In my campaign my players are working for a secretive organisation, and gets their orders through a magical scroll that lets them send messages back and forth. There are two copies of the scroll, and a copy will display whatever is written in the other.
They now suspect that someone is impersonat...
@MikeQ I was planning on running the whole sequence of adventures that (loosely) follow on from Sunless Citadel in 3.x. Looking at the summaries of some of the later adventures... there are BBEGs that only became a threat because of party actions in Sunless Citadel. I was looking forward to those twists coming to light, but sadly, the game fell apart halfway through Forge of Fury.
[bounces] I'm so excited about The Sun's Ransom. It's not the biggest or groundbreakingest game in ZineQuest but it's kinda aggressively my jam, from the tactile mechanics to the art to the themes.
Look at that mechanic: your dice pool is however many dice cover the sun on the cover of the zine, and as you get closer to bringing back the sun, your dice pool diminishes which literally uncovers the sun while weakening you because you're vampires and the sun is coming back.
And the draft art I've seen is drawing inspiration from the Comune di Firenze, the city of Florence in Renaissance-era Italy, and for reasons I can't quite articulate that's so thematically on point it's painful and I love it.
Florence of that era, and the Duomo specifically, for me it's an embodiment of the contradictions that Sun's Ransom is about. It's about selfishness and community spirit, pride and service, achieving the impossible and being blinkered to the obvious.
And I realize that's not anything most people are going to pick up, but I love that it's what the artist is putting down.
I also gotta say, as one artist to another, I feel that "MOON" label.
@AncientSwordRage I told Pidj it reminded me of the Duomo, and Pidj said "...what's that?" but passed it on to the artist and the artist went "SOMEONE NOTICED!?!"
The lecturer for several of my art classes in college, specialized in Renaissance Florence, so I studied it a LOT because he shoehorned it into every class he could.
The following question exists:
What counts as an attack?
Currently, the following are duplicates of it:
Do saving throw based spells that do damage count as attacks?
Can a Ranger uncanny dodge a blizzard?
Does an savethrow-type attack cause critical damage for an unconscious creature?
Does lig...
@ThomasMarkov we can just leave these, the situation is addressed. they don't need to be deleted or necessarily further downvoted; there's instructive value in keeping bad (appropriately downvoted) answers around.
i added several of those notices in that scenario as a mod as an instructive, trying-to-lean-hard-on-people-watching, don't-do-this-thing kind of intervention, and it never worked because the community just went "nah it's fine lol what's citation"
@ThomasMarkov i am not actually advocating we go and hunt these down and make them all deleted, i was just writing to someone to say "don't worry about these too much"
if i were to write that answer more exhaustively i'd include "or it'll sit around as a warning and reminder we have standards to follow"
I don't think we'll get people to agree on whether we actually want bad answeres, nor whether unsupported answers should just be deleted automatically. Or, at the very least, I know various users have different ideas on what should be done
if you open a new meta, you'll get some people saying to delete them and some saying not to
it's not actually something we need a single specific always-correct case for, because it's a case by case thing
there is also meta guidance of "don't go hunting down old content that is basically addressed at this point and trying to delete/close it, just deal with it when it presents itself as a problem again"
sometimes the community wants an answer gone, sometimes not. it's important to do housekeeping, it's just as important to leave some warning signs around the place.
@ThomasMarkov it is a common sentiment you will find come up a lot when someone is talking about digging through archives to fix old content that is causing no current problem, including now in this conversation
@NautArch the teeth should be consequences for posting a poor answer, with the warning being an indicator of what the querent is supposed to be doing about it. if downvotes are applied, teeth have been applied.
@ThomasMarkov I've seen KRyan and many others bring up quite often the idea that we don't need to go closing questions that only would be closed now after policy changes (like tool-rec game-rec and other similar things)
the times i applied that warning as a diamond moderator and later deleted the post are when it kept receiving upvotes anyway, or wasn't sufficiently downvoted, or was getting deleted as part of general cleanup because the question attracted 10 other bad answers too. as long as the citation warning was there and the answer was downvoted and no other pressing concern was happening, i didn't really need to do anything further.
@ThomasMarkov I agree, and there was even a recent case of somebody pointing to a question that should've been closed as an example of why their current question shouldn't have been closed; which is my main reason to say older questions should be closed so that they don't create false assumptions about what is and isn't acceptable now
@Medix2 well, no, i think that's an incorrect summary. we always have and still do apply rules timelessly: if it is off topic by current standards, it is off topic now, and we close it. we have, however, advocated you don't need to go hunting these down systematically. just wait until they bubble up to the main page, or close them when you happen to come across them, but don't go creating the work of systematically finding and closing all of them please.
@Medix2 also related but very different so i'll mention it in case it's getting mixed up there: there are users who have been around a long time who are frustrated about older questions that are perfectly serviceable, getting closed because newer users think they don't match site standards they might be used to from the subset of the site they've interacted with during their time.
@doppelgreener Can you elaborate some on this "don't go creating the work of systematically finding and closing all of them please."? My understanding is that participating in the review queue is opt-in anyway, and so if you're checking the queue, you're expecting the work to be there anyway. So I don't understand how "creating work" in the review queue is actually a problem.
@ThomasMarkov If you go filling the review queue with 100 questions that haven't been touched in five years, you're going to receive some angry letters.
on account of creating tons of work that doesn't matter
Mostly with stuff like "How can my character copy X fiction character or embody X traits" where, I'm told, either greatly detailed, or minimally detailed are the ideals, and it's the in-between that can't be answered well... but that's all pretty unrelated now XD
@ThomasMarkov because you're making people review 100 questions that haven't been touched in five years and are causing no problems whatsoever and never needed this action to be taken
"it's opt in" but someone has to do it, and until then it's filling the review queue and other things people put in there won't get reviewed
basically don't go creating work where it's not needed
like, we have limited time and energy here, we are all volunteers, focus your energy where it actually brings significant improvement. trawling through super old posts is not spending our energy wisely, and is asking others to spend their energy similarly.
well howdy, power seems to be stabilizing, but this is coming from mother in law's internet. 😮 It's been an interesting three days, finally returning to something more like 'normal' 😃
Doing all right, yes, Texas, the attempt at grid management posed some new challenges for the agency called ERCOT and a decade or so old decision to make the grid sort of 'stand alone' - result being that rolling brown outs/black outs were the plan and they were implemented in a way that made nobody happy.
Of course.
From where I sit, the public information campaign was a mess; got drowned out the the panic driving news media, and so darned much misinformation. But, I'll also say that the implementation was weird, from a user perspective. Lost if for 36 hrs, on for 4, and then off for another day. Problem was, no way to know when your area was up for a drop in our city. IN other places, they might have been more logical in pattern.
cell towers stayed up the whole time, in terms of power, and I think that's a "Harvey Lessons Learned" thing. One small bright spot. Also the first responders around here were superb. Cops were out in front of this, closing ice prone overpasses and such.
Fire and ambulance were on task, and in a win, the city garbage collection continued apace. 😃
@KorvinStarmast That's what I learned moving to Virginia from Rhode Island, the schools shutdown for any amount of snow because nobody has any clue what to do
@NautArch for them to explain what the problem is such that they're having trouble with this and are coming to us for an answer. their questions are usually "can i do x?" or "can i use x with y?" and ... that's it. one sentence. no indication of what they're having trouble with, no elaboration, no interaction with us whatsoever, no response when we ask for more detail, no effort, consistently. functionally it's like our question form is a google search box for them.
@Medix2 when I lived in CT, the locals were pretty good on getting the word out early in re snow, and a lot of people made spare change hooking up small plows to the front of their pick up trucks and SUV's to clear driveways.
@Medix2 Ive done the same. I once gave an answer, that was accepted, and I later realized my answer was wrong, and someone evil, not saying who, deleted.
I don't think I've ever thought about the chat room message "This room has been automatically deleted for inactivity"... weird that it appears but all the messages are still there
@ThomasMarkov If you are interested, MaxWilson (At GiTP forums) has a neat warlock spell point implementation that I am tempted to apply/use. Spell points and pact magic have a funny lash up.
If I can dig up his scheme from one of his posts I'll get you a link.
so my thoughts have been bubbling all day about the frame challenge stuff i talked in here about last night. at that point i was just saying this was an issue, but i didn't say what i think we could/should do about it. what i do is this:
If a post says "frame challenge", mentally delete that from the post, then re-assess it. Is it providing a useful solution to the querent's problem? Is it answering the question that was asked? If not, is that clear and justified why they're doing that? Potential way to assess this: if some random 100-rep user you didn't recognise was posting this (still minus "Frame challenge:"), would you be OK with this answer? If you've got concerns or feedback or think the answer is incomplete after asking these questions, leave that feedback.
(my concern about "frame challenge:" goes back to my unease that an answer self-describing as such has us not ask those questions we'd ask of most other answers, and lets answers get away with a lot they otherwise wouldn't be asked of, so basically this comes down to: consciously elide that to ask that of those answers)
which is not specifically in the dupe or answered by the answer on the dupe
the "dupe" is essentially about how many times you can use the bonus action to designate your prey. The new Q is about whether or not you can proc the attack effect more than once in a turn by cheesing target switching.
i remember i once had to explain that, basically, the D&D 3.5e rules on light and darkness mean that if you stand in the shadows to wait for someone to pass by a well-lit corridor next to those shadows, you are the one who can't see things clearly because you are in shadow (which imposes vision penalties on you), but the other person can see you just fine because they are in bright light. The rules worked fine if everyone was in the same light level, but not so much if you mixed them...
PC sunlight sensitivity gives disadvantage on attacks if your target is in direct sunlight, NPC sunlight sensitivity gives disadvantage if the NPC is in direct sunlight.
@ThomasMarkov Yeah It's nice to have, though... I'm surprised how much it was needed
@NautArch tbh I'm still salty about your answer not having Crawford's clarification to his clarification XD
This one: "My tweet below was addressing bonus actions and reactions that have triggers. A bonus action that has no trigger—such as Cunning Action and the misty step spell—can take place whenever you want on your turn (PH, 189)."
There's a good answer from Rykara for the original question, but to prevent it from being an XY question, is it worth editing it back to be focused in Satyrs and ask a new question about mongrelfolk in general?
@ThomasMarkov it was. I was trying to avoid it being an XY issue, but I think I've really got two questions. 1) How would Barovians respond to Satyrs and 2) How would they respond to Mongrelfolk, so have aligned the extant question to make the answer fit and will ask the second question as a new one.
I agree, but it wasn't very long after the edit. And it answers a seperate question that's useful for me and would be useful for people running Satyrs through CoS
I think I edited it while they were writing the answer. So it was a fair answer when it was submitted.
Wildly off-topic: Stack Overflow doesn't have a chat, right? Or am I just looking in the wrong place? It's not where the chat link is on most Stack Exchange sites I've seen.
Slightly more on-topic: How do I view the room descriptions (on this site)? Here There Be Dragons, for instance, says "For topics that should be opt-in, not opt-out. Please respect ..." and then it cuts out.
The following question exists:
What counts as an attack?
Currently, the following are duplicates of it:
Do saving throw based spells that do damage count as attacks?
Can a Ranger uncanny dodge a blizzard?
Does an savethrow-type attack cause critical damage for an unconscious creature?
Does lig...
Can a rogue use the Steady Aim optional class feature (Tasha's Cauldron of Everything, p. 62) with attack spells?
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