

Just look at RP and Mid-Atlantic, for 20th century examples of variants broadly and effectively enforced as "standard" by non-governing bodies.

(just the name RP is --to borrow an excellent term from JW Lewis-- invidious, and its continued use can probably be attributed largely to yet another canonizer, Fowler.)

AncientSwordRage

10:58 AM

@BESW thats a good word

vicky_molokh- unsilence Monica

@AncientSwordRage Well, actions of questionable intelligence do happen in this area as much as in history in general. Nonetheless, study/knowledge thereof is a good thing overall.

BESW

The entire American publication industry is so standardized that the style guides one must learn to navigate it can be counted on one hand, and people will die on the smallest of hills over claims of the objective superiority of utilitarian differences between them based on assumed application.

I once nearly got caught in a fistfight between two editors over whether or not a poem's use of a series of periods needed to follow a style guide's rules for ellipses in prose.

AncientSwordRage

@vicky_molokh-unsilenceMonica the reasons are dumb, but how do you know which words that rhyme with bum end in a b and which don't? That's also dumb

@BESW oh jeez

vicky_molokh- unsilence Monica

@AncientSwordRage I'm not sure what you mean. I'm not a language-reconstructor, I don't know what methods are used to evaluate the most likely pronunciations of words back in the day. Are you stating that the methods are badly designed?

AncientSwordRage

@vicky_molokh-unsilenceMonica I'm saying it's inconsistent

because most of the decisions were not prnounciation based

BESW

11:08 AM

@AncientSwordRage [gestures explosively] Boomb!

AncientSwordRage

in the video it explains that one of the -um+b words (crumb, dumb, thumb) etc used to not have the b, but the b was added stylistically to resemble latin, and they added a b to a few others for funsies

vicky_molokh- unsilence Monica

@AncientSwordRage Well yeah, humans are not great at consistency. It takes effort and knowledge to maintain it.

AncientSwordRage

@BESW do you pronounce boom and bum the same?

@vicky_molokh-unsilenceMonica true, but these were deliberate choices someone made

BESW

I keep remembering something I heard from someone from an island where their Indigenous language was used conversationally, about a neighbouring island where the language was not in conversational use. He said that the other island was so much more focused on spelling, because they didn't speak it; that people more fluent in the language could recognize the written words with nonstandardized spellings but people without that fluency needed to memorize the symbols.

AncientSwordRage

@BESW that scans

BESW

11:14 AM

And then I think about how when I moved to South Carolina, people couldn't understand me and I couldn't understand them, and it had less to do with regional syntax or localized vocabulary than with simple pronunciation.

AncientSwordRage

@BESW that also scans

vicky_molokh- unsilence Monica

@AncientSwordRage Again, if I'm understanding you correctly, I'm not thinking that's surprising. People are inconsistent even in deliberate choices, plus English pronunciation seems super-drifty across time and space (for whatever reason), which probably makes matters worse.

BESW

@AncientSwordRage "Yuff iksinta gaut?"

AncientSwordRage

@vicky_molokh-unsilenceMonica I'm not all that surprised

@BESW I'm lost unfortunately

BESW

"[are] you fixing [intending, preparing] to go out?"

AncientSwordRage

11:21 AM

oh ,oh!

"yu fiksin ta ga ut" but with unhelpful stresses

BESW

It's a totally intelligible phrase that's been so reduced to idiomatic recitation that the emphasis has become melodic.

AncientSwordRage

@BESW makes sense, I like how language develops that way

Langfocus also covers AAVE, which is really interesting

BESW

Or my friend in the Art Studio major, who declared "Ah gawt awl mah aht supplahs awt Mahkells."

(Michael's is a franchise of craft stores.)

And apparently I was just as hard to parse for them.

AncientSwordRage

@BESW that I can understand

I'm normally ok when listening

BESW

Once I got my ear adjusted, the big challenge was the major regional variances between different counties, gathered together in the city or the campus.

The difference between towns half an hour apart was more dramatic there, than it is here.

AncientSwordRage

11:29 AM

@BESW I hear that's the same in some regions of the UK

BESW

But here, we get people from all over the Pacific and beyond, so my ear never fully adjusts to a lot of them.

AncientSwordRage

@BESW do you get a lot of cross island traffic?

BESW

yeah, we're a major nexus for work, travel, education, and medicine.

AncientSwordRage

@BESW that's awesome

mind if I ask which island it is?

BESW

So there's a lot of people living here who come from other places, and also a lot of people here temporarily.

I'm from Guåhan, or Guam.

AncientSwordRage

11:32 AM

thanks!

kviiri

12:29 PM

@BESW Isn't this also the story behind "ampersand"?

AncientSwordRage

@BESW I'm currently really interested in languages, to the extent of planning 1-2 conlangs and I'm finding reading about non-european languages and cultures really interesting and eye-opening

@kviiri I think so, but in the written form

as well as @ maybe originating as E-ach A-t, and the 'a' got encircled by the 'e'

AncientSwordRage

12:46 PM

My favourite language feature I've found is Alliterative Agreement

Hot RPG Questions

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Q: What kind of creatures are subject to Phantom Rogue's Tokens of the Departed?

This might get a little fiddly, but I was curious how people would rule on this aspect of Phantom Rogue's level 13 feature, "Tokens of the Departed" When a life ends in your presence, you’re able to snatch a token from the departing soul, a sliver of its life essence that takes physical form: as...

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