TRPG General Chat

12:33 AM

@ThomasMarkov Interlocutor Of Borg?

12:45 AM

@NautArch In 3.5, invisibility gave something like +20 to Hide checks, which meant that if you were trying to hide at all it was basically impossible you’d be found by anyone who wasn’t trained in Spot AND actively looking for you.

So you weren’t automagically hidden, but it was functionally the same thing.

BESW

1:02 AM

Ah, here we go. Even better than I remembered:

> A creature can generally notice the presence of an active invisible creature within 30 feet with a DC 20 Spot check. The observer gains a hunch that “something’s there” but can’t see it or target it accurately with an attack. A creature who is holding still is very hard to notice (DC 30). An inanimate object, an unliving creature holding still, or a completely immobile creature is even harder to spot (DC 40).
It’s practically impossible (+20 DC) to pinpoint an invisible creature’s location with a Spot check, and even if a character succeeds on such a check, the invisible creature still be…

(I’ll give d20S credit where it’s due.)

Hot RPG Questions

1:37 AM

6

Q: If you force creature into the Snare spell square does it activate?

Snare is a spell that activates when The trap triggers when a Small creature or larger moves into the area protected by the spell. Would forced movement via the Thornwhip cantrip snare the foe?

TheDragonOfFlame

1:58 AM

D&D 5e has made invisibly much less over powered and it’s still one of the best spells in the game

Joshua

2:17 AM

Just don't fight a purple worm.

facepalm 19 minutes later; For some reason timestamps weren't showing up.

Hot RPG Questions

2:28 AM

4

Q: What does the Swarmkeeper mean by "horizontal"?

The Ranger Swarmkeeper Gathered Swarm has 2 ability's that can force horizontal movement. But how do they work? The attack's target must succeed on a Strength saving throw against your spell save DC or be moved by the swarm up to 15 feet horizontally in a direction of your choice Is this horizo...

dnd-5e ranger forced-movement

Hot RPG Questions

2:54 AM

2

Q: What's considered "hot weather"?

The PHB/basic rules list the following water requirements for a character: A character needs one gallon of water per day, or two gallons per day if the weather is hot. However, this section does not provide a definition of "hot" weather. Is this defined in RAW in some other location?

dnd-5e weather

BESW

3:06 AM

@HotRPGQuestions Hrm. They clearly cribbed a lot of their environmental text from 3.5, and then modified it to fit 5e. But 3.5 had a LOT more detailed information about exactly what different weather conditions entailed, so using it as a template for 5e left a lot of implied holes.

It's one thing to write low-detail rules text with "the GM will fill in the details" in mind. It's another thing to take details out of a rules text and expect the GM to fill them back in; the lack of detail will always feel like the GM is missing information, rather than being encouraged to add information, because that's exactly what's happening.

How often do our answerers show sympathy for askers who can sense that "the GM adds details" is not a complete reading of the text, and so "the GM adds details" is not a completely satisfying answer? Is there something we can do to improve that?

trogdor

3:40 AM

I feel like there's only so much we can do about,... a rules system like D&D 5e

which sort of makes up a very large chunk of site traffic

that doesn't mean there isn't anything we can do though

although I think there are also problems with this site itself which can easily pose as barriers to fixing problems like this

Hot RPG Questions

8

Q: How should a player and GM handle an ability that necessitates a player seeing a GM's roll?

A Dual-Cursed Oracle gets the following Revelation at 1st level: Misfortune (Ex): At 1st level, as an immediate action, you can force a creature within 30 feet to reroll any one d20 roll that it has just made before the results of the roll are revealed. The creature must take the result of the r...

pathfinder-1e gm-techniques

BESW

5:01 AM

J.R. Zambrano wrote a twitter thread about playing an antagonist PC and "one weird trick for playing a villain."

Hot RPG Questions

4

Q: Does a Swarmkeeper lose their swarm if they die?

In Tasha's Cauldron of Everything, the Swarmkeeper Ranger's "Gathered Swarm" feature states the following (emphasis added): A swarm of intangible nature spirits has bonded itself to you and can assist you in battle. Until you die, the swarm remains in your space [...]. In a recent encounter, my...

dnd-5e class-feature ranger character-death

BESW

DUKK BÖRG by Gem Room Games. Life is like a hurricane, here in... this module intended to be used with MÖRK BORG.

Megadungeon Jam A game jam hosted by Diwata ng Manila. I've always wanted to make a megadungeon but had never even attempted to endeavour at how to do so. It seemed many others felt the same, so here's a year-long opportunity to try your hand!

2

Indie Game Mutual Aid Bundle: Rent and Roof Edition A bundle hosted by Sandy Pug Games. Up to 32 items starting at $10.00. Two of our favourite people, @hellotenbear and @VVVisection are in some dire straits. One of them had their roof cave in, destroying a huge part of their home and making their living situation unbearable, and the other needs rent money bad.

3

The First Knight - Superhero Cinematic Universe TTRPG by W.H. Arthur. Play the story of the first superhero in an ancient battle between good and evil.

Monkey's Paw Games wrote a twitter thread about brevity and purpose in game design.

@Mithical [wave]

BESW

5:22 AM

"Itchfunding Projects" a crd.co page for TTRPGs that are crowdfunding using itch.io. Maintained by Keganexe.

Kienna S. wrote a twitter thread about applying the Mythbusters principle "You're never gonna be able to make something safe - [but] you can increase the margin of safety" to TTRPGs.

Glazius

@BESW You want to know the hilarious thing? 3.5 has a temperature range specified for what counts as hot weather, but it just says "In very hot climates, characters need two or three times as much water to avoid dehydration."

BESW

Yup. 5e's choices would baffle me if I had any expectation of coherent purpose in the design.

Mithical

@BESW *waves back*

Glazius

Well, yeah. You're not supposed to know the rules of D&D, you're just supposed to win rules arguments.

BESW

@Mithical What's new?

Mithical

5:35 AM

...not much, unfortunately. Overtired and on a bus, like most mornings :P Hoping my D&D session won't get pushed off again this week...

How're things over there?

BESW

Haven't had much time or brain for TRPGs lately, really want to work on some designs but haven't been able to do much design work since September.

Been reading a lot though. A Desolation Called Peace and Crossing the Line were really good, and I'm looking forward to The Properties of Perpetual Light.

Mithical

Ooh, those sound interesting!

BESW

There's a few books called Crossing the Line, I just read the 2019 autobiography by Richard Abercrombie.

Mithical

ah

in The Reading Room, 2 days ago, by Mithical

Currently reading The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin.

BESW

Ooh.

I never got into Le Guin, but I haven't tried for a while.

Mithical

5:50 AM

The writing so far is a bit... heavy, I suppose, but I'm finding it interesting.

BESW

Might have something to do with my exposure to her was getting a lavish gift of her books from someone who really shouldn't have been giving me anything.

A. B.

I've read The Other Wind and A Wizard of Earthsea (in that order - I tend to read what the libraries or second-hand bookshops happen to have). I liked them.

Oh, and I heard some but not all of the one with the planet called Winter on the radio.

Mithical

That'd be The Left Hand of Darkness, then, unless she wrote several books with a planet named that ;)

A. B.

Now I think about it, is that The Left Hand of Darkness? The one where the aliens changed sex every now and again.

Oh, crossed in the post.

That was a strange one.

Mithical

Earthsea has been on my to-read list for a while, but it hasn't yet shown up on the local swap shelf.

BESW

5:56 AM

A Desolation Called Peace is Arkady Martine's sequel to her debut novel A Memory Called Empire, and they're just astonishing speculative fiction, right up there alongside Anne Leckie's Raadch trilogy and NK Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy.

A. B.

Neither of which I have read :-D

I get embarrassed about books like that, to be honest.

Mithical

Oh? Why?

BESW

Award-winning bestsellers?

A. B.

Morally superior award-winning bestsellers with themes and issues and all that. Everyone talks about how look at them handling themes of this, that and the other, and if I were writing I would not have a clue how to write about it, and furthermore, if I were reading I probably would not register it.

BESW

I don't think any of them is "morally superior."

A. B.

6:02 AM

I suppose I'm probably not good at abstract.

Oh? Fair enough. I mean I thought you said.

BESW

The authors talk about things that are important to them.

A. B.

(I'm actually speaking only about Broken Earth because I've forgotten which one Raadch is.)

(Looked it up. Oh, of course, those.)

BESW

If you think portraying empire as Not Good Actually is somehow an inherently morally superior stance to empire being Good Actually, well. Yes, probably? But it doesn't mean it's lecturing or condescending.

It's navigating complexity.

A. B.

What puts me off is being given the impression that that's the point of the book.

Because said point will whistle over my head.

Mithical

I don't think the "point" of a book has to be the same for everyone.

The point of the book is whatever you personally took away from it... which, sometimes, is just an enjoyable read.

A. B.

6:07 AM

Actually, thinking about it, I wonder - no offence - whether a lot of it isn't because lately it's generally you I hear about books like that from. Because the two of us happen to speak such totally different languages.

I mean, the things you describe about a book sound dismal and incomprehensible to me, and that's what you understand, and if I read the exact same book I'd probably notice entirely different things about it. Right, @Mithical , exactly.

Actually, I did read one thing of NK Jemisin's, now I remember, the short story on her website. That's a good one.

Mithical

As an example, I can take, uh, Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse. You could take the "point" as warning against climate change or colonialism; you could also just enjoy the story about a post-apocalyptic world where the gods walk on Earth. Or both. You don't need to analyze stuff if you don't want to, but the undertones are still there for those who pick up on them.

A. B.

Looked it up again, it's called Stone Hunger. All the descriptive detail. And that is a fascinating, and well-thought-out (and scary) superpower.

Ooh, I've not heard of that one.

A. B.

6:37 AM

Unrelatedly, that Twitter thread about Mythbusters and TTRPGs makes a good point, considering things BESW's said in here before about things they've seen other people do.

Things like X-Cards, as far as I understand it, are not supposed to be a guarantee that nothing will go off the rails. They're to provide some kind of start at knowing what to do if it does.

BESW

@Mithical I once read a speculative fantasy trilogy in which a group of heroes from different ethnostates have to put aside their personal agendas to help an asexual homoromantic couple use the values of small joys they learned from their sustainable-agrarian homeland to stop a techno-industrial evil and reinstate a divinely ordained king.

Mithical

Ah yes, The Lord of the Rings. :D

BESW

Dingdingding.

None of the books I recommend are good only because of their themes. Otherwise I'd recommend Dune to everyone as an antifascist manifesto about the dangers of colonial religious propaganda, instead of warning people that it's a pompous condescending piece of well-intentioned exoticism that takes so long to get to its point that for most readers it winds up making a more coherent argument for colonial fascism.

I highly recommend A Memory Called Empire and A Desolation Called Peace to... just about anybody? It's a political thriller, AND a sapphic semi-tragedy, AND an exploration of the relationship between cultural and personal identity, AND a love-letter to poetics, AND a triumph of original worldbuilding, AND it's full of interesting nuanced characters, AND it's written with such a careful craft that sometimes I have to put it down and love a perfect phrase for a while...

Any of those things would make it worth reading for somebody, regardless of whether they notice or care about another of the things.

Oh, and it has a joke about picking a name for yourself in your foreign language class that absolutely kills me.

@Mithical I keep trying to start Storm of Locusts but I'm not in an emotional space for what I know it's going to do to me.

Mithical

7:11 AM

My problem is just getting ahold of it. :(

BESW

Aww.

I already read T Kingfisher's Paladin's Strength, the latest in her epic fantasy romance series about traumatized paladins. It was, as her books almost always are, sweet and sexy and funny and terrifying.

BESW

7:49 AM

*also, not 'already'

BESW

8:29 AM

Kickstarter: The RPG Printing Spree hosted by David Schirduan but the books are by several different creators. Fund a print run of several tabletop RPG books.

SmokeDetector

9:37 AM

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Link at beginning of answer, potentially bad keyword in answer (35): What is the purpose of a spell attack modifier? by jozi mac on rpg.SE (@Rubiksmoose)

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Link at beginning of answer, blacklisted user (105): What is the purpose of a spell attack modifier? by jozi mac on rpg.SE (@Rubiksmoose)

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Link at beginning of answer, potentially bad keyword in answer, blacklisted user (106): What is the purpose of a spell attack modifier? by jozi mac on rpg.SE (@Rubiksmoose)

AncientSwordRage

10:31 AM

oh we're doing book recommendations? ::scrolls up furiously::

BESW

The next PC Grant novel comes out later this week!

The next Murderbot novella is coming in May, as does PD Clark's next Fatma el-Sha’arawi novel.

...De Bodard's Seven of Infinities is still on my to-read list for some reason.

AncientSwordRage

@HotRPGQuestions @ThomasMarkov the Mid 80s was 40 years ago

AncientSwordRage

10:46 AM

@BESW I might just get Wizard of Earthsea on Audible... hmm

BESW

11:16 AM

@AncientSwordRage I've got a lot of respect for what I've read about it, but I just couldn't get past the first couple pages.

AncientSwordRage

@BESW I've found that with books, but not so much with audio books

BESW

Interesting.

'course, I don't do audiobooks much at all most of the time.

AncientSwordRage

I used to do so a) when commuting, and b) before I discovered podcasts

BESW

I've recently started listening to audiobooks while exercising or doing dishes or laundry, but mostly I'm listening to things I've already read.

Hot RPG Questions

11:51 AM

2

Q: Can I make an unarmed strike while holding a two handed weapon?

My barbarian Gus uses a Greataxe, a two handed weapon. While raging in combat against harpies, a round passed without Gus taking damage. On his turn, all harpies were out of his melee range, and he had used all his javelins. To maintain his rage, he slapped the fighter with an unarmed strike. ...

dnd-5e attack unarmed-combat

RevenantBacon

12:29 PM

Don't you love when someone who's not your boss assigns a task to you without checking to see if you know how to do it?

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