@Medix2 no, TM retagged the two questions - one that I tagged and one that Trish tagged to the 3d-space tag. The initial tag related to Trish's answer here rpg.stackexchange.com/a/185125/44723 - TM retagged the two questions from the volume tag to the 3d-space tag. Before TMs retags, the tag usage was for movement and calculating movement in a 3d environment. For some reason, TM took the "calculations" part to mean volume as well.

@Medix2 Seeing that TM thought it was the appropriate tag, trusting that choice, I retagged questions that I wanted to tag with the volume tag with the 3d-space tag instead. I read it thereafter and am quite baffled by TM's choice of retagging. I'm surprised that a tag about movement calculation was even a consideration for TMs retagging effort.

@Medix2 I care little about whether any such given tag about volume calculation is called "volume", "3d-space," or "weights and measurements" as long as things that are about the well-defined category of volume calculation have any tag that ties them together that has that name or a synonym of it.

While that's true in theory, in practice the Stack's approach to tagging makes tag definitions emergent. When Medix says that tag wikis don't influence tag usage, that's based on a decade of experience in this and other stack sites. The majority of questions are asked by casual users who probably don't read any of the documentation about the site, and tagging is designed with that in mind: tag meaning emerges from tag usage, not the other way around.

The meta community only intervenes with policy and synonyms when a tag is actively causing problems, not just when it's not living up to its theoretical potential. An internvention proposal needs to show the problem it's trying to solve, or else there's no basis to judge its merit.

(And it's very VERY hard to intervene meaningfully with brand-new tags, because they're brand-new and thus we don't have enough experience with their use to understand them yet.)

When sites like lit.se try to predict tag problems and pre-ordain tag usage (like inventing [<language>-literature] tags or making one-size-fits-all policies about pen names), their users don't notice or care and it just creates an eternal curation load for a small handful of burning-out megausers. When sites like rpg.se try to use tag wikis to solve recognized problems (like [product-recommendation] or [rules-as-written]), the same thing happens.

Tags are defined by the way they're used, and that's just baked into the way the Stack is built. It's designed to be a low-intervention system that is definitionally flawed and imprecise, because they've traded those qualities for low-friction interaction with the lowest common denominator of user.

@BESW Tsundoku posted a new answer to that pseudonym question to reflect current actual usage

I haven't paid much attention to lit.se for... two years?

Participating in its beta taught me a lot about the Stack and myself.

It was an attempt to support your point. People made a policy on meta, regular users didn't listen and just did what made sense to them, and now we have a different policy in practice because of that

Heh, that makes sense.

One of the reasons "guess the system" is so contentious, is that the entire "there must be a system tag" concept is an attempt to provide top-down curation of a bottom-up system. In the case of needing system tags, it's the best-so-far solution to a real problem created by the bottom-up model, but that doesn't make it frictionless.

Most stacks find that they need some kind of curation-policy of that type, but they are more successful the fewer of those top-down implementations they can get away with.

Each one creates more friction in a system designed to be as frictionless as possible.

The tagging policy that new users on Puzzling stumble over the most is when to use [riddle]. It has a colloquial meaning of "puzzle", but we've defined a riddle as something specific so I have to remove the tag quite a bit. It's fairly regular to have a puzzle which calls itself a "riddle" in the title/body where I remove the [riddle] tag.

[glances at lit meta]

So, lit.se still doesn't have much to do with romancelandia, huh.

(It seems to be attached to the idea that one name should take precedence, which doesn't make much sense for authors who publish under different names for different series or genres without any implied preference or hierarchy.)

It's better than the original policy there, though

Yeah, and honestly it's a ding against the tagging system as much as lit.se's cultural blinkeredness. The system is designed to assume a hierarchy of information.

So meta discussions aren't inclined to even think in ways that challenge the system's epistemology.

Today's D&D session was the first time I had a bad one, but afterwards the group talked and we think some of the main problems have been identified.

Sloane Leong wrote a twitter thread about how narrative 'structures' are "actually both not that complicated or essential."

@BESW I can very much see this being a huge bother, especially when the culture that deviates from the norm is a minority or underappreciated :(

"Why can't you people just have good sense and do it our way?"

@kviiri Or even just the simple fact that a lot of authors use different names for different genres/series without any one name rising over another.

@BESW Yeah

But yes, it can be very disruptive when English assumptions about names are imposed. Even something as simple and understandable as my having two middle names, means that it's literally impossible for all my official documents to match perfectly. Much less complications like familian names, reared names, christened names, and so much more.

@bobble awesome

@BESW its one of the 'traps' in web design, along with dates/timezones

there should just be 'What do we call you?' field, and even that isn't perfect

c.f. google trying to impose restrictions on your 'real name'

Ah, the notorious middle names which the computer can't do.

For things whose intended purpose is to be clever, computers aren't half stupid about some things.

that's barely scratching the surface

Yeah. I didn't even touch on "family name first, given name last" formats, non-English characters (or even hyphens), and so on.

Yeah, if it can't understand that I'd hate to see what it would make of somebody who has their surname at the beginning.

(haha we had the same idea at the same time)

Not to mention all the things that happen in Russian.

@BESW call names as well

heck, lets hope you're not Mr Null

Yeah, and reared names, familian names...

What was the connection with Lit.SE?

And just simply long names. In high school many of my classmates just plain couldn't fit their names--even just two of them in first/last form--on the sheet because it didn't have enough character boxes.

So I've got no surprise in me that lit.se's author-names tagging policies are bit blinkered, given that they're also struggling with the literature equivalent of "every game is D&D," as well as thinking mostly of literature as a legacy thing rather than a living thing.

here's the article I was after:kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/…

> People’s names sometimes have prefixes or suffixes, but you can safely ignore those.

I live in a place full of family names like san Nicolas, and you know what absolutely blows programmers' minds? Hyphenated given names.

Try feeding a program a name like Kimberly-John san Augustine Manglo'ña san Nicolas Junior.

@BESW So 'san Nicolas' I can grok, but I've never come across a hyphenated first name....

And that's still all in the expected order and has the expected parts.

@BESW ...until now

They're not that unheard-of. Anne-Marie?

@BESW that is a heck of a name :-D

(Name is not anybody I went to high school with, but it's not unlike several of them.)

I only know beginner-level programming, but I'd have thought that setting up a name input to accept non-alphanumeric characters was a pretty basic idea.

presumably just nobody thought of it.

@A.B. I think the issue may be that sometimes the people designing the systems have even less experience than that

:-D I sincerely hope not.

@AncientSwordRage They probably honestly think their first-generation Korean roommate in college is named Johnny.

or were trained by people to whom names were ASCII only when they joined by requirement and they've never adapted

Mind you, what I've been practising on is mainly stuff for playing with codes, so I may actually be quite good on special characters without having realised it.

What's this got to do with Lit.SE? I only found one meta question about names and that was about what to do with pseudonyms.

@A.B. I thought we were talking about tags?

Oh, I suppose bit of a puzzle how to make a tag out of one of those names.

I thought you meant it was something that was being discussed on Meta.

@A.B. ohno, it's something about lit.se and a thing called 'Romancelandia'

@AncientSwordRage I mentioned lit.se as an example of a site that ran into problems trying to force the tagging system to do things it's really not supposed to, and that shifted into a conversation about how lit.se struggles, in general, to recognize the size of the sea it swims in.

@BESW ah ok yeah

Romancelandia is a bucket term for the romance novel community, combining readers, authors, publishers, etc.

@BESW right

And a pretty common convention there is for one author to use different names for different series or genres they're writing, without any particular name being "the real one." Which throws a wrench in lit.se's tagging protocol that assumes when an author uses more than one name, a single one can be identified as the best-known or most significant.

@BESW got it

But even outside that, like. Part of the point of being Seanan McGuire and Mira Grant is that your readers never have to cross wires between horror and pulp fantasy unless they want to.

seem as easy fix though, to pick a name (birth/first published name) make that a tag, then synonym all of them?

@BESW oh I guess my idea scuppers that

well then....don't synonym them and plonk a link at the bottom of the wiki

Ursula Vernon writes as T Kingfisher when her books get sexy or heavy in ways that fans of Danny Dragonbreath shouldn't wander into during a casual Google.

Those two options are roughly what's being disputed on the Meta, yes.

Forcing T Kingfisher to turn into Ursula Vernon is going to seed her novels with graphic sex scenes into the same SEO as her middle-grade illustrated novels.

@BESW that's a bad

But lit.se generally tends to debate as if all their subjects are dead and buried and all their users are academics.

hmmm

Now you mention it, I know what you mean about it being particularly extreme among romance writers. There's an author called Amanda Quick who wrote some novels about a Victorian secret society of magicians (and the ladies they fell in love with).

(Aside: I was reading significantly above my level by that age and people were recommending me stuff with very nasty content; looking back, I wish I'd been reading her sex scenes instead of Creepy Old Man StealsYourPuns.)

I tried to look up what else she'd written, and found out that Amanda Quick was only one of seven names. I don't remember which one was true.

Ursula T. Kingfisher Vernon is certainly a thorny one.

@BESW I was reading Prattchet in primary school but that was Disproved Of

There's no real cut-off point you can fix for how different a writer's two or more sets of books can be before they ought to be different tags.

@AncientSwordRage For most of my elementary years, my parents were reading what I was reading--not to keep me from reading it, but so they'd know if there was anything that maybe should get talked about. But then my reading rate skyrocketed past any reasonable ability of them to keep up.

And then in the same year in high school my English teacher recommended Clan of the Cave Bear and my theology teacher gave extra credit if we read What's Eating Gilbert Grape and I realized that many adults are very bad at book recommendations.

@BESW I read a lot of what my parents read

@BESW I barely recognise those books, care to clue me in as to why they're bad recommendations?

@BESW Precisely, the tag usage for 3d-space was about 3d-movement, organising 3d-space or things in outer space until that concerned retagging effort by TM. With the one exception of calculating the hp of a spaceship. Looking at it, why would anybody use it for mundane volume calculation if it wasn't for that retagging effort by TM? It seems so pointless.

@AncientSwordRage I do not recommend those books to anyone. Details would be inappropriate for this chat.

@BESW oh

wow ok

Although if I absolutely HAD to read either of them to avoid reading anything by the Old Pun Lecher, well. There's the frying pan and there's the fire.

@BESW I'm obviously not pay enough attention, it's the second time you've mentioned OPL, but I've not picked up who that is...

if it's NSFC that's also ok

I'm not going to put enough information in this chat for people to find him if they don't already know.

ah ok no problem

@Akixkisu I'm not the person to persuade. I'm just pointing out that a meta post calling for an examination of the issue is going to get very little traction if it doesn't explain the issue.

It's hard to drum up support for a solution to a problem that hasn't been established to exist and that onus is on you. In meta.

If you feel the problem is so obvious it doesn't need explaining, then (a) this suggests you think TM is acting in bad faith by making the change you think is obviously bad, and we try not to assume bad faith; and (b) great! then it should be very simple and easy to add the explanation of the obvious thing.

@A.B. While Russian and adjacent jurisdictions' naming schemes are different from English, they're relatively coherent, and in fact it's usually easy to tell which is the family name and which is the personal name, and which is the patronym, both from the morphology and from the common order schemes. So converting to a Western name format well enough for a clear reference is pretty easy an overwhelming majority of times.

fair enough, I take it only one among those many possible variations of any one person's name is actually considered the "official" one, then. Good to know.

@A.B. Not sure why the scare quotes. People may give me dozens of nicknames, but ultimately when doing serious stuff like buying stuff, paying taxes, getting jobs, signing contracts, voting, getting permission to enter another jurisdiction, visiting a firing range, getting married, receiving an inheritance, the nicknames don't work.

Reason for scare quotes: because I'm not paying attention and hadn't thought whether it made sense or not. I probably do mean official literally. Also I'm nervous about saying anything definite about what does or doesn't apply to other countries these days.

@vicky_molokh-unsilenceMonica it read to me as thought they didn't want official to have to much weight, or imply that someone should only be known by that name

like "They call it your officialname , but we know you're really Vicky"

hi guys, how is everyone doing? Has been a while since I've been around.

@Sos Good thanks !you?

All good @AncientSwordRage :) It's good to come here and recognize a few names of people that have been so helpful in the past

@Sos who...me? :p

Yes! ANd BESW, I recognize at least the 2 of you

ehe

I'm coming here to ask for any input on something: I'm running the Dragon of Icespire Peak campaign with a group of 3 friends, and they have been really enjoying it seems. They now finished the first part of the campaign. But this process took months, as everyone is quite busy. They are very interested in playing, and there are some backstories going on which are cool, and would be a major turn-off if we changed this.

But still, im wondering if there is anything else that I could think about in between sessions, since there are gaps of weeks between them

I'm not really sure of what to ask to be honest ahah so any suggestions will be welcome!

Are you asking on how to fill in the gap in game or about downtime?

[distracted wave] Hi! Taxes time so am erratically present.

Sorry to interrupt, but I hope this is going to be really quick: do some of you have links to questions, chat conversations or blogs where the fact that Dungeon World sacrifices playability to looking like D&D is explained?

@BESW oh no, and I'm guessing you have to use the US tax system

My google-fu is really weak today

@AncientSwordRage and I'm self-employed, and I'm in a territory that no tax software has the specific forms for.

@AncientSwordRage mostly about downtime, if you see anything that I could ask them to do in the mean time. I was thinking if I could text them about their PCs doing something while they are in town. Training? Or perhaps this is all a bad idea

@BESW hi, welcome!

@Sos I once saw a group that scratched the downtime itch by writing in-character letters to NPCs. "Dear mother, hope this finds you well..." "To The Mayor Of Stone's Throw, Regarding: The Treacherous Nature Of Your Cobblestone Streets..." etc

@BESW Triple threat

@AncientSwordRage On the up side, I'm using my birthday ginger beer to make Pink Rangers while I work.

and hb!

Thanks!

@BESW I assume that's a drink?

I should dash off for a bit

ciao for niao

(I'm doing the lazy version, which is just cranberry and lemon juice in ginger beer.)

@Sos What's your goal for this? Keeping the group communicating between sessions? Providing space for character development at the more slow, thoughtful pace allowed by asynchronous play? Learning more about the world they're playing in?

lol

"not too strong for your guests" :P

I'm mostly thinking of keeping up interest at least to start. I feel that having something going on in between, even if not part of the main story, will be good as they will be eager to play more often. Further having individual character development would be a good added bonus, but not sure if I am able to do it asynchronously

So you specifically want it to be something that engages with their current characters and world, not just a same-group-of-players thing?

Not sure I understand, sorry

You mean individually as opposed to a group thing?

Well, like. You could run a game of Graffiti Speak if you just want to still be playing a game with your friends while the campaign is on hiatus.

Your options are a lot more limited if you want the interim play to be part of the same story.

I see. No, I'd prefer to have us in the same world setting where their PCs would be doing something, either alone or together, but that would keep them thinking about it every now and then

It doesnt need to be part of the main story (so I do like your suggestion with the letter, I could work with their backstories here)

(I've also done interim play with new characters in the same world as the campaign, doing something that the PCs would never get to do.)

Right!

(side note: this graffiti speak game you shared seems cool! wondering how it works)

Like, we once played a couple sessions of Monsters of the Week, in the same setting as our Atomic Robo campaign.

Let me explain a bit better

@Sos I haven't played it myself, but Pidj just re-upped it after some updates and it looks really cool. But then, I'm a fan of everything Pidj does. I just got my Kickstarter PDF of Sun's Ransom and eeeeee

My intention is not to have an interim session with those who are available, but rather to keep everyone thinking about the game every now and then

So more of something they can do on their own time.

yep!

exactly

that's why the lettter idea sounds good: I can write something small to one of them, so that they think about it, and send a letter back when they can

The Correspondence Jam submissions might include something helpful.

I'd also look at solo games like those that were in the Solo But Not Alone bundle and see if any of them could be adapted to fit the PCs/world.

I've mentioned a lot of solo games here in chat but none of them stand out immediately as helpful to you.

(Trying to wrap my head around these, this is a lot of new concepts to me)

Hah, yeah, some of those are on the cutting edge of indie self-pub TRPGs, poking "what is a game, actually" with a stick and seeing how it wiggles.

...and now I'm wondering if anybody could turn Walkies With Grim into a setting-specific game without it losing all its power.

So many possibilities that it becomes hard to think what would work

ahah

I have to check these later, running short on time. Thanks a lot @BESW

If you or anyone else has any other suggestions please do tag me. And HB again!

ttfn!

Happy Birthday(?) @BESW?

And @doppelgreener's, too!

Happy Birthdays @BESW and @doppelgreener!!

Thanks!

Happy birthday! (I never knew you two share a birthday!)

Same date, but since Greener moved across the world it's yesterday for me, but maybe still today for Greener?

@BESW thats still cool

Yeah, I'm pretty happy with my birthday buddy.

Happy birthday!

I don't have any birthday buddies (that I know of) but I am still happy with mine: the day before the Independence Day.

Hah

Thank you!!! :D

I appreciate it y'all

Happy shared birthday BESW!! :D

Happy birthday to the only friend whose birthday I can always remember!

Many happy returns of our day.

Haha!

I stayed up literally all night to finish WEGG because I knew that if I put it down I'd never able to pick it up again, but that if I didn't finish it I'd be haunted by it forever.

@ThomasMarkov Do we have a question on alchemist fire damage?

Ah found it

Someone got there before me

Just thinking @ThomasMarkov might want to provide an answer

@BESW I don't think that you are the person to persuade, but the one who offers interesting conversation.

@Sos I'd ask if any activities fit within everyone's schedule. I think it would be unfortunate if they eat your already limited gaming time.

@Zachiel Ultimately I think that's a bit of a misdiagnosis. Dungeon World is one of the first spinoffs from AW, and a lot of its roughness can be attributed more to not knowing what should go into a standalone successor. It's more that it offers a lot of false affordances to somebody coming from D&D, which is kind of bad for something that's supposed to be a transition product.

Like, the easiest and most wrong way to run a combat in Dungeon World is to treat it like a D&D combat - both sides are just there to tear down each other's hit points in a featureless white void, and when it's "the GM's turn to attack" a PC should Defy Danger. And the game doesn't say a whole lot to stop you from doing that.

PCs should have more to want out of a fight than "don't die", and NPCs should have more exits from combat than "die", so that you can present somebody interesting options in the chaos of combat.

But there isn't a whole lot of discussion about that; there's less discussion than there is in Apocalypse World, but that's almost cheating since Apocalypse World has been revised to put more discussion in it.

@Glazius that should go for D&D as well, but....

rpg.stackexchange.com/q/185144 according to her Fandom wiki page, there is information about her accepting all people (see last paragraph under "Activities") in Demihuman Deities.

(I don't own either that book or an account here, thus sharing in chat and not making an answer)

hmm, also last paragraph under "Personality"

@AncientSwordRage Yeah, that's fair. But D&D doesn't expect it and there's a lot of different things to do in combat even if all you're after is "don't die". Dungeon World makes the GM a lot more responsible for making combat interesting, because hit point numbers aren't gonna carry that weight.

@Glazius The weird thing is, super generic moves can make for super awesome games if they're designed more carefully. DW has a lot of "there's nothing wrong with the mechanics, but you've failed to make them cohere" issues.

@bobble forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Demihuman_Deities is a D&D 2nd Edition book, so definitly not a source as required by the question. Those information could be outdated.

I am, however, indebted to DW for showing me that D&D is a genre.

@BESW Yeah, a lot of that is from how early in the engine it was written. Monsterhearts and Monster of the Week were also a little incoherent in the first edition, and both had a second edition that improved on that. But I don't think we're getting a second edition of DW.

Yeah, and that's probably for the best, industry-wise.

Stonetop owes a whole lot to it but I don't know if I'd call it that.

Fellowship and Voidheart Symphony (and Rhapsody of Blood) all scratch different parts of that itch but I don't know that I'd call any of them works of D&D genre.

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Bad keyword in answer, bad keyword with email in answer, email in answer, pattern-matching email in answer, potentially bad keyword in answer (349): Can a caster cast a sleep spell on themselves? by lucy roland on rpg.SE (@Rubiksmoose)