My character's backstory is that he had to flee his city because he used a spell to save his best friend in the city watch. He is from a made-up city where spells and powerful magic were privileges that only nobility could have; it was illegal for commoners other than having simple magic items, ...
Jamila Nedjadi's game Apocalypse Keys is getting an Evil Hat publication. A tabletop roleplaying game about monsters holding back the apocalypse. They are agents who work for the DIVISION, a mysterious organization dedicated to understanding the occult, taming the supernatural, and protecting the world.
So, I was looking for a local source for The Princess Bride Adventure Book Board Game, and accidentally found out that there was a Princess Bride RPG released a few years ago, using the Fudge system.
Thought you guys would find this amusing. On MSE, someone asked about DnD:
> What's Dnd Is it a board game if it is How is it played answer quickly or die fools. I've tried it a ridiculous amount of times and I still don't get it.
"Is it a board game" and "answer quickly or die fools" made me crack up.
I'm no gamer at all, so this could be like a very silly, basic question for you guys. The thing is that I always read about "Dungeons and Dragons" game (not the video game, but the normal game to play with friends that are actually gathered together). And I would like to know how to play it.
I'v...
@Someone_Evil for the recently deleted question that was a bit rude, that is similar to the the first impression I got when arriving at this site. But I approached it somewhat differently, and, I had the good fortune to encounter NeilSlater early on when I made a post.
@KorvinStarmast You mean the stub I deleted? Yeah, I can see where the impression is coming from, but the answer they got is good and with the tone used, I don't think poring more attention on the q would help anyone (and deletion saved applying TM's edit on the stub aswell)
@AncientSwordRage Isn't Die singular, and something like "Dehn" (going by ear, not spelling, from Long Ago Memory) the plural version of that? Fools is plural ....
@AncientSwordRage Oh, never mind, you were Utterly Correct. If we use a noun in the plural form, we always use the same article: die
@AncientSwordRage I learned to German as a wee lad however I never studied it formally, more's the pity; I did study Spanish and spoke a bit before disuse overtook me ....
My language doesn't use articles at all, so "a" and "the" were a bit interesting concepts to grasp at first. I recall I had a Winnie the Pooh film in English that ended with "The End" and I asked my mom that "hey mom, I know what 'end' is but what is 'the'?" and she basically said it doesn't really mean anything x)
Of course, not too many years later, I got to dip my feet in French and Swedish that aren't content to have just definite and indefinite articles, but also different genders (and in Swedish, they even conjugate differently and in ways that aren't evident from the article used alone)
@kviiri wow, having grown up with definite and indefinite articles (English being at root a Germanic language) that lack of them seems exotic, but it obviously works. 😎
@AncientSwordRage Usually it's fairly clear by context, we get more troubles from the fact that we don't have gendered pronouns. Requires a fair amount of creativity from translators for those classic detective story twists that "ah-ha, so how do you know the perp was a she?"
@kviiri Oh, I wasn't nitpicking the conjugation/declension distinction (I am fuzzy on the terms anyway, they're foreign to me). I was just thinking that it's normal for different genders to flex differently in otherwise flexive languages.
Morphological typology is a way of classifying the languages of the world (see linguistic typology) that groups languages according to their common morphological structures. The field organizes languages on the basis of how those languages form words by combining morphemes. Analytic languages contain very little inflection, instead relying on features like word order and auxiliary words to convey meaning. Synthetic languages, ones that are not analytic, are divided into two categories: agglutinative and fusional languages. Agglutinative languages rely primarily on discrete particles (prefixes,...
It seems like one of those things where people look for patterns in history and might be very much prone to finding some, but it's hard to test the hypothesis under controlled conditions.
@AncientSwordRage My experience over the years have shown me not to do that, though. assuming a book is well written often results in disappointment as one begins to read ... 😯
@AncientSwordRage now that my telco is over... it does occasionally require a bit of creativity. Fairly often often one can use other words to substitute for the missing the, for example se which is in normal usage similar to English that (as in, "that tree over there") is commonly used though it's ungrammatical in many cases
And often you can also indicate things with the word order
that chinese doesn't do verb conjugation makes it easier to make things ambiguous. while 他去图书馆 means "they go to the library", it doesn't tell you when they went to the library (either past, present, or future) nor does it specifically say whether "they" is a he or she.
她 and 他 are third-person pronouns. while 她 is specifically female, 他 isn't specifically male. plus, they're homophones so you can't tell the difference in spoken dialogue
@AncientSwordRage One could use eg. word ordering, roughly speaking SVO corresponds to indefinite, OVS to definite, though context is usually still the most important factor
"Epäilty on Jaakko" (epäilty = suspect, on = is) would indicate that Jaakko is the suspect, "Jaakko on epäilty" would have the effect of Jaakko being a suspect but not necessarily the sole one for this context
The party I DM has completed their adventures in the Dalelands (Shadowdale and Daggerdale) and wants to travel to Waterdeep. The party is fairly low level, so their travel will be non-magical and not too expensive. The time period is the 1350s DR, the geography is similar to 5e but not to 4e. Wha...
@AncientSwordRage Sure it is, I have a map of the sword coast on the wall at home with major roads labelled. Major roads are major because they're the common route of travel.
If it's not been answered by the time I get home after work, I'll put something up based on my map
I just have to remember where Daggerdale is in relation to Waterdeep, because my map is H U G E
@NautArch Mordenkainen's Magnificent Emporium (4e) references but does not reprint rules from Dungeon Master's Guide 2 for its henchmen. I was looking into [followers-and-hirelings]
@NautArch Given that your answer is vintage 2017 which is when the question came up, it's a solid answer based on core: PHB, MM, DMG which is where any effort at balance was made. Xanathar's loosened that up a bit, and Tasha's doesn't seem to give a flying fart about bounded accuracy. What I really like about Tasha's is the class "you can change this at ASI time" to alleviate buyer's remorse and "you can swap out fighting styles" as a particularly good idea. I also like most 'class options'
The new Sorcerer classes are an over correction. (Just as Hexblade was an overcorrection for Pact of Blade's shortcomings due to MADness)
@NautArch The actual patron, though, just feels wrong to me 😮 as compared to the other three. Genie, on the other hand, is a pretty great patron concept though it may be a bit higher on the power curve ...
@KorvinStarmast I did see that one person posted about how I may have been right, but another kind of doubled down. Neither actually apologized for their reaction to my request to talk about what was happening.
But they wanted to know if i was going to respond...to what, I don't know.
@KorvinStarmast We do chat both voice and text. When they started going down a road of PCs challenging each other, I asked to chat about what that means before we went down that road.
There is an old question of mine that is not-so-well receveived by the communitiy, hence I'd like to know why, for avoiding to post bad questions i nthe future
I accepted Thomas's answer, since it satsfies me (even if I do not fully agree with the frame challenge part)
@AncientSwordRage It was trivial to me too, but in an answer to another question of mine the user implied that identical could mean anything the DM desires, so I wondered if there is any other game--way yo interpretate "identical"
@Eddymage They didn't make it a game term, and the 'use plain English' theme was one of the points of interest shared by the devs as the game came out for this edition. We have a number of Q&A from the era 2013 to 2015 about that which will have links to dev commentary on the use of normal English in the rule books
@Eddymage Maybe flag that right at the start? "This seems trivially obvious, but in blah blah blah, someone implies otherwise. Is there an in game reason to think this?"
"as the DM it's up to you to decide whether or not creatures are 'identical' enough to share the same initiative" is not equivalent to "you could consider any two random things identical"
rather, the intent is that, when you are already dealing with similar creatures that could be described as identical, it's up to you whether or not you actually do that in the circumstances.
@Eddymage from your question I usually thought that identical creature stands for with the same stats block: for example, in a situation where a party is fighting 3 trolls and 2 ogres I read the above rule as rolling one d20 for the trolls' group and one d20 for the ogres shows me that you answered your own question in the question. (That's the KISS principle at work and it's how I do it, though I tend to clump groups of more than five enemies, hordes, into multiple gruups).
but yes. If I were hazarding a guess I think people probably thought the suggestion that you might call a dragon and a kobold identical creatures was obviously ridiculous, and that sets off "this is not good faith" alarms
There's some room for ambiguity. Are two creatures with identical stat blocks still identical if they have different amounts of HP, or are subject to different spells/effects? What if they have the same stats but are described differently by the GM?
Also, to be fair, the sentence "The DM makes one roll for an entire group of identical creatures, so each member of the group acts at the same time." is weird and confusing and misleading. The PHB has a few instances where multiple creatures somehow take their turns simultaneously, but I don't recall seeing an explanation of how that actually works.
@MikeQ and of course, if they all have the same dex score how do you figure out which hobgoblin goes first? 😮😛 All of the tie breakers are the same value. So, DM just makes a decisin "start on the left and go clockwise" ... off you go ... no rule is needed
@Eddymage I upvoted your answer on that it seems, and I think it was you sharing 'what worked at our table' so nicely. also, your solution "compare the DEX scores, not the modifiers" matches how one of the groups I am in does it
@AncientSwordRage If you're unsure if something is a phishing scam, try googling some of the text. If it's a well-known scam, then the same text may have been reported elsewhere.
@Eddymage Oh, now I see. The negative user reaction was probably because you asked two similar questions back-to-back. It does kind of look like you asked the 2nd question because you were dissatisfied with answers to the 1st question, which is kind of a taboo around here.
@AncientSwordRage It goes back to a scandal in the UK back in the 60's, where the lady in question observed, to the interviewer, that she expected someone to deny, etc, the allegations ... IIRC, that case was in a movie called "Scandal" some years ago, but memory is hazy
In other words, of course we'll say that we are nicer now. 😎
One of my players' characters likes to use illusion spells in combat. To improve their effectiveness, he is asking me for an item that increases his spell save DC. The Rod of the Pact Keeper provides a spell save DC boost. However, it is locked to Warlocks. I'm considering giving him a similar it...
@KorvinStarmast I remember a comment of Thomas in a thread (I think on meta) where he explained that he spent several months to learn how the site works before starting to post Q&As...
For a somewhat different perspective, I spent three months doing nothing but reading the stack and learning how things worked and how to write good content. I wrote my first answer on June 4th of this year and have been the top user every month since. I am the #1 user in rep per day on the stack, and it’s because I took some time to learn what good content was and how the stack worked. I listened and learned before I began to post. I have had no trouble with the mods or anyone else because I assumed from the beginning that this is a meritocracy and the quality of my content is what matters. — Thomas MarkovNov 17 '20 at 1:27
@ThomasMarkov When I first encounterd RPGSE, there were just over 800 pages of content. I didn't post anything until I had already read from the beginning to page 800 somehthing, though some posts I read the question and moved on due to lack of interest in the topic. It took me a few months to bother reading meta; I didn't care. I also objected strongly to the 'let's discuss this in chat' and I have since found that my instincts were utterly correct in that regard.
@ThomasMarkov No, as far as I can tell, PTD only has a post on meta, which was the one migrated from main (and which edit caused my mirth this morning when I sent Someone Evil that comment)
It is not considered good practice on Stack Exchange to go and close old questions that are no longer considered on-topic unless they get bumped or something. Voting to close such questions puts them in the review queue and wastes reviewers’ time, for no benefit whatsoever. If we had a rash of re...
I think the right angle might be something like "do we need a site specific approach to this that is different from how current meta guidance approaches it"
Larger sites deal with a high count of review items on a regular basis and it works, because no single user is responsible for reviewing the whole queue and the system is built with that in mind.
Reviewers can just take bites out of it, and bow out when decision fatigue rears its head. Pressing ...
> It's much preferable for the queue to balloon occasionally, and be handled by the normal crowdsourcing mechanisms it has for precisely such events, than for people to refrain from flagging when they see something that deserves a flag. All that refraining results in is different people having to—redundantly—each stop and ponder how much flagging is “too much,”
> wasting user energy that would be better spent just about anywhere else on-site or off, just so that we can, inexplicably, prevent the flood-management measures designed into the system already from needing to be used.
Flooding is not something it is too useful to pin down exactly, but if it's the majority if activity in the stream or overshadows the normal, it probably is
Yes, to be clear, the highest rep user on this site took to meta to complain that he had to sit through two entire close reviews for brief questions that were obviously off topic.
Assuming we're talking of a fairly DnD-ish standpoint, I think there is at least the difference that creation usually involves a bit of creative(hence the name?) effort in refining the character's high concept, while advancement a mechanical thing with mainly mechanical implications
Eh, I still think it's all one process, like building a house. Laying the foundation is still part of the process of building the house, and finishing the foundation doesn't finish the house, neither does putting up a couple walls.
Starting a character at level 5 still requires that you go through the process of laying a foundation, it's just less time before you add the walls and can instead jump straight to working on the roof
Assume a Divine Soul Sorcerer. The spellcasting feature of the class states (highlight mine):
Additionally, when you gain a level in this class, you can choose one of the sorcerer spells you know and replace it with another spell from the sorcerer spell list, which also must be of a level for wh...
If you are attuning to a magical ring the DMG magic item categories states:
Magic rings offer an amazing array of powers to those lucky enough to find them. Unless a ring’s description says otherwise, a ring must be worn on a finger, or a similar digit, for the ring’s magic to function.
(empha...
I don't think so, it's only really about in-world communication and we haven't got a tag for that. Maybe we should/could but it's a fairly narrow topic AFAIK