TRPG General Chat - 2021-08-01

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Hot RPG Questions

12:44 AM

2

Q: Who is the High God?

Spelljammer indicates Krynn (world of the Dragonlance setting) exists in a shared universe with the rest of D&D. Krynnspace is a crystal sphere containing the world Krynn Astinous (Krynn’s most revered historian) translates from the Plates of Pakafhas into the Iconochronos the beginnings of the ...

dungeons-and-dragons religions-and-deities dragonlance

1 hour later…

1:46 AM

2

A: Magic wand time - what does your community need? (More questions from the Community VP)

RPG.SE: Make it possible for RPG system tags to always appear first, and display them in a special color There are two features I think RPG.SE would really benefit from (that would likely also benefit other sites on the Stack Exchange network), and they're both summarized well in existing feature...

2

Go upvote V2Blast’s answer over on meta.se

2:36 AM

@HotRPGQuestions Dionysus?

[hums the chorus to "Cult of Dionysus"]

1 hour later…

3:47 AM

@ThomasMarkov Heck yeah! Nice post @V2Blast 🙂

1 hour later…

4:48 AM

Thanks! :)

5:10 AM

I’m working on a project, and I have a wierd question to ask. I know I have a lot of those, but this one might be a little less wierd than normal. Namely, how do you name neighborhoods?

Like in my city, there’s River Park, Tahoe Park, and Oak Park; there’s Campus Commons and College Glen; and then there’s Mansion Heights and the Fab Forties. And I used to live in Willow Glen. How do those names come into being?

5:24 AM

@BardicWizard Oh, gosh. There's a TON of different kinds of naming conventions.

Roughly, they get divided into "We named this on purpose" and "Everybody calls it this so I guess that's its name now." Often both happen to the same place.

"We named this on purpose" includes places being named for a clear landmark (River Park), an influential person or family (near OR distant in time and/or space), for an aspiration (we want this to be the campus social space so we'll call it Campus Commons), or an event (real or mythical).

"Everybody calls it this" names can also draw on local people/families, events, or clear landmarks, or the observed (rather than aspirational) use of the place. Spontaneous names may also stop making sense to outsiders more quickly. We've got a Happy Birthday Road that got its name from a birthday sign that didn't get taken down for a few years. It's long gone now but the name stuck around.

On-purpose names tend to be outward-looking. Somebody said "I want this place to make people think of [thing]," whether it's Greenland (deceptive description), New York (new version of an old city), Queens (flattering a powerful patron), or Washington (invoking a historic reputation).

Emergent names tend to be more inward-looking, because they're often very localized references to common knowledge. Over time lots of people already associated the place with the thing, until it become more or less official.

5:59 AM

Ah, so River Park (which was named by the developer) and Campus Commons (which is on the college campus) are totally on purpose names, but oak park which is a really old neighborhood, or “hangtown” which is a nickname for placerville are emergent names

That’s kinda an interesting thought!

At least wrt taking it into fantasy

More thought when coherence

6:46 AM

@BardicWizard Possibly relephant:

40

A: Giving a setting a feeling of ancientness

To have a sense of ancientness either the world needs to have an ancient history to call on, or you'll need strategies to give the impression of one. Pulsehead's answer provides one way to create a history, but many worldbuilders never design so thoroughly and it doesn't stop them at all. Either ...

New developments have more on-purpose names because emergent names haven't have time to take hold yet; old developments have more emergent ones. The ratio might also reflect the level of top-down organization and administration in the area.

The more a central authority is in charge of things like mail or road maintenance, the more likely they are to impose names, or at least force unofficial names to become official. We've got a lot of roads here that didn't get official names until the cable television company starting hooking up peoples' TVs and needed an address for the paperwork. This means that whoever got TV on that street first, also got to name the street.

Sometimes they'd use an existing local name for the street or area, and sometimes they'd name it for themselves or to make a joke.

On the other hand, some of the villages (and other landmarks) are named for parts of the body, which map to the idea that the island was made from the body of a giant.

The city near where I went to college was built from the ground up as a tourist destination, so its neighborhoods and streets are overloaded with the names of flowers, trees, scenic attractions, and rich people.

5 hours later…

AncientSwordRage

11:50 AM

This would make a great question/answer pair on world building

12:46 PM

^^

1:24 PM

@ThomasMarkov I'm losing my mind, do 5e nets use Strength or Dex?

Ranged attack with ranged weapon = Dex

As a thrown weapon you make a ranged attack which uses dex

Okay, so Dale is just wrong

Martial ranged weapon.

@Medix2 where’s that?

Towards the end of the answer, first part of the list

1:28 PM

@Medix2 wow yeah, that’s just straight up wrong.

I might just answer this question with a much more thorough answer, and one that actually sites any rules

Oh wait, I count bounty it

I thought Thomas was trying to become Count Bounty?

@Medix2 lol just answer it

I know you would write great answer.

That I would bounty afterward

Or maybe I will later.

Dale just called me Dear Henry and I don’t know what it means or how to feel about it.

Yeah...

@ThomasMarkov "Fix it, dear Henry" is a reference to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There%27s_a_Hole_in_My_Bucket

1:41 PM

It's a song though

I’d rather eat my shirt than call Dale “Dear Liza”

2:01 PM

@ThomasMarkov Do you want Sauce with your shirt?

Pretty sure there’s a video of me eating my shirt on the internet somewhere.

With or without sauce?

Without.

Looks like I set it to private.

1 hour later…

3:14 PM

I need to affix felt to PVC. What adhesive to use? Anyone been down this hole before?

@nitsua60 Contact Cement. Contact cement works for a LOT of things. Or of course, add holes and sew the felt or Pelt to it.

@nitsua60 peanut butter.

hey is there someone online? I have a quick question ^^

ask away!

Two of my players, on their own, have decided to have "good person, gets possessed by some force, now I have two minds and sometimes one is on and the other is sleeping, one nice, one a dick"

different details, but same concept

what do I do

do i tell both ?

3:23 PM

you can also check the Users list on the side (for desktop) or in the menu (for mobile) to see if other people are in the room

And chat can work asynchronously too

Has the game started yet?

i'm talking with one of them right now and I'm facepalming

nope

we lost some players, so the game was paused, and this is one of the new players and one of the old ones taking the chance to get a new character since he wasn't happy with the old one

we had not restarted yet, we are just plannig to do so

thing is, a third character that is there from the beginning, had a very open ended backstory, and she has something like that already!

this is gonna be the "i'm possessed!" party

do I speak with the new players and tell them there's that?

vaguely related: rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/158406/…

In my experience, that posession/two minds thing is a gateway drug to My Guy Syndrome.

I think I'm gonna just tell them

they would realize after 1 or 2 sessions that's a thign

and let them solve i

it

I guess

I’ve had one player do it well, and several do it poorly.

3:31 PM

@ThomasMarkov That was one of my other worries, but decided I'd let them try

but if 2 people took this willingly, but previously I did it to another person that had an open ended backstory....

in a group of 5!

that's too much xD

The one that did it well was possessed by an entity whose goals were more or less aligned with the party, and would step in when it felt that a certain course of action would work toward those goals but the character was either indecisive or had a moral dilemma. The other players that weren’t so successful mostly used it as an excuse to be a murderhobo or a creep.

@Helwar I'd ask both of them not to plan on a character being a dick and rethink the concept.

“I wake up in the night, overtaken by the entity, and try to seduce the bar maiden”

“Her door is locked and no one answers. You hear the foot steps of the bouncer ascending the stairs. What do you do?”

“Uhhhhhhh”

“The bouncer approaches you. ‘Oi, the hell’re you up to’”

“Uhhh, I was looking for the bathroom”

Roll a deception check.

“Nat 1”

The bouncer kindly shows you to the horse stall outside.

"I try to seduce the horse"

2

I have them trading info on a discord call...

they seem to be reaching an agreement

3:44 PM

@NautArch the horse is an avatar of asmodeus. Roll initiative.

@ThomasMarkov OMG

@Helwar please to not be dicks, please to not be dicks

Is it a nightmare then? xD

@ThomasMarkov This is starting to feel like Magicians.

1 hour later…

Hot RPG Questions

4:50 PM

8

Q: Why Do We Keep Adventuring?

alright, so in general, I like 5e, it's got a lot of positives, but I'm noticing more and more that there aren't really any reasons for adventuring past a certain point. So, an example: Our group is running some of the prefab content, specifically, we just finished up Dragon Heist (Which is reall...

dnd-5e gm-techniques published-adventures campaign-development character-motivation

5:08 PM

@NautArch What, playing a bardbarian there? 😋

5:21 PM

@Helwar The thing to do (IMO) is to dial down to what the problem is you're anticipating. (If it were me, I'd be super-concerned about spotlight-time, for instance.) Then have that conversation with the players, if not the party.

@nitsua60 Didn't see an email so am guessing that your mash up is gestating. Let me know when to expect it. Just got Colevilles armies and campaigns book; it's 300 pages plus, so this will take me a while to figure out.

2 hours later…

6:59 PM

We need to change the name of arcane-focus to spellcasting-focus

Does pathfinder 1e have different types of focuses?

7:20 PM

Both terms have been used, and I think in multiple games.

0

Q: Should we change the tag [arcane-focus] to [spellcasting-focus]?

We currently have 87 questions tagged arcane-focus of which 79 are cotagged with dnd-5e, the other 8 being pathfinder-1e. In D&D 5e, the general category is spellcasting focus, with arcane focus being a specific type of spellcasting focus. But there are other types of spellcasting focuses that ar...

discussion tags

7:40 PM

I haven't written anything up yet. Maybe this week. Then again, maybe not?
Did you back Coleville's book? I think I did, so maybe I'll get mine soon? It's been so long....

7:59 PM

@nitsua60 yes, ages ago, and I got an email the other day, down loaded it. this is gonna take a while to digest.

2 hours later…

10:09 PM

@Trish I don’t really see a reason for that question to be protected at this time.

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Aug '211

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