The party got captured during a showdown with a major villain at the end of the last session: three of them died and the survivor got trapped while trying to flee the dungeon.
All four of them can cast spells, and the villain saw them doing so during the fight. He also saw that two of them have m...
A select few features occur, not when an attack roll is made, but instead when an attack is made.
Three examples are the Protection Fighting Style, the Arrow-Catching Shield magic item, and the Vengeance Paladin's Soul of Vengeance feature. These state (emphasis mine):
When a creature you can se...
If a clockwork soul sorcerer is in a social situation and has disadvantage on a persuasion check, then uses Restore Balance, would anyone be able to see that?
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My D&D session was called early because one of the players was feeling sick, and now I'm feeling out of sorts. Any advice to help with that sort of thing?
In Tasha's Primal Companion feature it doesn't say that the beast doesn't roll initiative, just that it acts during the player's turn. Is that enough to mean that it's the player that has to roll initiative?
I assume the answer is yes, but it would be nice if you were playing a strength build ran...
I'm relatively new to the game and DMing a group who are all also new to the game, so maybe this is something obvious that we just don't know. Last session the party was beset upon by a group of assassins in the night. In the ensuing fight, at two seperate times a character was brought below 0hp....
Chain Lightning has the following description:
You create a bolt of lightning that arcs toward a target of your choice that you can see within range. Three bolts then leap from that target to as many as three other targets, each of which must be within 30 feet of the first target.
The rules for...
I am currently playing an Investigator in a Pathfinder 2e game. I am thinking about taking the Shadowdancer archetype, but I am unsure how Shadow Sneak Attack works:
How does Shadow Sneak Attack Progress? Is it just 1d6 forever, or
does it progress on 11th and 15th levels?
Does Shadow Sneak Att...
Am I being way too critical, or are a lot of these answers more like idea generation. I see the case that they may be okay and I'm just working on not being so critical.
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> Any of us can say “here's what I'd do” based on no actual experience, or come up with something on the spot as an off-the-cuff idea, but our site is not looking for this content. We want to collect tried-and-tested solutions with well-understood outcomes. We don't want your opinion; we want your expertise. — rpg.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/8696/…
@NautArch Korvin's answer is good subjective, the others seem to just be "here, try this!"
Relatively new DM with a group of 5 players (some with ttrpg experience, some not) through a twist on the essentials kit module. One absolute first time player is running a 3rd level rogue with low HP 13, lower even than our party wizard. We roll for HP, and even with the reroll ones rule borrowe...
> This means when you provide a subjective solution you believe will resolve the situation, we expect that you cite analogous experience of how it has worked out in actual practice — your own experience or someone else's. Keep in mind any cultural differences when doing so.
Describing how it worked out is more preferable to describing how well it worked out: “these things happened, the people I was interacting with felt this way about it” is preferable to “it worked well”, but either is preferable to no citation of it actually being tried at all.
(one thing i'm privately kind of proud of is the number of metas I've written that later got copied to other sites. I think that number is currently 2, but that's still a lot. sometimes i'm not sure about these things but when that happens i'm like, wow i did good here.)
for who is still interested in that artifact shortbow I was tinkering with, I've prepared the second iteration https://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/181407/is-this-homebrew-shortbow-unique-item-balanced-second-version
Thanks everyone for your help, it's coming up quite nicely!
@doppelgreener which leads to different people getting exposed to the posts from different places and so more people familiar with the concepts :) (I was more familiar with the IPS version so that's what I linked)
@NautArch Yes there is; I am still trying to find the link to that answer with all of the verbal only spells ... I think it would be helpful for the answer.
Blatant unsupported yes, and I think we have. Though the whole process is awkward for mods. We want to give the chance to improve and elaborate, so there's no natural point to go back and give verdict (as it were). And going back and (silently) deleting upvoted answers is not fun for mods
If you want to see a large scale cleanup of unsupported answers, that seems like a good curation initiative to start on meta
I am not interested in engaging in Meta anymore, but if the Mods are the ones that put the notice up, I do think it's up to y'all to follow through. We don't have the power here.
And if we aren't going to follow through, then the post notice is no longer really necessary (or should be changed.)
If the goal is signal over noise, we need to remove the noise it seems.
But if we don't want to do that, that's fine - we just need to change our language and approach.
Well, the point of the post notice is to increase the visibility of that concern on the answer. Comments are much better suited to request additions on an answer
Sure, but there is very much an ongoing issue of these answers coming in. If we don't awnt to stop them, they want stop. That begs the question: do we?
*won't stop
And I'm not talking about historical clean up, either. This is current.
There's definitely few who voice the concerns, and with the end result of unsupported answers getting upvoted. It feels like the subjective experience basis is brought up more often for keeping (certain) questions open, than it is for curating their answers
It isn't silent. There are comments, post notices, and then deletion. They have multiple visible points that 10K plus users will always see. Yes, the folks who don't won't see a deleted answer, but I think an undeleted high upvote answer is a really bad precedent.
It says "you can keep writing these and get upvotes"
I think removing those answers absolutely teaches that user something.
We've also got several conversations about subjective support on Meta - I don't think we need another. We need to act on what we've said we would.
Again - unless we don't - but we need to be clear about that.
@NautArch I could go back and add "I solemnly swear I've tried this, it works, it's true, and I've been playing the game for many years." to all of my subjective answers if you think supporting them makes them better.
but more importantly, we actually have a post notice that says the answer may be deleted if not improved. If we never delete an act on that notice then what is the purpose of the notice
@GcL I wouldn't. I think the answer is supported. which may explain why there's no post notice.
@GcL Are we going to apply this standard to answers that cite rules but show no evidence of having tested them in play? Because revs up Chainsaw of Deletion.
@MarkWells The good subjective post specifically asks for answers backed up by experience. When you read one that is not clearly speculation, do you assume it's backed up by experience or not? If not, do you ask the poster to swear that it is?
@GcL I typically do assume it's backed up by experience. I might ask the poster to clarify what their experience was ("Did you find that handling it that way slowed down the game?" kinds of questions). That's different from demanding that they "swear" anything, which would be very pointless.
@MarkWells Asking a relevant question like, "Did you find the alternative was too slow?" might get the answer "yes." Which would be a detail that you found relevant and useful. It might not be the main point of the answer that they wanted to get across. It also doesn't add any more support than saying "yes" to "did you try this yourself?"
@MarkWells What question would you ask of this answer to get at the experience behind it?
@GcL I have the sense that you're inferring a position I don't have, which usually means I got tangled in my own snark and failed to communicate. So, as plainly as I can: I think answers should be supported by experience. I think a standard of "you must have tried this specific thing and written up an after-action report on it" is ridiculous and unachievable.
If an answer simply says that a solution worked, but doesn't explain how or why it worked, then that means mentioning the person's experience didn't improve the quality of the answer.
So if an answer uses logic to explain why a solution would work, but doesn't explicitly say that it was used in practice, then the additional mention of personal experience wouldn't improve the answer, and would therefore be unnecessary.
@MikeQ The thing we want to see used in practice, IMO, is house rules. Anyone can spend 30 seconds spitballing a house rule for some situation that might or might not achieve the gameplay result you want. The value is in the testing.
Testing and analysis. There is limited value in anecdotal evidence. That's the stuff of /r/dnd comments. Simply knowing that some solution worked for some other group doesn't tell me how that solution might work for my group.
Besides, this is the internet. Can't verify claims here. A story about a user's "real world" group is just as good as a story about a hypothetical group meant to demonstrate a point.
It doesn't take an expert to generate an idea. It takes an expert to analyze the idea and understand how it might impact the table. The latter I think is what we're looking for
I'm running a game of four (currently) 5th-level characters. All of them are heavy damage-dealers (a wizard, warlock, ranger and paladin) with the paladin as the nominal tank. However, the paladin is consistently going down the first few rounds of every combat. He has a pretty high AC (20 with sh...
A Good Subjective answer cites experience, your own or someone else's, to show how things actually work out so that people can evaluate your solution. Voters can use that information to inform their voting and feedback, and people visiting seeking a solution can evaluate the solutions that work best for them. Different people may pick different solutions because the "here's how it worked out in practice" information helped them find which one suited their specific case best.
This is not about verifying that someone isn't making something up. Even if we were to implicitly trust every author to only recommend solutions they have first-hand or second-hand experience with, we still need this information to evaluate solutions for effectiveness, as voters or as people trying to solve problems we're having.
This is also why "I tried this and here's how it worked out" is recommended and "I tried this and it worked well" is not — sure, it worked well, but worked well how? Walk us through what happened so we can better evaluate this solution for fit. Meanwhile, "I've tried this" and no information about what happened is hardly even Good Subjective citation at all.
Right! the fact these subjective problems are going to vary a little bit for each person that encounters them is why the "here's how it worked out" information is so important.
I still don't think the answers I cited are supported by that standard nor are they analysis of pros or cons. Thinking about other posters answers, I believe I can pick good answers, but I'm not closer to being able to explain why or how in a way r
@ThomasMarkov Yeah, I'm not sure exactly what Bri is thinking, but is suspect it sounds something along the lines of 'Munchkinmunchkinmunchkinmunchkinmunchkin"
@RevenantBacon Right, which isnt a sensible perspective since this is a DM working to give something interesting to a player, not a player working to convince the DM their overpowered item is balanced.
@MarkWells Thinking more about what you're saying and I do agree with you. We need more answers with subjective support, not more answers with objective support.
The problem I think is that those answers are harder to write, and if you have to deal with knee-jerk responses to them. The "I don't care that you just told me it worked out of fine, but to look out for X" folks.
Objective and constraints aren't bad, they give us a level field for discussion. But Subjective are more applicable because they're practical answers.
@NautArch I've never been comfortable with the idea that we even have "objective" questions and answers here. Roleplaying is a deeply subjective activity.
If a clockwork soul sorcerer is in a social situation and has disadvantage on a persuasion check, then uses Restore Balance, would anyone be able to see that?
Chain Lightning has the following description:
You create a bolt of lightning that arcs toward a target of your choice that you can see within range. Three bolts then leap from that target to as many as three other targets, each of which must be within 30 feet of the first target.
The rules for...
I am currently playing an Investigator in a Pathfinder 2e game. I am thinking about taking the Shadowdancer archetype, but I am unsure how Shadow Sneak Attack works:
How does Shadow Sneak Attack Progress? Is it just 1d6 forever, or
does it progress on 11th and 15th levels?
Does Shadow Sneak Att...
